Publishing the horrors of a world war
In 1934, the Star’s Gregory Clark captioned a new series of photos from the First World War. The publication and reaction from the public showed that many Canadians identified with the horror, not the glory, of the war
In 1934, 16 years after the armistice that ended the First World War, a series of new photos were released to Canadian newspapers. The Star published many of these striking pictures, with captions by war hero and journalist Gregory Clark. In their new book, The Vimy Trap: Or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great War, Ian McKay and Jamie Swift analyze this treatment and the response from readers.
Contrary to the view of Canada’s war efforts as noble and glorious — part of what the authors term “Vimyism” — they argue that the photos’ publication showed that by then, the war was widely viewed as a needless slaughter.
The book, timed to the centennial of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, is an attempt to debunk what the authors see as a distorted view of that battle and its legacy, Canada’s contributions and the First World War itself.
The Star was clearly aware that it was taking a risk in publishing such candid photographs of the war — that it was in danger of reopening “the wounds of memory,” especially those of the broken-hearted and bereaved. To reassure its readers, it ran endorsements from a number of eminent Ontarians. Sir William Mulock, Ontario’s former lieutenant-governor, commended the “marvellous reproductions of the dread details of war.” He believed the series would introduce the public to “the horror, the waste, the shame, the sin of war,” and, though the images might hurt, there was an overpowering need to warn Canadians against any glamorizing of military conflict.
Rather more surprising endorsements came in an article outlining the response of veteran patients at the Christie Street Military Hospital. Many of the men there had been disfigured by the war. “No picture is too gruesome to be published,” said one hospitalized veteran. “Our children should be made to look at them until they hate them, until they have the most utter contempt for war and all it stands for.”
The chaplain at the hospital, Rev.-Capt. Sidney Lambert, declared: “People have no conception of the horrors of war, or the filthy conditions under which men lived and died.” Lambert, wounded in the war, thought it “foolish for persons to say that the soldier is being made to remember the horrors he is trying so hard to forget. It is not the soldiers who are being retaught war horrors, but the youth of to-day who are being taught them for the first time.” If any group had a natural investment in a myth that sanctified the Great War as the birth of the nation, in which they played the role of heroic martyrs, it would surely have been this one. Yet none of the wounded veterans invoked this myth.
The series was hard-hitting. The images of dead and disfigured soldiers and civilians might well be censored in a 21st-century publication, certainly in a North America squeamish about depicting the bodily consequences of battles. Often the photographs were framed by headlines that forcefully underlined the gruesome nature of the scenes depicted. “Roast Men, Boiled Men, Tortured Men — War!” proclaimed one. “Man Demonstrated That He Was Still a Cave Man,” said another. “What is the Net Result Save Death and Ruin?” asked a third.
Still, in the series the Star was careful to avoid images of mutilated or killed — and identifiable — Canadians. The paper’s Gregory Clark, who wrote most of the captions, identified with suffering soldiers on both sides. Clark had spent three years on the Western Front, and as a major with the Canadian Mounted Rifles he had won the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry at Vimy Ridge. Ernest Hemingway, for a time his colleague on the Star, considered him one of the best journalists at the paper, as did a growing legion of readers and listeners entranced by his sports stories and radio broadcasts tinged with gentle humour.
Yet Clark’s captions in 1934 were hardly gentle. They were both funny and biting. Clark’s humour had the cobalt hue of someone for whom the war was suffused with the bitterest irony — as, again and again, we behold people unaware of the fate about to befall them. Of a picture of a recruiting meeting on the steps of Toronto City Hall in 1915 — titled “Your King and Country Need You” — Clark asked, with quiet sarcasm, “What is missing in this picture? Why the Cenotaph, which entirely changes the appearance of the city hall square!”
Commenting on a shot of an excited crowd outside Buckingham Palace on the night of the declaration of war, Clark wrote: “Whatever our honest and noble intentions this night, if any eye in this throng could have foreseen four years ahead, and a roll of 1,000,000 British men dead, could we have cheered as we did? Now we know that a declaration of war is the occasion of national mourning.”
An image of an Austrian firing squad executing Czechs prompted Clark’s scathing denunciation of how the Great War had been sold to the young: “In war, you have to be strong, because if you don’t nip anti-war sentiment in the bud, goodness knows how it might spread. Bullets or white feathers, it matters not how you stampede the lads in. The main thing is, get them in. Then let them try any sentiment!”
