On December 26, snipers on both sides resumed their job of picking off easy targets. Screams, groans, and whimpers of pain replaced the sound of carols.
Immediately after Christmas, most of the fighting had been on Germany’s far distant eastern borders. In the lakes and forests of northeastern Poland, Russians and Germans had pounded each other with deadly machine gunfire, rifle shots, shell splinters, and whirling shrapnel. Phrases like “terrific slaughter” and “inferno of shells” were scattered through printed reports of the bloody Battle of the Masurian Lakes, which began in early February in a blizzard. Once again, the carnage was shocking: the Germans killed 56,000 Russians and captured 100,000 more. According to War Office spokesmen, the Masurian Lakes battle was a victory for the Russians, who had checked a German offensive.
Meanwhile, on the western front, the Allies’ artillery had captured two little towns on France’s border with Flanders, towns with names no one back in Canada could spell—Passchendaele and Langemarck. But these lofty pronouncements could not blot out the tales of bloody mayhem on both fronts that were seeping across the Atlantic. Some of those stories were propaganda, deliberately spread by governmentwarmongers in London and Paris to encourage enlistment. Others were straightforward reporting from the battlefield. Canadians bombarded with such reports had no way of knowing the difference.
“French Government Tells of the Fiendish Atrocities Perpetrated by the Kaiser’s Men” read one headline, over a story alleging that German soldiers had used scissors to gouge out the eyes of French soldiers. Army doctors reported that German shells were packed with phosphorus, which poisoned wounds and led to men dying of necrosis. At a medical triage station, a correspondent for the Toronto Daily News met men who were “tired, tired, tired … their eyes are heavy with gazing over-long in Death’s face” as they sat on trolleys and held up their “frost-bitten, bandaged feet.” The German navy had been given instructions, according to a Canadian Press dispatch, to drown any innocent women and children travelling on captured vessels. “Fiendish Determination of Germans Marks the Latest Development of Prussian Kultur.” A report from Poland asserted that the Germans were using “a new explosive, the fumes of which temporarily blind combatants.” The reporter described how the fighting was so intense that “it is no longer possible to distinguish individual gun explosions from the rattle of infantry. All are mingled in one inarticulate battle shriek. At night as if in a thunderstorm the darkness is pierced by intermittent flashes of fire while sickly green rockets shed a ghastly light over the lines.”
Gruesome reports like these circulated through Canada endlessly by word of mouth. The war news was increasingly unsettling: German tactics were not just belligerent, they were immoral. What kind of men assaulted women or deliberately blinded their enemies? In the little town of Leaskdale, eighty kilometres north of Toronto, the writer Lucy Maud Montgomery (who had a two-year-old son) confided to her journal, “There have been such hideous stories in the papers lately of [Germans] cutting off the hands of little children in Belgium. Can they be true? They have committed terrible outrages and crimes, that issurely true, but I hope desperately that these stories of the mutilation of children are false. They harrow my soul … I cry myself to sleep about them and wake again in the darkness to cringe with the horror of it.”
What was happening to the brave lads who had left farms, factories, and families to defend the Empire? Families with menfolk at the front silently whispered prayers. Few people yet questioned the righteousness of the cause, or suggested that their boys’ bravery was anything less than heroic. “‘Tommy’ is majestic in his suffering,” the Toronto Daily News
Immediately after Christmas, most of the fighting had been on Germany’s far distant eastern borders. In the lakes and forests of northeastern Poland, Russians and Germans had pounded each other with deadly machine gunfire, rifle shots, shell splinters, and whirling shrapnel. Phrases like “terrific slaughter” and “inferno of shells” were scattered through printed reports of the bloody Battle of the Masurian Lakes, which began in early February in a blizzard. Once again, the carnage was shocking: the Germans killed 56,000 Russians and captured 100,000 more. According to War Office spokesmen, the Masurian Lakes battle was a victory for the Russians, who had checked a German offensive.
Meanwhile, on the western front, the Allies’ artillery had captured two little towns on France’s border with Flanders, towns with names no one back in Canada could spell—Passchendaele and Langemarck. But these lofty pronouncements could not blot out the tales of bloody mayhem on both fronts that were seeping across the Atlantic. Some of those stories were propaganda, deliberately spread by governmentwarmongers in London and Paris to encourage enlistment. Others were straightforward reporting from the battlefield. Canadians bombarded with such reports had no way of knowing the difference.
“French Government Tells of the Fiendish Atrocities Perpetrated by the Kaiser’s Men” read one headline, over a story alleging that German soldiers had used scissors to gouge out the eyes of French soldiers. Army doctors reported that German shells were packed with phosphorus, which poisoned wounds and led to men dying of necrosis. At a medical triage station, a correspondent for the Toronto Daily News met men who were “tired, tired, tired … their eyes are heavy with gazing over-long in Death’s face” as they sat on trolleys and held up their “frost-bitten, bandaged feet.” The German navy had been given instructions, according to a Canadian Press dispatch, to drown any innocent women and children travelling on captured vessels. “Fiendish Determination of Germans Marks the Latest Development of Prussian Kultur.” A report from Poland asserted that the Germans were using “a new explosive, the fumes of which temporarily blind combatants.” The reporter described how the fighting was so intense that “it is no longer possible to distinguish individual gun explosions from the rattle of infantry. All are mingled in one inarticulate battle shriek. At night as if in a thunderstorm the darkness is pierced by intermittent flashes of fire while sickly green rockets shed a ghastly light over the lines.”
Gruesome reports like these circulated through Canada endlessly by word of mouth. The war news was increasingly unsettling: German tactics were not just belligerent, they were immoral. What kind of men assaulted women or deliberately blinded their enemies? In the little town of Leaskdale, eighty kilometres north of Toronto, the writer Lucy Maud Montgomery (who had a two-year-old son) confided to her journal, “There have been such hideous stories in the papers lately of [Germans] cutting off the hands of little children in Belgium. Can they be true? They have committed terrible outrages and crimes, that issurely true, but I hope desperately that these stories of the mutilation of children are false. They harrow my soul … I cry myself to sleep about them and wake again in the darkness to cringe with the horror of it.”
What was happening to the brave lads who had left farms, factories, and families to defend the Empire? Families with menfolk at the front silently whispered prayers. Few people yet questioned the righteousness of the cause, or suggested that their boys’ bravery was anything less than heroic. “‘Tommy’ is majestic in his suffering,” the Toronto Daily News
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