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First published during the summer of 1929, All Else is Folly joined a lengthening cortege of Great War novels that had been written by veterans of the conflict. The line was led by Under Fire (1916), a gritty and grim work for which Henri Barbusse was awarded the Prix Goncourt, and included such titles as John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers (1921),

The cover of the Constable edition, the first to be published.

e e cummings’s The Enormous Room (1922), and Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1923). The most popular novel of the war, All Quiet on theWestern Front by Erich Maria Remarque, had preceded the publication of All Else is Folly by months; Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms would follow by mere weeks.

In the company of these canonical works and the many lesser titles of what came to be known as “the war book boom,” All Else is Folly stood out as something unique. Though published by the British house Constable, its author, Peregrine Acland, was a Canadian. While the Dominion’s veterans had already produced three Great War novels — The Major (1917) and The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land (1919) by Cameron Highlanders’ Chaplain Charles Gordon (Ralph Connor), and The Fighting Starkleys (1922) by Theodore Goodridge Roberts, briefly aide-de-camp to Arthur Currie — they were the works of older men who had not seen prolonged front-line deployments comparable in either the intensity or duration to those of a first Canadian Division company commander.

Acland’s war record set him apart from his literary comrades. Awarded a Military Cross at Observatory Ridge (Ypres) and later distinguishing himself at the Battle of the Somme, his war experiences were as dramatic and harrowing as anything found in the fictional accounts of the more widely known novelists of the Great War.

Compared to Connor, one of Canada’s bestselling authors, and Roberts, brother of Sir Charles G.D., Acland was an unknown. The author of a small number of overlooked short stories and poems scattered about The Canadian Magazine, Maclean’s, Pearson’s, the Globe, and the Evening Record of Windsor, Ontario, he was very much a nonentity in the world of letters. Yet Acland’s novel managed to garner the support of some of the day’s most respected names in literature; those early English readers and reviewers could not have ignored the praise conferred upon the novel by Ford Madox Ford’s “A Note by Way of Preface.” Then at the height of his talent and influence, the novelist, poet, and critic was not in the habit of penning such things — indeed, he notes as much — stating that his motivation lies in the hope that “a very large public may be found for Major Acland’s book on both sides of the Atlantic.”

The Globe (Toronto), December 14, 1929.

When the American Coward-McCann and Canadian McClelland & Stewart editions of All Else is Folly followed the British edition a few weeks after its publication, the novel’s reputation was bolstered by further endorsements from prominent public figures. The philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell, the editor and publisher Frank Harris, and John B. Watson, the father of behaviourism, all lauded the novel. Their remarks were featured prominently on the North American dust jackets. Further words of praise from Robert Borden, Canada’s wartime prime minister, were featured in advertisements: “No more vivid picture has been painted of what war meant to the average soldier.”

All Else is Folly was reviewed widely, receiving acclaim in newspapers ranging from the Times of London to the New York Times to Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald. In Canada, the influential William Arthur Deacon praised All Else is Folly as “one of the cleverest, most straightforward war revelations in fiction form.”1 In the pages of the Globe, reviewer Roger Irwin held the novel above A Farewell to Arms, writing that the former had “won a place at the top of the war fiction produced in 1929 on this continent.”2

For a few months, at least, it might have seemed that Ford’s wish for All Else is Folly was coming to pass. And yet, despite all these accolades, neither Constable nor Coward-McCann chose to reprint. McClelland & Stewart’s Canadian edition enjoyed three printings — quite uncommon for the day — but was then allowed to slip out of print. The last bookstores ever saw of All Else is Folly came in the form of a rather inelegant edition, most likely issued in 1930, from discount publisher Grosset & Dunlop. All Else is Folly appeared and then disappeared over a six month period between the summer of 1929 to the spring of 1930 — its author never published another piece of fiction or poetry.

