| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 60

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Serge Durflinger, Fighting from Home: The Second World War in Verdun, Quebec (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2006)

WHEN I GREW UP in a southern Ontario bedroom community that fed most commuters between Hamilton and Toronto, the family stories of my best buddy's parents, almost as much as much as my own, became part of my imagined sense of Canada's past. They both grew up in Verdun. Both were English Canadians. His father had served overseas as an artilleryman in Canada's Italian campaign. They married afterwards, and moved on to careers in engineering and local civic service as they played their parts in Canada's twinned booms of breadwinning and babies. But, like my own parents, bits and pieces of their past, from the 'no money' days in the 1930s to their search for security after demobilization, began to fit together like a scattered jigsaw puzzle forming part of my national picture, at least back then. For them, it had been a long road from Verdun. What was its major fork? The war, of course.

But memory, family stories too, are only partial, uneven, even fictional snapshots set against histories of locales, of regions, and certainly of countries at war. How do we approach intersections of memory and history? How do we reach conclusions about the meaning of this war from a study of the responses of its home front and overseas participants? My praise for Serge Durflinger's new book is for an inspiring account of Verdun's place in Canada's 'last good war.' I'm borrowing the phrase from Jack Granatstein's new illustrated history of Canada in the Second World War, a fine memory-prompter for those who survived the war and a good introduction to it for those viewing, for the first time, photographs of Canadians responding to the dark period that followed Hitler's invasions or the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Durflinger contributes to the 'good war' narrative. As a local case study his book is painstakingly researched, clearly written, often critical, yet implicitly patriotic – that is, motivated by a deeply felt sense of writing a community-based history from a place he grew up in that contributed in many positive ways to Canada's war effort: Verdun's 'good war.' "For me," as Durflinger put it, "no walk down Wellington Street, the city's main thoroughfare, can be separated from the ghosts that are everywhere now plainly visible to me. They tell an important and inspired story in which the community's Second World War experiences figure prominently." (xi) As such, Fighting from Home, which began as a doctoral dissertation, succeeds admirably.

How does Durflinger situate this city in the midst of the horrific costs of Canada's part in reaching VE and VJ Days? Even if just one locale is assessed, such exercises can be ambitious as inquiries located at micro/macro intersections. From his opening chapter, which sets the stage for September 1939, to his detailed account of the veterans' return, Durflinger has done both the research digging and the writer's job of crafting clear, succinct narratives. It is a lucid, lively account.

On the face of it, what made Verdun unique, compared to anywhere else in Canada, was the fact that large numbers of both French- and English-Canadians shared conditions of urban poverty – a basic push-factor for recruitment from both populations. Unsurprisingly, Verdun's 'fair share' in supplying men and women was simply not exceeded – anywhere. In assessing this, and many other aspects of war service, from civic volunteerism to the effects of rationing and family dislocations, both federal and local sources are used very effectively. And the records deployed, from the Department of National Defence to Munitions and Supply and National War Services, have been put to work by a scholar with broad expertise in military history. Skilled, too, is his use of local sources, from the Verdun and Montreal press, both French and English, as well as the partly bilingual Messenger/Le Messager, to civic records, to oral history (a must in such projects). Durflinger was clearly up for this task.

To tell a locale-based story cast within the 'good war' framework brings in many topics: enlistment rates, civic support for the war effort, and civilian war service in the paid workforce. Durflinger does justice to each. Throughout this book, he considers the manifest effects of war endured by some 70,000 Canadians, most of whom were working class and mainly of British or French origin, cramped together in a mere six square kilometers adjacent to the Montreal metropolis. 'Cramped,' for readers not aware of local conditions in the war years, provides an image of just how poor, densely housed, and socio-economically oppressed Verdun was. Durflinger opens with a stage setting portrait of housing conditions, with family members and other residents, young and old, living "on top of each other in nearly identical two- and three-storey tenement flats where everyone knows everyone else's business."(x) He then describes how, after 1939 and as the war's demands mounted, mainly younger adults – men and women of prime military age – mobilized Verdun into an urban space that provided better conditions for many as the war dragged on. The war's positive effects are, however, balanced with due consideration for its costs. Durflinger assesses the disruptions and dislocations families experienced at home as they faced the losses overseas.

Durflinger could have been more specific in responding to Ruth Roach Pierson's critical work on the gendered patterns of these responses evoked in the public sphere, though he does highlight shifting ethnic and class boundaries throughout his chapters. His descriptions are often graphic. Evocative, for instance, are his portraits of working-class life in a city of so few services or amenities. High urban density was characteristic of Verdun, from working families to the unemployed and elderly, next to mighty Montreal. Unfortunately, Verdun remained a city with no railway link, buses, hotels, industry, or licensed establishments. Durflinger is prone to refer to the tenement housing and socio-economically confined Verdun of the 1940s as a 'community,' though the theoretical implications of this key concept are not rigorously explored. French, English, and other ethnic minorities lived cheek by jowl, with an aqueduct on one side, the St. Lawrence on the other, and the Lachine canal not far by. His task, as he puts it, was to "overlay" on this city "the greatest military conflict the world has ever seen and observe what kind of responses and intracommunity dynamics develop. This is what this book is about." (x)