The Star repeatedly underlined the theme that the line between civilians and warriors had been erased in an age of mechanized warfare. A caption under a shot of a torpedoed British merchant ship sinking beneath the waves stated, with a prescient foreboding:
Hundreds of pictures like this were published in Germany and sent to the front to prove that if the boys would just do their job in the trenches, it would not be long before France and Britain would be starv- ing, their munitions exhausted, and both of them ready to surrender. In the next war, the scheme will be to bomb enemy cities from the air until even the babies will be begging for peace.
A representation of the sinking of the German cruiser Blucher in 1915 — an event that took 750 German sailors to their deaths in the North Sea — prompted Clark to put the image to work as a reminder that “war plays around with us all, making us blood brothers one day and the most desperate of enemies another day. And it is the common sailor, the common soldier, Tom, Dick and Harry, who starve and freeze and suffer and die.”
Clark stressed the shared humanity of soldiers on either side of the Western Front. He worked especially hard to debunk the “Myth of the Hun,” according to which the German people were predisposed by nature or history to cruelty and aggression. Sometimes this led him to deflate German pretensions to military prowess. Clark pointed out how fear-inspiring German soldiers had been transformed into “sad gray hosts bearing their wounded to Canadian dressing stations in September 1918.” He said of one diminutive German prisoner, caught in a May 1919 trench raid: “He bears little resemblance to the cartoons we used to see of the hated Hun.”
Apicture of a dead German with a Canadian soldier handling a Mauser rifle standing over him carried the caption: “What Price Glory?”
An image of the Canadian and German wounded helping one another across the mud of Passchendaele prompted Clark to write: “All Brothers. — And a good thing it was, too, because if you fell wounded in this Passchendaele mud, you ran the chance of never rising again.” A caption for a similar shot from Hill 70, showing two Canadian soldiers helping a German soldier, pointed out that the soldiers “almost seem as though they were hugging one another. Such is the tender power of imminent death over men.”
Clark used an image of a crowd of “damaged Canadians . . . waiting outside a dressing station in Ypres” in November 1917, after Passchendaele, to describe their attitude towards the one German to be seen standing amongst them:
There seems to be little hate here. But of course these are just common front line soldiers. Every mile you went back of the line, the hate grew stronger, until at last, when you got right back to civilization, there you found hate in its pure, unadulterated essence. These boys called him Jerry. Back home, they called him the Hun.
Here Clark was directly echoing (and just slightly altering) an insight from Generals Die in Bed.
Even when Clark did not frame photographs in a humanistic manner, readers might well have been brought to do so on their own. For example, the paper featured one photograph depicting “two schoolboy Germans” offering a “very awkward lift to a Canadian wounded in the foot” as evidence of an anti-romantic vision of the war: the clumsily carried Canadian was “Hardly the Subject for a Painting.” Yet with his emphasis on “schoolboy Germans” who were helping a-Canadian, Clark was effectively suggesting that the soldiers were simply young human beings caught up in a situation far beyond their control . . .
A consistent theme of the Star photospread was the ordinariness of the beings caught up in the war.
The photo “Bringing His Bread with Him” depicted two Germans helping a wounded Canadian at Arleux in 1917; one of them, under the impression that the British were short of bread, carried a loaf with him. “Shambles for Man and Beast” showed tired stretcher-bearers carrying a wounded comrade, with a caption pondering whether the men “would have a twinge of conscience as they looked at the poor horse and wondered to themselves what horses had ever done that they should be drawn into men’s wars” — a question that haunted one of the key figures in All Quiet on the Western Front.
For some readers, the single most arresting photograph was captioned “Canadian and German Boys at War.” It showed captured German teenagers, one of them shooting a worried glance towards his captors, being led down the “roads out from Cambrai” by equally youthful Canadians. Clark remarked, “This remarkable photograph is surely one of the bitterest arguments against war ever advanced.”
The Star editors’ heavy-handed didacticism says something about the emotions they hoped to elicit from the paper’s mass audience. They wanted readers to question — and then reject — war. But what did Canadians make of this message? Not all of the letter writers who responded to the Star series liked it. Some outraged patriots took the trouble to write to the paper. Yet if we place in the “thumbs down” category all those who expressed serious qualms about the series, those entries comprise less than 10 per cent of the total number of people whose letters appeared in the paper.
Excerpted from The Vimy Trap: Or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great War by Ian McKay and Jamie Swift (Between the Lines). The Vimy Trap has been shortlisted for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize for best book of Canadian history.