Chaplains of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-18: modern revisions on one hundred years of historiographical development

This article surveys nearly 100 years of how British and Canadian Great War army chaplains were historicised through three distinct stages: the interwar decades, the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and a revisionist phase that began in the 1990s and continues. Postwar memoirs of numerous literary-minded British and Canadian veterans almost invariably characterised chaplains as hypocritical and irrelevant to the average soldier, doing more harm than good to the cause of organised religion. This and other war disillusionment motifs were taken up by the 1960s anti-war movement and sealed into public consciousness. The 1990s, however, witnessed the beginning of scholarly, revisionist efforts to disentangle history from literature and myth. The effort has produced a more balanced, complex, and interesting assessment of chaplain front-line performance, as revealed through the diverse testimony of soldiers from all socio-economic backgrounds, not just the educated literary class.

“The place is a prison, and you can’t change it”

Speedwell Military Hospital was a hospital for veterans of the Canadian Expeditionary Force located in the newly-built Ontario Reformatory in Guelph. Speedwell was part of a nation-wide program administered by the Department of Soldiers’ Civil Re-Establishment (DSCR) during the First World War intended to neutralize some of the social dangers associated with demobilization. As the health of individual veterans at Speedwell became closely associated with the nation’s economic strength, the ultimate goal of hospitals like Speedwell was the transformation of sick and wounded veterans into healthy and productive workers. However, as the needs of patients changed after the war, the initial promise of Speedwell as a site of rehabilitative labour made it clearly unsuitable for veterans in need of long-term convalescence care.