The Cheerful Lie

Käthe Kollwitz, "The Mothers"

Although best known for her Anne of Green Gables fiction series, L.M. Montgomery was first published as a poet.* Yet during her lifetime, Montgomery published only one poem that explicitly addresses the First World War: “Our Women.”** A cursory reading of “Our Women” is likely to dismiss the poem as naively patriotic, but when read in the context of Montgomery’s other war writings and her personal grief, the poem reveals a complex, ambivalent view of the conflict. In its three short stanzas, Montgomery describes three women, each of whom is grappling with the emotional traumas of war.

"Would some thoughtful hand in this
distant land please scatter some 
flowers for me?" 

Our Women

Bride of a day, your eye is bright,
   And the flower of your cheek is red.
‘He died with a smile on a field of France—
   I smile for his sake,’ she said.

Mother of one, the baby you bore
   Sleeps in a chilly bed.
‘He gave himself with a gallant pride—
   Shall I be less proud?’ she said.

Woman, you weep and sit apart,
   Whence is your sorrow fed?
‘I have none of love or kin to go—
   I am shamed and sad,’ she said.
       —L.M. Montgomery

Each of the bereaved women portrayed in “Our Women” is isolated, walled off within her own stanza, set apart from both the grief and the comfort of others. Each speaks to herself in a private monologue of mourning. 

In the first stanza, a new bride attempts to convince herself that she must appear happy, and so she determinedly represses her grief at the death of her husband. She encourages herself to believe the implausible story that was often written in letters informing women of their husband’s, son’s, and sweetheart’s deaths: the end was quick and painless; he “died with a smile.” Mirroring the action of her husband at the moment of his death, the bride smiles “for his sake,” offering up the arduous task of concealing her own anguish as an act of patriotic service akin to that of her husband’s. Like soldiers who neither speak nor write of the horrors they witness at the front, women are also engaged in the nation-wide practice of telling, selling, and believing what Montgomery refers to in both Rilla of Ingleside and her journals as “the cheerful lie.”***

In the second stanza, a mother persuades herself to feel proud that her son is dead. First World War researchers have argued that the pressure on women to forego public mourning was especially true for mothers: “In many cultures, mothers were expected to disavow their grief and channel it into forms of patriotism and heightened nationalistic pride.”†  Nearly all countries involved in the First World War attempted to harness the political power of the ideals of Mother and Motherhood. Before the 1918 German offensive, Canadian General Sir Arthur Currie addressed his troops: “To those who will fall I say, ‘you will not die, but step into immortality. Your mothers will not lament your fate, but will be proud to have borne such sons.’”†† Taking pride in a child’s death was one of the ways that mothers were encouraged to find a sense of worth and purpose during the war. 

The only woman who allows herself to weep is the woman who has no one to give to the war. Both the grieving bride and mother define themselves in their relationships to the soldiers they have loved and lost. Both women model their behaviour after that of their soldier, giving smile for smile, pride for pride. The childless woman sits alone and weeps in shame: she does not have a loved one to sacrifice to the war. 

Montgomery’s personal situation was closest to the solitary figure described in the third stanza. Montgomery’s husband, Ewan Macdonald, was forty-four years old when the war began; her eldest son, Chester, had just turned two; and her second son, Hugh, was stillborn on August 13, 1914, just nine days after England declared war on Germany.†††  The loss of her infant son devastated Montgomery. In her thinking and writing, Montgomery’s maternal grief becomes entangled with the dead of the war. Like the women whose sons died far from home, she is haunted by the thought of her son “lying lonely in his little grave” and imagines hearing his cry: “Little Hugh was calling to me from his grave—‘Mother, won’t you come to me?’”†††† For Montgomery, the tragedy of her son’s death at birth is linked to the larger national tragedy of the war. Given this context, the shamed, weeping woman of “Our Women” who has no son to surrender to the state may be read as a disguised expression of the author’s own grief. 

Strikingly and at its core, Montgomery’s “Our Women” subverts the traditional elegy. There is no mourning for soldiers who have died; tears are shed only for the absence of bodies to lie on the altar of sacrifice. Mourning is reserved for the woman who sits apart, shamed and isolated in her own No Man’s Land. This woman feeds on the sorrow of failure, a failure to participate in the womanly patriotism that her culture and her country demand of her. “Our Women” is an anti-elegy that focuses not on men’s deaths, but on women’s interior experiences of war. The poem speaks with an undercurrent of quiet despair as it catalogues women’s limited options for action and emotion during the First World War. 

