Bracing for Armageddon: Rethinking the Outbreak of the First World War in Canada
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2016
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Abstract
In the summer of 1914, the great powers of Europe mobilized millions of soldiers for what was universally perceived to be the greatest conflagration in history. Part of a global, transatlantic, continental, and national telegraphic news network, Canadians vigilantly collected and disseminated news from Europe to a news-thirsty and literate rural and urban population. From the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June to the opening battles of July and August 1914, Canadians, citizens of a nation informed, avidly followed and prepared for the long-anticipated “world war” of 1914.
In this Golden Age of Newspapers and Telegraphy, with many newspapers offering multiple daily editions of the emerging world conflict, rural, small-town, and urban Canadians exhibited anxiety, fear, patriotism, enthusiasm, dread, and grim determination in the face of an unprecedented conflict. There was no uniform emotional and intellectual response to the outbreak of war in 1914 Canada. Furthermore, although national political leaders such as Sir Robert Borden and Sir Wilfrid Laurier attempted to fashion a national “political truce” in August 1914, the accumulated Conservative and Liberal hatreds of the past echoed in innumerable newspaper articles and editorials, as well as in contemporary diaries and letters.
Deluged with information on the gargantuan armies gathering in Europe, buttressed by British Secretary of War Kitchener’s declaration of the likelihood of a three-year struggle, many Canadians anticipated a war of potentially long duration, involving millions of casualties—even though they hoped their boys would be “Back by Christmas.” As the great war of 1914 unfolded on the Continent, Canadians utilized the pillars of western civilization, such as the Bible, Greek mythology, and European history, in order to make sense of the novel conflict. Above all, as a predominantly Christian nation, many Canadians envisioned the war through a religious prism and sensibility, invoking the greatest spectre of Christian eschatology, Armageddon. Armed with information from the international and national news network, in defence of monumental principles such as honour, decency, democracy, and the defence of small nations, Canadians marched to the killing fields of Great War Europe.
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History--Canadian
Citation
Gallant, D. J. (2016). Bracing for Armageddon: Rethinking the Outbreak of the First World War in Canada (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25158