French-Canadian Participation in the First World War

Cap Badge for the Francophone 22nd Battalion CEF

By James Patton

There are different estimates of the number of French-Canadians who volunteered to serve in the  Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) during the Great War. One widely accepted tally is around 15,000 volunteers, mostly  from the Montréal area, though Québec City, Western Québec and Eastern Ontario also provided significant numbers, too. It seems certain that some French-Canadians living in the U.S.A. returned to enlist and they would have been counted as American recruits, a part of a large  contingent that is officially recorded as 35,612, although alternative estimates run as high as 50,000.

How many were French-speaking (Francophones) is impossible to know since the attestation papers did not ask for that information. Though French-Canadians comprised nearly 30 percent of the nation’s population, they made up only about 4 percent of Canadian volunteers. Less than 5 percent of Québec’s males of military age were enrolled in infantry battalions, compared to about 15 percent in the rest of the country. To further confuse, about  half of the Québec recruits were English-speakers (Anglophones), and nearly half of  the Francophone volunteers came from provinces other than Québec. 

This Canadian recruitment poster in French calls for men to enlist in French-Canadian regiments, as “It’s time to act.”

It seems clear that many French-Canadians weren’t motivated to fight. The reasons are many and somewhat complex, but here is a list:  

• Francophones had a tradition of suspicion toward the British, and France had shown scant interest in their welfare after the 1760 treaty. Therefore, they felt little loyalty or obligation  to either "home country." 

• Recruiting campaigns consisted largely of flag-waving "King and Country" appeals, effective with Anglophones but likely not with Francophones. Many Anglophones were first or second generation in the country (one source says 48.5% of the CEF), while all of the Francophones were at least fifth generation. 

• Many French-Canadians, led by figures like Henri Bourassa (1868–1932), emphasized loyalty to Québec. They felt that their fidelity was to the land of their birth, and they should instead continue to concentrate on achieving independence for Québec . 

• Francphones had been alienated by government actions, e.g. the Canadian Department of Militia and Defence’s policy of strict unilingualism, and the Ontario Provincial government’s 1912  ban on French language in the schools. 

• Other influences included these: Religious—there was a theory that circulated that the war was a punishment of France for adopting "godless" secularism. Economic—the war brought welcomed prosperity to Québec, with many well-paying jobs available, especially in the war industries. Emigration- the French-Canadian diaspora to New England was still going at this time (about 900,000 left Québec between 1840 and 1930).

However, the  tipping point was conscription, imposed by Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden GCMG PC KC (1854–1937)  in August 1917, partly a result of public belief that the French-Canadians were "shirking" their duty. French Canada resisted; there  were widespread protests and even riots in Québec City, which led to martial law, enforced by 6,000 armed Anglophone conscripts.

As can be seen in the table that follows, there were 15 Francophone militia regiments in 1914 . Coincidentally, there were also, over the course of the war, 15 Francophone battalions in the CEF, out of a total of 260. Sir Sam Hughes  KCB PC VD (1853–1921), the Minister of Militia and Defence (until 9 November 1916), did not like Francophones, and didn’t allow any Francophone units in the First CEF contingent. Nearly 1,000 Francophones had volunteered in 1914, but they were assigned to Anglophone  battalions. 

Francophone Battalions of the CEF 1915–1919, Militia Recruitment Source and Present-Day Affiliation

Click on Table to Enlarge

Total for all units: 8,868

For the Second CEF contingent, a wealthy Québecois named Arthur Migneault MD (1865–1937), a purveyor of highly popular iron pills, circumvented Hughes’s obstinancy by going straight to Borden and offering to pay CD$ 50,000 (equivalent to CD$1.4 million if paid today) to cover the cost of forming, manning and equipping  ONE exclusively Francophone battalion for the CEF. Borden had no grounds to refuse, and so the 22nd Battalion CEF came to be, commonly known outside of  Québec as the “Van Doos,” an Anglicized version of  vingt-deux. 

Although Dr. Migneault supported the recruitment of two more Francophone CEF  battalions, the 41st and 57th, neither of these was ever deemed combat ready, partly due to a lack of Francophone officers. As the table above shows, save for the 22nd all of the Francophone battalions were eventually used to backfill operational losses.

Although the total Francophone participation in the CEF is estimated to be about 35,000, it would be down to the new 22nd to carry the colors alone. You can learn how they did tomorrow.

Sources include The Canadian War Museum, the Government of Canada and Badges of the CEF, by Lenard Babin and John Snitzel.

Eyewitness: Ambushed on the Eastern Front by Aspirant Officer Oskar Kokoschka, 4th Dragoon Squadron

Artist-Soldier Oskar Kokoschka

19 August 1915

There was something stirring at the edge of the forest. Dismount! Lead horses! Our line was joined by volunteers, and we beat forward into the bushes as if we were going out to shoot pheasant.

