Citizen-Soldiers of the Empire: The Dominion Experience in the First World War

Jonathan F. Vance

In 1966, an amateur historian asked Stanley Stanger for recollections of his experiences as a fighter pilot during the First World War. “I do not consider that shooting down another pilot is a memorable experience,” Stanger replied in a letter written just a year before he died. “I had the privilege of meeting one of them who was wounded, and who subsequently died. He was a young fellow just like me, and I never regretted anything more than that I should have taken his life.”

Like the vast majority of men and women who served in uniform during the First World War, Stanley Stanger was not a professional soldier. An investment broker from Montreal, Quebec, he had served in Canada’s militia before the war, at a time when militia duty was as much a social obligation as a military exercise. Stanger enlisted in March 1916 in the Canadian Army Service Corps and transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in April 1917, Bloody April, when the German Fokkers were taking such a devastating toll on the RFC over the trenches of the Western Front. Much of Stanger’s war, however, was spent on the Italian Front, where he eventually scored thirteen kills. But as soon as the war ended, he left the service and returned to his civilian occupation, running the family investment firm until his death in 1967.

For people like Stanley Stanger, the war represented an intrusion on an otherwise settled existence, an affair in parentheses, to borrow the phrase from the poet David Jones. In Stanger’s long and successful career as a Montreal broker, the three years spent in uniform were out of the ordinary as much as they were out of character. The war was not part of his normal life, but rather an enforced hiatus from it. As a citizen-soldier placed in an unexpected and unusual situation, Stanger was entirely typical, for all combatant nations relied on volunteer amateur soldiers during the First World War. But nowhere was the figure more important than in the self-governing dominions and major colonies of the British Empire. In the so-called 'white Empire' – Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Newfoundland, parts of the Caribbean, and especially Canada – the persona of the citizen-soldier, the man who had left a peaceful occupation, who beat his ploughshare into a sword, exercised an enormous influence on how the war was experienced.