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Commemorating military anniversaries, in this case of a war that took place 200 years ago, can be problematic. Faded memories and revisionist histories often gloss over the grim realities of long-past conflicts.
I am equivocal about how today’s re-enactors portray soldiers from 200 years ago. At any given historic site, most of the emphasis is on crisp uniforms, polished rifles and boots, immaculate white triangular tents, and more on what they wore, than on the suffering and horrors of battle.
During a re-enactment I witnessed in 2010 at Fort Erie, a few “soldiers” actually passed out from the August heat. Imagine what the real thing must have been like on the battlefield in 1812 in those itchy woollen uniforms!
Add MOSQUITOES and MALARIA to MISERY. As many soldiers died from disease as got wounded. A whole lot of blundering, plundering, pilfering and pillaging, went on, as well as scalping and eviscerating, amputating of limbs, and other body parts. Not to mention starvation. And not one inch of territory got exchanged when it was all over. Two emerging settler nations, white tribal cousins, many former compatriots, killing one another for power and turf. The real losers, of course, were the First Nations peoples.
After reading various histories from the Canadian side—the Rev. William Withrow, Castell Hopkins, Pierre Berton, Gerald Craig, and JMS Careless, I then read Pulitzer prize-winning American professor Alan Taylor’s new book The Civil War of 1812, (NY: Knopf, 2010) a refreshing addition to the list, as Taylor provides the reader with well researched detail on the major players, and doesn’t take sides. (For our review please see March 2011 issue of The Fife and Drum http://www.fortyork.ca/newsletter.htm)
Based on these readings, I completed a new series of paintings called DRESSED TO KILL.
These paintings are less about the Horrors of War—I leave that to Goya and Daumier—as about the peculiar military fashion of the times. Those high heavy hats, those tailored woollen coats with tails (!), those coarse linen trousers… How could anyone survive in the forest—winter or summer—or any season for that matter, in those clammy getups?
I painted the icons on the British side—General Isaac Brock, hero of the battle of Queenston Heights, who died while scaling the heights even though the battle was won by the British, Laura Secord, a young Niagara area housewife who traipsed through the woods and swamps to Beaver Dams to warn the British of an impending American attack, and the Shawnee warrior chief Tecumseh, a charismatic and respected leader who fought with the British because they had promised him and his tribes their own buffer nation in territory that now includes the American states of Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Illinois. But it was not to be. Tecumseh was killed by the Americans while fighting in Upper Canada. And it was the beginning of the end for Indian hegemony in North America.
From the pioneer settler’s perspective, add to the atrocities of war the destruction of private property, the stealing of livestock, burning of barns, homes, pilfering of grain, vegetables, clothing, etc. and you get some idea of the futility of it all.
Human depravity at its worst… But in one painting, Neighbor to Neighbour, I chose to depict two young American and British soldiers, in an idealized, formal but friendly confrontation, softened by the sands of time. The painting is an allegory about military prowess, but in the best of all possible worlds, enemies can and do become friends.
Much will be made in the months to come of this conflict that finally put an end to the fighting between two festive nations in the making. And, lest we forget, the senseless sacrifices of so many led eventually to the peaceful co-existence that we now take for granted between our two great democracies in the twenty-first century. May that peace abide.
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