* * *

Peregrine Palmer Acland did not come from a family of military men or novelists, though his family did have connections to the worlds of war and letters. His mother Elizabeth (née Adair) was the daughter of a Crimean War veteran. His father, Frederick Albert (F.A.) Acland, had worked for a number of English newspapers before he decided to leave England and settle in Canada. In 1883, weeks after his arrival in the Dominion, he secured a position at Toronto’s Globe, then moved on to other papers south of the border. At the time of Peregrine’s son’s birth — May 15, 1891, in Toronto — he was back at the Globe as news editor. He left for good in 1907, moving the family to Ottawa to take a job as secretary in the Department of Labour, under William Lyon Mackenzie King. In one respect it was a reversal in roles, the editor having hired King as a Globe cub reporter two decades earlier. The shift in power suited both men, with F.A. Acland moving on to become Deputy Minister of Labour and, later, the King’s Printer.

By his own account, Peregrine Acland was a bookish child. He earned early recognition for his writing in May 1904, within days of his fourteenth birthday, when he took first prize in a nationwide essay competition commemorating the centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar. “I was a disgustingly pasty-faced little bookworm, quite unable to keep my nose out of books of adventure, and equally unable to hold my own in the real life of childish sports,” he would later write.3 According to Acland, it was his good fortune at age fifteen to be the guest of a school friend whose father owned an Alberta cattle ranch. “Being forcibly dragged away from books for a time (though I used to go on round-up with a copy of Poe’s poems in my pockets), I gradually came to learn that literature is less interesting than life.”4

In April 1907, not yet sixteen, Acland saw the publication of his first short story, “Larraby’s Lope,” in The Canadian Magazine. “Telling of a cow-puncher’s stratagem, pitted against sheriff and deputies, and the outcome,” the tale was clearly inspired by his time in Alberta. Indeed, the west was to become a near constant presence in his prose and verse.

Acland would have met his unnamed school chum while attending Upper Canada College. The autumn after graduation, he began the first of what would be five directionless years at University College, University of Toronto, “either reading assiduously on courses [he] was not taking, or else not reading at all.”5 The deputy minister’s son began a literary journal at the university titled Arbor, dabbled in verse, some of which was published, and earned a bit of money through occasional work at the Globe and the Ottawa Free Press. Graduation, which was unavoidable, came in May of 1913, with Acland receiving honours in Modern History.

The previous month had seen one of his poems appear in The Canadian Magazine:

Spring in the Foothills6

Ride! Ride!

For the Winter snows have run

From their foe, the April sun,

And the roses rise in pride on the grassy mountain side,

(Then ride!)

Where the echo of my shout

Comes a-rolling round about,

As if winding on his horn had young Spring himself replied.

Ride! Ride!

For the timid calves are bawling,

And the antelopes are calling,

And each buck to each doe has cried that Winter at last has died.

(Then ride!)

When the scented winds blow strong,

And the old Earth-love calls long,

Swiftly leap into your saddle and westward, westward ride!

Peregrine Palmer Acland. This photograph was likely taken in Toronto prior to the September 1914 departure of the 1st Canadian Division. (Photo courtesy of the 48th Highlanders Museum, Toronto)

As if heeding his own advice, Acland soon set off for British Columbia to assume the editor’s position at the Prince Rupert Daily News. The tenure was short, though he did leave his mark: the paper became more attractive, news coverage increased, and there was a new focus on things literary. As the third month drew to a close, Acland resigned and trekked across British Columbia until he met the then-unfinished Grand Trunk Railway line, where he caught the first in a series of trains that would take him to his parents’ Ottawa home. Once back in the capital he embarked on a civil service career as a clerk in the Department of Finance.

Nine months later came the Great War.

Acland’s service record is one of extraordinary activity and advancement. He enlisted as a private in the Queen’s Own Rifles in Ottawa on September 19, 1914, and within three days was in Val Cartier, Quebec. Two weeks later, newly commissioned as a lieutenant in Toronto’s 48th Highlanders, the young officer was bound for Plymouth, England, aboard the SS Megantic as part of the largest convoy to then cross the Atlantic, carrying the 30,617 men of the 1st Canadian Contingent.

