Editing Lucy Maud Montgomery (section)

===World War I===

During the [[First World War]], Montgomery, horrified by reports of the "[[Rape of Belgium]]" in 1914, was an intense supporter of the war effort, seeing the war as a crusade to save civilization, regularly writing articles urging men to volunteer for the [[Canadian Expeditionary Force]] and for people on the home front to buy victory bonds.{{sfn|Brennan|1995|p=253}} Montgomery wrote in her diary on September 12, 1914, about the reports of the "Rape of Belgium":<blockquote>But oh, there have been such hideous stories in the papers lately of their cutting off the hands of little children in Belgium. Can they be true? They have committed terrible outrages and crimes, that is too surely true, but I hope desperately that these stories of the mutilation of children are false. They harrow my soul. I walk the floor in my agony over them. I cry myself to sleep about them and wake again in the darkness to cringe with the horror of it. If it were Chester!{{sfn|Rubio|Waterston|1987|p=155}}</blockquote> In Leaskdale, like everywhere else in Canada, recruiting meetings were held where ministers, such as the Reverend Macdonald, would speak of [[Kaiser Wilhelm II]] as the personification of evil, described the "Rape of Belgium" in graphic detail, and asked for young men to step up to volunteer to fight for Canada, the British Empire, and for justice, in what was described at the time as a crusade against evil.{{sfn|Rubio|2008|pp=187–188}} In a 1915 essay appealing for volunteers, Montgomery wrote: "I am not one of those who believe that this war will put an end to war. War is horrible, but there are things that are more horrible still, just as there are fates worse than death."{{sfn|Rubio|2008|p=188}} Montgomery argued prior to the war that Canada had been slipping into atheism, materialism and "moral decay", and the war had brought about a welcome revival of Christianity, patriotism and moral strength as the Canadian people faced the challenge of the greatest war yet fought in history.{{sfn|Rubio|2008|p=188}} Montgomery ended her essay by stating that women on the home front were playing a crucial role in the war effort, which led her to ask for [[women's suffrage]].{{sfn|Rubio|2008|p=189}} On October 7, 1915, Montgomery gave birth to her third child and was thrown into depression when she discovered she could not produce breast milk to feed her son, who was given cow's milk instead, which was a health risk in the days before [[pasteurization]].{{sfn|Rubio|2008|pp=190–191}}

Montgomery identified very strongly with the Allied cause, leading her on March 10, 1916, to write in her diary: "All my misery seemed to centre around [[Verdun]] where the snow was no longer white. I seemed in my own soul to embrace all the anguish and strain of France."{{sfn|Rubio|Waterston|1987|p=179}} In the same diary entry, Montgomery wrote of a strange experience, "a great calm seemed to descend upon me and envelop me. I was at peace. The conviction seized upon me that Verdun was safe-that the Germans would not pass the grim barrier of desperate France. I was as a woman from whom some evil spirit had been driven-or can it be as a priestess of old, who out of depths of agony wins some strange foresight of the future?"{{sfn|Rubio|Waterston|1987|p=179}} Montgomery celebrated every Allied victory at her house, for instance running up the Russian flag when she heard that the Russians had captured the supposedly impregnable Ottoman city-fortress of [[Trabzon|Trebizond]] in April 1916.{{sfn|Brennan|1995|p=253}} Every Allied defeat depressed her. When she heard of the [[Siege of Kut|fall of Kut-al-Amara]], she wrote in her diary on May 1, 1916: "Kut-el-Amara has been compelled to surrender at last. We have expected it for some time, but that did not prevent us from feeling very blue over it all. It is an encouragement to the Germans and a blow to Britain's prestige. I feel too depressed tonight to do anything."{{sfn|Rubio|Waterston|1987|p=183}} Much to Montgomery's disgust, Ewen refused to preach about the war. As it went on, Maud wrote in her diary "it unsettles him and he cannot do his work properly."{{sfn|Brennan|1995|p=253}} The Reverend Macdonald had developed doubts about the justice of the war as it went along, and had come to believe that by encouraging young men to enlist, he had sinned grievously.{{sfn|Rubio|2008|p=211}}

Montgomery, a deeply religious woman, wrote in her diary: "I believe in a God who is good, but not omnipotent. I also believe in a principle of Evil, equal to God in power ... darkness to His light. I believe an infinite ceaseless struggle goes on between them."{{sfn|Brennan|1995|p=253}} In a letter, Montgomery dismissed Kaiser Wilhelm II's claim that God was on the side of Germany, stating that the power responsible for the death of "little Hugh" (her stillborn son) was the same power responsible for the "Rape of Belgium", and for this reason she believed the Allies were destined to win the war.{{sfn|Brennan|1995|p=253}} Montgomery had worked as a Sunday School teacher at her husband's church, and many of the men from Uxbridge county who were killed or wounded in the war had once been her students, causing her much emotional distress.{{sfn|Rubio|2008|pp=192–193}} Uxbridge county lost 21 men in the Great War from 1915, when Canadian troops first saw action at the [[Second Battle of Ypres]], until the war's end in 1918.{{sfn|Rubio|2008|p=192}} Montgomery's biographer Mary Henley Rubio observed: "Increasingly, the war was all that she thought of and wanted to talk about. Her journals show she was absolutely consumed by it, wracked by it, tortured by it, obsessed by it -- even addicted to it."{{sfn|Rubio|2008|p=193}} Montgomery was sometimes annoyed if her husband did not buy a daily newspaper from the corner store because she always wanted to read the latest war news.{{sfn|Rubio|2008|p=193}}