Reliving the Trenches: Memory Plays by Veterans of the Great War

By Wilfrid Laurier University Press

In Reliving the Trenches, three plays written by returned soldiers who served in the Great War with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France and Belgium appear in print for the first time. With a critical introduction that references the authors' service files to establish the plays as memoirs, these plays are an important addition to Canadian literature of the Great War.

Important but overlooked war memoirs that relive trench life and warfare as experienced by combat veterans, the three plays include The P.B.I., written and staged in 1920 by recently returned veterans at the University of Toronto. Parts of this play appeared in print in serial form in 1922. Glory Hole, written in 1929 by William Stabler Atkinson, and Dawn in Heaven, written and staged in Winnipeg in 1934 by Simon Jauvoish, have never been published.

These plays impact Canadian literature and theatre history by revealing a body of previously unknown modernist writing, and they impact life writing studies by showing how memoirs can be concealed behind genre conventions. They offer fascinating details of the daily routines of the soldiers in the trenches by bringing them back to life in theatrical re-enactment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Oct 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781771125048

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Embodiments of War Memories

The three plays in this volume are important but overlooked literary documents of the First World War that relive and stage trench warfare as experienced by combat veterans. Two of them are published here for the first time, and the third for the first time in its entirety—parts of it having appeared serially in The Canadian Forum in 1921. Written between 1920 and 1934, these plays are rare examples of war memories framed in dramatic form to re-embody the lived experience of the war in the trenches and the rear echelons.

In the years after the war ended, many returning soldiers struggled to adapt to the new era of peace and to make sense of the horrors they had survived. It was a collective struggle. They formed veterans’ associations, held reunions, and raised funds for memorials. Their activities were fuelled by grief, by tribute, by trauma, and often, by pride in victory. At the University of Toronto, the Varsity Veterans campaigned to raise money to build what now stands as Soldiers’ Tower, attached to Hart House. Four returned soldiers whose studies had been interrupted by the war came up with the idea of gathering as many fellow vets as they could to mount a play about their experiences. In this they were helped by the availability of the new Hart House Theatre, the university’s experimental theatre that opened in 1919 in a basement space used as a rifle range during the war. When their play, The P.B.I. or Mademoiselle from Bully Grenay, opened in the spring of 1920, thirty returned soldiers donned their uniforms and picked up their kit to muster on stage and re-enact their experiences, and to re-experience the camaraderie of army life.

They were not the only ones to turn to the theatre to relive their war. Eight years after his discharge from the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), an insurance broker and playwright in the Okanagan Valley sat down to write a play about his time in the trenches in the Ypres salient. He had enjoyed some previous modest success writing comedies for a Vancouver producer, but this play was something different. No contrived plot, no comic relief, no heroics, no resolution. The play he wrote, Glory Hole, A Play of the Great War, stages the actuality of daily life as he remembered it. It is an unremarked masterpiece of Canadian theatrical modernism—unremarked because he didn’t publish it.

And seventeen years after his war ended with a bullet in the shoulder at Vimy Ridge, a physician and occasional poet in Winnipeg wrote and produced, also with a cast of veterans, in a one-off performance, a feverish and harrowing play about his experience of the cruelty of the military justice system in the field. This too was never published. With scenes of lurid expressionism mixed with realism, it surfaces as a unique work of theatrical modernism that shifts our understanding of theatre history in Canada.

These authors all served in the same areas of France and Belgium, principally in the Ypres salient and the Lens sector, between 1915 and 1918 and saw action in the major battles of the Canadian Corps, the main combat formation of the CEF, including the Second Battle of Ypres and the battles of Mount Sorrel, Hill 60, Arras, Vimy Ridge, and Passchendaele. They served an average of sixteen months in the front lines; the shortest duration was three months, the longest was forty. Three of them served as privates, one as a sergeant, and two as junior officers, both of whom won the Military Cross. Four served in the infantry, one in the Canadian Engineers, and the sixth in the artillery. Three of them were wounded, one losing an arm. They are, in the larger context, typical and unremarkable representatives of the 630,000 members of the CEF. What makes them unique is that they chose to embody their memories of the war in theatrical form.