The enemy was withdrawing deeper into the forest, firing only sporadically. So we had to mount again, which was always the worst part, for since conscription had been introduced the requisitioned horses were as gun-shy as the reservists who had been called up were wretched horsemen. After all, most of them were used to sitting only on an office chair. In the forest suddenly we were met by a hail of bullets so near and so thick that one seemed to see each bullet flitting past; it was like a startled swarm of wasps.

Charge! Now the great day had come, the day for which I too had been longing. I still had enough presence of mind to urge my mount forward and to one side, out of the throng of other horses that had now gone wild, as if chased by ghosts, the congestion being made worse by more coming up from the rear and galloping over the fallen men and beasts.

I wanted to settle this thing on my own and to look the enemy straight in the face. A hero’s death – fair enough! But I had no wish to be trampled to death like a worm. The Russians had lured us into a trap. I had actually set eyes on the Russian machine-gun before I felt a dull blow on my temple.

The sun and the moon were both shining at once and my head ached like mad. What on earth was I to do with this scent of flowers? Some flower – I couldn’t remember its name however I racked my brains. And all that yelling round me and the moaning of the wounded, which seemed to fill the whole forest – that must have been what brought me round. Good Lord, they must be in agony! Then I became absorbed by the fact that I couldn’t control the cavalry boot with the leg in it, which was moving about too far away, although it belonged to me. I recognised the boot by the spur: contrary to regulations, my spurs had no sharp rowels. Over on the grass there were two captains in Russian uniform dancing a ballet, running up and kissing each other on the cheeks like two young girls. That would have been against regulations in our army.

I had a tiny round hole in my head. My horse, lying on top of me, had lashed out one last time before dying, and that had brought me to my senses. I tried to say something, but my mouth was stiff with blood, which was beginning to congeal. The shadows all round me were growing huger and huger, and I wanted to ask how it was that the sun and moon were both shining at the same time. I wanted to point at the sky, but my arm wouldn’t move. Perhaps I lay there unconscious for several days.

A Knight Errant (Self Portrait)
1915

After  suffering a lung puncture and the head injury, Kokoschka was first reported dead, but he had been captured and was eventually freed and taken to hospital. He received the Silver Bravery Medal 1st Class for his conduct during the assault. He remained in the army for the remainder of the war but never returned to active duty.  His wartime experiences, particularly his severe physical injuries and the psychological trauma of the war, heavily influenced his art, including during a period of postwar hallucinations.

Source: Oskar Kokoschka, My Life 

La journée de Versailles — Der Tag von Versailles — The day of Versailles

28 June 1919

By Charles B. Burdick 

The Crowd Outside the Palace Grounds at Versailles

About 2:30 p.m. Georges Clemenceau entered the Hall of Mirrors and looked about him to see that all arrangements were in perfect order. He observed a group of wounded veterans at one side with their medals of valor pinned to their uniforms and, walking up to them, engaged them in a brief conversation. At 2:45 p.m. he moved up to the middle table and took his seat as the presiding officer. Observant spectators noted the singular fact that he sat almost directly under the ceiling decoration bearing the legend, "The king governs alone." The spot was as close as possible to the location of William I of Prussia when he had become the German Emperor in 1871.

Wilson and Lloyd George entered the room soon after Clemenceau, and the assemblage saluted them with discreet applause. At last the table was full, except for the German and Chinese delegations. Clemenceau glanced to the right and to the left; people had taken their seats but still conversed with their neighbors. He made a sign to the ushers who whispered, "Ssh! Ssh!" to the offenders. The talking ceased and only the sound of occasional coughing and the dry rustle of programs marred the silence. A sharp military order startled the audience as the Gardes Republicaine at the doorway flashed their sabers into their scabbards with a loud click. In the ensuing silence Clemenceau, his voice distant but penetrating, commanded, "Let the Germans enter." His direction was followed by a hush as the two German delegates, preceded by four Allied officers, entered by way of the Hall of Peace and moved to their seats. Dr. Mueller, a tall man with a scrubby little mustache, wearing black, with a short black tie over his white shirt front, appeared pale and nervous. Dr. Bell held himself calm and erect. The Germans bowed stiffly and sat down. The final moment had arrived at last. Wilson made the audible remark, "How I hate them."

At 3:15 p.m. Georges Clemenceau rose and announced, "The meeting is opened." He then spoke briefly in French: An agreement has been reached upon the conditions of the treaty of peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and the German Empire. The text has been verified; the president of the conference has certified in writing that the text about to be signed conformed to the text of the 200 copies which have been sent to the German delegates. The signatures about to be given constitute an irrevocable engagement to carry out loyally and faithfully in their entirety all the conditions that have been decided upon. I, therefore, have the honor of asking the German plenipotentiaries to affix their signatures to the treaty before me.

