Dr. Duff Crerar, Grande Prairie Regional College

Canadian writers and historians have sparred for decades over the long-term effect war service had on survivors of the First World War, or Great War, as they called it. One school argues that the war was a monumental disenchantment with everything and everyone responsible for the war, asserting that an entire generation returned from the war either hollow and broken, or consumed by repressed veteran rage. This rage was only expressed by a few courageous writers who shocked the post-war era with a literature of bitter recrimination and savage alienation. Other writers have pointed to a general, if deeply sober, continuation of the tradition that the soldiers were heroes, sacrificed in a war that should not have happened (by tragic miscalculation), but nevertheless was just. The books themselves become literary monuments of memory, constructing and representing a war remembered. But have the bitter accounts any more historical reliability than the “tragic fallen” tradition? This paper offers an attempt, through military and intellectual history to demonstrate the underlying unity between both traditions, and the disparity between “memoirs” which were not strictly memoirs, but in actuality early efforts to deal with their rage through the genre of the novel, and those trying to tell, in their own way, “how it really was”.