Theatrical Modernism and the Refusal of the Great War Myth

Studies of Canadian literature emerging from the war have had little, if anything, to say about drama, for the simple reason that there was not much of it. Unlike the flood of poetry and narrative prose produced during and after the war by men and women who served, there was almost no theatrical writing by Canadians, apart from occasional playlets published in trench newspapers, and the comic skits, recitations, and monologues performed by the army concert parties that Jason Wilson documents in his Soldiers of Song.¹ But literary drama from the war was scarce. After the serial publication of parts of The P.B.I. in 1921, the first play about the war by a Canadian veteran to appear in print was published in 2003 by the author’s grandson.²

The publication of these plays is a significant addition to the canon of Canadian literature emerging from the First World War. What little research there has been into drama written out of the experience of the war has focused on the army concert parties that entertained the troops during the war, and there has been little critical or historical research into Canadian drama from the war.³ The publication of these plays is thus a major expansion of the canon of Canadian war drama and, when seen in the critical space opened by the triangulation of literary studies, theatre history, and life writing studies, impacts each of these disciplinary conversations. In the field of literary studies, they are examples of a Canadian war literature that implicitly refuses to engage with the Great War myth of national formation that Jonathan F. Vance, Neta Gordon, and Joel Baetz see as recurrent in novels, poetry, and contemporary drama.⁴ In the field of life writing they reveal how memoirs can be hidden in the conventions of literary drama and popular culture. In terms of theatre history, they broaden our understanding of early theatrical modernisms in Canada because in their theatrical and textual realism and their formal experimentation these plays are unique in Canadian drama of the 1920s and 1930s.

Analyses of literary productions of the war tend to begin with what Gordon and Baetz call the Great War myth, and which McKay and Swift excoriate as the Vimy trap that has become the cornerstone of a conservative reading of Canadian history.⁵ This myth is so pervasive that it can be described as a national pedagogy. For example, the Canadian War Museum’s online exhibition on the First World War points to the victory at Vimy Ridge, achieved by citizen soldiers hammered into a professionalized army, as the moment in which a colony grew into nationhood: The victory at Vimy was a defining event for Canada, considered by many contemporaries and later scholars to be a significant event in Canada’s progress to full independence from Britain.⁶ This myth is pervasively reproduced in popular culture, such as the Vimy Ridge episode of Historica Canada’s televised Heritage Minutes, in which a voice reads a letter to his mother while the camera pans over the battle, ending with the words, "And Mother, I thought, we are a nation. This is us."⁷

That the Great War myth should be a preoccupation of literary scholars is understandable, as it was in large part a literary invention, beginning with the rhetorics of sacrifice that Vance explores in his groundbreaking Death So Noble.⁸ Poetry, novels, and art, whether popular or high culture, comprise an important part of the public sphere where these rhetorics circulate. But there was almost no theatrical response to the war, other than nostalgic tours of reconstituted army concert parties, of which the Dumbells were the most famous. Shakespeare notwithstanding, theatre in Canada was a marginal art form that carried little cultural capital. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t popular—it was, although the vaudeville shows that dominated theatrical taste in Canada migrated to radio over the course of the 1920s and playhouses became cinemas. Despite this popularity, there were few outlets for serious drama; Canadian repertory companies looked for commercial successes that they could take on the road, and public taste preferred plot-driven comedies and melodramas. It was not until the 1920s that a theatrical system that treated drama as a literary art began to emerge in what has since been called the Little Theatre movement. We see so few plays from soldiers of the war because there was no producing system to encourage them.

