Canada's Volunteers and Conscripts

Jonathan F. Vance

The First World War was the first mass undertaking in Canada’s history. Over 10% of its entire population served in uniform (some 700,000 men and women [1]), tens of thousands of others devoted countless hours to charitable work, and for the first time the nation manufactured munitions on a mass scale. At the same time, the federal government was forced to grow, if only to keep track of everything. Life was regulated, controlled, and monitored to an unprecedented degree.

When it was all over, there was accounting to be done and reports to be published, to satisfy the curiosity of the public and the demands of the bureaucrats. The most pressing matter proved to be the most elusive: who had actually served? On an individual level, Canadians knew full well who had served – after all, they went to great pains to record the names on local memorials. But collectively? That was a different matter. What parts of the country had contributed the most volunteers and conscripts? What about their ethnicity, religion, occupation, age, and marital status? Why had they enlisted? Even with the most advanced calculation systems then available, getting a sense of the men and women who made up the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) proved to be no easy task.

One of the most enduring images of August 1914 is the crowds of enthusiastic Canadians spilling into the streets, singing patriotic songs and declaring their determination to do whatever it took to beat the Hun. In the days following Britain’s declaration of war on Germany on 4 August 1914, many of the young men from these crowds descended upon recruiting offices, eager to enlist for God, King, and Empire. The enthusiasm was so infectious that Sir Sam Hughes, the energetic if unstable Minister of Militia and Defence, decided to scrap his department’s mobilization plan, a meticulously organized scheme prepared in 1912, in favour of a procedure more befitting the moment. He issued a call to arms, directing the country’s militia units to send their young men to Valcartier in Quebec, where a brand new (indeed not even completed) encampment would accommodate them until they could be shipped to England.