Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War

Dean F. Oliver is postdoctoral fellow at the Norman Paterson School of
International Affairs, Carleton University.

Informed by a vast array of sources and a subtle, sophisticated
analysis, this first-class piece of scholarship takes the burgeoning
international literature on war, social memory, and cultural history and
holds it to account through a brilliant analysis of Canada’s World War
I experience. In the process, it adds both breadth and depth to the
Canadian canon and critiques in lustrous detail many of the
international field’s long-established truths.

Chief among these truths is the notion that the postwar period
witnessed a rejection of earlier norms and values in seeking to atone
for the sins of the “blundering generation.” While scrupulously
evenhanded in assessing this view, Vance notes the extent to which it
was based on limited surveys of elite opinion, principally the angry
prose of a small group of pacifist or anti-establishment intellectuals.
In churning through reams of popular fiction, dozens of mass circulation
magazines, and the records of charitable organizations and veterans’
groups, Death So Noble reaches much the opposite conclusion. Duty,
honor, country, and other moral touchstones, Vance writes, were adopted
enthusiastically after Versailles, with the evidence visible today in
the hundreds of monuments, sculptures, and war memorial chapels that
still dot the land. For war veterans and the society that sent them off
to fight, anything less would have represented an unconscionable break
with the past. The literati might well have wished it otherwise, Vance
notes, but for most Canadians 1914 had been a “good war.”

The attempt to keep it so in the literature and iconography of the
conflict was one of the defining features of Canada’s interwar
intellectual landscape. Vance cites numerous examples of this process,
from popular attitudes toward immigration to the compilation of the
war’s official history. Canadians were engaged in nothing less than
the construction of a national identity in those years, Vance suggests,
one based firmly on the defence of history and on the legitimacy of
their war dead. Much was sacrificed in this search for meaning, not
least objectivity, but Pierre Berton and other popular writers were
correct after all: Canada really was born on Vimy Ridge.