Canada’s Great War, 1914–1918

Canada’s Great War, 1914–1918

How Canada Helped Save

the British Empire and Became

a North American Nation

Brian Douglas Tennyson

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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Copyright © 2015 by Brian Tennyson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tennyson, Brian Douglas.

Canada’s Great War, 1914–1918 : how Canada helped save the British empire and became a North American nation / Brian Douglas Tennyson.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8108-8859-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-8860-9 (ebook)

1. World War, 1914–1918—Canada. 2. Canada—History—1914–1945. 3. Canada—Foreign relations—United States. 4. United States—Foreign relations—Canada. I. Title.

D547.C2T448 2015

940.4’0971—dc23

2014023379

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For Chris, Lindsay, Jennifer, and Matt

Oh, we come from the East

And we come from the West,

To fight for what we love the best;

Jolly Canucks are we!

—Excerpt from a popular song sung by Canadian soldiers, quoted

in Joseph S. Smith, Over There and Back in Three Uniforms

(New York: E.P. Dutton, 1918), 58

Photo Credits

All of the images reproduced in this book were scanned from sources believed to be free of copyright.

The photographs of Robert Borden, Sam Hughes, Arthur Currie, Julian Byng, John McCrae, the 75th Battalion at Regina Trench, Canadian troops after capturing Vimy Ridge, General Pershing at Canadian Headquarters, Taking the Salute at Mons, and Crossing the Rhine are from Anon., Canada in the Great World War (Toronto: United Publishers, 1919–21), 2:26, 2:32, 3:frontispiece, 3:256, 6:110, 4:180, 4:148, 5:90, 5:228, 5:256, respectively.

The photographs of Valcartier training camp and Lord Tweedsmuir at Arlington Cemetery are from the Library of Congress images collection, LC-DIG-ggbain-17228 and LC-DIG-hec-22480, respectively.

The Facts for Canadians, the Heroes, the Happy Man, and the Priceless Gem Posters are from the Library of Congress image collection, LC-USZC4-12717, LC-USZC4-12562, LC-USZC4-12397, and LC-USZC4-12561, respectively.

The photograph of the Vimy Memorial is by HTO3 [CC-BY-SA-3.0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vimy_memorial_from_the_north_side_of_the_face.jpg (downloaded on May 23, 2014).

Introduction

Many books, perhaps too many, have been written about World War I or what used to be known as the Great War until another one made it necessary to number them. This centennial year of the outbreak of the Great War will undoubtedly generate a flood of yet more books as well as documentary and dramatic films, television specials, academic conferences, and commemorative events.

It is well that this should be so because the importance of the Great War to the history of Western civilization, and indeed of the whole world, really cannot be exaggerated. It remains with us still because it is one of the very few clear dividing lines in our historical evolution, a clear demarcation line between “before” and “after.”

There is a considerable literature on Canada’s Great War experience, but not as much as that on other countries. This doubtless reflects the fact that the war was highly divisive: between the English- and French-speaking populations, rural and urban areas, and social classes. Several veterans did publish memoirs, either as books or magazine articles, and a number of regimental histories were published, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. Professional historians and popular writers showed little interest, however, until the 1970s, and since then the publication of books, journal articles, and fiction on the Great War and Canada’s role in it has become a modest industry.[1]

Do we need another one? One is tempted to think not, but the existence of this book clearly demonstrates that I have responded in the affirmative. Why? Certainly not because I have anything new to say about the achievements of the Canadian Corps, about which Tim Cook has written so powerfully, or the Royal Canadian Navy, which has been covered very effectively by Roger Sarty and Marc Milner, or even the war in the air, which Sidney Wise has examined very fully in the first volume of the official history of the Royal Canadian Air Force.

But there has not been a general account of Canada’s overall role in the war for several years. Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook published a still useful account in Canada 1896–1921: A Nation Transformed in 1974, and Desmond Morton and J. L. Granatstein’s Marching to Armageddon: Canadians and the Great War, 1914–1919 (1989) is still an excellent quick reference with many illustrations. Brown and Cook deal with the war in the context of a general history of Canada from 1896 to 1921, however, while Morton and Granatstein focus on the activities of the Canadian Corps in Europe. In 2004 Granatstein published Hell’s Corner: An Illustrated History of Canada’s War, an excellent brief account, but again focused on the Canadian Corps, which is especially valuable for its many illustrations reproduced from the Canadian War Museum’s outstanding collection.

Canada’s Great War attempts to present the whole story in light of the tremendous amount of scholarship that has been undertaken in the last two decades. Its account of the military involvement includes not just the army but the usually neglected navy and Canada’s major contribution to the British flying services. At the same time, it examines the profound economic and social impact of the war on Canada.

More significantly, it addresses the cliché familiar to all Canadians that Canada entered the war as a colony and emerged as a nation. Canada was not a colony in 1914, nor was it a nation in 1918. Because it was a Dominion in 1914 and therefore self-governing in domestic affairs, Canada’s status was significantly different from that of crown colonies governed from London. And while it clearly had achieved a new enhanced status by 1918, few would have agreed with Prime Minister Robert Borden when he claimed that Canada was now a nation. The fact that he always used the adjective “autonomous” rather than “independent” and thought in terms of nationhood within an empire sharing common foreign and defense policies makes clear that Borden’s sense of nationhood was quite different from the modern meaning of the word and was controversial even in his own time.

Another objective is to demonstrate that the traditional tendency to treat Canada’s evolution toward nationhood only in terms of its relationship with Britain tells only part of the story. There is no aspect of Canadian history that can be properly understood without taking into account the country’s close proximity to and relationship with the United States, the giant neighbor with which it shares the North American continent. Nineteenth-century Canadians understood this, but perhaps because we have become so economically, socially, and culturally integrated with the United States over the past century, we are inclined not to realize that this development was a modern one that mirrored the loosening of our ties with Britain.

It was a transformation of enormous significance, because for a very long time Canadians tended to believe that destiny offered them two choices: they could remain British or they could become American. That is not to say that Canada had to remain under some degree of British control or that, alternatively, it had to become part of the United States, although many Canadians thought those were indeed the options. But for most people the issue was orientation, values, and interests, and a concern for security in a dangerous world.

For a long time Canadians—at least English Canadians—tended to look down their noses at the United States because of its seemingly chaotic democracy, the perception that its public life was far more corrupt than that of Britain and Canada, and its “common” culture, to employ a derogatory term that used to carry great weight. But the extraordinary economic growth of the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century eventually and inevitably overflowed into Canada in terms of trade and investment, which included cultural influence through books, newspapers, magazines, films, radio, and television. Much to the dismay of the English-Canadian elite, whose orientation was solidly British, American cultural products were warmly welcomed by most people.

The situation in French Canada was more complex. While few French Canadians—to use the traditional term—favored joining the United States, many joined their English-Canadian counterparts in voting with their feet, emigrating in large numbers in order to share in the prosperity of the northeastern states. Like francophones in Canada outside of Quebec, they adapted to the melting-pot environment while struggling to maintain their language and culture. Those who remained at home welcomed American trade and investment but did worry about the impact of a Protestant Anglophone culture on the survival of their language and identity.

The point here is that Canada did not emerge from the Great War just with a greater national consciousness, the sense that it was now a nation psychologically and emotionally, if not quite yet constitutionally. The experience of the war shattered the illusions of many Canadians about their “mother country” and the superiority of all things British to all things Canadian, or American for that matter. This, combined with the remarkable level of Canadian-American cooperation that developed during the war and the dramatic growth of Canadian-American economic integration, meant that Canada came out of the war with not just a sense of itself as a nation but a sense of itself as a North American nation, no longer fearful of its great neighbor and embracing the economic benefits and its “common” culture. Although it took another generation for Canadians to complete the psychological transition from looking to Mother England to looking to Uncle Sam, the shift had begun and the Great War had much to do with it.

It should be emphasized that this book makes no effort to address the entire history of the Great War. Because it is only examining Canada’s role, it focuses on the Western Front, where most Canadian soldiers and nurses served, although it does briefly discuss Canada’s involvement in the Allied interventions in Russia in 1918–19. It should also be understood that because Newfoundland did not join Canada until 1949, this book does not discuss its role in the war, although there are occasional references to the Newfoundland Regiment.

I am tempted to say that this book almost wrote itself, but my wife would protest quite vigorously, considering the many hours almost daily for the past year that I have spent working on it. Canada’s Great War seems, however, the logical culmination of my research over the past twenty years, which has focused on Canada’s experience in the war. Last year I published a biographical bibliography of publications written by Canadian men and women who served in the war which prepared the way for this book. But the writing was easy in the sense that I knew I had a good story to tell and a theme which has been touched on by other historians but never really developed.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the veterans who published accounts of their experiences, and also to Canada’s Great War historians who in recent years have written so many wonderful books and journal articles on the Canadian experience. I have leaned heavily on them. The select bibliography at the end of this book lists only some of the many recent books and articles which will reward further reading.

I am particularly grateful to Roger Sarty, who shared information on the naval war with me, and to Gordon Greavette, who kindly allowed me to consult his recent doctoral dissertation on the Shell Committee. I am grateful also to the Canadian War Museum and Library and Archives Canada, whose holdings vastly enriched my knowledge of the subject. As always, I am grateful to South Shore Libraries, particularly their Bridgewater branch, whose interlibrary loan service gave me access to many books not otherwise available in a small town.

I am particularly grateful to Bennett Graff, acquisitions editor at Rowman and Littlefield, who first proposed that I write this book. It was not something I had planned to do, but after thinking about it for a while, I concluded that there was indeed a need for another book on Canada’s role in the Great War, and I thought I might enjoy the challenge of trying to write it. I can only hope that Bennett’s faith in me will prove to have been justified. I also want to thank Kellie Hagan, whose helpful and patient editorial guidance in the final preparation of this book was much appreciated.

Finally, I want to acknowledge the extraordinary support of my wife, Sandra Atwell-Tennyson. She always encourages me in these projects, although I suspect she does sometimes tire of dinner-table conversations about long-dead politicians, soldiers, and battles. In addition to moral support, she used her impressive computer research skills to help clarify obscure points on which I tend to fixate. She also proofread the manuscript and asked many pointed questions. As a result, this book is without a doubt better written than it might otherwise have been. For this and much else I am grateful.

Because this book is being published in the United States, I have used American spellings where they differ from Canadian usage, as in such words as “defense” and “labor,” except when they are part of official names such as Department of Defence and Department of Labour. Similarly, distances are given in miles rather than kilometres.

1. On Canadian literature on the war, see Tim Cook, Clio’s Warriors: Canadian Historians and the Writing of the World Wars (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006) and The Canadian Experience of the Great War: A Guide to Memoirs, ed. Brian Douglas Tennyson (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2013).

Chapter 1

The Summer of 1914

The north wind blew wildly all night. War was on it, blowing all over the world.

—Ethel Chadwick, 1914[1]

The summer of 1914 was, by all reports, an outstanding one, the best in living memory. Stephen Leacock, professor of economics at McGill University, better known as the country’s most popular humorist, later recalled “the glory of the Canadian summer, of summer cottages and bush camps; and for the city population the soft evening sky, the canopy of stars over the merry-go-round resorts in the cool of the summer evening.”[2] Having fled the oppressive heat and humidity of Montreal, he spent the summer at his home on Lake Couchiching, near Orillia, Ontario, the town he had made famous as the fictional Mariposa in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

Most Canadians did not take a great interest in international affairs, and this was reflected in their newspapers, which focused largely on domestic and local news. When they did report international news, it was usually to report on the political situation in Britain—the mother country of most Canadians—or political scandals, disasters, or colorful crimes in the United States. Europe and the rest of the world were pretty much ignored.

And so when the assassination of an Austrian archduke—whatever an archduke was—occurred in late June, it was not headline news and was only reported briefly on the inside pages of most newspapers. Robert Borden, the prime minister, did not mention it in his diary. Assassinations and minor squabbles between usually obscure states somewhere in eastern Europe seemed to occur frequently and were obviously of no importance and little interest to most Canadians. Even an educated, well-traveled man like the Rev. Charles W. Gordon, better known to the world as the popular novelist Ralph Connor, recalled that, while he had seen the announcement of the assassination, he had paid little attention to it because “I had never heard of Serajevo” and “assassinations seemed to be one of the chief outdoor sports of the semicivilized peoples of those Central European countries.”[3]

He, like most Canadians, was almost certainly unaware that Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian politician who had brought about the unification of Germany in the 1860s, had once predicted that “one day the great European war will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.”[4] But who precisely was Bismarck and where were the Balkans? And surely the very idea of a great European war was unthinkable in these progressive modern times anyway, wasn’t it?

Canada in 1914 was “a land of hope and sunshine,” as Leacock described it, “where little towns spread their square streets and their trim maple trees beside placid lakes almost within echo of the primeval forest.”[5] The Bulletin, the weekly newspaper in Bridgewater, a little mill-town southwest of Halifax in Nova Scotia, was probably representative of most small-town newspapers when it reported the assassination on page five, then had nothing further to add on the subject for another month. More typical of its news stories was the announcement of the first garden party of the summer season, which was to take place on the evening of July 6. “A special effort,” readers were assured, had been made “to make this even more attractive than usual.” One no doubt popular attraction was Madame Babette, who would “give a forecast of the future.”[6] Sadly, we have no record of how accurate she proved to be.

The outbreak of war a month later came, as Leacock put it, “out of a clear sky.”[7] Gordon and his family were at their summer camp on an island in Lake of the Woods in northwestern Ontario. “With our canoes and boats, with our swimming and tennis, with our campfires and singsongs our life was full of rest and happy peace. It was a good world,” at least until Thursday, July 30, when their boat “returning with supplies from the little town brought back a newspaper with red headlines splashed on its front page.”[8]

Canadians might be forgiven if the crisis was a complete surprise to them because it was almost as much of a surprise to Europeans, including many of their political leaders. The great alliance system, which was later blamed for making the war inevitable, had surely made it unthinkable because any act of aggression would trigger an all-out conflagration. The system obviously didn’t work and as a minor regional issue became intractable and dragged in all the major powers, the crisis came to a head over the Bank Holiday weekend at the beginning of August. The newspapers now began to pay attention, as did their readers.

While it was apparent that Europe was on the verge of war, it was less clear if Britain would be involved. Germany and Austria-Hungary were bound by a defense alliance, as were France and Russia, but Britain had only an “entente” with France and few, including most ministers in the British government, actually knew what that meant. In retrospect it remains an interesting question what the British government would have done in August 1914 if Germany had not forced its hand—some would say provided the perfect opportunity—by invading France through neutral Belgium.

The problem in 1914 was that the German army had prepared only one war plan after France and Russia became allies, and it called for an immediate invasion of France that bypassed the French fortresses along the German border by going northwest through Belgium. This made eminent sense militarily because the French had not fortified their border with Belgium, but it involved violating Belgian neutrality, unless of course Belgium agreed to allow the German army to pass through. But that would have constituted a violation of its neutrality and Belgium refused to allow it.

And so when Germany invaded Belgium in order to get to France, it violated Belgium’s neutrality, which all the European powers had guaranteed in 1834, and that took the British government into the war. In fact, it probably would have gone in anyway because senior ministers in the British government had been assuring France for several years that, in the event of war with Germany, Britain would come to its aid, and the British and French armies had been holding talks and making joint plans for some time.

But if Britain went to war in 1914, what would Canada do?

Canada was a Dominion in the British Empire, the senior Dominion in fact, created in 1867 by the union of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Other provinces and territories had subsequently joined over the years so that by 1873 Canada encompassed the entire northern half of North America with the exception of Alaska, which the United States had acquired in 1867, and Newfoundland, which did not join Canada until 1949.

As a Dominion in the British Empire, Canada’s head of state was the British monarch, but because he or she obviously lived in Britain, Canada had a governor general, who was appointed periodically to represent the monarch. The governor general in 1914 was Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, Queen Victoria’s youngest son. Connaught had pursued a military career and married Princess Louise of Prussia, a great-niece of the German emperor, but also enjoyed an extramarital relationship for many years with Leonie Leslie, wife of an Irish cavalry officer, who was one of the three daughters of Leonard Jerome of Baltimore. Leonie Leslie’s sister, Jennie Jerome, married Lord Randolph Churchill, giving her a title and status and giving him a significant replenishment of financial resources, and therefore became Winston Churchill’s mother. Connaught had arrived in Canada in 1911 and, rather unusually, was planning to return home in September after only three years in office, perhaps because King George V wanted to appoint his brother-in-law, the Duke of Teck, in his place. With the outbreak of war, however, Connaught’s term was extended until 1916 because of his military background. Teck, having changed his name to Athlone because of anti-German hysteria during the war, later served as governor general of Canada during the Second World War.[9]

Dominions were not the same as colonies in the British Empire. Dominions were self-governing in domestic affairs but remained bound by British foreign policy and largely relied on the British army and navy for defense. It followed, therefore, that if Britain went to war, as it did in South Africa in 1899 and with Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914, Canada and the other Dominions were automatically at war as well.

It had been well understood for many years, however, that the Dominions were not expected to participate in every British war, because Britain, rather like the United States in the late twentieth century, seemed always to be involved in a regional conflict somewhere in the world. But Canadians could volunteer to serve in the British forces, and in the event of a significant conflict, public opinion in Canada would almost certainly compel the government to provide some level of official support.

Thus, for example, when the British government sent an expedition to Egypt in 1885 to rescue General Charles Gordon, who was under siege in Khartoum, it recruited several Canadian voyageurs—boatmen—to transport the relief force up the Nile River. More significantly, when Britain went to war against two Afrikaner republics in South Africa in 1899, public enthusiasm in English Canada forced the government to officially recruit more than 7,000 volunteers, although they served in the British army, not as a Canadian force.

As the situation deteriorated during that first weekend in August 1914, therefore, the question was what kind of support Canada would provide, and how much. As Tim Cook, Canada’s leading historian of the First World War, puts it, “the question on everyone’s lips was whether Canadians would embrace the war beyond waving flags and singing songs or allow the European great powers to embrace their suicidal solution alone.”[10]

Canada did not actually have an army in 1914. It did, however, have the nucleus of an army. The Royal Military College at Kingston, Ontario, trained officers, there was an artillery school at Quebec City, and there was what was called the permanent force, which comprised about 3,000 men, around which an army could be built in time of need. The men who would be called upon to form this army were members of the militia, which had about 43,000 men organized in infantry regiments and artillery, cavalry and hospital and nursing units throughout the country.

On the whole, the Canadian militia was more of a social organization which Colonel William Hamilton Merritt, a prominent mining engineer and long-time active militiaman, described as “perhaps the most expensive and ineffective military system of any civilized community in the world.”[11] But to be fair, nobody seriously thought there was any real military threat to Canada.

The militia was a part-time activity for virtually all of its members, who had regular jobs, so the level of their training was pretty basic, although many had served in the British army before emigrating to Canada. Each summer the militia gathered at Camp Petawawa, north of Ottawa, for its annual two-week training camp. The highlight of the 1914 camp, which took place in early July and was presided over by the Duke of Connaught, was a three-day mock battle in which 10,000 militiamen divided into two opposing forces engaged in manoeuvres that, according to the obviously uninformed Ottawa newspapers, constituted “the nearest approach to real battle ever staged for men in training.”[12]

Many people probably assumed that the government would do what it had done in 1899: offer a battalion of volunteers, thereby showing support for the British cause but not risking too large a commitment because that would inevitably become politically divisive, as the South African commitment had done. This assumed, of course, that a larger commitment wasn’t necessary anyway because Britain, France, and Russia could surely handle what was expected to be a brief war.

But the world had changed a lot since 1899, and Germany and Austria-Hungary could hardly be compared with the Transvaal and Orange Free Colony in South Africa. Germany had the largest standing army in Europe, and it was also the best trained and equipped. Germany was also the major industrial power on the Continent and possessed the most efficient railway network. France, while clearly a weaker military power, was determined to avenge its 1871 defeat and to regain the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. France also had the massive Russian Empire on its side, threatening Germany from the east, although Russia’s primary interest was in gaining control of Constantinople and the strategic Bosphorus Strait linking the Black Sea with the Mediterranean Sea.[13] Despite the naïve belief among the general public in Britain, Canada, and elsewhere that this war, if it came, would be brief, Lord Kitchener, the Chief of Staff of the British army, knew better and so did Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary.

The European crisis in 1914 was, in reality, the climax of the extraordinary wave of nationalism/imperialism that had swept over Europe and North America—and even in Japan, although few noticed—in the second half of the nineteenth century. While it was undoubtedly driven by the ambitions of business and financial interests, politicians joined in for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was a rising literacy rate that combined with the spread of low-priced newspapers to make mass public opinion a significant factor in public affairs for the first time in history. The pseudo-Darwinian idea that the superior people of the world should rule the inferior peoples for their own good in order to “civilize” and Christianize them, while serving the financial and business interests of their states of course, was not only generally accepted but trumpeted as a noble obligation that Rudyard Kipling called “the white man’s burden.”

British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli had delighted Queen Victoria back in the 1870s by proclaiming her Empress of India, then had succeeded in getting control of the Suez Canal, the essential strategic link between Europe and the Far East. The government of Lord Salisbury had gone to war in 1899 to get control over the Transvaal and Orange Free Colony in South Africa, nominally to protect the civil rights of British immigrants in those countries but really because the world’s greatest deposits of gold and diamonds had been discovered there. Almost simultaneously, the United States, similarly manipulated and pressured by imperialist politicians like Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt and powerful newspaper magnates like William Randolph Hearst, went to war with Spain to “liberate” Cuba, which it subsequently occupied, along with Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam.

Canada was hardly in a position to engage in imperialist expansionism. With a population of less than eight million in 1914, it occupied a territory larger than the United States—as Canadians always liked to remind Americans—although much of it was barely habitable, and it had all it could handle just to build the essential infrastructure such as railways to make it manageable. It also had a culturally diverse population, with about a third of its people being French-speaking Catholics, mostly but not entirely living in the Province of Quebec. French Canadians—as they were then called—saw themselves as the real Canadians because they had been cut off from France since the middle of the eighteenth century, while most English Canadians still clung to the British connection. Most French Canadians had no interest in international affairs except in relation to the Catholic Church and felt no loyalty to or affinity with modern France.

Further complicating the situation was that Canada had shared in the tremendous wave of European immigration since the 1890s that had increased the size of the population by about a third. While many of these new arrivals were also British, a sizeable minority came from places like Italy, Germany, Russia, and territories in eastern Europe that were then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There were enough of these recent European immigrants that assimilating them was increasingly being seen as a problem by many English Canadians because of their cultural and religious differences.

English Canadians—a broad term applied to pretty much everybody who was not French Canadian—retained close emotional ties to Britain. It was the mother country of most of them, and they took great pride in being part of the greatest empire the world had ever known, an empire that in their minds was a positive civilizing force in the world, an attitude generally attributed today to Americans.

Canadians, at least English Canadians but certainly also some French Canadians, took pride in being Canadian but also generally were proud of being British. Indeed, the distinction was immaterial to most of them. Their flag was the Union Jack, their national anthem was “God Save the King,” and school textbooks included British patriotic poetry by Kipling, Tennyson, and others; Canadian boys, like their British counterparts, read the Boy’s Own Annual and the patriotic action novels of G. A. Henty.

While this may seem contradictory or illogical to modern readers, it seemed perfectly logical at the time, just as one can identify oneself as both a Nova Scotian and a Canadian or both a Texan and an American. The point is that Canadians, at least some of them—and this group usually included a lot of prominent people who influenced public opinion—thought Canada could and should play a role in the British imperial enterprise. Even Henri Bourassa, the most prominent French-Canadian nationalist of the time, who founded and edited the influential Montreal newspaper Le Devoir, acknowledged that Canada, as “an Anglo-French nation,” was “tied to England and France by a thousand ethnic, social, intellectual and economic threads” and had “a vital interest in the maintenance of the prestige, power and world action of France and England.”[14] As can be seen, however, Bourassa’s dream was of a bicultural and bilingual Canada, not the English-speaking Protestant Dominion of 1914.

Thus, when the crisis came in August 1914, most Canadians would have agreed with Toronto’s Globe newspaper when it said that if Britain went to war “it also means war for Canada,” which meant that Canadians must unite not just for the defense of Canada but “for the maintenance of Empire integrity, and for the preservation in the world of Britain’s ideas of Democratic Government.”[15] Montreal’s Daily Star expressed a similar view. “If we are beaten in this struggle against two of the greatest armies ever seen in the world,” it warned, “we will pass finally from the roster of great Nations, and our Empire will become one of the defaced mileposts which mark the tragic road by which the human race has journeyed.”[16] By “we,” the Daily Star clearly made no distinction between Britain and Canada.

As the European crisis unfolded in the early days of August, the Canadian government was at no point consulted or even kept informed of developments. Prime Minister Borden, like other Canadians, got his information from what he read in the daily newspapers. In mid-July he and his wife had fled the oppressive humidity and searing heat of Ottawa for a golfing vacation at Port Carling in Ontario’s beautiful Muskoka resort country, and, unlike political leaders today, he made no effort to keep in close touch with his office. Normally, his best source of information would have been the Governor General, but Connaught and his family were enjoying a vacation at Banff Springs Hotel in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta.

Borden first mentioned the European crisis in his diary on July 27, noting that Austria had declared war on Serbia and that stock markets were “in panic.” On the 28th, he thought that a general European war was “exceedingly probable” and that it would be “almost impossible for us [meaning the British Empire] to keep out if France is involved.”[17] Accordingly, when the British government alerted the Dominions to the seriousness of the situation on the 29th, the government mobilized militia units on the coasts to guard wireless stations and undersea cable landing sites, while the Royal Canadian Garrison Artillery and the Royal Canadian Regiment were placed on active duty at Quebec City and at the naval bases at Halifax and Esquimalt.

On the 31st, Borden somewhat reluctantly abandoned his holiday, leaving his wife in Muskoka in the hope that he would be able to return in a few days, and returned to Ottawa. He displayed no undue anxiety, however, traveling first to Toronto, where he spent the night, arriving in Ottawa on the morning of Saturday, August 1. The Cabinet had been summoned, but even before it met Borden sent a message to London assuring the imperial government that if it went to war Canadians would be “united in a common resolve to put forth every effort and to make every sacrifice necessary to ensure the integrity and maintain the honour of our Empire.”[18]

After Germany invaded Belgium, the British government issued an ultimatum on August 4, demanding that it withdraw its forces by 11:00 p.m.—7:00 p.m. in Ottawa—that evening or it would go to war. The story has been told many times of the senior ministers of the British government sitting glumly around the Cabinet table in Downing Street that evening as the sun set and the streetlights were lit—it was done by hand in those days—hoping for but not expecting a favorable response from Germany. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, had alerted the Royal Navy to be prepared for action, and Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, observed that the lights of Europe were going out, not to be relit in their lifetime.

The mood in the Cabinet room may have been somber that evening, but a large crowd had gathered in front of Buckingham Palace to wave flags, sing patriotic songs, and cheer the prospect of going to war. It was the same in cities elsewhere, including in Germany. In Ottawa, Borden reported in his diary that “crowds on [the] streets cheered me,” reflecting the “great excitement in all Canadian Cities.”[19] Crowds—mostly men, to be sure—marched up and down Sparks Street singing the “Marseillaise,” the “Maple Leaf Forever,” and “God Save the King,” and four thousand people gathered in front of the city’s premier hotel, the Chateau Laurier, which is situated just across the Rideau Canal from the parliament buildings, singing, shouting, and waving Union Jacks.

It was the same in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, as crowds besieged newspaper offices looking for information all afternoon on the 4th. Their numbers grew in the early evening when people were liberated from their jobs for the day. The crowds became so large that the police gave up trying to direct traffic and turned to crowd control. In Winnipeg, where the Knights of Pythias had gathered for an international convention, local citizens similarly displayed their patriotic enthusiasm, presumably making a keen impression on the American delegates.

That patriotic enthusiasm was undoubtedly enhanced in Vancouver when Talbot Papineau, a Montreal lawyer and descendent of Louis-Joseph Papineau, the leader of the 1837 uprising in Quebec, assured those attending a meeting of the Associated Canadian Clubs “that there would be as many French Canadians as English Canadians to take up arms in defense of the Empire in this crisis.”[20] Papineau was highly regarded, at least in English Canada, and was often mentioned as a likely future prime minister because he seemed the ideal Québécois: he had an English-speaking (American) mother, had had a largely English-speaking upbringing, was Protestant, had attended McGill University, and went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. This was the kind of French-Canadian leader that English Canadians liked, as opposed to his troublesome cousin, the French Catholic nationalist Henri Bourassa.[21]

Were Canadians really exhilarated at the prospect of going to war? Appearances can be deceiving. The press reports of excited crowds in the streets were, inevitably, describing events in the larger urban centers, which was not where most Canadians lived. No careful analysis of this phenomenon has been done, but Adrian Gregory, who has examined the situation in Britain, argues that the evidence for “mass enthusiasm” there “is surprisingly weak.” Similarly, Jeffrey Verhey argues that the crowds in German cities were only—for the most part—displaying excitement, “a depth of emotion, an intensity of feeling,” not enthusiasm for war.[22] While the outbreak of war undoubtedly did generate an outpouring of patriotism and excitement at the prospect of great adventure among many Canadians, what evidence we have suggests that this was truer in the larger urban areas than among farmers, fishermen, and other segments of the rural population.

It was also truer of English Canadians than French Canadians. Although it was true that crowds in Montreal, the country’s largest French city, roamed the streets singing “La Marseillaise” and “Rule Britannia,” these crowds gathered in English areas of the city, not in the French areas, which remained quiet.[23] The reality was that while some French Canadians enthusiastically supported participation in the war, the majority regarded it as a British war requiring Canadian participation at a certain level but certainly not a war that directly involved Canadian interests.

Similarly, there was little display of enthusiasm among the recently arrived European immigrants, especially those from Germany or Austria-Hungary. There were about 400,000 German-born immigrants in Canada in 1914 and another 125,000 from Austria-Hungary, a significant number in a population of less than 8 million. A few foreign-language newspapers in western Canada were bold enough to express support for their homelands, provoking the Toronto Globe to call for the registration of enemy aliens and rigid curfews, recommending that anyone who disobeyed such regulations should be “court-martialled and shot as a spy.”[24]

Within days militia colonels were wiring Ottawa offering their units for overseas service. Among these militia regiments was the 79th Cameron Highlanders of Winnipeg, of which the Rev. Charles Gordon was chaplain. Many years later, he frankly reflected on August 1914’s impact on men like him who had long been active in the militia:

I was proud of my battalion, the smartest and most gorgeously arrayed in all western Canada. I had loved the splendid, historic, romantic glory of the kilted Highlanders, but . . . I was no fighting man, I was a chaplain. Besides, I was within six years of being sixty years of age. For the first time in my life, in spite of the great wars that had shaken the world during my time, I looked the thing in the face.[25]

That was an honest statement of the reality of 1914 for some men. Gordon’s decision was essentially made for him: when some 300 of the officers and men of his beloved Highlanders who were also members of his congregation volunteered for overseas service, he knew he had to go with them.[26]

The British government asked Canada to contribute a division—approximately 20,000 men—and the government promptly called for 25,000 volunteers. It did so without seeking the approval of parliament because it was not in session. When it returned on August 18, it met in a special “war session” to approve the government’s actions and to give members the opportunity to declare their full support for the war effort.

Despite the fact that most Canadians went to war with no realization of the horrors that lay ahead and in the naïve belief that the war would be over by Christmas, this certainly was not the way that Borden presented the situation. This would, he warned, be “the greatest war the world has ever known” and “peril confronts us such as this Empire has not faced for a hundred years.” Canada would, he declared, “stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and the other Dominions in this quarrel,”

not for love of battle, not for lust of conquest, not for greed of possessions, but for the cause of honor, to maintain solemn pledges, to uphold the principles of liberty, to withstand forces that would convert the world into an armed camp; yes, in the very name of the peace that we sought at any cost save that of dishonor, we have entered into this war.[27]

Wilfrid Laurier, the seventy-two-year-old former prime minister and, since 1911, leader of the opposition in parliament, despite being appalled that such a disaster should have befallen the civilized world and fearing its divisive impact on Canada, repeated the declaration he had made in 1910 when proposing to build the Canadian navy: “when Britain is at war, Canada is at war, there is no distinction. . . . When the call comes, our answer goes at once, and it goes in the classical language of the British answer to the call of duty, ‘Ready, aye, ready!’”[28] More significantly, Henri Bourassa, the leading spokesman for Quebec’s nationalists, endorsed Canada’s participation in the war on condition that troops would only be raised on a voluntary basis, an assurance that Borden had already made.

There was no difficulty in recruiting 25,000 men. Men who had been very active in the militia, such as Colonel J. A. Currie, who commanded the 48th Highlanders in Toronto, were usually anxious to go, as were men who had past experience in the Canadian or British armies. Most of them lived in cities or towns or were farmers working land close to population centers because they were the best informed on the situation by the newspapers. But the news quickly filtered out into the remoter districts, and engineers, surveyors, fur trappers, and cowboys headed for the nearest regimental headquarters, hoping they weren’t too late.

This might seem surprising a century later, but many men had many reasons for wanting to participate in the war. Some, especially recent British immigrants, felt it was their patriotic duty, and they made up two-thirds of the first contingent. Harold Baldwin, for example, who had emigrated from England around 1907 and was farming in Saskatchewan, went “straight from the harvest, a journey of eighty miles on horseback and train, without a coat, with well ventilated overalls, equally well-worn shoes and an unshaven chin,” to enlist in Saskatoon. “Like the rest of the Englishmen in Canada who had answered the call,” he said, “I was determined, if it was humanly possible, to go overseas with the first contingent.”[29]

Others were not motivated by patriotism exactly but by a belief that if ever there was a just war this was it, because of Germany’s brazen invasion of neutral Belgium and the reports being received—some true, some not—of the atrocities they were committing there. Some saw it as a great adventure and a rare opportunity to escape the boredom of life on a farm or in a small town or just in a tedious job, and not a few joined because they needed a job. When William Lyon Mackenzie King, a former Liberal Cabinet minister, observed the first volunteers marching to the train station through downtown Ottawa, he thought that most of them looked “as though they were unemployed and who [sic] had taken the work as an act of despair. They were poor in physique” and “I should think 80% East Londoners or old country failures. . . It was a humiliating spectacle, nothing Canadian about them.”[30] King was prejudiced, of course; he was at heart a pacifist with a profound distrust of jingoism and the military which he retained through his subsequent brilliant career as Canada’s longest-serving prime minister.

In fact, the physical standards for acceptance in August 1914 were high. Thousands of men were rejected because they were too short or too tall, not healthy enough, or had flat feet or weak eyesight. Harold Baldwin was rejected because he was only 5’4” tall, but he persuaded the doctor examining volunteers to approve him “by telling him, without winking an eye, that I had served with the First Battalion of the North Staffordshire Regiment in England for four years, which was a battalion of the regular army, and that as they had thought sufficiently well of my stature to sign me up, a Canadian volunteer battalion could not in reason be any more particular than one of the Imperial Army.” It was a lie, as he readily acknowledged, but “I’m not in the least ashamed of it.”[31]

The government also accepted the offer of Montreal millionaire Hamilton Gault to pay the cost of raising and equipping a battalion. Gault’s family had made its fortune in the textile industry, but his passion was the military. He had long been active in the militia and served with the Canadian Mounted Rifles in the South African War. Now, despite his age (forty-seven) and the fact that he had lost the sight in one eye, he was desperately keen to go to war again.

Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry Regiment, the last privately raised regiment in the British Empire, was recruited almost entirely from British veterans living in Canada and was named in honor of Princess Patricia of Connaught, the daughter of the governor general and granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who was very popular in Ottawa society. Princess Patricia was named colonel-in-chief in 1918 and personally designed the regiment’s badge and colors. Francis Farquhar, an experienced British army officer who was the governor general’s military secretary, was its first commander.

Not all of the men who volunteered, either in 1914 or later, were men. Some were mere boys who lied about their age because they were so keen to be part of the great adventure. It has been estimated that as many as 20,000 underage soldiers made it to Europe and thousands more tried but never got out of Canada.[32] William Bouchard, Harold Wilson, and Harold Wyld were only three of many “men” who enlisted at the age of sixteen. Underage soldiers were dismissed if identified in Canada. Thus, Arthur Phillips, who was only fifteen when he enlisted, was discharged before going overseas. If they got to England, official policy was to keep them there, working in the Forestry Corps or other units, until they reached eighteen, when they could be transferred into a combat unit. Thus, Wilson and Wyld spent the war in England. So did Harry Scott of Morden, Manitoba, who enlisted at the age of sixteen. Clearly, however, many underage soldiers were not identified, for whatever reason, and saw action. Bouchard served overseas in the 21st Battalion and was killed at Courcelette. Similarly, Edward Forrest, who was seventeen when he enlisted, served in the 78th Battalion and was wounded three times before the end of the war.

Remarkably, some boys as young as fourteen managed to enlist. One was John Mason of Montreal, who enlisted in the 13th (Black Watch) Battalion and actually served in France and Belgium for thirteen months before being sent home. Clement Taylor, a fifteen-year-old student in Regina, was in action for a week with the 5th Battalion before being wounded, after which he was returned to England and kept there for the duration of the war.

And not all those who volunteered were even male. The Canadian Army Nursing Corps, part of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, which had only five members in 1914, quickly recruited ninety-five additional trained nurses, who went overseas with the first contingent. By the end of the war more than 3,100 women had served, 2,504 of them overseas. Another 1,200 Canadian women, who were not trained nurses, served as Voluntary Aid Detachment volunteers.

The man in direct charge of organizing and managing Canada’s military effort was Sam Hughes, the Minister of Militia and Defence. A bombastic, megalomaniacal Anglo-Saxon Protestant imperialist who had been active in the militia all of his adult life and had seen some action in South Africa, Hughes welcomed the outbreak of war in August 1914 as a dream come true. Born in Darlington, Ontario, in 1852, he had become the owner/editor of a small-town newspaper and got himself elected to parliament. When the Conservatives won the 1911 election, he was appointed Minister of Militia and Defense.

Harold Hartney, who served in the 28th Battalion and the Royal Flying Corps, described Hughes as “the first dictator with whom I ever came in contact. And he was a corker.”[33] “Dictator” is too strong a word, but it is certainly true that Hughes was very much a hands-on minister in control of his department. Possessed of vast energy, he was firm in his opinions, and highly emotional. He was, in fact, unstable—to the point that many thought him actually mad. For years he nursed an obsessive grievance because he was convinced that he deserved the Victoria Cross—the highest honor for exceptional bravery in the British army—for his brief service as a transport officer in South Africa. Indeed, not being a modest man, he thought he merited two of them and spent years badgering the prime minister and governor general on the subject.

Perhaps as dangerous as his egotism and instability was the fact that Hughes felt only contempt for the permanent force staff, and, presumably because he had not received the VC, he had no use for the senior staff of the British army either. Indeed, even though he was an ardent imperialist, he doesn’t seem to have had much use for the British generally. On August 3, for example, after Germany had invaded Belgium but before the British issued their ultimatum, Hughes jumped to the conclusion that they were trying to find a way out of going to war. He became so infuriated that he ordered the Union Jack that flew over Militia Headquarters in Ottawa to be lowered to half-mast. “By God,” he reputedly bellowed—Hughes frequently bellowed—“England is going to skunk it. Oh, what a shameful state of things. I don’t want to be a Britisher under such conditions.”[34] It took two hours to persuade him that he was being premature and should allow the flag to be raised again.

When war was declared on the 4th, Hughes was ecstatic and as excited as anyone else in the country. Actually, he was probably more excited than anyone else because he would be in charge of the Canadian army.

1. Ethel Chadwick diary, August 2, 1914, quoted in Sandra Gwyn, Tapestry of War: A Private View of Canadians in the Great War (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1992), 18.

2. Stephen Leacock, Canada: The Foundations of its Future (Montreal, 1951), 222.

3. Charles W. Gordon, Postscript to Adventure: The Autobiography of Ralph Connor (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1938), 202–03.

4. Quoted in Mark Zuehlke, Brave Battalion: The Remarkable Saga of the 16th Battalion (Canadian Scottish) in the First World War (Toronto: John Wiley & Sons Canada, 2008), 1.

