The struggle for the meaning of war

Inroads: A Journal of Opinion, Summer-Fall, 2008 by Bob Chodos

Suzanne Evans, Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I end the Politics of Grief Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007. 209 pages.

For several years, the terms of debate on the Iraq war in the United States have been heavily influenced by the political imperative to "support the troops." Although a distinction is made between "supporting the troops" and "supporting the war," how do you support the troops if you don't support their mission? An echo of the same rhetorical phenomenon shows up in Canada as well. "If you don't stand behind our troops feel free to stand in front of them" reads the bumper sticker on a car parked outside my local Legion hall.

Meanwhile, the 90th anniversary of the battle of Vimy Ridge was the subject of massive media coverage in April 2007. It was here, commentator after commentator intoned, that Canada became a nation. By contrast, another anniversary passed almost unnoticed nine months earlier, at least in mainland Canada. July 1, 2006, was the 90th anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Among the tens of thousands of casualties on that one day were several hundred soldiers of the Newfoundland Regiment. In a small, tightly knit society, this tragedy had a devastating impact that is still being felt. If Canada became a nation at Vimy, the senseless slaughter of Beaumont Hamel represented a different kind of coming of age for Newfoundland.

Events on the battlefield are only one part of war; as these recent instances show, there is also a struggle to control the meaning of those events, and this struggle often goes on long after the events themselves are over. Governments mobilize all the institutions of society--religion, education, the arts, the media--to ensure that the killing and dying are construed in the way the government wants. As Ottawa writer Suzanne Evans demonstrates in her provocative book, no institution is more important in this regard than motherhood.

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Evans's curiosity was initially piqued when she saw a picture of a Palestinian woman smiling serenely at the death of her martyr son. How, she asked, could a woman show joy over the death of her child? As she looked further, she found that, far from being limited to the Israel/Palestine conflict; this sentiment crossed cultures, religions, nations and eras. She found sources for it in the Sikh and Islamic traditions as well as a biblical example, the Maccabean mother who witnesses the death by torture of her seven sons, urging each one in turn to accept martyrdom rather than taste the ritually unclean food being forced on them by their Hellenistic persecutors (2 Maccabees 7).

In particular, she found mothers supporting the official meaning of the death of their sons in Canada during World War I, and that war and its commemoration are her primary subject:

   The sentiment is widespread
   within Canada
   today that when Muslims
   (or almost any explicitly
   religious group) speak of
   martyrs and sacrifice, the
   actors are "fundamentalists." ... It is the
   other, willing to die for a cause, who is
   touched with fanaticism. But the literature
   of World War I is full of examples
   of supportive stories of noble Canadian
   mothers willing to sacrifice their heroic
   sons for an Empire and its Motherland.

Thus, in the December 1915 issue of Everywoman's World magazine, Mrs. E.A. Hughes described her reaction on receiving the telegram that reported the death in action of her son Danny: "I am a proud mother this Christmas. For I gave Canada and the Empire a Christmas present. I gave them my chiefest possession. I yielded what was more than aught else in the world to me. I sacrificed the life of my boy."

Evans places the role of mothers during World War I in the context both of the long history of mothers of martyrs and of the widespread use in World War I of the Christian language of sacrifice, in everything from the speeches of religious leaders to the drawings of war cartoonist Louis Raemaekers. In the second half of her book, she examines the various ways in which the war has been commemorated from its immediate aftermath to the present day, and finds that mothers and maternal imagery (as in the allegorical figure of Mother Canada at the Vimy Ridge Memorial in France) play a large role.

She notes that it was in the wake of World War I, in 1919, that Canada initiated a medal for the mothers of slain soldiers, the Silver Cross. The American equivalent, the Gold Star, was established around the same time. Silver Cross and Gold Star mothers have been a prominent part of remembrance ceremonies ever since; even today, a representative Silver Cross mother lays a wreath on the National War Memorial in Ottawa each Remembrance Day.

Of course, not all mothers have been willing to be complicit in the death of their sons. Evans quotes Gertrude Richardson of Swan River, Manitoba, who wrote in the socialist Canadian Forward in 1917, "I read with a shudder the other day of one [mother] who said she 'would just push her son back into the trenches if he tries to escape.' God help the world if such an ideal of motherhood were to triumph." And one of the most outspoken American critics of the current war in Iraq has been Cindy Sheehan, president of Gold Star Families for Peace and mother of Spc. Casey Austin Sheehan, killed in action in Iraq in 2004. Although Evans does not mention it, these mothers have a biblical forebear as well: Ritzpah, a concubine of King Saul's (2 Samuel 21). After Saul's death, his successor, David, seeks to settle an unresovled dispute by offering up seven of Saul's sons to be hanged by the neighbouring Gibeonites. The Gibeonites are happy with this resolution, but Ritzpah, who is the mother of two of the sons, is not. She conducts a six-month vigil over the bodies of the seven, until David finally gives them a decent burial.