German Plenipotentiaries Hermann Mueller
and Johannes Bell Signing the Treaty

The Germans rose quickly from their seats when he had finished his remarks, knowing that they were the first to sign, but William Martin, director of protocol, motioned them to sit down. Mantoux, the official interpreter, began translating Clemenceau's words into German. In his first sentence, when he reached the words, "the German Empire," or, as Clemenceau had said in French, "l'empire allemande," he retranslated it as, "the German Republic." While this change reflected political realities, Clemenceau whispered, "Say 'German Reich,'" this being the term employed by the Germans.

Paul Dutasta, general secretary of the conference, then led the five Germans–two plenipotentiaries and three secretaries–to the treaty table where Mueller and Bell, two lonely men in simple black frock coats among the sea of colorful military and diplomatic uniforms, signed their names. Bell's pen did not work and one of Colonel Edward House's secretaries offered his personal pen for the German's use. Mueller appended his name in the cramped manner of a man trying to hide his involvement in a dubious action while Bell, using the loaned instrument, scrawled his nervous approval in huge letters.

The delegation from the United States followed the Germans. President Wilson rose, and as he began his walk to the historic table, followed in order by Secretary of State Robert Lansing, Colonel House, General Tasker Bliss, and Henry White, other delegates stretched out their hands in congratulation. He came forward with a broad smile and signed his name at the spot indicated by William Marten. Lloyd George, together with Arthur Balfour, Viscount Milner, and Andrew Bonar Law, followed the Americans. Then came the delegates from the British dominions, followed by the representatives of France, in order, Clemenceau, Stephen Pichon, Louis Klotz, André Tardieu, and Jules Cambon; the president of the council signed his name without seating himself.

The general tension that had prevailed before the Germans had signed was now gone. There was a general relaxation; conversation hummed again in an undertone. The remaining delegations, headed by those of Italy, Japan, and Belgium, stood up one by one and passed onward to the queue waiting by the signing table. Meanwhile, adventuresome onlookers congregated around the main table getting autographs. Everything went quickly. The efficient officials of the Quai d'Orsay stood attentively in position indicating places to sign, enforcing procedures, blotting with neat little pads.

French 75s Preparing to Fire the Celebratory Barrage

Suddenly, as Ignace Jan Paderewski, the Polish plenipotentiary, was signing his name, from outside came the crash of guns thundering a salute, announcing to Paris that the Germans had signed the peace treaty. Through the few open windows came the sound of distant crowds cheering hoarsely.

At 3:50 p.m. the signing process was complete. The protocol officials renewed their "Ssh! Ssh!" injunction, cutting short the loud, invasive chatter. There was a final hush. Clemenceau announced, "Gentlemen, all of the signatures have been given. The signing of the peace conditions between the Allied and Associated powers and the German Reich is an accomplished fact. The conference is over. "

Source: Over the Top, August 2009

The Child's ABC of the War

Images Can Be Enlarged by Clicking on Them.

Here's a selection of pages from a 1915 British publication that bizarrely attempted to "sell"  the delights and nicer side of war to kids, while making sure they understood who the real baddies were. The full work can be found online, courtesy of Florida State University, HERE.  It's worth a look. By the way, Ruskin House in London has been ground zero for Britain's progressive movement for a century. 

Thanks to regular contributor Bryan Alexander for bringing this gem to our attention. MH

Surprise! In 1912 Kaiser Wilhelm II Found Himself Saddled with a Socialist Reichstag

Kaiser Wilhelm II with Chancellor Bismarck Present Opens a Session of the Reichstag

By Dennis Cross

In 1912 Kaiser Wilhelm II celebrated his 24th year as emperor of Germany. A grandson of Queen Victoria, he ascended the throne during her reign, and for the next 13 years ruled Germany. Among European sovereigns, only Franz Joseph, the octogenarian emperor of Austria-Hungary, could claim longer tenure. In 1912 Wilhelm understandably regarded himself, if not as first among equals, at least as a force to be reckoned with. He also regarded himself, again not without reason, as the autocrat of the German Empire.

The Reichstag was the popularly elected legislative body of the German empire, but it had little power. The Kaiser had sole authority over foreign affairs, and even on domestic matters the Reichstag could vote only on proposals put forward by the government. Legislation had to be approved by the upper house of the legislature, the Bundesrat, which represented the princes of the German states and was dominated by Prussia. The chancellor and all the ministers of the government were named by the Kaiser, carried out the Kaiser's policies, and could not be removed by the legislature. Despite its institutional weaknesses, however, the Reichstag was in a position to cause difficulties for the government when controlled by opponents of government policies.

Reichstag elections were held on 12 January 1912. They resulted in a stunning victory for the Social Democratic Party, returning 110 SDP members, more than twice the number of the second-place Centre Party, which had previously held the most seats. The election results made possible a coalition of left-to-center parties with the potential to obstruct government policies and make life difficult for Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. 

