http://www.archives.gov.on.ca/ENGLISH/exhibits/posters/recruitment.htm
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On this day, August 8, 1914 Frank, having returned to the west to his job as surgeon in the Winnipeg General Hospital after a visit home to Bayham, Ontario, met Murray heading east from his homestead. It was Frank’s birthday.
I know this as Frank reminisced in Dublin, on the same day in 1916, “Wonder where I’ll spend my next birthday, two years ago Murray and I went for a trip on the Red River, last year I was on the Altantic, this year in Ireland, next year, where?? Guess I am a roaming stone but the old world was made for us to live in and a little roaming is at least interesting, if not financially profitable.”
The next year on August 8th 1917, Frank wrote home to Mother having attended “a little dinner party tonight at the Continental Hotel,” Giza, Egypt and continued describing “a couple of moonlight picnics out on the Nile during the week.”
Now allow me to surmise - two farm boys by birth and heritage, brothers with contrasting characters who respect and care deeply for one another, sitting around a camp fire along the Red River in Manitoba, sharing their thoughts and future plans. Both very informed as to world happenings and politics. Methodist in religion and brought up on childhood readings of the patriotic verse of Rudyard Kipling and G.A Henty's adventure tales that reflected Victorian values and heroic Englishness. Instilled with a strong sense of right and wrong, good against evil, with an upbringing of personal responsibility and accountability, plus community and civic duty, I can only imagine how the frenzied euphoria of the first month of the war would have effected these two boys conscious of their sense of duty, attempting to decide how each would contribute.
Parades organized with flags waving in patriotic fervour, impassioned speeches, volunteers flooding recruiting offices, jubilant crowds reading newspaper office bulletins, newspaper photos of excited crowds filling the downtown streets of Quebec City, Montreal and Toronto cheering militia men as they marched, and fear that a free trip to Europe and the fun would be missed as the war might end by Christmas. What a great adventure fighting for King and Country, especially when combined with a heady sense of camaraderie!
This following a cold winter, a drought that destroyed much of the 1914 wheat crop in the west, considerable unemployment (as experienced by Murray), and a summer described as the worst depression since the 1890s. For many families, joining the colours and earning a soldier’s pay was an attractive financial alternative. And then, return to the warm and proud embrace of your family, in a few months, a hero’s welcome.
At the outbreak of war, Canada’s permanent force, with little military history, was comprised of barely 3,000 soldiers. The Canadian ‘army’ was described as an army of amateurs. About 74, 000 men had received training as part-time militia men, Frank and Murray’s brother, Ward being one of them. In June 1909, Frank wrote, teasing Ward about his cadet training, “Am starting for Three Rivers Camp next Tuesday a.m. Expect to have some snap shots taken while there so can have some souviners of my 'military life.' Ha! Ha! Suppose Ward salutes everything on the farm from the chicken lice & fleas to fence posts.”
How would the Benner boys ‘do their bit’ to defend the values of Western civilization?
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