Anyone who hasn’t read Barbara Tuchman’s Pulitzer prize-winning book from 1962, The Guns of August should read it this summer, which is coincidentally the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War.
The Guns of August has nothing to do with humour, lawyers, or life in Vancouver, but it has much to say about the world that started to fall apart in August 1914; and arguably fell apart by 1918. Perhaps, by the news this summer, it’s falling apart again.
If you got through law school and have a sense of history, politics, and the society we live in, you’ll know 1914 matters a lot. With Russian rebels shooting down Malaysian passenger jets over Ukraine, chaos and civil war raging throughout Syria, Libya, and Iraq (and in the process, changing the borders of Syria and Iraq and creating a “caliphate” called the Islamic State that somehow wants to return to the 14th century), August 2014 is a good time to reflect about August 1914. (Or, given what I’m hearing about ISIS, maybe I should recommend one of Barbara Tuchman’s other fine books, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.)
History is in all of us, and the First World War still has resonance for those of us of a certain age. My grandfather on my dad’s side, Jack Wilson, was a bicycle courier with Canadian Cyclist Battalion and served (as my dad told me), at Passchendaele and the Somme, delivering messages up and down the trenches, “going over the top,” and in the process, being hit by mustard gas twice during his military service.
When he returned to Canada in 1919, his doctors required him to leave Hamilton for “better air” because his lungs were so damaged, so he moved to Victoria, where he died in 1961.
My great uncle on my mother’s side, Graham Parsons, was 18 when he was “called up” towards the end of the war. He was two years younger than my son is now. Arguably, the war had been led by officers who thought little of sending men across no-man’s land to a barrage of machine gun fire; all for a few dozen yards of territory here and there. When “The Empire” ran out of soldiers, more were conscripted. Graham was one of them.
Young Graham received his initial military training in eastern Canada, boarded a freighter for Liverpool, and was stationed at a camp called Kinmel in Bodelwyddan, North Wales in October 1918. I’ve read reports the camp was a “filthy, overcrowded hellhole, without bedding and sufficient coal or wood to heat the soldiers’ barracks and where the men were forced to sleep on damp earth and eat food that was described as pig swill.”
Because the conditions were so decrepit at Kinmel, he died 13 days before the end of the First World War of the Spanish Flu, which killed him and another 20 million people in 1919. He’s buried there, along with around 80 other Canadian soldiers whose glacially slow repatriation at the end of the war became a national disgrace. The Canadian government didn’t want to send the soldiers back until the spring of 1919 for political reasons (something about Canadian ports being frozen and not wanting the soldiers coming through the U.S.). But the soldiers wanted to get home, and feared the best jobs were going to other returning soldiers.
So five months after Graham died of the flu, the Canadians rioted. The Camp Kinmel riots resulted in five men being shot and killed and 23 wounded. There were 78 soldiers, mostly Canadian, arrested; 25 were convicted of mutiny. Because Graham’s brother (my grandfather), travelled to Australia as a merchant mariner during the war, he survived the trenches, the carnage, and the flu that killed his brother at Kinmel.
And thus 100 years later, I’m here to tell this story and Graham’s hypothetical descendants aren’t.
Talk to anyone who is 60 or older, and they may well have had a parent serve in the Second World War and a grandparent serve in the First. But be mindful who you talk to. A neighbour of mine was very intrigued to see a set of binoculars my grandfather pulled off of a dead German soldier in 1916. His grandfather had also fought in 1916 . . . but for the Kaiser. He had inherited the same set of binoculars from his grandfather as I had from mine. Over discussions about our respective grandparents, I learned his father had been at Stalingrad. And a year or two later, I met his dad and we talked about his time in Stalingrad. This led to my friend writing a book called The Last Plane.
In many ways, the First World War changed the world more than the Second, especially if you take into account the First arguably started the Second (by giving Germany a 20-year truce to reload). The Great Powers that won the war carved it up for their own imperial purposes (some of those purposes involved oil), leading us, 100 years later, to deal with Syria, Iraq, and the empire that the Ottomans lost. Now, we have to deal with an emboldened Russia; apparently nostalgic for the old Soviet days (another creature spawned from the First World War), and bent on regaining territory it lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
As I look out on this hot and sunny August day in 2014 in one of the world’s most beautiful cities, I have to remind myself about the world of my grandfather’s generation, and how easy that world can be lost.
