Review: Hell's Corner
| Author | Jonathan F. Vance |
| Published date | 01 June 2005 |
| Date | 01 June 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200506000225 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
I
Reviews
|
world." What remains is for the institutions of power to accept this new
reality
and reshape our international role to take full advantage of the
unique strengths of Canada as a model citizen. Welsh's book offers a fine
starting place for this project.
Reg
Whitaker/University
of
Victoria
HELL'S
CORNER
An
Illustrated
History
of
Canada's
Great
War
J.
L. Granatstein
Vancouver:
Douglas & Mclntyre, 2004. x, 198pp. $50.00 cloth
(ISBN
1-
55365-047-6)
Judging by what they read, Edwardian Canadians had no particular interest
in the world around them. Only a minority of them were immigrants
(according
to the
1911
census, nearly 80 percent of the population had been
born in Canada), and the bestseller lists that the trade periodical
Bookseller
and
Stationer
started compiling in 1899 included very few non-fiction
books
that had anything to do with international affairs. Religion,
civics,
philosophy, natural
science,
yes—but world politics, no. Few people cared
when
400-odd
French Canadians joined the Zouaves in the late 1860s to
defend the papal states against partisans interested in unifying Italy, or
when Canadian boatmen volunteered to help pull Britain's chestnuts out of
the fire by rafting troops up the Nile to relieve the siege of Khartoum in
1884 . The South African War (1899-1902) caught the reading public's
attention for a short while, but over the next decade, Canada was largely
oblivious
to the deteriorating international situation. This explains the
shock
of
August
1914:
the war came to Canada like a bolt from the blue, and
the nation was seized by the realization that history had presented it with
an opportunity to take its place on the world stage.
Four
years later, Canada re-emerged from the inferno, immeasurably
poorer for the loss of
60,000
lives but with a more sharply defined sense of
itself
and its place in the world. The country had proven that it had a right-
ful
role in international affairs, and had used its success on the battlefields
of
Europe to leverage greater influence within the British empire and on the
world stage. It has become a
cliché
to state that Canada became a nation on
the battlefields of Flanders, but it is a
cliché
with more than a grain of
truth.
I
578 I International
Journal
|
Spring
2005
|
To continue reading
Request your trial