Defiant Spirits

by Ross King

  The pine tree is offered as an emblem of Canada and its defiant spirit in the same way that Jackson, two years earlier, suggested the maple. Thomson probably knew from park rangers and perhaps also loggers that the jack pine had unique properties of survival. It was a tree that quite literally rose from the flames. Its cones, coated in resin, were opened by forest fires, and as the seeds were released, new growth arose phoenix-like from the devastation.41 This idea of regeneration and endurance, of the burned earth scattered with vital seeds, would have been a comforting one to contemplate at the end of 1916, when Canada bore such terrible scars of conflagration.

  Thomson painted The Jack Pine from a sketch done the previous spring on Grand Lake, near Achray. The atmosphere is one of transcendent repose, with the arabesques of The West Wind resolving into horizontal bands of lake and sky. With its outspread and drooping branches making it a lakeside calvary, the tree is anthropomorphized into an image of loneliness, suffering and endurance. If the central motif of Canadian art and life is survival—staying alive amid the fierce, beautiful and uncaring forces of nature42—then Thomson’s painting more than any other image stamps this symbol on the Canadian imagination.

  For The Jack Pine, Thomson made use of a technique he is not known to have used before. The horizontal strokes of paint in the sky and water were added over an undercoat of crimson visible in the blood-red tracery of the languid branches. The undercoat gives this painting its wonderfully luminous, almost incandescent sunset. The Impressionists achieved luminosity by using pale undercoats, but the technique of working over a reddish ground had a precedent, intriguingly, in medieval and Renaissance painting. Reddish outlines were often used in icon painting,43 and Italian artists used grounds of Armenian bole when gilding altarpieces and other panel paintings. Bole was a red clay that, mixed with parchment size, served as an adhesive for the gold leaf. Its rich colour, showing through the tissue-paper-thin foil, gave the gold an added lustre.

  Where and how Thomson learned about this method—if indeed he was deliberately copying the earlier techniques—is unknown. The best description of Armenian bole was found in Cennino Cennini’s fifteenth-century handbook Il Libro dell’Arte, a work not translated into English until the early 1930s. Whatever the case, Thomson’s use of a crimson undercoat not only gave an eerily lambent, blood-red silhouette to the jack pine but also turned the tree—a coniferous symbol of trial-by-fire and resurrection—into a kind of votive image. This painting, soon to become such an emblem of Canada, was perhaps conceived and executed quite literally as an icon.

  DESPITE HIS PERSONAL worries, Thomson seemed uncharacteristically pleased with his efforts in these and other paintings. Gone were the match-flinging frustrations of a few years before. Early in 1917 he wrote to his father, “For myself I have been first rate and am getting considerable work done.” A few weeks later, more optimism as he reported that he had “some pretty good stuff.” 44 His new self-confidence probably had something to do with the encouragement of Florence McGillivray. In any case, the discouragements of past years seemed behind him as he experimented heedlessly on canvas.

  Around this time, Thomson probably enjoyed the benefits of another tutor. During visits to Algonquin Park he was introduced by the ranger Bud Callighen to the painter and art instructor John Sloan Gordon. Gordon was a friend of Arthur Heming, with whom he had trekked the Canadian tundra. He spent part of each summer at Camp Nominigan with the Hamilton photographer A.M. Cunningham (who in 1915 bought A.Y. Jackson’s Near Canoe Lake and donated it to the Art Gallery of Hamilton). Gordon was a Canadian combination of the backwoods and the boulevards. He studied in Paris for several years in the 1890s before returning to Hamilton to become, in 1909, principal of the Hamilton Art School. His landscapes, such as Niagara Falls and Old Mill, Brantford (the latter bought by the National Gallery in 1909), showed the influence of the broken-colour techniques of Seurat and Signac absorbed during his years in Paris. He would later be celebrated as the first man in Canada “to use the class of technique termed ‘Pointillism’ in Europe.” 45

  Gordon’s influence and example may be behind The Pointers, one of Thomson’s most striking and experimental works. Originally named (by Dr. MacCallum) Pageant of the North, it depicted the activities of the logging industry. It shows a “crib and cage” and a trio of eight-man “pointer boats” (shallow-draft vessels with red-lacquered, V-shaped hulls) making their way across a calm lake. The crib and cage was used by lumber companies to move booms of logs across calm waters. A large raft harnessed to the logs, it was propelled over the water by means of a horse-powered capstan anchored to the

  far shore.

  Although his subject matter in The Pointers was the industry of rural Ontario, for his style of representation Thomson looked farther afield. The painting was created from broken touches of exaggerated (though not non-naturalistic) colour that revealed his continued interest in Divisionism and Fauvism. It is witness to his sheer joy of colour and technique, with sky and water created with broad hyphens of orange and purple applied in brushstrokes of unmixed pigment juxtaposed like the platelets of a mosaic—the same “brick-like rectangles” used by Signac and Cross. The lack of shadows, a hallmark of Fauve canvases, gives the painting not only brilliance but also a flatness. This surface flatness is further emphasized by the fact that the entirety of the canvas was painted with the same brushstrokes and an equal colour saturation. Artists traditionally used larger and broader brushstrokes, as well as more intense colours, for the foreground, adding background details (to suggest recession and depth) in thinner, paler tones, and with a finer brush. Thomson did away with this sort of perspective. The result was not a faithful and naturalistic transcription of the landscape but a decorative work of art that rejoiced in delicious agonies of colour.

  Despite his new self-confidence of expression, Thomson sent nothing to the 1917 OSA exhibition. His reluctance may have been due to the fierce attack by Carl Ahrens a year earlier: the coruscating Fauvism of a work such as The Pointers would surely have attracted the ire of Ahrens and Charlesworth. Evidently he was unwilling to risk further “white feather” and “hermaphrodite” jibes even for the sake of unveiling his remarkable new works.

  Thomson nonetheless attracted some media attention, this time more favourable. In the spring of 1917 he was interviewed in the Studio Building by his hometown newspaper, the Owen Sound Sun. The reporter was taken slightly aback when shown some of the painter’s latest canvases, noting that “at first the brilliancy rather daunts one” and that the colours seemed to “scream.” He proudly declared, however, that Thomson was “a young artist . . . on the threshold of an exceptionally brilliant career.” 46

  5 IMPERISHABLE SPLENDOUR

  I’M OUT OF it for a few weeks and I’m not sorry,” A.Y. Jackson wrote to Arthur Lismer at the end of June 1916, three weeks after his wounding at Sanctuary Wood. He had received what was known in the trenches as a “blighty” wound—one severe enough to get him sent back across the Channel. “At present,” he told Lismer, “I’m convalescing along with forty other Canadians in an old house overlooking the Yare.” 1

  Jackson was shipped from the Canadian field hospital in Étaples-sur-mer to Brundall House Hospital, a large brick mansion on the River Yare outside Norwich. Besides the wounded hip, he had shrapnel in his left shoulder. “Luckily it missed the bone,” he wrote to Lismer, “or it would have made an awful mess as it was about the size of a thimble and rather ragged.” He offered to send the “odd junk” to his mother for use as a hatpin.2 Although his sense of humour remained intact, Jackson had no illusions about how close he had come to death. “It was luck to come out of that business alive . . . No,” he told Lismer, “war does not improve by coming into closer contact with it.”

  Like so many veterans, Jackson almost never spoke or wrote of his experiences in the trenches. MacDonald was the first and, apparently, the only person to whom he gave a full account of the trauma. One of
his fellow soldiers wrote of the difficulty of communicating with those back home: “I had been trying to imagine how I would express my feelings when I got home, and now I knew I never could, none of us could. We could no more make ourselves articulate than those who would not return; we were in a world apart, prisoners, in chains that would never loosen till death freed us.” 3

  Jackson undoubtedly bore psychological scars much deeper than those from his shrapnel wounds. As Harold Innis, wounded in France in 1917, later reflected, “There remains the fact that no one who has been wounded, or no one for that matter who has seen a great deal of front line service, is physically or mentally better for the experience.” In his opinion, soldiers suffered psychological damage “from which only the strongest survive.” 4 A French doctor who served at a clearing station such as the one to which Jackson was first evacuated observed that “the brave soldier becomes a coward” after suffering a wound at the front: “He is shorn of his warrior courage.” 5 Jackson was certainly one of the stronger and braver ones, but his silence makes difficult the task of understanding how severely he was affected. His response to the horrors of war would be found not in words but in his paintings.

  From Brundall House, Jackson was sent, in August, to Horton Manor, a former lunatic asylum near Epsom commandeered by the War Office as a convalescent camp for Commonwealth soldiers. Here, he told Lismer, he was supposed “to get into shape for the front again.” 6 But he did not immediately return to the front or take part in the Battle of the Somme. From Epsom he was sent for duty in the Army Post Office near Hastings, on the Sussex coast. He found the work “very dull . . . with little to do. Some of the boys relieved the tedium by steaming open letters of an intimate nature, which, they had learned, were being received by some of their comrades, and reading them aloud for the entertainment of the rest of us.” 7 Other recreations included visits to the local circus to see the tattooed lady and to the cinema to watch serials such as The Iron Claw. What Jackson wanted to do, however, was paint, though both opportunity and inspiration eluded him. “I have not been storing up much material for making pictures later,” he had lamented to Lismer from Brundall House Hospital. “I suppose it is pretty hard for you chaps to go on painting with this horror going on,” he added, “and there seems to be little chance of it ending. We can bungle along longer than they can. That seems to be our principal hope.” 8

  During his long months of convalescence he was, unsurprisingly, homesick for Canada. In the spring of 1917 he received a package from two of the Breithaupt sisters, his distant cousins from Berlin, Ontario (recently renamed Kitchener after much vigorous debate). The twenty-one-year-old Catherine, a music student, had knitted him pairs of socks and gloves, and twenty-nine-year-old Rosa made him a pot of maple cream.9

  Jackson had a great affection for the vivacious and artistic Breithaupt sisters, not least because they were the ones who first introduced him to Georgian Bay. He once claimed to be in love with Rosa, a talented painter and the recipient of a gold medal in art at the Ontario Ladies’ College. The pair exchanged canvases as tokens of their mutual admiration, and in the summer of 1913 he had painted her portrait on Chippewa Island: a true sign of devotion, perhaps, in a man who otherwise shunned portraiture.10 But in 1917 Rosa married A. Russell Hewetson, the son of a Brampton shoe merchant. Possibilities for romance between the pair, such as they ever might have been, reached an end.

  Jackson’s letter of thanks to Catherine ended with an exasperated comment about the war: “It’s a grim business,” he told her, “but it must be gone through. Either we break them or they break us. After what they have done it is impossible to come to any agreement, and yet it’s very cruel to see such magnificent boys sacrifice themselves.” 11

  Many more magnificent boys were destined to sacrifice themselves. On the day Jackson wrote these words, April 9, 1917, Easter Monday, the Canadian Corps was beginning its attack on the German Sixth Army at Vimy Ridge.

  IN THE WORDS of a correspondent for The Times, Vimy Ridge was the “most bitterly contested and blood-stained area of the whole Western Front.” 12 A series of promontories running diagonally northwest to southeast near the village of Vimy, ten kilometres north of Arras, it was a formidable bastion protecting the Flanders plain. Captured by the Germans in the first months of the war, it became the keystone of their defences, an impregnable fortification with concrete machine-gun nests and three rows of deep trenches, all woven with barbed-wire fencing. For more than two years it had defied attacks that cost the French army 120,000 casualties; many of the dead lay beneath its heights in unmarked graves.

  By the end of 1916, following the Battle of the Somme, all four Canadian divisions had assembled on the line below the Vimy Ridge in preparation for an offensive. The attack was part of a plan by the French commander-in-chief, General Robert-Georges Nivelle, to cut off the German salient in France and win the war in 1917. The assault began at 5:30 am on Easter Monday, at first light and in driving sleet and snow. Twenty-one battalions crossed the frost-hardened graveyard of no man’s land and fought, in the words of one history book, as a “terrible, efficient machine of death.” 13 A few hours later, as 15,000 Canadian infantry attacked the German positions, sometimes with bayonet charges into withering machine-gun fire, the snow stopped and the sun appeared. In the sudden light the entrenched Germans witnessed the heights covered with advancing Canadian soldiers. Although the outcome was no longer in doubt, battle continued for three more days, at the end of which the whole of the ridge was captured along with 4,000 German prisoners. Four Canadians received the Victoria Cross, among them Private William Milne, a twenty-four-year-old farmer from Moose Jaw who single-handedly captured two machine-gun emplacements. Killed later that day, he was one of 3,598 Canadian dead.

