A World At War

 As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, Canada engaged in more and more efforts at home on its own defense, developing a navy, building drill halls across the country, and establishing the foundation of a professional army as opposed to a militia. In 1914, the world went to war, as a combination of nationalism, alliances, and old grudges got set off by the assassination of an Austrian archduke in Sarajevo. Canada would get drawn into the conflict from the start.

The First World War started to see the concept of war art. Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian-British politician and news publisher, would create a program of war art to document the conflict. Much of that war art ended up in the Canadian War Museum's collection. This is Canada's Answer, by Norman Wilkinson, depicting the first numbers of Canadian soldiers sailing to Britain in the fall of 1914.

The Great War saw the advancement of technology in contrast with tactics that were still dating back to Napoleon's day- massed charges against entrenched positions. With weapons that had become far more accurate than anything Napoleon had dreamed of, it became a recipe for death on a scale far beyond what he could have seen. It would take four years before anyone could break out of that mindset in a way that broke the stalemate.

Here we have The Second Battle Of Ypres, 22 April to 25 May 1915, a dramatic painting by Richard Jack. It has a counterpart across from it which has a no-photos notation, with the effects of a gas attack. Both battles at Ypres consisted of killing on a vast scale for no result. A long line of trenches would soon stretch from north to south across Europe called the Western Front.

John McCrae was a Canadian surgeon, officer, and poet who saw action on the western front and died of illness there later in the war. After the death of a friend, he wrote the poem In Flanders Fields, which has transcended national boundaries since. His service pistol is here.

A section of this area looks at propaganda. Edith Cavell was a British nurse executed by the Germans in 1915. The act outraged the allies, and she was seen as a martyr. The Canadian government later named a particularly photogenic mountain in the Rockies after her.

A story went out that during the Second Battle of Ypres, German soldiers had crucified a Canadian soldier on a barn door. It was not verified, but the story stuck. This is Canada's Golgotha, a sculpture by Derwent Wood,