In late August 1917, the federal government of Canada passed the Military Service Act, a law of conscription that made all male citizens between the ages of 20 and 45 subject to military service for the rest of the war. The First World War was dragging on, thousands were dying or injured, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for Canada to muster enough troops to send overseas.
Despite the patriotism that surrounds our mythmaking memories of Vimy, Canadians in 1917 were divided over the decision for mandatory military service. French-Canadians, as well as many farmers, labourers, and immigrants were opposed to the measure. As were pacifists. Among the largely muted voices that opposed Canada’s participation in the war altogether were Mennonites in Ontario whose particular religious beliefs demanded that they ‘not kill’ and ‘not resist evil’—hence their adherence to ‘nonresistance’, or the more familiar term ‘pacifism’.
An exhibit called “Sites of Nonresistance”—open to the public at Grebel—tells some of these alternative war stories.
From the outset of the war, Mennonites had quietly engaged in wartime relief work, often initiated by newly organized women’s societies. They sent material goods overseas and to Halifax after the horrific explosion in that city in 1917. That same year their churches formed the Non-Resistant Relief Organization to coordinate efforts to relieve wartime suffering.
But when conscription came into force, Mennonites and other peace churches faced a new dilemma—how to remind the government of its promises that they be exempt from military service while still exhibiting obedience as citizens. As more and more families lost menfolk overseas, Mennonites felt increasing hostility from the Canadian public. And wrestled with their own consciences.
Though not herself subject to conscription, Mary Wismer, studying at Macdonald Institute in Guelph, wondered whether her pacifist faith would allow her to practice as a dietitian in a military hospital. A Mennonite church wondered if it should take the name of a “warlord” when their city’s name was changed from Berlin to Kitchener in 1916. Daniel Brenneman was apprehended from a neighbour’s farm in East Zorra Township and held for six weeks in a military prison in London where he resisted putting on a military uniform. Bishop Ernie J. Swalm in Niagara faced a court martial for resisting military enlistment.
These stories, and others, compiled from letters, diaries, newspapers, photographs and other sources, offer a very different perspective on the Great War than we are accustomed to hearing during these years of celebratory commemoration.
War monuments remind us daily of dramatic and familiar stories of war. The “Sites of Nonresistance” exhibit tells war stories of a different kind, and lays out an alternative memorial narrative—one of opposition to unquestioning nationalism that spurs people to kill one another.
From September 25 to November 11, the exhibit also featured a display called “The World Remembers” which showed the nearly 700,000 names of soldiers—on all sides—killed in 1917. It was a sobering reminder of the cost of war.
As we move into the last year of First World War commemoration events, let’s remember the muddy and bloody sites where soldiers and civilians died tragically 100 years ago, and grieve for their loss. Let’s also remember the ‘sites of nonresistance’ at which men and women followed their conscience and resisted military involvement in the war. Let’s remember, uncomfortably, how easy it was for our first modern war to expose rifts in Canadian society. In a world that recently seems dangerously on the brink of another such global conflict, the sites of peace are needed more than ever.
