WHEN Britain declared war on Germany on August 4th 1914, it was committing not only its own men, but those of its empire. The five “dominions”—Australia, Canada, Newfoundland (which joined with Canada in 1949), New Zealand and South Africa—were self-governing but had no power over foreign policy. Most entered the war willingly, proud to go to the aid of the empire, often pictured as a lion with its cubs, as in the image above. But as the war dragged on and their young men died in droves (see chart), they pressed for more say in its conduct and, after it ended, more control over their destinies. The men who came home often found that fighting for Britain had, paradoxically, made them feel more distant from it. A century later, many historians see the first world war as the former dominions’ “war of independence”.

“My three years in the British navy have…shown me how completely indifferent was the centre of the imperial faith, England, to my native land,” wrote Arthur Lower, a Canadian who became a historian on his return. “I came back from the war much more of a Canadian than I went into it.” Such sentiments across the dominions led eventually to the 1931 Statute of Westminster, which recast the British empire as a Commonwealth of Nations. “The mother lion and her cubs was a thing of the past,” writes Jonathan Vance, a Canadian historian, in his recent book, “Maple Leaf Empire”. “The new Commonwealth was an association of siblings.”

The first world war gave the dominions not only a push to independence, but also founding myths. “It’s very hard to pinpoint the birth date of Australia, New Zealand or Canada,” says Ian McKay, a historian at Queen’s University in Ontario. “So there’s a tendency to try to find that magic moment, the big battle where it all happens.”

For Canada, that was the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917, when Canadian soldiers captured a German position in northern France at a cost of 10,600 lives. Perhaps because it was the first time the four Canadian divisions had fought together, or because the position had previously been held against the British and French, it has since been seen as the moment when Canada leapt in spirit from colony to nation.

“Historical narratives of violent pasts have always been useful instruments for politicians to legitimise existing orders or to try and forge national identities,” writes Maarten Van Alstein of the Flemish Peace Institute. The current Conservative government sees in Vimy Ridge a symbol of Canada as a “warrior nation” that it finds more congenial than the opposition Liberals’ emphasis on peacekeeping. On its 90th anniversary Stephen Harper, the prime minister, described the battle as a “spectacular victory, a stunning breakthrough that helped turn the war in the Allies’ favour”.

Many historians disagree. The entry for Vimy Ridge in “The Canadian Encyclopaedia” describes the battle as “strategically insignificant”. Canada’s decisive contribution came the following year, says Jack Granatstein, a historian whose new book, “The Greatest Victory”, tells how the country’s corps defeated a quarter of Germany’s divisions on the western front during the war’s final hundred days. And though the war helped forge a Canadian identity it also revealed internal rifts, points out Tim Cook of the Canadian War Museum. French Canadians fiercely resisted conscription, introduced in 1917.

At least France and Britain were on the same side. For South Africa fighting for Britain was far more problematic. The Union of South Africa, only four years old in 1914, had just emerged from the bitter Anglo-Boer War which saw the Afrikaner minority defeated by the British. The British-educated General Jan Smuts had to quell a rebellion by Afrikaners who felt closer to Germany than Britain before he could begin the task of annexing the German colony of South West Africa, now Namibia. South Africa’s equivalent of Vimy Ridge was Delville Wood, where one of the bloodiest engagements of the 1916 Battle of the Somme took place. This patch of trees, held by a brigade of white South Africans at the cost of four-fifths of its men being injured or killed, was commemorated for some decades afterwards. But during white-minority rule remembrance faded, apart from a brief interlude in the 1980s as the apartheid-era government sought to remind foreign critics of South Africa’s role in fighting for the “free world”. Today, the site of Delville Wood is a memorial to fallen South Africans. But the battle’s status as a national symbol of bravery and sacrifice is now shared with the SS Mendi, a steamship that sank in 1917 after being accidentally rammed in the British Channel en route to France, with the loss of 607 members of the South African Labour Corps, nine officers and all 33 crew. Official accounts describe the men singing and performing a traditional death dance on deck as the ship slipped below the waves. (Historians are sceptical.) Non-white South Africans could not carry weapons and served only as labourers. Under apartheid their role was ignored. But the long-overlooked tragedy is now used by the ruling African National Congress as a symbol of how far South Africa has come from its racist past. Last year its anniversary, February 21st, was named Armed Forces Day. A presidential medal, the Mendi Order for Bravery, instituted in 2003, adds to the myth-making.

The attack at dawn

When the war broke out Australia’s states had been joined in federation for just 13 years and New Zealand had been a selfgoverning dominion for just seven. More than 400,000 young Australians, and nearly 130,000 New Zealanders, served during the war—out of loyalty to Britain, a spirit of adventure, and a desire to prove their young nations’ worth. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) sailed to the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915. The disastrous eight-month campaign against Turkish forces ended with 8,700 Australians and 2,700 New Zealanders dead, 2,000 of them killed on the first day.

The death toll on the western front the following year was higher. Yet in both countries it is Gallipoli that is remembered as the defining moment. The image back home of the soldiers at Gallipoli was “tough and inventive…chivalrous, gallant and sardonic”, wrote Bill Mandle, an Australian historian who died in May. Their war commemorations will reach a peak on the centenary of the first landings on April 25th next year. Since 1916 the date has been known as Anzac Day.

The alternatives for birth-of-a-nation moments for Australia, Canada and New Zealand are the long, messy negotiations on their status, first within empire and then in the Commonwealth, points out Mr McKay—or perhaps the story of the dispossession of their native peoples. One reason Gallipoli has kept its mythical status in Australia, he thinks, is that in recent years Australia Day on January 26th, which marks the start of white settlement, has seen protests over aboriginal land rights.

Australian politicians mostly endorse the place Gallipoli has come to occupy in the national consciousness. Peter Stanley of the University of New South Wales describes the commemorations as an exercise in “bipartisan nationalism”. But the consensus is not absolute. Paul Keating, prime minister for the Labor Party for five years to 1996, has described the notion that Australia was “born again or even redeemed” at Gallipoli as “utter nonsense”. For him, the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea, where Australia fought the Japanese in the second world war, is where “the depth and soul of the Australian nation was confirmed”, and the country moved out of Britain’s shadow and formed the alliance with America that has underpinned its foreign policy ever since.

In his book “Anzac’s Long Shadow: the Cost of our National Obsession”, James Brown, who served for Australia in Iraq and Afghanistan, argues that the celebration of Anzac Day has “morphed into a sort of military Halloween”. Australia’s “longest eulogy”, he says, has tended to exclude veterans of more recent wars. To his surprise, his lament has resonated with many servicemen. Similar complaints are echoed in Canada about the focus on Vimy Ridge. The first world war launched Britain’s former dominions as independent nations. But they have written many pages of their histories in the century since.