On 7 February 1912, before British emissary Richard Haldane, the Kaiser spoke at the Reichstag announcing that a bill augmenting naval and army strength would be introduced later in the legislative session.  The socialist dominated Reichstag, nonetheless, subsequently approved bills expanding the standing German army from 515,000 to 544,000, and construction of three more dreadnoughts and two light cruisers. When war broke out in 1914,  the SPD parliamentary group unanimously voted to approve war credits on 4 August 1914. Yet, as the war dragged on the SPD support for the war diminished and the causcus fragmented. In 1917, its strong anti-war faction was expelled from the party, and they formed the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which advocated an immediate end to the war.

Source:  Originally presented in the Fall 2012 Journal of the World War One Historical Association

From the Somme to the Armistice: The Memoirs of Captain Stormont Gibbs, M.C.

Captain Charles Stormont Gibbs, MC,
4th Suffolks

There's a sub-genre of World War One literature that I swore off about 20 years ago, when I concluded I had reached my lifetime quota for such works. It's the vast collection of the accounts of former British Army junior officers who had attended public schools (prep schools in American lingo). Almost all of them are clear, coherent, with high-level vocabularies. Most, however, tell the stories of the same battles, the same sort of disillusionment. My problem with these memoirs is not their quality, accuracy, or all those tragic deaths, but their same template.

Nonetheless,  I am always looking for fresh works on the Great War, fiction as well as non-fiction,  and Charles Stormont Gibbs work, From the Somme to the Armistice, seems to have been rediscovered and  gaining  some 21st-century popularity.  I couldn't bring myself to read it, but I discovered some excellent quotes and excerpts that, collectively I think, capture the spirit of the work, and I offer them below for our readers' consideration. Someday, I might just buy a copy for myself.

Charles Cobden Stormont Gibbs (1897–1969) was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant out of Radley College's OTC program in November 1916. He arrived in France while the Battle of the Somme was already underway and soon joined the festivities. Serving to the end of the war, he earned the Military Cross for "organising defensive measures to meet enemy counter-attacks under heavy bombardment."A fter the war, he became an educator, most notably running Gayhurst preparatory school in Gayhurst, near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire.

At the Somme

1.  This string of wounded men took the stuffing out of me a bit. Like most people I had not fully realised that the horror of war is wounds, not death. I had thought of people being killed perhaps, if they weren’t lucky enough to get a nice little wound at first.

2. The next shock of the war came to me – the next experience – the death of one’s friends. It didn’t seem possible. I jumped out of the trench and ran forward into no man’s land “Come back sir, you can’t do any good”, from an old man in the trench behind. I came back. Wounded they might be but there they lie until they died, for no living man could go to their help – certainly not the only officer but two left in the battalion – just the colonel, Tack, Rush and I – all the rest had gone, even the doctor. I got back in the trench and cried until I couldn’t see.

3. I knew an orderly or runner wouldn't  have much chance of finding his way so I decided to go myself. I memorised the details of the map, took a direction off the star and after twenty minutes or stumbling along stepped straight into the Company HQ - Triumph! 

4. A struggling line of men,  running in a sort of staggering run. Some running, some dropping. The first few got level with me and as I looked at them I saw in their eyes that wild look of men mad with fear.”

5.  We got wedged in a traffic jam for some minutes and it seemed touch and go whether they [his men] could be kept in a frame of mind to follow on. Especially was this so when the result of the jam became evident in the shape of strings of wounded coming down from further forward. Amongst these was young Suttle with all the fingers of one hand hanging by shreds of skin. He held up his hand as he passed me with a grimace but he knew his wound had saved his life.

6. In any sort of hand fighting there are the savage emotions that motivate the shot or thrust. The great horror of war is this prostitution of civilized man. He has to fight for his country and to do so has in actual practice to be brutalized for his country; he has to learn to hate with the primitive blood lust of the savage if he is to push a bayonet into another human being (who probably no more wants to fight than he does). Need he hate? In the case of the average man he must as the counter-balance to fear. 

Then Came Passchendaele

7.  I returned to France from leave about 19th September [1917].  I reached the transport lines in front of Ypres in the evening and went up with  the rations after dark. . . We had to follow the line of the Menin Road keeping off the road some fifty yards at one side, for the road was continually under shellfire. . . I remember falling over a dead man and the revolting sensation one had when this happened in the dark.

8.  The great idea seemed to be to take the Passchendaele ridge on which hundreds of lives had been squandered. Canadians had tried, Australians had tried, but the Germans still defended the ridge and it was said that on the position of the line from which we were to start there was the greatest concentration of enemy artillery yet known.

9.  When dawn came things did not pan out as they should have done if the generals had their way. First no one was ready except ourselves.  The Middlesex had lost their way and arrived an hour late, the other battalion quie lost  and never did arrive at all.

10.  Our barrage opened as planned and immediately the enemy put down a counter barrage of such intensity that its effect was quite unimaginable. . . We had practically no shelter so that the men lay flat at first, for it had been decided not to advance until the battalions on our flanks were ready.  To prevent chaos and panic and simply losing the lot, the CO and I had to walk backwards and forwards along the top of the  trench–at least that is what the "Old Man" did and I had to be with him. . . Well, we both had charmed lives.  The CO's revolver took one piece of shell that would have killed him and I got a clod in the back that knocked me down. . . 