Acland wrote of the beginning of his Atlantic crossing in “With the Highlanders En Route to England.” Published in the October 6, 1914, edition of The Globe, while the ship was at sea, it is very much a document of another age, and a striking example of the Canadian military’s early amateurism; the article reveals operational details concerning not only the date of departure, but also which ship contained the divisional ammunition column, as well as the field and clearing hospitals — a tidy bit of information for an ambitious U-boat captain. Such a disclosure today would likely lead to court-marshal.

While “With the Highlanders En Route to England” and Acland’s personal diary of the crossing hold great value to military historians, the most significant writing he produced aboard the SS Megantic came in the form of a fifty-two-line poem:

The Reveille of Romance

Regret no more the age of arms,

Nor sigh “Romance is dead,”

Out of life’s dull and dreary maze

Romance has raised her head.

Now at her golden clarion call

The sword salutes the sun;

The bayonet glitters from its sheath

To deck the deadly gun;

The tramp of horse is heard afar

And down the autumn wind

The shrapnel shrieks of sudden doom

To which brave eyes are blind.

The Reveille of Romance was printed as an eight-page chapbook, likely by Acland’s family, for private distribution. The poet John Masefield sent Acland an encouraging note on receiving a copy, hoping he would find it “profitable to write more.”7 The Canadian poet and writer E.W. Thomson, himself a veteran of both the American Civil War and the Fenian Raids, wrote to congratulate Acland’s father on his son’s achievement. Alfred Noyes8 also wrote approvingly, and recalled a poetry reading Acland attended at the home of Duncan Campbell Scott.

The first they would have seen of the poem came in the February 27, 1915, edition of the Globe, four months after Acland had disembarked from the Megantic. It would then be reprinted in the Canadian Military Gazette on June 27, 1915, with the “remarkable poem” generating such interest that the publication was obliged to provide some brief biographic details of the young soldier-poet in a subsequent issue.

Reading the poem today within the context of the great anti-war poems that came after, one is tempted to dismiss it as emblematic of the high-spirited, patriotic verse that appeared in newspapers and periodicals the world over, particularly in the early years of the war. Yet, in giving the presidential address to the Royal Society of Canada in 1918, Canadian Poets of the Great War anthologist W.D. Lighthall9 includes Peregrine Acland’s poem in a discussion alongside the work of John McCrae and Bernard Freeman Trotter. “The Reveille of Romance” he said, showed “the spirit of high resolve and the imaginative outlook which actuated those who sprang to arms at the first call.”10

At the time Acland’s poem was being read by the public, the lieutenant had already endured a rainy autumn training in the mud of Salisbury Plain, a miserable experience that was relieved by occasional trips to London on weekend furlough. He would later recall one memorable visit to George Bernard Shaw’s home in Adelphi Terrace. Acland, who had “been more strongly influenced by the Third Act of ‘Man and Superman’ than by anything else in literature except the Sermon on the Mount,”11 was not disappointed:

As I gave him a little Irish blarney about being able to die happy now that I had seen him, he soon dropped his mask and treated me quite humanely. His pose, icy and with a shade of the sneer about it, damages him, though he assumes it as a protection. It is as incongruous as the comic mask on the face of tragedy. I have seen no eyes which can show greater depth of feeling than do his on occasion, and for all his flippancy, I have met no one who realizes more intensely the essential horror of war and who yet so vigorously appreciates the necessity of fighting our way out of it.12

The beginning of 1915 brought disappointment when Acland was sent to Weymouth to supervise training with the 3rd Wiltshires, the depot and training battalion for the Moonrakers, as they were nicknamed, rather than being sent to France with the rest of the 15th Battalion (48th Highlanders). As a result, he was still in Weymouth when word came in April of the German gas attack at Ypres. “From this none of the junior officers of the Fifteenth Battalion (48th Highlanders) came out undamaged,” he wrote in the war’s dying days, “and very few came out at all, on our side of No Man’s Land. Nineteen officers out of twenty-one and 670 men out 1,000 represented the loss of that unit alone.”13

