Part 1: Peter McArthur, the hardest question and the “horrible, horrible” war

By Stephanie McDonald, December 2024

It’s a question from a child no parent is equipped to answer: Should I go to war? It was what Daniel, eldest son of Mabel and Peter McArthur, asked of his father in the early years of the First World War. 

Even as prolific a writer as Peter McArthur was, one can imagine how the man dubbed the “Sage of Ekfrid” struggled to find the right words to share with his son. His response reveals both his wish for his child to come to his own decision as well as the urge to protect and keep him safe.

Peter penned his answer to Dan’s question in a letter on January 25, 1916, a year and a half into the war. 

My Dear Dannie-boy:

The question you have asked me is the hardest I have ever had to face and I am afraid I cannot give you much help. You know my position is that such a question is one that a man must settle with his own soul. Under the military law you are now a man and expected to arrive at your own decision without guidance or interference. Think it out for yourself. If you feel in your heart that you should go I cannot tell you not to, for by doing so I might ruin your after life. If you feel that you should not go and I told you to go the result might be equally disastrous. Only keep this in mind, that if you come to the decision that keeps you true to all that is best in yourself, whether it be to enlist or to serve to the best of your ability at home you will always be equally dear to me.

If you decide to enlist I should favor the signalling corps. The work is as dangerous and requires as high a courage as any other but would not make it necessary for you to do actual fighting and shed blood.

I cannot tell you how much my heart is with you in this trial you are passing through. It is such a trial as never came to me. But whatever decision you make, try to make it without thought of what others may say or think. 

“To thine own self be true and it must follow as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” (From Act 1, Scene 3 of Hamlet, by William Shakespeare.

Your loving father,  Peter McArthur

It is all horrible, horrible. Why don’t they take old cusses like me who, as a friend said, “has seen most everything and should be ready to go.” Canada is being raked over for recruits just now and thousands of boys of eighteen to twenty are enlisting.

Peter McArthur

Dan did enlist in the Army, and as a signaller as his father had suggested. We can trace his journey over the next few years from letters that Peter wrote to his friend and fellow writer C. Bowyer Vaux of Philadelphia, whom he had met in 1894 in New York City. These letters are held in the archives at Western University. 

Just a month before writing the letter to Dan, McArthur tells Vaux that Dan was home from college for the Christmas holidays and talked of enlisting, but expressed skepticism it would happen. In March 1916, at the age of 18, Dan was one of the newly enlisted. As was common when major events happened in his life, McArthur wrote to Vaux to share the news, perhaps seeking some solace from his old friend. 

Got your letter this morning and it came at a time when I needed a word of cheer. Dan has enlisted for overseas service and we find it hard to let him go. He has enlisted with the college battery and is taking a special course as a signaller. He seems such a little boy to go into this terrible thing. But there are hundreds of thousands of parents in Canada who are feeling as we do.

With thanks to the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Peter McArthur for permission to share the 1916 letter from Peter to his son Daniel, as well as the family photos used in this piece. 

Part 2: Peter McArthur, the hardest question and the “horrible, horrible” war

On 15th March 1916 Daniel McArthur, son of Ekfrid Township writer, poet, farmer and philosopher Peter McArthur, enlisted in the 56th Battery (commonly known as the O.A.C. Battery as most recruits were students at the Ontario Agricultural College) in Guelph. Two months later, in mid-May 1916, he was stationed closer to home, in nearby London. 

Peter wrote to his friend and long-time correspondent C. Bowyer Vaux, saying they saw Dan “every week or two but we can’t get used to seeing him in uniform.” At the end of the same month Dan was still in training in London but in a few weeks was to go to the training base in Petawawa, “and we shall not see much more of him before he goes across to the war.” 

By September of 1916 Dan was in England. Another update was shared with Vaux in November.

We hear from Dan regularly and he seems to be having a great time in England. It is not likely that he will reach the trenches for some months yet as their final training is being delayed for some reason. But I have very little hope that the war will be ended before he reaches the front. 

As 1916 drew to a close, on December 30th, McArthur added a note by hand in the margin of his typewritten letter:

P.S. Dan writes that he expects to be in France early in January. Then our real time of suspense and dread will begin.

But in February he remained in England,  

for which we are duly thankful. The battery he went with was broken up and he was placed with a battery that needs further training. He seems well and cheerful.

By July of 1917 Dan was still in England (“we are expecting to hear all the time of his going to France”), but McArthur now had a new worry to contend with. He told Vaux that McKellar, his second born, 

was also bound to enlist but as he is only seventeen I refused to allow him. He is busy farming and we have in the largest crop we have had since we returned to the land.

By the fall of 1917, the time that Peter and his wife Mabel had been so anxious about, had arrived. On November 4th he wrote to Vaux with the news. 

Dan is now in the thick of the fighting in France and from what I am able to learn his work – artillery signaller – is about the most dangerous in the army. He writes very cheerfully, but we are worried all the time. Some of his friends have appeared in the casualty lists already.