Of workable lengths, Durflinger's eight chapters explore how different groups within the social hierarchies of class and ethnicity responded to military demands and economic change. He begins with the consensus-based narrative of "forging a community," sketching Verdun's early history, its geography, its 'proud' record in WWI, its spurts of population growth driven by changing economies, and its 'pulling together' in the grinding poverty throughout the 1930s. Later, he sets his chapter themes within the broad pattern of economic oppression giving way to wartime recruitment and industrial wage employment. From political sociologist Leo Zakuta, who wrote just three years after the war, Durflinger crafts a class-based sense of solidarity and living environment. He writes about waterways, low rental housing, and the constant search for work drawing people together, at least in terms of a common experience. Zakuta called Verdun "one of the strongest" areas where everyday life patterns and space defined community identity, or "local self-consciousness."(19) Of course, for a city this size, we might consider other evidence on such themes as ethnic division, class oppression, or of gendered relationships of masculine power or feminine resistance to it. This book does not. Such topics do not fit Durflinger's narrative purpose.

Instead we get a detailed analysis of why so many men and women enlisted (Verdun's total came to approximately 7,000); how city hall provided home front support; how both war industry workers and civilian volunteers played their parts. We learn how the city's mayor, Lancashire-born Edward Wilson, led a municipal government that stood solidly behind the war effort, endorsed by both French and English voters and property holders. More than most communities, Verdun's patterns of participation in war service efforts by citizen volunteers, as compared to paid labour employment by wage-earning men and women, did not neatly break down along class lines. Large numbers of citizens across the social classes worked for pay and volunteered as civilians on the home front.

Durflinger pursues carefully Verdun's answer to the question rooted in Québec's and Canada's fundamental conundrum of uneven English and French participation in a war involving Britain – how many joined up from these groups and why? Durflinger's "by service and language" chart for men and women shows 5,126 English against 1,190 French. The estimated total for the city as a whole, a tenth of all city residents across all ethnic groups, was even higher.

And 'against' is really the wrong word. Durflinger examines carefully the implications of francophone enlistees having to choose among Québec regiments, over half of which were, by language and by identity traditions, 'English.' Verdun also provided a high proportion of bilinguals. English 'with' French, as he underscores, is more accurate. Through useful case illustrations he also describes the local experience of 'disincentives' for French speakers, concluding that war service decisions were "not only about language."( 34) Nonetheless and overall, for Verdun, this was a 'good' war with respect to recruitment and national unity. As with the First World War, however, local responses to enemy aliens (Germans and Italians) proved divisive. Verdun's enemy alien proportion, however, was not high. According to the 1941 Dominion census, only 376 Germans and 295 Italians were resident in the city's ethnically mixed neighbourhoods.

Unifying factors across Verdun are given much more attention. From Mayor Wilson's 'Cigarette Fund For Verdun Soldiers Overseas' to city hall's effort to mobilize civilian support for the HMCS Dunver, a Royal Canadian Navy ship named after Verdun, Durflinger often conflates 'community' with overt displays of civic pride. Salvage drives, Victory Savings and Loans campaigns, and civilian home defence activities are described through newspaper sources that tend to subsume signs of ethnic difference in describing local events through a booster's sense of local pride. Durflinger does consider different social identities, but not as potential fissures that split Verdunites, fundamentally, over the conscription crisis or other potential sources of local conflict. Women's volunteer service, for instance, forms just part of the war effort consensus Durflinger focuses on. In one case, he illustrates this through several verses from a patriotic poem written by a Private Linstead, a year into the war. As a member of the Women's Volunteer Reserve Corps she cast herself as one of "just a bunch of women/Not expecting praise/But raising dollars where we can/ to shorten Hitler's Days." (101)

Does Durflinger cross the line toward an overly sentimental account of Verdunites during the war? I don't think so. His consensus-based assessments of how the Canadian Legion, the YMCA, and Verdun's churches and schools got behind Canada's war are balanced with hard looks at family life disruption, crime, and juvenile delinquency. Durflinger's coverage of the June 1944 Verdun 'zuit-suit' riot, for example, I found fascinating, and nuanced. Tapping into newspaper accounts, he describes how in one incident the youth fad of 'garish' dress and oppositional street culture, present in other parts of Canada, the United States, and even Britain at this time, took a truculent turn. At the Verdun Dance Palace, a waterfront hall next to Woodland Park, at least 100 soldiers, most not much older than the zuit-suiters, clashed with about 60 civilian youths, "not all of whom were zooters," Durflinger adds. "Dozens of naval shore patrolmen, army provosts, and Verdun police arrived to break up the melee, watched by large numbers of Verdunites. The brawl lasted for more than an hour and was over by 11 p.m." (161)

As a teenager myself, years later, I remember my father referring to my dress as akin to a 'zoot-suiter.' 'A what?' I wondered then. Durflinger's lively and well crafted account on Verdun's place in Canada's war is a revealing and well-researched study of how an important working-class community came together to provide its youth, its energies, and its organizational capacity to support the war effort overseas and at home. Readers will find significant and powerful signs of how this particular Québec and Canadian city took part in a bloody but necessary war. Verdun is a telling site of both memory and lived experience. It offers the story of a place, time, and set of local people's reactions to a horrific era like no other. Durflinger tells their story, clearly inspired by much of it; clearly aware of its harder edges. Years after I left my own hometown, I met a woman who became my marriage partner. Her mother, too, grew up in Verdun during the war. Durflinger helps describe how.


ROBERT RUTHERDALE Algoma University College

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