It should not be surprising that soldiers who saw some of the worst fighting in the war and chose to write plays about it did not perpetuate the myth of a nation forged in the trenches, presenting instead a vision of the war in a mode that Baetz, citing E.K. Brown, describes as the harsher manner.⁹ I suggest two reasons to explain this. The first is that at least some of the authors had an uneasy alignment to the ideology that sought to transform settler colonialism into national statism. Two of these plays were written by immigrant-settlers (one an English homesteader, the other a Lithuanian Jew), and both served in the trenches as privates. Glory Hole and Dawn in Heaven are angry plays that reflect their authors’ disillusionment with the army. They may have resisted the conflation of army and nation that the Great War myth proposed. The extent of the social unrest this conflation provoked, and the reaction that reinforced it, can be seen in the public reception of the painting on the cover of this book. Sir Eric Kennington was a prominent British war artist, who in 1918 spent time with the 16th Battalion, The Canadian Highlanders, of the Canadian 1st Division. This was the battalion in which William Stabler Atkinson served in the Battle of the St. Eloi Craters at Ypres, and which he depicts in minute detail in Glory Hole. In Kennington’s painting, weary soldiers, some of them ghostlike, march through the ruins of a devastated town. When he finished the painting in 1920, he titled it The Victims. This aroused controversy, led by the former commanding officer of the battalion, and to appease his critics Kennington renamed the painting The Conquerors, the title it still bears.¹⁰ But in Glory Hole and Dawn in Heaven, the men in the trench clearly are victims in a harsh, impersonal, and oppressive system of power, as were their authors, both of whom came home from the war with damaged bodies.

The second reason for the harsher manner of the plays is that the refusal of the myth of the war entailed a refusal of the narrative forms in which that myth had been encoded. Looked at in this way, these plays mark an important development in modernist theatre in Canada, where there was no tradition of the new dramatic realism that had begin to emerge in the art theatres of Europe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. There, authors like Ibsen and Strindberg broke the conventions of plot-driven dramaturgy in favour of dramatic action derived from the psychological lives of characters interacting with their social and physical environments, using the language of common life. The naturalist ideal of a drama without plot and artifice, as expressed by Zola, may be a receding horizon that can never be reached, but it spurred writers to develop dramatic forms that broke with convention to replicate everyday life and were received as radical, and indeed obscene, in their day. Although Canadian audiences could see Ibsen’s plays when they toured from New York, and although some astute Canadian critics, notably Hector Charlesworth in Saturday Night, championed the new modern drama, no such plays were written in Canada until after the war—because, as Charlesworth pointed out, a non-commercial art theatre required some form of public support. That was an idea that had just come into public awareness in Britain in 1904 when William Archer and Harley Granville Barker published their Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre (which would take almost sixty years to realize). It would find its Canadian advocates, especially in Vincent Massey, who devoted much energy over the years to the cause of public subsidies. Massey founded Hart House Theatre to promote art theatre and Canadian drama, and to draw the link between the two, and in 1928 his two-volume Canadian Plays from Hart House Theatre was the first anthology of Canadian drama.

B.K. Sandwell, like Charlesworth, was an influential liberal journalist who took up the cause of Canadian theatre, although for him the issue was economic as much as cultural. As he argued repeatedly at luncheon clubs, the theatre in Canada was annexed to the New York stage. Almost every theatre in Canada was owned or contractually bound to the immense American booking syndicates, which functioned much like modern film distribution companies (of which they were the direct precursor), a fact deplored by liberal nationalist critics at the time because of the steady flow of melodramas, musicals, and vaudeville shows across the border.

Looking back from a time when experimentation and creativity are primary theatrical values, it can be hard to appreciate how rigidly entrenched genre conventions were. To gauge how radical the plays included here were, we can contextualize them in what Gordon Williams, writing of the British theatre that thousands of Canadian soldiers would have seen, calls theatrical provision during the war.¹¹ Because it is there, in the base camps and on leave in London and Paris, that soldiers saw theatre, many for the first time. One of them was William Stabler Atkinson, who spent the last two years of the war in England, first as a patient in an army hospital and then as a staff member. In his spare time he went to the theatre, and the light, witty comedies he wrote after the war would have suited any of the theatres in London.

