Desmond Morton

‘Kicking and Complaining’: Demobilization Riots in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1918–19

THE POSTWAR DEMOBILIZATION RIOTS among Canadian troops in England in 1918• 9 have easily been overlooked. Most participants were content to have hastened their own repatriation; they had no desire to attract disciplinary penalties. Canadian officials preferred to bury the riots in accounts of their own administrative ingenuity. Military historians, like most participants, regarded demobilization as a boring postlude to the drama of war.1 Labour historians, who might have found the riots relevant to postwar militancy in Canada, have never shown much interest in military service as part of the working-class experience. However, as a few British historians have belatedly recognized, most soldiers in the world wars were civilians in uniform. At the root of