Order HERE

Doughboy Cartoons from Stars and Stripes

Lead Cartoon from Issue #1, 8 February 1918

From the Library of Congress

On 13 June 1919, The Stars and Stripes, "The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918 to 1919" published its final issue. On page five of that issue, the editors announced that the newspaper was being "reverently hauled down" because the war was over and treated their readers, "the most homesick and most likable Army on earth," to a history of the newspaper's activities. The account named and honored the men who had assisted behind the scenes in the writing of the newspaper, as well as in its illustration, design, printing, and distribution.  Their team of cartoonists were fully remembered. The brief history was full of the humor that had characterized the newspaper throughout its run. 

Here we present a selection of those cartoons, some humorous, some making a serious point.

Final Issue, 13 June 1919

Remembering a Veteran: Sgt. Roy Thompson, 1st Motor Mechanics Regiment, AEF — He Made a Life After a Wartime Disability

Sgt. Roy Evans Thompson

By Roy's Son, Dale Thompson

Future Doughboy Roy Thompson grew up on a farm outside Albion, Washington. As a teenager he found neither farming nor schoolwork appealing, leaving high school far short of graduation. He loved to fix things, however, and his inclinations soon led him to working on farm machinery in a local garage, and he found employment operating a massive wheat thresher. He came to realize, though, that there were some useful things to absorb in school for a budding mechanic, such as algebra. Roy spent late 1916 and early 1917 back in high school. Then—surprise—Uncle Sam came knocking. America needed lots of soldiers immediately, if not sooner. He was drafted and inducted into the Army at Fort Lewis, Washington on 4 November 1917. By some magical personnel processing, the Army actually discovered that Roy would be more valuable to the war effort as a mechanic than an infantryman and trained him accordingly. By February 1918 he was aboard the USS President Lincoln heading for France with the other men of the 1st Motor Mechanics Regiment. Roy wrote many letters home to the "Dear Home-folks" and kept a diary, well documenting his service time. An early letter he wrote from his troopship on 13 February suggests he was better suited for the army than the navy.

Dear Home-folks:

Well, I'm out in the middle of the big water, and still able to handle my meals as usual. I think this fact is due to the good weather, as we have only had one day that was very rough. I have been feeling somewhat shaky, and have had a headache a good deal, but haven't been disabled yet.

At the time he wrote this letter, Roy obviously had sensed no omen that he was sailing on a doomed ship—on 31 May 1918 the President Lincoln was torpedoed by German submarine U-90 and sunk about 500 miles off the French coast on a return trip to the U.S.—nor that, within a year, he would be "disabled" for the rest of his life.

Roy was soon assigned to the Air Service as a mechanic and spent the duration of the war at shops and depots in the eastern part of France, behind the huge American battlefields in the vicinity of Verdun. His duty, he reports, was away from the shooting war, involving long hours doing the typical work of mechanic (mostly automotive) with some construction thrown in:

Sat. 8 June

Putting up track in boiler shop and lining up the A-beams thereof.

Weds. 12 June

Went to work at 7 am overhauling Studebaker. Quit at 10 pm.

Mon. 12 August

Working on a Benz (German). Took in French lesson at the Y but didn't learn a great deal.

So the diaries continue on, through the great St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne Offensives, the Armistice, and the winding-down right up until January 1919, when Roy's life would take a terrible turn. An unlucky accident would set him off on a medical odyssey to seven military hospitals, where multiple amputations took his right foot and then additional sections of his right leg as infection spread. At the final stop, Letterman General Hospital at San Francisco's Presidio, he had the good fortune to be treated at the very place a groundbreaking new type of artificial limb was being developed, the "Letterman Leg."

Orthopedics Ward at Letterman General Hospital

The chain of events started when he was granted leave in January 1919 and started out on bicycle with a buddy heading for the town of Abainville where other Air Service shops were located. Attempting to jump a passing train, he had some unspecified mishap and badly injured his right foot. While his letters to his family at the time consistently understated the seriousness of his wound, he was much more candid in his diary:

Sun. 5 January

Griner and I started to Abainville on bicycles. Train accident at 2:10. Taken to Gondrecourt hospital and immediate operation.

Mon. 6 January

Lots of pain. Morphine before I could sleep

Tues. 7 January

More pain. Wound dressed A.M. Foot amputated about 3 pm. Lots of pain after I came out of ether. Finally morphine and some sleep.

Several hospital stops and operations later, after seven weeks, Roy was pleased with his progress:

Weds. 27 February

Wound entirely healed. . .

