Lost in the Crowd

As a group of Acadians in uniform went door to door in Moncton, New Brunswick, to raise money for the newly formed 165th Battalion at the midpoint of the First World War, one angry resident shouted aggressively that he “would like to see every one of the 165th shot down one by one.” While an atypical reaction, it revealed the tension in the Maritimes, where the extremity of the war effort, with its tens of thousands of Canadians killed or maimed from combat, was leading to strife and division. 

In Gregory Kennedy’s fine new book on Acadian soldiers’ experiences of the war, he does not elaborate on whether the angry man was an English patriot furious at the French-speaking Catholic Acadians who were thought not to be “doing their bit” in the war against Germany. And he does not say whether the man was an Acadian who felt that those young men should not go overseas to fight in the imperial, English war, nor that they deserved the fate that he felt awaited them on the Western Front. 

His book will be of great interest to anyone seeking to better understand the Acadian experience in the war, and it’s a useful reminder that the cleavages between English Canada and French Canada extended beyond Quebec’s interaction with Ottawa. Employing sophisticated social history research, including accessing censuses, other official records, and newspapers, Kennedy has reconstructed the service of Acadians as they struggled to survive, to fight, to endure discipline, and, for the survivors, to deal with the war’s impact on their postwar health. 

About five thousand Acadians are thought to have served in uniform in the First World War, and Kennedy has done important work in restoring their history. No longer are they “lost in the crowd.”