Gregory M.W. Kennedy, Lost in the Crowd: Acadian Soldiers of Canada’s First World War (Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen’s Press, 2024)
Reviewed by Beverly Boutilier
In December 1915, Acadian leaders meeting in New Brunswick complained that volunteers serving in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) from their communities had become “perdus dans la foule” or lost in the crowd. At a time when the loyalty of linguistic and religious minorities was often called into question, they advocated the formation of a distinct Acadian regiment to make the community’s sacrifice visible to all. More than a century later, Lost in the Crowd: Acadian Soldiers of Canada’s First World War (Montreal and Kingston, MQUP, 2024) by Gregory M.W. Kennedy has a similar aim. Using the men of the 165th (Acadian) Regiment in 1916 as his starting point, Kennedy creates a compelling portrait of one minority community’s experience of war.
Inspiration for the study came from a student question at Brandon University, where Kennedy teaches history and serves as dean of arts. Did members of Atlantic Canada’s Acadian community serve in Canada’s military during the First World War? A specialist in colonial Acadie, Kennedy did not know and went looking for answers.
Histories of Acadie have tended to focus on the British expulsion of Acadians in the 1750s from present-day New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, for refusing to swear allegiance to the British Crown. In turn, histories of Canada’s First World War often assume that French-Canadians, inside and outside of Quebec, opposed the war. But as Kennedy notes, the First World War coincided with a period of intense national awakening among descendants of the original Acadians. The decision of some Acadian men to join the fight and the handwringing of Acadian community leaders over the visibility of their efforts suggested to Kennedy that something more was going on.
So, then, did Acadians serve? The short answer is yes. Thousands of Acadian men joined regiments raised in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and PEI at the outset of the war and travelled overseas to fight, but the community’s efforts to raise a separate Acadian regiment in 1916 were mixed. Authorized by the Canadian Expeditionary Force as one of several “special identity” units, the 165th was unable to recruit enough men and in 1917 deployed to Europe understrength. Once there, the regiment was disbanded and its men sent to the French-Swiss border to cut wood with the Canadian Forestry Corps. Still the very presence of Acadians volunteers in the CEF begs a question. As the descendants of a French-speaking and Catholic people forcibly expelled from their lands by British conquerors, why did Acadian men choose to fight at all?
Perhaps the book’s most important contribution is the collective portrait of Acadian soldiers that forms the core of the study. Starting with a list of the 532 men who deployed to Europe with the 165th and clearly self-identified as Acadian, Kennedy and his intrepid team of research assistants sifted war records, personnel files, pre-and postwar census data, private papers and family-held fonds to populate a database of over 1200 soldiers with verifiable Acadian roots, including a sample of men who joined other units before the end of 1915 and another drawn from the complete nominal roll of the 26th (New Brunswick) Battalion.
“Perhaps you do know how great it is for a young man in his prime to go and fight for God and homeland and to give his life if God deems it necessary to combat evil.”
— André Arsenault to his parents, 3 September 1918, Lost in the Crowd, p. 199.
What emerges from the data is a cohort of men sharing common bonds of language, faith and community that set them apart from most volunteers fighting in Canadian khaki, over half of whom were recent immigrants from the British isles. But as with any social history project, the gaps are as tantalizing as the glimmers. Personal papers in the form of soldier letters and diaries offer occasional voices that bring the data to life, though why these men chose to serve remains largely opaque. What is clear is how Acadian leaders sought to use the service of Acadian soldiers to claim a wider place for the entire community within the Canadian state.
In these ways, Lost in the Crowd restores another lost perspective to the war zone and, by tying the men to the communities that sent them, also deepens our understanding of the war’s battle lines at home. The study’s brief focus on the postwar period highlights an area in need of further probing. Though the fighting in Europe ended, for far too many veterans and their families “the war to end war” became a war without end.
Further
- 165th Battalion pictures at Early Canadian History.
- L’Institut d’études acadiennes (IEA) de l’Université de Moncton.
- Ottawa Citizen‘s tribute to soldiers, “We Are The Dead.”
- McGill-Queen’s University Press Remembrance Day Reading List.
- Photo of the Canadian Forestry Corps at Wartime Heritage Association.
- Witness the illumination of the Unknown Soldier’s headstone at the Canadian War Museum.
Gregory M.W. Kennedy is professor of history and dean of the Faculty of Arts at Brandon University and the author of Something of a Peasant Paradise? Comparing Rural Societies in Acadie and the Loudunais, 1604—1755.
Beverly Boutilier is a historian and fiction writer based in Ottawa. During a postdoctoral career in international development and peace building, she lived and worked in Indonesia for five years, first on Sulawesi and then on Java. She is currently at work on a Great War novel set in Europe during the cease-fire between November 1918 and June 1919.
Header Photo: Canadian Troops Return from Trenches, Battles and Fighting Photographs of the First World War, Canadian War Museum.
