Ralph Connor

Peter Buienhuis

Another who reacted to disaster at the front with confirmed idealism was a Presbyterian minister, Charles W. Gordon, better known as Ralph Connor, author of the enormously successful romances, The Man From Glengarry and The Sky Pilot. At the age of fifty-four he was appointed chaplain to the 79th Cameron Highlanders of Winnipeg. He accompanied his battalion to the Somme, but he was at the base hospital when the Camerons went in to take Regina Trench in October 1916. Two hundred and fifty-seven men returned of the original eleven hundred. In his autobiography, Postscript to Adventure. Connor blames staff bungling for the massacre. The battalion was assured that the wire in front of the trench had been cut and that a strong point which could enfilade an attack had been blown up. Neither report was true.

Returning to Canada in 1917 he made such an effective speech about his experiences with the battalion to parliamentarians and churchmen in Ottawa that he was asked by the prime minister to make a propaganda tour of the United States. He spoke in halls and churches about the sacred cause of the Allies. and he was addressing a meeting of the Yale Alumni Association in New York when the message came that the president had asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

It is hardly surprising, then that Connor's war fiction should be unstintingly patriotic and idealistic. The Major, published in 1917, was written to expose pro-German sentiment in Canada and to encourage recruiting. It established the formula by which many novels of this genre were to be written: either the hero or one of the central figures is a pacifist or indifferent to the war. He is converted by atrocity stories or by a woman, or both, enlists and goes off to fight, and either dies or emerges with an aesthetically acceptable wound.

 The Sky Pilot in No Man s Land ( 1919) follows this formula. The hero is a young and quite priggish preacher, Barry Dunbar, who joins up as padre at the outbreak of war and spends most of his time upbraiding his soldier charges for their swearing and drinking. His universal unpopularity is redeemed after his father. mortally wounded while serving as a sergeant in the first Canadian contingent. tells him he should not act as a censor but go with his men as a friend and tell them about God. He does so and performs extraordinary feats of heroism and sacrifice. Many of the incidents of the novel are based on Gordon's own experience at the front, including the slaughter of his battalion on the Somme. Instead of going to base hospital as Gordon did, however, Barry insists on going up to the front with his men and is killed while helping to carry back a wounded man from an advanced trench. Before that, in the approved sentimental tradition, he has married a nurse in the Volunteer Aid Detachment who is to bear his child. The padre's dying words provide the cliche on which the hook ends, "'Major-tell-the boys- that-God-is good-Never-to be-afraid-but to-carry on-' "

In The Sky Pilot in No Mans Land there is no recrimination about the bungled staff work that led to the slaughter of the battalion. Barry thinks: "The thing in which they were engaged was vastly more important than the fate of any individual or of any battalion. Victory was necessary, was guaranteed, and was demanding its price.'' These sentiments are reminiscent of Hay's and Kipling s belief in the necessity of joyful sacrifice to the battalion.

From:  Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914-1933 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1987), pp.153-54.