Guest blog: Picturing Quebec’s Recruits*

Published on January 18, 2022

By Zachary Mitchell, Curatorial Assistant at the Canadian Centre for the Great War

Of the nearly 620,000 men who enlisted with the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) during the First World War, roughly 88,000 attested in the province of Quebec. Who were these men?

The answer, it turns out, is more complicated than it seems, according to recent research undertaken by the Canadian Centre for the Great War. In partnership with the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network (QAHN), the Centre has created a new exhibition, Picturing Quebec’s Recruits, launched on the Centre’s website ahead of Remembrance Day last autumn. The project draws on military records and personal documents found in the Centre’s collection, including files on 60 recruits who were living in the province when the war was officially declared. The exhibition offers a glimpse into the lives and identities of soldiers from Quebec who either volunteered or were conscripted for service.

As with their counterparts elsewhere in Canada, Quebecers who served in the First World War were mostly in their mid-twenties and unmarried when they enlisted, but their personal stories reveal many dissimilarities. They came from different communities and backgrounds, they differed in their motivations to serve, and they would go on to have diverse wartime and postwar experiences.

Take the case of Geoffrey Pike, just twenty years old when he signed up with the 13th Battalion (Royal Highlanders of Canada) on December 2, 1914. Born in Buckingham, England, the Montreal bank clerk was one of the thousands of British-born men living in Quebec who were motivated to enlist, in part, by strong familial and cultural ties to Great Britain. Men born on the British Isles made up a large proportion of Canadian troops in the First World War, accounting for roughly 38 per cent of all Canadian recruits over the course of the conflict. In fact, Canadian-born men only formed a (slim) majority of the CEF in 1918 after the introduction of conscription.

Pike trained with the unit in Canada and England before landing in France in May 1915. In October he was wounded during a German bombardment, suffering a compound fracture to his femur as well as multiple minor shrapnel wounds. Infection set in soon after and Pike became dangerously ill; his right leg had to be amputated at the thigh on November 13.

Pike remained in the army for nearly a year following surgery as he underwent further treatment and rehabilitation. During this period he was issued an artificial limb, with which he learned to “walk well” after some months of practice, according to a report on file. After being demobilized as medically unfit in October 1916, Pike apparently returned to his job at the Union Bank of Canada on St. James Street (now rue St. Jacques). Despite the severity of his wound, he would live to the age of eighty, dying in 1975.

Pike’s story conforms fairly closely to First World War narratives in the popular imagination. Other recruits, such as Charles Thomas Hughes, had markedly different experiences.

Hughes, a native Montrealer who lived on Jeanne Mance Street near what is now the campus of l’Université de Québec à Montréal, enlisted with the Canadian Field Artillery (CFA) on February 27, 1917 at the age of 18. Thanks to his diary, which he kept from January 1917 through February 1918, we know that Hughes was an avid athlete who played a variety of sports, and that he attended Sunday church service and related activities in a number of different parishes. Given such strong social connections at home, his reasons for enlisting defy easy explanation. Social pressures and intrinsic motivation evidently played a role, as they did with all recruits. However, the timing of Hughes’ enlistment suggests another possible factor: the onset of conscription. The federal election of 1917 had essentially been a referendum on the highly contentious issue of conscription. The victory of Robert Borden’s government in December signaled to Canadians across the country that conscription was coming – it was simply a matter of when and the specific bounds the legislation would take.

Unmarried, and employed as a clerk, Hughes would have almost certainly been aware that he would be among the first to be drafted. Volunteering, then, at least offered the possibility of choosing one’s service branch and avoiding the “sharp end” of the infantry battalions. This is, of course, simply speculation, but it shows how many different factors could be at play in men’s minds at the time as they considered enlisting. Hughes’ diary offers no hints as to why he chose to volunteer, either. His entry for February 26 simply states: “Went to Guy St barracks [and] passed for the 79th Battery. In afternoon went to Medical Board.”

Whatever his reasons, his service took a fortunate turn. In October 1917, Hughes was assigned to the 4th Canadian Divisional Ammunition Column, an auxiliary formation principally responsible for the transport of munitions, where he would remain for the duration of the war. Aside from a few instances of disciplinary action after running afoul of his superiors, Hughes describes a rather uneventful string of days spent on duty, his evenings filled with reading, card games, letter writing, and the occasional YMCA-sponsored entertainment. Hughes returned to Canada and was demobilized in April 1919.

Hughes later joined a unit of the Non-Permanent Active Militia during the interwar years. He enlisted in the Canadian Army during the Second World War, though, but little is known of his service save that he survived the war. He died in 1957 at the age of 59.

The sixty men explored in Picturing Quebec’s Recruits constitute a tiny sample of the enormous legacy of Canadian First World War veterans. It is a legacy that underscores the great diversity of men from across the country, including Quebec, who served and sacrificed at a pivotal moment in Canada’s history. The conflict was a commonly shared experience for a generation of men who called Canada home; and in its aftermath, these veterans emerged as a significant bloc of Canadian society exerting social and political capital out of proportion to their numbers.

Fledgling organizations such as the Great War Veterans Association (GWVA) would come into existence, helping to maintain and affirm veterans’ identities. These processes were perhaps less prevalent in Quebec given the lower number of veterans and the contentious debates surrounding the province’s support for the war effort, but they can nevertheless be observed as part of a developing sense of Canadian identity amongst many individual Quebecers. Acknowledging the lives of Quebec’s recruits allows us to understand the conflict in greater depth and offers us a more nuanced understanding of the postwar societies that emerged in its aftermath.

* This article originally appeared in the Winter 2021 edition of the Quebec Heritage News, Vol. 16, No.1.

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