5. Stephen Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (New York: John Lane Company, 1912), xii.

6. Bridgewater Bulletin, June 30, 1914.

7. Leacock, Canada, 222.

8. Gordon, 202–03.

9. He was in fact the last British governor general of Canada. He was succeeded in 1951 by Vincent Massey, a member of the wealthy family that manufactured agricultural equipment. Those who objected to this severance of one more British connection could perhaps take some solace in the knowledge that Massey had the reputation of being more cultured and British in his lifestyle and manners than even the most eminent British aristocrats.

10. Tim Cook, Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917–1918 (Toronto: Viking, 2008), 23.

11. Quoted in Ralph Allen, Ordeal by Fire: Canada 1910–1945 (Toronto, 1961), 64.

12. Gwyn, 9.

13. For a brilliant and challenging new interpretation of Russia’s role in the outbreak of the war and its war aims, see Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011.

14. Quoted in Jonathan F. Vance, Maple Leaf Empire: Canada, Britain, and Two World Wars (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2012), 39.

15. Quoted in Vance, Maple Leaf, 39.

16. Montreal Daily Star, August 4, 1914, quoted in Zuehlke, 3.

17. Quoted in Robert Craig Brown, Robert Laird Borden: A Biography. Vol. 1 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1975), 261.

18. Quoted in Brown, 262.

19. C. P. Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict. Vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 175.

20. Quoted in Desmond Morton and J. L. Granatstein. Marching to Armageddon: Canadians and the Great War, 1914–1919 (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1989), 6.

21. It was not to be. Papineau was killed on October 30, 1917, at Passchendaele in the Battle of the Somme.

22. Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 11; Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 231.

23. John English, Borden: His Life and World (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1977), 106.

24. The Globe, August 7, 1914, quoted in Tim Cook, Warlords: Borden, Mackenzie King, and Canada’s World Wars (Toronto: Penguin Books Canada, 2013), 46.

25. Gordon, 203–04.

26. Gordon, 212. When the battalion went overseas, 350 of its officers and men, including the colonel, were members of Gordon’s congregation. Gordon, 213.

27. Quoted in Zuehlke, 7.

28. Quoted in Zeuhlke, 7.

29. Harold Baldwin, “Holding the Line” (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1918), 2.

30. Quoted in Gwyn, 62.

31. Baldwin, 3.

32. Tim Cook, “‘He Was Determined to Go’: Underage Soldiers in the Canadian Expeditionary Force,” Histoire sociale/Social History, 41, no. 81 (May 2008), 48 note 5. On underage soldiers, see also Dan Black and John Boileau, Old Enough to Fight: Canada’s Boy Soldiers in the First World War. Toronto: James Lorimer, 2013.

33. Harold E. Hartney, Up and at ’Em. 2nd ed. (New York: Ace Books, 1971), 15.

34. Quoted in Gwyn, 51.

Chapter 2

Between Mother England

and Uncle Sam

Whether born here or elsewhere, the men from the Dominion are essentially Canadian in temper and outlook, organized by Canada, inspired by Canada, and of the very warp and woof of Canada.

—The Times, 1915[1]

Canadians were disappointed but not surprised when President Woodrow Wilson declared that the United States would adopt a policy of strict neutrality and called on Americans to be “impartial in thought as well as in action.” Wilson’s refusal to offer even moral support to the Allies was incomprehensible to Canadians—Borden privately thought Wilson “stupid and indifferent”[2] —convinced as they were that this was not merely a struggle between rival empires but a crusade to protect the weak (like Serbia and Belgium) from oppression and to preserve freedom and democracy.

Some Americans quickly decided that, if their country would not do the right thing, they would do it themselves, and about 7% of the men in the first contingent were Americans. This might seem surprising but it was not unprecedented. Several Americans had been among the Canadian volunteers who served in the South African War.[3] Why did so many Americans want to serve in a foreign war, especially as they risked losing their citizenship by serving in a foreign army?

As in Canada, some of them were recent British immigrants. George Bell, for example, was born in Liverpool but had emigrated to Detroit, where he worked as a printer and was only months away from receiving his citizenship papers when the war broke out. He crossed over to Windsor, Ontario, and enlisted on August 8.[4]

Others, like Joseph Smith, had Canadian connections. He was born in Philadelphia, but his family had been long-established in eastern Ontario. Rather colorfully, he was working as a cowboy in British Columbia, and it was only when he rode into Dog Creek to treat himself to supper at the local hotel in late September that he learned that a war had broken out in the Balkans. Thinking at first that it was just “another one of those fights that were always starting in the Balkans” and, since he was from the United States, which was neutral, Smith thought “I ought to be neutral too.” But when he discussed the situation with other men in the dining room, he changed his mind. “While I was an alien, I had lived in Canada. I had enjoyed her hospitality. Much of my education was acquired in a Canadian school. Canadians were among my dearest friends.” In the end, he decided that the issues at stake were not important. Britain had asked its empire for help, Dog Creek “heard and was going to answer that call. Even if I were an alien I had been in that district for more than a year and I owed it to Dog Creek and the district to join up with the rest.”[5]

Alexander McClintock of Kentucky thought that the United States “ought to be fighting along with England and France on account of the way Belgium had been treated, if for no other reason. As there seemed to be a considerable division of opinion on this point among the people at home, I came to the conclusion that any man who was free, white, and twenty-one and felt as I did, ought to go over and get into it single-handed on the side where his convictions led him, if there wasn’t some particular reason why he couldn’t.”[6] McClintock went to New York intending to join the Foreign Legion in France but while there met a Canadian who was in the Princess Pats and “decided to go up to Canada and look things over.” Two days later he enlisted in the 87th (Canadian Grenadier Guards) Battalion in Montreal.

Others were just looking for adventure. William Ross Jones, who was born in Scotland but had emigrated to the United States, was working for the New York Central Railroad in Amsterdam, New York, when the war broke out. After a friend who had enlisted in the Royal Canadian Dragoons wrote to him saying “that if I wanted to see action now was the time,” Jones promptly went to Valcartier, Quebec, and enlisted in September 1914, leaving behind a wife and thirteen-month-old son. He was actually among the very first: his regimental number was 59.[7] Similarly, Herbert McBride, who was a lawyer in Indianapolis and an officer in the Indiana National Guard but had spent time in Canada before the war, confessed that it was not “the early reports of German atrocities, or the news of Belgium’s wanton invasion” that caused him to enlist. “No, it was simply that I wanted to find out what a ‘regular war’ was like. It looked as though there was going to be a good scrap on and I didn’t want to miss it.” McBride went to Kingston, Ontario, to enlist in October 1914 and went overseas with the 38th Battalion.[8]

Canadian-American relations had been growing closer in recent years, reflecting a remarkably porous border that had long allowed people to move back and forth pretty freely to work and live. At the same time, Canadian-American trade had been growing significantly, as had American investment in Canada. The two countries shared a common language and were conscious, in this imperialist era, of their shared British heritage. There was much talk among the political and intellectual leaders of both countries, and even some in Britain, about the powerful influence on the world that the Anglo-Saxon or English-speaking peoples could wield if they worked together.

When Canada went to war in 1914 but the United States remained neutral, a totally unprecedented situation was created. The United States had proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine in the early nineteenth century, warning European powers that it would not tolerate interference in hemispheric affairs, but this was intended to keep them out of the Caribbean and South America. No one had claimed that it applied to Canada, but Canada’s participation in the war might well result in German naval activity and actual fighting very close to the United States. Hypothetically at least, it could even result in a German invasion of Canada, although that was highly improbable.[9]

J. A. Currie, who commanded the 48th Highlanders in Toronto, later recalled an American friend suggesting to him in August 1914 that Canada could stay out of the war because it was protected by the Monroe Doctrine. His response was telling: “Yes we believe in the Monroe Doctrine just the same as you do. We are going to fight for it on the Plains of Flanders.”[10]

In 1914, Canada and the United States celebrated the century of peace that had followed the end of the War of 1812, initiating what they proudly—if inaccurately and somewhat smugly—described as the longest undefended border in the world. Speeches were made, magazine articles were written, and a general feeling of bonhomie prevailed. If people on both sides were viewing their shared history through rose-tinted glasses, this was no doubt because their relationship had improved considerably in recent years and people anticipated, or at least hoped, that this trend would continue. Certainly, their relationship was rapidly becoming more intimate.

Canadian-American relations had ranged from indifferent to hostile in the preceding century. The British colonies that originally became Canada had—with the exception of Quebec—largely come into existence as a result of the American Revolution. Those that had existed before that, notably Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, were small and thinly populated until thousands of Loyalists fleeing or expelled from the rebellious colonies settled in the remaining British colonies to the north. Even so, most people in Nova Scotia before the American Revolution, excepting the French-speaking Acadians, had moved there in the 1750s and 1760s from New England. The Acadians, of course, had a rather different relationship with the United States. After their expulsion from Nova Scotia in 1755, many of them had settled in Louisiana, whose “Cajun” population is directly descended from them.

The Loyalists were soon followed by hundreds, if not thousands, of other people, who moved north and west into British territory after the American Revolution not for political reasons but because there was lots of good land available, especially in Upper and Lower Canada (now southern Ontario and Quebec). They were, it seems, indifferent to the new international boundary or to whether they lived in the new republic or returned to British territory.

Only a few years later, in 1812, the United States, for a variety of reasons, declared war on Britain and invaded Canada, assuming that Canadians would welcome assistance in achieving their liberation from what they assumed to be oppressive British rule. While some of the more recent settlers, who actually constituted the majority of the population in Upper Canada by this time, did welcome the Americans, many did not, and they combined with the Loyalists and their descendants to repel the successive American attacks. The War of 1812 greatly strengthened conservative attitudes in Canada: suspicion of “democracy,” which was seen as mob rule that led inevitably to general corruption, rejection of republicanism, and of course increased distrust and fear of the United States. American politicians who spoke throughout the rest of the century of their nation’s manifest destiny to include all of North America unwittingly reinforced those attitudes.

Most Canadians would have agreed with Principal G. M. Grant of Queen’s University when he said in 1898 that “we are Canadian, and in order to be Canadian we must be British.”[11] As illogical as this statement may appear today, it made perfect sense to Canadians until the middle of the twentieth century because the alternative appeared to be that Canadians “must be” Americans. There were some, however, especially in the 1880s when Canada was struggling through difficult economic times, who argued that Canada should just join the United States and share in its perceived greater prosperity.

But most Canadians, even if they favored closer economic relations with the United States, did not share this view because they tended to regard American democracy with condescension. As the prominent Montreal physician and writer Andrew Macphail rightly observed in 1914, albeit with tongue in cheek, Canadians had for too long thanked God that they were “not like those republicans and sinners . . . with whom it was dangerous for simpleminded people like ourselves to have any truck or trade.”[12] While understandable in the past, he believed that this attitude had encouraged an unhealthy complacency and self-righteousness among Canadians.

One thing that Canadians and Americans had in common in the early twentieth century was a smug sense of moral superiority over Europe. While Europe had a long and continuing history of national rivalries and warfare, Canadians and Americans had learned to share an entire continent peaceably, resolving disputes through negotiation and arbitration rather than force. This was, as William Lyon Mackenzie King, then Minister of Labour in the Canadian government, claimed in a speech in New York in 1910, the Canadian-American way, “the answer of the new world to the war talk of the old.”[13]

James Macdonald, managing editor of the Toronto Globe—the largest newspaper in the country—believed that the system of civilized internationalism that Canada and the United States had evolved was the hope of the world. Working himself up to an almost hysterical fervor in the highly emotional year 1917, he wrote that “for more than a hundred years . . . while the boundary lines of every other continent have blazed in war and dripped with blood, the internationalism of North America has held,” providing the world with “the unbroken pledge of a far greater peace for all the world through a millennium yet to come.”[14]

This sort of talk was all well intended, of course, but represented an ignorance or denial of historical reality. While it is true that the War of 1812 was the last time the United States attacked Canada, there were a number of occasions when unofficial military assaults took place and times when war seemed imminent. American sympathizers supported the 1837 rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada and even launched cross-border raids, for example, and some rebels sought and received sanctuary in the United States when the rebellions failed.

The American Civil War demonstrated vividly the complexity of the Canadian-American relationship. Most Canadians opposed slavery and supported the Union, despite the British government’s ambivalence, and approximately 40,000 Canadians served in the Union army, compared to the few hundred who enlisted in the Confederate army. Most of these men had already emigrated to the United States, but they were joined by volunteers enlisted in Canada by Union recruiters. At least twenty-nine Canadian-born men were awarded the Medal of Honor during the Civil War. At the same time, some 15,000 American draft dodgers and deserters fled to Canada, which declined American requests to send them back.

One of the Canadians who served in the civil war was actually a woman pretending to be a man. Sarah Emma Edmonds, a Canadian living in Michigan, served as a male nurse in the 2nd Michigan Infantry, calling herself Frank Thompson, then was a Union spy before working as a female nurse in a hospital in Washington.[15]

Notwithstanding Canadian sympathy for the Union cause, Anglo-American relations deteriorated sharply during the war because of episodes such as the Trent affair, when the U.S. navy stopped a British ship on the high seas, and the St. Albans raid, when a group of Confederates in Montreal attacked St. Albans, Vermont.[16] The situation was not improved by the fact that the Confederacy was purchasing warships in Britain and Confederate ships were welcomed in Nova Scotia ports.

By the end of the war, there was widespread talk in the United States, even at high political levels, of punishing the British by invading and seizing Canada. This didn’t happen, but the American government clearly chose to look the other way when the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish-American nationalist organization, launched a series of military raids across the border in the delusional hope that Britain would free Ireland in exchange for Canada. These incursions involved actual battles between the Canadian militia and the Fenian raiders, in which men were killed and significant damage was done to property. In April 1868, a Fenian even assassinated Thomas D’Arcy McGee, an Irish Canadian politician who was one of the Fathers of Confederation.

Fear of the United States was a major factor in the decision of the Canadian colonies to join together in a confederation in 1867, in the rather naïve belief or hope that they could resist an American invasion more effectively together than separately. Given that their combined population was only about 10% that of the United States and that the Maritime colonies were not even connected to Canada by a railway or road, this seemed unlikely, but something had to be done because the British government was making it very clear in the 1860s that it could no longer be expected to defend Canada from external military threats.

The primary objective of Confederation, however, was to unite the existing colonies in the east with the vast British territory in the northwest, then being governed by the Hudson’s Bay Company, to create a transcontinental political and economic union. The urgency of achieving this as quickly as possible was underlined in 1867 when the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, thereby cutting off the northern half of the Pacific coast from British—soon to be Canadian—territory. Meanwhile, American settlers at Red River (Winnipeg) and in British Columbia were calling on the U.S. government to include those regions in the American union.

Britain was determined, after the difficulties of the 1860s, to improve its relationship with the United States and the latter, emerging from a devastating civil war, was equally anxious to improve its relations with Britain. At the same time, some prominent Americans—including Charles Sumner, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the 1860s, and Hamilton Fish, President Grant’s secretary of state—still hoped to somehow take over the vast Hudson’s Bay Company territories in the northwest and thought Britain should simply hand Canada over to the United States as compensation for its grievances. Grant, while wanting to improve relations with Britain, actually agreed with them and delayed resolving those grievances, hoping that Britain might prove to be agreeable.

In the end, in the Treaty of Washington signed in 1871, both sides resolved all their outstanding issues, either through direct negotiations or by agreeing to arbitration. What was really important about the Treaty of Washington was that by agreeing to resolve its issues with the British, the United States was in effect indicating its acceptance of the new Dominion. In truth, the era of reasonably good feeling between Canada and the United States and the undefended border dates back not to 1814 but to 1871.

Inevitably, problems would arise between two governments sharing a vast continent, but both sides were committed to resolving them through negotiations. There were, however, two problems with this. In the first place, negotiations between a large and powerful nation and its small (in population) weak neighbor were bound to be difficult if the issue was of any importance to the large nation. Equally importantly, as a Dominion, Canada’s foreign relations were handled by the British government, which was never going to risk damaging its relationship with the United States for the sake of a Canadian concern.

The hard reality was that the Canadian-American border was undefended because Americans rightly saw that Canada posed no threat and Canadians knew that they lacked the manpower and resources to defend themselves against an American invasion. The best Canadian defense was to ensure that Canadian-American relations never deteriorated to the point that war became a possibility.

Canadian governments after Confederation moved quickly to take over the vast northwestern territories, and British Columbia was brought into the union. A National Policy was adopted which included protective tariffs to stimulate and support Canadian industrial development, and railways were built linking central Canada with the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. At the same time, though, the National Policy always allowed for lower tariffs on natural products and raw materials if the United States was ever willing to extend reciprocal treatment.

The National Policy was not just an effort to develop the economy, but a declaration of economic independence—not from Britain, but from the United States. In other words, it represented the belief that if Canada was going to survive as a separate nation, it needed to have a strong economy with an industrial base and a transportation/communications system linking its vast regions. Indeed, the National Policy was a response to American tariff policy, which since the termination of the Reciprocity Treaty in 1866 had erected a high protective wall around the United States. Leonard Tilley, the Canadian Minister of Finance in 1879, actually brought in an American consultant to advise him on drawing up the National Policy tariff schedule.[17]

Paradoxically, however, the National Policy played a major role in encouraging the economic integration of the Canadian and American economies because the protective tariff, by discriminating against foreign (American) manufactured goods, encouraged American companies to establish branch plants in Canada. Within a decade, sixty-five branch manufacturing plants had been established in Canada by such major companies as the Singer Manufacturing Company, International Harvester, National Cash Register, and Westinghouse. In time, large American corporations such as Standard Oil began acquiring Canadian companies and merging them into single entities that could dominate the Canadian market as they dominated the American market.

By 1900, U.S. investments in Canada constituted 14% of total foreign investment, a figure that rose to 23% by 1914, representing a quarter of all U.S. foreign investments.[18] Meanwhile, other large corporations like Western Union, American Bell Telephone, and insurance companies also moved into Canada, although the tariff was not an issue for them. They came because they saw a significant market and the advantages of being registered as a Canadian (i.e., British) company, and by 1913 there were 451 American-owned businesses in Canada. If encouraging American investment in Canada seems inconsistent with a nationalistic economic policy, the inconsistency was not apparent to Canadian politicians and businessmen. A company incorporated in Canada was considered Canadian, regardless of who owned it.

The influx of American capital inevitably brought with it American trade unions, which organized local branches as well. The Knights of Labor came in the 1880s and the American Federation of Labor soon followed. As Samuel Gompers, president of the AFL, once said, “we are more than neighbors; we are kin . . . our labor problem with all its ideals, aspirations, and ambitions is alike for both of us.”[19] By 1902 the AFL dominated the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada, and by 1919 American unions represented 90% of the organized workers of Canada.

Meanwhile, the flood of Canadians moving to the United States continued as young people sought jobs in the cities or farms in the west. The belief that the United States was more prosperous, offered greater opportunities, and enjoyed a lower cost of living—a belief that persists to this day—understandably stimulated some Canadians to support the idea of annexation. The 1890 U.S. census reported that nearly a million Americans had been born in Canada.

Some Canadians thought that Canada should do the inevitable and join the United States. Thus began the debate, which endured for most of the next century, over the “price” of being Canadian. While outright annexationists were a relatively small, albeit highly vocal, minority, the issues they raised did have a political impact. The Canadian elections of 1887 and 1891 were fought largely over the question of whether Canada should join an economic union or negotiate a complete free trade agreement with the United States. John A. Macdonald, author of the National Policy in 1879, won both elections, albeit with reduced majorities, and when the Liberals finally did get into office in 1896 under the leadership of Wilfrid Laurier, they did so only after finally embracing the National Policy.

At the same time, however, they offered a tariff reduction to any country that would reciprocate. This was, of course, aimed at the United States which did not respond, but in a brilliant display of sleight of hand, Laurier granted the reduced rate to Britain without compensation because it had no tariffs to reduce and promoted this innovation as a new policy of “imperial preference.” Accordingly, most Canadians regarded it as a positive step in strengthening the imperial connection and a rebuff to the United States.

It had no practical effect. The British share of Canadian imports declined from a third to a fifth over the next decade, while the American share rose from one-half to two-thirds. At the same time, Canadian exports to the United States doubled while exports to Britain rose only about a third. In other words, the United States was rapidly becoming Canada’s most important trading partner.

The growing American influence was not just in trade and investment. Canada was increasingly being influenced by American popular culture, to the point that it seemed, as Andrew Macphail wrote, that “the American spirit” was “at war for the possession of Canada’s soul.”[20] This could be seen in the growing popularity of American consumer goods, whether automobiles or corn flakes, whose advertising became omnipresent in newspapers, books, and magazines. American films, the latest entertainment technology, quickly spread into Canada where they received a warm reception. Indeed, some of the earliest American movie stars were actually Canadians, most famously Gladys Smith, who was born in Toronto in 1893 and went on to become the most popular actress of the silent film era as Mary Pickford, often referred to as “America’s Sweetheart.”

In sports, while cricket remained popular, baseball was growing in popularity as well. The earliest recorded baseball game took place in Beachville, Ontario, in 1838, and the London Tecumsehs were charter members of the International Association of Professional Base Ball Players, defeating the Pittsburgh Alleghenies to win its first championship in 1877. When Babe Ruth hit his first professional home run, it was in Toronto on September 5, 1914, in a game between the Providence Grays and the Toronto Maple Leafs in the International League.[21]

Even so, three-quarters of the one million immigrants who came to Canada in the first two decades of the century were British, far more than the number who moved up from the United States. Between 1901 and 1921, 752,000 immigrants came to Canada from Britain, three times as many as from the United States. By 1911 there were 497,249 American-born people living in Canada, however, representing about 7% of the total population. Most of them were western farmers seeking land in Saskatchewan and Alberta.

Both the British and Canadian governments were anxious at the turn of the century to improve their relations with the United States. The biggest issue was the boundary between Canada and Alaska, which was in dispute. This might not have been terribly important except for the fact that gold had been discovered in Yukon and the Alaskan panhandle affected ocean access to the territory. After a good deal of squabbling, the two sides agreed to submit the issue to a quasi-judicial tribunal. The British representatives were two Canadian lawyers and the British Lord Chief Justice. President Theodore Roosevelt made clear that the decision would be political rather than quasi-judicial when he appointed Elihu Root, his Secretary of War, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the prominent anglophobe who had played a key role in pushing the United States into the Spanish-American war, and George Turner, a former senator from Washington State who had already publicly denounced the Canadian position.[22] Not surprisingly, the commission endorsed the American position, the two Canadians supported the Canadian position, and Lord Alverstone sided with the Americans, as he undoubtedly had been instructed to do by British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour.

Canadians were outraged, but the reality was that the Canadian claim was a weak one and Roosevelt had warned, both publicly and privately, that if the tribunal did not give him what he wanted he would send in the U.S. army to occupy the disputed territory. For their part, the British were determined not to alienate the United States at this critical point in international affairs. And as Canadian historian C. P. Stacey has pointed out, resolving the Alaskan boundary dispute was “an essential part of a general Anglo-American rapprochement by which Canada, in the long run, was the greatest gainer” even if, in the short-term, it was disagreeable.[23]

British leaders were well aware that their nation was less secure than it had been only a few years earlier, a point brought home by the response of European nations, notably Germany, to the South African War. As well as resolving the Alaskan boundary issue, they signed a treaty with the United States in 1901, abandoning British claims in Central America, which cleared the way for the United States to build the Panama Canal. This act alone “committed Great Britain to naval inferiority in American waters and therefore to friendship with the United States.”[24] A year later Britain signed a defensive alliance with Japan.

As it happened, the British were not the only ones anxious to improve Anglo-American relations. Prominent Americans, notably Elihu Root, were as well. Sensibly, Laurier was agreeable too, and over the next decade, eight treaties and agreements were signed, resolving all the main issues. More impressively, they formed the International Joint Commission, the purpose of which was—and still is—to resolve issues relating to lakes and rivers shared by the two countries. Thus, “well before the outbreak of the First World War . . . no serious controversy remained unsettled between Canada and the United States.”[25]

This was reflected in the fact that, political posturing aside, the Canadian militia and the U.S. National Guard developed a friendly relationship in the later years of the nineteenth century. Recreational fraternal visits became an annual event for several regiments on both sides of the border, with Americans participating in the celebration of Queen Victoria’s birthday and Canadians joining in 4th of July celebrations.[26]

But just as relations were improving and the after-dinner speeches extolling the cooperative sharing of the continent were becoming more frequent, the bombshell of reciprocity was dropped. In 1910 the Taft administration unexpectedly proposed a new trade agreement that would essentially replicate the 1854 reciprocity agreement, establishing free trade in natural products and raw materials. Every Canadian government since 1865 had sought this seemingly unattainable goal, and so the Laurier government quickly agreed. The timing was fortuitous because the government was facing re-election in 1911 and this, it was thought, would guarantee success.

But times had changed, as the Conservative party quickly realized. Financial and business interests were violently opposed to the agreement, fearing that it would harm the east-west transportation system that had been built up and would inevitably be extended to manufactured goods as well. While the backlash against the government on this issue did reflect, to some extent, the always latent Canadian suspicion of American intentions, it also reflected the longstanding belief by many English-Canadian Protestants that Laurier’s patriotism was suspect. When combined with the raging controversy over Laurier’s proposal to build a Canadian navy (which will be discussed later), the conclusion seemed clear: this government was weak on the British connection and leaned toward economic and possibly even political integration with the United States.

In the end, after one of the uglier election campaigns in Canadian history, Laurier went down in defeat and the Conservatives returned to office, led by Robert Borden, a lawyer from Nova Scotia. The change in government inevitably implied a change in Canadian relations with Britain and the United States because Laurier’s political strength was based in Quebec and rural Canada, while Borden’s support was almost entirely based in English Canada, especially Ontario and the Maritimes, with virtually no strength in Quebec, except among the English-speaking minority.

While Borden and Laurier were both nationalists, Laurier was also fundamentally an isolationist and pacifist who resisted those in Britain and Canada who sought to centralize or institutionalize the empire. Borden represented the readiness of many English Canadians to see Canada play an active part in world politics through contributing to imperial foreign and defense policies in return for a voice in the formation of those policies. When Laurier had said in 1900 that “if you want us to help you, call us to your councils,” he was speaking hypothetically because he didn’t want to participate in imperial councils. Borden did, and as luck would have it, his was the government that would take Canada into the First World War.

1. The Times, 22 May 22, 1915, quoted in Vance, Maple Leaf, 65.

2. Borden diary, February 5, 1916, quoted in Cook, Warlords, 124.

3. 5.7% of the 5th Canadian Mounted Rifles, for example, Carman Miller, Painting the Map Red: Canada and the South African War, 1899–1902 (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 417.

4. Fred Gaffen, Cross-Border Warriors (Toronto: Dundurn, 1995), 20.

5. Joseph S. Smith, Other There and Back in Three Uniforms, 11–12.

6. Alexander McClintock, Best o’ Luck: How a Fighting Kentuckian Won the Thanks of Britain’s King (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, 1917), 13. McClintock was either a naval student at Kentucky State University or a student at the Virginia Military Institute when he went to Montreal in October 1915 and enlisted in the 87th (Canadian Grenadier Guards) Battalion. He said both things at different times. He was badly wounded at the Somme in November 1916, suffering twenty-two shrapnel wounds to his legs, but survived. He was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, was invalided home and discharged. He then joined the U.S. army reserve as a lieutenant but did not go overseas. “Unable to find solace in sleep, and tormented by what the Western Front had done to him,” he committed suicide in June 1918. Tim Cook, At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1914–1916 (Toronto: Viking, 2007), 519.

7. William R. Jones, Fighting the Hun from Saddle and Trench (Albany, NY: Aiken Book Company, 1918), 1. He served as a sergeant major in the Royal Canadian Dragoons. Following demobilization, he re-enlisted at Toronto in June 1919 and served in the 259th Battalion in the Siberian expedition.

8. Herbert W. McBride, The Emma Gees (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1918), 2. See also Herbert W. McBride, A Rifleman Went to War (Plantersville, SC: Small-Arms Technical Publishing Company, 1935). After being wounded in 1916, he was discharged and returned home in April 1917 and spent the rest of the war training American troops in the United States.

9. Speaking in Kingston, Ontario, in 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt explicitly extended it to Canada, saying “the Dominion of Canada is part of the sisterhood of the British Empire. I give to you assurance that the people of the United States will not stand idly by if domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other empire.” Quoted in C. G. Fenwick, “Canada and the Monroe Doctrine,” The American Journal of International Law 32, no. 4 (October 1938): 782.

10. J. A. Currie, The Red Watch: With the First Canadians in Flanders (London: Constable, 1916), 22.

11. Quoted in Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook, Canada 1896–1921: A Nation Transformed (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), 28.

12. Quoted in J. L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer, For Better or For Worse: Canada and the United States to the 1990s (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1991), x.

13. Quoted in Granatstein and Hillmer, xi.

14. Quoted in Granatstein and Hillmer, xi.

15. For her version of her alleged exploits, see her book, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army: Comprising the Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps and Battle-Fields (Hartford, CT: W. S. Williams, 1865). Another Canadian living in Michigan who served in the Union army was a distant cousin of mine. James Tennyson, who was born at Hawkesbury, Upper Canada, moved to Port Huron, Michigan, with his parents in the 1850s. He enlisted in the 7th Michigan Infantry in August 1861 and was killed at Antietam on September 17, 1862.

16. The Confederate soldiers crossed the border and robbed three banks in St. Albans, then returned to Montreal. They were arrested and charged, but the court ruled that because they had acted under military orders, Canada, which like Britain was officially neutral, could not extradite them to the United States. Canada therefore freed the raiders but returned the $88,000 seized from them to the banks.

17. John Herd Thompson and Stephen J. Randall, Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies. 2nd ed. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 57.

18. Thompson and Randall, 58. It rose again to $2.1 million in 1920. Thompson and Randall, 81.

19. Quoted in Thompson and Randall, 83.

20. Quoted in Thompson and Randall, 85.

21. Jackie Robinson played for the Montreal Royals, farm team of the Brooklyn Dodgers, in 1946 before going on a year later to break Major League Baseball’s color bar. In 1969 Canada joined the major leagues when the Montreal Expos team was established. Toronto followed in 1977 with the Blue Jays, who won the World Series in 1992 and 1993.

22. His reliability is perhaps confirmed by the fact that he served as counsel to the United States delegation in the northeastern fisheries arbitration with Britain at The Hague in 1910, then served from 1911 to 1914 on the International Joint Commission, the body created to resolve disputes regarding boundary waters between the United States and Canada.

23. Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, 100.

24. Kenneth G. Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 1815–1908 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 350.

25. Stacey, 105.

26. See James A. Woods, “The Good Neighbors and Their Undefended Fence: U.S.-Canadian Cross-Border Military Excursions before the First World War,” American Review of Canadian Studies 43, no. 1 (2013): 49–69.

Chapter 3

Answering the Call

We are part of the British Empire. It’s a family affair. We’ve got to stand by each other.

—Lucy Maud Montgomery[1]

The men who volunteered in August 1914 spent their first week or more at the local armories where they had enlisted or in nearby temporary camps that had to be hastily prepared to accommodate them while they were processed and were introduced to army life. Inevitably, there was much marching drill, there were inoculations, and some, though not many, received uniforms. Then the order came from Ottawa that they were to proceed to the national training and assembly camp.

To everyone’s surprise, including that of the army’s Chief of the General Staff (GCS), Sir Willoughby Gwatkin, this was not Camp Petawawa, the permanent force’s well-established camp north of Ottawa, but a new camp which didn’t actually yet exist, on the outskirts of the little town of Valcartier, northeast of Quebec City.

This decision was, of course, made by Sam Hughes personally, and as bizarre as it initially seemed to many, it made some sense because Valcartier was just twenty miles from Quebec City, a major harbor at the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.[2] Fred Curry, a pharmacist from Brockville, Ontario, who joined the 2nd Battalion as a lieutenant, thought “a more picturesque site for a camp than ValCartier [sic] could hardly be imagined, situated as it was among the foothills of the Laurentian mountains along the banks of the Jacques Cartier River.”[3]

The problem was that there was no army camp at Valcartier, although the Militia Department had already decided to build one there because of its more convenient location. But it had only recently acquired the land, and the camp had not yet been built. In normal times the clearing of the land and construction of the camp would have proceeded at the usual pace, but the sudden outbreak of war changed everything. Hughes saw no reason to wait and ordered that the camp be built and made operational immediately if not sooner.

Hughes always believed that he could get what he wanted if he seized the initiative, provided the money, and hired one of his friends to do the work. In this instance, he hired William Price, a Quebec City businessman engaged in the lumbering, pulp and paper, and electrical generating industries who had also served briefly as a Conservative member of parliament from 1908 to 1911. Long active in the militia, he was now promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel as well.[4]

Amazingly, Hughes did get what he wanted in this case. In less than two weeks, 12,000 acres of forest and farmland were transformed into a functioning military camp, complete with railway siding, roads, electricity, telephone system, running water, parade ground, barracks, and tents. Arthur Chute, who was among the first volunteers to arrive, recalled that “as the troops kept pouring in,” the tents

marched farther across the plain, and each night I watched the myriad lights of a great city twinkling farther and farther down into the long darkness of the valley. . . . It was a moving sight to stand by the headquarters flagstaff by night, to look out upon the sea of camp-fires and far-shining lights; to hear the hum of its restless life and to breathe the air of vast adventure.”[5]

The popular modern view that Canada was militarily unprepared for war in 1914 is a misconception. Much progress had been made since the South African War in reorganizing the Militia Department, the permanent force, and the militia. Sir Frederick Borden—Robert Borden’s cousin—who was Minister of Militia in the Laurier government, recognized that armies had become much more complex than in the past and created the Ordnance Stores Corps and Engineer Corps in 1903, the Medical Corps in 1904, and the Army Pay Corps in 1907. He also doubled the size of the permanent force from 2,000 to 4,000 men so that it could garrison the naval bases at Halifax and Esquimalt when the British withdrew their troops in 1904.

Also in 1904, he reorganized the army’s senior command structure, replacing the General Officer Commanding (GOC) with a Chief of the General Staff (CGS), and creating a Militia Council modelled on the British Army Council. At the same time, he agreed to standardize military training, organization, and equipment to make them compatible with the British army. Canadian militia units were also encouraged to establish formal linkages with British regiments and several did. Canadian military historian G. F. G. Stanley has described the Canadian militiaman in this era as “a replica of the British Territorial Tommy in arms, training, equipment, and habits of thought.”[6]

All of this had required a significant increase in the department’s budget, which Borden obtained, and when the Conservatives took office in 1911, Hughes continued the work begun by Borden, almost doubling the department’s budget from $7 million in 1911 to $13.5 million in 1913. He was able to do this because both he and Robert Borden shared Winston Churchill’s view that war with Germany was coming, and probably within the next four years.

Gwatkin had prepared a mobilization plan that would raise 25,000 volunteers through the commanding officers of the military districts into which Canada was divided. But when the government decided on August 6 to raise them, Hughes ignored Gwatkin’s plan and issued a dramatic call directly to the 226 militia commanders across the country, “like the fiery cross passing through the Highlands of Scotland or the mountains of Ireland in former days,”[7] inviting them to recruit the volunteers instead. He then, incredibly, set about organizing the contingent himself, creating the new battalions and personally choosing their officers—in short, making all the decisions himself.

If this appears chaotic, it was. Hughes thrived on chaos, especially if he was the controlling force at the center of it. And while the natural tendency is to assume that such an unstructured approach to organizing a very large enterprise must be inefficient, Tim Cook, the historian of the Canadian Corps, concludes that Hughes’s approach was “surprisingly effective,” perhaps because it “caught the flavor of the time and the scramble to serve.”[8] Within two weeks Valcartier was basically ready and basic training began.

When the volunteers boarded trains from wherever they were in Canada for the journey to Valcartier, large crowds gathered to watch them parade through the streets and gathered at the local train station to cheer them on their way. Colonel J. A. Currie claimed that 100,000 people crowded downtown Toronto to see the 48th Highlanders off. In Saskatoon, “a record crowd turned out” even though, in Harold Baldwin’s opinion, few of the volunteers had relatives there because “the majority of us were Britishers who had left the Old Country to try our luck in the new land.”[9]

Baldwin was right, and not just about the men who volunteered in Saskatoon. Of the 36,267 men in the first contingent, 63% had been born in Britain or had immigrated to Canada from other parts of the empire. Only 1,245 of them were French Canadians. There were no African Canadians or Asians among them because any who had volunteered had been rejected, although Natives were welcomed because of the popular belief that they innately possessed superior shooting and tracking skills and were likely to be more ferocious than white soldiers.

Some British men, especially those with previous military experience, returned home to serve in the British army or navy, and some Canadian-born men who had strong British connections went with them. At the same time, some men from what were now the enemy nations were returning home as well, either because they had previously served in the armed forces and were still registered as reservists or just because they felt that it was their duty to do so. Austro-Hungarian reservists in Canada were called to duty as early as July 26, and Bishop Nicholas Budka of Winnipeg openly reminded the men in his Ukrainian congregation of their duty to their emperor.[10]

One recent German immigrant who quickly crossed the border into the United States to catch a ship home was an elegant and personable Ottawa wine merchant who had been “much in favor” at Rideau Hall, the official residence of the governor general. Joachim Ribbentrop had emigrated to Montreal in 1911 but moved to Ottawa in 1913. His popularity at Rideau Hall did not reflect just his good looks and personality; the Duchess of Connaught was delighted to know someone in the small and relatively dull Canadian capital with whom she could converse in her native language. Ribbentrop left so quickly as the crisis unfolded that he was short of money and borrowed ten dollars from James Sherwood, a friend who happened to be the son of Colonel Percy Sherwood, head of the Dominion Police.

After serving in the German army during the war and being awarded the Iron Cross, Ribbentrop became a prominent figure in the Nazi party and served first as Hitler’s ambassador to Britain, then as foreign minister in the fateful 1930s. During the Nuremberg trials after the war, in which he was convicted of war crimes, he wrote a memoir in which he said that if war had not broken out in 1914 he might well have spent the rest of his life in Ottawa.[11]

By September 4, there were 32,000 men and 8,000 horses at Valcartier, far more than anyone had expected, and it was an impressive sight. When William Jones arrived he was surprised to see “miles and miles of tents” and “the great white city spread out before me populated with men only, was surely a wonderful and impressive sight. All was activity. Everyone was busy. Wooden houses were being built, roads constructed and everything being done to provide a place to receive and quarter the soldiers.”[12]

The camp reminded Arthur Chute of gold-rush cities like San Francisco in 1849 or Dawson City in 1898 because “here was the same spontaneous and sudden springing up, and here was the same restless blood of a new country, bringing with it an air of imminence and adventure.[13] Like many others, Chute—in the innocence of 1914—thought that “the spirit in which [they] came to fight” was “the Empire’s greatest glory . . . a touchstone of British devotion, a proof of an Empire that must endure.”[14]

The first task, aside from housing and feeding so many men, was to organize them into the new overseas battalions. Initially, Hughes had intended the battalions to combine men from various parts of the country, but some were made up of men from particular regions and others were made up almost entirely of men from single militia regiments because so many of their members had volunteered and been accepted. The 1st Battalion, for example, comprised men from southwestern Ontario, while the 8th was made up almost entirely from Winnipeg’s 90th Rifles. The 16th Battalion, which became known as the Canadian Scottish, was made up of volunteers from several Highland regiments. The twelve artillery batteries, eleven militia engineering units, and medical service corps were all formed from militia units.[15]

The first sixteen battalions constituted a division (approximately 20,000 men), organized into three brigades, plus artillery and support units. The First Brigade was made up of four Ontario battalions under the command of Colonel Malcolm S. Mercer, a Toronto lawyer. The Second Brigade included four western battalions under the command of Arthur Currie, a real estate developer in Victoria, British Columbia, who had long been active in the militia. The Third Brigade—a Highland unit made up of the 48th Highlanders, the Royal Highlanders, the Royal Regiment of Canada, and the 16th (Canadian Scottish) Battalion—was commanded by Colonel Richard E. W. Turner, a veteran from a Quebec City merchant family who had been awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery in South Africa. Command of the artillery was given to Colonel E. W. B. Morrison, the editor of the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, but again, a man with lengthy militia experience and a strong reputation.

Aside from qualifications and experience, being a Conservative was definitely an asset for militia officers seeking senior appointments or hoping for promotion. Turner was certainly a Conservative, although Currie was well known to be a Liberal, but he was also a close friend of Garnet Hughes, Sam Hughes’s son. But if Hughes took care of his friends, both personal and political, he took particular care of his family. Garnet, who had attended the Royal Military College and was active in the militia, was appointed Brigade-Major of the Third Brigade under Turner, and later rose to the rank of Major General. John Hughes, Sam’s older brother, who also had long experience in the militia, briefly commanded Valcartier in 1915, then became Inspector General of the army in Canada, also with the rank of Major General. Another brother, William St. Pierre Hughes, who had spent his career in the penitentiary system but was also active in the militia, commanded the 21st Battalion at the beginning of the war and briefly commanded the Tenth Brigade in 1915–16 before being retired shortly after Sam left the government.

Sam did not neglect himself, of course. Upon the outbreak of war, he began wearing his militia uniform on a daily basis, and in the autumn of 1914, he went to England and pleaded—unsuccessfully—to be allowed to lead his “boys” into battle. He also promoted himself from Colonel to Major General, was awarded a knighthood in 1915, and ultimately was made an honorary Lieutenant General in the British army.

Meanwhile, uniforms, equipment, and weapons had to be found because despite the prewar planning no one had thought to stockpile such things. Thirty thousand rifles were ordered from the Ross Rifle Company in nearby Quebec City, and 50,000 uniforms and sets of boots were ordered from clothing and shoe factories. Newly built farm wagons were purchased to serve as divisional transport, and a variety of motor vehicles arrived as well. This was all done in typical Hughes fashion, with no tendering for contracts, which were handed out to contractors who supported the Conservative party and/or were friends of the minister.

Not surprisingly, the quality was often low: uniforms made of poor quality fabric, boots actually made of cardboard that dissolved when they got wet, and most famously, the controversial Ross rifle, which was excellent for target shooting and sniping but overheated and jammed in battle conditions and was incompatible with rain and mud. Hughes also ordered Colt machine guns from the United States, even though he knew that the British water-cooled Vickers was a better weapon. But to be fair, Vickers had all it could do to meet the demands of the British army. As it happened, most of the Colts didn’t arrive until after the first contingent had gone to England, so it didn’t make any immediate difference.

Hughes also insisted that the troops be provided with the Canadian-made Oliver-pattern equipment, which consisted of a heavy pack with stiff leather harness and huge brass buckles that dug into the shoulders. Because a leather yoke in front rode up under the chin and choked the wearer as weight dragged the pack down, Canadian troops when marching soon developed a distinctive convulsive heave of the shoulders to prevent strangulation.[16]

Nevertheless, Hughes thought by the middle of September that the Canadian Expeditionary Force, to use its official name, was ready to be paraded before the governor general and prime minister. This great event took place on Sunday, September 20, in brilliant sunshine. If the dignitaries were impressed, so were at least some of the men themselves. William Jones—a Scot who had emigrated to the United States and was working for the New York Central Railroad in Amsterdam, New York, when he went to Valcartier to enlist—recalled that he “had never before seen such a fine looking body of men.” The sight “was wonderful and inspiring,” and “I felt I was the proudest boy in the whole of Canada. I still hold the opinion that look where you will, you can never find a like number of finer or more soldierly looking boys than made up that first Canadian contingent to which I found myself attached.”[17]

Incredible as it may seem, Hughes had originally intended not to include the permanent force in the mobilization in August 1914. Needless to say, this was impracticable and two cavalry regiments, the Royal Canadian Dragoons and Lord Strathcona’s Horse, as well as two batteries of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, were mobilized and included in the first contingent. But the Royal Canadian Regiment, the country’s only permanent infantry regiment, was dispatched not to England or France but to Bermuda to provide local defense in the unlikely event of an attack, relieving a British regiment so that it could participate in the war.

The Princess Pats did not attend the training camp at Valcartier, but mobilized separately at Lévis, a town situated directly across the St. Lawrence River from Quebec City. Virtually all of its men—1,049 out of 1,098—had previously served in the British army or the South African War. The Princess Pats went to France as part of the British 80th Brigade in December 1914, making them the first Canadian soldiers to see active duty.[18]

The move to England came a month later, when the troops rode and marched from Valcartier to Quebec City to board their transport ships. Jones recalled that “bands were playing, caps were raised and waved” and the excitement “filled each one of us with enthusiasm and unbounded happiness.”[19] In Quebec City, “people [were] cheering, laughing and crying, and waving handkerchiefs, flags and caps. Kisses were wafted to us from windows, flowers [were] showered upon us, and . . . I, for one, certainly felt giddy and already quite like a hero.”[20]

Embarkation was a nightmare. Some ships arrived loaded down with private cargo and 132,275 bags of flour, a gift from Canada to the British people. Battalions were marched aboard only to be marched off again when there was not enough room, and extra ships had to be chartered to carry the overflow. Units were separated from their baggage and mounted units were separated from their horses. Indeed, the 16th Battalion complained that its horses were put on one ship, their harness on another, the wagons on another, and the wheels on yet another! One ship set sail with the officers and men bearing no relation to one another, while the hold was filled with a miscellaneous collection of unidentified baggage. When the last of thirty-one ships finally cleared the harbor, 863 horses and 4,512 tons of baggage, plus vehicles and ammunition and even a few soldiers, were left behind. Even then, ammunition had to be ferried out to the ships, to comply with a belated order requiring so many rounds per ship.[21] William Price, the businessman who had built Valcartier, was in charge of the docks and the embarkation and must be held responsible for all this, although his biographer places the blame on “inexperienced staff,” “embarkation orders disregarded, congestion in the port of Quebec, and vessels ill-suited to transporting cannons and trucks.”[22]

After waiting off Gaspé for six British cruisers to arrive, the great flotilla finally sailed on September 29, accompanied by a ship carrying the Newfoundland Regiment. Colonel J. A. Currie later claimed, presumably with a straight face, that because of “the moral character and influence” of the men in the first contingent, “never since the days of Cromwell’s New Army did the Empire possess a more athletic, courageous or God-fearing army than the First Canadian Contingent.”[23] If that was pompous and silly, Hughes managed to top it, telling the troops, presumably with a straight face, that “the world regards you as a marvel.”[24]

Meanwhile, Canada’s navy had also mobilized for action. Although it was new, it didn’t amount to much, even though at the time of Confederation the new Dominion possessed the world’s fourth largest merchant marine fleet, and the actual navy was only four years old.

There had never been much interest in naval defense, largely because Canadians expected the Royal Navy to protect them, but also no doubt because the political center of the country was in Ottawa, a long way from the sea. But two things happened in the early years of the new century. Germany decided to build a navy large enough to threaten, or at least challenge, the supremacy of the Royal Navy, and it, in response, redefined its role to focus on capital ships that would concentrate in home waters to protect Britain itself.

As part of this new policy, Britain signed a defense treaty with Japan, effectively entrusting it with the protection of Britain’s Far Eastern interests. At the same time, it reduced the North America and West Indies squadron to a single destroyer based at Bermuda, transferred the naval bases at Halifax and Esquimalt to Canada, and withdrew their garrisons.

What this meant was that Canada’s naval defense now effectively depended on the United States, Canada’s only potential enemy. While no one seriously thought by this time that the United States would ever attack Canada, it was awkward to realize that the nation’s security depended on a neighboring state whose interests could hardly always be expected to coincide with those of Canada. As the Canadian naval historian Roger Sarty has pointed out, the danger was “no longer invasion, but the loss of Canadian sovereignty if Canada were too dependent upon protection supplied by the American fleet.”[25]

What was to be done? The British government pressured Canada and the other Dominions to contribute to the cost of building battleships for the Royal Navy, whose mandate still included the protection of the empire’s vast maritime trade. Laurier knew that this was not possible politically because it would arouse enormous opposition in Quebec and even among many English Canadians. He therefore developed a plan to militarize the existing Fisheries Protection Service, which was operated by the Department of Marine and Fisheries. It was a start.

The Fisheries Protection Service already possessed eight armed cruisers, six icebreakers, and nearly twenty other auxiliary vessels, and in 1904, two high-speed, steel-hulled cruisers, armed with quick-firing guns, were acquired. At the same time, a naval militia was established and plans were announced to create a naval military academy. To carry out these initiatives an effective minister—Louis-Philippe Brodeur—was appointed and Rear Admiral Sir Charles Kingsmill, a Canadian who had enjoyed a distinguished career in the Royal Navy, was appointed Director of Marine Services (later redesignated Director of the Naval Service). The mandate of the naval service was to patrol the country’s coasts, primarily to police the fisheries but also to play a role in coastal defense if necessary. This role was limited, however, by the fact that Canada as a Dominion had jurisdiction only over territorial waters extending three miles from shore.

When the Anglo-German naval armaments race exploded into a crisis with the revelation in March 1909 that Britain was falling seriously behind, the British appealed to the Dominion governments for greater assistance, a call naturally taken up by the Conservative party and many newspapers in English Canada. Laurier, recognizing that his cautious and gradualist approach to the evolution of a Canadian navy was no longer politically acceptable, responded by announcing that Canada would build its own local navy rather than contribute to the costs of the Royal Navy. Australia had already done this, providing a useful precedent.

This compromise initially seemed acceptable to both Quebec Nationalists and English-Canadian imperialists, but not for long. With the British politicians and media panicking at the thought that Germany might actually achieve naval superiority within the next five years—a pot stirred enthusiastically by Winston Churchill—an imperial conference was called in the summer of 1909 to address the problem. The outcome was that Australia and Canada affirmed that they would build navies which would, of course, cooperate with the Royal Navy in time of war, while the smaller Dominions—Newfoundland, New Zealand, and two of the South African colonies—agreed to make financial contributions.

The Admiralty, presumably trying to be helpful, recommended that Canada build five cruisers and six destroyers which could not only patrol the country’s coasts but also assist the Royal Navy in the protection of shipping on the high seas. Rather surprisingly, Laurier agreed to this, immediately provoking the Quebec Nationalists who had accepted the idea of a modest fleet for coastal patrolling but vigorously opposed a more powerful navy whose real purpose in their opinion would be to collaborate with the Royal Navy in foreign wars.

Meanwhile, Laurier had proudly declared that the ships for this navy would be built in Canada, provoking many in English Canada to protest that this would delay their actual construction for years because Canada had no shipyards with the expertise or experience to build modern warships. They argued that, while this should be the long-term goal, in order to meet the immediate crisis, Canada should contribute to the cost of building ships for the Royal Navy at British shipyards. This was the position taken by Borden, the leader of the Conservatives, no doubt because he was under intense pressure from English-Canadian imperialists, but also—to be fair—because he genuinely believed that the German threat was both real and imminent.

Parliament passed the legislation establishing the navy as proposed by Laurier in March 1910, and two ships were purchased from the Royal Navy to be used primarily for training purposes. HMS Niobe, an 11,000-ton cruiser considered obsolete not because of its age—it was only eleven years old—or because its armament was out-of-date but because it lacked a full armored belt, soon arrived in Halifax, and HMS Rainbow, a 3,600-ton light cruiser, was sent to Esquimalt on the west coast.

That same year the Royal Naval College was established at Halifax with ten cadets. Among them were Victor Brodeur, son of the minister, and Percy Nelles, both of whom eventually rose to the rank of admiral. Indeed, as Chief of the Naval Staff from 1933 to 1943, Nelles was “the most important professional leader the navy has ever known.”[26] Another member of the first class was William Maitland-Dougall, who subsequently transferred into the Royal Navy and commanded a British submarine in the English Channel during the First World War until his vessel was mistakenly destroyed by a French airship in March 1918. He was the first and remains the only Canadian submarine commander ever to have been killed in action.[27]

There were, of course, the inevitable teething pains in developing the navy. The Royal Navy provided training personnel, and the 1911 Imperial Conference agreed that because the new Dominion navies were under the exclusive control of their respective governments, their ships could operate beyond the three-mile territorial limit. The Admiralty insisted, however, that they fly the Royal Navy’s ensign, which they did into the 1960s. The only concessions to Canadian identity—and they were important to Canadians—were that the Canadian Naval Service was redesignated the Royal Canadian Navy and the names of its ships were allowed to be identified as HMCS instead of HMS.[28]

This concession was of little significance in 1911, however, because there weren’t any ships other than Niobe and Rainbow. The government did attempt to move ahead with construction, but it hadn’t made any progress when the 1911 federal election took place. Laurier’s naval policy was one of the major issues in the election, and he was hammered for not providing the necessary support to the Royal Navy while at the same proposing a trade agreement that the Conservatives argued would surely lead sooner or later to Canada’s absorption into the United States. In Quebec, the Nationalists formed what Laurier called an “unholy alliance” with Borden’s Conservatives, and together they defeated the government and made Borden Prime Minister.

Meanwhile, Niobe’s first cruise, from Halifax to Yarmouth in July 1911, turned into a fiasco. The ship ran aground near Cape Sable (off the southwestern coast of Nova Scotia) on its return voyage and had to be towed back to Halifax, where it took sixteen months to repair the damage. Marc Milner, historian of the Royal Canadian Navy, suggests, unkindly but accurately, that “the grounding of the flagship of Laurier’s new navy was a metaphor for his government’s whole naval policy.”[29]

The new Borden government tried valiantly but failed utterly to make any progress on its approach to the naval issue over the next three years. Recruiting for the navy was suspended, although the Royal Naval College was allowed to continue training cadets while Borden tried to pass legislation authorizing the $35 million in aid that Churchill, now First Lord of the Admiralty, said was needed. After the Liberal-dominated Senate vetoed the bill, the naval budget was slashed, and the number of personnel shrank from more than 800 in 1911 to about 350 in 1913, most of them British sailors on loan. Indeed, in the last two years before the war more men deserted from the navy than joined it, and the government made no effort to find them. It did try, in a roundabout way, to provide support for the Royal Navy by establishing the Royal Naval Canadian Volunteer Reserve (RNCVR) in May 1914. Its planned complement of 3,600 men was intended not to serve in the Canadian navy but to augment the personnel of the Royal Navy in wartime.[30]

C. P. Stacey, the eminent Canadian military historian, concluded bluntly that Borden’s naval policy “cannot be considered anything but a national disaster” because it “produced the bitterest of controversies but no ships.” Equally important, it “damaged Canada’s reputation in the Empire and would have done more harm had it not been followed so quickly by the outbreak of war.”[31] Notwithstanding these frustrations, the naval staff in Ottawa did draft a war plan, however, and vessels from the Fisheries Protection Service took part in naval exercises, including practicing minesweeping in the Halifax approaches and functioning as a harbor examination service.[32]

Canada’s only warship capable of going to sea and doing anything at all useful in August 1914 was HMCS Rainbow, although the government did unexpectedly acquire two submarines. Responding to public concerns about the German navy’s Asiatic Squadron that was known to be operating somewhere in the Pacific, British Columbia’s Premier Richard McBride purchased two submarines under construction for the government of Chile at a private shipyard in Seattle. The cost was $1.15 million, and as Milner observes, “it says a great deal about the way naval policy was made, that a provincial government could spend twice the 1914 naval budget in the dark of night on two small submarines.”[33] The federal government quickly purchased them from British Columbia, and naval reservists were mustered to man them.

The Rainbow was the only British or Canadian warship in the entire eastern Pacific when the war broke out, but it had functioned only as a training ship since being acquired by Canada and was “vastly out-gunned, manned by reservists and carrying only target ammunition.”[34] Nevertheless, it was what was available, and its captain, Walter Hose, a former Royal Navy officer now serving in the Royal Canadian Navy, bravely put to sea.

Hose was well aware that the German naval squadron included two modern armored cruisers, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, whose gunnery was renowned and whose armor could not be penetrated by Rainbow’s guns except at point-blank range, meaning that, as Milner puts it, they “could eat Rainbow for breakfast.”[35] The German squadron also included four modern light cruisers that were newer and faster and had longer-range guns than Rainbow, meaning that they could shell the Canadian vessel from a distance with impunity.

Luckily, Rainbow just narrowly missed encountering the German naval squadron off San Francisco, so just the fact that it was not destroyed may have made Canadians on the west coast think that they were being protected. Meanwhile, the two submarines were put into service protecting the west coast, even though they had no torpedoes, gyroscopes, spare tools, or even manuals![36] In fact, Canada’s west coast was not really being defended by the Rainbow and the two submarines and would have to depend on the Japanese navy, which did send a battleship and two armored cruisers to patrol the west coast of North America as long as Admiral Maximilien von Spee’s German squadron remained in eastern Pacific waters.[37]

The issue came to a head when von Spee’s squadron was intercepted by Rear Admiral Christopher Cradock’s Royal Navy squadron off Coronel, Chile. In the ensuing battle on November 1, the Germans inflicted a sharp victory, destroying two of Cradock’s ships, one of which was his flagship, HMS Good Hope. When it went down, it took with it the cream of the Royal Naval College of Canada’s first cadets, four young men who had joined Cradock’s ship when it visited Halifax in August. Arthur Silver, William Palmer, Malcolm Cann, and John Hatheway were Canada’s first battle casualties in the war.[38]

1. “Kenneth Ford,” speaking in L. M. Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1921), 47.

2. For an entertaining description of militia training at Petawawa before the war, see Frederic C. Curry, From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the First Canadian Brigade (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, 1916), 11–23. Curry described Petawawa as “fifty miles of sandy hills, covered here and there with second growth scrub.” In the summer, when the annual militia camp took place, it was extremely hot and humid, and “other attractions” included “sand fleas, mosquitoes, and black flies, so that after passing through a fortnight in Petewawa [sic] one is versed in all modern methods of warfare, including the subterranean and the aerial.” Curry, 11, 12.

3. Curry, 81.

4. On Price’s complex business career, see Jean Benoit, “Sir William Price,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/price_william_15E.html (accessed March 28, 2014).

5. Arthur Hunt Chute, The Real Front (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1918), 9. The first commander of Valcartier was Colonel Victor Williams, a Canadian cavalry officer who was adjutant general at militia headquarters when the war broke out. When the first contingent sailed for England in October 1914, he went with them and commanded the Eighth Brigade until June 1916, when he was severely wounded and captured at the battle for Mount Sorrel. After the war, he was promoted to Major General and commanded Military District 2 (Toronto), then was Commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police from 1922 to 1939.

6. Quoted in Vance, Maple Leaf, 29.

7. Zuehlke, Brave Battalion, 8.

8. Cook, At the Sharp End, 33.

9. Baldwin, “Holding the Line,” 4.

10. Morton and Granatstein, Marching to Armageddon, 5.

11. Gwyn, Tapestry of War, 54–57.

12. Jones, Fighting the Hun, 6.

13. Chute, 9.

14. Chute, 11–12.

15. Vance, Maple Leaf, 48.

16. Larry Worthington, Amid the Guns Below: The Story of the Canadian Corps, 1914–1918 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965), 5.

17. Jones, 16–17.

18. Strictly speaking, No. 2 Stationary Hospital was the first Canadian military unit to go to France, arriving at Boulogne in November 1914. On the 27th, it converted the Hôtel du Golf at Le Touquet into a 300-bed hospital, the first of a series of Canadian base hospitals along the French coast between Boulogne and Dieppe. But the Princess Pats were the first Canadian combat troops to go to France.

19. Jones, 21–22.

20. Jones, 22.

21. Worthington, 6–7.

22. Benoit. Borden and Hughes apparently didn’t think that embarkation had been a fiasco because Price was knighted for his services in January 1915.

23. Currie, 37.

24. Quoted in Worthington, 18.

25. Roger Sarty, The Maritime Defence of Canada (Toronto: Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies, 1996), 10, cited in Marc Milner, Canada’s Navy: The First Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 11.

26. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 21.

27. He was also the youngest Canadian to command a submarine, the first and only Canadian submarine commanding officer to be lost in action, and probably the last Canadian to be killed in the war while serving in the navy. His brother, Hamish Maitland-Dougall, was killed at Vimy Ridge in April 1917.

28. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 22.

29. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 25.

30. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 28–30.

31. Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, 160–61.

32. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 29.

33. Marc Milner, “The Original Rainbow Warrior,” Legion Magazine Online (May 1, 2004), http://legionmagazine.com/en/2004/05/the-original-rainbow-warrior (accessed September 27, 2013).

34. Milner, “Rainbow.”

35. Milner, “Rainbow.”

36. Milner, “Rainbow.”

37. Stacey, 160.

38. Vance claims that the first Canadian to be killed in the war was Stanley Wilson “of Toronto,” who had served for fifteen years in the Royal Navy and was serving on HMS Amphion when the war broke out. Operating with two destroyers, the Amphion had just sunk a German ship laying mines off the German coast and was heading for port when it struck a mine and quickly sank—the first Royal Naval vessel to be sunk in the war—taking about 150 sailors with it. Vance, Maple Leaf, 43. There is, however, no Stanley Wilson listed in the Royal Navy records as one of those died on the Amphion, but there was a Stanley Gerald Wilson, born in England in 1887, who drowned accidentally on August 5 while serving on HMS Falmouth. His body was not recovered, but he is commemorated on the Chatham memorial in Kent. There is no indication that he had any connection with Canada, and when his will was probated, he left his effects to his widowed mother, who lived in England.

Chapter 4

Preparing for War

None have written of the making of this force, but it is a story that richly deserves to be told.

—Arthur Chute, 1918

When the British warships arrived at Gaspé to escort the Canadian convoy to England, they were greeted “with rousing cheers, which were answered in kind by the men of the fighting ships. It was the most impressive sight I have ever witnessed,” Harold Baldwin of the 5th Battalion wrote, not merely because neither he nor anyone else in the first contingent had ever seen a naval squadron at sea but also because “up to that time nothing had so majestically expressed the sentiment of the Overseas Dominions hastening to the help of the mother country.”[1] He might well be impressed: the fleet carried the largest military force ever to cross the Atlantic to that point.

The ten-day voyage was uneventful and increasingly boring to most men, although the officers organized lectures, physical exercises, and lifeboat drills. It took longer than it might have because the ships carrying the horses had to keep their speed down. Even so, the journey was hard on the horses. As Colonel Currie recalled, every now and then there would be a stir on one of the horse transports “and a horse that had succumbed to mal-de-mere would be unceremoniously dumped overboard. Such occasions were marked by a fusillade of pistol shots from each ship as the carcase drifted past, for, contrary to traditions, most of us carried revolvers for the first time in our lives and were anxious to display our prowess.”[2]

There was also entertainment of sorts, put on by the men themselves that included singing, juggling, and boxing matches. Some battalions had brought a band, so there was music from time to time. There were also the Sunday church services, which may have had more meaning for the men than they had before they enlisted. According to Baldwin, these services

were deeply impressive and will remain in my memory as long as I live. The majestic ship ploughing through the water and the swish of the spray mingling with the men’s voices as we sang the hymns we learned in childhood made a lasting impression on all of us, and I am sure that the emotion of those moments has stayed with every man throughout our campaign in France and since.[3]

As the convoy approached England, concern about German submarine activity caused it to change its destination from Southampton to Plymouth, site of the Royal Navy’s great Devonport naval base. When the ships first sighted the southwestern tip of England, “a cheer went up from every throat on every ship. Men climbed into the riggings, bands began playing and everyone was happy to the limit.” By the time the ships arrived at Plymouth, “England was thoroughly awake to the fact that 33,200 men—British soldiers, loyal to the Motherland—had arrived from Canada.”[4]

Well, not really, because when the ships slipped quietly into Plymouth harbor, the townspeople were clearly unaware that they had brought the Canadian contingent because there was no one at dockside to greet them. The truth was that British censors, rightly fearful of German submarines, had prohibited the publication of any information regarding its voyage or imminent arrival.

The ships had to sit at dockside for some time before disembarkation could begin, and it was not until some of the men from Lord Strathcona’s Horse “displayed a huge pennant from the ship . . . that our identity was disclosed.” Within minutes—mere seconds according to Baldwin—the local population realized that the Canadians had arrived “and in less than half an hour the harbor was alive with every conceivable kind of craft, loaded near to the sinking point with cheering humanity.”[5]

Secrecy about the convoy’s arrival apparently extended to the local British military authorities as well. While they “sweated out how to unload the ships,”[6] the troops had to remain on them for another nine frustrating days. The tedium and frustration may have been somewhat relieved when riveters working on a battleship under construction nearby chalked “Bravo Canadians” in huge letters on its plating, and people on the dock responded to appeals from the trapped soldiers by throwing “cigarettes, tobacco, food, candy—in fact, everything that could comfort a soldier’s heart”—onto the decks.[7]

The British were understandably thrilled by the arrival of the Canadians, whom they imagined to be all “pioneers and backwoodsmen” from a frontier land occupied by Indians, fur trappers, and Mounties, a delusion that the troops, most of whom were office clerks, factory workers, and farmers—and British-born—did not think it necessary to correct.[8] At least some of them, even if British-born, did think of themselves as Canadians. One of them, Harold Baldwin, later recalled “the thrill within me” when the band played “O Canada” and it was “echoed back by the glorious hills of Devon.”

There was also an undercurrent of wonderful feeling that made me proud, not only that I was a Britisher, but that our grim old mother-nation was nursing there in one of her great harbors the robust manhood of a virile daughter-nation that had heard the call and answered and that I was a part, however small, of that answer.[9]

That feeling was not uncommon among the Canadians, whether British-born or not. It was not long, however, before they discovered that the imperialist sentiment which was so strong in Canada—in English Canada at least—appeared to be much weaker in Britain, a fact that was somewhat disconcerting to men who had crossed an ocean to defend that empire.

It was now that the Canadians first learned who would command the CEF in Europe. Happily, it would not be Sam Hughes, who had rushed across the Atlantic to plead his case with Lord Kitchener one final time, but Lieutenant General Edwin Alderson, an experienced British officer who had commanded Canadian troops in the South African War. Arthur Chute thought him “an ideal commander for Colonial troops” because he was “a hard rider in the hunting-field, a keen sportsman, a deep student of military science, progressive in his views, firm in his discipline, broadened by a world-wide experience, and hardened by many campaigns.”[10]

After what Baldwin described as a “thoroughly profane and good-natured farewell with the burly British sailors and a rousing welcome from the people,” the troops marched through crowded streets of cheering civilians to the train station to travel to the British army’s training camp on Salisbury Plain.[11] Captain J. F. C. Fuller, the British army’s Deputy Assistant Director of Railway Transport, was responsible for getting the Canadians and their baggage onto the trains for Salisbury Plain and recalled that they were “assaulted by every young and old harlot in the dual city. Men fell out or were pulled out of the ranks to vanish down side streets. A few reached the railway station, but the remainder painted Devonport and Plymouth pink, red, and purple.”[12]

Colonel Currie claimed that the trouble began while the men were waiting to board the train at the station because “quite a crowd gathered at the station, and everybody wanted to give my men bottles of whiskey and gin. I stopped it as well as I could,” but Hughes had not allowed any alcohol at Valcartier, so the men “had not had a drink for two months” and “a few . . . fell by the wayside.”[13] On reflection, Currie thought that “we should have tried out our men in Canada, and given them a free hand, so that the drinkers would be weeded out before coming over.”[14]

Next day the pubs were closed early but by then the town was “swarming with drunks.” Requisitioning an empty building, Fuller turned it into a prison in which drunken Canadians were locked for twenty-four hours. A train labelled Drunkard’s Special left each morning for Salisbury Plain until they were all gone, although a few went AWOL and only showed up days later.”[15]

Fuller also had to transport the division’s baggage, but because it had not been loaded onto the ships in any coherent order, nor been unloaded in any order, it was not delivered in any order either. The Canadian troops did not impress Fuller when they refused to load the baggage, arguing that “they had come to fight, not to do coolie work.” Fuller therefore had to round up British soldiers to do the job. Upon arrival, it took weeks to sort it all out.[16]

The Canadians arrived at Patney railway station, “shivering and blinking sleepily,” at one o’clock in the morning. There was no transport there to meet them, so they had to march eleven miles to the camp, each man carrying 100 to 125 pounds of equipment, guided through the country roads by “a constable with a lantern and a bicycle.”[17] Currie claims that it was “an ideal night for marching, neither too hot nor too cold,” but he was not carrying a heavy pack. Baldwin described it as “a truly murderous hike [that] blistered our feet [and] spoiled our tempers.”[18]

They arrived at dawn to discover tents flapping “sadly against tent poles as if sympathizing with our woeful plight.” The tents had simply been erected and left loosely staked for the Canadians to tighten and make habitable, but despite the rain, “we were too weary to bother with them; we simply dropped on the ground and slept the sleep of utter exhaustion.”[19] This was their introduction to Salisbury Plain, an area noted, as Currie laconically explained, “for its historical associations and its bad climate.”[20]

The winter of 1914–15 was exceptionally bad, and Salisbury Plain became “one seething quagmire of mud.” Indeed, Baldwin declared that “words are powerless to describe our continual conflict with that mud; it was everywhere—in our eyes, our hair, our tents, our clothes, our grub; we often had to swallow it as well as wallow in it.”[21] Arthur Chute described it as “a nightmare” which “the few surviving veterans still in the front line speak of . . . with greatest horror.”[22] To be fair, Salisbury Plain had been established as a summer camp, which explains why the men had to spend the winter in tents made of linen “so thin you could count the stars through them”[23] rather than thick waterproof canvas. It could be argued, of course, that living and training in fields of mud, while unplanned, proved to be useful preparation for what was to come in Flanders.

Despite the conditions, Baldwin claimed that “we were healthy and happy and, in consequence, were grumbling all the time. We roundly cursed our officers, anathematized the mud, swore we would mutiny—all done sotto voce. But we were very, very happy.”[24] Chute agreed that “no matter how gloomily the day began, dinner always found us gay, masters of our spirits. Hard exercise and ceaseless training prevented repining, and brought forth strong bodies and brave spirits.”[25]

Perhaps so, but one suspects that both men, writing while the war was still on, were not being entirely forthright with their readers. It is certainly not entirely true that the men were healthy. An epidemic of spinal meningitis spread through the camp that winter, making many men sick and killing twenty-eight of them.[26] “Those were the saddest, bluest days that I experienced in my two and a half years of soldiering,” Chute recalled. “Every day I could look out of my tent in the melancholic blur of mist and rain and see the draped gun-carriage moving to the ‘Dead March’ from Saul, while one battalion or another slowly followed their comrade to his grave.”[27]

Because so many of the first contingent were British men who had only emigrated to Canada in recent years, returning in 1914 was in a sense a free trip home, and they were received enthusiastically because they had returned to help the motherland. The transition from Canada to England was easier for them than for Canadian-born men because they had families to visit and knew their way around.

At the same time, the experience of returning “home” made many if not most of them realize that they “had become Canadianized” to the extent that Britain’s flaws—dirty industrial cities, crowded countryside, and the entrenched class system—and Canada’s advantages were now perhaps clearer to them than they had been.[28] As The Times later wrote, “whether born here or elsewhere, the men from the Dominion are essentially Canadian in temper and outlook, organized by Canada, inspired by Canada, and of the very warp and woof of Canada.”[29]

At the same time, however, several Canadians—obviously only those who could afford the luxury—arranged for their wives and children to move to England so that they could be close to their husbands until they went to France. The Manchester Guardian reported in July 1915 that a passenger liner had recently arrived with nearly a thousand such people.[30] According to Jonathan Vance there were 3,000 wives in England by May 1916, a number that rose to an astonishing 30,000 by early 1917.[31]

Most Canadians found the British people friendly and welcoming, and many stories were told of invitations to private homes for meals, especially during holidays like Christmas. At the same time, British shopkeepers and taxi drivers too often took advantage of the fact that the Canadians found the British sterling currency confusing—this was long before Britain adopted the decimal currency system used by Canada and the United States—and overcharged or cheated them when giving change. The Canadians often thought a one pound note was the equivalent of a dollar, when in fact it was worth five dollars. They were often confused as well about the value of a half-crown or a shilling.[32]

One is reminded of a story—a joke with a little bite to it—popular in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, years ago when many Cape Bretoners migrated to the Boston area in search of jobs. One time a man from Inverness who was among them went to the train station and asked when the train would arrive from Inverness. When the clerk said he had no idea but would check the schedules, the man from Inverness expressed great surprise that the clerk would not know when the train from Inverness would arrived because everyone in Inverness knew when the train from Boston would arrive.

The point is that Canadians, as they became more exposed to the world beyond their borders, began to learn that while they found it interesting and even important to be familiar with Britain, and later the United States, the citizens of those major powers, with their much larger populations and complex global interests, did not generally find it important to be especially familiar with Canada.

In other words, the center of empire, when viewed and experienced first-hand, proved not to be the idealized wonderful place that many Canadians had been taught to believe it was. This was hardly surprising, really, and reflected no fault on either side. It was just the almost inevitable discovery that reality cannot always meet the unrealistic expectations that advertisers, promoters, and propagandists create in those they seek to influence. This was not entirely a surprise or an original discovery, although it probably was to most of the Canadians in Britain during the war. As early as 1904, Sara Jeannette Duncan, a Toronto journalist, had published a novel entitled The Imperialist that described the disillusionment of a typical English-Canadian imperialist when he went “home.”[33]

Shortly after their arrival, the Canadians were granted a week’s leave. They went off in groups, large and small, some to visit family and some just to see the sights. Many naturally headed for London, but others went elsewhere, and some got no farther than the local village pubs. Inevitably, some of them drank too much and got into brawls or were just generally rowdy. The authorities, while somewhat sympathetic to the men’s high spirits and the fact that they had just been released from more than two weeks’ confinement on ocean transports, recognized that they had to ensure that the Canadian troops were not thought to be, and weren’t in fact, a mob of wild semi-civilized colonials.

Discipline was improved, if not to British military standards, at least to an acceptable level, aided by General Alderson’s decision to ignore Sam Hughes’s ban on alcohol in camp. Hughes may have been a teetotaler, but 31,000 men could not reasonably be expected to share his values. Alderson allowed beer but no hard liquor, and the impact on morale was apparent. Lieutenant Victor Tupper, a grandson of former Canadian Prime Minister Sir Charles Tupper, no doubt spoke for most of the troops when he said that Alderson “won the hearts of all ranks by fighting Sam Hughes and establishing wet canteens. He said, in short, that we had been treated as schoolboys long enough, and that in the future we should be handled like men.”[34] It was true, and the wet canteens became very important to the men, not just because of the beer but as social clubs.

Alderson spent the bleak winter of 1914–15 doing what he could to prepare the Canadians for combat. He dismissed some of the officers chosen by Hughes who clearly were not suitable to lead men in battle and replaced the worse than useless Canadian-made Oliver equipment and cardboard boots with better British equipment. He also alienated Colonel J. W. Carson, Sam Hughes’s personal representative in Britain—and possibly would have alienated some of the men as well if they had known—when he declined the War Office’s offer to kick British troops out of their barracks and give them to Canadians, which Carson had pressured the War Office to do. Alderson saw no reason why his men should be given special treatment and recognized the bad feeling that it would generate.

The Canadians were already less than popular with British military officials, who thought they were not only undisciplined but too informal. Harold Peat recalled that “as far as discipline was concerned, we did not even know it by name. The military authorities could not understand how it was that a major or a captain and a private could go on leave together, eat together and in general chum around together.”[35]

Despite the appalling weather, Alderson established a rigorous training program for the men. “It was drill, drill, drill, all day long, rain or shine, and it was almost always rain.”[36] Training actually included instruction in field tactics and shooting practice, while night alarms “would see us sleepily but frantically struggling to don our equipment so that we would make a record for our company being first at the assembly post.”[37] Every day men were delegated to clean and groom the horses at a nearby camp. One day, when it was part of Baldwin’s duty

to assist in taking a load of provisions for the men who were looking after the horses, we came upon a wondrous object, lying resplendent in all its native beauty, by the side of the road. Hardly believing our eyes, we bore down upon the stranger. It was real, and we rejoiced. Thirty-six gallons of good beer had wandered away from a jolting wagon. . . .

That night . . . by the dim light of two stable lanterns we paid our respects to the delightful stranger until we had exhausted its hospitality, and at “Lights Out” we tacked homewards, after an affectionate farewell to one another.[38]

There were more sober experiences as well. A few nights later, having gone to visit a friend who was serving in the Princess Pats, then training at a different camp, Baldwin was returning home across the hills when he

suddenly became aware of the roll of men’s voices singing an old familiar hymn. The wind blowing in my direction carried the sound even above the swish of the rain; in fact, the solemnity of it all was intensified by the steady swish of the downpour. Every evening men by the thousands congregated in our only place of recreation, the YMCA marquee, and on this evening they were singing that old favorite of all civilization, “Nearer My God to Thee.” It sounded like a mighty requiem.[39]

The final event before departing for France was a review attended by King George V and Queen Mary, Lord Kitchener—the famous general who was now British War Secretary—and other dignitaries on February 4, 1915. “Morning broke with the usual drizzle of rain,” Baldwin records, but “happily stopped later on, giving us instead a very fine day.” When the battalions arrived at the parade ground, the Highlanders were already there on the slope of a gently rising hill, “making the air hideous” with the “terrific skirling” of their bagpipes that “squealed their defiance of everything non-Scotch.”[40]

As far as the eye could see, line after line of infantry stretched up the gently sloping hill. A massed band at our immediate rear did much to give one a curious feeling of elation. The huge Union Jack directly to our front surmounting the reviewing platform streamed grandly out in the breeze that was steadily blowing across the plain.[41]

Eventually the royal party and attendant dignitaries arrived, and, after inspection, the march-past took place. It began with the artillery “thundering down the slope at a mad gallop,” then slowing down to walk “as proudly as horses ever did” past the reviewing stand. Next came the cavalry, wearing their Stetson hats and long yellow cloaks, followed by the battalions of infantry.

Following the review, “line after line of infantry arranged itself on each side of the track, and as the train bearing our distinguished visitors steamed through, a roar of cheering echoed and re-echoed away over the plain.”[42] They presumably did not on this occasion sing the song that had become so popular among the Canadians on Salisbury Plain:

We are Sam Hughes’s army

No bloody good are we

We cannot march, we cannot shoot

No bloody good are we.[43]

The next day, the troops marched to Amesbury to board a train that would take them to the coast, “a gruelling tramp of about an hour,” done in the rain, of course.[44] Five of the original battalions—the 6th, 9th, 11th, 12th, and 17th—were left behind, much to their disappointment, to form the basis of the Second Division already being recruited in Canada and to provide reinforcements to the battalions going to France. Thus, 18,517 men and 4,764 horses sailed to France in what was now being called the First Division. Some battalions had already acquired a mascot which led them on marches. Goats were popular for some reason, and the mascot of the 5th Battalion was “Billy,” a Rocky Mountain goat who served throughout the war and came home a much-loved veteran.

They sailed from Avonmouth, landing at St. Nazaire in Brittany three days later. It was not an especially enjoyable voyage. “We slept where we could,” according to Baldwin, “and passed the days huddled together on the lower deck of the old cattle barge, for she was nothing else.” Many played poker, gambling all they had, not thinking there was much point in saving their meager resources as they went to war.[45]

As the ships came into port on a beautiful spring morning, a crowd of French children was on hand singing “Tipperary,” which had become the unofficial “battle song of the British Army.”[46] The men responded with “a storm of cheering.” Oranges, bananas, grapes, and fruit of all kinds were thrown to them, “to which we replied by sending over buttons, badges, etc, these ‘Souvenirs Canadien’ being literally fought over by the crowd.”[47]

After disembarkation, all the equipment had to be unloaded, which this time was done by the troops themselves, then they marched to the train station to move north. It was not an easy march because it was done in “heavy marching order,” meaning that the men were carrying a “rifle and bayonet attached to braces” that were attached “by self-locking buckles to the belt,” plus a knapsack or valise containing a shaving kit, towel, soap, change of underwear, socks, one pair of boots, mess tin, “and any other little convenience you may wish to carry.” They also carried Sam Hughes’s infamous—and useless—entrenching tool, hanging from their belt, and a water bottle. In pouches attached to their belt and braces, they carried 120 rounds of ammunition, and a blanket and oil sheet rolled on top of the knapsack. As if this was not enough, they had been given goatskin coats upon landing, a gift from the Tsar of Russia, which gave off a powerful odor “not unlike the presence of a skunk.”[48]

At the station, the men had to load all the equipment onto the train, then boarded boxcars marked “Chevaux 8, Hommes 40,” meaning that they were designed to carry eight horses or forty men. It was here that the division suffered its first casualty, when Corporal John McMaster, a thirty-three-year old weaver from Hespeler, Ontario, fell under a train and had an arm and leg severed.[49]

They spent the next three days in these boxcars and “not only could we not lie down, but there was not enough room to even sit down, and when we rested we took it by relays. However . . . in spite of our cramped quarters we managed to be happy and enjoy our first glimpse of ‘La Belle France.’”[50] Colonel Currie, who traveled comfortably as an officer, claimed that while the men “had to stand [for] 48 hours” of their journey, they “did it without a murmur.”[51]

Three days later they detrained, “on a bleak, raw morning,” at Hazebrouck, on the Belgian border. This was the headquarters of Lieutenant General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien’s 2nd British Army, to which the Canadian contingent was attached because he had commanded Canadian troops in the South African War.

Arriving in the battle zone was both exciting and disturbing because, as Baldwin observed, “the terrible toll of this conflict was brought home to us. Line after line of wooden crosses, with the names and regiments of the men who lay beneath, stretched for an appalling distance. . . . Later on I noticed the poppies that abound all through sunny France, waving their pretty heads between the crosses.”[52]

A few days later, they began their march to Armentières, a distance of twenty-two miles. They were now just behind the front line at Ypres, the most bitterly contested sector throughout the entire war. “Before us [were] the roar of the guns and the scintillant flight of star-shells, and the first of the New World troops had come to take their place on the firing-line.”[53]

1. Baldwin, “Holding the Line,” 22.

2. Curry, From the St. Lawrence, 40.

3. Baldwin, 28.

4. Jones, Fighting the Hun, 27.

5. Baldwin, 29.

6. Cook, At the Sharp End, 70.

7. Baldwin, 30.

8. Curry, 42.

9. Baldwin, 30.

10. Chute, The Real Front, 17.

11. Baldwin, 31.

12. J. F. C. Fuller, Memoirs of an Unconventional Soldier (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1936), 7–8.

13. Currie, The Red Watch, 65.

14. Currie, 65–66.

15. Fuller, 8.

16. Fuller, 7.

17. Currie, 67.

18. Currie, 68; Baldwin, 34.

19. Baldwin, 34.

20. Currie, 69.

21. Baldwin, 36.

22. Chute, 16.

23. Currie, 73.

24. Baldwin, 36.

25. Chute, 18.

26. Chute claims that 400 Canadian soldiers died of spinal meningitis at Salisbury Plain, but this is not correct. Chute, 19.

27. Chute, 19.

28. Vance, Maple Leaf, 56.

29. The Times, May 22, 1915, quoted in Vance, Maple Leaf, 65.

30. Cited in Vance, Maple Leaf, 55

31. Vance, Maple Leaf, 86.

32. There were twenty shillings in the pound, making a shilling worth about twenty-five cents in Canadian currency. The half-crown coin was worth two and a half shillings, making it worth about sixty-three cents.

33. Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Imperialist (New York: Appleton, 1904, reprinted Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1961).

34. Quoted in Cook, At the Sharp End, 76.

35. Harold R. Peat, Private Peat (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1917), 19.

36. Currie, 86.

37. Baldwin, 43.

38. Baldwin, 45–47.

39. Baldwin, 54.

40. Baldwin, 60, 61.

41. Baldwin, 62.

42. Baldwin, 65, 66.

43. Cook, At the Sharp End, 100.

44. Baldwin, 66.

45. Baldwin, 69.

46. Baldwin, 70.

47. Baldwin, 71. Oddly, Harold Peat says “the populace could not have known of our coming, for there was no scene, nor was there a reception.” Peat, 34.

48. Baldwin, 72–74.

49. Cook, At the Sharp End, 96.

50. Baldwin, 75.

51. Currie, 116.

52. Baldwin, 76.

53. Chute, 23.

Chapter 5

Discovering Modern Warfare

Men must have a fairly elevated motive for getting themselves killed. To die to protect or enhance the wealth, power or privilege of someone else, the most common reason for conflict over the centuries, lacks beauty.

—John Kenneth Galbraith[1]

As is probably well known, when the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was assassinated on June 28, 1914, by a Bosnian Serb with high-level support in the Serbian government, the Balkans entered a crisis which quickly dragged in all the major powers in Europe. Austria-Hungary determined that it was time to eliminate the Serbian problem—a decision that was unacceptable to Russia for a variety of reasons. Russia’s mobilization triggered the Franco-Russian alliance, bringing France into the war, while Germany felt obliged to join in because of its alliance with Austria-Hungary.

Because Germany’s greatest fear was having to fight a war on two fronts, the German army had developed a war plan that addressed this danger. Assuming that Russia would be relatively slow to mobilize its potentially vast army, the Schlieffen Plan—named after Field Marshal Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, Chief of the Imperial German General Staff who designed it—called for an immediate attack on France designed to knock it out of the war quickly so that German troops on the Western Front could then be moved to the Eastern Front to help Austria-Hungary face the Russian behemoth.

It was a good concept and made eminent sense, at least in theory. The problem was that after the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 the French had built an extensive network of powerful fortifications along its border with Germany. While they might not have been strong enough to prevent the Germans from getting through, they certainly were strong enough to slow them down considerably.

The Schlieffen Plan got around this difficulty by proposing to invade France through Belgium because France had not built strong fortifications on the Franco-Belgian border. The reason they had not done so was not just that Belgium was not seen as a threat but also because Belgium had maintained a position of neutrality since becoming an independent nation in 1830. The Germans hoped, probably not too seriously, that Belgium would allow their army to travel through its territory in order to reach France, but if Belgium refused, regarding it as a violation of its neutrality, the Germans would invade Belgium.

This had the very significant result of bringing Britain into the war. Although it had formed an entente with France, which seemed non-committal, in fact it had guaranteed France that it would come to its aid if it were attacked by Germany, and the British and French armies had organized joint maneuvers for several years before 1914. When the crisis came, British politicians and public opinion were divided, but Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality proved to be the decisive issue, with the British going to war at least nominally in protest against Germany’s callous repudiation of a guarantee it and the other major powers had made in the Treaty of London in 1839.

The German army opened the war by sweeping through Belgium into northeastern France, with a view to moving westward, then swinging south to encircle and capture Paris, then turning eastward to attack the French army, which was supporting the Belgians in the north and had invaded Lorraine in the south. Britain sent the cream of its small professional army across to support the French in the north, where it first collided with sixty-one German divisions near the Belgian city of Mons.

Badly outnumbered and with the French troops already shaky, the British were badly mauled and began retreating southward. Then the Germans made a very serious mistake. Because the Russian army had mobilized much more quickly than expected, the German High Command shifted some of its forces in France to the Eastern Front to bolster its armies there. This endangered the Schlieffen Plan, which was based on overwhelming superiority of firepower and manpower.

With his advance slowing down because his forces had been weakened, German General von Kluck now decided not to encircle Paris but to make his southern swing east of the city, a decision that may well have been one of the turning points in the war. The Allied armies stopped retreating and turned to face the Germans at the Marne River, all available reserves were mobilized in Paris, and the German advance was stopped. The Schlieffen Plan had failed.

By now the weather was deteriorating, and both sides dug in for the winter, thus unintentionally changing the war from one of rapid movement to one based on 500 miles of trenches stretching from the English Channel to the border of Switzerland. What had been achieved by the end of November? The Germans had occupied Belgium—with the notable exception of the area around Ypres—and France’s northeastern industrial heartland, but the effort had cost them 750,000 casualties. The Allies had successfully stopped the German advance, but at a cost of 800,000 French and 95,000 British casualties, virtually the entire British pre-war army. A new and much larger army would have to be created, and it was obvious even to the most naïve or uninformed that the war would not be over by Christmas.

The First World War, although it became a global conflict, was fought primarily—at least as far as Britain, France, Canada, and eventually the United States were concerned—in a relatively small area that included western Belgium and northeastern France. Within that small area, it raged largely in Flanders, a territory that stretched from the North Sea in Belgium southwesterly to the French coast along the English Channel. The most important city in the area was Ypres, an ancient community that had become the center of the European cloth trade by the fourteenth century. It had since declined in importance but remained a regional market town popular with tourists because of its medieval buildings, most notably the Cloth Hall built in 1260. Ypres was, more than any other place, the focal point of the war on the Western Front for two reasons: because it was seen as the gateway to the strategically important ports on the English Channel and because it was an important railway center on the western edge of Belgium.

Ypres rests at the foot of several ridges, “an eight-mile arc of high ground to the east that semi-encircles it like a huge amphitheatre,” as the American writer Winston Groom has described it.[2] These ridges are not very high, reaching at most 160 feet, but they provide “a complete and commanding” view of both Ypres and Flanders. It was on or near these ridges that many of the war’s most infamous battles would be fought: Messines, Wytschaete, Ploegsteert, Hollebeke, St. Eloi, Hooge, St. Julien, Zandvoorde, Langemarck, Zonnebeck, Zillebeck, Pilckem Ridge, Polygon Wood, and Passchendaele.[3]

When the German advance was stopped in November 1914, Ypres was the center of a protrusion or salient which was the only part of Belgium that the Germans had not captured. Throughout the war, they wanted to straighten out their line, while the Allies were determined to deny this last piece of Belgium to them, even though a salient—surrounded on three sides—could only be defended at very high cost. Whether or not possession of the city and salient was important enough strategically to justify the four-year struggle over it is an open question, but the symbolic importance of Ypres appears to have trumped strategic considerations.

The number of casualties sustained at and around Ypres throughout the war was enormous—more than 180,000 on both sides in November 1914 alone. As Winston Groom rather dramatically but accurately puts it, it was at Ypres that “more than a million soldiers were shot, bayoneted, bludgeoned, bombed, grenaded, gassed, incinerated by flamethrowers, drowned in shell craters, smothered by caved-in trenches, obliterated by underground mines, or, more often than not, blown to pieces by artillery shells.” It became one of the largest graveyards on earth.[4]

Both sides spent the winter of 1914–15 entrenching themselves, training new troops, and building up their resources, with a view to launching new offensives in the spring. Because the power of artillery on both sides had already been clearly demonstrated—more than half of all wounds received during the war were caused by artillery—extensive, elaborate trench systems began to be built. From now until the summer of 1918, the war would be one of attrition, and no one quite knew how to wage war that way. Lord Kitchener frankly acknowledged, “I don’t know what is to be done,”[5] and if he didn’t, who did?

It was at this point that the first Canadians arrived. They did not come from the First Division, however, because it was still training in England. They were the Princess Pats, who entered the trenches at Vierstraat, just southwest of Ypres, on January 6, 1915, despite their limited training and having been in France for only two weeks. The urgency to bring them in doubtless reflected not cavalier self-confidence but the fact that British losses had been so catastrophic that they were desperately needed.

Over the next two days, the Germans shelled their position, and two men were killed, while several others were wounded. Thus, Norman Fry and Henry Bellinger became the first Canadian soldiers to be killed in action in Europe. Like virtually all the men in the Princess Pats, Fry and Bellinger had been born in England and had emigrated to Canada before the war. Both had lengthy previous service in the British army—Fry with twenty years in the Coldstream Guards, and Bellinger with ten years in the Rifle Brigade. Bellinger was buried at a nearby military cemetery, but Fry’s body was never found, and his name is among the thousands who have no known graves whose names are inscribed on the Menin Gate Memorial at Ypres.

A little over a month later, in the middle of February, the First Canadian Division arrived to join Sir John French’s British Expeditionary Force, two divisions of which were holding the line in the eastern part of the Ypres Salient. It was the first division that was not a regular formation from the British army, and not a great deal was expected of the Canadians by the British, who looked down on them as untrained colonial amateurs, or the Germans either. General Gustav von Fabeck, one of the generals who had led the German assault on Ypres in October 1914, lumped the Canadians in with the “Indians, Moroccans and other trash, feeble adversaries who surrender in great numbers if attacked with vigor”[6]—even though he had never had any dealings with Canadian troops.

Even though the division went into the trenches during a relatively quiet period, it sustained 278 casualties in March, an indication that the meaning of “quiet” was relative. It was, needless to say, a sobering adjustment. Harold Baldwin recalled that the land was full of holes, large and small, from the shelling, and “in places there were heads, hands and feet sticking out of the ground. In one old trench laid [sic] fully sixty dead Boches half exhumed. Broken rifles, ammunition, equipment, [and] broken machine guns of every kind lay about.”[7]

The division’s introduction to combat took place early in the great battle known as the Second Battle of Ypres. The Canadians were assigned to help the British capture the village of Neuve Chapelle and Aubers Ridge, which overlooked Lille, La Bassée, the Yser Canal, and the railway lines that ran between them. The British attacked on the morning of March 10 and achieved some initial success, until the Germans counterattacked on the 12th, stopping the British advance. The Canadians did not participate in the actual assault but were placed on the British flank, with orders to tie down the German forces in the trenches facing them with heavy gunfire backed up by artillery fire.

When this futile assault was abandoned, the British had lost nearly 13,000 men, including one hundred Canadians who were what is now callously described as collateral damage. The 2nd Battalion’s Colonel Currie concluded, rather curiously, that the battle “was a great victory for the British,” although he acknowledged that the Canadians “did not gather much of the fruits of victory.”[8] Tim Cook claims that “few complained,” however, because Canada “had begun to do its part at the front, but few suspected they would soon be called on to save the British army from catastrophic defeat.”[9]

That came a month later. In early April, the First Division was shifted from Sir Douglas Haig’s First Army to Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien’s Second Army near St. Julien, another village near Ypres, because a German assault was anticipated. It began with an artillery barrage on the still largely intact city for a week, which did huge damage, including the destruction of the medieval cloth hall. The Germans then redirected their artillery to the Allied trenches. According to Currie, “the streets of St. Julien were covered with a curtain of shell fire” and “the air was filled with the weird sound of the rifle bullets as they rattled a deadly tattoo on the few tiles that remained clinging to the charred and battered roofs.”[10]

A couple of hours later, a heavy, low-lying, greyish-yellow cloud was observed drifting westerly from the German lines. It was chlorine gas, which the Germans were using for the first time, despite having signed the 1907 Hague Convention banning the use of such weapons. This seemed at the time to be a great surprise to the British and French officers, although it should not have been. General Edmond Ferry, commander of the French Eleventh Division that was holding the line next to the Canadians, had learned about it in advance from a captured German soldier and had sent a warning to the commanders of both the British Twenty-Eighth Division and the Canadian division.[11]

Major Andrew McNaughton, who commanded the Canadian artillery, took the threat seriously, but aerial reconnaissance, if there was any, failed to reveal the 5,730 gas canisters that had been brought up to the German line before the attack. He nevertheless shelled the German lines anyway in an effort to damage the gas canisters, if they were in fact there, but obviously without effect.

Chlorine gas very quickly destroyed the lungs of those who breathed it in. “A man dies by gas in horrible torment,” Harold Peat said. “He turns perfectly black, . . . black as black leather, eyes, even lips, teeth, nails. He foams at the mouth as a dog in hydrophobia; he lingers five or six minutes and then—goes West.”[12] McNaughton described it similarly, if somewhat less dramatically. The men exposed to it “literally were coughing their lungs out; glue was coming out of their mouths. It was a very disturbing, very disturbing sight.”[13]

The German chlorine gas at Ypres was directed mainly at the French and Algerian troops who held the line on the left flank of the Canadians. About 6,000 troops were killed in a matter of minutes, and, not surprisingly, the Algerian troops, having no defense against a gas attack, panicked and fled. This created a four-mile gap in the line that enabled the Germans to take Kitcheners Wood,[14] where the British heavy artillery was located. The road to Ypres was now open, with only the newly arrived and inexperienced Canadian First Division in their way.

Remarkably, the Canadians, together with some French troops, stood their ground. This did not reflect bravery alone. When a Canadian Sanitary Corps officer with a background in chemistry quickly noticed that the brass uniform buttons of men exposed to the gas were turning green, indicating chlorine, the men were instructed to urinate into their handkerchiefs and hold them over their mouth and nose because the ammonia in urine would at least to some extent neutralize the chlorine.[15]

This did not mean that the Canadians were not affected by the gas. Baldwin, who was sent with a message to a dressing station at the back of the line, described what he saw there: “row after row of brawny Canadian Highlanders lay raving and gasping with the effects of the horrible gas, and those nearing their end were almost as black as coal. It was too awful.”[16]

The fact that the Canadians, totally inexperienced troops, held their line, while others around them fled when attacked by a shocking weapon against which they had no defense, is astonishing. As Cook says, “few would have suspected before the war that ordinary men,” meaning non-professional volunteer soldiers, “would rise to the occasion under such terrible strain. But most of the Canadians did, and their quiet heroics staved off defeat at Ypres.”[17]

Then, in the first major Canadian operation of the war, General Turner sent reserve companies of his Third Brigade into St. Julien, while Alderson ordered the Canadians to retake Kitcheners Wood. The problem was that Kitcheners Wood was on a hill overlooking St. Julien, so they would have to attack uphill. This became, in fact, a constant reality on the Western Front throughout the war: the Germans almost always held the high ground, which was relatively easy to defend, and Allied troops almost always had to attack uphill.

The attack by 1,600 men of the 10th and 16th Battalions took place just before midnight on April 22, even though there had been no opportunity to reconnoitre the ground. Inevitably, the Germans heard them coming, fired flares, and began shooting. When the surviving Canadians reached the German trenches, they were in a foul temper and took few prisoners, even though several Germans did try to surrender. In the process, the 10th Battalion was reduced to 5 officers and 188 men and the 16th to 5 officers and 260 men. In other words, two-thirds of the officers and men involved in the battle were lost.[18]

At this point, they dug in for the night. The Germans spent the 23rd shelling and firing on the Canadians, who managed to hang on despite serious losses. Then, early on the morning of the 24th, they launched another gas attack—this time aimed directly at the Canadians just west of St. Julien, hoping to drive them back with a view to capturing Poperinge, the Allied supply center eight miles west of Ypres. This gas attack was, of course, not unexpected, and the men had been issued cotton bandoliers which, when soaked in tubs of water that had been placed along the line and held to the nostrils, constituted some protection, albeit not much, from the gas. David Shand, a British soldier who happened to be in the area, later reported seeing between 200 and 300 Canadian soldiers at a casualty clearing station, some of them “still writhing on the ground, their tongues hanging out.”[19]

By noon on the 24th, most of the Canadian battalions had been shattered into company- and platoon-level units and had little or no communication with Alderson’s divisional headquarters, which were several miles to the rear and clearly out of touch with the situation. As a result, Turner found himself trying to direct a battle with scattered bits of information that were out of date by the time he got them. What was worse was that his headquarters were being shelled as well. In this situation, “the exhausted, slightly gassed, and increasingly shell-shocked” Turner made a serious error.[20]

Despite Alderson’s order to hold St. Julien, Turner instead moved his troops back to a stronger defensive position. It is not clear if he misinterpreted the order or concluded—rightly—that Alderson did not grasp how desperate the situation was. His decision, however, was suicidal for his troops because, in the middle of an intense, closely fought battle in broad daylight, he was ordering them to disengage and withdraw. This was when the 2nd Battalion, according to Colonel David Watson, suffered its heaviest losses in the battle.

What was worse was that the withdrawal of Turner’s Third Brigade created a 2,500-yard gap in the line, leaving Arthur Currie’s Second Brigade dangerously exposed. “Utterly bewildered” by the situation[21] and the failure of Major General Thomas Snow, commanding the British Twenty-Seventh Division, which included Canada’s Princess Pats, to respond to his calls for reinforcements, Currie now compounded Turner’s error by deciding to appeal personally to Snow at his headquarters.

This was tantamount to deserting his command during a battle. It was also futile. Snow, who had the “well-deserved reputation” of being “the rudest man in the British army” and had never made any secret of his contempt for “colonial” troops, not only refused to send reinforcements but told Currie to return to the front and “give them hell.” Currie later said it was the most “stupid remark” he had ever heard.[22]

Currie did return to his post and eventually pulled his men back to join what was left of the Third Brigade on Gravenstafel Ridge, a slightly better position. Curiously, Snow did in fact release five British battalions to fill the gap between Currie and Turner but didn’t deign to let Currie know he was doing it. Meanwhile, Turner had also abandoned his post, going to divisional headquarters to plead for reinforcements. When Alderson learned that Turner had withdrawn his brigade from the line and ordered them back, Turner refused, calling it suicide.

This entire situation was extraordinary. At the very beginning of their participation in the war, two Canadian generals were disobeying, or at least challenging, orders from British generals on the grounds that those generals didn’t understand the situation! It was undoubtedly true, but their behavior was insubordination. Meanwhile, the Germans had occupied St. Julien, but when Snow’s five battalions arrived, they counterattacked and drove the Germans back all along the front, enabling Currie to withdraw his forces.

The Princess Pats remained in the field to help defend Frezenberg Ridge against a German attack, which took place on May 8. Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Farquhar, had been killed by a sniper some weeks earlier, and his successor, Lieutenant Colonel H. C. Buller, had been wounded on May 4, so Major Hamilton Gault assumed command. He, too, was wounded during the heavy German bombardment on the 8th, and Captain Agar Adamson took charge.

By nine o’clock that morning, all of the battalion’s field and company officers were casualties from the savage artillery barrage, and NCOs had to take their places. Then Adamson was wounded that evening as well, and one of the NCOs, Lance Corporal A. G. Pearson, had to take command. The Princess Pats were cut off until eventually a British rifle brigade came to their rescue. The day’s fighting had cost them nearly 700 casualties out of their total strength of less than 1,000. Pearson was awarded the Military Cross for his part in the action and rose eventually to the rank of acting lieutenant colonel and commanded the regiment at the end of the war. The battle for Frezenberg, while largely forgotten by the general public, remains the most treasured battle honor of the Princess Pats to this day.

The Second Battle of Ypres dragged on until May 25 when it ended, like the first, in a stalemate. It had cost the Allies more than 70,000 men and the Germans about 35,000—a total, as Groom points out, of about 100,000 men “shot down for less than three miles of real estate.”[23] While neither side could be said to have won, the salient was now smaller than it had been, and the Germans occupied not only the high ground at the far edges of the ridges but also the high inner ridges close to the city. The Allies had given up the villages of Langemarck, Gravenstafel, St. Julien, Zonnebeck, and Westhoek, as well as Pilckem Ridge in the north and Frezenberg Ridge in the south.

But the situation could have been much worse, and almost certainly would have been if the Canadians had not been there, a fact recognized by both British and French commanders. While it was undoubtedly overstating the facts to say, as one British staff officer did, that they had prevented “one of the greatest disasters in the history of the British army,” they had, as Sir John French acknowledged, definitely “saved the situation.”[24] According to Baldwin, they were greeted by the British troops when they withdrew with “a terrific cheer,” which meant “more to us than all the eulogies of generals or newspapers.”[25]

What was impressive was not just that the Canadian division had shown extraordinary steadiness and courage in a very bad situation, but that the division was made up of amateur, inexperienced officers and men. As Vance says, “a more experienced formation might have recognized the impossibility of the situation and pulled back.” This, in fact, was what General Horace Smith-Dorrien, the commander of the British Second Army, had recommended, but the French “thought him weak and sacked him.”[26] The Canadians, “perhaps because they did not know any better . . . stuck in and fought” and “when they gave ground, it was only when there was no one left who could hold a rifle or [had] no more bullets left to fire.”[27] Henceforth, British commanders would show them more respect, as indeed would the Germans, and the word “colonial,” which had been used condescendingly, became “a mark of distinction.”[28]

The first Victoria Crosses awarded to Canadian soldiers in the war were earned during this battle, and there were four of them. Fred Fisher of the 13th Battalion earned the first Canadian VC at St. Julien on the 23rd, and Fred Hall of the 8th Battalion—Winnipeg’s “Little Black Devils”—earned the second on the 24th while trying to rescue wounded men. Both had to be awarded posthumously. Lieutenant Edward Bellew of the 7th Battalion and Captain Francis Scrimger, a medical officer, also received VCs. Bellew was captured in the battle, the first Canadian soldier to be captured in the war.[29]

If it was a tremendously impressive performance for inexperienced troops, it was also an extravagant waste of men. Of the 18,000 men it had in the field, the division sustained about 6,000 casualties, many of them survivors of the gas attack. As Canadian writer Pierre Berton has written, “in the years that followed, old soldiers in military hospitals would cough themselves to death, a grim reminder of those desperate moments in the green hell of the Ypres Salient.”[30]

One casualty of the spring fighting was the 10th Battalion’s Colonel J. A. Currie. “Gassed, exhausted, and having seen his men shot to bits” at the Second Battle of Ypres, “he snapped, and deserted from the front. He was found in a rear dugout, insensible, perhaps drunk, and definitely shell-shocked.”[31] Currie was only one of several pre-war militia officers who raised and led regiments overseas but proved unable to cope with modern warfare. Most didn’t crack, as Currie did, but had to be replaced because they simply lacked the technical or leadership skills required.

Surprisingly, many of the pre-war officers adapted well and proved to be courageous, effective leaders. Of the twelve battalion commanders who served at the Second Battle of Ypres, three—Arthur Birchall of the 2nd, William Hart-McHarg of the 7th, and Russell Boyle of the 10th—were killed, and Currie collapsed. The remaining eight rose through the ranks as the war continued, and every officer who later became a divisional commander had fought at the Second Battle of Ypres. So, too, had most of the brigadier generals, while many junior officers and NCOs who survived the battle rose to command battalions. In short, the Second Battle of Ypres veterans went on to fill most of the senior command positions in the Canadian Corps.[32]

Germany’s use of poison gas at the Second Battle of Ypres reinforced the impression among people in the Allied countries, which their governments naturally encouraged, that it was a nation of barbarians. This was, of course, hypocritical because Lord Kitchener, while denouncing the use of gas as barbaric, promptly asked the Cabinet to authorize the British army to use it as well. This was done, and it was used, not only by the British but by Canadian troops as well.

Hypocrisy trumps reason during wartime, however, and British and Canadian propagandists worked hard henceforth at encouraging people to see the war not as a clash of rival empires but a crusade, a war between Christian civilization and Hun barbarism. The mass circulation newspapers, which had learned how to manipulate public opinion, fully cooperated in the propaganda campaign either because their proprietors actually believed what they were saying or—more probably—because it was good for circulation. As important as it was to convince the civilian population that the war was justified, it was even more important to convince people in the United States. And American public opinion was already becoming increasingly sympathetic to the Allies because of ill-conceived German actions, such as torpedoing the Lusitania, a passenger liner, while the Second Battle of Ypres was raging, with the loss of nearly 1,200 lives, including 128 American men, women, and children.

Possibly the most powerful piece of propaganda that came out of the Second Battle of Ypres was a poem. “In Flanders Fields” was written during the battle on May 2 by Canadian Major John McCrae, a doctor serving as medical officer of the First Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery. Working in a dressing station near the Ypres Canal, McCrae wrote the poem after his friend, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was killed in the battle. According to Colonel E. W. B. “Dinky” Morrison, his commanding officer, McCrae read the poem to him one day but then tossed it into a waste basket, from which Morrison rescued it and sent it to Punch magazine in London. Morrison, it should be noted, was only one of several men who claimed the credit for getting the poem published.

In any event, “In Flanders Fields” was published in the December 1915 issue of Punch, and it almost instantly achieved astonishing popularity, undoubtedly becoming the best-known poem to emerge from the war. In 1919, Moina Michael, who taught at the University of Georgia, began wearing a poppy because of McCrae’s poem, and two years later the American Legion Auxiliary adopted the poppy as a symbol of remembrance for war veterans. Former President and Mrs. Wilson wore poppies on Armistice Day in 1921 when the body of the Unknown Soldier was laid to rest in Arlington Cemetery.[33]

The practice quickly spread throughout the United States, Britain, and Canada and continues to this day in connection with Remembrance Day. The sale of the poppies over the years by the Royal Canadian Legion has raised millions of dollars to support its work on behalf of veterans. John McCrae did not, however, live to see any of this. He died of pneumonia in a Canadian military hospital at Boulogne in January 1918. His family home in Guelph, Ontario, has since become a national historic site.

A less attractive impact of the Second Battle of Ypres and the demonization of the Germans was the emergence of the claim that a Canadian soldier had been found crucified on a barn door with bayonets through his hands and feet. The story spread like the proverbial wildfire among the Canadian troops and in Canada, with many soldiers claiming that they had personally seen the victim. Later, investigators were never able to confirm the truth of the story, and many men eventually admitted that they had not actually seen the crucified soldier but had been told about him by trusted sources. This Christ-like image of the martyred Canadian reinforced the importance of crusading against a barbaric enemy and seemed to justify Canadian troops when they showed no mercy to Germans or opted not to take prisoners in future battles.[34]

Remarkably, the Canadians began developing a reputation for not taking prisoners as early as the spring of 1915, when they first entered the trenches. Robert Graves, the British poet and writer who served in the war, later claimed that the Canadians had “the worst reputation for acts of violence against prisoners,” which they justified as revenge for the alleged crucifixion. “How far this reputation for atrocities was deserved,” he concluded, “and how far it could be ascribed to the overseas habit of bragging and leg-pulling, we could not decide.”[35]

While Graves’s memoir of his war experiences “is generally regarded as being as much fiction as genuine memoir,”[36] the Canadians did undoubtedly develop a nasty reputation, as did the Australians. Canadian troops did capture some 43,000 German soldiers during the war, however, and it needs to be remembered that surrendering on a battlefield when men were under great stress and emotions were running high was inevitably dangerous. Cook concludes, judiciously but perhaps just a little defensively as well, that the Canadians “likely performed no more executions than any other troops on the battlefield,” although they may have “tended to be more vocal about those executions they did commit . . . because this image suited their emerging reputation as elite fighting troops.”[37]

1. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977), 111.

2. Winston Groom, A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient 1914–1918 (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002), 34.

3. Groom, 35.

4. Groom, 35.

5. Quoted in Cook, At the Sharp End, 67.

6. Quoted in Groom, 98.

7. Baldwin, “Holding the Line,” 155.

8. Currie, The Red Watch, 173.

9. Cook, At the Sharp End, 107.

10. Currie, 219.

11. A. Fortescue Duguid, Official History of the Canadian Forces in the Great War, 1914–1919. Vol. 1 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1938), Appendix no. 180, 227–28.

12. Peat, Private Peat, 146.

13. Quoted in Groom, 99.

14. Kitcheners Wood was not, as might be expected, named after Lord Kitchener. It was so-called because it was where the cooks for French troops previously posted in the area had prepared their meals.

15. Groom, 100.

16. Baldwin, 168.

17. Cook, At the Sharp End, 143.

18. Cook, At the Sharp End, 128.

19. Quoted in Pierre Berton, Marching as to War: Canada’s Turbulent Years 1899–1953 (Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2002), 146.

20. Cook, At the Sharp End, 151.

21. This was Denis Winter’s interpretation. Denis Winter, Haig’s Command: A Reassessment (London: Penguin, 2001), 41.

22. Cook, At the Sharp End, 157.

23. Groom, 116.

24. Quoted in Berton, 147.

25. Baldwin, 176–77.

26. Many agree with Worthington that he was “one of the ablest generals on the Western Front.” Worthington, Amid the Guns Below, 28.

27. Vance, Maple Leaf, 63.

28. Vance, Maple Leaf, 64.

29. He was one of more than 1,400 Canadians captured at the Second Battle of Ypres. In total, 132 Canadian officers and 3,715 men were taken prisoner during the war. See also Desmond Morton, Silent Battle: Canadian Prisoners of War in Germany, 1914–1919. Toronto: Key Porter, 1992.

30. Berton, 147.

31. Cook, At the Sharp End, 148. Currie was sent to England, promoted to full colonel, and sent home. Not surprisingly, he does not talk about this in his war memoir. According to him, he was sent to England on medical leave because his lungs had been damaged by gas inhalation, then he was returned to Canada because “the Minister of Militia would like me . . . to lecture to the officers in training and assist in recruiting.” Currie, 286. He went on to express mild surprise that his name was not included in the list of honors earned at the Second Battle of Ypres.

32. Cook, At the Sharp End, 166.

33. Gene Smith, When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson (New York: William Morrow, 1964), 201.

34. Cook, At the Sharp End, 163.

35. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London: The Folio Society, 1981; First published 1929), 163.

36. Cook, At the Sharp End, 309.

37. Cook, At the Sharp End, 309.

Chapter 6

Building the Corps

This war is the suicide of civilization.

—Robert Borden, 1915[1]

The terrible spring of 1915 wasn’t over yet, because the Allies responded to the Second Battle of Ypres with their own offensive southwest of the city in Artois. The goal was for the French to capture Vimy Ridge, an exceptionally high escarpment in the generally flat country in this area that overlooked Lens and the Douai Plain and the important German railway lines that ran through it. If Vimy Ridge could be taken, possession of the Plain would become untenable, and it might even be possible to push the Germans out of Belgium altogether. The Canadians marched southeast and were reattached to Douglas Haig’s First Army to support the French by attacking the German line between Neuve Chapelle to the north and the village of Festubert to the south.

The first attack, carried out mainly by Indian troops against Aubers Ridge on May 9, went badly, but Haig naturally decided to try again. The second attack, on the 15th, made rapid initial progress despite the failure of a four-day artillery bombardment by more than 400 guns firing 100,000 shells to effectively destroy the German defenses. The Germans fell back to a line directly in front of the village, at which point Haig, sensing a breakthrough, ordered the Canadians to finish the job.

There were two problems, however. Haig’s staff officers had not actually surveyed the battlefield and were using maps that had been printed geographically backward and upside down. This may not have mattered much, in fact, as the heavy bombardment had destroyed many landmarks. What did matter was that light rain had become heavy, turning the battlefield which had already been churned up by the artillery barrage into a muddy quagmire.

The Canadians attacked early on the evening of the 18th and succeeded in reaching their objective, which was an orchard that became known as Canadian Orchard because it was the furthest point reached by the British in the battle for Festubert. But they were now trapped on the battlefield in full view of the Germans, unable even to get supplies from the rear. Currie was now ordered to launch a supporting attack. Convinced that it was a futile mission, he sent in only two companies of infantry and a small party of grenadiers—a force too weak to accomplish much, but as many men as he was prepared to waste. The only way forward was through a narrow communications trench, on which the Germans had naturally trained a machine gun. After considerable slaughter, the attack, which Currie admitted was “a complete failure,” was called off.

The outspoken Currie attributed the foolishness of the mission to the fact that the “son of a bitch who wrote this order never saw a trench.”[2] Haig—who was earning the title of “Butcher Haig”—naturally blamed the failure of the attack on the Canadians, claiming that they had not tried hard enough and should try again. Meanwhile, the Germans were bringing in reinforcements. After a weak barrage, the third Canadian attack took place early on the evening of the 21st, while it was still daylight. Inevitably, the Germans inflicted huge losses on them, then, as was their habit, withdrew and counterattacked the next day, supported by an artillery barrage.

As at the Second Battle of Ypres, the Canadians held their position, albeit at huge cost—18 officers and 250 men from the 10th Battalion alone—and then Haig, annoyed at the apparent weakness of the colonial troops, ordered yet another attack. It took place on the 24th, even though the ground was so chewed up that the troops had to carry footbridges to lay across the swamp. Recognizing the futility of the exercise, battalion commanders, with Currie’s “tacit approval,” committed only limited resources to the operation.[3] Surprisingly, however, this attack succeeded and the Germans withdrew from Festubert. It was a significant if minor victory for the Canadians, but it cost 2,605 casualties, 661 of them killed, for which they had gained 600 yards on a mile-long front. Put another way, four men had been killed for every yard gained. The battle was, as Turner said, a “pure bloody mess,” the result of confusion and incompetence both at and behind the front.[4]

Three weeks later, on June 15, Mercer’s First Brigade was ordered to repeat the exercise a few miles south, at Givenchy, where, again, troops attacked without adequate artillery support. While it was true that this assault was supported by the explosion of underground mines, the blast killed at least fifty Canadians as well as many Germans, and communications between those supposedly directing the operation and those doing the fighting were again inadequate and intermittent. The attack was a failure, resulting only in more pointless casualties, and the Canadians withdrew after only three hours’ fighting. By now, the French had given up trying to capture Vimy Ridge after sustaining huge losses, so the British and Canadians could stop trying to support them.

Alderson and his divisional staff, virtually all of whom were British, had certainly given the impression of being not only incompetent but callous, and apparently “out of touch with troops at the front,” an impression that had been growing among the Canadians since the beginning of the war.[5] To be fair, Alderson was under heavy pressure from Haig, who in turn was under heavy pressure from General Joseph Joffre—the commander-in-chief of the French army—and at this point in the war the British were still functioning as a junior ally of the French. Still, relations between the British and Canadian forces, and their governments, would soon be strained if this sort of thing continued.

While all this was going on, the Second Canadian Division arrived in England. Even before the first contingent had reached England in October 1914, the government had called for more volunteers. Like the First Division, the Second comprised twelve battalions organized into three brigades, plus supporting units such as cavalry, artillery, and engineers. Among them was the first francophone battalion from Quebec. The 22nd Battalion, which is still in existence today as the Royal 22nd Regiment or Van Doos—an English corruption of vingt-deuxième—would prove to be the only francophone battalion in the entire Canadian Corps throughout the war.

The first commander of the Second Division was the legendary Major General Sam Steele, a sixty-six-year-old Canadian professional soldier whose service went back as far as the Red River uprising in 1870.[6] Needless to say, this was a political appointment and an almost honorary one, as no one expected that Steele would actually take the division into combat.

Public enthusiasm for the war had not abated since August, and the new battalions had no difficulty in finding enough volunteers, although their composition differed significantly from that of the First Division. Whereas two-thirds of the men in the First Division had been British-born, the majority of men in the Second were Canadian-born. Taking the 25th (Nova Scotia) Battalion as an example, 39 of its 42 officers and 915 of the 1,300 men were born in Canada. Eighteen others were born in the United States, most being the sons of parents who had emigrated to New England in recent years.[7]

The organization and basic training of the Second Division was handled differently as well. Instead of having all the volunteers go to Valcartier, this time they remained in their respective military districts because Valcartier lacked winter quarters and training facilities. Nor did the Second Division cross the Atlantic in a dramatic convoy as the First had done. Instead, the battalions sailed separately on fast ocean liners, but not until May 1915 because British military authorities did not want them to arrive until the First Division had moved on to France, except for three battalions which went over in February to provide reinforcements for the First Division.

Quebec’s 22nd Battalion and Nova Scotia’s 25th Battalion sailed from Halifax on the Cunard Line’s Saxonia on May 20. Howard Johnstone, a lieutenant in the 25th Battalion, recalled that “all the way down the harbor we were cheered to the echo.”[8] While there must have been some trepidation about the voyage, as the Lusitania had been sunk by a German submarine with the loss of nearly 1,200 lives just two weeks earlier, the voyage was “uneventful.”[9] Happily, “the utmost cordiality” prevailed between the officers and men of the 22nd and 25th Battalions during the voyage.[10] Indeed, according to Johnstone the men of the 22nd “are learning to sing ‘Ho iero mho nighdean bholdeach’ in French, while we have translated ‘Alouette’ and ‘Ma Boule Roulante’ into Gaelic.”[11]

Upon arriving at Plymouth, the Second Division did not go to Salisbury Plain as the First Division had done, but to the British army camp at Shorncliffe, in the hills overlooking Folkestone in Kent. The British troops there had been moved to nearby Aldershot, the British army’s largest training camp. Most of the Canadian troops already in the country, with the exception of the Canadian cavalry depot at Canterbury, had already moved to Shorncliffe. One officer described Shorncliffe as “an enormous camp” that seemed like a Canadian city. “There are soldiers everywhere you go, all with the Maple Leaf on their caps, and the good word Canada on their shoulders. If you go into Folkestone in the evening, it is almost beyond description. The mass of khaki is bewildering.”[12]

Shorncliffe had the great advantage of being very close to the Channel ports such as Dover, Plymouth, and Southampton, but also fairly close to London. It possessed relatively modern brick housing for the troops, although there was not enough of it to accommodate the growing numbers of arriving troops. As a result, tents and “small waterproof huts” were provided, which Georges Vanier of the 22nd Battalion considered “excellent lodgings.”[13] As the war went on and the number of Canadians in England continued to grow, additional training camps were established at Bramshott, Crowborough, Hastings, New Shoreham, Otterpool, Seaford, and Witley, all of which were close to both Shorncliffe and Aldershot.

While the locations of the training camps were much better than Salisbury Plain, relations with the local population do not appear to have improved. Canteen services at Shorncliffe proved to be a major aggravation because they were operated by a private British company whose provisions were, according to Robert Clements, a sergeant in the 25th Battalion, not only overpriced but “unbelievably bad and the beer poor and weak.” To make matters worse, the canteen manager was “loud mouthed, insolent and just plain ignorant.” In view of the fact that the nearest pub was at least two miles away, this situation was a ticking time bomb, and one night it exploded. Some of the men “escorted” the canteen’s manager and staff to the camp gates, then burned down the building with all its contents. Needless to say, this caught the attention of the officers, who investigated the situation and remedied it.[14]

There was also serious trouble in nearby Folkestone, where the soldiers spent most of their short leaves. Some shopkeepers were not above overcharging for goods or taking advantage of the fact that many Canadian soldiers did not understand that the British pound was equivalent to five Canadian dollars. This was a risky practice, however, because many soldiers, being themselves British, were quite familiar with the currency.

As with the canteen problem at Shorncliffe, a crisis was not long in coming. According to Clements, there was an “incident” in Folkestone on the weekend after the Second Division arrived at Shorncliffe. The town was full of Canadians, who had just received their first pay. The trouble began in a fish-and-chip shop on Tontine Street in the lower part of the town when a Canadian soldier paid for his food with a one-pound note and was given change for a ten-shilling note (i.e., half of one pound).

When the soldier, who happened to know the difference, asked for the correct change, an argument resulted and “the Canadian and his friends took the shop apart and distributed its contents, including the shopkeeper, in the street. This citizen called on his friends for support,” and soon a major riot was taking place. Canadians rallied to the support of their friends and not only “took charge of the whole street” but “badly damaged” several shop fronts and “some looting took place.” Eventually, two British cavalry regiments had to be called in to restore order.[15]

It was a dry summer, and the open fields at Shorncliffe and the nearby rolling Kentish countryside provided ideal training conditions. According to Ralph Lewis, a Newfoundlander in the 25th Battalion, “we had to work, and real hard, too, but undoubtedly the process made us better men and tended to increase our confidence as soldiers.”[16] It ended with the inevitable formal reviews by Borden and Hughes—now proudly “Sir” Sam Hughes—and by Andrew Bonar Law, Britain’s Colonial Secretary (and a Canadian by birth), another by Princess Alexander of Teck, and finally by the King and Lord Kitchener. As usual for inspections, it rained on the day that the king and Kitchener came, but Vanier still thought it “a moving spectacle, the most beautiful day of my military life.”[17] Reflecting the way the war had been going, this inspection was also “watched with interest by a large number of civilians and by many wounded soldiers and nursing sisters from hospitals close at hand.”[18]

The Second Division crossed the English Channel by night in stages between September 13 and 17, 1915. Vanier described the departure from camp as “very impressive and cheering. We got a rousing send-off” and “at every railway station where we stopped the people gave us a parting cheer.”[19] Clements later recalled that the ferry “was packed with just enough room to stand or lie down on the decks,” so the men “were unable to unload their gear to relax as much as the cramped quarters and the filthy ship would permit.” Many men were sick, “as much from the foul air and ship smells as from the motion of the sea.”

Then the fastenings on one of the side hatches gave way and the doors swung open, so that the sea washed in when the ship rolled. For a brief time some fifty men near the doors were in danger of being washed overboard, but “they clung to each other while those further inside managed to pull them to safety.” After a struggle the ship’s crew got the doors closed, and happily, the distance across the Channel was not great.[20]

Upon arrival, the Second Division had to march to Bailleul, a small town southwest of Ypres, site of the Canadian headquarters. This was “the first real test” of its physical condition and morale,[21] and it didn’t get off to an inspiring start. “Through some brilliant staff work at the Battalion HQ level,” Clements recalled, the troops were actually sent in the wrong direction. “After several weary hours and becoming completely lost, a halt was called to wait for daylight and rescue from its wanderings. Meanwhile, Brigade HQ had been searching in all directions for their lost sheep, finally locating them soon after day break.”[22] The troops had to march back to their point of departure and proceed in the right direction, and they were expected to make up for the wasted time as well. “It was a sorry lot who came to rest in their proper place late that second night.”[23]

Another three days’ marching finally got them to their destination just over the Belgian border near the village of Locre. There they linked up with the First Division, which was already holding this front as the left sector of the British Second Army’s line north of Armentières, between Ploegsteert and Messines, facing the Germans who were entrenched along the Messines-Wytschaete Ridge.

The Canadian Corps was not involved in any major fighting after the vicious battles in the spring because the First Division required rest and rebuilding and the Second Division needed time to learn about modern war from the surviving veterans of the First Division. They were lucky because they avoided the first major offensive launched by the British in September 1915. The objective was to capture Loos, a strategically situated city on the Douai Plain overlooked by Vimy Ridge. The offensive failed, even though the British preceded it by launching 5,000 cylinders of the chlorine gas that they had denounced four months earlier as an immoral weapon, but at the cost of 100,000 casualties. Coming, as it did, at the end of a very bad year for the Allies, Loos was the last straw, and Sir John French was replaced as British commander-in-chief by Sir Douglas Haig, who had in fact conceived and led the attack on Loos.

The decision had already been made that when the Second Division got to France it would be joined with the First to form an army corps. As part of this restructuring, the Princess Pats and the Royal Canadian Regiment, which had arrived from garrison duty in Bermuda, were included as well, giving the new Canadian Corps a total strength of 1,354 officers and 36,522 other ranks. Australia and New Zealand had already established the precedent of having a Dominion formation, so the British were agreeable as long as a British general commanded it.

Sir Edwin Alderson, who had commanded the First Division, was promoted to command the Canadian Corps, and Arthur Currie, who had commanded the Second Brigade, was promoted to command the First Division. Clearly, Sam Steele, who had taken the Second Division overseas, could not actually command it in active service because of his age, so he now stepped aside, and Richard Turner was promoted to command it. Garnet Hughes, son of Sam Hughes, was promoted to command the First Brigade, replacing Malcolm Mercer, who was promoted to Major General commanding the Corps Troops, a miscellaneous collection of units that included the Canadian Cavalry Brigade, two unassigned infantry brigades, six regiments of Canadian Mounted Rifles, and supporting units. Lord Brooke,[24] who had commanded the Canadian forces at Petawawa in 1913, was given the Fourth Brigade. David Watson was promoted to command the Fifth and H. D. B. Ketchen got the Sixth.

The British War Office lent many officers to help the Canadian Corps develop the expertise needed to manage an organization of this size and complexity and to help it become an effective fighting force. While some Canadian nationalists, including Sam Hughes, wanted to replace British officers with Canadians, the reality of the situation was that there were few Canadian officers at this early stage of the war who had the training and experience to take over. As Arthur Currie, who strongly favored having the Canadians operating as a national formation, wrote, the question was not “whether a man is a Canadian or otherwise, it is one of the best man for the job.”[25]

Meanwhile, the government had agreed in June 1915 to recruit a third division, in addition to supplying 5,000 reinforcements a month to sustain the two divisions already overseas. Borden had reservations about the country’s ability to raise so many men, as indeed did Gwatkin, the Chief of the General Staff, but they accepted Hughes’s assurances that it could be done on the dubious grounds that, as Alderson had allegedly explained to him, the third division in an army corps was usually kept in reserve and therefore suffered no casualties. The Third Division was created not by another recruiting campaign, however, but by transferring the six mounted rifle battalions, the Princess Pats, and the Royal Canadian Regiment into it and adding other battalions from those already in England. Malcolm Mercer was promoted to command it.

At about the same time, when the British government abandoned its disastrous attack on the Dardanelles and shifted nine divisions from Egypt to Europe, it asked Canada to send twelve battalions to replace them. The government declined to do so partly because it was determined to keep its forces together but also because it suspected that public opinion would support sending troops to Europe more readily than sending them to the Middle East. It did, however, promise that the Third Division would be followed by the Fourth, which was duly authorized in the spring of 1916.

The Canadian Corps spent the “cold, wet winter” of 1915–16 guarding the southern flank of the “sacred and cursed Ypres salient.”[26] That winter in Flanders was very challenging, both physically and psychologically. Constant rain filled the trenches “with dirty, stinking water” and turned Flanders into “a solid mass of brown clay,”[27] and there was no respite for the men, who stood for days in thigh-deep water while trench shelters caved in, leaving no protection from the teeming skies. Conditions were little better in the billets, “where roofs leaked and it was all but impossible to coax more than a noxious smoke from the damp coke and charcoal that came up with the rations.”[28] Inevitably, there were many cases of influenza and other respiratory ailments, as well as “trench foot,” a condition like frostbite caused by the continued cold wetness which could lead to gangrene.[29]

The situation was not relieved by the food services. Rations consisted of bully beef, hard-tack, and water. Dry tea was issued along with “tommy-cookers,” small cans of fuel that could boil water. Unfortunately, too often the water was brought up to the trenches in cans that had previously been filled with gasoline, so the flavor of the tea left much to be desired. Francis MacGregor recalled that tea leaves were saved and “boiled over and over” and that there was no milk or sugar.[30] As a result, men scrounged the countryside in search of vegetables and livestock, which they purchased or “appropriated,” according to circumstances, and looked forward to their return to rest billets, where they could purchase meals in local restaurants and bars.

What was more demoralizing, undoubtedly, was the realization that after months of this there was no apparent end in sight. Thus, like the men of the First Division in 1914, those of the Second in 1915 found their first overseas Christmas “most depressing,” not only because the war was dragging on but because, in George Nasmith’s words, “the leaden atmosphere and lowering skies” of winter in northern France and Belgium were so different from the “blue cloudless skies, and crisp sparkling snow” of home.[31]

Despite the claim in the official history of the Canadian Expeditionary Force that there was none of the large-scale fraternization that had characterized the unofficial Christmas truce between British and German troops in 1914,[32] there definitely was fraternization, albeit on a smaller scale. Christmas Day “dawned peacefully” with only occasional gunfire, which “died down as the day advanced.” By early afternoon, shelling and rifle fire ceased completely, and soon German soldiers were seen lifting heads and shoulders cautiously over the parapet of their front line trench. Encouraged by the lack of fire from the Canadians, a number of them climbed over the top, advanced into No Man’s Land, and, making signs of friendship, invited the Canadians to join them to celebrate the occasion.[33] “Conversation proved difficult at first, but a number of the Germans spoke English fluently and others, having rehearsed for the occasion, one must judge, endeavoured to establish their benevolence by constant repetition of the phrase ‘Kaiser no damn good.’”[34] For nearly an hour the Canadians and Germans exchanged gifts of cigarettes, food, uniform buttons and badges, and beer. But news of this totally unacceptable behavior had reached headquarters, and the Canadians were ordered to return to their trenches immediately. “When all had reported back, a salvo of artillery fire, aimed carefully to burst at a spot where no harm to friend or foe would result, warned the Germans that the truce was over and that hostilities had been resumed.”[35]

Nineteen-fifteen had been a brutal introduction to modern warfare, but the Canadians had, on the whole, met the challenge successfully, performing at least as well as, if not better than, British troops, despite being mere “colonials.” Canada’s commitment to the war had grown profoundly, from the initial division to three, and a fourth was being contemplated. And while they were officially part of the British army, the Canadians were now organized into a distinct Canadian Corps, enabling most Canadian troops to serve together as almost a distinct army within the British army.

1. Diary, April 1915, quoted in English, Borden, 109.

2. Cook, At the Sharp End, 191, 189.

3. Cook, At the Sharp End, 212.

4. Quoted in Cook, At the Sharp End, 214.

5. Cook, At the Sharp End, 185.

6. Sam Steele (1849–1919) had not only served many years with the North West Mounted Police but had seen military service in the Red River expedition of 1870–71 and the North West Rebellion of 1885. During the South African war, he had raised and commanded Lord Strathcona’s Regiment. He subsequently commanded Military Districts 10 and 13 and served as Inspector General for western Canada before being given command of the Second Division in 1915. On his remarkable career, see S. B. Steele, Forty Years in Canada (New York: Dodd Mead, 1915; reprinted Toronto, 2000).

7. Public Archives of Nova Scotia [PANS], MG 100, f116, #9. J. P. Dwyer letter to editor, Halifax Chronicle, June, 1964.

8. Letter to Sydney Daily Post, May 28, 1915, reprinted in Halifax Morning Chronicle, June 18, 1915.

9. R. Lewis, Over the Top with the 25th: Chronicle of Events at Vimy Ridge and Courcellette [sic] (Halifax, NS: H. H. Marshall, 1918), 7. This was not always the case. J. Logan, who sailed with the 54th Battalion on the Saxonia a year later, described the food aboard ship as “hell. They damn near starved us and what we did get they gave to us like hogs. They had three stores for selling stuff—eatables—so a bunch of the 54th got together and raided them. We broke into a hatch and got lots to eat. They have the 54th Battalion charged up with six thousand dollars. We certainly played Hell. The men were starving and had to do something. Our own officers would not stop us, so you can guess how bad it was.” J. Logan, quoted in William D. Mathieson, My Grandfather’s War: Canadians Remember the First World War (Toronto: Macmillan, 1981), 27.

10. Letter to Middleton [Nova Scotia] Outlook, reprinted in Halifax Morning Chronicle, July 21, 1915. John Addy Sponagle was a medical doctor from Middleton who joined the 25th in November 1914.

11. Letter to Sydney Daily Post, May 28, 1915, reprinted in Halifax Morning Chronicle, June 18, 1915.

12. Report from unidentified 25th Battalion officer. Halifax Morning Chronicle, July 15, 1915.

13. Vanier diary, May 30, 1915, quoted in Georges Philias Vanier, Georges Vanier, Soldier: The Wartime Letters and Diaries, 1915–1919, ed. Deborah Cowley (Toronto: Dundurn, 2000), 38. Born in Montreal, Georges-Philéas Vanier became a lawyer and served in the 22nd Battalion until being wounded in 1918, resulting in the loss of a leg. He earned the Military Cross and bar and the Distinguished Service Order. After the war, he returned to his law practice before serving as aide-de-camp to Governors General Lord Byng and Lord Willingdon. He served as secretary to the Canadian High Commission in London from 1930 to 1939, then was briefly Canadian minister to France. Promoted to major general, he served as Canadian minister to the governments in exile of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Yugoslavia, and Canadian representative to the Free French and later the Conseil National de la Résistance. He served as ambassador to France from 1944 to 1953, then was the first francophone governor general of Canada from 1959 to 1967.

14. Robert N. Clements, Merry Hell: The Story of the 25th Battalion (Nova Scotia Regiment), Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919, ed. Brian Douglas Tennyson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 49–51.

15. Clements, 44. Clements adds that the Canadians subsequently “learned to protect their money better and the public became more aware of the hazards of trying to shortchange them.” Clements, 45. Lieutenant Karl Wetherbe of the 6th Battalion Engineers noted on June 5th, 1915, that “A. Cozzie’s fried fish shop . . . has been placed out of bounds for all troops.” Karl Wetherbe, From the Rideau to the Rhine and Back: The 6th Field Company and Battalion Canadian Engineers in the Great War (Toronto: Hunter-Rose, 1928), 25.

16. Lewis, 7.

17. Vanier to his mother, September 2, 1915, quoted in Vanier, 52.

18. R. C. Fetherstonhaugh, The 24th Battalion, C.E.F., Victoria Rifles of Canada, 1914–1919 (Montreal: Gazette Print. Co., 1930), 20.

19. Vanier to his mother, September 14, 1915, quoted in Vanier, 57.

20. Clements, 73.

21. G. W. L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1962), 110.

22. Clements, 75.

23. Clements, 75.

24. Leopold Greville (1882–1928) was the son of the Earl of Warwick and became the sixth earl in 1924. He served as aide-de-camp to Sir John French until being given command of the Fourth Brigade.

25. Quoted in Cook, At the Sharp End, 307. On British assistance to the Corps, see Douglas E. Delaney, “Mentoring the Canadian Corps: Imperial Officers and the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918,” The Journal of Military History 77, no. 3 (July 2013): 931–53.

26. Morton and Granatstein, Marching to Armageddon, 106.

27. MacGregor, 39; Clements, 78.

28. MacGregor, 39.

29. Vanier reported on November 2nd that there was five feet of water in the communications trench. Vanier diary, November 2, 1915, quoted in Vanier, 83.

30. MacGregor, 40.

31. MacGregor, 40.

32. Nicholson, 127. George Nasmith also claimed that “on Christmas day the enemy made numerous efforts to fraternize with the Canadians but without success,” acknowledging only that “there was practically no firing throughout the day and lugubrious German songs were wafted at intervals to our trenches.” George Gallie Nasmith, Canada’s Sons and Great Britain in the World War, Vol. 1 (Toronto: J.C. Winston, 1919), 260. Stanley Weintraub makes no reference to the 1915 “truce” in Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce. New York: Free Press, 2001.

33. Fetherstonhaugh, 34.

34. Fetherstonhaugh, 34.

35. Fetherstonhaugh, 34–35.

Chapter 7

Shock Troops of the Empire

As bad as the later battles of 1917 and 1918 turned out to be, none of them at their worst could fully compare with what happened to the Canadian troops on the Somme in September and October of 1916.

—Robert Clements[1]

In a sense it could be argued that 1916, as desperate as that appalling year was in terms of wholesale slaughter on the Western Front, marked the turning point of the war, at least as far as Canada was concerned. Borden was not satisfied with British political leadership generally, but he especially was not satisfied with its management of the war and had become convinced that Canadian troops were being squandered by incompetent British officers. He was not, of course, the only one who was thinking this way, but he was the leader of the senior Dominion, which at that point had some 90,000 men in uniform.

In January 1916, he told Sir George Perley—the American-born lumber magnate and political colleague whom he had appointed acting high commissioner (equivalent to ambassador) in London following Sir Charles Tupper’s death in 1914—that Canada would not continue to send troops to be wasted and must be given a voice in the formulation of policy.[2] This would become an important issue in 1916, and the fact that the Canadian government was paying the full costs of its growing army strengthened Borden’s hand in demanding some control over its deployment.

The hated and ineffective Ross rifle was finally replaced by the British Lee-Enfield in the spring, the American-made Colt machine guns were replaced with lighter and more reliable British Lewis machine guns, and as fast as they could be produced, steel helmets were replacing the useless cloth caps that the Canadians had been wearing since 1914.

Most significantly, in October Borden finally sacked Sam Hughes, the erratic, unstable, albeit energetic Minister of Militia and Defence, replacing him with A. E. Kemp, a competent Toronto financier. At the same time, management of the Canadian army in Britain and France and direct relations with British military leaders was assigned to the equally competent Perley, who became Minister of Overseas Forces with a seat in the Cabinet. Finally, Borden’s frustration and increasingly vocal criticisms of British military leadership impressed David Lloyd George, the Secretary of State for War—who fully agreed with him—who in December 1916 staged a political coup and replaced the ineffective Herbert Asquith as prime minister.

It cannot be said that the year began well on the battlefield. In fact, it could not have begun in a more disastrous way. In March, the Canadian Second Division was called upon to support the British Third Division’s attempt to eliminate a small trench salient—which has been described as “a slight knoll or mound in a water-logged area”[3]—at St. Eloi in the Ypres Salient. On the day of the attack, March 27, six enormous mines were exploded, wiping out two German companies, destroying large sections of the German trenches, and creating huge craters. Even so, the Germans mounted a determined defense, supported by an intense artillery bombardment that further churned up the mud. The fighting took place in utter chaos until the night of April 3/4, when the British withdrew and were replaced by the Canadians. The Germans naturally seized the opportunity provided by this transition to counterattack.

Meanwhile, the weather, which had improved somewhat during March, had reverted to the usual heavy rain so that the fighting was taking place not just in a sea of mud but one in which trenches no longer existed and shell-holes and craters were filled with water. It was, according to Robert Clements, “one big sea of mud and water,” accompanied by fog which “reduced visibility to nil.”[4]

As the German artillery shelled the Canadians stumbling blindly in the darkness, rain, and fog, many men disappeared in the mud or water-filled shell holes and were drowned. The 31st Battalion’s Donald Fraser reported that the Canadians were led by a guide to one of the craters, “a slimy pool of rotten, stagnant water,” where they were left “with no information regarding the whereabouts of the enemy or our immediate communications.” In the morning, “the sights that met our gaze were so horrible and ghastly that they beggar description. Heads, arms and legs were protruding from the mud at every yard and dear God knows how many bodies the earth swallowed.” At least thirty corpses could be seen lying in the crater “and beneath its clayey waters other victims must be lying killed and drowned.”[5] Meanwhile, communications completely broke down, meaning that divisional headquarters “could give no protective artillery support and indescribable chaos reigned.”[6]

By noon on the 4th, half of the 27th Battalion had been killed or wounded, and that night the Germans retook most of what the British had captured. The original intention had been for the Fifth Brigade to continue the attack, but common sense finally prevailed, and it was required only to hold off the German counterattacks while building whatever shelter the ground and weather would permit.[7] The 25th Battalion was especially hard hit, Ralph Lewis recalling that “some of our boys were obliged to remain in those mine craters for twenty-four hours with no chance of communication with the rear.” Lieutenant Howard Johnstone and his men beat off “no less than five attacks in four hours.”[8]

Gerald McElhenny later described the battle of the St. Eloi craters as “beyond a doubt the most trying experience” which the 25th Battalion ever experienced. “The situation may better be imagined than described.”[9] Agar Adamson, a captain in the Princess Pats, wrote to his wife that it was “beyond my powers to describe what has happened in the last 4 days, but I know if I read what I am going to write, I doubt if I would be able to believe it was not written by a liar or [was] the ravings of a lunatic.”[10]

When it all came to an end on April 19 with both sides exhausted, the few surviving Canadians surrendered. Canadian losses were about 1,400, three times those of the Germans, and as one historian has said, “the slaughter had all been over the ownership of seven holes in the mud.”[11] “None of us ever expected to get out,” Adamson wrote; “our only salvation was that the Germans had no idea how weak we were.”[12] Although Nasmith was undoubtedly correct when he described it “as one of the greatest feats of endurance and stubborn tenacity in the history of Canadian arms, being only rivalled perhaps by the battle of Passchendaele,”[13] he was also right when he said that “there was little glory in it for anybody and a good deal of prestige lost by many.”[14]

It was, in fact, a total disaster and repercussions were not long in coming. Alderson arrived on the 15th to deliver a stern reprimand to both the officers and men of the Second Division on their initial performance, callously telling the inexperienced troops that it was “the duty of every officer, non-commissioned officer and man to die in the trenches” if necessary to prevent the enemy from breaking through their lines.”[15] He later told the division’s officers not only that “it was their duty to shoot a man who retired in the face of the enemy without orders” but also that “by their determination and force of character, they must get a real grip of their men.”[16]

To reinforce the point, Alderson sacked the commanders of the 25th and 27th Battalions. Sir Herbert Plumer, commanding officer of the British Second Army, took action as well, firing his Chief of Staff and several British officers. He wanted to fire Turner and Ketchen, the commanders of the 5th and 6th Canadian Brigades, because they clearly had lost touch with what was going on and had provided little or no leadership. Alderson agreed with Plumer, especially bearing in mind Turner’s weak performance at the Second Battle of Ypres.

Haig, however, after weighing “the danger of a serious feud between the Canadians and the British” against “the retention of a couple of incompetent commanders,” rejected Plumer’s recommendations and Prime Minister Borden concurred. The extraordinary result was that Turner and Ketchen retained their commands and Alderson was fired![17] He was replaced by Sir Julian Byng, a British cavalry officer who had proven to be an effective field commander and had managed the successful British withdrawal from Gallipoli.[18]

The battle for St. Eloi was a severe embarrassment for the Canadian Corps, but using the inexperienced Second Division troops in what was clearly going to be a difficult operation was obviously unwise, especially when no reconnaissance had been done in advance and the almost immediate breakdown in communications meant that neither Turner nor Ketchen had any real idea of what was going on. More seriously, however, neither had made any real effort to find out what was going on, and their analysis of what information they had was inadequate. The historian of the Canadian Corps, Tim Cook, actually places most of the blame for the fiasco on Plumer because he had sent inexperienced troops into a very difficult if not impossible situation, relying on commanders like Turner and Ketchen, who had not thus far distinguished themselves as field commanders.[19]

When Byng assumed command of the Corps, he moved quickly to deal with its weak leadership. He removed or transferred fifteen battalion commanders and two Brigadier Generals, including Turner. This proved to be a very wise move because it made available to Borden a highly competent military administrator. Turner was subsequently promoted to the newly created position of Chief of Staff of the Canadian forces in England, responsible for their training and overall management, and did an excellent job of it. Byng also wisely recognized that Arthur Currie, while still learning his job, was fundamentally sound and determined to improve as a commander, and in effect adopted him as his protégé and likely successor.

While the badly shaken Second Division tried to recover from this disaster, the Third Division arrived from England and joined the First Division on Mount Sorrel and at nearby Observatory Ridge, almost the only high ground remaining in British hands at Ypres. As one historian has described it, Mount Sorrel was “a scarred lump of earth that glowered sullenly over the battlefield”[20] that included Sanctuary Wood, the most easterly projection of the Ypres Salient. If the Germans could take it they would overlook the entire salient and might be able to force the Allies to withdraw from it.

On June 2, they launched a fierce artillery bombardment on the totally inexperienced Third Division, killing Major General Malcolm Mercer, its commanding officer, who became the highest ranking Canadian officer to be killed in the war. The 5th Canadian Mounted Rifles lost 90% of their men and the Princess Pats about half. Lieutenant Colonel George Baker of the 5th Canadian Mounted Rifles and Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Buller of the Princess Pats were both killed. Baker was also a member of parliament, the only one killed in action in the war.[21] Brigadier General Victor Williams, commander of the Eighth Brigade and formerly commandant of Valcartier at the beginning of the war, was wounded and captured.

This savage artillery bombardment was followed by an infantry attack that drove the Canadians back, giving the Germans control of Mount Sorrel and leaving the road to Ypres open and undefended. They staged another attack on the 3rd, but the Canadians managed to hold their positions until on the 12th Currie’s First Division was brought in and staged a major assault, which seemed to surprise the Germans, who fell back to their original positions. At this point both sides gave up the struggle. The Canadians had held their ground but at the cost of 8,000 men, while the Germans had lost almost 6,000 trying to take it.

A month later, Haig launched the infamous Somme offensive, the largest British offensive of the entire war. As unbelievable as it may seem in retrospect, given its horrendous cost, this major offensive was undertaken primarily to relieve pressure on the French army which was suffering staggering losses at Verdun. “Put in the most brutal terms,” one historian has said, “the plan was about killing Germans on the Somme so they couldn’t kill Frenchmen elsewhere.”[22] To be fair, though, it was also intended to eliminate a large German salient overlooking the Somme River.

As usual, it began with a massive artillery barrage that fired 1.7 million shells,[23] followed by an attack by eleven British divisions on the morning of July 1, 1916—Dominion Day (Canada’s national birthday). Despite the magnitude of the bombardment, the German trenches had not been badly damaged, and the attacking troops faced the usual barbed wire and hundreds of German machine guns.

It was on this first day of the Somme offensive that the Newfoundland Regiment was virtually wiped out at Beaumont-Hamel. Two previous assaults there by British troops having failed that morning, the Newfoundland Regiment was sent in, sustaining 684 casualties, 310 of them killed. It was a catastrophe that shook Newfoundland badly, and to this day, July 1 is commemorated in Newfoundland—which joined Canada in 1949—not as Canada’s national birthday but as the anniversary of the slaughter of the Newfoundland Regiment.

The Newfoundlanders had plenty of company. On that irrational first day of the Somme offensive, the British suffered 57,470 casualties, 19,240 of them fatal. Morton and Granatstein do not exaggerate when they describe the first day of the Somme offensive as “a military tragedy of epochal dimensions.”[24] Nobody ever called Haig faint-hearted, however, and these losses did not cause him to have second thoughts, so the offensive carried on. But the Germans were as committed to holding this salient as the Allies were to holding the Ypres Salient, so the slaughter continued through July and August into September. Fortunately, the Canadians, who had marched the fifty miles south from Hazebrouck to Albert in August, were held in reserve until early September, by which time Robert Clements said “the oldtimers could fairly smell all the signs of something big rapidly coming along.”[25]

It was indeed. The Canadians were then called upon to assist the British in an attack intended to capture the village of Courcelette and Regina Trench, a major German defensive position which lay beyond it. The attack began with a major artillery barrage on September 15. Arthur Chute, who was in an ammunition column delivering shells to the artillery, described arriving at the front and hearing

the unbroken voice of a thousand guns . . . firing at white heat. For a moment I was dazed by the awful shock of noises. Then the meaning of it all flashed upon me, and I was happy—a creature of the very storm itself. This was England’s answer to the Hun, our voice to the Beast.[26]

The attack on Courcelette marked the first use of tanks, but their impact proved to be insignificant. Haig had been promised 150 tanks for use at the Somme, but only 49 arrived and only 13 actually participated in the battle. Seven of them were allotted to the Canadians, but only one got through. Even so, the tanks did alarm the Germans and helped the men of the Second and Third Divisions to take the town. It was a brutal battle, however, involving house-to-house fighting during which the 22nd and 25th Battalions fought off eleven counterattacks in two days.

Beyond the village lay Kenora Ridge, which was taken after another week of hand-to-hand combat in heavy rain, but the initial assault on Regina Trench failed badly. Of the 580 men of the 43rd (Cameron Highlanders) Battalion who went over the top, only 68 returned.[27] Then the Fourth Division, which had arrived in France during the summer but had just entered the lines, was brought in and succeeded after two weeks of hard fighting. It was “a hollow victory,” however. Once a strong position, Regina Trench “was now smashed and flattened by repeated bombardment—a mass of debris and dead bodies, too many of them Canadian.”[28]

Still, the Canadians had achieved their objective, and Haig was delighted with the results, declaring that the capture of Courcelette had resulted in “a gain more considerable than any which had attended our arms in the course of a single operation since the commencement of the offensive.”[29] Lieutenant Colonel Edward Hilliam, who commanded the 25th Battalion and was himself wounded at Courcelette, declared that “I have the honor of commanding the finest body of men I have ever seen.”[30] Nasmith, ever the cheerleader, waxed poetically over “the magnificent courage and heroism” of the Canadians, concluding breathlessly that “only when some master of language takes up the theme, and with brain aflame with the heroic grandeur of their deeds, will justice be done to the glorious achievements of our Canadian boys during their ‘blood baths of the Somme’.”[31]

The victory came at tremendous cost, however: 7,230 casualties “for half a broken-down small French town and a few acres of muddy clay.”[32] Clements believed that, “as bad as the later battles of 1917 and 1918 turned out to be, none of them at their worst could fully compare with what happened to the Canadian troops on the Somme in September and October of 1916.”[33] Some were beginning to wonder if the cost of supporting the British was not merely high but much higher than necessary. “Call it glory if you like,” said Clements, but “some of those who were there and managed to survive had other words for it and for those higher up who had sent them and their wonderful young friends head-on into that deadly trap.”[34] When the Rev. Charles Gordon, the 43rd Battalion’s chaplain, returned to Canada on leave not long after the battle for Regina Trench and stopped in Ottawa to see Sam Hughes, an old friend, he told him about the battle. Hughes “listened to my story with tears of rage and grief running down his face,” he later recalled. “It would not be fair to give a verbatim report of his comments on the High Command of the British army.”[35]

When Haig finally called an end to the Somme offensive because of the deteriorating weather conditions—and just possibly because of the horrendous losses—in November 1916, the British had lost 419,654 men, more than 24,000 of them Canadians, the French had lost 194,541, and the Germans had lost 465,525. What the Allies had gained was thirty miles of ground, seven miles wide. It was, as Morton and Granatstein have said, “mass butchery ordered by generals who were all-powerful and never seen.”[36]

The Canadians now returned north to trenches in front of Bully Grenay in Artois to prepare for the British spring offensive at Arras. Now recognized by the British to be outstanding “storm troops,” they were henceforth designated to lead the assault in difficult battles. Their assignment in the Arras offensive was to capture Vimy Ridge, the prominent escarpment overlooking the Douai Plain that the Allies had already tried three times and failed to take back from the Germans at a cost to both sides of some 300,000 men.

The British Arras offensive was part of a larger offensive spearheaded by the new French commander-in-chief, Robert Nivelle, intended to destroy German soldiers in a large salient that extended north from Soissons to Arras. Because the Canadians were being asked to take Vimy Ridge without any British support (except for one brigade), all four divisions of the Canadian Corps were brought together to fight as a unit for the first time.

Byng planned the assault in exceptional detail, training the troops on a full-scale mock-up of the battlefield built behind the lines so that all officers and even the men knew the terrain and understood precisely what was expected of them. Instead of attacking in line in successive waves, the usual practice, they would attack in platoons, moving at their own rate. Tramways and plank roads were built to carry ammunition and other supplies and equipment to the front line, and when the day of battle came, the men got to the attack point through underground caves and tunnels instead of having to slog through the mud.[37]

After a two-week barrage of a million shells, an even more intense bombardment by 1,000 guns began at 5:30 a.m. on April 9—Easter Monday. When the troops attacked in sleet and snow, they kept pace with the barrage which was coordinated to creep just ahead of them, a risky new but effective tactic. Within an hour, the First, Second, and Third Divisions had reached their objectives. Only the Fourth Division, which was responsible for taking and holding Hill 145, the highest and most important point on the ridge, encountered problems, but by mid-afternoon on the 10th, it had succeeded as well, thanks largely to an assault by Cape Breton’s 85th Highlanders—a newly arrived battalion that had received limited training and had no battle experience—that courageously charged up the ridge with no artillery support.

British military historian Robin Neillands described Vimy Ridge as “that rare thing, a Great War battle that went according to plan.”[38] It was a good deal more than that. It was the first major Allied victory on the Western Front since the war had begun and the Canadians “had captured more ground, more prisoners, and more guns than any previous operation, all of which had been done against the heaviest of odds.”[39] John Keegan has described the Canadian achievement as “sensational.”[40] Probably equally gratifying to Canadians at home at least was the praise that came from below the border. “Well done, Canada,” wrote the New York Times.[41]

The price, as usual, was high: more than 10,500 casualties, 3,598 of them killed. According to Tim Cook, the fighting at Vimy was “far more intense and costly than the slaughter on the Somme” and April 9 was not only “the single bloodiest day of the entire war for the Canadian Corps” but the “bloodiest in all of Canadian military history.”[42] Four Victoria Crosses were earned that day.

The Canadian triumph at Vimy Ridge was more than just a battlefield victory or a vindication of meticulous organization and planning. It was “the turning point in the war for the Canadian Corps: the point where it moved from an amateur to a professional warfighting force.” From Vimy onward, the Canadians “never lost another set-piece or major engagement, delivering victory after victory, and often against the most formidable of defensive positions. By war’s end, the Canadian Corps had fully earned their [sic] reputation as shock troops.”[43]

But the victory at Vimy Ridge was more important than that. Because all four Canadian divisions fought together for the first time and all regions of Canada participated in the battle, the victory immediately assumed a profound symbolic significance for Canadians. It was seen as signifying the birth of a nation. Percy Willmot, a sergeant in the 25th Battalion, realized this at the time, writing that “as the guns spoke, over the bags they went—men of CB [Cape Breton], sons of NS [Nova Scotia] & NB [New Brunswick]—FC’s [French Canadians] & westerners—all Canucks.”[44] In other words, as Brigadier General A. E. Ross later said, “in those few minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation.”[45] Many Canadians would agree with historian D. J. Goodspeed that “no matter what the constitutional historians may say, it was on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917, and not on any other date, that Canada became a nation.”[46]

As Cook has rightly observed, Vimy Ridge “overshadows every other event in Canada’s Great War experience.”[47] This was recognized in 1922 when the French government ceded the ridge and the land surrounding it to Canada in perpetuity. On it stands a stunning white marble memorial unveiled in 1936 that lists the names of 11,285 Canadian soldiers of the Great War who have no known graves. Over the years the Vimy memorial has become the overseas focal point for Canadian war remembrance, virtually a shrine to which Canadians make a pilgrimage by the thousands every year.

Julian Byng was rewarded for his triumph at Vimy Ridge with a promotion to command the British Third Army. He was succeeded as commander of the Canadian Corps by Arthur Currie. The Canadian Corps, already a distinct army within the British army, finally had a Canadian commanding officer. Currie had impressed Byng and other British military leaders and would go on in the final year and a half of the war to impress British political leaders as well. Indeed, Lloyd George, who had little confidence in Haig, seriously contemplated promoting Currie to command all British forces in the field in 1918.

Unfortunately, he did not look like a general. Not having had a military education and a professional military career, he didn’t demonstrate the usual ramrod posture, didn’t wear the usual Kitchener-style moustache, and had a pear shape which his uniform could not conceal. Truth be told, he looked like a soft headquarters general who enjoyed the luxuries of behind-the-line chateaux. But his appearance was misleading, although it was true that he was awkward when trying to chat with the men and he didn’t like to get muddy when visiting the trenches. But he genuinely cared about his men, and as the historian Jonathan Vance puts it, “he was thorough and dogged” but also “showed the flashes of flair and creativity that characterize the best commanders.”[48]

His first operation was to direct the Canadian Corps’ participation in the next phase of the Arras offensive. Sir Henry Horne, commanding the British First Army, ordered Currie to capture Lens, which was eight miles northeast of Arras and visible from Vimy Ridge. After studying the situation, Currie concluded that a frontal assault on Lens would serve little purpose and be very costly in casualties, and persuaded Horne that, before advancing on Lens, he should first capture Hill 70, which would give the Allies the high ground overlooking the city and force the Germans to counterattack over open ground.

The attack took place on August 15, and Hill 70 was taken in a fierce battle, after which the Canadians advanced on Lens. As expected, the Germans counterattacked—twenty-one-times—through an artillery barrage and the fire of 250 Canadian machine guns. When it all came to an end on the 25th, the Canadians had achieved their main goal, taking Hill 70 and inflicting some 20,000 casualties on the Germans, but they had failed to capture Lens. Brigadier General E. W. B. Morrison, the Canadian Corps’ artillery commander, described it as “the greatest Boche-killing week that anyone in the Canadian Corps has ever taken part in.”[49] Even though Haig called it “one of the finest minor operations of the war,” a British staff officer told Morrison that Horne was “appalled” by how many shells had been fired. Morrison’s blunt reply: “So are the Germans.”[50]

For one of the first times on the Western Front, the defending forces had suffered greater losses than the attacking forces. In the somewhat distorted logic of the war, this was thought a positive result. But it was also, in Currie’s opinion, “the hardest battle in which the Corps has participated.”[51] Six Canadians earned the Victoria Cross, but there were more than 9,000 casualties. It is arguable that there were too many casualties, in fact, because, while Currie had meticulously planned the assault on Hill 70, the attacks on Lens were “clumsy, hurried affairs that betrayed Currie’s inexperience.”[52] The operation should have been called off earlier than it was, and even though Haig was undoubtedly right when he observed that the morale of the Corps was “very high,”[53] some at least were beginning to wonder if Currie was beginning to seek success at the expense of his men.

With the collapse of the Nivelle offensive, there were mutinies in fifty-four divisions of the French army, and Nivelle was replaced as commander-in-chief of the French army by General Philippe Pétain. Meanwhile, revolution had broken out in Russia in March 1917, and the Germans had understandably assisted Vladimir Lenin to return home from Switzerland. Not surprisingly, the Canadian government was less helpful when Leon Trotsky set out for Russia, sailing from New York to Europe via Halifax. He and his family were removed from the ship and taken to an internment camp at Amherst, Nova Scotia, for questioning. During their twenty-six day stay, while they were being interrogated, Trotsky typically established a strong rapport with many of the 850 internees—some of them German prisoners of war but most of them immigrants from what had become enemy countries—and when he and his family were finally released, they enjoyed a rousing send-off that included the camp orchestra playing a revolutionary march. Captain F. C. Whiteman, an officer at the camp, later recalled that Trotsky had “quite the most powerful personality of any man [he had] ever met before or since.”[54] Trotsky resumed his journey to Russia, where he joined Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who got control of the government six months later and promptly took Russia out of the war.

Despite the failure of the Nivelle offensive, Haig believed that the Germans were on their last legs, and he was now finally able to launch his long-desired Flanders offensive. The result was what was officially called the Third Battle of Ypres but was more popularly known—especially in Canada—as Passchendaele, a series of battles that took place between July and November 1917 for control of the ridges south and east of Ypres. The fighting began on June 7 with an attack on the German positions at Messines-Wytschaete Ridge, which dominated Ypres. Nineteen mines—many of them planted by a tunnelling company of Cape Breton coal miners—shattered the whole face of the ridge on an eight-mile front, after which it was easily taken. This prepared the way for the main offensive later in the summer by removing the Germans from a strategic position which they had held for two years.

The offensive began on July 31 with an attack on Pilckem Ridge, and by early October, the Germans had been pushed back to Passchendaele Ridge, at heavy cost to both sides. At this point the Canadian Corps was brought in to capture the village of Passchendaele and the high ground on which it stood. Ironically, its starting point was virtually the same line the Canadians had defended more than two years earlier before the first gas attacks in April 1915.

The decision to use the Canadian Corps—and the Australian Corps—for the assault on Passchendaele reflected Haig’s belief that the Canadians and Australians were the best troops under his command and he needed a victory, both to bolster his own reputation and to raise morale in the British army. Bernard Montgomery, then a captain who rose to the rank of Field Marshal in the Second World War and became Lord Montgomery of Alamein, commented at the time that “the Canadians . . . seem to think they are the best troops in France and that we get them to do our most difficult jobs.”[55] It was true: they were and Haig did.

By now the weather had turned and the heavy rain was making field operations very difficult. Convinced that capturing Passchendaele would cost some 16,000 casualties, Currie planned carefully, making sure that he had ample supplies and had prepared his troops thoroughly and had enough artillery support. Even so, Will R. Bird, a Nova Scotian serving in the 42nd (Black Watch) Battalion, complained that “the whole affair was cockeyed. We were new in the sector. None knew the terrain. None knew what defenses the German had or his strength. The place after dark was a swampy wilderness with nothing to use as a guide.”[56]

The attack was launched on October 26 in heavy rain and battlefield conditions that were about as bad as they could be. John Angus MacNeil of Inverness, Cape Breton, later recalled that “it wasn’t raining—it was pouring down” and “more people drowned in the shell-holes than were killed by the bullets.”[57] Even so, after two weeks of ferocious fighting, Passchendaele was taken on November 6, and by the 10th the Canadians held all the high ground northeast of the town. The Third Battle of Ypres confirmed the Canadian Corps’ reputation as shock troops and may also have saved Haig’s career.

As usual, the cost of victory was high: more than 16,000 casualties, as Currie had predicted. One of them was Corporal Robert Clarence Borden, a young cousin of Sir Robert Borden, who had enlisted in July 1916 and was killed on October 30 while serving in the 85th Battalion. Nasmith thought Passchendaele was “the most terrible and tragic battle” that the Canadian Corps ever fought,[58] and Will Bird, who was there, later said that no man who survived Passchendaele would ever be the same.[59] Whether or not it was worth the price is obviously open to debate, but Clements recalls that among the men “there was not any feeling of glorious achievement or particular satisfaction.”[60] Agar Adamson, by now commanding the Princess Pats, noted that “the higher authorities are expressing to us their appreciation of our efforts, but I cannot help wondering if the position gained was worth the awful sacrifice of life.”[61]

Again, many men wondered if Currie was becoming just another butcher like Haig. What they didn’t know was that he had argued against the operation, warning Haig that it would be a slaughter and not worth the cost: “Let the Germans have it—keep it—rot in it!”[62] But Haig “spoke in the rosiest terms of our chances of breaking through,” according to Lieutenant Colonel Alan Brooke, who was Chief Artillery Staff Officer for the Canadian Corps at the time. “I had been all over the ground and, to my mind, such an eventuality was quite impossible. I was certain that he was misinformed and had never seen the ground himself.”[63]

It was true. When Lieutenant General Launcelot Kiggell, Haig’s Chief of Staff—who enjoyed a successful military career without ever actually having to serve in the field—went to have a personal look at the battlefield, he was genuinely appalled at the almost inconceivable horror of the sea of mud littered with corpses and is reported to have burst into tears, asking “Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?”[64]

Haig’s Ypres offensive was a catastrophe. Lloyd George, who had opposed it, described it as a “senseless campaign” and “one of the greatest disasters of the war.”[65] Borden claimed in 1937 that Currie told him shortly after the battle that its only purpose was “to save the face of the British High Command.”[66]

According to Denis Winter, the British and German forces fired 30 million shells at each other and sustained a million casualties in an area just seven miles wide. This constituted more killing per square yard than any other battle in the entire war.[67] And what had been achieved? Haig had pushed the Germans back five miles, thereby actually enlarging the salient, which was still surrounded on three sides by the Germans.

But if the Ypres offensive had failed, the Canadians had succeeded at Passchendaele, demonstrating that the Canadian Corps was “much the most effective unit in the BEF [British Expeditionary Force]” and Currie was emerging as “the most effective commander in the British Army.”[68] The Australians were similarly recognized as being among the most effective troops on the Western Front. Cyril Falls, a British staff officer who later wrote the first volume of the British official history, privately acknowledged that while the British army was the best disciplined, it was also the “least effective in the war, though one can’t say so in the Official History.” He blamed the British class system, which through most of the war only allowed men with the right social background, regardless of ability or experience, to become officers, as well as ineffective training, which he blamed on Haig.[69]

Undeterred, the ever-confident Haig now launched another offensive, this one against Cambrai, a French city just west of Arras and about forty-five miles south of Ypres. It was a key supply center for the German Hindenburg Line, which the Allies could threaten by capturing the nearby Bourlon Ridge, and unlike the Ypres Sector it was not a mass of mud. This was significant because Haig intended the battle for Cambrai to be fought primarily by tanks.

The battle for Cambrai, which began on November 20, 1917, has been described as “a leap into the war of the future,”[70] not only because it involved 430 tanks leading 5 infantry divisions but also because the massive artillery bombardment that preceded it, firing both regular shells and poison gas, was supported by hundreds of British airplanes bombing the German positions.

It was ill conceived, however, because tanks alone could not win a battle and Haig did not have enough troops, having had to send several divisions to Italy after the hapless Italians had just suffered a disastrous defeat at Caporetto. Haig knew that he didn’t have enough infantry, however, and therefore planned to use the Cavalry Corps if necessary as dismounted reinforcements for the infantry. This meant that, while the Canadian Corps did not participate in the battle, the Canadian Cavalry Brigade, made up of the Royal Canadian Dragoons, Lord Strathcona’s Horse, and the Fort Garry Horse, did because it was part of the British Fifth Cavalry Division.

The assault began well as the tanks crushed the barbed wire and reached the German trenches, but by the end of the first day, about half of them were out of commission from shellfire or mechanical problems. The British did succeed in taking Bourlon Ridge and Wood, but the Germans naturally counterattacked, and Byng did not have enough men to hold them back. At this point, on November 20, the Cavalry Corps launched an old-fashioned cavalry charge against entrenched German machine guns and artillery. The Fort Garry Horse participated in this remarkable if foolhardy episode and paid a high price for the honor: of the 133 cavalrymen who took part in it, only 46 survived.

Among them was Lieutenant Harcus Strachan, who took command of his squadron when its leader was killed. After overrunning the German machine-gun positions, he attacked the artillery and personally killed seven gunners with his sword. He and his men then fought their way back through the German lines at night on foot, taking fifteen prisoners with them. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery and leadership.[71]

It was all very gallant, but it also proved to be pointless because the British were unable to capture Cambrai, although they did gain some ground. They lost 44,000 men, the Germans lost 41,000, and the battle for Cambrai “devastated British morale like no other setback of the war.”[72] The Canadians could at least take some comfort from the fact that they had again distinguished themselves.

Sir Robert Borden. Source: Anon., Canada in the Great World War, vol. 2 (Toronto: United Publishers, 1919–21), 26.

Sir Sam Hughes. Source: Anon., Canada in the Great World War, vol. 2 (Toronto: United Publishers, 1919–21), 32.

Valcartier Training Camp, 1914 (Bain News Service. 1914. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2005017536/).

Sir Arthur Currie. Source: Anon., Canada in the Great World War, vol. 3 (Toronto: United Publishers, 1919–21), frontispiece.

Facts for Canadians poster (Toronto: Central Recruiting Committee, No. 2 Military Division. 1915. From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2005691291/).

Sir Julian Byng. Source: Anon., Canada in the Great World War, vol. 3 (Toronto: United Publishers, 1919–21), 256.

John McCrae. Source: Anon., Canada in the Great World War, vol. 6 (Toronto: United Publishers, 1919–21), 110.

75th Battalion fixing bayonets in Regina Trench. Source: Anon., Canada in the Great World War, vol. 4 (Toronto: United Publishers, 1919–21), 180.

Canadian troops after capturing Vimy Ridge. Source: Anon., Canada in the Great World War, vol. 4 (Toronto: United Publishers, 1919–21), 148.

General Pershing visiting Canadian Headquarters. Source: Anon., Canada in the Great World War, vol. 5 (Toronto: United Publishers, 1919–21), 90.

Taking the salute at Mons. Source: Anon., Canada in the Great World War, vol. 5 (Toronto: United Publishers, 1919–21), 228.

Crossing the Rhine. Source: Anon., Canada in the Great World War, vol. 5 (Toronto: United Publishers, 1919–21), 256.

Vimy Memorial. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vimy_memorial_from_the_north_side_of_the_face.jpg).

Canadian Governor General Lord Tweedsmuir placing a wreath at the Canadian Memorial Cross, Arlington Cemetery, March 31, 1937 (Harris & Ewing, 1937; from Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/hec2009009178/).

1. Clements, Merry Hell, 203.

2. Upon reflection, Borden did not send the letter, but he kept it, no doubt because it reflected his mounting frustration, and quoted it in his memoirs, published in 1938. See Robert Laird Borden: His Memoirs, ed. Henry Borden. Vol. 2 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1938), 622–23.

3. Worthington, Amid the Guns Below, 42.

4. Clements, 138.

5. Quoted in Groom, A Storm in Flanders, 145.

6. Nasmith, On the Fringe of the Great Fight, 261–62.

7. Clements, 145.

8. Lewis, Over the Top with the 25th, 21.

9. G. C. McElhiney, “The 25th Battalion,” in Nova Scotia’s Part in the Great War, ed. M. S. Hunt (Halifax, NS: Nova Scotia Veteran Publishing Co., 1920), 75.

10. Quoted in Groom, 92.

11. Worthington, 44.

12. Quoted in Groom, 93.

13. Nasmith, On the Fringe of the Great Fight, 262.

14. Nasmith, On the Fringe of the Great Fight, 248.

15. Library and Archives Canada (LAC), RG 9, III, A, Series 8, File 8–1–52. Alderson notes.

16. Ibid.

17. Alderson was given the nominal post of inspector general of the Canadian forces in England but retired in November 1916. He was replaced as commander of the Canadian Corps by Sir Julian Byng, a British cavalry officer who had recently managed the British evacuation at Gallipoli. He subsequently commanded the British Third Army and in 1925 became governor general of Canada.

18. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 145. For what it was worth, when the 25th retired from the lines for a rest, it was visited by King George and Queen Mary, who “walked through our lines and appeared much interested in our welfare.” Lewis, 21.

19. Tim Cook, “The Blind Leading the Blind: The Battle of the St. Eloi Craters,” Canadian Military History, 5, no. 2 (Autumn 1996): 9–10.

20. Vance, Maple Leaf, 74.

21. George Harold Baker (b.1877) was a lawyer in Sweetsburg, Quebec, when he was elected to the House of Commons in 1911. He was the son of George Barnard Baker (1834–1910), who served in the House of Commons from 1870 to 1874, 1879 to 1887, and 1891 to 1896. He also served in Quebec’s Legislative Assembly from 1875 to 1878 and was a member of the Senate from 1896 until 1910.

22. Vance, Maple Leaf, 75.

23. As impressive as this seems, it must be remembered that about 30% of British shells were duds that did not explode.

24. Morton and Granatstein, Marching to Armageddon, 94.

25. Clements, 198.

26. Chute, The Real Front, 41–42.

27. Gordon, 214.

28. Worthington, 59.

29. Quoted in Nicholson, 173.

30. Hilliam to GOC, Fifth Brigade, quoted in McElhenny, 78. Perhaps so, but there weren’t many of them left to command by the end of the battle. When the 25th reassembled at Albert, there were only eighty-nine all ranks. “In just short of three weeks the great battalion of over 1,000 finely trained wonderful Nova Scotians had temporarily ceased to exist.” Clements, 158.

31. Nasmith, Canada’s Sons, 302.

32. Clements, 153.

33. Clements, 203.

34. Clements, 153.

35. Gordon, 285.

36. Morton and Granatstein, 120.

37. Vance, Maple Leaf, 103.

38. Robin Neillands, The Great War Generals on the Western Front 1914–1918 (London: Robinson, 1998), 350.

39. Cook, Shock Troops, 148.

40. Keegan quoted in Vanier, Georges Vanier, Soldier, 191.

41. Quoted in Berton, Marching as to War, 180.

42. Cook, Shock Troops, 143–44.

43. Cook, Shock Troops, 146.

44. Percy Willmot to Dorothy Willmot, April 16, 1916, quoted in Brian Douglas Tennyson, Percy Willmot: A Cape Bretoner at War (Sydney, NS: Cape Breton University Press, 2007), 161.

45. Canadian War Museum, “The Battle of Vimy Ridge,” http://www.warmuseum.ca/cwm/exhibitions/vimy/index_e.shtmlacc (accessed July 26, 2013). Arthur Edward Ross (1870–1952) was a physician who served in the Canadian Army Medical Corps in the war, rising to Director of Medical Services for the CEF with the rank of Brigadier General. He was credited with being the first to find measures to combat trench foot and the effects of mustard gas. He also served in the Ontario Legislative Assembly from 1911 to 1921 and in the House of Commons from 1921 to 1935.

46. D. J. Goodspeed, The Road Past Vimy: The Canadian Corps 1914–1918 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1969), 93.

47. Tim Cook, “Vimy: A Battle Remembered,” Legion Magazine Online (March 1, 2012), http://legionmagazine.com/en/2012/03/vimy-a-battle-remembered-hill-70-a-battle-forgotten (accessed September 15, 2013).

48. Vance, Maple Leaf, 104.

49. Cook, Shock Troops, 305.

50. William Rawling, “Sir Edward Whipple Bancroft Morrison,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, (accessed February 14, 2014).

51. Among the Canadian casualties at Hill 70 was my great-uncle Jonas (Jonnie) Willard Burns (1894–1923). Born in the little village of Marmora, Ontario, he was a teamster there when he enlisted in the 155th Battalion in January 1916. He went overseas in the 21st Battalion in November 1916 and was badly injured by machine gun fire at Hill 70, his injuries leaving him totally paralysed from his waist down. He was invalided back to a military hospital in Toronto, where he died in April 1923. He was awarded no medals or decorations, although he was entitled to wear a wound stripe.

52. Cook, Shock Troops, 306.

53. Quoted in Cook, Shock Troops, 305.

54. “Recollections of Captain F. C. Whiteman, RCE,” Ottawa Citizen, August 22, 1940, cited in Benjamin Isitt, From Victoria to Vladivostok: Canada’s Siberian Expedition, 1917–19 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 20.

55. Quoted in Cook, Shock Troops, 321.

56. Quoted in Groom, 220–21.

57. Quoted in H. L. Livingstone et al, “Cape Bretoners in World War One,” Cape Breton’s Magazine, 33 (June 1983): 161.

58. Nasmith, Canada’s Sons, Vol. 2, 29.

59. Quoted in Groom, 224.

60. Clements, 189.

61. Quoted in Groom, 221.

62. Quoted in Cook, Shock Troops, 317.

63. Quoted in Winter, Haig’s Command, 108. Born into a prominent Anglo-Irish family, Alan Brooke (1883–1963) was a professional soldier who served in the Royal Artillery and was seconded to the Canadian Corps from early 1917 until early 1918 when he was appointed to command the British First Army’s artillery. He later rose to Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1941 and was promoted to Field Marshal in 1944. He was named Baron Alanbrooke in 1945 and Viscount Alanbrooke in 1946.

64. Quoted in Groom, 225.

65. Quoted in John Terraine, The Road to Passchendaele (London: Leo Cooper, 1977), xix–xx.

66. Sir Robert Borden, Letters to Limbo, ed. Henry Borden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 59.

67. Winter, 45–46.

68. Winter, 131, 41.

69. Winter, 145.

70. Morton and Granatstein, 174.

71. For a detailed analysis of the cavalry’s role at Cambrai and the debate over its alleged failure, see David Kenyon, British Cavalry on the Western Front 1916–1918 (Unpublished PhD thesis, Cranfield University Defence College of Management and Technology, 2007), 167–205.

72. Morton and Granatstein, 174.

Chapter 8

The Home Front

There was something depressingly symbolic in the fire that gutted the Houses of Parliament on February 3, 1916. It was like a forewarning that . . . the country was entering a period of profound trouble.

—Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook[1]

Canada’s war was not fought only in France and Belgium. As quaint as it may seem to us a century later, the First World War was in fact the first modern war. This statement doesn’t just apply to the new weapons technologies that were employed for the first time, such as machine guns, airplanes, and submarines. It applies also to the fact that all the resources of the nation had to be mobilized. Vast amounts of money were needed to pay for the war, and farmers had to expand their production as much as possible to feed both the army and the European civilian populations. Manufacturers had to maintain production to the extent possible, while some of them converted their factories to produce war equipment and supplies. And workers had to be found to replace the men who enlisted in the army or other services, a number that eventually rose to more than 600,000.

The impact of all this on not just the economy but on Canadian society generally proved to be profound. In many ways, it could be considered positive, but in many other ways, it was disruptive and divisive. The one thing that was certain, although unanticipated in August 1914, was that Canada was a very different place in 1918 from what it had been only four years earlier. This was not, of course, unique to Canada. It was also true of Britain and the other combatant nations, including the United States, although its involvement in the war was very brief compared to that of its Allies.

The Canadian economy grew dramatically during the war. The amount of farmland devoted to field crops rose from 35 million acres in 1913 to 53 million acres in 1919, while wheat acreage on the prairies rose by 80%.[2] By 1921, twice as many Canadians were employed in non-agricultural pursuits as in agricultural pursuits.[3] This reflected the very significant growth in the industrial sector of the economy. It has been estimated that the gross income produced by industry rose from $2.4 billion in 1914 to $4.4 billion in 1919, much of it in the secondary manufacturing sector, where the gross income produced rose from $390 million in 1914 to $1.1 billion in 1919. Much of this increased production was exported to Britain and Europe.

Because the Canadian economy had gone into a slump in the two years before the war, this growth was of course very welcome. What most people, including the politicians, did not at first realize was that managing the national economy was a vital component in managing a modern war. Many people at the time, and since, have been highly critical of the Borden government’s inefficient management of the war economy, be it the use of manpower, the letting of contracts for war materiel, or the overall management of vital resources. There can be no doubt that the government made many mistakes, but it got better at doing these things as it gained experience.

What needs to be remembered by modern critics is that neither Borden nor anyone else in Canada had any experience of even trying to “manage” an economy beyond tinkering with the tariff system. Indeed, very few Canadians before 1914 even thought the government should be trying to manage the economy. Borden and his colleagues not only had to learn how to manage a war, they had to make the psychological adjustment to accepting that managing the economy was an essential part of governing a nation engaged in a major war.

The transition took a little time. Borden told the House of Commons in 1915 that the government did not intend “to interfere with the business activities of the country,” at least not unless and until the situation absolutely required some degree of intervention.[4] It was not long before that situation arrived, and it is fascinating to observe the politicians, all of whom were the product of nineteenth-century economic liberalism, grapple with the problem and reverse their views on the role of government, at least during the temporary crisis environment of a major war.

The most dramatic illustration of this transformation related to the seemingly insatiable demand for munitions and other war materiel. Because the government had virtually no experience in large-scale purchasing, there was no system in place at the outset of the war, resulting in the inevitable corruption and mismanagement. Borden addressed this as early as April 1915 by establishing a War Purchasing Commission to take responsibility for the contracting for all Canadian military expenditures and all British and Allied orders for war supplies except munitions. Under the capable chairmanship of Edward Kemp, a prominent Toronto manufacturer and conservative member of parliament, the Commission “shifted expenditure away from what was good for the party to what was good for the war effort,” developed a systematic tendering process, issued contracts only to proven suppliers, and restricted patronage “to contractors who could deliver quality material.”[5]

The Militia Department had already set up a Shell Committee to serve as the purchasing agent for the British government, which was buying huge amounts of munitions in Canada. The Shell Committee quickly built up a significant munitions industry in Canada, but a political crisis soon developed over the activities of at least one of its members, J. Wesley Allison, who was of course an old friend of Sam Hughes. This led to the abolition of the Shell Committee and its replacement by the Imperial Munitions Board.[6] The Board was chaired by Joseph Flavelle, president of the largest pork-packing company in the British Empire and a prominent financier. It did an outstanding job, and by 1918 was even selling surplus production to the U.S. Ordnance Department. The IMB was directly responsible to the British Ministry of Munitions, however, which meant that the Canadian government was allowing the British to oversee the largest employer of workers in the country, a reflection, as Tim Cook points out, “of the colonial mentality that still prevailed in Ottawa.”[7]

Equally significant was the problem of Canada’s railways and the solution which the government eventually and reluctantly found for it. Some background information is required to make any sense of this situation. When Confederation took place in 1867, one of its major objectives was to create the firm foundation on which acquisition of the vast northwestern territories controlled by the Hudson’s Bay Company could be transferred to Canada, creating a transcontinental empire rivaling that of the United States.

The Canadian Pacific Railway was built in the 1880s and was an immediate success, both financially and in enabling the government to move troops quickly at the time of the 1885 North West uprising. When Laurier’s Liberals came into office in 1896, at the beginning of a decade of extraordinary economic and population growth, they responded to the acknowledged need for a second transcontinental railway, but in an extravagant and highly politicized fashion.

The Grand Trunk Railway, which operated in Ontario and Quebec, was granted a charter (with subsidies) to build a line from Prince Rupert on the west coast to Winnipeg, where it would connect with the National Transcontinental Railway, which the government proposed to build to link Winnipeg to Quebec City. This would be leased to the Grand Trunk, and another section would be built linking Quebec City with Moncton on the east coast. This was not an unreasonable policy, but the government then yielded to political pressure and also provided subsidies to the Canadian Northern Railway, which operated lines in Manitoba and northern Ontario but was expanding to become another transcontinental railway. In other words, the Laurier government chartered or subsidized not one new transcontinental railway but two.

Clearly, in retrospect and to many people at the time, this was more railway than Canada needed, but the early twentieth century—at least until 1914—was a period of exuberant optimism in Canada. The outbreak of a global war, not surprisingly, was not anticipated. When it broke out, the new lines were not yet completed, and they were heavily indebted, to both private investors and the government. Capital for investment in railways dried up as governments began borrowing aggressively to finance the war effort, but the railways were important to that war effort, besides which their collapse would very likely trigger a financial and political crisis.

The Borden government, therefore, continued assisting them from 1914 to 1916 but took mortgages on them when it concluded that it could not continue to do so. And yet they were vital to the war effort. The result was that in June 1917 Borden made the extraordinary decision to nationalize the Canadian Northern, combining it with the already-government-owned National Transcontinental and the Intercolonial (built in the 1870s to link the Maritime provinces with Montreal) to create Canadian National Railways. The Grand Trunk and Grand Trunk Pacific continued to receive subsidies until 1920, by which time they clearly were bankrupt and were absorbed into the CNR as well.

The nationalization of the railways was bitterly opposed by a large segment of the business community, especially in Montreal and particularly by the Canadian Pacific Railway, and did enormous harm to the Conservative party at the very time that it was alienating many thousands of ordinary Canadians with its conscription policy (which will be discussed in the next chapter). Borden was denounced as a socialist or even a communist, which was of course absurd, but the whole affair showed, as did conscription, that Borden, who had thought of himself as a progressive conservative before the war, was above all else a pragmatist who would do what he thought needed to be done, regardless of philosophy or ideology or even political interests.

Nobody could have been more surprised by his decision to nationalize the railways than Borden himself. It might be noted, however, that the U.S. government also nationalized American railways as a temporary wartime measure, operating them from 1917 to 1920 through the United States Railroad Administration.

Similarly, the huge need to feed both the Allied armies and the civilian populations of Europe forced the government to intervene in the grain trade. In 1915 it commandeered a large portion of the grain crop for sale to Italy, and when Britain, France, and Italy established the Wheat Executive Agreement in November 1916, Canada and the United States both responded by forming wheat export companies to manage the purchase and export of grain on behalf of their farmers. When an anticipated shortage of wheat in the spring of 1917 drove prices up from $1.90 to $3.00 a bushel, the Canadian government went further, establishing the Board of Grain Supervisors (later succeeded by the Canadian Wheat Board), which was given monopoly control over wheat sales, to determine domestic and foreign requirements and to regulate domestic prices and distribution.

Again, faced in the winter of 1917–18 with a possibly serious coal shortage which would affect the production of war industries and also create hardship for the general population in this pre-oil and pre-gas era, the government appointed a Fuel Controller to regulate prices, distribution, delivery, and consumption. The United States similarly created the United States Fuel Administration, and the two organizations worked closely together, establishing a continental distribution system for American anthracite coal. As well as regulating the price of coal, miners’ wages also were controlled.

It was also in 1917 that the government appointed a Food Controller to stimulate greater production and conserve supplies, although it did not reduce or regulate prices, as many people had hoped it would in view of the inflation in prices taking place. Its role has been described as “a middle road between the British method of compulsion and the American effort at volunteerism.”[8]

The dramatic expansion of the economy, combined with enlistments in the army, had the effect of eliminating unemployment and creating a labor shortage. To a considerable extent the jobs were filled by women, who began working in factories, on farms, in offices, and in public services. By the end of the war, more than 30,000 women were employed in munitions factories alone, and thousands of others held jobs that had not been available to them before the war.

At the same time, the booming economy and labor shortage had the effect of raising wages, but the amount of money being pumped into the economy also created inflation. The cost of living rose by 18% in 1917, 13% in 1918, and 10% in 1919.[9] Put another way, it has been calculated that an average weekly household budget rose from $7.96 in November 1914 to $13.49 in November 1918.[10] This naturally made life more difficult for most people and stimulated labor unrest, which boiled over at the end of the war.

While wages did rise during the war, they failed to keep pace with inflation, causing unrest in the working population. Membership in trade unions grew, and strikes became more frequent as the war dragged on. In July 1918 the government responded by banning strikes and lockouts for the duration, although it conceded the right of workers to join unions and required that female workers receive equal pay for equal work. As the historians Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook have observed, “on paper it was a rather enlightened labour policy. But it came much too late” and “responded to rather than anticipated the conditions the Great War imposed on labor. Like their employers, workmen were in serious trouble before the war. Like their employers, they did well during the war. But their employers did better.”[11]

Meanwhile, the good wages being paid in factories and the shortage of men because of enlistments in the army also encouraged many young men in rural areas to move into the urban centers. This accelerated the problem of rural depopulation, which agricultural leaders traced back to and blamed on the National Policy of protective tariffs adopted in 1879. The highly emotional issue of rural depopulation, when combined with the conscription controversy, ignited a fierce political firestorm that would sweep the government from office in 1921.

By the end of the war, the Canadian government, with the cooperation of provincial and municipal governments, had assumed a large role in the management of the economy. Brown and Cook claim that the government had justified this on the ground that it was essential to achieve the war’s goal of preserving “civilization,” which “assumed continuance” of the pre-war laissez-faire attitude to the economy.[12] This assertion is questionable, however, because—as we shall see—many Canadians came out of the war hoping that the post-war world would be a better place based on new attitudes and major changes in society.

The radical transformation in government’s role in society had not taken place as the result of an ideological conversion by the politicians and leading businessmen of the nation but because they believed that the war simply had to be won and they were prepared to do whatever was necessary to achieve that goal. Canadians generally accepted these policies, albeit with considerable grumbling. But the determination to do whatever was necessary to win the war also led most politicians and business leaders to another decision that would, when combined with the social stresses caused by wartime controls, result in unprecedented social, cultural, and regional divisions that came perilously close to destroying the nation that they were trying to save.

The initial offer of 25,000 troops had been easily manageable, although to most people in 1914 even that involved raising a significant amount of additional revenue. But when Borden kept raising the Canadian commitment, eventually promising to raise five divisions, there were many experienced and knowledgeable people who thought it could not be done and, even if it could be done, that it would impose an unsustainable financial and economic burden on the economy.

Neither Borden nor his ministers appreciated the strain his rising manpower commitments were making on the economy.[13] The government did recognize at the outset that it could not finance the war effort from current revenues, so it raised the tariff on coffee, sugar, alcohol, and tobacco products, and excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco as well. It also began issuing notes to meet its monetary requirements, in other words issuing enough paper money, which inevitably led to inflation. In 1914 it borrowed $60 million in London, followed by borrowing another $45 million in New York—the first time a Canadian government had borrowed there—in the spring. The idea of borrowing money in New York was a delicate one because of the nature of Canadian-American relations, but the reality was that money was no longer available in London, the country’s usual source of capital, and Canadian-American relations were much closer than they had been before the war. The government subsequently followed up with further loans in New York of $75 million in 1916 and $100 million in 1917. What Sir Thomas White, the minister of finance, may not have realized, or if he did he recognized that he had no alternative, was that the American loans “tied Canada to Wall Street as the Dominion’s primary lender. This change would be critical for the country in cutting its financial tethers to Britain.”[14]

The government also broke new ground in 1915 by offering bonds on the domestic market. Fifty million dollars was easily raised—much to the astonishment of White, who naturally followed up in 1916 and 1917 with further bond issues. Perceiving that there was more money in the country than it had thought, the government now issued Victory Bonds, which raised more than $400 million in 1917 and $660 million in 1918!

As the war dragged on there was a growing feeling in the country that those at home profiting from the war should share in the burden, based on the argument that the men who volunteered were offering their lives, so surely those at home, especially those making money from war production, could help to pay for the war. The result in 1916 was a modest business profits tax, which was well received by the general public.

Less well received was a general income tax, which would have been unthinkable before the war. The government was understandably very reluctant to take this step, but it needed the money, and, as the issue of conscription came to the forefront in 1917, there was much public support for a tax on those with high incomes. The rate of the tax was only 4% except for those whose incomes exceeded $6,000, and there were also generous exemptions. Because the incomes of most people were well below $2,000, most people paid little or no income tax during the war.

But the fox was in the chicken coop, so to speak. Even though the government promised that income tax was only a temporary wartime measure, it survives to this day. But the government did manage to finance the war effort, although it did build up what was then thought a monstrous national debt in the process. Much of that debt was owed to foreign investors, especially in the United States, but a lot of it was owed to Canadians who had purchased government bonds.

The impact of the war on women and their place in society was profound. In addition to replacing men in many jobs previously thought unsuitable to females or unavailable to them, women formed the backbone of organizations like the Canadian Patriotic Fund, which raised money to support the families of soldiers, and the Canadian Red Cross, which raised money but also produced bandages and other items needed by the soldiers. As well, perhaps rather surprisingly, women played a prominent role in the recruiting campaigns across the country. Inevitably, many of them began to ask why they were denied equal civil rights. The suffrage movement had been in existence for several years before the war, but the contribution which women made to the war effort in so many ways shattered the standard argument that their proper role was in the home as mothers and wives.

The Rev. Charles Gordon—whom we have met already as Ralph Connor, an internationally known best-selling novelist and chaplain of the 43rd (Cameron Highlanders) Battalion—recognized the change in his 1917 novel, The Major. When the protagonist, a Canadian who had been working in Chicago, met a former female classmate, he “could hardly believe his eyes and ears, so immense was the change that had taken place in Jane during these ten months [of war].” Larry naturally wondered what had “released those powers of mind and soul which he could now recognize as being her own, but which he had never seen in action,” and immediately recognized that “the mighty change was due to the terrible energising touch of war.”[15] Clearly a modern man, Larry later married Jane.

Politicians, primarily on the provincial level, began to pay attention, especially when the newly elected provincial Liberal government of T. C. Norris in Manitoba quickly enfranchised women in 1916. Manitoba was the first province in Canada to do so, but within six years, women in every province except Quebec could vote in provincial elections and all could vote in federal elections. The enfranchisement of women was a significant step forward in Canadian social values, but it was not an isolated event. The war had very quickly taken on the aura of a crusade by “civilized” nations against German “barbarism,” but it had also somehow connected with the prewar reform movements of what had become known as the progressive era that advocated a variety of social or moral reforms.

The moral reform movement was led by the Methodist and Presbyterian churches, which were the two largest Protestant churches in English Canada. In the years before the war, many of their clergy and laity had begun advocating a “social gospel,” meaning that Christians should not focus entirely on their personal salvation but should also address society’s myriad social problems. As the General Council of the Methodist Church declared in 1906, Christians had a responsibility to “set up the Kingdom of God among men . . . a social order founded on the principles of the Gospel.”[16]

The outbreak of the war strengthened the moral reform movement, as it seemed to some to present an obvious opportunity to reconstruct society. As Canadian historian John English puts it, “Protestant leaders became Christian soldiers who identified the Canadian role in the war with the Church’s struggle against evil.”[17] The Rev. James Henderson of Timothy Eaton Memorial (Methodist) Church in Toronto, once told mothers whose sons had been killed that their sons had “accomplished far more for Canada, for the Empire, for the world, for Christ, done more to bring about a new order of things in a few months than you or I could ever do if we lived a thousand years.”[18] In other words, the sacrifices made in the war would create “a new order of things” in which “social justice, faith, and service would be pre-eminent values.”[19]

Unquestionably, the most controversial aspect of the social reform movement related to the sale and consumption of alcohol. The temperance movement had been growing in strength for several years before the war. It was not, as many think today, a puritanical movement which objected to alcohol on moral grounds; it was a reform movement which saw the very real harmful social impact of too much, too cheap, too readily available alcohol in an era when most men were paid weekly in cash and walked to and from work.

In 1898 the Laurier government had held a national plebiscite on prohibition, which showed a fairly large majority in favor in English Canada but much less support in Quebec. Not surprisingly, Laurier chose not to take any action, but the strength of the temperance movement had continued to grow, and when King George V pledged publicly in 1914 that he would abstain from alcohol for the duration of the war, he provided an important impetus to the movement. An old navy man, he quickly regretted having made the commitment, but he did strike an important chord, and during the war, the temperance movement was reinforced by the argument that the consumption of alcohol negatively affected the efficiency of workers, while its production diverted grain from food production. The result was that by 1916 every province except Quebec had prohibited the sale of alcohol. Although there was clearly much public support for prohibition, Stephen Leacock, the McGill economics professor and humorist and a man who made no secret of his appreciation of alcohol, no doubt spoke for many Canadian men when he sadly commented, “I wish somehow we could prohibit the use of alcohol and merely drink beer and whiskey and gin as we used to.”[20]

Another dimension of the government’s attempt to regulate society during the war was its strict censorship policy. Initially, it focused on news reports from Europe, fearing—no doubt rightly—that if people knew how bad things really were, men would never enlist, nor would their families encourage them to do so. Newspapers and magazines were forbidden to describe the high level of casualties or even to report on defeats in battle. The chief censor, Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Chambers, became especially agitated by the graphic reports published in the Ottawa Journal by Robert W. Service, the internationally acclaimed Canadian poet who was working as a civilian ambulance driver in France. Chambers ordered the Journal to stop publishing Service’s accounts or to sanitize them, which the Journal did without protest. Chambers went much further, however, with foreign language publications, prohibiting 253 of them from entering Canada from the United States and banning 19 Canadian newspapers published in foreign languages. In November 1916 he banned the importation from the United States of all newspapers published by William Randolph Hearst because of their notoriously anti-British editorial policy.

Chambers’s office also monitored the telephone and telegraph systems and eventually assumed control over movies, photographs, and even gramophone records. As Pierre Berton summed it up, “Allied soldiers must be depicted as unfailingly cheerful, the trenches must appear to be as clean and dry as a kitchen floor, and death had to seem as peaceful as an afternoon nap.”[21] When an American film entitled Peace at any Price was banned because it emphasized the barbarity of the war by showing heaps of bodies, Chambers commented scathingly that it was the sort of thing one could expect from an industry controlled by “disloyal Germans, Poles, and Jews.”[22]

Combined with censorship was the effective propaganda campaign, organized and led primarily by Max Aitken, a Canadian who had made his first fortune in the investment business, then moved to England, where he became a powerful newspaper owner and political manipulator and in 1917 became Lord Beaverbrook. In January 1915 Borden authorized Aitken to establish the Canadian War Records Office in London and to serve as Canada’s official “eye-witness” on Canadian activities in Europe. An extraordinarily focused, energetic, and unscrupulous man, Aitken sent a stream of invariably positive dispatches on the Canadian army’s activities to both British and Canadian newspapers and in 1916 published Canada in Flanders, a glorified account of the Canadian army’s exploits, which he claimed was based on his own personal observations and interviews with Canadian soldiers. This was so well received that two more volumes were published as well.

Aitken’s propaganda campaign was very successful, to the point that British leaders complained that the public was being given the impression that the Canadians were fighting the war all on their own! The British, it need hardly be said, were not far behind in developing their own propaganda apparatus, hiring several successful writers including John Buchan, Rudyard Kipling, and John Galsworthy to work on their behalf. At the same time, British and other writers published novels during the war portraying the Germans as uncivilized barbarians. Rudyard Kipling, who lost his only son in the war, undoubtedly expressed the view of many Britons and Canadians when he said “there are only two divisions in the world today: human beings and Germans.”[23]

Canadian writers wrote patriotic novels as well. Most notable among them were S. N. Dancey’s The Faith of a Belgian (1916), which condemned Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality, Robert Stead’s The Cowpuncher (1917), which blatantly encouraged enlistments, and Charles W. Gordon’s The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land (1919), which sought to exploit the fast-fading sentimental idealism of the earlier years by having his young Protestant chaplain die a sacrificial death.[24] Even Nellie McClung, the popular novelist and prominent feminist leader in Alberta who had been an outspoken pacifist before the war, supported the war and participated in the propaganda campaign after her son enlisted.

Hugh Eayrs claimed in 1919 that Canadian publishers had distributed “probably at least one thousand different war books” during the war years, “old books and new books, wise books and foolish books, books intimately connected with and bearing on the Great War and books that had no possible relation whatsoever.” While the vast majority of these were not Canadian books and, as Eayrs notes, many had nothing to do with the war, he nevertheless expressed pride in the fact that Canadian publishers “had done their part as propagandists at a time when propaganda counted.”[25]

To some extent, the Canadian propaganda campaign was aimed not so much at Canadians as at the United States, as part of the effort to bring that country into the war. Coningsby Dawson, who was born in England but emigrated to the United States in 1905, is a good example of how British and Canadian efforts overlapped, as indeed did their perceptions of their identity and interests. Dawson’s parents and two brothers subsequently emigrated as well. Dawson’s parents settled in Taunton, Massachusetts, but the two brothers—both of whom served in the Royal Navy during the war—bought and managed a fruit farm near Nelson, British Columbia.

When the war broke out, Coningsby Dawson immediately went to Ottawa and met with Sam Hughes, who, because of Dawson’s social status—his father, William J. Dawson, was a prominent clergyman and author of twenty-one books—offered him a commission in the Canadian Field Artillery. After completing his training, Dawson served in France until being wounded in 1917. He then returned to the United States and spent the remaining war years writing articles in American popular magazines and lecturing around the country. He also published The Glory of the Trenches (New York, 1918), an extended essay expressing “the spiritual processes which worked behind the grim offence of war,” claiming that soldiers faced death with serenity, knowing that those who fell in a righteous cause earned the right to “hang beside Christ.”[26]

The Canadian propaganda campaign was part of the much larger British effort in the United States carried out under the direction of Sir Gilbert Parker, a popular novelist originally from Canada whose wife was American. Parker actually developed a mailing list of 260,000 influential American individuals, newspapers, libraries, YMCAs, and other organizations to which he sent “personal” letters and copies of British documents—never revealing that he was in fact working for the government—so that they might better understand the British point of view. It is generally agreed that his work was masterful and helped to sway American public opinion in favor of the Allies.

Germany’s reliance on submarines to stop, or at least reduce, the number of merchant ships carrying desperately needed foodstuffs and war materiel to Britain had a major impact on American public opinion as well. After backing off somewhat in its attacks on neutral shipping in 1916, Germany announced in January 1917 that it was resuming unrestricted submarine warfare. By the spring, its U-boats were destroying 500,000 tons of merchant shipping a month, including American ships. This led President Wilson to sever diplomatic relations with Germany in February.

