November 11^th

by John Thompson

11/10/03

In 1914, Canada’s population had just reached 8 million people, but over the next four years some 690,000 Canadians would march off to the First World War. Of these almost 60,000 died in uniform over the next five years.

In retrospect, the First World War was very good for Canada. For a start, the accomplishments of the Canadian Corps, particularly at Vimy Ridge and during the ‘Hundred Days’ of 1918, engendered a sense of patriotism and a separate Canadian identity that had never existed before. Most of us thought of ourselves as Britons in 1914, and as Canadians in 1919, but 60,000 dead (to say nothing of the wounded and those with mental scars) was a high price for a small country.

As a result of the war, Canada is dotted with small memorials — bronze tablets in churches enshrining their dead parishioners, in stores and head offices where dead employees and co-workers were recalled. Even some of the smallest hamlets built a small cenotaph naming those who never returned.

At this time of the year, hundreds of small quiet tributes and ceremonies take place across the country. One of those ceremonies I always attend is at my old fraternity house — the Toronto chapter of Zeta Psi.

During the First World War, all of the undergraduate members of the chapter put down their books and volunteered to fight; so did some 90% of the those brothers who had graduated within the last ten years. The sister chapter in Montreal did almost as well — most all of its young men went immediately.

Some of them were already well known and famous: Charles Alexander Moss had been the youngest man ever to head the Law Society of Upper Canada, and was well on the way to a sterling legal career. He died as an infantry company commander in October 1916, lingering for three weeks after being struck by a German shell fragment at the Battle of the Somme.

Others were the scions of what were then the leading families of Toronto. Many of these names were again listed among the dead of the Second World War as nephews joined their uncles in giving what Abraham Lincoln described in the American Civil War as ‘that last full measure of devotion’. Other names have vanished altogether — Felix Olivier Bolte was his parents’ only son and their hopes died with him in 1918. The Fraternity’s president still sits on a throne-like chair donated in his memory.

Some others won a small measure of fame — but at fearsome cost. The 18 year old Fred Fisher from the Montreal Zeta Psi chapter died in April 1915, as the infant Canadian Corps faced its first battle near Ypres, when the elite divisions of the German Army struck the Canadians behind a cloud of poison gas (the first time such a weapon was successfully used in war). Fisher, the lone survivor of his machine gun crew, held off one attack for long enough for an endangered battery of artillery to withdraw to safety, and posthumously received Canada’s first Victoria Cross of the War.

Another brother heads the Chapter House’s list of First World War dead. Much loved and respected, he was a talented physician and very active in the life of both Canadian chapters of the fraternity. He died in France in 1918 of pneumonia, brought on by overwork and stress after three years of tending to the mass casualties that the war brought to his hospital. Many Canadians remember him not so much for this, but for the few lines he penned after days of running a front-line aid station in April 1915.

In a rare quiet moment as the German offensive stalled before the stubborn Canadian defence, he looked out at the rows of freshly dug graves near his aid station. In grief, for he had just learned of the death of one of his closest friends, he noted that poppies were springing up between the rows of crosses; and that — despite the shellfire all around — the larks were still singing and flying. Then he took his note pad and drafted a short poem…

At this time every year, Toronto’s Zetes assemble in the fraternity house. From the active student members to the octogenarian veterans, we know LCol Dr. John A. McRae and all the other names on the bronze tablets as our brothers. They still belong to us, and we still belong to them. The message in "In Flanders’ Fields" remains afresh and we do not forget. The torch is for all of us to hold.

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders’ fields

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca