Even with Remembrance Day serving as an annual reminder, and with so many iconic images attached to it, the First World War is a subject difficult for many of us to come to grips with. What with its labyrinthine causes, perennially disputed historical legacy, and the sheer passage of time, it’s a conflict that can feel almost impossibly distant. Sit down for a while with Philippe Bieler, though, and it starts to feel a whole lot closer.

The Montreal-raised businessman — such is his vigour that you have to keep reminding yourself that he is 81 years old — brings more than an increasingly rare one-generation-removed perspective to the events of 1914-18. Bieler brings an intimate family connection and a remarkable cache of first-hand documents and photographs that places him perfectly to bring a fresh view to one of history’s most-told stories. The result, Onward, Dear Boys: A Family Memoir of the Great War, is a war book of rare power, and a compelling addition to the literature of immigration, too.

“I was trying to write a story,” Bieler said of the book that took him three years to put together. “It’s not a history. You won’t find listings of generals and battles. It’s a story of a family. I was trying to put across what these four boys at the front, and their parents and the younger brother back home, felt about this war. They lived it.”

Indeed they did. The four boys to whom Bieler refers are his father and uncles, who emigrated to Montreal with their Swiss parents shortly before the war. The eldest, the author’s father Jean, was assistant to the commander of the McGill-funded Canadian Hospital in Boulogne, France; his brother Étienne was lieutenant of an artillery brigade; younger siblings André and Philippe were privates on the front lines, the latter dying in the line of duty in 1917; the last-born, Jacques, was too young to serve.

Collectively, their experience encompasses not only some of the names that have become bywords for horror and heroism — the Somme, Vimy, Passchendaele — but also the occasional joys and idylls that are too often left out of historical accounts. These are all evoked vividly in an extensive collection of family letters — sons writing home, sometimes literally from the trenches, mother writing back to her boys — that form the heart of Bieler’s book. The immediacy of the epistolary format brings the time alive far more effectively than most conventionally-told accounts can. Add to that the sense of mission the author invests in bringing the family’s story to light, and you have a book that deserves a special spotlight on the very crowded shelf of Great War accounts.

My Dear Parents,

I am writing to you from a little paradise where we are resting after a stint in the trenches. Our camp is set up in a field completely surrounded by a beautiful forest in the French style, hardly touched by the bombardments. It is so restful to be in a normal corner of the country and forget a bit about the massacres and the barbarism of the Front! –Philippe, July 20, 1917

In taking the project on (after a short-lived attempt at fictionalizing the material into a novel), Bieler had a running start: his grandmother had compiled and written, over a period of many years, “Nos Origines,” a detailed family history that also served as a slice-of-life record of its places and times. It was that privately printed chronicle that served as the bedrock for Onward, Dear Boys. As a child, young Bieler had seen his grandmother working on the book; it became a family touchstone on completion, and eventually took on an importance in Bieler’s life that he could not have foreseen.

“At her death, when everybody got a little bit of something from her, I inherited her book,” Bieler recalled. “That really struck me. My grandmother didn’t do things haphazardly. There was some reason she gave it to me, and I would like to think that she knew even then that I would do something with it. So I’ve had that on my conscience most of my life.”

***

Charles Bieler, Blanche Merle d’Aubigné Bieler, and their five sons came to Montreal in 1908. Originally from Switzerland (the family name, sometimes mistaken for French, is in fact German), they were prominent in evangelical Calvinist circles — Charles was a protestant pastor, Blanche the daughter of a pastor. A position for Charles as general agent of the Sunday Schools of France took the family to Paris, before a combination of economics and general restlessness caused them to set their sights still further afield.

“They lived in a quite menial way,” Bieler said of the family’s life in the years immediately before they came to Montreal. “Even back then, to have five sons in a city like Paris was expensive. … The basic reason (they emigrated) was they didn’t have the funds to educate and push their five sons into the world the way they would like, and so they thought the new world would be a good idea. And they liked adventure.”

The spur, when it came, was a prosaic one: Charles Bieler answered an ad. McGill University was looking for a professor to head the French department of its Presbyterian College, and Charles landed the position.