Three weeks later, the British forwarded a telegram sent by German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmerman to the German ambassador in Mexico—which British Naval Intelligence had decrypted—to Wilson. This extraordinary telegram asked Mexico to support Germany in the war, in return for which Germany would help Mexico to recover the territory it had ceded to the United States following the Mexican-American War. It was the final straw, and the United States finally declared war on April 2, 1917. This meant, in effect, that the outcome of the war was certain because once American manpower, financial, and industrial resources were mobilized in support of the Allies, Germany could not possibly win the war.

1. Brown and Cook, Canada 1896–1921, 262.

2. Brown and Cook, 234.

3. English, Borden, 159.

4. Quoted in Brown and Cook, 236.

5. John A. Turley-Ewart and Robert Craig Brown, “Sir Albert Edward Kemp,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/kemp_albert_edward_15E.html (accessed April 16, 2014).

6. The Shell Committee has traditionally been regarded as a failure, but a recent study argues convincingly that it achieved a great deal, making possible the undeniable success of the Imperial Munitions Board. See Gordon Errnest Ira Greavette, The Shell Committee: A Study in Canadian Industrial Mobilization and Politics in War, September 1914–November 1915. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2013. I am indebted to Dr. Greavette for giving me access to his thesis.

7. Cook, Warlords, 58. At the same time, however, having the IMB operate at arms-length from the government shielded Borden from the political attacks that he had had to endure when the Shell Committee was in existence.

8. Brown and Cook, 239.

9. English, Borden, 159.

10. Brown and Cook, 240.

11. Brown and Cook, 243.

12. Brown and Cook, 248, 249.

13. English, Borden, 110.

14. Cook, Warlords, 54.

15. Cited in English, Borden, 127.

16. Quoted in English, Borden, 125.

17. English, Borden, 125.

18. Quoted in English, Borden, 125.

19. English, Borden, 125.

20. Stephen Leacock, Frenzied Fiction (New York: John Lane, 1920), 201.

21. Berton, 164.

22. Quoted in Berton, 164.

23. Quoted in Berton, 166.

24. On Canadian war novels, see Dagmar Novak, Dubious Glory: The Two World Wars and the Canadian Novel (New York: Peter Lang, 2000) and Eric Thompson, “Canadian Fiction of the Great War,” Canadian Literature, 91 (Winter 1981): 81–96.

25. Hugh Eayrs, “Canadian publishers and war propaganda,” Canadian Bookman (January 1919), 47. Hugh Smithurst Eayrs (1894–1940) was president of the Macmillan Company of Canada from 1921 to 1940.

26. Dawson also published The Unknown Soldier (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1929), a sentimental religious novella suggesting that Christ lived and died anew within the person of each nation’s Unknown Soldier. Other relevant publications included two collections of his wartime letters home, entitled Carry On: Letters in Wartime (New York: John Lane, 1918) and Living Bayonets: A Record of the Last Push (New York: John Lane, 1919), The Test of Scarlet: A Romance of Reality (Toronto: Ryerson, 1919), a novel about Canadian artillery troops in the war, and Fugitives from Passion (Garden City: Doubleday, 1930), a novel about a Canadian officer in the war.

Chapter 9

Conscription

Our first duty is to win, at any cost, the coming election in order that we may continue to do our part in winning the War and that Canada not be disgraced.

—Robert Borden[1]

The profound losses suffered by the Canadian Corps in 1915 and 1916 shocked and surprised the country. And what made the unexpected cost of loyalty even worse was that there was no reason whatever to think that anything was being accomplished by this level of sacrifice. What was to be done? When would it end? No one knew, certainly not the generals or the politicians in Britain and certainly not Robert Borden and his colleagues in Ottawa.

More than 100,000 men had enlisted in 1914 and the first half of 1915, but more were clearly needed. The authorized size of the CEF was raised to 150,000, then in October 1915 to 250,000. On New Year’s Day 1916, without consulting his Cabinet, caucus, or even General Gwatkin, Borden announced that Canada would raise 500,000 men, a huge number in view of the fact that the entire population of Canada was less than 8 million, half of whom were women, and many of the male half were boys or men too old to fight. Besides, not all men of fighting age could join the army even if they wanted to because that would bring the economy to its knees.[2]

But even if the country could spare 500,000 men to go overseas, were that many men willing to go? It was apparent by 1916 that more and more of them were not. By the middle of the year, enlistments were barely keeping pace with the casualty rate despite the social and media pressure on young men to enlist. Canadian churches contributed to this pressure, arguing that Christians had a responsibility to do their duty in a just war. This was especially true of the Methodist Church, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, but it was also true of the Anglican and Presbyterian churches as well. The Roman Catholic Church, while providing chaplains to the troops, was less outspoken, presumably because the majority of its members were French Canadians.

The government, and Sam Hughes especially, have been criticized for recruiting only one French Canadian battalion—the 22nd—but in fact thirteen others were also authorized—the 41st, 57th, 69th, 150th, 163rd, 165th (New Brunswick), 167th, 178th, 189th, 206th, 230th (Eastern Ontario), 233rd (Winnipeg), and 258th—mostly in Quebec, but also in other areas containing significant francophone populations. None of them were able to recruit enough men, so they, like most other battalions, were disbanded in England and their men used to reinforce the battalions in the field. Philippe Panneton did not exaggerate by very much when he claimed in his 1938 novel, Trente Arpents, that “the peace-loving people of Quebec were not in the least interested in the Great European Madness.”[3]

Recruitment drives were held all over the country, at which politicians—including Laurier—and clergymen spoke, while recruiting leagues around the country lobbied the government to establish a national registration system and even conscription. One recruitment rally in Toronto’s Riverdale Park in August 1915 reportedly attracted 100,000 people—in a city of 400,000—who listened to military bands and were dazzled by a fireworks display, although they were spared the jingoistic oratory. About 400 men did volunteer that evening, some of them perhaps shamed into doing so by the women who circulated through the crowd placing white feathers on the lapels of apparently healthy young men not in uniform.[4]

It might seem odd that at least some women worked actively to pressure men into enlisting. Doubtless they succumbed to public pressure, such as that created by prominent activists like Emmeline Pankhurst, who toured Canada urging Canadian women to pressure their men into enlisting. “How will you like to think,” the famous suffragette asked a Vancouver audience, “that the man you love has allowed other men to do his duty for him while he sheltered himself behind the sacrifice of other men?”[5] But many women had a more practical motivation: if they had a father, brother, or son overseas, they understood the importance of there being enough recruits to reinforce them.

Even the annual exhibition of paintings by the Ontario Society of Artists in Toronto in March 1916 provided an opportunity to denounce “slackers”. In his review in the Daily Star of the exhibition, which included the first presentation of paintings by artists like Tom Thomson, Arthur Lismer, A. Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, and J. E. H. MacDonald—who would become known and revered as the Group of Seven—the traditional painter Carl Ahrens not only attacked the shocking new post-impressionist style and vivid colors but accused these young men of being cowards because they had not enlisted. In fact, Jackson had by this time landed in France with his battalion, and Harris was only weeks away from going overseas as an officer in the Royal Grenadiers, while Lismer served as an official war artist during the war. MacDonald, who was forty-two, was rather old for overseas service, but it was undeniably true that Thomson, who was a pacifist, had not enlisted.[6]

Meanwhile, by 1916 the government was trying to enlarge the pool of men who would be accepted into the army. First to go was the minimum height requirement, but there weren’t enough under-sized men interested in enlisting, and many of those who did actually transferred from other existing battalions into the 143rd and 216th “bantam” battalions. Similarly, Japanese Canadians, who had been rejected because this was a “white man’s war,” were now accepted even though they still weren’t allowed to vote.

More significantly, Aboriginal men, whom the government had rejected for the same reason, were now welcomed, although Ottawa declined a private offer to recruit and fund a battalion comprised entirely of Six Nations (Iroquois) warriors. The reason, it seems, was that the Six Nations considered themselves a separate nation and wanted to deal with the government on a nation-to-nation basis, a complication that Ottawa did not need in 1916.

Even so, more than 4,000 Aboriginals—approximately 35% percent of all status Aboriginal males of military age—enlisted, and this figure does not include non-status Aboriginals, Métis, or Inuit for whom there are no records. The Six Nations reserves in Ontario provided 300 men, most of whom enlisted in the 114th (Brock’s Rangers) Battalion. Two of them were Tom Longboat, the famous long-distance runner, and Cameron Brant, great-great-grandson of Joseph Brant, the famous Mohawk chief who supported the British forces in New York during the American Revolution.

The 107th (Timber Wolf) Battalion, recruited in Manitoba, included more than 500 Aboriginal men, and the 52nd (Bull Moose) Battalion, recruited in northwestern Ontario, included more than 100 Anishnawbe (Ojibwa) men. Nearly half of all eligible Mi’kmaq and Maliseet men in the Maritime provinces, including every eligible male from the Mi’kmaq reserve near Sydney, Nova Scotia, enlisted. Similarly, all but three eligible men from the Algonquin reserve at Golden Lake, Ontario, enlisted, and more than half of the eligible adult males on the Cote Reserve in Saskatchewan served overseas. In British Columbia, every man between the ages of twenty and thirty-five of the Head of the Lake band enlisted. From the far north, John Campbell travelled 3,000 miles by trail, canoe, and steamer to enlist in Vancouver. These numbers were remarkable, but they are even more impressive when we bear in mind that many Aboriginal men, especially those living in remote parts of the country, spoke little or no English and knew little of the outside world.[7]

The government even agreed in 1916 to accept African Canadians, who had been volunteering from the outset of the war but in almost all cases were rejected. The Militia Department had no actual policy on the matter, but racial discrimination was normal in Canadian society at the time, and black immigrants, whether from the United States or the Caribbean, had long been discouraged. The department left the decision on which volunteers to accept or not to accept with the commanding officers of the various units. When Gwatkin, the Chief of the General Staff, was consulted, his response was to ask: “Would Canadian Negroes make good fighting men?” His answer: “I do not think so.”[8]

The 104th (New Brunswick) Battalion took the first step when it accepted twenty African Canadian volunteers, but when they reported to camp, they were rejected by the battalion’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel George Fowler. He explained to W. E. Hodgins, the Acting Adjutant General for Military District 6, that he had “been fortunate to have secured a very fine class of recruits and I did not think it fair to these men that they should have to mingle with Negroes.”[9] His view was shared by other senior officers. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Ogilvie, who commanded Military District 11 (Victoria, British Columbia), advised the government that “white men here will not serve in the same ranks with negros [sic] or colored persons.”[10] Appeals to Hughes were in vain. In other words, despite the serious and growing shortage of volunteers, African Canadians were unwelcome.

Brigadier General E. A. Cruikshank, commanding Military District 13 (Alberta), came up with a solution when he recommended the creation of a separate battalion for African Canadians. Gwatkin gratefully seized upon this suggestion, although stipulating that it should be a labor battalion, not an infantry battalion. At the same time, African Canadians could continue to enlist in battalions that would accept them.

The result was the formation on July 5, 1916, of the 2nd Construction Battalion, the only African Canadian battalion in Canadian history, with headquarters at Pictou, Nova Scotia. All of its officers, including Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Sutherland, were white, with the lone exception of the chaplain, the Rev. William White, a Baptist minister originally from Williamsburg, Virginia, but now living in Truro, Nova Scotia. An exception could be made for White because all chaplains were given the honorific title of captain, so that in a sense they were not “real” officers. Nonetheless, White became the only commissioned officer of African descent in any of the British Empire’s armed forces during the war.[11]

The 2nd Construction Battalion had great difficulty raising enough men, however, and after its arrival in England in March 1917, it was reduced to company status and spent the rest of the war attached to the Canadian Forestry Corps. Winston Ruck, its historian, claims that “some of the men” were eventually transferred into infantry battalions. Oddly, when the 106th Battalion was authorized at about the same time as the 2nd Construction Battalion with headquarters also in Truro, it was ordered to accept African Canadian volunteers, and it did accept about sixteen. Like all other new battalions, it was broken up in England to provide reinforcements for the battalions already in the field.

This change in policy at Militia Headquarters doubtless reflected the magnitude of the manpower crisis because, when the government introduced conscription a couple of months later, it applied to African Canadian men as well as European Canadians. The government was, however, dealing with an undeniably difficult issue in view of the racial prejudice prevalent in Canadian society at this time. Some European Canadian men objected to serving alongside African Canadians, regardless of government policy. Isaac Phills, a native of St. Vincent in the Caribbean who had immigrated to Sydney, Nova Scotia, later recalled that, after training and living in integrated quarters in Canada, he and other African Canadian soldiers were placed in a segregated unit and assigned to fatigue and labor duties when they got overseas.[12]

Danielle Pittman, who has examined the experience of the 2nd Construction Company in the war, concluded that African Canadian soldiers “were usually treated as equals in France, and the majority of European Canadians seem to have had no issue with them.”[13] There was a riot among the Canadian troops that many thought was a race riot at the Kinmel Park demobilization camp in Wales on January 7, 1919. Two days later, however, several European Canadian soldiers at Witley Camp stormed the local police station to free a decorated African Canadian soldier who had been arrested, in their view unfairly.[14]

Meanwhile, the manpower situation became more critical in 1917 because Russia’s withdrawal from the war meant that Germany could transfer large numbers of troops from the Eastern Front to the Western Front. Aside from the measures already taken, as described above, there was another one which Sam Hughes had thought up even before there was a manpower problem. It was to recruit Americans living in Canada or the border states. Several thousand Americans, some of whom were already in Canada for various reasons, had already enlisted in the army, and others had deliberately crossed the border in order to enlist, so it was clear that there was a pool of potential recruits, at least until the United States entered the war.

Foreign recruiting violated U.S. neutrality laws, of course, and Canada’s Militia Act clearly stated that recruits had to be British subjects. Hughes was not the sort of man to be deterred by such considerations, however, and this problem had been evaded from the outset by having Americans who enlisted in Canada falsely declare their place of enlistment as their place of residence. Hughes now ambitiously authorized the creation of five battalions—the 97th, 211th, 212th, 213th, and 237th—which he proposed to organize into a brigade to be known as the American Legion.

Americans living in Canada were encouraged to join one of these battalions, and agents were sent into the United States to recruit men there as well. It was not long before American consuls in various Canadian cities were complaining of public displays of American emblems at the Legion’s recruiting offices. Indeed, the 97th Battalion’s colors actually included the American flag. Secretary of State Robert Lansing protested to the British ambassador, who passed his complaint along to the governor general, who ordered Hughes to stop recruiting in the United States. Typically, Hughes ignored him and expanded the campaign. More complaints came from newspapers in various American cities, and an official of the Department of Agriculture in St. Louis even warned men that a Canadian labor recruiting program then being promoted in the area was actually a conspiracy to lure U.S. citizens into the Canadian army.[15] Nonetheless, some 2,700 American men did enlist, one of whom was Charles Botsford of Ogdensburg, New York, who travelled to Halifax in May 1916 and joined the 237th Battalion as a lieutenant.

The American recruiting scheme was a failure, however. The 2,700 men enlisted in the five “American” battalions but that only averaged about 540 men each. As well, the desertion rate was high, discipline was poor, and there was more than one instance of officers misappropriating regimental funds. If this wasn’t enough, at least one of the battalion commanders appointed by Hughes was totally unqualified. The Rev. C. S. Bullock, a Unitarian minister in Toronto, despite having no military experience of any kind, was given command of the 237th Battalion.

The problems came to a head in March 1916 when Hughes ordered the 97th Battalion to be sent to England. The Colonial Secretary, Andrew Bonar Law, appealed to Borden not to allow this because of American sensitivities, and Borden, who seems not to have been aware of Hughes’s project, cancelled the order. He also now investigated, only to discover that Gwatkin, the Chief of the General Staff, had opposed the scheme from the outset and was particularly appalled by Bullock’s appointment. Borden was not unhappy to have the American volunteers, but he definitely did not want to upset or embarrass President Wilson, especially as 1916 was a presidential election year.

In the course of the next twelve months, the American Legion project was terminated. The 212th and 237th Battalions were merged into the 97th. Charles Botsford subsequently served in the 254th Battalion, and when it too was disbanded in July 1917, he transferred into the U.S. army, rising to the rank of captain. Between 1918 and 1921, he published four volumes giving a fictionalized account of the experiences of the American army in the war.[16]

The 97th, 211th, and 213th Battalions did go to England, but all three were then broken up and the men transferred into existing battalions. At least one of the commanding officers, Lieutenant Colonel Warren Sage of the 211th, pleaded for its survival, arguing that Americans serving in other battalions could be transferred into it. “It would seem but fair,” he argued, “that at least one of the American battalions be kept together in view of the large number of Americans enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, and if, as it looks at present [February 1917], the United States of America should go to war with Germany all ranks would feel that they were fighting for their own country as well as for Britain.”[17]

It was in vain because, as Ronald Haycock, the historian of the American Legion, concluded, the scheme had been a “military, political, and diplomatic embarrassment to all concerned.”[18] It was more than that: there was an element of hoax about the whole affair, perhaps not intended, because by 1916 all new battalions were being broken up in England to supply reinforcements for the battalions already in the field.

Recruiting in the United States did not stop, however. After the United States went into the war, the British Recruiting Mission—later renamed the British-Canadian Recruiting Mission—was established and began operations in New York City in June 1917. While it was getting organized, U.S. army recruiting offices cooperated by receiving applications, conducting medical examinations, providing subsistence allowances, and forwarding men to the nearest Canadian army depot in Canada or, in the case of Britons and Australians, to the Imperial Recruits Depot at Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The Mission also assisted the British army to raise recruits for its Jewish Legion, a unit founded in August 1917 to serve with British forces in the Middle East. It began with the 38th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, but expanded to include the 39th and 40th Battalions as well. Although part of the British army, it was organized and trained in Canada at Fort Edward, near Windsor, Nova Scotia. The reason for this was that, while it welcomed Jewish men from Britain and elsewhere, its primary goal was to recruit men in Canada and the United States. It had strong backing from Zionist organizations, which wanted to help liberate Palestine from the Ottomans. The issuance by the British government of the Balfour Declaration in November 1917, promising the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine after the war, proved to be a powerful stimulant to recruiting.

By the end of the war, about 10,000 men had enlisted in the Jewish Legion, about 5,000 of them from the United States,[19] and about 300 from Canada. All of them were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. Typical of them were Aaron Bay, who was born in Jerusalem but had moved to Canada with his parents before the war; Joseph Birnbaum, who was born in Poland in 1896 but emigrated to Toronto in 1910; Moishe Caiserman, who was born in Romania in 1897 but emigrated to Montreal in 1910 and was a founder of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union; and Sam Finkelstein, who was born in Russia in 1897 and emigrated to Canada in 1911.[20] The rest of the recruits came from Palestine and other parts of the Ottoman Empire, England, and Argentina. Some went on to become important figures in Israel, such as David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol, its first and third Prime Ministers, and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the nation’s second President.

By November 1917, there were twenty-seven recruiting depots across the United States, as well as mobile units. Canadians prominently involved in the Mission’s work included Lieutenant Colonel J. S. Dennis, a militia officer from Calgary who was responsible for the western states, Lieutenant Colonel Percy Guthrie of the 236th (MacLean Highlanders) Battalion of New Brunswick who recruited men in New England, and Major Jules-Olivier Daly-Gingras of the 22nd Battalion, who sought recruits among the large French-Canadian immigrant population in New England. He was assisted by the Rev. Constant Doyon, the former Catholic chaplain of the 22nd Battalion.[21]

Remarkably, the Mission succeeded in recruiting 47,188 men.[22] Not all were necessarily American citizens, however. Thomas Dinesen, for example, was a Danish civil engineer who, having been rejected by the British and French armies, went to New York in 1917, where he was rejected by the U.S. army as well. He finally succeeded when the Canadian recruiting office accepted him. He served overseas in the 42nd (Royal Highlanders) Battalion, earning both the Victoria Cross and the Croix de Guerre for extraordinary bravery at Parvillers in August 1918.[23]

But about 5% of the new recruits deserted en route to Canada and about 37% were rejected as medically unfit. An indication of the unsatisfactory results of the Recruiting Mission was the fact that in September 1917 Canada began accepting men who were not British subjects if they had been born in Allied or neutral countries and could speak either English or French. Four months later it began accepting Syrians and Armenians who had been born in the Ottoman Empire (a hostile power). It seems that a few men from Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria—also enemy states—were also accepted, although recruits from Poland (then part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire) and Russia were rejected. Volunteers of Chinese and Japanese descent were also rejected, although several Japanese Canadians had been accepted, and at least forty-nine men of African descent from the British West Indies were accepted.[24]

Because neither British subjects living in the United States nor American citizens living in Britain or Canada could be drafted by the countries in which they were resident, Britain and the United States negotiated an agreement which gave these men the choice of returning home, where they could be conscripted, or remaining where they were subject to local conscription legislation. The result was that about 20,000 potential CEF recruits living in the United States chose to serve in the AEF rather than return home, while more than 18,000 Americans living in Canada registered with U.S. consular officials and were therefore exempt from conscription.[25] Clearly, this arrangement did not work to Canada’s advantage.

By the autumn of 1918, the Mission had become redundant, and it ceased operations in October. Of the 47,188 men recruited, only 33,335 actually joined the Canadian army. Only about 17,000 of them reached France before the Armistice because of the length of time it took to train them, and only 7,100 of them were infantrymen. The Mission’s historian, Richard Holt, concludes that “the meagre results hardly justified the time, effort and expense of running a large and elaborate recruiting structure in a foreign country.”[26] To be fair, however, as was the case with conscription, the number of men raised and dispatched to Europe would have been significantly higher if the war had dragged on into 1919, as the politicians had thought it would.

Despite all the efforts by the government and patriotic organizations and the media to encourage more men to enlist, it was obvious that not enough men were volunteering to sustain Canada’s commitment. If the war was going to be won—was the alternative even an option?—Canada would have to find more men, so that the Allies could at least hold on until American troops arrived in meaningful numbers.

The crisis arrived in the spring of 1917, by which time more than 27,000 of the approximately 45,000 infantrymen serving in the Canadian Corps had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, more than half of them since the beginning of the year.[27] In order to maintain the four divisions, the government needed to raise more than 6,000 men each month, but it was getting only about 5,000. The result was that battalions were going into action with as few as 600 or 700 men instead of the normal 1,000, and wounded men were increasingly being sent back to their units before they had fully recuperated. In other words, it was not just a matter of keeping up the Canadian commitment to Britain; it was also a matter of not letting down the men already overseas, who were putting their lives on the line.

When Borden went to London to participate in the Imperial War Cabinet in the spring of 1917, he also met with Arthur Currie, whose advice reflected the feeling of most of his troops that the sacrifices they were making would be intolerable if the “shirkers” at home were not coerced into doing their duty. And to be honest, when they thought of shirkers they were usually, if not always, thinking of French Canadians, among whom the rate of enlistment was much lower than it was among English Canadians.

Borden genuinely believed that the war had become a crusade being fought by the British Empire, which represented civilization, and barbarism, which was obviously represented by Germany and its Austrian and Turkish allies. The very fact that people commonly referred to the Germans as Huns was telling because, when the so-called barbarian tribes were attacking the Roman Empire, the Huns were regarded as the least civilized and most barbaric of them all. Never mind that the Huns were an Asian people whom the Germanic tribes or nations were fleeing when they entered the Roman Empire. Most people didn’t know their history, and it didn’t really matter: they got the point.

Borden returned home convinced that conscription was unavoidable, a decision he announced in the House of Commons on May 18. He did not justify it on the grounds of supporting Britain or the empire; he appealed to Canadian nationalism. “The battle for Canadian liberty and autonomy is being fought today on the plains of France and Belgium,” he said, and conscription was needed not just to maintain the strength of the Canadian Corps but to keep faith with its members. If they returned to Canada “with fierce resentment in their hearts,” feeling that they had been “deserted and betrayed,” he asked, “how shall we meet them when they ask the reason?”[28]

Borden knew that conscription would be highly controversial and tried to limit the damage by inviting Laurier and his followers to join him in a coalition government. He would carry on as prime minister, but Laurier would be appointed his deputy and the Cabinet would have an equal number of Liberals and Conservatives. He also offered to defer conscription until after the new government was formed. Laurier pondered for two weeks before rejecting both conscription and a coalition. Laurier spoke for many Canadians when he argued that conscription might be acceptable if Canada were under attack or threatened, but it was not acceptable to raise troops for an overseas war. Besides, it would hand Quebec over to the Nationalists, which would be disastrous to national unity.

He wasn’t thinking only of Quebec, however. Although Canadians tend to think that the conscription crisis was an English-French conflict, Laurier was well aware that many people in English Canada opposed it as well. Farmers, for example, whether English or French, were generally opposed to having their sons conscripted because they were essential labor on the family farm at a time when the government was appealing to farmers to boost their production. The same was true of fishermen. Similarly, trade unions undoubtedly spoke for many of their members when they denounced conscription of the only “capital” a working man had (i.e., his body), while businessmen were making huge profits on government wartime contracts. Aboriginal leaders opposed conscription as well, arguing that their treaties guaranteed that they could never be compelled to take up arms against their will. And of course there were those many thousands of European immigrants who had come to Canada in recent years from what were now enemy nations, who could not be expected to favor conscription in a war against their homelands.

The government proceeded to ram the Military Service Act through Parliament, using closure on all three readings of the bill. With a view to raising 100,000 men, the Act empowered the government to conscript all men between the ages of eighteen and sixty. It did, however, allow exemptions for those employed in war production, agriculture, and the fishery, and on religious grounds or cases of hardship. It then called an election.

Laurier believed with good reason that a victory by the Unionist government was by no means a foregone conclusion. He didn’t fully grasp how committed Borden was to the war effort. “Our first duty,” Borden wrote in his diary, “is to win, at any cost, the coming election in order that we may continue to do our part in winning the War and that Canada not be disgraced.”[29] Because defeat was not an option, he now rewrote the country’s electoral laws to ensure victory. In a nod to the women’s suffrage movement, women were allowed to vote for the first time, but only those with a direct connection to a man who was serving or had served in the army. At the same time, he disenfranchised the thousands of enemy aliens except those who had a son serving overseas with the Allies (they were also exempt from conscription). Anyone exempted from conscription such as conscientious objectors and members of pacifist churches (such as Mennonites) were also disfranchised. All soldiers serving overseas, including those who were underage (twenty-one) or British-born, were allowed to vote, and they could opt either to vote for a specific candidate in their home constituency or to vote simply by party. This meant that the parties could allocate these votes to constituencies where they were needed. Because the overseas soldiers overwhelmingly supported conscription, this option obviously favored the government. Just to make victory even more likely, the government promised during the election campaign that the sons of farmers would be exempt from conscription.

The 1917 federal election was, without question, the ugliest and most vicious in Canadian history. The Unionists played the patriotic card, urging Canadians to support their boys overseas, to support the motherland, and to send a clear message to people whose loyalty was suspect—namely Laurier and his French-Canadian followers—that this was a British country with British ideals and values. One Toronto newspaper infamously printed a map of Canada on its front page with Quebec alone painted black, above a cutline declaring the province “the foul blot on Canada.”[30]

Not surprisingly, the government won the election, seemingly confirming public support for conscription. But even a cursory analysis of the results makes clear that if the electoral laws had not been rewritten, the results would have been much closer, and if farmers’ sons had not been exempted, the Unionists might even have lost because many farmers were prepared to vote for conscription as long as their sons were exempt. And the enfranchisement of pro-conscription women and disenfranchisement of immigrants from enemy countries totally distorted the results everywhere.

As always in parliamentary elections, the comfortable majority of seats that Borden won in parliament needs to be compared with the popular vote. Even after rewriting the electoral laws, the Unionists won only 1,070,694 out of 1,880,702 cast, and the Liberals returned to parliament with only three fewer seats than they had won in 1911. Allowing the overseas soldiers’ votes to be manipulated turned over fourteen constituencies from the Liberals to the Unionists. All things considered, it was hardly a ringing endorsement for conscription.

What was worse was that Canada now had, for the first time and in the midst of the greatest crisis the country had ever faced, an English-speaking Protestant government and a French-speaking Catholic opposition. Every government from 1867 to 1911 had included the majority of seats in Quebec, regardless of which party—Conservative or Liberal—won the election. Borden had won in 1911 without Quebec, and now he had done it again, with a vengeance. As one prominent journalist later wrote, “Canada had lost nearly as much ground in its struggle for unity as it had won in the previous one hundred and fifty-eight years since the Plains of Abraham.”[31]

Québécois were so distressed by conscription and the fact that it was clearly aimed at them that in January 1918 the province’s Legislative Assembly debated—but fortunately did not vote on—a motion proposing that Quebec should separate from Canada if “in the view of the other provinces, it is believed that she is an obstacle to the union, progress, and development of Canada.” It was, although no one realized it at the time, the birth of the sovereignist movement in Quebec.

Quebec was deeply alienated, and most of the men simply didn’t report for service when called up. Across the country more than 24,000 men defaulted, but almost 19,000 of them were from Quebec. Many fled into the woods, but hundreds crossed the border into the United States. There was rioting in Quebec City on March 28 when federal police tried to arrest defaulters, and a mob burned the Military Service Registry office, including its records, and pillaged English-Canadian businesses while municipal officials stood by. The government cynically sent in troops from Toronto led by Major General François-Louis Lessard, one of the few French-Canadian generals in the army—who was never sent overseas—to restore order. On April 1, they opened fire, killing four civilians and injuring as many as seventy-five others. The subsequent coroner’s jury blamed Ottawa for tactless enforcement of the Military Service Act.

But opposition to conscription among those likely to be conscripted was almost as great in English Canada as it was in Quebec. Of the 401,882 men who were called up, 379,629 filed appeals, and they were by no means all French Canadians. Frank Carvell, minister of public works in Borden’s new Unionist government, told the House of Commons that “there are thousands and tens of thousands, yes, hundreds of thousands, of people in the rest of Canada who have tried assiduously to evade military service.”[32] He was right. After going through the appeals process, the exemption rate in Quebec was 9%, but in Ontario, which was so vociferous in proclaiming its loyalty and denouncing French-Canadian disloyalty, the rate was 8.2%, not a significant difference.

Ralph Allen has claimed, no doubt correctly, that “the hearing of appeals took far more time than the swearing in and training of new soldiers.”[33] John Kenneth Galbraith, the eminent Harvard economist who grew up in southwestern Ontario, later recalled that his father “was the dominant influence on the local draft board,” which “granted exemptions on the basis of one grave necessity or another to nearly all who did not wish to die. The Scotch who made up the farm community of the area were not strongly so inclined.”[34]

If they were not exempted by the local tribunal, conscripted men could appeal to the courts, right up to the ultimate appeal judge, Mr. Justice Lyman Duff of the Supreme Court. Some 42,000 men did appeal their cases to Duff, and he exempted most farmers and their sons because the government had promised during the election campaign to do so. He also exempted Catholic novices in holy orders but not Protestant divinity students. Conscientious objectors such as Mennonites and Doukhobors were exempted, while members of other groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, to whom pacifism was not a core belief, were not. In January 1918, the government amended the legislation to exempt Aboriginal men.

Meanwhile, the Fifth Division, commanded by Sam Hughes’s son, Garnet, was sitting idly in England when only politics was preventing its 21,000 officers and men from being used to reinforce the Canadian Corps. But the Fifth had only been created in December 1916 as a result of intense pressure from the British and, of course, Sam Hughes, who had been determined from the outset of the war that Garnet should command a division. However reluctantly, Borden gave in—his last ill-judged concession to Sam Hughes—and Garnet got his division.

Inevitably, this led to a nasty cat-fight because Garnet was determined to take the Fifth Division into combat, even though there obviously were not enough men to support five divisions. Canada could, of course, follow the questionable British lead by reducing the number of battalions in a division, but Currie adamantly opposed this idea. Aside from the fact that he did not want Garnet Hughes in France, he knew that four divisions were Canada’s limit. Perley agreed with him, and eventually Borden did as well, so in February 1918 the Fifth Division was broken up to provide reinforcements for the other four divisions. “Political expediency [had] led to its formation, the appointment of its commander, its continued survival in the face of Canadian manpower shortages, and finally to its eventual disbandment.”[35] “It was,” as the Toronto Daily Star said, “a mistake from the start.”[36]

The political crisis generated by the introduction of conscription wasn’t over yet. When Germany’s last major offensive in March 1918, hoping to knock the Allies out of the war before the Americans arrived in strength, broke through the Allied lines, the sense of crisis was profound. More troops were urgently needed, and the government, panicking, cancelled the exemption for farmers’ sons.

Outrage spread throughout rural Canada, not just in Quebec but in English Canada as well. Farmers from all across the country organized rallies, signed petitions, and lobbied the politicians. Trainloads of them converged on Ottawa and rallied in front of parliament, where they pounded on the locked doors demanding that Borden come out and face them. He did so but didn’t back down. Since the government had just won a comfortable majority in the 1917 election, there was nothing the farmers could do except fume and rage. But having concluded that they could no longer trust politicians—the Unionist government was a coalition of Liberals and Conservatives—they began to organize with a view to electing farmers to represent rural Canada and to do so outside of the party system.

The result over the next three years was a political revolution which saw provincial governments toppled by informal coalitions of farmers and urban workers that in some cases didn’t even have a leader. The Conservative government of Ontario fell in 1919, the Liberal government of Manitoba survived the 1920 election, although with only a minority of seats in the Legislature, and the Liberal governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan were both defeated in 1921. When the next federal election came, also in 1921, the farmers, now organized as the United Farmers of Canada, elected sixty-five members. The Unionists, now calling themselves the Unionist and Conservative Party, came in a pathetic third with fifty seats. A new era had dawned in Canadian politics.

It was not just a political revolution. As Galbraith puts it, Canada’s traditional ruling class, whose prestige and influence “came from its Englishness, its identification with the King, Empire and the Church of England,” had “invested its prestige heavily in the war. And as Canadians now reflected on what had been gained and at what price, and especially on the mindless emotion and propaganda that had sustained the slaughter, that prestige evaporated like the morning mist.”[37]

Having paid this enormous price, what had been achieved? By November 1918, 99,561 men had been recruited through conscription but only 47,509 went overseas and only half of them—24,132 to be precise—joined battalions in France. To be fair, it needs to be remembered that political leaders like Lloyd George and Borden were assuming that the war would continue into 1919 if not beyond. But even if it did, would another 50,000 or even 100,000 Canadians really make a difference, given that American troops were beginning to arrive in Europe in the spring of 1918?

1. Borden diary, September 25, 1917, quoted in Cook, Warlords, 119.

2. By way of comparison, Australia, with a population of 4 million—about half that of Canada—raised 421,809 men, representing 38.7% of its male population between the ages of eighteen and forty-four. Australia did not, of course, have a large French population, but it did have a large Irish population, many of whom felt no affection for Britain. Australia held two referenda on conscription during the war, both of which were defeated.

3. Philippe Panneton (writing as Ringuet), Trente Arpents (Paris: Flammarion, 1938), 144, quoted in Susan Fisher, “Canada and the Great War,” in The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature, ed. Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kroller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 230. The only francophone war novel published during the war was Ulric Barthe’s Similia Similibus ou La Guerre au Canada: Essai romantique sur un Sujet d’Actualité (Québec: Telegraph, 1916), which depicted an imagined German takeover of Quebec City.

4. Ian Hugh Maclean Miller, Our Glory & Our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 114. See also Miller, 77–78.

5. Quoted in Ross King, “White Feathers & Tangled Gardens,” Canadian Art Online (Winter 2009), 75–78, http://www.canadianart.ca/features/2009/12/01/white-feathers-tangeled-gardens (accessed October 21, 2013.

6. See also King, “White Feathers.”

7. On Aboriginal participation in the war, see Timothy C. Winegard, For King and Kanata: Canadian Indians and the First World War. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012.

8. Quoted in Calvin W. Ruck, The Black Battalion 1916–1920: Canada’s Best Kept Military Secret (Halifax, NS: Nimbus, 1987), 9.

9. Ruck, 10.

10. Quoted in Ruck. 12. This account is based on Ruck, 8–12.

11. By comparison, Ruck notes that 600 African Americans were commissioned in the American armed forces during the war. After the war, White resumed his pastoral career in Halifax. When Acadia University awarded him an honorary degree in 1936, it was the first ever given by any Canadian university to an African Canadian.

12. Ruck, 29. In 1967 Phills was the first African Canadian to be inducted into the Order of Canada.

13. Danielle Pittman, Moving Mountains: The No. 2 Construction Battalion and African Canadian Experience during the First World War. Unpublished BA honors thesis, Mount St. Vincent University, 2012, http://dc.msvu.ca:8080/fr/bitstream/handle/10587/1168/DaniellePittmanBAThesis2012.pdf?sequence=1 (accessed August 1, 2013).

14. Cook, Shock Troops, 592.

15. Ronald G. Haycock, “The American Legion in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1917: A Study in Failure.” Military Affairs, 43, no. 3 (October 1979): 117.

16. Charles Botsford, Joining the Colors (Philadelphia: Penn Publishing, 1918), Fighting with the U.S. Army (Philadelphia: Penn Publishing, 1919), In the Trenches ((Philadelphia: Penn Publishing, 1920), and At the Front (Philadelphia: Penn Publishing, 1921).

17. Lieutenant Colonel Warren Sage to Officer Commanding 14th Canadian Training Brigade, February 6, 1917, http://data2.collect.../e001472669.jpg (accessed April 11, 2014). Sage was himself originally an American from New York City, who had been living in Calgary for several years.

18. Haycock, “American Legion,” 119.

19. Nancy Gentile Ford, Americans All!: Foreign-Born Soldiers in World War 1 (College Station, TX: A&M Press, 2001), 44.

20. For a complete list of the members of the Jewish Legion, see Leon Chaifetz, Album of the Jewish Legion, http://www.jewishpubliclibrary.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/JEWISH-LEGION.pdf (accessed May 5, 2014).

21. Richard Holt, “British Blood Calls British Blood: The British-Canadian Recruiting Mission of 1917–1918,” Canadian Military History 22, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 29.

22. Holt, 35, note 2.

23. Following the war, he moved to Kenya where he worked as a farmer and civil engineer, until returning to Denmark in 1925 to pursue a literary career. See also Merry Hell: A Dane with the Canadians (London: Jarrolds, 1930), first published in Copenhagen in 1929. His sister, Karen Dinesen, also lived in Kenya for several years and wrote books, including Out of Africa (London, 1937).

24. Holt, 31.

25. Holt, 35.

26. Holt, 35.

27. Cook, Shock Troops, 368.

28. Quoted in Morton and Granatstein, Marching to Armageddon, 145.

29. Borden diary, September 25, 1917, quoted in Cook, Warlords, 119.

30. Toronto Daily News, December 14, 1917, cited in Mason Wade, The French Canadians 1760–1967 (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1968), 752

31. Allen, Ordeal by Fire, 157.

32. Quoted in Allen, 159.

33. Allen, 158.

34. Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 159.

35. William Stewart, “Frustrated Belligerence: The Unhappy History of the 5th Canadian Division in the First World War,” Canadian Military History 22, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 31.

36. Quoted in Stewart, 31.

37. Galbraith, 159.

Chapter 10

Demanding a Voice

It can hardly be expected that we shall put 400,000 or 500,000 men in the field and willingly accept the position of having no more voice and receiving no more consideration than if we were toy automata. Any person cherishing such an expectation harbors an unfortunate and even dangerous delusion.

—Robert Borden, 1916[1]

Closely related to the manpower problem was the problem of Canada’s relationship with Britain. While Canada had been automatically committed when Britain declared war because of its Dominion status, it had—with the exception of most French Canadians and some others—gone in not just willingly but enthusiastically, determined not merely to support the mother country but to show what it could do. Borden later wrote that “the people of Canada entered this war from a profound conviction of duty to the Empire and to the civilized world” and “probably no part of the Britannic Commonwealth was more disinterested in reaching a decision as to that duty.”[2] This was true, at least at the outset of the war in 1914, but it was no longer true by 1916.

Britain’s relationship with its Dominions had been evolving in the years before the war, because of the political and economic development of the Dominions, their growing sense of identity, and the emergence of a highly vocal and influential movement promoting imperial unity. The advocates of imperial unity exploited the tremendous growth in British—some would say English—nationalism in the later years of the nineteenth century, which celebrated Britain’s rich heritage and culture, its industrial supremacy, its status as the policeman of the world, and the “civilizing” influence of its global empire.

And who could deny it? British finance and industry dominated the world, and the resurgence of imperialism in the second half of the century had added large chunks of Africa, as well as islands in the Pacific and concessions in China, to an empire that already included Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and virtually countless other bits and pieces around the world. As well, Britain dominated the Middle East and in the 1870s got control of the newly built Suez Canal, the strategic short route between Europe and Asia.

