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Category: WWI

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We called them heroes

It’s the 100thanniversary of Armistice Day and the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht this weekend.
Olympic with Returned Soldiers, 1919, Arthur Lismer, courtesy Canadian War Museum
I knew a World War I veteran. George Vanderhoek was elderly when I met him in 1980; he was a gentle, fatherly influence when I was in my first ‘grown up’ job.  I feel now as if my memories of him reach into the mists of time. It saddens me.
Sunday marks the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day. This was the end of the “The War That Will End War,” as H.G. Wells mistakenly called it. Ironically, tonight is the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, showing just how vain a hope peace can be.
Study for Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company, Hill 60, St Eloi, 1918, David Bomberg, courtesy Imperial War Museum
There have been some horrible times to be alive in human history. The period from 1918 to 1948 ranks among the worst for Europeans and Russians. It was an age of massive dislocation, death, war, and genocide. Asia eventually followed Europe’s lead in the next generation, with Mao Zedong and Pol Pot killing off their countrymen. In the modern era we’ve witnessed repeated African genocides. It’s enough to make you weep.
Charge of Flowerdew’s Squadron, 1918, Alfred Munnings, courtesy Canadian War Museum
Can I draw any conclusions from this seemingly endless wave of terror? None other than that humans, in an unredeemed state, are capable of unimaginable cruelty. That knowledge is always tempered with the understanding that, at the same time, there are people of great compassion who intervene even when the fight isn’t their own. We called them heroes back then.
The Resurrection of the Soldiers, 1927–1932, Sir Stanley Spencer, courtesy Sandham Memorial Chapel
We entered the Great War late, because it wasn’t our fight. The Commonwealth countries, tied to Great Britain, were in it from the beginning. But in either case, soldiers were volunteering to fix a problem that had nothing to do with them or their country. 
Prudence Heward, of whom I wrote this week, was one of many artists who dropped their brushes and went to the aid of Britain. A.Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris and Fred Varley came from Canada; Arthur Streeton from Australia. Of course, many British artists served as well, including Stanley Spencer, David Bomberg and Alfred Munnings. And American poet Joyce Kilmer was killed at the Second Battle of the Marne.
Mount St Quentin, 1918, Arthur Streeton, courtesy Melbourne Museum
Some of these artists were attached as war illustrators (as Winslow Homer had done in our own Civil War). Some just picked up a musket and joined up. Their calling in art was subservient to their calling as human beings.
WW1 was the last of a particularly heinous kind of war, the kind where rulers used their citizenry in an elaborate game of chess. It was replaced by something worse. “After the ‘war to end war’, they seem to have been in Paris at making the ‘Peace to end Peace’,” wrote British staff officer Archibald Wavell in a sadly prescient comment.
Houses of Ypres, 1917, A. Y. Jackson, courtesy Canadian War Museum
Years ago, my Australian cousin Mary taught me to make Anzac biscuits. These cookies were made for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps during the Great War, because they would survive the long journey around the globe. I could spend this centenary of Armistice Day thinking futile thoughts, or I can bake a batch of Anzacs and remember the heroism of men and women from around the globe. That, after all, is the second great lesson of the twentieth century.
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The Halifax explosion

For many, it was the worst battlefield carnage they would see in the whole war, and it was here on the home front.
A view of Halifax two days after the explosion. Imo is visible aground on the far side of the harbor.

Shipbuilding in Nova Scotia dates to 1606. By the eighteenth century, the Canadian Maritimes were a global boatbuilding center. Their importance increased when Britain banned the United States from the West Indies trade after the American Revolution.

