Canadian Prisoners of the First World War: The Struggle for Resilience
Abstract
In the First World War, 3,500 Canadian soldiers were taken prisoner. Throughout their captivity, they endured intense humiliation, dehumanization, and abuse. Despite this, the men were able to remain resilient and even found ways to fight back. By using memoirs and letters written by the prisoners, this paper will analyze how these Canadians were determined to keep fighting. This paper will be using an analogy of a bank account to explain how close the prisoners came to breakdown, and how they continuously struggled to endure. Society and war had taught these men that prisoners were weak and cowardly, but they were determined to change this narrative and prove their own bravery through decisive actions of physical and mental resistance, evasion, and escape. By all accounts, the prisoners should have run out of their morale reserves, they should have gone past the breaking point of war weariness to complete breakdown, and they should have had nothing left in them to endure. But the foundation of camaraderie they had built on the front lines set the Canadian soldiers up to endure trauma, remain resilient, and continue their own fight while in the prison camps of Germany. The purpose of this paper is to give a voice to Canadian prisoners of the First World War, and to use the concept of resilience to understand their determination to continue their fight in German territory.