Acland rejoined his regiment in France at month’s end, and in mid-May saw his first action in the Battle of Festubert. He would describe the three days of combat as “an awful muddle,” while recognizing that his was “an army in the making”:

We were hard pressed, and our commanders had to do the best they knew how with the material at their disposal. I didn’t take this calmly philosophic view at first. It was only with more soldiering and more reading about other wars, that I learned that this waste is incidental to all wars, and that the good soldier has to be prepared to die cheerfully not only for his country, but for his general’s blunders.14

In the end, the battle claimed over sixteen thousand British, Canadian, and Indian casualties under the command of Douglas Haig, then a lieutenant general on his way to becoming a field marshal. The 48th Highlanders were sent to Givenchy after the fighting, then in July on to trenches in the area of Ploegsteert and Wulverghem, opposite the Messines Ridge, just kilometres south of Ypres. There Acland’s division remained for eight months occupied by shelling during the day and patrols by night. In March 1916 they were dispatched for six months to the Ypres salient.15

The Ypres Salient in April 1915, at the time of the Second Battle of Ypres.

Acland was now a captain and company commander. Responsibility weighed heavily; in one counter-attack more than half his men became casualties. Over the night of June 2, 1916, the 48th Highlanders were rushed into the line to plug a gap the Germans had opened. Early on the morning of the third, the Canadians counterattacked in front of Mont Sorrel, and, beneath an intense barrage, Acland was wounded when the force of an exploding shell knocked him semi-conscious into a shell-hole, and onto a bayonet carried by one of his men. He was fortunate; several more senior captains were killed or seriously wounded early in the engagement. Acland stepped up to take command of the line, continuing the attack by directing four companies along with attached machine gun and bombing details. Facing interlacing machine gun fire with artillery support, the men of the 48th under Acland’s direction took tremendous casualties, but the attack was ordered to proceed. In Acland’s own words, his company contributed to “sacrifice battalions, sent in with next to no artillery support (there was at the moment none that could be given us) to stop a gap and so to prevent further German inroads.”16 The further German inroads Acland mentions would have meant the fall of the city of Ypres.

Whether public or private, Acland’s writing about his service is tinged with self-criticism and reproach:

I never so wanted to run away in all my life, and only stopped myself by reflecting that certain shame and necessary self-destruction lay behind and that, while it would be better to blow out one’s brains than to yield to cowardice, it was more sensible to stay in the lines and carry on. I was so dazed with lack of sleep, over-fatigue and the … horrendous din of the shelling that I soon felt myself to be of little use as an officer, and all I can say is that I stuck it out.17

Acland counted himself lucky and considered himself unworthy of the Military Cross awarded for his part in the action. Others interpreted his actions differently: the Canadian Military Gazette of August 21, 1916, announced the award “for conspicuous bravery during an attack. He led his company, formed under very heavy fire, with great dash, and, though wounded, remained at his post and dug himself in.”

In late August Acland was promoted to major, and subsequently set out on what would be two separate deployments at the Somme.18 It was during the second engagement, on September 26, 1916, just northwest of Courcelette, that Acland’s time at the front came to an abrupt end. At approximately 1:30 in the afternoon his company, having overrun a German communication line, were advancing in the direction of the infamous Regina Trench when Acland was hit by German machine gun fire. Shot in the left chest between the seventh and eighth ribs and in the left breast two inches above his left nipple, it is miraculous he wasn’t killed instantly. Instead, Acland fell into a shell-hole, where he lay in pain, barely able to breathe. A stretcher-bearer appeared, quickly dressed his wound, and thinking his wounds were fatal, left him with morphine and water and proceeded on with the attacking line, as per battalion orders.

