BOOK REVIEWS
![[Image]](canecover.jpg) |
It Made You Think of Home Bruce Cane |
Deward Barnes enlisted in 1916, at the age of 28, and soon found himself serving in France. Nothing unusual in that, as 1916 was perhaps the most productive "recruiting year" in Canada. Deward kept a diary. Again, not a rare thing, even though the keeping of diaries on active service wasn't really allowed. Deward's diary is, in many ways, like many others, brief notes of a purely personal nature, making mention of friends and comrades who are usually quite unknown at this distance in time, and using "army" phrases and terms which might mean little to the modern reader. What makes Deward's diary stand out though - and what makes it so important - is the intervention of Bruce Cane.
Bruce Cane has researched and interpreted the diary in the most thorough way, and as a result this diary has something important to say to us today. The research brings the diary out of itself. When soldiers wrote diaries like this one, they often dwelt on details of the minutiae of army life, which, since we do not fully appreciate them, we may be tempted to gloss over in our reading. Our lack of understanding can make us miss important things, but Bruce Cane's interpretive notes fill out the gaps and state the unstated.
As a result, Deward's diary becomes an important, annotated, historical document. It traces the events of a soldier's life, from the boredom of training to the terror of action. It emphasises the importance of meeting friends now and again, and of other links with the old life, like letter-writing to stay in touch with those at home, and it teaches us how the soldiers at the front learned to appreciate the simplest of comforts.
We also see how Deward's attitudes to the war changed as time passes and as he describes the physical hardship and the mental ones too - even being ordered to take part in a military execution as part of his service.
Home was never far from his thoughts, however, and the title, "It made you think of home" is a phrase which he often used when times were hardest.
All in all, an excellent amplification of a soldier's diary. A fitting tribute to the endurance of men like Deward and very sound illustration of what they had to endure.
It Made You Think of Home
is published by The Dundurn Group, Toronto.
Hardback
318 pages, with photographs
ISBN: 1-55002-512-0
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