On arrival in a new city in a new country in 1908 they found that, as French-speaking Calvinists, they were in a complicated position socially, religiously and linguistically, effectively a minority within a minority.

They settled first in the east end — “because it was French-speaking,” Bieler said — but soon realized that as evangelical Protestants their lot didn’t lie with their Catholic neighbours. Within a year they had moved to Westmount, where they bought a house on Columbia Ave. for $250.

Things went swimmingly enough for the Bielers at first, with the sons attending English schools and taking the first steps toward their professions and vocations. Six years later, events in Europe conspired to make things much more difficult, for the Bielers and for everyone else.

“It was all very surprising for my grandfather,” said Bieler of the family patriarch’s response to the onset of war. “He said, ‘How can this be? We moved here, to a country that we thought had nothing to do with what was going on back there.’ But I’ve never seen or heard any indication that they became antagonistic or negative toward it. They found it curious to start with, but quickly they felt, ‘Well, we’re part of Canada now, and if Canada’s part of the British Empire, and the British Empire’s going to fight in this war, then that’s us, that’s it.’

“There was no question as far as they were concerned, as much as they disliked it, that their sons were going to fight in that war.

“There was an additional reason, of course, in that the war was in France, from whence they came, and there was the feeling ‘We need to help France.’ But for them it was primarily about Canada.”

In a city and province where conscription was an ongoing flashpoint, the Bielers — parents and sons alike — were in no doubt as to where they stood.

“It was a big, big issue in our family, because my grandmother was violently pro-conscription,” Bieler said. “She was a very strong and dynamic lady, involved up to her teeth in so many things, and she fought for it. So the boys, for that reason in part, because she was such a commanding creature, were all for it. There’s a lot of comment back in forth in the letters to the effect of ‘What’s happening with conscription? Are these cowards going to get caught or are they not?’”

A family connection with the locally formed Princess Patricia’s Regiment meant that the Bieler boys were probably more likely than most to evince what’s perhaps the difficult aspect of that epoch to understand a hundred years later: the sense of genuine excitement felt by many enlisters.

“‘Isn’t this going to be great?’ That was their sense,” said Bieler. “Remember, at first it was generally thought that it was all going to be over by Christmas. But they were pretty realistic, too. It was already 1915 by the time they enlisted, and things were going pretty badly. So it is surprising that these boys — and I’m going way beyond my own family when I say this — had such enthusiasm to be going over.”

***

That the family letters on which Bieler draws so extensively survived as intact as they did feels almost miraculous when you consider the literal journey these letters had to undertake in order to get from the battlefront to the home front and vice versa in the first place. It’s an epic in itself.

“What would happen quite regularly,” said Bieler, “is that the boys would see each other for one reason or another. They weren’t necessarily in the same platoons, but their paths would cross. When they saw their officer brother ride past on his horse, they would give their messages to him, and when that brother had occasion to be in Boulogne, which he would give these messages to my father, and my father would stick them in the Ottawa pouch, that’s the pouch that the hospital would send all their facts back to Canada, and those messages would end up back at my grandmother’s.

“I would suspect that there could be three months (before a letter reached its destination). But in those days, even the news was not very current. The joke in the family is that my grandmother really invented CNN. She knew more about what was going on in the war than The Gazette did,” Bieler laughed.

With all letters to and from France being heavily vetted and censored, correspondents were forced to express their true emotions between the lines. In translating the letters from French into English, then, Bieler found that he faced more than just the practical challenges of fading ink on thin crumbling paper, ornate 19th-century-style penmanship, and occasional daubs of mud and other evidence of the trenches. He had to somehow convey a sense of the extraordinary conditions under which they were written. He succeeds, with results that can be truly poignant — as with one of the last letters Philippe ever sent, composed with a understated optimism that turned out to be tragically mistaken:

My dear parents,

Here I am again with my company after some great memories from my leave. We are resting behind the lines … you will no doubt realize that my return to the trenches wasn’t joyful. I was homesick for the first time, but that will pass … –Philippe, Sept. 12, 1917

After the war, Jean Bieler went on to an illustrious public career, first with the League of Nations in New York and Switzerland, and later with the Quebec government, where he was instrumental in the formation of Hydro-Québec.