Three weeks later at the AEF hospital at Beau Desert, France, he received his first artificial leg. It didn't fit very well, and this led to a blister and another infection. But these problems were apparently treated sufficiently to allow Roy to head home. He departed France aboard the USS President Grant on 24 April and arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey, on 6 May. He spent over a month getting checked out at Army General Hospital #3 at Rahway, New Jersey, before being assigned to Letterman General Hospital located in what Roy called "Frisco." He arrived at the Presidio on 12 June. Two weeks later he was measured for his "Letterman Leg." In his diary, Roy doesn't indicate exactly when he was issued this new leg, but he was granted an extended furlough in the latter half of 1919, returning to Letterman in January 1920, when he received his full discharge. Roy Evans Thompson, disabled vet, was now a civilian. But he intended to be a fully productive citizen and began immediately to build his skill set.

Roy and His Mother, Cora, at His Graduation from
Washington State College, June 1925

After his discharge, he immediately enrolled and attended a one-year accelerated high school program to prepare him for Washington State College in Pullman. In a class paper he wrote about his revised views of education:

My experiences have brot [sic] about some very decided changes in my opinion of educations. From complete satisfaction over an eighth grade diploma to a great desire for all the education I can get is a considerable reversal of sentiment. I am indeed thankful that I was shown the advantages of education before all opportunity of acquiring one was gone.

By 1921 he had completed his high school work in the specialized college preparatory program and enrolled in Washington State, pursuing two degrees, a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and a Bachelor of Arts in Education. He received both degrees in June of 1925. Sometime before graduation Roy also became a landowner. He filed for a homestead in Okanogan County, Washington, lived on it for six months to obtain title and then rented out the land to a local farmer. When he graduated, he left the state to pursue his career as a mechanical engineer.

From 1925 Roy worked as a professional engineer. His first position was with the United States Patent Office in Washington, DC. He left after a year and worked for a series of manufacturing companies across America for over 40 years. He specialized in the design of gears and power transmission equipment and was granted at least two patents for his inventions. Roy married Hester McCracken at the start of his career in 1925. They had two children, Dale and Marjorie, and four grandchildren. Roy retired in 1968 and lived ten more years, during which the former high school drop-out and Doughboy became a dedicated booster of continuing education.

Roy's son, Dale Thompson, has compiled all his father's war letters, diary, documents, and photos, along with considerable biographical commentary on his dad in a 206-page book titled Dear Home-folks. It can be ordered from Amazon HERE.

This article is presented in fond memory of my friend and longtime neighbor Roy's son, Dale Thompson, who passed away this past Thursday.  It was great having a fellow WWI enthusiast and a swell guy nearby. 

Cambrai: The Great Tank Battle of the First World War — Video

Lonesome Memorial #19 The Gates of Château de Soupir (a Ruin)

As far as I can determine, this stately structure outside of the village of Soupir, just north of the River Aisne, has no official designation as a war memorial. A survivor of the war, it stands alone, towering over an active farm field without any signage or informational kiosks. It will, however, remain linked to the Great War as long as it stands, the only remaining element of a grand chateau that suffered destruction during the brutal actions of 1914 (First Battle of the Aisne), 1917 (Nivelle Offensive) and 1918 (Germany's Blücher Offensive and the Second Battle of the Marne.)  After the postwar site clearance, only this entrance survived, a veteran  and memory of the war.

The 16th-century château had been an active military establishment during the war. It was initially used as a hospital by the French army. In November 1914, however, it was taken by the Germans, and the wounded French soldiers inside became prisoners. The French Army managed to retake the castle and village during an offensive that same month. By April 1917 Soupir Château served as a command post for the 127th Divisional Infantry Division and the 25th Infantry Battalion. The château was damaged severely that year and more so in 1918 as the opposing armies fought back and forth through the sector.

 

The Château, Prewar and 1917

The poet and editor Malcolm Cowley served as an American Field Service Ambulance Driver in the area and was quite saddened by the badly damaged château and the immense park that surrounded it. In his 1922 poem "Château de Soupir: 1917" he wrote: "in tortured immobility, the deities of stone or bronze await a new catastrophe." After the war, most of the ruins that Cowley had viewed still stood on the site. They were sold and cleared away in the 1920s.  Someone with aesthetic and historical sensibilities decided, fortunately, that the relatively undamaged 1908 monumental entrance gates should remain. These lonesome sentinels are now forever linked in some symbolic but well-recognized fashion to the First World War. 

Nearby in the village of Soupir its churchyard contains 36 British Commonwealth burials. A large German and two French cemeteries lie one half-mile directly to the south. An Italian cemetery, with 592 fallen during 1918's combat, is located one half mile to the southwest. These bear testament to the severity of the fighting in the area over the four years of the war.

Visiting:

The nearest city to Soupir is Soissons.  From there, Soupir is about a 30-minute drive east by car—first via D925 with a turn north onto D88 at the Italian cemetery mentioned above. Drive immediately north of Soupir and look for the gates in the open field on your right. Find a safe place to park to view the gates.

