Suzanne Evans in the Ottawa Citizen: Using grief to fuel patriotism

Ottawa author looks at how mothers of fallen soldiers are used to foster support for war

Janice Kennedy
The Ottawa Citizen
Sunday, June 3, 2007

Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs:
World War I and the Politics of Grief
By Suzanne Evans
McGill-Queen's University Press, 224 pages

If they hadn't already been killed or maimed that December of 1915, husbands and brothers and sons were huddling in muddy trenches overseas, their absence a deep shadow over the approaching Christmas holiday. Canadians, especially Canadian women left to tend the home fires, needed hope, consolation, inspiration.

It came in an article published by Everywoman's World, the most widely-read magazine in the country during the First World War -- distributed to 67,000 homes in 1915, and 125,000 two years later. The article, titled I Am A Proud Mother This Christmas, was by a "Mrs. E.A. Hughes," a widow who had just received a telegram informing her of the death of her son, Pte. Danny Hughes, her only remaining child.

In the story, she describes her initial fleeting sadness, followed by her realization of the greater truth: "I am a proud mother this Christmas. For I gave Canada and the Empire a Christmas present. I gave them my chiefest possession ... I sacrificed the life of my boy."

That historical nugget is just one among many found in the new book by Suzanne Evans. Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief is crammed with such fascinating stories -- and with fascinating postscripts.

Researching the Mrs. Hughes story, the 50-year-old Ottawa writer uncovered something intriguing. Since no one with Danny's profile turns up in any of the archived documents of the time -- something easy to check today but not within reach of the average citizen 92 years ago -- Mrs. Hughes and her Danny, who died so valiantly in action, may in fact have been a fiction.

Rich with analysis and anecdote, Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs, Evans' first book, looks critically at the manipulation of emotional impact for a cause.

She says the image of the sacrificing war mother has long been a potent, and useful, symbol.

"We think we would do anything to keep our children safe," says Evans, a mother herself. "A story like the Mrs. Hughes one takes that expectation and turns it around, so that anyone listening to it must say, 'What is the cause for which this mother is willing to sacrifice her child?' -- and then, 'I wish to follow this cause.' I think that is what the propagandists of World War One were hoping. These stories were designed to gain followers."

And gain followers they did, as mothers by the thousands bade brave farewells to the sons they sent off to fight for King and country. More than 60,000 Canadians, most of them young, were killed during the First World War. It is not mere coincidence, Evans points out, that Canada's Memorial Cross medal -- known as the Silver Cross and issued for wives and mothers of soldiers who have died in military action -- has its origins in that conflict.

Evans, who shares her comfortable Alta Vista home with two daughters and her husband, novelist Alan Cumyn, has a doctorate in religious studies from the University of Ottawa. She first became intrigued by the topic of war mothers when she stumbled upon the phrase "mother of martyrs" while reading a book about Islam. The reference was to Palestinian women of the first intifada.

"It floored me," she recalls. "I couldn't imagine a mother being proud of the sacrifice of her son for a cause -- and showing joy. At first, I just thought, 'Well, that's gross,' and I closed the book and put it away. But it stuck like a burr in my brain."

Evans started looking into history and went back as far as the late first and early second century BCE, during the time of the Maccabees, when a Jewish mother appears as the first recorded "mother of martyrs." (The Bible story tells of the mother's seven sons who are all tortured for their faith before her eyes and prior to her own death. The last one, the youngest, dies after his mother strengthens his resolve not to renounce his faith to save his life.) But such stories, while proving the antiquity of the willing-mother-of-martyrs phenomenon, were too far away in time and place to provide context for its modern counterpart.

"I thought, 'It will make it easier to understand if I can find something else closer to home, in my own culture.'"

The idea came one Remembrance Day nearly 17 years ago. Bundling her young daughter into her stroller, Evans went downtown to the ceremonies at the National War Memorial. Seeing the Silver Cross mother, she found herself thinking about the enormity of loss felt by mothers who lose children to war, and went on to research the history of the Silver Cross.

"World War One became my access point to understanding stories from other places and other times." It was not her era, but it was her culture. In her family, she says, there are all kinds of stories of women, including her great-grandmother, who willingly saw their sons off to war.

"This is my English Canadian heritage," says the Toronto-born Evans, "and I don't think of my family as being crazy or warmongering. So if that's there for us, it can be a way of understanding other places, a way of understanding that it's not madness, it's war."

Looking for echoes of familiarity in other parts of the world, especially in current conflicts, Evans says she found them -- present-day mothers willing to sacrifice their children, and government recruitment posters geared at women, urging them to give their sons to the cause.

In other words, the gulf between the Mrs. Hugheses of 1915 and today's Islamic "mothers of martyrs" proved to be no gulf at all.

As she threw herself into the research that would eventually become both her doctoral thesis and the new book, Evans found another source of cultural support as well. Her husband was also researching the First World War for his 2003 novel, The Sojourn and its 2006 sequel, The Famished Lover. (In fact, two of Cumyn's arresting photos of wartime statues, stone portraits in grief, appear in Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs.)

But as she finished the book, and as the Canadian death toll in Afghanistan rose, it became increasingly apparent to her that the present ties with the past lie in more than a resonance with intifada mothers.

"It's incumbent upon us to ask questions," she says of the mission in Afghanistan. "I have seen how stories of old martyrs have been used as touchstones to create a background and add a whole world view to modern stories."

She was especially uneasy about the way Canadian officials used the rededication ceremonies at Vimy in April, drawing glorified parallels between then and now.

"When you see the picture of Mr. Harper with his hand on the wall of the monument, it's like the power of that mythology infusing him. He becomes a war leader."

While she does not compare Afghanistan to the 1914-18 conflict, where the death toll was a thousand times higher, she thinks the machinery of martyrology is at work in much the same way.

Evans says there is a direct connection between her academic focus on religious studies and the issues of her new book. Raised in a distinctly secular home and professing no single faith herself ("They all fascinate me"), she says she nevertheless maintains a profound respect for the practice of religion -- as long as it doesn't become a bludgeon.

"It can be a tool for great things, for wonderful kindness and love and action in the world. And people can also use it and misuse it according to their desires."

In the First World War, she says, as in wars from the beginning of time, it was assumed that "God was on our side," whichever side that may have been. She cites one of the letters that her husband has from a great-uncle who fought during that conflict. "He writes that something really snapped in him when, on the battlefield, he saw the buckle on a German uniform. And it says, in German, 'God is on our side.'"

Religion or maternal love, Evans is distressed by the kind of manipulation that exploits and twists and serves a sometimes dubious cause.

"The whole idea of offering a son, and now daughter, to fight for a cause and be sacrificed turns our expectation of motherlove on its head," she says, alluding to the present because these days there is no escaping it.

The mythologizing that comes of such reversals, she suggests, tends to silence people at a time when there should be no silencing. "In times of war, people seem to dispense with questions rather than raise them." And that, says Evans, is not the answer.

Not as long as there are sons and daughters dying for someone's idea of a cause. Not as long as there are mothers left behind to mourn.

Janice Kennedy is a senior writer at the Citizen.

To listen to an interview with Suzanne Evans please visit CBC's The Current website: http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2007/200705/20070507.html