I published a more fully developed essay on the subject in the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies: “‘I Smile for His Sake’: Unmasking Grief in L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Our Women.’”
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* Her poem “On Cape Le Force” appeared in the Charlotte Daily Patriot in 1890, when Montgomery was fifteen years old.
** “Our Women” was published in John W. Garvin’s Canadian Poems of the Great War, McClelland and Stewart, 1918.
*** L.M. Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside, Virago, 2014, p. 160 and L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1911–1917, (24 July 1915), p. 200.
† Joy Demousi, “Gender and Mourning” in Susan R. Grayzel and Tammy M. Proctor (eds.) Gender and the Great War, 2017, p. 213.
†† Arthur Currie, qtd. in Suzanne Evans’ Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief, McGill-Queens UP, 2007, p. 77.
††† For further discussion of Montgomery, motherhood, and the death of Hugh, see Rita Bode’s “LM Montgomery and the Anguish of Mother Loss,” in Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict, edited by Jean Mitchell, Cambridge Scholars, 2008, pp. 50–66; and Tara K. Parmiter’s “Like a Childless Mother: LM Montgomery and the Anguish of a Mother’s Loss,” in L.M. Montgomery and Gender, edited by E. Holly Pike and Laura M. Robinson, MQUP, 2021, pp. 316–330.
†††† L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1911–1917, (Sept. 3rd and 8th, 1914), pp. 165, 167.

A Grave in Flanders

FG Scott at son's grave in August 1918
 Australian War Memorial E04978

Frederick George Scott was serving as a chaplain with the First Canadian Division in France when he learned of the death of his twenty-four-year-old son Henry, killed in October 1916 while leading an attack on enemy lines near Albert. After the chaos of battle, Henry’s body had been hastily buried between the lines, but could not be recovered. In late November 1916, the fifty-five-year-old chaplain set out to find his son’s remains and rebury them.

Frederick George Scott, known as the poet of the Laurentians, was an Anglican priest before the war. He volunteered as an Army Chaplain in August 1914 and recalled his thoughts when he stood in the pulpit that same Sunday: “When I was preaching at the service and looked down at the congregation, I had a queer feeling that some mysterious power was dragging me into a whirlpool, and the ordinary life around me and the things that were so dear to me had already begun to fade away.”*

Canon Scott was an atypical military chaplain, choosing to serve not near field hospitals at the rear, but instead near the front. Others report that he was “Always in the thick of the fighting, bearing almost a charmed life, ignoring any suggestion that he should be posted to a softer job ‘further back.’”** Perhaps because of his own sons’ war service (two of his sons were with the Canadians at the Western Front), Scott “made a habit of spending time with his men on the front lines, giving last rites to the dying. He often courted death to be with the soldiers, whom he saw as ‘his boys.’ Though he was commissioned as a major, he frequently went in the trenches wearing a private’s uniform with his clerical collar so as to mingle with the men more freely.”***

In Scott’s memoir, The Great War as I Saw It (1922), he recalls his time in Flanders: 

The wood [Ploegsteert] in those days was a very pleasant place to wander through. Anything that reminded us of the free life of nature acted as a tonic to the nerves, and the little paths among the trees which whispered overhead in the summer breezes made one imagine that one was wandering through the forests in Canada. In the wood were several cemeteries kept by different units, very neatly laid out and carefully fenced in. I met an officer one day who told me he was going up to the trenches one evening past a cemetery in the wood, when he heard the sound of someone sobbing. He looked into the place and there saw a young boy lying beside a newly made grave. He went in and spoke to him and the boy seemed confused that he had been discovered in his sorrow. “It’s the grave of my brother, Sir,” he said, “He was buried here this afternoon and now I have got to go back to the line without him.” The lad dried his eyes, shouldered his rifle and went through the woodland path up to the trenches. No one would know again the inner sorrow that had darkened his life. ****

It is likely this account that contributed to inspiring Scott’s poem “A Grave in Flanders.” 

Ploegsteert Wood war cross,
image by Redvers

A Grave in Flanders†

All night the tall trees over-head
     Are whispering to the stars;
Their roots are wrapped about the dead
     And hide the hideous scars.

The tide of war goes rolling by,
     The legions sweep along;
And daily in the summer sky
     The birds will sing their song.

No place is this for human tears,
     The time for tears is done;
Transfigured in these awful years,
     The two worlds blend in one.

This boy had visions while in life
     Of stars on distant skies;
So death came in the midst of strife
     A sudden, glad surprise.

