Defining a nation
Canada gears up to commemorate a nation-defining war
Canada prepares to mark the 100th anniversary of the First World War.
TORONTO — The commander of the 28th Canadian Battalion at the Battle of Vimy Ridge naturally had some biases, but his analysis of the horror and heroics of April 9-12, 1917, has become, rightly or wrongly, the generally accepted view in this country.
“It was Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific on parade,” Brig. Gen. Alexander Ross declared afterwards. “I thought then that I witnessed the birth of a nation.”
More than 10,000 Canadians were killed or wounded during those few days in France. For the first time, Canadian soldiers fought as one unit, under the command of Canadian officers and employing tactics developed by Canadians. And we won, trouncing the Germans, succeeding where our allies had failed and congratulating ourselves ever since.
The Battle of Vimy Ridge has become one of our “founding myths” and, whether you agree or disagree with the general’s thoughts on the “birth of a nation,” you are going to be hearing Ross’s message repeatedly during the next four years as the federal government, largely through the Canadian War Museum, begins coast-tocoast commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the First World War. Think of it all as Birth of a Nation, The Sequel.
The Ottawa-based, federally funded museum is developing an ambitious series of temporary travelling exhibitions, a retooling of some permanent exhibitions, revamped web presentations, weekly Facebook and Twitter updates and so-called legacy projects, including one called “supply line” that will loan educational kits, with actual First World War artifacts, to schools so children can hold a piece of real shrapnel in their hands as they explore the country’s founding myth.
Tim Cook is the war museum’s acting director of research, a much decorated author, one of the country’s top First World War historians and the man who declared in a recent interview that the coming onslaught of wartime memorabilia and education will be “fabulously intense.”
Cook admits he did not coin that phrase “fabulously intense.” (The designers of the eight-year-old war museum building, in praising their own work, apparently deserve that credit.) But one can’t help but believe Cook’s superlatives are heartfelt after listening to a briefing by top museum officials on their plans for the next four years.
The overriding message from all these activities is, “at the most basic level, how this war shaped our country; how Canada was never the same afterward,” Cook says.
The first visible sign of the Great War revisited will actually be in Stephen Harper’s hometown of Calgary this September with an art exhibition at the Glenbow Museum. Tentatively titled War into Landscape, the show pairs the art of Canada’s A.Y. Jackson and Germany’s Otto Dix. Both artists sketched scenes in the same area on the Western Front of the war, but on opposite sides. Jackson went on to become a member of the nationalistic Group of Seven landscape artists. Dix, by the 1930s, was termed “degenerate” by Hitler, but was considered by more informed art critics as one of Germany’s best 20th century artists. Many of the Dix works about war from the German perspective have never before been seen in Canada.
That art show will come to the war museum in Ottawa in April next year at the same time as the opening of another exhibition there tentatively titled Picturing War, which will show artworks created, not just by official war artists, but by average soldiers. This is the first time the museum is exhibiting works en masse from its vast collection of soldiers’ amateur art.
“This will be the guys in the trenches sketching on their sketchbooks for their sweethearts at home or for themselves,” Cook says.
A fundraising gala will be held in April to help kick off the four years of anniversary-related events centred at the museum.
All this may sound an awful lot like the recent multi-million-dollar events by the federal government to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812. Online surfers couldn’t check their local Environment Canada weather forecast without being directed to a link on the War of 1812 and how it was the de facto birth of a nation in which Canadians of British, French and First Nations ancestry united to repel American invaders.
We won that war, we tell ourselves, although the Americans think they won, too.
So, is the war museum being directed or prodded by a Conservative government intent on Canadians becoming more patriotic and military-minded from sea to sea?
“Actually, not at all,” says Yasmine Mingay, the museum communications manager who, with the speed of a CF-18, tended to interrupt the joint interview with Cook and museum director general James Whitham when politically sensitive questions arose.
Mingay may be right. Every federal cultural institution in Ottawa has known for years what pleases the government. They generally do not have to be told what to do. Various cultural bureaucrats from different organizations meet regularly to share intelligence and keep one step ahead of their political masters.
There were vague, hesitant answers from Mingay and company about government funding of these First World War projects. Upon careful parsing, the answers could be interpreted in various ways, although the answers seemed destined to leave the impression that the government was not topping up the museum’s budgets to restage the First World War.
The war museum will launch one, two or three new exhibitions in each of the next four years. Most exhibitions will be designed to travel across the country. Negotiations are ongoing with museums to determine which shows will appear where.
Next year, along with the two aforementioned art shows, there will be an exhibition tentatively titled Iron Harvest, about the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium in 1915, where Canadians’ were first felled by the Germans’ deadly chlorine gas and 6,000 of our troops perished in four days of fighting. This is the battle that inspired what is perhaps Canada’s most recited poem, In Flanders Fields by John McCrae.
Belgian farmers near Ypres still find shell fragments, human remains and other horrors every spring when fields are plowed. Hence, the name of the exhibition. Belgian museums will be lending artifacts from their collections for the Canadian show.
Other later exhibitions include one on the war in the air, war and media, women in war and one on Victoria Cross winners.
The marquee exhibition will be about Vimy in 2017. Expect to see personal stories, war art, photographs, military artifacts and dramatic plaster maquettes by sculptor Walter Allward for the Vimy Memorial in France.
This exhibition will explore the “founding myth” phenomena, equating Canada’s most iconic wartime adventure with the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War, the Battle of Britain in the Second World War, Australia’s defeat at Gallipoli and seminal battles for other countries. Essentially, says Cook, the exhibition will ask: “How did Vimy become what it is today, an icon, a symbol, even a myth, the birth of a nation?”
Vimy may be “the big one,” but Whitham, the museum director general, says another project is the one closest to his heart: a planned online exhibition telling the stories of hundreds of soldiers and picturing their medals.
The final First World War exhibition will open in April 2018 and will be titled 100 Days of Battle, which refers to the final 100-day push by Canadians at the end of the war. That exhibition will then shift into a look back at the last 100 years and how we have come to view the war and how it has changed us.
Many of the exhibitions, although primarily about the First World War, will have some Second World War content, next year being the 75th anniversary of the start of that war. Anniversaries of some specific Second World War battles will be highlighted in their own exhibitions after the First World War memories go back in the vault. But before all that, the war museum will open an exhibition this weekend, simply titled Peace. It will be an opportunity for everyone to take a break of sorts before the coming battles.