A Urinal As War Art

Fountain –R. Mutt and Artist Marcel Duchamp

By David Lubin from the Oxford University Press Blog, 19 May 2017

[Over a century ago] two of the most influential historical events of the twentieth century occurred within a span of three days. The first of these took place on 6 April 1917, when the United States declared war on Germany and, in doing so, thrust the USA into a leading role on the world stage for the first time in its history. . . 

The other earth-rattling event occurred three days later, on April 9, 1917, when an expatriate French artist named Marcel Duchamp affixed a false name (“R. Mutt”) to a white porcelain urinal that he had purchased in a Manhattan plumbing supply outfit and, under the droll title Fountain, submitted to the first annual exhibition of the American Society of Independent Artists.

The liberal members of the Society had proudly announced that this was to be an egalitarian exhibition, with no judges, juries, or rejections; anyone who paid the nominal membership dues and entry fee would be guaranteed a place. Duchamp, under his pseudonym, paid the required fees, but his submission was rejected all the same, and with vehement indignation, because a signed, store-bought plumbing fixture could not be countenanced as “art.”

The organizers of the exhibition did not know that the urbane Frenchman who had gained international notoriety four years earlier at the Armory Show for his cubo-futurist painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was among them that spring morning when the urinal was unpacked from its shipping crate. Thus they did not hold back in their scorn.

They rightly understood that Mutt (even the name was intended as an insult) was “pissing” on their time-honored beliefs about artistic authenticity, originality, and beauty, insolently demanding reconsideration of such beliefs. As one of his few allies of the time contended, “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.”

Surprisingly, no one ever made a direct connection between America’s declaration of war on Germany on 6 April 1917, and Duchamp’s declaration of war on traditional art and its value systems a mere two or three days later. Surely that has something to do with the still-commanding formalism in the art world, especially the elite, theoretically dominated art world, preventing us from grasping how the most acclaimed artwork of the twentieth century, famous for its Dada overturning of conventional aesthetics, could also and at the same time, have been a blistering counter-response to America’s brash entrance into the global war.

Fountain — Original Display
Photographed by Alfred Stieglitz

Another reason the highly political nature of Fountain, its “obscene” comment on the obscene nature of the war, has long gone unrecognized is that Duchamp, as an artist, gentleman, and dandy, cultivated a persona of impeccable detachment. The persistence of that persona in the half century since the artist’s death in 1968 has made it difficult to regard him as anything but perfectly suave and preternaturally untroubled by the external political world erupting into flames around him.

Mythology aside, Duchamp was anything but indifferent about the politics of the moment. He despised the war in particular, having fled his homeland two years earlier because, as he explained in an interview, “Everywhere the talk turned upon war. Nothing but war was talked about from morning until night. In such an atmosphere, especially for one who holds war to be an abomination, it may readily be conceived existence was heavy and dull.” A grand understatement!

Now, in 1917, with his adopted homeland plunging hysterically into a conflict he thought barbarous and unnecessary, Duchamp wanted to take the mickey out of two intertwined organizations. One was the state, with its pretentious and hypocritical claim that it was going to war against Germany to “make the world safe for democracy,” when, as a member of the Left, he believed quite the contrary. The other was the so-called progressive art world that self-flatteringly claimed to be democratic and non-hierarchical in its support of artists and new forms of art but was in fact not that way at all.

Fountain was the insolent response of a resident alien to his adopted homeland’s vulgar and disgusting embrace of war. It was a “piss on both your houses” gesture of antagonism.

The gallery owner, photographer, and champion of avant-garde art Alfred Stieglitz understood it as such when he had the rejected Fountain hauled up to his Gallery 291, where he photographed it for posterity (the original ready-made disappeared almost immediately after that, probably discarded by Duchamp as no longer serving a need). In choosing a backdrop for the photograph, the art impresario could have used a plain white background, as would become typical later in the century for displaying sculptural objects in pristine isolation from the world around them—the white cube approach. Or he could have photographed it in front of one of the semi-abstract paintings of the newly discovered artist to whom he as giving a solo exhibition at the time, Georgia O’Keeffe.

Warriors, Marsden Hartley, 1913

Instead, the gallery owner photographed it against an unsold canvas by his protégé Marsden Hartley, who, in love with a German cavalry officer, had lived in Berlin on the eve of the war and painted a series of radiant quasi-abstractions of Prussian horsemen in tight white breeches parading on imperial review. Stieglitz “posed” Fountain directly in front of a Hartley oil painting called Warriors, establishing a powerful, if highly ambiguous, link between militarism, as celebrated by the American modernist painter, America’s declaration of war against Germany, and Duchamp’s declaration of war against the art establishment. The urinal is placed in front of Warriors in such a way as to invite the viewer to urinate on militancy, be it German, American, or any other kind.

Several years earlier, the Italian poet F. T. Marinetti, in his first Futurist manifesto, had proclaimed that war is good because it purifies society; he called it the “the hygiene of the state.” Strange as it may seem to us today, many of Marinetti’s fellow artists and intellectuals looked forward to the Great War, naively believing it would overturn stale, outmoded ways of thinking, wash away the sediments of the past, and launch society into a better, purer, more ideal future.