He found the songs for which he yearned
     Hopes that had mocked desire;
His heart is resting now which burned
     With such consuming fire.

So down the ringing road we pass,
     And leave him where he fell,
The guardian trees, the waving grass,
The birds will love him well.
     —Frederick George Scott, 1st Canadian Division, BEF

Nature guarded the dead just as it brought solace to the living. Scott recalls a night spent ministering to the wounded in a sunken trench near Courcelette in late September 1916:

The stars were always a great comfort to me. Above the gun-flashes or the bursting of shells and shrapnel, they would stand out calm and clear, twinkling just as merrily as I have seen them do on many a pleasant sleigh-drive in Canada. I had seen Orion for the first time that year, rising over the broken Cathedral at Albert. I always felt when he arrived for his winter visit to the sky, that he came as an old friend, and was waiting like us for the wretched war to end.†† 

Just weeks later, Scott received word that one of his sons had died in battle. His memoir records his visit to the 87th Battalion shortly after to learn the details:

When the battalion was relieved the dead had to be left unburied, but several men volunteered to go and get my son’s body. This I would not hear of, for the fighting was still severe, and I did not believe in living men risking their lives to bring out the dead. I looked far over into the murky distance, where I saw long ridges of brown land, now wet with a drizzling rain, and thought how gloriously consecrated was that soil, and how worthy to be the last resting place of those who had died for their country. Resolving to come back later on when things were quieter, and make my final search, I bid good-bye to the officers and men of the battalion and was motored back to my Headquarters.”††† 

Scott was able to return to the area near Regina Trench over a month later in mid-November, and with a runner, he found a cross marking his son’s grave. They began to dig until they exposed a hand wearing Henry’s signet ring. Removing the ring, the chaplain read the burial service, then “made a small mound where the body lay, and then by quick dashes from shell hole to shell hole we got back at last to the communication trench…. It was a strange scene of desolation, for the November rains had made the battle fields a dreary, sodden waste.”° A working party brought Henry Hutton Scott’s remains back behind the lines on Nov. 24. His father was there as they

laid my dear boy to rest in the little cemetery on Tara Hill …. I was thankful to have been able to have him buried in a place which is known and can be visited .… In June of the following year, when the Germans had retired after our victory at Vimy Ridge, I paid one more visit to Regina Trench. The early summer had clothed the waste land in fresh and living green. Larks were singing gaily in the sunny sky. No sound of shell or gun disturbed the whisper of the breeze as it passed over the sweet-smelling fields. Even the trenches were filling up and Mother Nature was trying to hide the cruel wounds which the war had made upon her loving breast. One could hardly recall the visions of gloom and darkness which had once shrouded that scene of battle. In the healing process of time all mortal agonies, thank God, will finally be obliterated.°°    

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* Frederick George Scott, The Great War As I Saw It, 1922, F.D. Goodchild, p. 15.
** Llewellyn H. Gwynne, “Forward,” The Great War As I Saw It by FG Scott, p. 9.
*** André Forget, “100 years after Vimy, a chaplain’s witness to war still resonantes,” Anglican Journal, 11 April 2017, https://www.anglicanjournal.com/100-years-after-vimy-a-chaplain-s-witness-to-war-still-resonates/.
**** Scott, The Great War, p. 101.
† Published in Frederick George Scott’s In the Battle Silences: Poems Written at the Front, Musson Book Co, 1916.
†† Scott, The Great War, pp. 143–144.
††† Scott, The Great War, p. 148.
° Scott, The Great War, p. 157.
°° Scott, The Great War, p. 158. 

Grey Knitting

First World War sheet music

“In Flanders Fields,” written by John McCrae in May of 1915, is perhaps the best known Canadian poem of the war. But Katherine Hale’s “Grey Knitting,” published in December of 1914, was enormously popular during the war and in the years immediately following. In less than six weeks, Grey Knitting and Other Poems ran into four editions of a thousand copies each; an American journalist wrote, “Katherine Hale has established herself as a favourite with American editors. . . . ‘Grey Knitting’ is going the rounds of the newspapers on this side of the line,” and the poem was included in the 1921 Standard Canadian Reciter: A Book of the Best Readings and Recitations from Canadian Literature.*

In 1917, Lilian Whiting in Canada, the Spellbinder wrote, “Perhaps no poem of the war has more closely touched the universal heart than has ‘Katherine Hale’s’ poem, so intense in its restrained power.”** Today, Hale’s war poetry is dismissed as “sentimental and patriotic,” while “Grey Knitting” has been described as “a disturbing misrecognition of institutionalised violence: it mistakes suffering for gaiety and finds in bloodshed a transcendence that discredits Hale as a critical commentator on war.***

Grey Knitting

 

All through the country, in the autumn stillness,

   A web of grey spreads strangely, rim to rim;

And you may hear the sound of knitting needles,

   Incessant, gentle, dim.

