Robert Lester Harper wrote hundreds of pages of letters to his wife, Mabel, while he served in the First World War.Supplied
Brandon Marriott is the author of Till We Meet Again: A Canadian in the First World War.
“Please don’t write another academic book,” my wife said. “Write something that people actually want to read.” As a historian who had spent a decade learning how to write academic books, her comment rankled me. But she had a point. We had recently returned from a trip to Vimy Ridge where I learned that my wife’s great grandfather, Lester Harper, had fought in the famous battle. In fact, Lester had written hundreds of pages of letters to his wife, Mabel, from the muddy trenches and dugouts of the Western Front.
The contents of his correspondence shocked me. This was not what I expected an infantryman in the front lines of the Great War to be writing about to his wife in Canada. As Pierre Berton noted in Vimy: most of the letters from the First World War were brief and impersonal. The soldiers simply stated that they were well, then commented on the weather and when they figured that the war would end. Not Lester. He told his wife what he really thought. “Let them [the Canadian politicians] come here and make a few trips up the line,” he stated in frustration. “Then they will sober up, believe me.”
The story of Lester’s life was just as remarkable as his correspondence. Not only was he a decorated war veteran who climbed the ranks of the military from private to lieutenant, but he was also a pioneer who trekked into northern B.C. and built a homestead from scratch. This needs to be a book, I realized.
For the next three years, I fully immersed myself in the First World War. I read war diaries, military records, battle reports, memoirs, academic articles, historical texts, and even classic novels. I read everything that I could get my hands on.
After three years of studying the First World War, I know that I will never be able to truly understand the horrors of war no matter how much I read about it. Yet my research has given me a greater appreciation of Remembrance Day. It is an important moment for us to both honour those who have served in the Canadian Armed Forces as well as to sombrely reflect upon their sacrifices and the human cost of warfare. For Lester, Remembrance Day was very significant. After returning home from Europe, he never missed a ceremony at his local Pouce Coupe Legion. The former lieutenant knew the cost of war firsthand. His friends and colleagues were killed around him on the Western Front. His brother was wounded at the Battle of Courcelette. His cousin was shot, captured, and taken to Germany as a P.O.W. during the Battle of Fresnoy.
Although Lester escaped the war physically unharmed, he bore the mental scars from the trauma. The Great War had forever changed him. “You may not know me,” he wrote to his wife shortly after the Armistice in 1918. “I shall be a great deal different to the Lester you used to know.” Like many of his fellow veterans, he suffered horribly from nightmares for years after returning home to Canada and refused to speak about his experience on the Western Front until near the end of his life almost 50 years later. “Some come back wounded,” Lester admitted. “But few come back all right.”
All of our veterans and their families know the sacrifice that life in the military entails. From the Silver Cross Mothers whose children have paid the ultimate price to the spouses of military personnel who, like Mabel, are left at home as single parents while their partners serve abroad. As Roméo Dallaire wrote in Shake Hands With the Devil, “There is nothing normal about being the spouse or child of a soldier, sailor or airperson in the Canadian Forces.” The families live the missions and suffer from similar trauma too.
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There are also longer-term implications of military service that usually aren’t front of mind. Veterans, for example, suffer from higher rates of depression and anxiety than civilians. This Remembrance Day, I think especially of my cousin and her family. Her husband, Lee Marten, served from 1999 to 2013 as a corporal, second-in-command of a section, in the 6th Field Engineer Squadron – a reserve force from Vancouver. Over a decade later, at the youthful age of 46 with two children at home, Lee was diagnosed with ALS. Veterans are twice as likely to develop this incurable disease (for reasons which remain unclear).
We owe a debt of gratitude to our military personnel – both past and present – as well as their families. Thanks to their sacrifices, many of us have been fortunate to grow up in Canada feeling far removed from war. Our primary experience of it has come through books or movies or news reports about distant places. But our comfort can lead to complacency, especially among the youth without military ties. In an era of short attention spans, how do we engage a younger generation of Canadians who may not feel as connected to these important but increasingly distant moments of our past? How do we breed empathy and bridge the gap between those who have served and those have not?
To me, this is where the stories of our past become vital. The generation who fought in the Great War is no longer with us, so none of us can ever truly know how it felt to live through the horrors of the Western Front. But we can pay homage to the veterans by remembering their sacrifices, reading their stories, and learning from their experiences.
While there are a plethora of amazing books about the Canadian Armed Forces, still more needs to be written before it is too late. I am reminded of one of my first lessons about studying Lester’s life: much has already been lost to history. Through hours of research, I was able to reclaim Lester’s war experience by determining what it was like for him and what could have happened to him, but there were some moments of his life that can never be fully recovered.
This provides an urgent reminder. As another year passes and we lose more of our aging veterans who fought in the Second World War, we need to preserve the personal accounts before their generation is gone, and we no longer have access to this crucial part of our national memory. Their stories, in particular, are critical reminders of the dangers of extremism, unchecked aggression, and propaganda as well as the human cost of war – all issues important today. As our collective memory of the Second World War fades away, how much do we risk repeating the mistakes of the past if we fail to heed the lessons that they offer?
Our world today is one in which strongmen and extremism flourish. Civilian populations are facing annexation, invasion, occupation, and even starvation. Children are still dying from bullets and bombs. In times like these, maybe the stories from our past need to be heard again – the ones where ordinary Canadians stood up and fought for what they believed in.