"Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went — Reading Companion

From Sketchbook to Service

Keene’s transformation from artist to soldier is traced through the book’s early chapters. The opening pages depict a world of “black flies” and worries about “the price of my tubes of color,” a far cry from the later concerns about shell fire and trench mirrors. The author’s father appears as a sketching companion, and the news of war arrives belatedly, via newspapers two or three days old. This slow infiltration of global events into a remote pastoral setting underscores the sudden rupture of war. The structure here is unhurried, allowing the reader to inhabit the pre-war normalcy before the narrative accelerates into training and deployment. Keene’s eye for detail—the depot, the restless waiting—foreshadows his later ability to capture the texture of military life.

The Language of the Trenches

Keene documents the evolving lexicon of the front, noting that “Blighty” is a wound that sends a man home, a term “originally from the Indians, but now universally adopted in the new trench language.” Such linguistic observations recur throughout the text, revealing how soldiers coin and repurpose words to cope with their environment. The title itself, Crumps, refers to a type of shell, and the book’s illustrations—listed as “The ‘Crump’” and “Whiz-Bangs”—further emphasize this specialized vocabulary. The narrative also records the dark humor of the trenches, as when Keene remarks that “the mineral rights of this territory should be very valuable some day” after the war has “salted the earth with nickel, lead, steel, copper, and aluminum.” This blend of technical jargon and ironic commentary gives the account a distinctive voice.

Motor Machines and Mud

A recurring structural element is the movement of motor machine-gun units. Keene describes how the guns are not fired from the motorcycles themselves but are brought up as close as possible to the front, then carried by hand through the trenches. This logistical detail—the separation of transport from combat—shapes the narrative’s pacing, as journeys to the line are punctuated by shelling, ruined cottages, and the need to avoid attracting attention. The author’s billet in a loft “amongst rags, old agricultural implements, sacks, and the accumulation of years of dirt” contrasts with the earlier pastoral scenes. The repeated image of the pump on the manure heap becomes a grimly comic motif, grounding the reader in the physical reality of farm billets turned into temporary homes.

Ypres and the Architecture of Ruin

The account of Ypres is one of the most vivid set pieces. Keene writes of a town “on everybody’s lips for months” and describes devastation that “baffles description,” comparing it unfavorably to the San Francisco earthquake. He notes that much of the shelling was done “to deliberately destroy the objects of architectural value,” a detail that speaks to the cultural destruction of war. The narrative’s structure here shifts to a more reflective mode, with Keene observing that “Belgium will have to be rebuilt entirely, or left as it is, a monument to ‘Kultur.’” The use of the German term in scare quotes underscores the ideological dimension of the conflict. This section also introduces the major living in a smashed prison, a former master of foxhounds now past the age limit—a figure who embodies the war’s disruption of ordinary lives and hierarchies.

Keene’s account is valuable not for grand strategy but for its accumulation of small, telling details: the hot shell fragments, the trench mirror, the flies at dawn. Readers should attend to the interplay between the author’s artist’s eye and his soldier’s practicality, and to the way the narrative’s episodic structure mirrors the fragmentation of front-line experience. The book’s illustrations, listed but not reproduced in this edition, would likely reinforce these visual and thematic patterns.