 

A tiny click of little wooden needles,

   Elfin amid the gianthood of war;

Whispers of women, tireless and patient,

   Who weave the web afar.

 

Whispers of women, tireless and patient—

   “Foolish, inadequate!” we hear you say;

“Grey wool on fields of hell is out of fashion,”

   And yet we weave the web from day to day.

 

Suppose some soldier dying, gayly dying,

   Under the alien skies, in his last hour,

Should listen, in death’s prescience so vivid,

   And hear a fairy sound bloom like a flower—

 

I like to think that soldiers, gayly dying

   For the white Christ on fields with shame sown deep,

May hear the fairy click of women’s needles,

   As they fall fast asleep.

            —Katherine Hale

 

The poem mystically shrinks the distance between the home front and the battlefield. Fairy enchantments and woven webs of love and homespun yarn comfort dying soldiers, whispering to them of the mothers, sisters, wives, and sweethearts laboring on their behalf. And although men die, it is women who haunt the battlefield, participating in the war with knitted work that is both highly emotional and immensely practical.

Katherine Hale

Katherine Hale was the pseudonym of Mrs. John W. Garvin. Born Amelia Warnock in Galt, Ontario, by the time of the Great War, Hale had “attained distinction in literary and music criticism, poetry, short stories, essays, and in literary and song recitals.”† After the war, Hale published Morning in the West (1923), a free-verse collection of poems that explores modernist themes such as the environment, nationalism, gender roles, and the shaping power of legend and myth, all within a Canadian setting. Katherine Hale died in 1956, and in her obituary, her friend Lotta Dempsey quoted from a letter Hale had written earlier: “I believe that one just has to take every experience fearlessly and saturate it with life, expurgate ruthlessly the un-essentials and then, as best one can, re-think it into poetry….But everyone has his own method; and after all, so far as the boundless world of art is concerned, we are all like pigmies, lost in its tremendous ramifications. ††

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*American journalist quoted in Leading Canadian Poets, edited by Walter Pilling Percival, 1948, p. 81.

**Lilian Whiting, Canada, The Spellbinder, J.M. Dent, 1917, p. 264.

***Wanda Campbell, “Moonlight and Morning: Women’s Early Contribution to Canadian Modernism” in The Canadian Modernists Meet, edited by Dean Irvine, p. 86; Rebecca Campbell, We Gave Our Glorious Laddies: Canadian Women’s War Poetry, 1915–1920, thesis, University of British Columbia, 2007, p. 8.

†John W. Garvin, “Katherine Hale,” in Canadian Poems of the Great War, edited by John W. Garvin, McClelland & Stewart, 1918, p. 72.

††Lotta Dempsey, “Katherine Hale Knew Triumph and Tragedy,” Toronto Globe and Mail, 11 Sept. 1956, p. 14.

The Piper

Piper James Richardson, Canadian, V.C., by James P. Beadle

“In Flanders Fields,” written by Canadian physician John McCrae in May of 1915, was published in Punch magazine December 8, 1915.  The poem quickly became one of the most popular poems of the war, set to music, quoted by politicians, and used to inspire the purchase of war bonds. Joel Baetz  notes, “Within two years it had been reprinted so many times that McCrae, who was initially surprised and humbled by its publication, was uninterested in later iterations and annoyed by its continual misuse.”*

The poem also inspired many response poems, among them “The Piper,” written by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables. The first Anne book was published in 1908, but Montgomery continued to write about the adventures of Anne and her family. In her 1921 novel, Rilla of Ingleside, Anne’s son Walter Blythe joins the Great War, enlisting with the Canadian forces. Before volunteering, Walter says to a friend, “Before this war is over … every man and woman and child in Canada will feel it … You will weep tears of blood over it. The Piper has come—and he will pipe until every corner of the world has heard his awful and irresistible music. It will be years before the dance of death is over … And in those years millions of hearts will break.”**

While at the front, Walter writes a poem, a “short, poignant little thing” that gains immediate popularity, as described in the novel:

            Everywhere it was copied—in metropolitan dailies and little village weeklies, in profound reviews and “agony columns,” in Red Cross appeals and Government recruiting propaganda. Mothers and sisters wept over it, young lads thrilled to it, the whole great heart of humanity caught it up as an epitome of all the pain and hope and pity and purpose of the might conflict, crystallized in three brief immortal verses. A Canadian lad in the Flanders trenches had written the one great poem of the war. “The Piper,” by Pte. Walter Blythe, was a classic from its first printing.***

In the novel, when “The Piper” is read at public gatherings, crowds respond with cries of “We’ll follow—we’ll follow—we won’t break faith.”†  The novel’s poem was almost certainly inspired by McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields.” But in Rilla of Ingleside, the poem itself is never included. It was only in 1942, in the midst of the Second World War, that Montgomery included "The Piper" in the manuscript for The Blythes Are Quoted, the last work she would write. At the start of that book, she explains, “In my books Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside, a poem is mentioned, “The Piper,” supposed to have been written and published by Walter Blythe before his death in the First World War. Although the poem had no real existence many people have written me, asking where they could get it. It has been written recently, but seems even more appropriate now than then.”

 

Charlottetown War Memorial

The Piper

One day the Piper came down the Glen …
      Sweet and long and low played he!
The children followed from door to door,
No matter how those who loved might implore
      So wiling the song of his melody
As the song of a woodland rill.

Some day the Piper will come again
      To pipe to the sons of the maple tree!
You and I will follow from door to door,
Many of us will come back no more …
      What matter that if Freedom still
Be the crown of each native hill?

            —Lucy Maud Montgomery

In Rilla of Ingleside, Walter is killed in 1916 at the attack on Courcelette, but in his last letter to his sister Rilla, written the night before his death, he explains that he has seen a vision of the Piper:

            I was doing sentry-go and I saw him marching across No-man’s-land from our trenches to the German trenches—the same tall shadowy form, piping weirdly, —and behind him followed boys in khaki. Rilla, I tell you I saw him—it was no fancy—no illusion. I heard his music, and then —he was gone. But I had seen him—and I knew what it meant—I knew that I was among those who followed him.

                        “Rilla, the Piper will pipe me ‘west’ tomorrow. I feel sure of this. And Rilla, I’m not afraid. When you hear the news, remember that. I’ve won my own freedom here—freedom from all fear. I shall never be afraid of anything again—not of death—nor of life, if, after all, I am to go on living. And life, I think, would be the harder of the two to face, —for it could never be beautiful for me again. There would always be such horrible things to remember—things that would make life ugly and painful always for me. I could never forget them. But whether it’s life or death, I’m not afraid, Rilla-my-Rilla, and I am not sorry that I came. I’m satisfied. I’ll never write the poems I once dreamed of writing—but I’ve helped to make Canada safe for the poets of the future—ay, and the dreamers, too … ††

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Walter Blythe closes the letter to his sister, “And you will tell your children of the Idea we fought and died for—teach them it must be lived for as well as died for, else the price paid for it will have been given for nought. This will be part of your work, Rilla. And if you —all you girls back in the homeland—do it, then we who don’t come back will know that you have not ‘broken faith’ with us.”†††

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* Joel Baetz, Battle Lines: Canadian Poetry in English and the First World War, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2018.

** Lucy Maud Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside, Frederick A. Stokes, 1921, pp. 44-45.

*** Rilla, pp. 226-227.

† Rilla, p. 242.

†† Rilla, pp. 257-258.

††† Rilla, p. 259.

Laughing at war

Pantomime rehearsal at Baupaume Jan 1918,  © IWM Q8378

Recovering in hospital from a war wound, Canadian soldier Tom Johnson wrote to his sweetheart,

What an awful job you will have to make me into a dignified Methodist minister. For the last two days two nurses have had to make a savage attack on me & my bed to get “that Canadian” out before 7 am. But today I routed the enemy who had brought up a bowl of water to sprinkle on me, by upsetting it in their hands with a crutch I had secreted under my bedclothes in case of a raid at dawn. The man in the next bed & I won a complete victory this time - they said it was “just like those Canadians.”*

Though he may have teased the nurses, Johnson made clear his appreciation for the Canadian sisters at the hospital. Complimenting their readiness to joke and laugh, he writes in the same letter, “I begin to think that the gift of humor is as priceless as the gift of physical courage.”*

Soldiers responded to the deadly seriousness of the war with humor that helped them to endure physical hardship, cope with psychological trauma, and strengthen the bonds of comradeship. In his essay on Canadian soldiers’ humor in the Great War, historian Tim Cook writes,

