[FORUM] "Could we go to war again?"

[rfmcdonald]

I take the title of this post and it's theme from Peter Shawn Taylor's recent MacLean's article commemorating the centenary of the First World War.

Mountsberg, Ont., was once a village with a future. In the early 1900s, it boasted a general store, a blacksmith, a post office, a steam sawmill, two churches, a public school and perhaps 150 residents in town and on neighbouring farms. Located between Guelph and Hamilton, with a nearby railway siding offering easy access to Toronto, Mountsberg was on the verge of becoming a major rural service centre. Then came the Great War.

Like most of Canada, Mountsberg responded quickly and eagerly to the call of king and country in 1914. And, along with the rest of Canada, by 1918, it was forever changed.

Two dozen men from Mountsberg—about half the young male population—went off to war. Four years later, six of them, including 21-year-old Roy Mount of the village’s founding family, were dead. Many others, including the local Methodist minister and Erle Glennie, the popular schoolteacher who joined the Royal Flying Corps, survived the conflict but didn’t return. The village never recovered.

“Mountsberg lost heavily in the war,” says Jonathan Vance, a historian at Western University in London, Ont. “Its young, working-age male population was all but wiped out or never came back.” Robbed of so much of its small workforce, the village lost business to nearby competitors. The post office closed. Then the store, mill, blacksmith, school and one church. The railway no longer stopped at Mountsberg. Today, the village has largely disappeared from the map; a few acreages, some heritage buildings and an owl conservation area are all that remain. A weathered war memorial standing sentinel in an empty park is the lone reminder of its unmet potential. Like so many individual Canadians, the village of Mountsberg itself made the ultimate sacrifice in the Great War.

The First World War stands as the biggest, most deadly task Canada has ever undertaken. More young men died in the trenches of France and Belgium than have been killed in all of Canada’s other wars combined. At home, the impact was nearly as profound. Those who didn’t fight found their lives altered in innumerable ways at work and in leisure. Such universal sacrifice was accepted by most Canadians as both entirely reasonable and absolutely necessary. As a collective undertaking, the totality of the war effort thus demands consideration as one of Canada’s greatest triumphs. And yet, by 2014 standards, it also seems utterly foreign.

A century removed from the Great War, Canadians today expect their politicians to ensure our lives are made more comfortable and safe, not threatened by antique obligations of duty and national honour; we demand protection from sacrifice, not exhortations that we give more, work harder or put our lives at obvious risk. Any attempt to put Canada’s effort in the Great War in modern perspective runs headlong into the uncomfortable question of whether we still retain that apparently boundless capacity for suffering and commitment we displayed from 1914 to 1918. Would Canadians today answer a call to duty for a national project the size, scope and duration of the Great War? Could we do it again?

The author's conclusion is that it is possible, that Canadians would be willing to make sacrifices if needed. I ask you, my readers, if you agree.