It was nearly the last question I fielded the other night. I’d just told the story of Uxbridge youth Lyman Nichols – how (underage) he had joined Sam Sharpe’s 116th Ontario County Battalion in 1915, but when he turned 18 how, as a bandsman, he joined the 116th officially and marched off to the Great War, how he survived the battles at Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele, and how he’d come home wounded among 160 surviving soldiers (of the regiment’s original 1,600).
“What had helped the Canadians get through?” someone at my Vimy dinner audience in Peterborough asked.
“They were task-oriented,” I suggested. “Perhaps more than all the regular soldiers from Britain and the Empire, the Canadians before the war had been farmers, lumberjacks, fisherman, labourers, even students who all understood the meaning of getting a job done.”
Since this past week was the 107th anniversary of the Canadian assault on Vimy Ridge, from April 9-12, 1917, I spoke a number of times to both military and civilian groups, not about glory in war, but about the skill and nature of Canadians under such adverse conditions.
Not only did Lyman Nichols’ story come to mind, but dozens of others, including Gregory Clark, who left a cub-reporting job at the Toronto Daily Star in 1915 to enlist, train and serve in the 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles. As only a journalist-turned-volunteer-soldier could Clark have perceived what happened at Vimy, he wrote:
“The grand strategy is all great formations. … But the minute the battle begins, it is out of the hands of generals. It is the sections of average young men – a little band of brothers – doing the thinking and planning. The battle is won by (corporals) and their five or six boys.”
And I’d have left it there. Except that a man in my audience made an even more perceptive observation. “Canada and Canadians have always had a greater respect for work and working people than anywhere else,” he said.
I later met Alan Wilson, a former Briton who served in the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland during the time of the troubles. Then, he moved to Canada and became a Canadian citizen. “In other countries of the world, in Britain, there is no working middle class. Here, there is a healthy middle class, in large part made up of people whose work is respected.”
Not having worked that often as a journalist and broadcaster outside Canada, I hadn’t considered labour that way. That said, I’ve always considered writing as much a task to accomplish as a profession. Writers work with tools – pens, keyboards and wireless devices – always with an objective – delivering news, features, broadcast content on focus, on time and often on budget.
Consequently, I’ve always viewed the work I do the same way a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, or contracter does. When my father returned from overseas after the Second World War, he might have ended up in the same workshops as his mother and brother, sewing fur pelts into coats (indeed his mother was a respected piecemeal worker in the fur district of New York City). But Dad chose to work as a reporter, then columnist and broadcaster. And above his office desk hung a sign I’ve quoted here before.
“There’s only one way to become a writer,” it reads, “by applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” The sign hangs in my office to this very day.
And sometimes I imagine my grandmother stitching furs seamlessly at the same time I remember my dad writing newspaper, radio and TV scripts seamlessly. Both forms of work required specialized skill and deserved equal respect.
Another Canadian serving as a volunteer in the Canadian Expeditionary Force at Vimy was (later) renowned political economist, Harold Innis. In March 1916, McMaster University waived the need for honours student Innis to complete final exams so that he could rush off to join Canada’s 4th Field Battery first at the battle of the Somme in 1916, then at Vimy in 1917. Initially, he found serving in an artillery regiment difficult. As an intellectual, he said he couldn’t relate to his battery mates, men “from industrial communities,” men he called “louts” in diary.
But at Vimy, suddenly tasked with the challenge of delivering the famous creeping barrage (friendly shells as protection retreating in front of the Canadians as they worked their way up the ridge on Easter Monday 1917), his view of his battery mates changed.
“As comrades-in-arms, we had built a deep respect for the job at hand. And we were not fighting for King and Empire anymore, but for Canada and Canada alone.”