Fountain rejected futurist rhetoric. It condemned Wilsonian progressivism, too, and spat on—or, more specifically, pissed on—idealism of any sort, be it political, military, or aesthetic.

L.H.O.O.Q., Marcel Duchamp, 1919

Thus the two birthdays we [recently commemorated]—that of America’s military-industrial complex, as inaugurated by the nation’s leap into the fray of the First World War, and of the Duchampian strain of modern art, as marked by the submission and rejection of Fountain—are twinned episodes in the lives we collectively lead. To understand how Fountain, in the context of its electrifying historical moment, was not only anti-art but also anti-war is to help artists today better understand the extent to which making art can, or cannot, be an alternative to making war. 

12 "Common Sense" Quotes About War from George Bernard Shaw

G.B. Shaw, September 1914

In November 1914, George Bernard Shaw published a controversial 35,000 word essay  in a supplement for the New Statesman titled “Common Sense About the War” that blamed both sides for the conflict and attacked British propaganda.  The public reception was not friendly, many his countrymen accusing him of a lack of patriotism. Piling on across the pond, the New York Times added: "Like Iago, Mr. Shaw is nothing if not critical, and in this crisis his criticism is for the most part bitter, extreme, and in purpose destructive." 

I recently got around to reading  the essay and—while there's some of the expected socialist, anti-capitalist cant, and a few expressions of unclassifiable bollocks—I found that there's also much that lives up to the "Common Sense" promise of the title.  A link to the full article is provided below, but here are a dozen of Shaw's quotes that I think are worth singling out. MH

1.   The time has come,”to pluck up courage and begin to talk and write soberly about the war.”

2.   Our way of getting an army able to fight the German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us into wholesale enlistment. 

3.  It is very difficult for anyone who is not either a Junker  [i.e Young nobleman,  country squire, etc.]  or a successful barrister to get into an English Cabinet. . . The Foreign Office is a Junker Club. Our governing classes are overwhelmingly Junker: all who are not Junkers are riff-raff whose only claim to their position is the possession of ability of some sort: mostly ability to make money.

4.  Will you now at last believe, O stupid British, German, and French patriots, what the Socialists have been telling you for so many years: that your Union Jacks and tricolours and Imperial Eagles ( where the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered ) are only toys to keep you amused, and that there are only two real flags in the world henceforth: the red flag of Democratic Socialism and the black flag of Capitalism, the flag of God and the flag of Mammon?

5.   I see the Junkers and Militarists of England and Germany jumping at the chance they have longed for in vain for many years of smashing one another and establishing their own oligarchy as the dominant military power in the world. 

6.  When Europe and America come to settle the treaty that will end this business (for America is concerned in it as much as we are), they will not deal with us as the lovable and innocent victims of a treacherous tyrant and a savage soldiery. They will have to consider how these two incorrigibly pugnacious and inveterately snobbish peoples, who have snarled at one another for forty years with bristling hair and grinning fangs, and are now rolling over with their teeth in one another's throats, are to be tamed into trusty watch-dogs of the peace of the world.

7.  Some of the best disposed parties will stumble over the old delusion of disarmament. They think it is the gun that matters. They are wrong: the gun matters very much when war breaks out; but what makes both war and the gun is the man behind them. And if that man really means the peace of the world to be kept, he will take care to have a gun to keep it with. 

8. Junker-Militarism promotes only stupid people and snobs, and suppresses genuine realists as if they were snakes, it always turns out when a crisis arrives that  the silly people don't know their own silly business.  The Kaiser and his ministers made an appalling mess of their job. 

9. Even the wise, who loathe war, and regard it as such a dishonour and disgrace in itself that all its laurels cannot hide its brand of Cain, had to admit that police duty is necessary and that war must be made on such war as the Germans had made by attacking France in an avowed attempt to substitute a hegemony of cannon for the comity of nations. There was no  alternative.

10.  We cannot smash or disable Germany, however completely we may defeat her, because we can do that only by killing her women; and it is trifling to pretend that we are capable of any such villainy. [Oh?] Even to embarrass her financially by looting her would recoil on ourselves, as she is one of our commercial customers and one of our most frequently visited neighbors.

11.   Militarism must not be treated as a disease peculiar to Prussia.

12. To sum up, we must remember that if this war does not make an end of war in the west, our allies of to-day may be our enemies of to-morrow, as they are of yesterday, and our enemies of to-day our allies of to-morrow as they are of yesterday; so that if we aim merely at a fresh balance of military power, we are as likely as not to negotiate our own destruction.

Coming Soon:   GBS presented a retrospective view of the war in the preface to the published version of his 1919 play Heartbreak House. I'll be presenting a similar selection of my favorite quotes from that document in the near future. MH

Bernard Shaw's full 35,000 word essay “Common Sense About the War” can be downloaded as a pdf document HERE.