Last words

April 26, 2005 5:49 AM

Dear Mother, Just a wee note. I am “going over the parapet”, and the chances of a “sub” getting back alive are abut nix.

A letter home written by Canadian soldier Hart Leech in 1916.
posted by DeepFriedTwinkies (21 comments total)

So silly canadian dialects go back at least 90 years. Neat!
posted by Mayor Curley at 5:55 AM on April 26, 2005

I've always wondered what makes otherwise relatively sane men rush to their certain death. In the end, many might just as well have comitted suicide back in Canada (or Australia, or New Zealand) for all the difference their ultimate sacrifice in the the 'war to end all wars' made.
posted by spazzm at 6:05 AM on April 26, 2005

Poor kid. "Made Perilous Canoe Journey to Enlist" -- to be any more Canadian than that, he would have had to arrive on a sled pulled by a moose with a beaver riding on its back. (Which of course is something all good Canadians are known to do. When they aren't making perilous canoe journeys.)
posted by pracowity at 6:09 AM on April 26, 2005

pracowity wins :)
posted by Popular Ethics at 6:17 AM on April 26, 2005

spazzm, while I have no doubt that some or perhaps many of those lives could have been spared, I am even more confident that committing suicide when faced with the possibility of the Germans taking over the western world is an even more senseless idea. Shame on you.

/me admits he once did a canoe run to the next town simply to get a case of beer.
posted by furtive at 6:30 AM on April 26, 2005

Furtive:

Don't conflate the causes of WWI with those of WWII. The First World War was NOT simply a result of naked German aggression. There were many reasons for it, not least of which was the fact that ALL the countries initially involved had very specific war preparation / troop mobilisation plans that they couldn't figure out how to back out of until far too late.
posted by dersins at 6:39 AM on April 26, 2005

to be any more Canadian than that, he would have had to arrive on a sled pulled by a moose with a beaver riding on its back

ahem...eating poutine?
posted by felix betachat at 6:56 AM on April 26, 2005

Sometimes I read a historical novel and think "Oh, come on, you're piling on the period slang a little thick." If I'm ever tempted to think that again, I'll just reread this letter. I shudder to think what the contemporary equivalent is like.

By the way, I'm guessing "sub" is short for subaltern (junior officer); cf these citations from the OED:
1756 WASHINGTON Writ. (1889) I. 293 Leaving Garrisons in them from 15 to 30 men under command of a sub or Trusty Sergeant. 1812 Sporting Mag. XXXIX. 245 A Sub' of Dragoons. 1865 LEVER Luttrell xxxvi. 262 Some hard~up Sub who can't pay his mess debts.

On preview: OK, this is pretty off-topic, but since it's come up: the best explanation I've seen for WWI (the only one that begins to make sense to me) is David Fromkin's in Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?: that it started off as (what was supposed to be) a quick, limited war in which Austria kicked Serbia's ass, egged on by Germany (which promised "faithful support" if attacking Serbia brought trouble with Russia); then, as soon as Russia mobilized, Germany issued an ultimatum and told Austria to pull back its troops from Serbia and fulfill its treaty obligations to help Germany against Russia. The Austrians were pissed off (they had been on the verge of defeating Serbia) but had to comply, Germany declared war on Russia when the ultimatum expired on Aug. 1, invaded Belgium and France because France was Russia's ally and they had to go through neutral Belgium to get around the French defenses, Britain declared war because of its treaty with Belgium, and the catastrophe began. It was mainly Moltke's doing; the Kaiser didn't want a war, particularly not one with France and Britain, but Moltke was determined to defeat Russia before it got too powerful, and the war plans developed years before envisioned a two-front war, so Moltke bullied him into it.
posted by languagehat at 7:05 AM on April 26, 2005

I've always wondered what makes otherwise relatively sane men rush to their certain death.

I've just finished reading Goodbye to All That, poet Robert Graves' autobiographical account of the war. Graves and his friends didn't like the war, but they weren't about to abandon friends and country once it had begun and their country needed fighters. So they would be wounded and given an honorable way out of fighting, but would recover and go back to the trenches for more.

