After the Armistice: Veterans, the Influenza Pandemic and Remembrance

The guns fall silent

At 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918, the armistice took effect and the fighting stopped. Church bells rang across Canada; people poured into the streets. But for many families, the end of the war brought grief rather than celebration: more than 66 000 Canadians and Newfoundlanders had died, and thousands more came home wounded in body or mind.

Coming home (B2.1)

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were still overseas at the armistice, and bringing them home took most of 1919. They returned to a country that had changed:

• Jobs: war factories closed; many veterans could not find work, and some found women or newcomers in their old jobs.
• Prices had risen during the war, but wages had not kept up.
• Injuries: thousands lived with lost limbs, gas damage to lungs, or shell shock. Pensions existed for disabled veterans, but many felt they were too small and too hard to obtain.
• Soldier Settlement: the federal Soldier Settlement Board lent veterans money to buy farms. Thousands took up land, but much of it was poor, prices for crops fell in the early 1920s, and many settlers fell into debt and lost their farms.
• Veterans organized. The Great War Veterans' Association (founded 1917) pressed for better pensions and jobs. In 1925, veterans' groups united to form the Canadian Legion (today the Royal Canadian Legion). Veterans' frustration also fed the labour unrest of 1919 (a later lesson).

First Nations, Métis and Inuit veterans (B1.4)

First Nations soldiers had served alongside other Canadians as equals in the trenches. At home, they returned to the Indian Act:

• As legal wards of the government, Status First Nations veterans were largely shut out of veterans' benefits such as Soldier Settlement loans.
• The government took 85 844 acres of reserve land to give to non-Indigenous veterans under the Soldier Settlement program.
• Some veterans were pressured to give up their Indian status (enfranchisement) in return for the rights other citizens had, which meant losing their place in their community; their wives and children could lose status with them (you will study this in the women's rights lesson).
• The service of Métis and Inuit veterans was often not recorded at all, so their access to benefits is poorly documented.

This injustice led some veterans to organize. Mohawk veteran F. O. Loft founded the League of Indians in 1919 (lesson on First Nations, Métis and Inuit). Today 8 November is marked as National Indigenous Veterans Day.

The influenza pandemic, 1918–1920

In the last months of the war, a new and deadly strain of influenza (often called the "Spanish flu", though it did not start in Spain) spread around the world, carried in part by troop movements. It killed about 50 000 to 55 000 people in Canada (estimates vary), close to the number of Canadian soldiers who died in the war. Unusually, it hit young, healthy adults hard.

• Schools, churches, theatres and pool halls were closed in many cities; people wore gauze masks.
• Some First Nations and Inuit communities suffered very high death rates, made worse by poor access to doctors and by poverty.
• Consequence: in 1919 the federal government created a Department of Health, a major step toward national public health.

How Canada chose to remember (B3.2)

• 11 November was marked as Armistice Day from 1919, with two minutes of silence at 11 a.m. From 1921 to 1930 it was held on a Monday in November together with Thanksgiving. In 1931 it was renamed Remembrance Day and fixed on 11 November.
• The poppy: in May 1915, after the Second Battle of Ypres, Canadian John McCrae wrote In Flanders Fields, which begins with poppies growing between the crosses. The poem became famous around the world. Campaigners in the United States and France promoted the poppy as a symbol of remembrance, and in 1921 the Great War Veterans' Association adopted it in Canada.
• Memorials: in the 1920s, communities across Canada built cenotaphs and plaques listing their dead. Canada later built the Vimy Memorial in France (unveiled 1936) and the National War Memorial in Ottawa (unveiled 1939).

Whose memory? Early memorials often left out names of soldiers from some communities, or the work of nurses and labour battalions. Today communities are adding these stories, such as monuments to the No. 2 Construction Battalion and to Indigenous veterans.