When Canadian troops arrived in England, they discovered a popular theatre culture that ranged from ubiquitous seaside Pierrot troupes to rep theatre melodramas to West End spectacles. They saw them in London and in the purpose-built theatres erected on army bases by the Navy and Army Canteen Board. There they could see roadshow productions of London hits and army concert parties, which were organized at the division and battalion level, some informally and some officially, many under the aegis of the YMCA. Like vaudeville and music halls, the concert parties featured skits, recitations, music, and stand-up comedy. They could also see blackface minstrel shows; one such was performed by The Cantanks of the 1st Canadian Tank Battalion at the Garrison Theatre in Bovington in 1918, two days after the end of the war.¹² The cast featured both officers and other ranks, and like many such entertainments, it included female impersonators. In 1919, Raymond Massey (destined to be a major Hollywood actor) staged blackface minstrel shows in Siberia—to a likely baffled multinational audience that included Russian, Czech, and Japanese troops—and on the troopship at sea, to keep the men of the Canadian Siberian Expeditionary Force occupied and entertained.¹³

When soldiers went on leave they had access to a wide range of services through the YMCA’s Beaver Hut in London, including West End theatre tickets. They would see hits like Walter Howard’s Seven Days Leave, which ran for two years at the Lyceum theatre. It was a spy drama set on the coast of Cornwall, with the final act set on a German U-boat. We see echoes of this genre of spy melodrama in The P.B.I.; what seems improbable to today’s reader was common fare for wartime audiences. Or they might enjoy topsy-turvy comedies like J.E. Harold Terry’s hit General Post, in which a pompous British lord tries to comprehend a world in which his tailor can be a brigadier general with a Victoria Cross. These plays were absurd and entirely unrealistic, but as Gordon Williams argues, they were popular because they were among the few dramas to even acknowledge the war and the social anxieties it produced.¹⁴

Most of these melodramas and comedies were written to well-worn templates descended from the cup and saucer realism of the late nineteenth century (the genre perfected and then demolished—critically at least—by Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw). Country estates, London drawing rooms, society characters and their servants, and complicated plots predicated on a secret or a hidden menace dominated the dramatic stage—during wartime, often involving a spy ring. Such were the plays audiences expected to see and playwrights were expected to write, bound by tradition, conservatism, and the box office.

Some war plays by Canadians followed this pattern. A revealing example, and one that helps us to understand why Atkinson and Jauvoish both refused to perpetuate this dramatic model, and why their work was radical, is a play by Oliver Hezzlewood, an Oshawa businessman who served as a recruiting officer and was sent overseas on a special mission (likely a junket to give him a quick tour and I was there credit).¹⁵ Unlike the three plays in this volume, Hezzlewood’s play, The Invisible Urge, written in 1926, shows no evidence of life writing, although the foreword to the published text claims many authenticated incidents of thrilling adventure and of miraculous interposition are worked into the plot.¹⁶ A précis of the play reveals the way that the dramatic mechanics of melodrama distort the reality of the war.

A young man, Harold Foster arrives at his friend’s family cottage in Ontario after a bracing 600-mile canoe trip. A thoughtful, melancholic poet, he puzzles over the invisible urge that leads men to sacrifice their lives for their ideals. He loves Helen, his friend’s sister, who is ardently courted by a loutish neighbour. As servants set up lights for a fancy-dress masquerade in the woods, Harold and his friend dress like an Indian and a habitant, and speak of serious matters in fake dialect. His friend’s father returns from a secret trip to Ottawa with news of impending war. The friends all vow to join up, but the lout refuses on the grounds that someone must take care of the women. Helen begs Harold to stay home. But he must obey the invisible urge. She breaks off their relationship.

The second act takes place in a military hospital in France. Harold, now a captain, is recovering from wounds incurred heroically and dashes off to his unit, despite the doctor’s orders. No sooner has he left than Helen enters. She is now a nursing sister, having joined to find and reconcile with Harold. Hearing that he has returned to the front, she dons the uniform of a wounded soldier and resolves to follow him to the trenches. Her brother, Harold’s best friend, now a major, enters with a wounded soldier. He is himself seriously wounded but defers treatment to tend to his man. As the soldier dies, he sees a vision of the White Comrade, who we take to be Jesus.