In the spring of 1918 McArthur wrote to Vaux with an apology. 

I know it is inecuseable [sic] that I should be so long without writing to you, but for months past I have been under such a strain that I simply couldn’t write. Dan has been in the front trenches for the past seven months and though the major of his company has been killed, and some of his friends killed and others wounded he has escaped so far. During the long winter the strain told heavily on Mrs McArthur and for the past six weeks she has been in the hospital in London, suffering from anaemia.

Mercifully, the McArthur’s continued to get “good news” from Dan through the summer and early fall of 1918, though a year after first wanting to, McArthur shares that “MacKellar is going to enlist as soon as the fall work is done on the farm – so the war is coming home to us.” On October 13, 1918, McArthur tells Vaux that McKellar has passed the preliminary examination for the Royal Air Force, though there were more tests to come. “He was not old enough for any other branch of the service as he is only eighteen, but he was bound to go.”

And then, at last, on November 11th, 1918, the war ended. Four days later, on November 15th McArthur wrote to Vaux. 

I am several letters behind and haven’t much to say but feel I must exchange a good word with you about the coming of peace. It is surely the greatest news this old world has heard for many a day. To have the slaughter of our boys stopped gives us heart to face whatever the future may have in store.

While the war had ended, the McArthur’s didn’t get immediate news from Dan. In that same November letter, McArthur told Vaux that 

the little yellow envelope telling us that Dan had been “gassed” gave us a shock but we got a cablegram from himself telling us that it was “Not serious. Back on duty.”

He continued:

We are now anxious to hear that he got through safely to the end. I really think I have done more worrying about him since peace was declared than in all the months he was in France – a year and four months. But no news is good news just now. We should soon hear from him about how he fared in the last weeks of the war.

The end of the war was just the start of the long wait for Dan to return home. In March 1919 McArthur told Vaux that Dan was still in Belgium. “We are hoping to get him home soon though I am afraid he will be among the last to get back.”

It wasn’t until June 1919, seven months after the Armistice and nearly three years since he went overseas, that Dan returned to Canada and was discharged from the Army. McKellar meanwhile, no longer needed in the Air Force, was at home. McArthur told Vaux that 

MacKellar has been doing big work on the farm – has forty three acres under crop. I have to keep at it pretty regularly helping him out.

In a letter dated October 5th, one sentence stands out. An ordinary update at any other time, but after years of upheaval and uncertainty, it signalled a return to normalcy. 

Everybody well – Dan back in college.

In the years that followed, the war’s presence didn’t completely go away. In September 1921 McArthur wrote to Vaux saying, 

Things have been quiet with us this summer. We had the whole family at home for some months for the first time since the outbreak of war. Dan was run down – a “heart murmur” that he brought out of the war – and I insisted on his staying at home for the summer. He took things easy – spent most of his time cartooning and sketching and last week a specialist pronounced him cured. He is now on his way to New York to study art.

A year later, in a letter from July 1922, McArthur reports having 

a glorious summer with everyone in good health and busy. They are all at home today – Dan and also his fiancee – Miss Dorothy Day who started to college with him and waited for him through the Great War. They hope to be married this fall. MacKellar is also engaged – Miss Frances Moss – daughter of the Glencoe lawyer.

While McArthur worried about hard times ahead for the country, re-adjusting to a new reality, he wrote of his personal contentment. He concludes his letter to Vaux by saying, 

no man can predict the future and as “This little world of mine” is happy we have not much to complain about.

Daniel Carman McArthur served with the 56th O.A.C. Battery (which was combined with two other units to form the 55th Battery) as a signaller in the First World War. After graduating from the Ontario Agricultural College, he worked as an agricultural journalist at The Globe newspaper, then with The Farmer’s Sun where he later became editor. In 1940 he was appointed the first chief news editor of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and held this position until 1953. He then relocated from Toronto to Ottawa where he worked as director of special program events for the CBC until his retirement in 1962. Dan died in 1967 at the age of 69. He and his wife Dorothy had six children. Read more about Dan McArthur here. 

Peter McArthur was born in 1866 in Ekfrid Township and died on October 28, 1924, following an operation in Victoria Hospital, London. He was buried under a maple tree “flaming with autumn crimson” in Eddie Cemetery close to the graves of his mother and father. Read more about Peter McArthur from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography here

Daniel Carman McArthur (from Canadian Singers and Their Songs)

Beginning of letter from Peter McArthur to his son Dan (Courtesy of Catherine Burns)

End of letter from Peter McArthur to his son Dan (Courtesy of Catherine Burns)

The McArthur family. From back left: Jim, Dan, a friend. Middle: Peter, Mabel. Front: Ian, McKellar, Elizabeth. (Courtesy of Charlotte Waller)

Peter and Mabel McArthur on their Ekfrid Township farm. (Courtesy of Charlotte Waller)