It was an agony to lose the rough hand of the stretcher-bearer, an agony which made me understand Nelson’s ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’ It was not Hardy that the dying sailor yearned to embrace, but the spirit of man and all human friendliness.19

In his account, Acland recalls his efforts to remain alert. The great fear was that he would be taken for dead should he lose consciousness. Revolver at his side, Acland was prepared to shoot the approaching enemy. “I had no desire to be taken prisoner in that condition,” he writes.20

The stretcher-bearers that had been sent out on his behalf failed to find the major, but as the afternoon stretched into the evening and then the morning of the following day, enough strength returned to give Acland hope that he might survive. After fourteen hours in the shell-hole, the German artillery suddenly shifted: realizing he was once again in the line of fire, he began lightening his load. Before much progress was made, an explosion split Acland’s face from forehead to chin. Still, he managed to get to his feet and with “sheer desire for life”21 started on a slow trek around shell-holes and deserted trenches, knowing the flashes of light in the distance had to be the Allied guns. Blind in one eye and severely wounded, in the hour just before dawn he stumbled upon a burial detail; they escorted him to a first aid dressing station. Acland spent the remainder of the year in Mrs. Arnold’s hospital in South Kensington; it was five months before he was again able to stand.

The December 16, 1916, edition of the Globe reported that F.A. Acland and his wife had sailed for England to visit their son in hospital; Elizabeth Acland would stay at Peregrine’s bedside in England as he battled lung haemorrhages and septic pneumonia between surgical procedures over a five-month period. On March 3, 1917, Acland was invited to an investiture at Buckingham Palace, where he was one of fifty seriously wounded soldiers to receive the Military Cross. Prime Minister Robert Borden, as well as the recently retired Governor General Prince Arthur Duke of Connaught and Princess Patricia were also in attendance.

In May of 1917, Acland was healthy enough to return to Canada; later that summer, he became involved in the University of Toronto’s military instructor program, likely after participating in rehabilitation and physiotherapy programs stationed on campus. With the United States entering the war in April 1917, Canadian officers with an academic background were sent to American colleges and universities to further military links between the two countries while also alleviating some of the burden of instruction on the U.S. officer corps.

In mid-October the major was sent to Washington State College, where he was entrusted with training over five hundred cadets in military tactics employed at the European Front. Acland held the position of Assistant Professor of Military Science and Tactics at the college, and would do so officially until the Armistice, though health complications limited the scope of his involvement: on several occasions doctors advised him to recuperate in the drier climates of California and Colorado.

On one convalescent stay to Colorado Springs, in the summer of 1918, Acland met and soon married Mary Louise Danforth, of Cleveland, Ohio. Through the influence of the Canadian historian George M. Wrong, Acland secured a position at the prestigious Groton School in Massachusetts in the fall of 1918, where he was initially engaged to oversee military training for the school’s cadet corps. Acland struggled with poor health during the years immediately after the war; though he was officially a teacher at Groton from the fall of 1918 until the spring of 1922, recurring concerns about his vision, tonsils, teeth, and, most critically, his lungs, meant he did little actual teaching in the 1921–22 school year. Though his tenure there was short, Acland’s correspondence with the school and its founder, Rev. Endicott Peabody, lasted for more than three decades and it was Peabody who enabled Acland to temporarily relocate to Hamilton, Bermuda, for the sake of his health in the fall of 1921. Though he lost part of the use of one lung, the warm climate agreed with Acland, who claimed in a letter dated March 4, 1922, that his health was the best it had been since 1916.

The North American cover used by Coward-McCann and for the first McClelland & Stewart printings. The banner, containing promotional blurbs from Ford Maddox Ford, John B. Watson, and Frank Harris, conceals the trench full of dead and dying men.

After a brief stay in the fall of 1922 at Michigan’s Battle Creek Sanitarium, the elite health resort run by Dr. J.H. Kellogg, Acland expressed an interest in looking for work as a writer in Toronto. He returned to the Queen City, and by 1924 his health was definitely improved: so much so that Acland weighed “pounds in street clothes,”22 nearly his weight when he went off to France. It speaks to the extent of Acland’s war injuries that it took him nearly eight years to recover a semblance of his former strength.

