Tim Cook knew death. To a military historian, immersed in the ways, means, and costs of war, it was an occupational hazard. In a forest of books, articles, lectures, and exhibitions, he told the story of Canada’s wars with authority, clarity, and intimacy.
His public world was about courage, suffering, heroism. For so long, his private world was, too.
For Tim, who died on October 25 of cancer at 53 years old, death was not an abstraction. He could not leave it at the office at the end of the day. When he had chemotherapy for the first time, he noted that it had come from the mustard gas used in the Great War. On that chemical plague he was an expert; it was the subject of his first book, No Place to Run.
In 2011, barely 40 years old, he learned that he had Hodgkin’s disease. Three years later, a week before Christmas, he had stem-cell replacement. He reflected on it with a sigh. “I’m a young guy and it sucks, but that’s the way it is, and you move forward,” he told the Ottawa Citizen.
He persisted, doggedly and cheerfully. There was no self-pity. He wrote about war while he fought his own, though he never put it to me that way. We lunched, and when he could not eat, we walked. We talked sports, politics, history, children. We never talked about dying.
For the last 14 years or so, he defied the fates. His response was to write and write and write. His books were granular, atmospheric, and lyrical; he didn’t just toss them off for a royalty cheque. He roamed the battlefields, interviewed veterans, mined the archives, absorbed the letters and diaries. Deeply researched, imaginatively conceived, and elegantly written, Tim presented a portrait of Canada on the sharp end, sometimes noble, sometimes not.
Shock Troops, winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, took us into the trenches of the Great War, explaining the evolving tactics, urine-soaked handkerchiefs in our mouths against clouds of gas. Vimy explored the nationalist mythology around our most celebrated battle. Clio’s Warriors addressed the role of historians in shaping the national narrative. The Madman and the Butcher recreated the sulphurous feud between Sam Hughes and General Arthur Currie.
The Necessary War and Fight to the Finish chronicled Canadians in the Second World War. They channeled the ambition and confidence that Canada showed in that struggle, where Tim accentuated our outsize contribution. Lest we forget.
Tim knew, as those in the history business do, how hard it is in an age of ebbing attention. We are an unconscious people, blithely ignorant of our past, certain we fell from the heavens fully formed just yesterday, suffering a contented, collective amnesia. “Canada … places little stock in its history, teaching it badly, embracing it little, feeding it only episodically,” Tim lamented in 2017. Yet if ignorance was the malady, he was the antidote.
For his labours, Tim, the warrior writer and master storyteller, was much decorated. His resume glittered with medals, ribbons, and awards from every literary campaign. In 2012, he became a Member of the Order of Canada.
Tim understood the big picture. His books were sprawling canvases, like a Bruegel painting. Look closely, though, and there is much happening. Tim was always after the telling detail. What did you eat? What did you wear? What did you read? That curiosity animated the exhibitions he curated at the Canadian War Museum, where he was chief historian and director of research.
“He was committed to his role as a public historian,” says Michael Petrou, author and colleague at the museum. “Every day Tim would walk through its halls and galleries. His fingerprints were everywhere, but he said he did these walks not to see the museum’s texts and artifacts, but to watch how people responded to them — what made them stop and read or look more closely, what moved them, what they talked about with each other.”
Tim had his professional disappointments. He had hoped, for example, for a permanent perch teaching in a university. That did not stop him from cheering his friends’ successes, praising their work, sending notes of congratulations.
He was funny. When three of us sat together on a book-prize jury, we agreed early on to review the scores of books and eliminate quickly those that didn’t qualify. Tim was ruthless. “Read it this morning,” he reported. “It’s in the recycling bin!”
Tim and I used the same small branch of the Ottawa Public Library, where books we reserved sat on a designated shelf with our names on labels on the spine. It was hard not to see Tim’s requests sitting next to mine. It was also hard not to tease him, which I did, slipping notes inside. “Really, Tim? You’re going to read this dreck?” He retaliated hilariously, with choice words on my own selections.
Tim was guts and grit in an infinity pool of grace. He had kept his disease at bay for so long that when I saw him in late September, I did not imagine it was catching up. We were at a black-tie literary dinner, and as always at these affairs, he looked like he would rather be elsewhere. His ill-fitting shirt collar suggested he’d lost weight. I asked how he was doing. He shrugged. We made plans to meet.
We celebrate Tim today as the finest Canadian military historian of his generation. And more. We remember him — those fortunate to have flown in his slipstream — as scholar, writer, fellow traveller, enthusiast, mentor, son, husband, father, friend.
Oh, Tim. You fought your war within and without so bravely. You finished so strongly. At the end, know that you leave this life with the warm applause of a grateful people.
Donate Now