Meanwhile in the trenches, a group of soldiers watch out as Harold, out of sight, rescues one of his men in no man’s land. To distract the Germans, they sing sentimental war songs. Helen enters in disguise, ostensibly to deliver a message to Harold. Suddenly the Germans open heavy fire. Overhead, an airplane buzzes around them to save Harold’s life. The Germans shoot it down. Helen wonders who that brave pilot might be.

The third act returns us to the cottage, where there is an elegant reunion party after the war. Harold now blinded, is melancholic. His friend, the major, is dead and buried in France. Helen loves him but he avoids her. A man enters to announce the arrival of a newly returned officer, a heroic pilot awarded the Victoria Cross for risking his life saving a soldier on the battlefield. He has been in a prisoner of war camp. In fact, it is the churl from the first act. Harold defers to him as the better choice for Helen, but we learn that the churl-turned-hero is now married and has a rich wife in England. Harold, alone in the room, soliloquizes that he can never burden his beloved and must keep his love secret. But she hears the soliloquy and assures him of her love. The sudden shock of hearing this miraculously cures his blindness.

The plot of The Invisible Urge is ludicrous, its style derivative, and its masculinist sentiments ugly. It is stuffed with the murderous rhetoric of sacrifice and glory that the men in Glory Hole and Dawn in Heaven mock. But it is useful to read it because it shows how fidelity to tiresome and discredited dramatic conventions was a codification of a conservative, indeed reactionary, ideology.

Put against plays like this, the modernism of Glory Hole and Dawn in Heaven is startling. The formal innovations in the plays were solutions to a new problem: how to show and tell the truth of the war without the distortions of dramatic convention. There is a direct relationship between the authors’ purposes and their dramatic models. In the case of The P.B.I. the medley of comedy, melodrama, and commemoration is a triumphalist victory cry that evokes the gaiety of wartime entertainments, but underneath that is an elegiac need to document the lived experience of the war in a collective display of solidarity. But by the end of the 1920s, the rush of victory had given way to acrimonious disillusionment as the world slid toward economic depression and fascism. The austere minimalism and grief-laden rejection of dramatic artifice in Glory Hole is made possible by the template of the memory play, in which we occupy the author’s field of vision, devoid of sentimentality. By the mid 1930s, at the height of the Depression, at a time when Canadian politics had become radically polarized and the discourse of the Great War had become politicized, Simon Jauvoish found the techniques of expressionist theatricality a powerful dramatic method to express his moral outrage in Dawn in Heaven. All three of these plays are important early examples of what can be called naïve modernism in Canadian theatre.¹⁷

These plays make possible a significant revision of the history of theatrical modernism in Canada by expanding its scope beyond the existing historiography that attributes its source to the European and American influences on Roy Mitchell and Lawren Harris’s Theosophically influenced stagings at Hart House Theatre, and to Herman Voaden’s symphonic expressionism in the plays he wrote and staged at the Central High School of Commerce in Toronto in the 1920s. The plays in this volume disrupt that genealogy by providing examples of a modernism that emerged locally as solutions to problems of form and representation. The P.B.I., in its staging, is one of the first attempts at collective documentary in Canadian theatre, Dawn in Heaven is a rare example of early theatrical expressionism, and Glory Hole is a naturalist text that seeks to eliminate dramatic artifice in its narrative structure in favour of detailed re-enactment. All of these were radical formal innovations in their time in Canada.

While these plays may seem to be out of step with the overall literary effort coming out of the war, they are Canadian examples of an international tendency in post-war drama and theatre towards anti-heroic realism in the late 1920s and early 1930s. There had been plays written in Canada during the war years as jingoistic propaganda, including a crowded genre of pageants for children, but few of the plays identified as having been written by soldiers offer any sentiment of patriotism. By the end of the 1920s, with rising unemployment and the fear of another war, literature coming out of war experience expressed the angry and despairing mood of the the harsher manner, with R.C. Sherrif’s Journey’s End and Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie appearing in 1928, Robert Graves’s Good-Bye to All That and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the