By December, 1917, Halifax was a bustling Canadian port of 60,000 people, with a recently renovated harbor. On December 6, it was destroyed in a spectacular military disaster. About 2,000 people were killed and 9,000 others were injured, including a Mi’kmaq village that was destroyed by the resulting tsunami. Until Hiroshima, this was the largest explosion humankind ever created.
St. Joseph’s Convent, located on the southeast corner of Göttingen and Kaye streets. The last body from the Halifax explosion wasn’t recovered until 1919.
Halifax and Dartmouth lie on opposite sides of a deep natural harbor. To get into its protected basin, boats traverse a narrow glacial channel that separates the two cities. Halifax Harbour is on the fastest sea route between Europe and North America. The success of German U-boat attacks had led the Allies to institute the convoy system. Halifax was a major western staging point. As the war raged, the port bustled with troop ships, relief supplies, and munitions ships forming up to cross the Atlantic.
The harbor was protected by two sets of submarine nets. These were raised and lowered each night.
On the night of December 5, the French freighter Mont Blanc arrived too late to clear the submarine nets. She would enter the harbor the following morning under the command of an experienced harbor pilot, Francis Mackey. The freighter was carrying a highly-volatile cargo of 2,300 tons of picric acid, 200 tons of TNT, 35 tons of benzole, and 10 tons of gun cotton. Mackey asked for special protections during her transit of the narrows. He didn’t get them.
Halifax boatyard after the explosion.
As soon as the nets were lowered, Mont Blanc started up channel. Meanwhile, the Norwegian vessel Imo left its mooring, bound for New York. She was hustling, trying to make up for lost time, and was on the wrong side of the channel. The two ships had what we might describe as a fender-bender. Unfortunately, the barrels of benzole toppled and flooded Mont Blanc’s hold. Sparks from Imo’s engines lit the mess into an uncontrolled conflagration.
SS Imo aground after the explosion.
Mont Blanc’s crew quickly abandoned ship. People gathered on the waterfront to watch the burning boat drifting onto the docks. As the fire department arrived, Mont Blancexploded in a blinding flash of raw energy.
In addition to the terrible loss of life, Halifax’s waterfront was leveled. Over 12,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. Hundreds of people were blinded by flying glass. Overturned stoves and lamps sparked fires across the city. People were killed by the explosion, the resulting fires, or by flying debris.
Kathleen Malloy, victim of the Halifax Explosion, sits up in a hospital bed, likely at Pine Hill Convales­cent Hospital where injured babies were treated. (City of Toronto Archives)
Help came from many sources. Thousands of Canadian, British and American sailors and soldiers immediately sprang into action to create an emergency relief team. For many of them, this would be the worst battlefield carnage they would see. Doctors and nurses arrived by train. Among these was a large contingent from Boston, MA.
In 1918, Halifax sent a Christmas tree to the City of Boston in thanks. That tradition was revived in 1971. The tree is lit on Boston Commons each year and is the official Christmas tree of the city.
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The un-peaceful plein air paintings of Sir Alfred Munnings

Charge of Flowerdew’s Squadron, 1918, Sir Alfred Munnings, Canadian War Museum
“I love it when a painter shows a little more than I had credited him or her with,” Victoria Brzustowicz wrote me earlier this month. “I had always dismissed Alfred Munnings as a facile society painter of horses and the beautiful people who owned them. Then I saw some more energetic pieces and I was impressed. These have the vitality and energy of Sorolla, I think.”
If I thought of Sir Alfred at all, I’ve only done so in passing, because his early twentieth-century horses are too twee for me. Then I came across the stupendous canvas, above, the Charge of Flowerdew’s Squadron, from the Canadian War Museum, and realized I had to reassess him.
Study of Lady Munnings Riding with Her Dogs on Exmoor, 1924, Sir Alfred Munnings, Munnings Art Museum
Raised in the English countryside, Munnings was apprenticed to a printer at the age of 14. He attended art school in his spare time. The loss of sight in his right eye in 1898, when he was twenty, did not affect either his drawing and painting skills or his ability to ride. He was married twice, both times to avid horsewomen. His second wife, Violet McBride, encouraged his career as a society painter, which resulted in his knighthood in 1944.
Munnings is famous for an inebriated defense of traditional painting, delivered to millions of listeners over the BBC. “Alfred, if you met Picasso coming down the street would you join with me in kicking his … something something?” he recalled Winston Churchill asking him.
Munnings volunteered for the Great War, but in his mid-thirties and blind in one eye, was deemed unfit. Instead, he processed tens of thousands of Canadian horses en route to the battlefields of France.
Major-General the Right Hon. JEB Seely on Warrior, 1918, Sir Alfred Munnings, Canadian War Museum
Eventually, he was moved forward to a horse depot on the Western Front. There he painted a field portrait of General Jack Seely astride his horse Warrior, above. During this painting, artist and models came under enemy fire.
Warrior participated in one of the last great cavalry charges in modern warfare, during the Battle of Moreuil Wood in 1918. Charge of Flowerdew’s Squadron (1918) is a scene from that engagement. Canadian Lieutenant Gordon Flowerdew led a charge against two lines of enemy, each about sixty strong, heavily armed with machine guns. Although about 70% of Flowerdew’s squadron were casualties, they managed to ride over the enemy lines twice, forcing them to withdraw. Flowerdew himself was fatally wounded. Though Moreuil Wood was taken and the German advance checked, a quarter of the men and half of the horses were lost.
Draft horses, lumber mill in the Forest of Dreux, 1918, Sir Alfred Munnings, Canadian War Museum
WWI was the last war in which horses played a critical part, but it was a crucial one. It has been estimated that some eight million horses, mules and donkeys died on both sides. For an artist who loved the beasts, sending them off to battle and painting them while they worked must have been terrible responsibilities.