In Toronto Acland lived first at the Windsor Arms, then at an address on Charles Street East, but his specific means of support remains something of a mystery. Years later, Acland would claim that he had twenty years’ experience in the [advertising] agency field, suggesting he began in 1922 or 1923. December of 1925 found him working in advertising in New York, where he wrote Peabody that his career was going well, “but it is only a means to an end — scribbling.”23 He and Mary were living in a Fifth Avenue apartment two blocks north of Washington Square, an address they held until at least the 1929 publication of All Else is Folly. Acland’s means must have been substantial: he was successful enough to employ a young woman named Katherine Yates Sanborn as his literary secretary.

In the decade that followed the publication of his novel, Acland appears to have abandoned whatever dreams he would have had of a literary career. While uncertainty caused by the Great Depression may have played a role in his decision, it must be recognized that Acland was doing quite well. During the economic crisis, he rose to prominence within J. Walter Thompson agency, to this day one of the largest and most influential advertising agencies in the world. By 1938 he was manager of their operations in Toronto, and his salary, approximately fourteen thousand dollars a year, was roughly three times that of a Member of Parliament.

And yet, Acland gave it all up to serve again during the Second World War. No longer young or fit enough for soldiering, he took a position as advisor, press officer, and secretary to his father’s old friend, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. Acland worked in that capacity until just after King’s retirement, overseeing the transition period to successor Louis St. Laurent. He then returned to Toronto and the advertising world, where he became manager of the Day, Duke & Tarleton agency; his appointment was announced in the January 28, 1949, New York Times, accompanied by a striking portrait taken by Yousef Karsh.

Peregrine Palmer Acland died on Saturday, May 11, 1963, in Sunnybrook Hospital, Toronto, presumably of cancer; his obituary solicited donations for the Canadian Cancer Society in lieu of flowers. He is buried beside Mary, his wife, in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery. The couple had no children.

* * *

All Else is Folly was not Acland’s first attempt at a Great War novel. In the summer of 1918, he had completed, then destroyed, several chapters of a book intended to “knock everything from Ian Hay to [Henri] Barbusse into a cocked hat.”24 The little that is known about the composition of All Else is Folly comes in the form of an author’s note, dated October 23, 1929, and appearing only in the second and third Canadian printings. In it, Acland reveals that the novel “was first written nearly two years ago” and had since undergone several rewrites.

More than one contemporary critic referred to All Else is Folly as the work of a gifted amateur, and that assessment holds up eighty-five years later. Despite its faults, the work is an important, significant, and unusual book within both the narrow confines of the Canadian War novel as well as within the larger scope of the realistic war novels that were published during the interwar period.

If one were to imagine Canada’s Great War novels as a line with the extremely naïve and jingoistic on one end and the pessimistic and realistic on the other, Acland’s All Else is Folly would occupy the middle ground. It is the first of our nation’s realistic war novels, anticipating those that would follow — Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed (1930) and Philip Child’s God’s Sparrows (1937) — while at the same time being even-handed enough to appeal to those who guided Canada through the war. All Else is Folly can be read in either light. Indeed, it was; how else could such a novel appeal equally to Canada’s wartime prime minister, Robert Borden, and the pacifist Bertrand Russell?

Perhaps the origins of Borden’s favourable view of the novel are easy to trace: the bricklayer who becomes Falcon’s batman is named for him, after all, and the protagonist offers explanations for the man’s behaviour twice:

“But he couldn’t be angry with Borden. He knew Borden too well. If there had been a mistake it couldn’t have been Borden’s fault.”

“Borden watched over him like a Mastiff. No, like a brother.”