  Despite the victory, such horrendous losses, felt in every Canadian city, were all the more tragic given how the British and French offensives against the Germans quickly bogged down at Arras (where the poet Edward Thomas died) and on the Aisne. By the end of April, General Nivelle was relieved of his command. A month later, French troops were in open revolt against their generals. The war, it was only too clear, would not be won in 1917.

  THE CANADIAN DEAD of Vimy Ridge were remembered in London almost three months after the battle. At a special service in Westminster Abbey, Herbert Ryle, the dean of Westminster, addressed an enormous congregation that included King George v, soon to make his own official visit to Vimy Ridge. Also present were hundreds of Canadian soldiers, many recovering from wounds. “Not in vain, not forgotten, not unhonoured have they laid down their lives,” Dean Ryle declared from the sanctuary steps. “Ypres, Vimy Ridge, and a hundred other fights have crowned with imperishable splendour the glory of Canadian nationhood.” The service then concluded with, in the words of one newspaper, a “lusty” rendition of “The Maple Leaf Forever.” 14

  This service, held on Monday, July 2, commemorated fifty years of Confederation, or what was awkwardly known in the press as the “semi-centennial.” Similar celebrations, with an equal mixture of reverence and rejoicing, were held across Canada, all of them, since the actual anniversary of Confederation fell inconveniently on a Sunday, one day late. In Ottawa, soldiers paraded to Parliament Hill with members of the police and fire brigades and troops of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides. The new Parliament building—still under construction after the 1916 fire—was dedicated to (as a plaque unveiled on a central pillar in Confederation Hall proclaimed) “the Fathers of Confederation and to the Canadians fighting in Europe.” Outside, British, French and American flags fluttered in the breeze. Sir Robert Borden and the governor general, the Duke of Devonshire, delivered speeches. Afterwards a choir sang the Dominion’s unofficial anthem, “O Canada.” 15

  These celebrations, like the euphoria over the victory at Vimy Ridge, did not last. Four days after the Ottawa ceremony, the House of Commons passed the Conscription Bill. The controversial legislation was made necessary, Borden believe
d, by the simple and inescapable fact that Canada was unable to replace through volunteers the large numbers of soldiers killed or wounded on the Western Front. In April 1917, when the Canadian Corps sustained 23,939 casualties, only 4,761 men volunteered for service to replace them.16 A.Y. Jackson’s battalion was in the process of being disbanded because recruitment problems in Montreal meant the casualties of Sanctuary Wood could not be replaced. Clearly the Canadian divisions could not be maintained at strength or raised to the promised number of 500,000 without the government resorting to more drastic methods of recruitment.

  On July 6, after an all-night sitting that concluded with the singing of “God Save the King” at five o’clock in the morning, the Commons affirmed the principle of conscription by 118 votes to 55. The vote, and the heated debate preceding it, revealed stark divisions that served as a reproach to anyone who believed Canadian heroics at the Somme and Vimy Ridge, or the nationwide celebrations of the semi-centennial, could unite the country or confirm its identity. Every single Ontario mp, whether Liberal or Conservative, supported the bill, which was unanimously opposed by francophone mps in Quebec. There was likewise strong opposition in the West, which, as sharp-eyed foreign correspondents noted, was grossly underrepresented in Parliament by some twenty seats.17 An amendment to the bill, introduced by Sir Wilfrid Laurier and providing for a referendum on the issue, was defeated by a virtually identical pattern of voting. The bill was therefore due to be sent before the Senate at the beginning of August, after which it would receive royal assent and come into force as the Military Service Act. This selective draft aimed to make eligible for compulsory military duty all men between the ages of twenty and forty-five, in particular those who were unmarried and without children.

  In the summer of 1917, debate over the controversial legislation filled Canadian newspapers and sometimes—with anti-conscription parades and protests in Quebec—the streets of Canadian cities. A Montreal journal called L’Idéal Catholique published an article entitled “Down with Confederation”; it was quickly reprinted in three hundred other newspapers.18 Stories reached the papers of “preparations for revolt” in Quebec, while the New Brunswick–born