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« The Anxious Waiting Ones at Home » : Deux familles canadiennes plongées dans le tourment de la Grande Guerre
Abstract
Le présent article traite des effets de la Première Guerre mondiale sur le quotidien de deux familles canadiennes à travers la correspondance laissée par civils et militaires. Les lettres échangées par Ruth Antliff et son fils William, en service outre-mer, témoignent des inquiétudes qui remplissent le quotidien des mères de soldats et ouvrent une fenêtre sur la collectivité montréalaise en temps de guerre. Quant à la correspondance conjugale d’Isabelle et de Sidney Brook, de Craigmyle, en Alberta, elle atteste du courage des épouses laissées derrière et dévoile les répercussions de la guerre sur une famille agricole de l’Ouest.
This article examines the impact of the First World War on the daily lives of two Canadian families through the correspondence left by civilians and soldiers. The letters exchanged by Ruth Antliff and her son William, serving overseas, reflect the daily concerns of mothers and soldiers and shine light on life in wartime Montreal. And the letters exchanged by spouses Isabelle and Sidney Brook, of Craigmyle, Alberta, demonstrate the courage of the wives left behind and how the war affected a farm family in the West.
In the light of the serious political tensions in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, British, German and, ultimately, also US American churches sought reconciliation and balance. However, almost as soon as war had broken out, they created a religious culture of war. Church-history research of this epoch began in the 1970s with a description of the facts and the conduct of the leading participants - together with theological-ethical evaluation, and, often as not, a tone of moral condemnation. In the 1990s, analysis of the mentality history aspect of the religious culture of war was added to this field of research. Since 2000, investigations of the stories of everyday life for ordinary soldiers and civilians on the home front predominate, combined with questions about the importance of religion for specific sub-groups and regions. To what extent did Christian belief among sub-cultures in the exceptional situation of war shape their perception of the realities of the world? To a large extent, the outlined methodological perspectives leave the question unanswered as to why the Church's religious peace-efforts were able to turn so quickly into military involvement. Using an emotional-history approach, this article seeks to provide one of the first explanatory approaches: Against a background of painful experiences of marginalisation, church institutions utilised the extraordinary situation of war to stake an immediate claim to authoritative reinforcement and an interpretation of collective positive emotions from the midst of bourgeois society - not least to regain a sense of public importance within the community. When the consequent, mythically excessive "Spirit of 1914" quickly evaporated, the majority of the foremost religious leaders still held tight to the narrative, because the religious institutions did not want to restrict themselves to the niche of individual support - primarily solace and consolation in personal disasters - of which the general public was, to a large extent, deprived. Commitment to peace was considered to be a concern of the minorities that barely rated emotionally; effectively, it was scorned as an outsider position to which they simply did not want to commit.
The First World War proved to be a powerful stimulus for the temperance movement in Canada. Temperance advocates argued moral and economic reasons for prohibition: those who failed to abstain from drink were hindering victory; prohibition was patriotic. When canteens serving beer were opened in Canadian training camps in England to limit solders' drinking in local villages, temperance groups were outraged. As prohibitionist fought to ban drink, a divisive edge was driven into the gulf between the soldiers in the trenches and the civilians on the home front. The campaign to ban wet canteens demonstrates that each constituency, military and civilian, contained distinct cultures with different perspectives on pleasure and danger.