What are we to make of this? In the British Great War novel tradition, the brass hats and political leaders are the enemy of the fighting man, unsympathetic to his plight, and the source of his misery. So is it horribly inauthentic for a Canadian “anti-war” novel to absolve one of the political architects of the war? Could any other war novel of the period claim such disparate champions?

To dismiss All Else is Folly as romance is to misread it; to classify it purely as anti-war is to misunderstand it. As the novel’s subtitle suggests, it is both. All Else is Folly is a work of dualities, be it the prime minister who becomes a batman, the Colonel who becomes a private, or the protagonist himself who is simultaneously “built for action” but has “meditative eyes,” and who is ultimately cleft in two by artillery — whether Allied or German, we are not told — while between the lines in no-man’s land.

The second and final McClelland & Stewart cover, issued late in 1929.

Ford concludes his preface by praising Acland’s ability to capture and convey the atmosphere and emotion of battle. “I wish I could have done it as well myself,” writes the author of that Great War tetralogy Parade’s End (1924–28). He ends with the statement “that it will be little less than a scandal if the book is not read enormously widely.”

For one brief season, it was read widely, appearing in multiple editions throughout the English-speaking world, and then the novel faded from view. Might it be that All Else is Folly fell victim to the more dominant narrative of the war, written by the likes of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen, and perpetuated by literary critics like Paul Fussell, where the more desolate, the more grim, the better, at least in literary circles? Or is the cause of neglect found in our very own soil? More than any other in Canada’s history, the First World War is held aloft as the event in which nationhood began to take root. How then is it that all novels written by Canadian veterans of the conflict quickly fell out of print? How is it that only one, Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed, returned and remained consistently in print? How is it that Canadian students read All Quiet on the Western Front while the Great War novels of veterans Peregrine Acland, Philip Child, W. Redvers Dent, and Will Bird are unrecognized?

A scandal, indeed. It is hoped that this edition, the first in more than eight decades, will at long last bring this most central of Canada’s war novels back to prominence.

Notes

1 William Arthur Deacon, “W.A.D. Says Acland Novel One of the Best in Europe or America,” The Ottawa Citizen, October 5, 1929: 13

2 Roger Irwin, “Fiction Holds Own Against Encroaching Books of Fact,” The Globe, December 17,1929: 19.

3 Peregrine Acland,“My Life, War Adventures and Poems,” Pearson’s Magazine, October 1918: 326.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Peregrine Acland, “Spring in the Foothills,” The Canadian Magazine, April 1913: 546.

7 John Masefield, letter to PA, February 4, 1915, Peregrine Acland fonds, LAC.

8 lfred Noyes (1880–1958), English poet and short story writer. Though a pacifist, he enlisted, believing that war was justified against an aggressive enemy.

9 William Douw Lighthall (1857–1954), lawyer, novelist, and poet, remembered for Songs of the Great Dominion (1889), considered a groundbreaking anthology of Canadian verse.

10 W.D. Lighthall. “Canadian Poets of the Great War,” in From the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada – Third Series, Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 1918, Appendix A: LI.

11 Pearson’s Magazine: 327.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Projecting into enemy territory, the Ypres salient was the site of numerous battles, the most famous being the Second Battle of Ypres (April 21–May 25, 1915), which saw the destruction of much of Ypres and Germany’s first mass use of poison gas on the Western Front.

16 Ibid, 328.

17 Ibid.

18 At the time of the first deployment, the Battle of the Somme had been raging for more than a month. The largest engagement of the war, it ended on November 18, 1916, having claimed over one million casualties.

19 Pearson’s Magazine: 328.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 PA, letter to Endicott Peabody, May 2, 1924, Groton School Archives.

23 PA, letter to Endicott Peabody, December 20, 1925, Groton School Archives.

24 PA, letter to Endicott Peabody, March 16, 1921, Groton School Archives. Ian Hay is the pseudonym of John Hay Beith, author of The First Hundred Thousand (1916). A lighthearted account of his wartime experiences serving with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, it proved to be one of the most popular books published during the conflict.