Comedy and humour allowed for the soldiers to exert some control over their wartime experience….In this war of endurance, laughter was armour, the joke was a crutch, and the song was a shield.  Gentle or jagged, humour was everywhere.”**

Humor even found its way into war poetry. Robert M. Eassie, serving with the Canadian 5^th Battalion, published his comic verse in the 1917 volume Odes to Trifles. A review appearing in

The Literary Digest proclaimed that the author “must be the most cheerful man in all the Canadian Expeditionary Forces,” for the “incurable optimist beguiles his time in the trenches by bringing the Nursery Rimes up to date.”† Eassie’s book included twenty-four parodies of children’s rhymes in the section titled “Rhymes from a New Nursery.”  Here are just two examples:

Reg Maurice WWI postcard

Jack and Bill, they stuck it till

Their knees were under water;

Jack fell down, and said to Bill

Some words he didn’t oughter!

Fritzie-Witzie sat on a bomb,

Fritzie-Witzie went up pom-pom!

All Bill’s Herr Doktors and medicine men

Couldn’t put Fritzie together again!

Subverting the idealism of war-time heroics, the first poem laughs not only at the soldier’s obscenity-laden response to the discomforts and indignities of the Western Front, but at the absurdity of moral codes that condemn cursing while promoting killing.  The second poem trivializes terror as it mocks death and dismemberment, the grisly realities of a battle zone littered with unburied and unidentifiable human remains.

Odes to Trifles also included an entire “Alphabet of Limericks.” Though its origins are uncertain, the limerick's humor lies in its treatment of taboo subjects. Robert Eassie's examples delight in exposing wounds in unmentionable places and soldiers’ sexual dalliances; heroism is best left to brave girls.

Donald McGill WWI postcard

A

There was a young hero of Aire

Who was hit, but he couldn’t say where,

Till a comrade close by

Said, “Just sit down and try,”

And he did, and he shouted, “It’s there!”

N

There was a brave girl of Nieppe

Who was full of sand, ginger, and pep;

With Taube or Fokker

The Huns couldn’t shock her

And she’d smile when she spotted a Zepp!

O
There was a sweet thing at Olhain

Whose kisses were hard to obtain;

But, once they were snatched,

They couldn’t be matched

From the Salient down to the Aisne. 

Donald McGill WWI postcard

V

There was a young fellow of Vimy

Who said, “If my sweetheart could see me

Accepting the kisses

Of these here French misses,

I guess I would rather not be me!”

Cook's discussion of Canadian First World War humor argues, “Antiheroic jokes were among the most transgressive forms of humour as they seemingly undermined the patriotic and heroic discourse of the war,” as well as allowing soldiers to “distance themselves from those at home, and reinforce the bonds that strengthened their own insulated society.”° Perhaps the most shockingly transgressive act, however, was responding to the war and its carnage with laughter. The satirical cartoons of Bruce Bairnsfather, immensely popular with the soldiers of the Great War, were initially criticized by many on the home front, including a member of the British Parliament who condemned them as “vulgar caricatures of our heroes.”

Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and other great poets of the war wrote of the pity of war, the horror, suffering, and sacrifice. But soldiers also composed and shared rougher, ruder verses.  A post-war collection of limericks (ignoring Irish origins and contributions to the form) explained,

Limericks are as English as roast beef; they, and they alone, possess that harmonious homely ring which warms our hearts when we hear them repeated round the camp-fire. Whenever two or three of our countrymen are gathered together in rough parts of the world, there you will find these verses; it is limericks that keep the flag flying, that fill you with a breath of old England in strange lands, and constitute one of the strongest sentimental links binding our Colonies to the mother-country.°°

Canadian author Robert Eassie is likely to have laughed at the sentiment.  

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* Thomas William Johnson, “My dear Lulu,” 11 October 1917, Canadian Letters and Images Project, www.canadianletters.ca/content/document-11797?position=47&list=3l9eP5vF0ZutKTj-Zunr4hNhAV-RI9EJH335xCXfAnI, Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.

** Tim Cook, “‘I will meet the world with a smile and a joke,’ Canadian Soldiers’ Humour in the Great War,” Canadian Military Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2, 2015, p. 50.

† “Current Poetry,” Literary Digest, Vol. 56, 30 March 1918, p. 42. 

° Cook, “I will meet the world,” pp. 57-58.

°° Norman Douglas, “Introduction,” Some Limericks, Library of Alexandria, 1929.