Of course, a number of men who could have gone didn't go, many of them by finding work at home that was necessary to the war effort or by claiming to be conscientious objectors. Goodbye to All That is the book in which you'll find conscientious objector Lytton Strachey's famous response to the question about what he would do if he saw a German soldier raping his sister: "I would try to get between them." (Or something to that effect. I don't have the book in front of me.)
posted by pracowity at 7:20 AM on April 26, 2005

I think that pracowity has it about right. The solidarity factor plays a big role. In addition, as the letter states, the reason many rush into certain death is because it is their job to do just that.

Spazzm, I wonder if such snide comments are appropriate in this context. Actions are heroic regardless of the greater context of the situation. Sure, the first World-War didn't secure peace for all time (I don't think that any way can accomplish such a task, and in any event that wasn't the purpose), but the stoicism of this man is not the less honorable for that.
posted by Tullius at 7:36 AM on April 26, 2005

Canadian, my ass. There's not a single "eh?" or "Take off, you hoser!" in the whole letter.
posted by fungible at 7:37 AM on April 26, 2005

Actually, that site says the letter wasn't mailed home but found in another officer's kit a decade later, then forwarded to his father. Also,

"In the battle in which Lieut. Leech fell there were nearly 500 casualties affecting Winnipeg families."
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 7:41 AM on April 26, 2005

Or, you could say that WWI happened because Gavrilo Princep didn't get laid the night before and was walking around grumpy. The cause kind of comes down to either inevitability or small pebbles.
posted by edgeways at 9:28 AM on April 26, 2005

The letter is in this month's Harper's Readings, but they cut the last paragraph. Curious. S’there y’are.
posted by mrgrimm at 11:00 AM on April 26, 2005

Or, you could say that WWI happened because Gavrilo Princep didn't get laid the night before and was walking around grumpy.

But "assassination of archduke" does not equal "world war." Lots of bigwigs were getting assassinated back then; why did this particular one cause such a disproportionate reaction? Yeah, Austria seized on it as a pretext to strike at Serbia, but why should that have led to a wider war? As I say, Fromkin's explanation is the only one that makes sense to me; Moltke did want war with Russia, and he did use his influence with Austria, so the basic factors are there. It's just that they're submerged in such a confusion of treaties and mobilizations and after-the-fact justifications and explanations that people tend to lose sight of them.
posted by languagehat at 11:54 AM on April 26, 2005

Best. Soldier's. Letter. Home. Ever.
posted by bwg at 5:11 PM on April 26, 2005

Oh good, we've derailed into a discussion on the causes of WWI! I love this kind of thread. My understanding of the underlying impetus for the war (and its been a while since World History 151, but it made sense to me) was that Germany had been late getting in on the colony/empire building pastime of the other European powers, due to its relatively recent unification. This meant that all the good colony spots were taken. The other European powers made their secret war agreements as a deterrent to German aggression against their colonies. However, since it would not be much of a deterrent if the Germans didn't know, they had to let it slip. Germany then made their own secret agreements ( and let everyone know) to keep pace. The original agreements, I believe, were concerned with the Germans attempting to take over the various European colonies. Thus the war was basically countries with colonies (and their former colonial possessions) versus countries that wanted colonies.

Sound plausible, or am I letting my Marxist streak show?
posted by MetalDog at 6:16 PM on April 26, 2005

That is some letter. There is the one about French troops bleating like sheep on their way to the slaughter during WW I, dunno if it is apocryphal.
posted by mlis at 7:00 PM on April 26, 2005

Great post. I can't believe I got stuck on mygastricbypass.com yesterday!

My wife will be starting as a history teacher in the fall, and she happens to be very interested in WWI. If she ends up teaching that era, there are some great links in this thread for her. I almost want to teach it:

- Explore Fromkin's causes in the class.

- Have the students write a letter home from the front; compare to Hart Leech's.

- Read Goodbye To All That in the class.

This stuff practically teaches itself!
posted by Doohickie at 9:31 AM on April 27, 2005

It was an old Digger who said, "The royal families of Europe chose up sides and went at it."
posted by emf at 2:26 AM on April 28, 2005

[More WWI, not Canada] The British TV series "Upstairs, Downstairs" (1971-75, available on DVD and at Netflix) spends most of the third and fourth season, I think it is, on the Great War. The lack of dread -- indeed, giddy anticipation -- portrayed in the lead-up to the war is so foreign. That, and being able to go out on your balcony in London and hear the bombing going on in France.
posted by Aknaton at 6:42 AM on April 30, 2005