What he wasn’t, says his son, was effusive about his life and memories. Like so many who have witnessed war close-up, he was never forthcoming about what he had seen.

“My father was the epitome of what people regard as a Swiss professional: he said nothing to anybody about anything,” Bieler said. “It was only at his death bed, or a few weeks before, that he took me aside as the eldest son and said, ‘You know, your uncles have always said that I should write about my experiences, but I want you to know that it wasn’t for me to do that. That was not my role. My role was to assist, not to broadcast.”

***

As for the book’s author, this self-described entrepreneur who says he has followed “sixteen different professions” has a wife 37 years his junior and two young children. (He also has four adult children form a previous marriage.) He divides his time between homes in Wales and the south of France, tends occasionally to a successful cranberry business he runs with his brother, and professes himself fundamentally altered by the experience of writing his first book.

“It changed me from being strictly a businessman to being a little bit of an intellectual,” he said. “I’m an impatient person who’s led a very active life, so when I recollect that I spent three years going through all this material … there had to be a hell of a lot of interest. I was excited while working on it but I couldn’t put my finger on why. But now I think it was a little bit like my father and my uncles. I sensed it was my duty.”

Back in the city of his youth and early adulthood, where two of his sisters still live, for a round of book promotion, socializing and business, Bieler, sees a sea change from the city he left as a 34-year-old.

“I felt Montreal was pretty damn tense,” he recalled of the period leading up to his moving to London in 1967. “I became a bit negative about (French Canada), so I was rather relieved to have left at that time. But having been here 10 days now on this visit, I’ve got a new feeling about Montreal. I feel good about it. You get on a bus and you just sense a happiness, a certain calm. Can I put my finger on it? Not really. But I’m very, very impressed.”

And how does this grandfather feel about how his book might be received among the generation who are now at the age at which his father and uncles went to war? Not very optimistic, as it happens.

“To make a very general statement, I would say this generation has no more serious interest (in First World War) than they probably have in ISIS. World affairs is just not part of their makeup. I talk to them, but there isn’t a great deal of interest. It’s sad.”

Don’t bet against that changing, one by one, with those who let Onward, Dear Boys into their lives.

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Onward, Dear Boys (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 315 pp, $34.95) will be launched on Remembrance Day, Tuesday, Nov. 11, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at The University Club, 2047 Mansfield St. Dress code is business casual.

First World War in letters: ‘I was buried twice, and fortunately I was rescued’

Here are five excerpts from some of the letters exchanged by the Bieler family of Montreal during the First World War, translated by Philippe Bieler in his book Onward, Dear Boys: A Family Memoir of the Great War.

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Aug. 19, 1915

My dear mother,

We have had a lot of rain these last few days, and we naturally enjoy the inevitable mud in our sleeping holes. However, since we don’t sleep very often nor for very long, having had only two hours of rest last night, and the two hours weren’t all in a row, you can imagine that I was in a great mood, while cooking our breakfast with wet wood and kneeling in the mud!

André

*****************

June 6, 1916

Dear mother,

You have probably received my card telling you that I was wounded. It’s happily nothing very serious, and I think that I will be cured in a week.

I don’t think that I can describe to you the German attack, but it was terrible, particularly the bombardment. We felt as though we were on a boat, such was the turbulence of the ground. I was buried twice, and fortunately I was rescued.

André

********************

April 12, 1917

My dear mother,

Here I am again with the machine gunners, after three days of convalescence, where I was very bored … It’s much more interesting here. (…) The view extends towards a village built in a hollow, with its red roofs, its belfry, its château, and sand dunes spotted with clumps of pines. The sea in the distance is sometimes blue and calm and other times dark and menacing.

Philippe

********************

March, 13, 1918

My dear boys,

Today, I will have some unexpected tasks, because the military authorities are taking over our college to turn it into a convalescent hospital. You will be amused to learn that I will move into a bathroom in Divinity Hall. That is called a war measure.

Charles

********************

Aug. 29, 1918

My dear boys,

We will read a few short verses from the big Bible, and pray for the victory that may follow the uninterrupted march that we have just read about, and we also pray for the European families that we love so much, and especially for our soldiers. We are presuming that the Canadian advance is giving the topographers so much work that André finds it impossible to write.

Blanche

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