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Militia Myths: Ideas of the Canadian Citizen Soldier, 1896-1921
Militia Myths Ideas of the Canadian Citizen Soldier 18961921 Author:James Wood The image of farmers and workers called to the battlefields — endures in Canada's social memory of the First World War. But is — the ideal of being a citizen first and a soldier only by necessity as — recent as our histories and memories suggest? — Militia Myths brings to light a military culture that — consistently employed the citizen soldie... more »r as its foremost symbol, but
was otherwise in a state of profound transition. At the time of
Confederation, the defence of Canada itself represented the
country's only real obligation to the British Empire, but by the
early twentieth century Canadians were already fighting an imperial war
in South Africa. In 1914, they began raising an army to fight on the
Western Front. By the end of the First World War, the ideological
transition was complete: for better or for worse, the untrained
civilian who had answered the call-to-arms in 1914 had replaced the
long-serving volunteer militiaman of the past as the archetypal
Canadian citizen soldier.
Militia Myths traces the evolution of a uniquely Canadian
amateur military tradition -- one that has had an enormous impact
on the country's experience of the First and Second World