The reality, however, was that British industrial supremacy had peaked by the 1890s, and other countries such as the United States, France, and Germany were catching up and even surpassing Britain. Coal, vast quantities of which Britain possessed, was already being challenged as the dominant source of energy by oil, which the United States and the Middle East possessed but Britain did not. In other words, the imperial unity movement did not reflect British supremacy but awareness that that supremacy was in decline, an attempt to bolster Britain’s position in the world by somehow combining its economic and military resources with those of its Dominions, as well as its colonial empire.

The first major test came with the outbreak of the South African War in 1898, and, because that experience is vital background to understanding the First World War experience, it needs to be briefly reviewed. When the British government, with Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain leading the charge, went to war with two small isolated Afrikaner republics in southern Africa, it claimed to be defending human rights, which it asserted were being abused by the “backward” Afrikaners. In fact, the British government was being manipulated by powerful business interests because the world’s greatest deposits of both gold and diamonds had been discovered in the Transvaal, and those business interests, already involved, wanted control. The only thing “backward” about the Afrikaners was that they valued their culture, independence, and lifestyle more than the gold and diamonds, the exploitation of which they could see clearly would lead to their being swamped by English and other foreign immigrants and interests.

Britain foresaw no difficulties in conquering Transvaal and the neighboring Orange Free State, but to display to the world that the mighty British Empire was a united force when it went to war, it asked the Dominions to contribute troops. This, it was thought, would send an important message to France, Germany, or any other power that did not wish Britain well.

In Canada, that posed a problem. Canadians were generally agreed that they should support Britain if it ever needed military assistance in a crisis. But they were divided on the idea of providing military assistance that was not actually needed but was desired just to display imperial unity. Imperialists, of course, supported the idea, nationalists—especially French-Canadian nationalists—opposed the idea, and what might be described as the moderate majority had mixed feelings.

In the inevitable political firestorm that ensued, Laurier sought a compromise: the Canadian government would recruit volunteers who wanted to serve in the war and would transport them to South Africa, where they would serve in the British army at British expense. More than 7,000 Canadians did serve in South Africa before that “little” war was finally won three years later.

Meanwhile, even before the war Chamberlain had invited the Dominion prime ministers who would be in London to participate in the celebration of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897 to meet with British ministers to discuss imperial foreign and defense policy, making clear at the same time that a voice in policy-making implied accepting a share of the responsibility for that policy. Some Dominion leaders, notably the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand, welcomed this initiative. Canada’s Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier did not, however, because in his opinion shared responsibility for common policies conflicted with Canada’s gradual but inevitable transition to independent nationhood and would be politically unacceptable to French Canadians and indeed to many in English Canada as well.

Laurier did attend, however, and the 1897 meeting of British and Dominion leaders set the precedent for a series of what became known as imperial conferences, at which information and opinions were exchanged. British political leaders, especially the imperialists, used these conferences to try to seduce Laurier—he was given a knighthood in 1897—and in 1902 he actually seemed to encourage them by saying publicly that if Britain wanted Canadian assistance it should “call us to your councils.” This was profoundly encouraging to the imperialists, who didn’t realize that Laurier was only speaking hypothetically; Laurier had no desire to participate in any kind of imperial council, and certainly didn’t intend to share responsibility for British foreign and defense policy. It didn’t seem to matter, however, because the Liberal government that took office in Britain three years later shared Laurier’s reservations about the implications of power-sharing.

Thus, when New Zealand’s Prime Minister Joseph Ward called at the 1911 imperial conference for the creation of an “imperial parliament of defense,” British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith responded bluntly that the British government’s power to manage its foreign policy “cannot be shared” and any attempt to do so would “be absolutely fatal to our present system of responsible government.”[3] This was Laurier’s view precisely.

Laurier was defeated in the 1911 Canadian election, however, and his successor, Robert Borden, was convinced, as he had stated in the House of Commons in November 1910, that Canadians would not tolerate having no voice in “the councils of the Empire” if they were going to “take their part . . . in the defense of the Empire.”[4] This was the essential difference between the views of Borden and Laurier—and the Canadians that they represented—on the imperial relationship. Both accepted that Canada was moving gradually toward complete autonomy, but Laurier interpreted that as traditional independence, while Borden thought Canada could be autonomous within a new imperial framework in which the Dominions shared in both the decision-making and responsibility for imperial foreign and defense policy.

More than a century later, we may well ask why people like Borden sought what clearly appears in retrospect to be less than complete independence. The explanation lies in Borden’s distinction between traditional nationalism and imperial nationalism, in which there was no difference between British subjects living in Britain and those living overseas. The position taken by Asquith and Laurier, he argued, “seems to proceed upon the assumption” that the only British citizens who could “properly be entrusted” with control over imperial foreign policy were those who lived in Britain, but he saw no reason why those living in the overseas Dominions should be excluded from the process.[5]

Although he was not likely aware of it, Borden’s attitude was remarkably similar to that of Benjamin Franklin in the 1750s and 1760s. Franklin predicted in 1751 that the population of the Thirteen Colonies was growing so rapidly that it would soon be greater than that of Britain, but he did not think this would lead to separation. As Gordon S. Wood has explained, he thought that “the growth of British subjects in America could only benefit the entire empire” and that America should remain “at least as connected to England as Scotland.”[6] Well into the political crisis that ended in revolution, Franklin was advocating American representation in parliament or some other form of closer imperial union because he believed that the British Empire “was the greatest phenomenon of the eighteenth century, and . . . he wanted very much to be part of it.”[7] Like Franklin, Borden was “feeling his way towards some intermediate mechanism of consultation that would not involve the destruction of the autonomy of the individual countries of the Empire such as would inevitably result from the creation of an imperial Parliament or an imperial executive. This was the goal; how it was to be reached he did not know.”[8]

It was not insignificant that Borden reorganized the Canadian Department of External Affairs in 1912 so that it reported to the prime minister rather than the secretary of state, as Laurier had arranged when he created the department in 1909. The Department of the Secretary of State was a minor department in Canadian governments, so Borden’s change signalled that he intended to pursue a more active international policy than Laurier had done. Less than a year later he made another important change. The elderly Sir Joseph Pope remained Undersecretary of the Department of External Affairs, but the young Loring Christie was appointed its legal advisor and quickly became the dominant figure and Borden’s closest advisor.

Like Borden, Christie was a Nova Scotian, but he had studied law at Harvard University, where he edited the Harvard Law Review, and he had practiced law in New York City in the firm founded by Elihu Root. In 1910 he had been appointed an attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice, and from 1911 to 1913 was assistant to the solicitor general of the United States. Despite—or perhaps because of—his American experience, however, Christie was a keen advocate of imperial federation, although he probably was also influential in encouraging Borden to improve Canada’s relationship with the United States. What Christie represented was the ambivalence of Canadians to the two countries most important to them.

British leaders, on the whole, did not really want to share power with the Dominions, but they had a practical problem: they couldn’t afford the rapidly rising cost of imperial defense caused by the naval arms race with Germany in the decade before 1914. They, therefore, appealed for help to the Dominions, thinking—not unreasonably—that they should contribute to the cost of the Royal Navy since they benefited from the protection it provided to the entire Empire.

This inevitably brings to mind British efforts to impose taxes on the Thirteen Colonies in the 1760s and 1770s, which led to the outbreak of the American Revolution. There is a parallel because Britain had fought a major global war with France that ended in 1763 with the annexation of French territories in North America, a step taken not because those territories had any significant value to Britain but to eliminate the longstanding threat posed by the French and their native allies to New England and the other northern colonies. Britain came out of the war with a large debt, while still bearing responsibility for defense of the expanding American frontier, so it thought the Thirteen Colonies should contribute to their own defense. As we all know, that didn’t work out too well.

There was a critical difference between the two situations, however. Britain had neither the legal power nor the desire to tax the Dominions, so all its leaders could do was to explain the situation and appeal to them to accept some responsibility for their own defense. And at least some British leaders, including Asquith, recognized that something would have to be given in return. In July 1912, he told the British House of Commons that “side by side with this growing participation in the active burdens of the Empire, on the part of our Dominions there rests with us undoubtedly the duty of making such response as we can to their obviously reasonable appeal that they should be entitled to be heard in the determination of the policy and in the direction of Imperial affairs.”[9]

Canada went into the World War I willingly, but Borden had not abandoned his prewar views on how the imperial relationship should evolve. Speaking in Montreal on December 7, 1914, he expressed his confidence that the day was not far off “when the men of Canada, Australia, South Africa, and the other dominions will have the same just voice in these questions [peace and war] as those who live within the British Isles. Any man who doubts that will come, doubts that the Empire will hold together.”[10]

As we have seen, the Borden government had repeatedly increased its initial manpower contribution until, by 1915, it had raised three divisions and planned to raise a fourth, but there was a serious problem. British and French generals appeared to be wasting men on a profligate scale in offensives like those at Ypres and the Somme that made no sense to reasonable people. What was worse, perhaps, was that the British government was allowing them to do so. Even worse, Canadian troops were being included in the slaughter—without any consultation with or input from the Canadian government. If Borden was not impressed by the British generals, neither was he impressed by British political leadership in the management of the war.

Thus, Borden and his government found themselves in the totally unacceptable position of having to answer to Canadians for how things were going without having any control over the situation. This was not a position in which any politician wants to find himself, nor is it a position in which he ever should find himself. A six-week visit to London in the summer of 1915 included several meetings with British ministers and even sitting in on a Cabinet meeting, but at the end of it, Borden was more frustrated than ever, not only with the lack of consultation but with the quality of the information being provided.

He now bluntly told Andrew Bonar Law, the colonial secretary—and a former Canadian—that, unless he started receiving better information, he would “return to Canada with no definite intention of urging my fellow countrymen to continue in the war work they have already begun or with the intensive preparation which I am sure they are ready to undertake.”[11] This had some effect as he then got a serious briefing from David Lloyd George, the outspoken and ambitious Minister of Munitions, but he still returned to Canada dissatisfied.

In October 1915, after the government raised Canada’s commitment from 150,000 men to 250,000, Borden again pleaded for more information, pointing out that Dominion governments were answerable to their electorates. He now went a step further, declaring that they must also have a role in the policy-making process. The unimaginative Bonar Law assured Borden that, while he accepted “the right of the Canadian Government to have some share of the control in a war in which Canada is playing so big a part,” he was “not able to see any way in which this could be practically done.”[12] He did, however, promise to provide more information. This was an unacceptable response, which Borden brooded over for a couple of months.

Then, early in January 1916, without consulting his Cabinet, Borden made the astonishing announcement that Canada would raise its commitment to 500,000 men. It seems likely that this dramatic gesture was intended not only to impress the British but to strengthen his hand in demanding a meaningful role in the determination of policy. At precisely the same time, he wrote a strongly worded letter to Perley, intended for Bonar Law, declaring that “it can hardly be expected that we shall put 400,000 or 500,000 men in the field and willingly accept the position of having no more voice and receiving no more consideration than if we were toy automata. Any person cherishing such an expectation harbors an unfortunate and even dangerous delusion.” If this war was being waged by the British Empire, he asked, “why do the statesmen of the British Isles arrogate to themselves solely the methods by which it shall be carried on?”[13]

Upon reflection, Borden told Perley not to pass the letter on to Bonar Law, but Perley undoubtedly did alert Bonar Law and other British ministers to Borden’s frustration. This may have contributed to some extent to the drastic changes that took place in the British government in 1916 because many prominent British politicians shared Borden’s frustration with the Asquith government. First, Lloyd George became Secretary of State for War in June 1916 and began his struggle to establish effective civilian control over the war. Then in December he became prime minister, replacing the ineffective Asquith.[14]

Lloyd George immediately reorganized the British government, concentrating power in a new War Cabinet comprising the five most powerful ministers. He also recognized that if Britain wanted the Dominions to maintain, or even increase, their level of support for the war effort, “they should feel that they have a share in our councils as well as in our burdens.”[15] As one of his advisors pointed out, the Dominions were “fighting not for us but with us.”[16]

He therefore called an Imperial War Conference in 1917 so that Dominion leaders could be both informed and consulted on war policy. More significantly, he also created the Imperial War Cabinet, which included the members of the War Cabinet and the Dominion prime ministers (or, in the case of South Africa, the prime minister’s representative). Here the Dominion leaders could receive all kinds of confidential information to which they had not previously been privy and had the opportunity to present their views and share in determining policy. This marked a significant change in the imperial relationship.

As of the spring of 1917, therefore, when the Imperial War Cabinet met for the first time, Canada and the other Dominions had a meaningful voice in foreign and defense policy. At the same time, the Imperial War Conference, meeting concurrently, adopted Resolution IX promising that as soon as possible after the war the constitutional structure of the empire would be adjusted to recognize that, while the Dominions were “autonomous nations” possessing “complete control” over their domestic affairs, they also had “a right . . . to an adequate voice in foreign policy and in foreign relations.” This would require the creation of a system of “effective” and “continuous consultation in all important matters of common Imperial concern.” Despite the hagiography that quickly built up around the charismatic Jan Smuts, who represented South Africa’s Prime Minister Louis Botha in London and became the darling of Britain’s ruling class, Resolution IX originated with and was introduced by Borden.[17]

Lloyd George’s action in creating the Imperial War Cabinet was “perhaps the most uniquely imaginative in the modern history of the British community” and marked the beginning of the transition from empire to commonwealth.[18] As Borden said during an Imperial War Cabinet meeting on May 2, 1917, it “met the national consciousness of the Overseas Dominions in a way in which it had never been met before,”[19] and Resolution IX would build on this to establish the equality of the Dominions with Britain. This new status “had been won by their soldiers on the battlefield, but the initiative towards obtaining the recognition had been largely Borden’s.”[20]

But the Imperial War Cabinet was not really a cabinet because, while it could make decisions affecting the empire as a whole, each country also retained its autonomy. In other words, it was, and in reality could only be, a conference whose decisions were subject to the approval of the various parliaments. In view of the fact that its overseas participants were the prime ministers of the Dominions, however, it was normally safe to assume that this would not be a problem. A larger problem was the fact that the Imperial War Cabinet could only function when the Dominion leaders were in London, and as heads of governments, they obviously could not be there most of the time.

The reality, indeed, was that, while the Imperial War Cabinet was consulted on a number of issues during its meetings in 1917 and the Dominion leaders were able to express their views, the British government continued to manage the war effort. It was after the Dominion leaders returned home, for example, that the British government approved the disastrous Somme offensive, in which the Canadian Corps suffered heavy unnecessary losses at Passchendaele. As usual, Canada was informed but not consulted. Not surprisingly, Borden was outraged because by this time he had formed a coalition government and fought and won a terribly divisive wartime election so that Canada could maintain the size of its manpower contribution—at the cost of major ethnic, social, and regional divisions.

When the Imperial War Cabinet met again in June 1918, Borden made clear his utter dissatisfaction, blaming the failures of the past year not on the soldiers but on “the lack of foresight, lack of preparation, and . . . defects of system and organization.” Privately, he noted that Currie had given him “an awful picture of the situation among the British. Says incompetent officers not removed, officers too casual, too cocksure.”[21] “For God’s sake,” he bluntly told the Imperial War Cabinet, “let us get down to earnest endeavor and hold this line until the Americans can come in and help us to sustain it till the end.”[22]

Henry Borden, who accompanied his uncle, the prime minister, to England in June 1918, was present when the members of the Imperial War Cabinet gathered before going into one of their meetings. “I do not recall the statement of Mr. Lloyd George which provoked my uncle’s remarks,” he later wrote, “but I have never forgotten his words, the pointed finger, his voice shaking with emotion: ‘Mr. Prime Minister, I want to tell you that if ever there is a repetition of the battle of Passchendaele, not a Canadian soldier will leave the shores of Canada so long as the Canadian people entrust the government of their country to my hands.’”[23]

It was strong language, and not the sort of thing that British politicians were accustomed to hearing from their Dominion counterparts. But Lloyd George was delighted, because he agreed with Borden’s criticisms of British army commanders, and responded by establishing a Committee of Prime Ministers within the Imperial War Cabinet to review war strategy and recommend future policy. With Lloyd George himself in the chair, the Committee sought to assert the supremacy of the politicians over the generals by requiring them to provide detailed explanations of past failures and projections of future plans. In truth, the Committee’s success was limited because people understandably doubted if politicians understood war better than generals, and Haig enjoyed the strong personal support of the king.

Nevertheless, the creation of the Imperial War Cabinet and the Committee of Prime Ministers demonstrated dramatically the change in Anglo-Canadian relations brought about by the war. It had been a long time coming and had taken the prospect of British defeat and the clever opportunism of Lloyd George to bring about the recognition of Canada’s right to a voice in imperial policy-making. It was a significant step forward, although it came too late to be of much importance in the war. Germany was on the brink of collapse, and within weeks, the British and Dominion leaders were discussing peace terms.

1. Borden to Perley, January 4, 1916, quoted in Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, 192.

2. Cited in Brown and Cook, Canada 1896–1921, 275.

3. Quoted in Stacey, 162.

4. Quoted in Stacey, 153–54.

5. Borden, speaking in the House of Commons in 1912, quoted in Stacey, 164.

6. Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 71.

7. Wood, 72.

8. Stacey, 168.

9. Quoted in Stacey, 154.

10. Quoted in Stacey, 184.

11. Quoted in Stacey, 189.

12. Quoted in Stacey, 190.

13. Borden to Perley, January 4, 1916, quoted in Stacey, 192.

14. Bonar Law was appointed chancellor of the exchequer (minister of finance) in the new government and was succeeded at the Colonial Office by Walter Long, whose primary interest was the problem of Ireland.

15. David Lloyd, War Memoirs, quoted in Stacey, 103.

16. Quoted in Cook, Warlords, 88.

17. Cf. Brian Douglas Tennyson, Canadian Relations with South Africa: A Diplomatic History (Washington: University Press of America, 1982), 45–48.

18. Stacey, 205.

19. Quoted in Stacey, 210.

20. Stacey, 216.

21. Borden diary, quoted in Brown and Cook, 284.

22. Quoted in Brown and Cook, 284.

23. Quoted in Borden, Letters to Limbo, vi.

Chapter 11

Partners in a Common Cause

Even war itself would be cheaply purchased if, in a great and noble cause, the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack should wave together over an Anglo-Saxon alliance.

—Joseph Chamberlain, 1898[1]

Despite the fact that the Conservative party had won the 1911 election largely by means of an emotional campaign denouncing Laurier’s inadequate support for the mother country and opposing reciprocity with the United States, Borden wasted no time in reassuring Canada’s most important neighbor that his government was not anti-American.

Indeed, in a speech at Halifax in November 1911, he enunciated what came to be known as the “linchpin” concept of Canada’s nascent foreign policy: the notion that Canada had a special role to play in bridging the Anglo-American relationship. “Canada’s voice and influence,” he declared, “should always be for harmony . . . between our Empire and the great Republic and I believe that she will always be a bond of abiding friendship between them.”[2]

He hadn’t factored in the impact of a global war. When the United States failed to protest Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality in August 1914, which most Canadians regarded as the real justification for their participation in the war, they were shocked. As Hugh Keenleyside said in a 1929 study of Canadian-American relations, Canadians “did not expect the United States to enter the war, but they did expect a protest from the government that had so often and so emphatically proclaimed its allegiance to the principles of international law.”[3] The declaration by Newton D. Baker, President Wilson’s Secretary of War, that because of its neutrality the United States was “now in the dominant moral position in the world,” was greeted with ridicule by Canadians who felt that they, rather than the Americans, “had recognized and accepted the task of fighting to maintain the moral standards of civilization.”[4] This contempt—for such it became—grew with time as the United States clung to neutrality “while long lists of wounded and dead and missing were filling Canadian newspapers.”[5]

Incidents such as the visit of a German cargo submarine to Baltimore in July 1916 to load nickel—vital in the production of armored plating—also shocked Canadians for its insensitivity and real significance because metal mined by an American company in Sudbury, Ontario, and shipped from what was supposed to be a neutral port would likely be used against Canadian soldiers. Even more annoying was the American response to U-53, the first German combat submarine to cross the Atlantic, when it visited Newport, Rhode Island, in October 1916. After being welcomed by officers of the U.S. Navy and after offering tours to the general public, it sailed out and sank five Allied merchant vessels just off the coast. Two U.S. naval ships passively witnessed the sinking of one of them but did not attempt to prevent the attack because that would have been a violation of U.S. neutrality. A passenger liner sailing from New York to Halifax rescued the survivors.

Canadians were at least broadly aware that many Americans did understand where their country’s interest lay, as was shown not just by public statements but by the more significant fact that several thousand American men went to Canada to enlist in the Canadian army or to train for service in the Royal Flying Corps.[6] But they found it difficult to understand Wilson’s refusal to offer even moral support to the Allies and were angered by the frequent criticisms of Britain made by his irrepressible Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan. And they could not help observing that, while American politicians took the high moral ground of refusing to be dragged into a European conflict, they had no objection to profiting from the war by selling supplies to both sides.

The fact that the United States was benefiting financially from its neutrality became a bone of contention very early in the war, especially in view of the fact that Canada had been struggling with a serious economic downturn since 1912. Borden complained angrily to the British about the fact that they and the French were placing large orders for military equipment in the United States while “the people of Canada” were “making sacrifices hitherto undreamed of to support [the] Empire in this war. A very painful and even bitter feeling is being aroused throughout the Dominion. Men are going without bread in Canada while those across the line are receiving good wages for work that could be done as efficiently and as cheaply in this country.”[7]

Coincidentally, a major military contract did go to Canada but only because of political difficulties in the United States. In November 1914, the Admiralty contracted the Electric Boat Company in Groton, Connecticut, to build twenty submarines. Although the U.S. government vetoed the deal because it violated American neutrality, it did allow the company—in a secret deal with the British government about which the Canadian government was neither consulted nor informed—to ship the components to the Canadian Vickers shipyard in Montreal to be assembled, thereby violating not only its own neutrality but Canadian laws as well. This created more than 2,000 jobs and led to further contracts for Canadian Vickers assembling submarine components for the Italian and Russian navies.

Meanwhile, the Canadian government worked closely with the British government in its effort to persuade influential Americans that the United States should enter the war. Early in 1917, Borden sent Rev. Charles Gordon, the prominent clergyman and author (using the pseudonym Ralph Connor)—and a returned army chaplain—on a speaking tour of the United States. Gordon was reluctant to go because he was disgusted by both U.S. neutrality and the fact that American financiers and industrialists were making millions of dollars out of the war. He did go, however, and George Doran, the New York publisher, who was originally Canadian, organized his tour.

Gordon travelled to several cities in the United States, explaining why Canada was at war and describing the Canadian war effort. He pointedly recounted the sacrifices being made and frankly told Americans how Canadians were unable “to understand the attitude of the American people, our friends and neighbors, largely of the same racial stock and holding the same ethical and religious ideals in regard to the rights of our common humanity.”[8]

He also met with President Wilson and later claimed to have bluntly told him that Canadians despised “the American people who hold the same religious faith, who cherish the same Christian ideals, [but] stand on the side lines unmoved and watch our men die for these ideals.” Wilson allegedly assured Gordon that he did support the Allied cause and that his “main purpose” in recent months had been “to unite my people behind me.”[9] It was true, and when Wilson declared war on Germany in April 1917 during his tour, Gordon later recalled that he “was conscious of an overwhelming tide of emotion. The final issue of the war was already decided.”[10]

It wasn’t long after the U.S. entered the war that there was talk of Canada establishing some kind of representation in Washington, because of the substantial economic relationship between the two countries and the exigencies of the war. Canada’s industrial war effort was being directed by the Imperial Munitions Board (IMB), the British agency responsible for all war contracts in Canada. By 1917, more than 600 factories in Canada, employing some 250,000 workers, were producing almost 100,000 shells per day, supplying between a quarter and a third of all the ammunition used by British artillery and more than half the shrapnel. IMB contracts also involved the production of airplanes and ships. By the war’s end, the IMB and its predecessor, Sam Hughes’s Shell Committee, had spent $1.25 billion producing 65 million shells, 49 million cartridge cases, 30 million fuses, 35 million primers, 112 million pounds of explosives, 2,900 airplanes, 88 ships, and other assorted supplies.[11]

This remarkable industrial enterprise was largely dependent on materials imported from the United States, however, so the IMB had an office in Washington, but by early 1918 Borden was convinced that the Canadian government should be represented there as well. While traveling to Georgia for a winter holiday, he met with President Wilson, declaring afterward that the Americans had agreed “that the resources of the two countries should be pooled in the most effective co-operation and that the boundary line had little or no significance in considering or dealing with these vital questions.”[12] As significant as this declaration was, what is really interesting is that Borden, who had fought an election campaign warning Canadians that closer economic ties with the United States would lead to annexation, now welcomed those closer ties because circumstances had changed.

As a result, he appointed Lloyd Harris, a prominent Canadian manufacturer serving on the IMB board, to head the Canadian War Mission in Washington. Although attached to the British embassy, the Mission was authorized to deal directly with the U.S. government. This was a practical step, not a conscious effort to advance Canadian autonomy, because it would redirect to the Mission the huge volume of communications that the British embassy received that concerned only Canadian-American issues.

The Canadian War Mission’s task was to support IMB efforts to secure U.S. contracts and to collaborate with the newly established U.S. War Industries Board to coordinate the production of war materiel. This was critically important because Canada had a very large balance-of-payments deficit with the United States that was expected to reach $500 million in the next fiscal year. American manufacturers were resisting using Canadian facilities, but with President Wilson’s support, William McAdoo, the Treasury Secretary, and Bernard Baruch, chairman of the War Industries Board, took action, and U.S. firms almost immediately began issuing contracts to Canadian companies to produce munitions. When the U.S. government restricted steel exports, not realizing the major impact this would have on Canadian munitions production because Canada imported steel from the United States, hurried and forceful consultations took place to make an exception for exports to Canada. Three months later, Harris was able to report to Borden that contracts worth $100 million had already been secured and more were expected. Stacey describes the American response to Borden’s request for economic assistance as “the most striking example of Canadian-American co-operation” during the war.[13]

Because the demands of the war forced all governments to intervene in the management of their economies to a degree unthinkable before 1914, Canadian and American bureaucrats actually worked together to some extent. W. D. Hanna, Canada’s Food Controller, met with Herbert Hoover, head of the U.S. Food Administration, and Canada’s Imperial Munitions Board signed an agreement with the U.S. Ordnance Department to coordinate the production of artillery shells. Not much actually came of these agreements, however, before the war ended somewhat unexpectedly in 1918.

There was also minor but significant military cooperation between the two countries. As will be discussed elsewhere, the Royal Canadian Navy and the U.S. Navy worked together to protect merchant vessels from submarine attacks in Atlantic coastal waters. As well, the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service, both of which were recruiting and training men in Canada, assisted the U.S. Signal Corps with the training of thousands of American pilots and air crew.

The Canadian and American armies also collaborated in training Polish Americans to serve in a Polish army formed by the French government in June 1917. Canada provided a training camp and staff at Niagara-on-the-Lake, a small town in south-western Ontario close to the border. When the number of volunteers grew to the point that it could not handle them all, the U.S. Army took some of them at its base at Fort Niagara. Eventually, 20,720 officers and men trained in the two facilities served in Europe.[14]

If American participation in the war brought the two countries closer together, the continuing anti-British attitudes of some prominent Americans continued to cause offense as well. At the annual 4th of July parade in New York in 1918, for example, William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers were notoriously anti-British, refused to stand and remove his hat when a contingent of Canadian troops marched past. And when William Jennings Bryan, who had opposed America’s entry into the war, gave a speech in Toronto later that year, he was greeted by angry veterans who disrupted the meeting and demanded that the “pro-German” politician go home. Bryan’s weak protest that the United States had raised an army of 1.5 million men was met with ridicule. Even Borden acerbically noted that to equal Canada’s contribution on a per capita basis the United States would have to send 5.5 million men to Europe, a comment made publicly by former President Theodore Roosevelt as well.[15]

Perhaps inevitably, American participation in the war soon led to widespread boasting by American politicians and media that the United States was winning the war for the Allies. In a sense it was true, of course, because the British and French were near exhaustion by 1917, and the American contribution, although relatively minor, was critical because it tipped the balance, and if the war had dragged on any longer, that contribution would have become larger.

Still, in view of the appalling cost of the war to Canadians, not to mention the British and French, the American attitude was insensitive, and unfortunately enduring. Keenleyside claimed in 1929 that Canadians were still offended—ten years later—by the fact that for three hard years “America counted her profits while Canada buried her dead.”[16] Canadians were also offended by the fact that after the war was won the United States negotiated a separate treaty with Germany “which retained . . . all the benefits conferred by the Treaty of Versailles, and denied all the obligations undertaken by signatories of the general treaty.”[17]

Canadian resentment of their perceived attitudes of Americans reflected, of course, an incomplete understanding of the United States, which they tended to believe was an essentially Anglo-Saxon offshoot of Britain, like Canada, or at least English Canada. But the United States had changed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the immigration of millions of Irish Catholics, Germans, and East Europeans. Not only were most of these people unsympathetic or indifferent to Britain, some of their leaders actually waged a propaganda campaign against Britain, which Canadians tended to believe represented the general view of Americans.[18] Even if these views represented only a minority viewpoint, it was nonetheless a significant minority which no American politician could realistically afford to ignore.

Every year, on the first Saturday in December, a very large Christmas tree is illuminated on the Boston Common. It is a festive occasion and marks the beginning of the Christmas season in that city. Many people may not know that that tree is a Christmas gift from the people of Nova Scotia and has a direct connection with the First World War.

At 9:05 a.m. on December 6, 1917, two ships collided in the harbor at Halifax, Nova Scotia. This might not have been an event of very great significance, but one of the ships, the French Mont Blanc, was carrying a full cargo of high explosives, benzol and monochlorobenzol. Just after entering the harbor that morning, it was struck by the Imo, a Belgian relief ship that had just returned from Europe and was en route to New York to pick up another cargo.

Because it had to make way for an American ship entering the harbor, the Imo moved to the left, then veered further to the left to avoid a tugboat pulling two barges. This placed it on the wrong side of the channel, and it drove right into the Mont Blanc. The resulting explosion destroyed the entire north end of Halifax and did widespread damage beyond that, killing more than 2,000 people, injuring another 6,000, and leaving 9,000 people homeless in a city of 60,000. It was the largest man-made explosion in history until the atomic bombs were dropped in 1945.

As military and civic officials scrambled to understand and cope with this extraordinary crisis, Lieutenant Colonel (Dr.) Frederick McKelvey Bell, Assistant Director of Medical Services for Military District 6 (Halifax), quickly took charge of medical operations in the shattered city. Bell had served overseas for more than two years before being posted to Halifax, so he had extensive first-hand experience with battlefield wounds and conditions, experience that was now unexpectedly relevant on the home front. Remarkably, he told a newspaper reporter that he “had never seen anything on the battlefront equal to the scenes of destruction that he witnessed in Halifax today.”[19]

Prime Minister Borden, himself a Nova Scotian, happened to be in Halifax that day as part of his travels during the federal election campaign then taking place. Luckily, his private rail car was not damaged, although the rail-yard in which it was sitting certainly was. After he made a quick tour of the devastated city and met with civic officials, the government swung into action, bringing in troops to help clear the streets and search for survivors, and mobilizing relief supplies.

Within minutes, a call went out to other towns, initially in Nova Scotia, then beyond to the neighboring province of New Brunswick, seeking emergency assistance. Doctors and nurses were critically needed, of course, as well as temporary housing and food relief for the survivors. Over the course of the day, telegrams were sent as far as Ottawa, Montreal, Boston, and New York. One even went to Havana, which forwarded it to Washington, which in turn passed it along to the American Red Cross. The Red Cross was already aware of the situation, however, because it had received a telegram from its representative in the Department of Military Relief, who happened to be in Halifax that day, and it had already alerted its local offices along the eastern seaboard.

In Boston, James Phelan, a banker, heard about the explosion from a message circulated by a Halifax banker. He immediately contacted Henry B. Endicott, a prominent shoe manufacturer who was also chairman of the Massachusetts Committee on Public Safety. Together, they went to see Governor Samuel McCall, who immediately sent a telegram to Halifax Mayor Peter Martin promising that Massachusetts was “ready to go the limit in rendering every assistance you may be in need of.”[20] This was the beginning of an extraordinary story.

The Committee met that afternoon and, even though McCall had received no response from Halifax—because the telegraph lines were down—it decided to organize a private train to take doctors, nurses, and supplies to Halifax. The Boston & Maine Railroad offered a train, and McCall appointed Abraham C. Ratshesky, a Boston businessman and state senator, Commissioner-in-Charge of the Halifax Relief Expedition. The Committee then called a public meeting, which took place at Faneuil Hall, to launch a fund-raising campaign and raised $100,000 on the first day.

Meanwhile, the USS Tacoma was fifty-two miles out to sea, returning home after having escorted a convoy to Europe. It was not bound for Halifax, but Captain Powers Symington changed course when he spotted the huge black cloud on the horizon. The Tacoma was quickly followed by a nearby troop transport vessel returning home from France, the USS Von Steuben, whose Captain Stanford Moses had also spotted the cloud and made the same decision. Curiously, just six weeks earlier, on October 24, the Von Steuben had very nearly collided at the Philadelphia naval yard with a Japanese ship loaded with high explosives, and on November 9 it had actually collided with the USS Agamemnon while en route to France.[21]

When the two ships arrived at Halifax, they found that the USS Old Colony, a coastal passenger vessel that happened to be in Halifax harbor but was undamaged, was being converted into a hospital ship. The Old Colony had just been purchased by the U.S. Navy and was en route to Britain to be transferred to the Royal Navy, but had stopped at Halifax for engine repairs. The Tacoma transferred its medical officers and staff to the Old Colony, and equipment was also transferred from the USS Morrill,[22] an American Coast Guard cutter that also happened to be in port, to set up operating rooms. The Tacoma also provided 250 men to patrol the streets of Halifax.

It didn’t take long for news of the disaster to reach the troops in Europe, some of whom—especially those in the 25th Battalion—were from Halifax and had not been home or seen their families for more than two years. When the explosion occurred, the 25th was in the trenches facing Lens. One can only imagine the alarm caused by the news, which was limited by the fact that communications with Halifax were cut off for days. Even in normal circumstances, it took ten days or more for overseas soldiers to get a reply to a letter sent home. Now, beyond knowing that hundreds of people had been killed and injured, the Haligonians in the trenches had no idea if their families had survived or were well.

The army made every effort to obtain reliable information for them, and most men remained on duty. Some, of course, eventually learned that their families were safe, but others had family and close relatives killed or badly injured. A few men were allowed to return home on compassionate leave, after which they were either discharged or reassigned as instructors at Camp Aldershot, Nova Scotia.

Back in Boston, the local branch of the American Red Cross organized a relief expedition headed by Dr. William Edwards Ladd, a prominent physician and surgeon, who took thirty doctors and fifty nurses, as well as supplies, to Halifax. At the same time, Colonel William A. Brooks provided thirteen medical professionals from the Massachusetts State Guard, and Harvard University sent a complete hospital unit. Ratshesky travelled with them on the special train, as did John Moors, who had been appointed director of the Halifax Relief Unit by the American Red Cross because he had extensive experience with disaster relief.

Meanwhile, the Red Cross in New York was sending several trains with engineers, doctors, nurses, tools, lumber, medical supplies, and 1,000 portable houses. Other relief trains also began arriving from Maine, Philadelphia, and Washington. The State of Maine Unit alone sent 110 doctors, plus nurses and other volunteers, who converted the Halifax Ladies College into a temporary hospital.[23]

Captain Eugene O’Donnell of the U.S. Steamboat Inspection Service in Boston organized a ship that sent supplies, including 25,000 blankets. The U.S. Army sent relief supplies as well, including food, and the Rhode Island Red Cross sent fifty doctors, fifty-three nurses, and a pharmacist. Ten days after the explosion, the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave a concert featuring Nellie Melba to raise funds.

These were just the major relief efforts organized by governments and the American Red Cross. Private donations of supplies and money came from all over the United States, ranging from a Christian Science train from Boston with clothing, food, and $10,000 in cash to individuals and organizations as far away as Tacoma, Kentucky, Iowa, and even Alaska—a list far too long and widespread to be reproduced. The city of Chicago, recalling generous aid sent by Canadians at the time of its great fire in October 1871, donated $125,000. Andrew Carnegie paid all the costs—more than $20,000—of repairing the damage caused by the explosion to Dalhousie University buildings.

Without deprecating the extraordinary spontaneous support that came from all over the United States, the greatest support undoubtedly came from Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. When the Halifax Relief Commission later officially thanked Massachusetts for its overwhelming generosity and sympathy, Ratshesky responded that the hearts of the people of Massachusetts had “gone out to your citizens, not only in [their] generous supply of clothing, food and money, but, better than all, in that fine sentiment of affection for the people of your city that will bring about a strengthened friendship that will last for generations to come.”[24]

Remarkably, Massachusetts’s generosity did not end in December 1917. Upon their return home, many of the people involved in the relief effort formed an organization which they called the Halifax-Massachusetts Relief Associates, which worked with Halifax and the government of Nova Scotia for the next five years to improve the lives of survivors and general health conditions in the city. This involved an expenditure of $50,000 a year, which was matched by $15,000 from the Canadian government and $10,000 from the Nova Scotia government. In total, the Associates raised $716,000, a huge sum at the time, all of it donated by the people of Massachusetts.

The people of Nova Scotia, and particularly Halifax, were astonished and gratified by this extraordinary generosity on the part of their southern neighbors. Of course Halifax and Boston shared a long history. Indeed, most Nova Scotians—including Prime Minister Borden—could trace their ancestry to New Englanders who had moved north either as Planters in the 1750s or somewhat later as Loyalists during the American Revolution. At the same time, Boston and Massachusetts were home to thousands of Nova Scotians who had crossed the border over the years seeking better economic opportunities.

When the Spanish influenza epidemic swept North America in 1918, Nova Scotia demonstrated its appreciation, albeit on a smaller scale, by sending doctors to Massachusetts to help out, and in December of that year the Province sent Boston the first giant Christmas tree as a special thank-offering. The gesture was not immediately repeated, but it was revived in 1971 and continues to this day. How significant this annual gift is to the people of Boston and Massachusetts generally is difficult to assess, but the process of selecting the tree, cutting and shipping it off to Boston continues to be very significant in Nova Scotia and particularly Halifax. It reminds people not only of the terrible disaster that took place in December 1917 but also of the profound generosity of the people of Boston, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and—to be fair—other cities and states, and constitutes a unique bond of kinship between the two communities.

1. Quoted in Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, 233.

2. Quoted in Stacey, 151.

3. Hugh L. Keenleyside, Canada and the United States: Some Aspects of their Historical Relations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952; First published 1929), 345. Hugh Llewellyn Keenleyside joined the Canadian Department of External (Foreign) Affairs in 1928 and served in Tokyo from 1929 to 1936. During the Second World War, he was secretary, then chairman of the Canadian section of the Canada-United States Permanent Joint Board on Defense. He later served as Director-General of the United Nations Technical Assistance Administration.

4. Keenleyside, 346.

5. Oscar D. Skelton, The Canadian Dominion: A Chronicle of Our Northern Neighbor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), 274–75. Skelton was an academic at Queen’s University who had earned his PhD at the University of Chicago. In 1925 he became Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s undersecretary of state for external affairs (i.e., deputy minister of foreign affairs] and closest advisor. See also O. D. Skelton: The Work of the World, 1923–1941, ed. Norman Hillmer. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2013.

6. Skelton claimed in 1921 that 12,000 of the first 360,000 Canadian troops who went overseas were Americans. Skelton, Dominion, 275.

7. Quoted in Stacey, 180.

8. Gordon, 307.

9. Gordon, 301–02.

10. Gordon, 325.

11. Michael Bliss, “Sir Joseph Wesley Flavelle,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/flavelle_joseph_wesley_16E.html (accessed August 25, 2013).

12. Quoted in Morton and Granatstein, Marching to Armageddon, 192.

13. Stacey, 233.

14. See C. R. Young, “The White Eagle at Niagara: How Canada Trained the Polish Army,” MacLean’s Magazine 32, no 9 (September 1919): 23–25, 89.

15. Quoted in Thompson and Randall, Canada and the United States, 97–98.

16. Quoted in Thompson and Randall, 98.

17. Keenleyside, 359.

18. Keenleyside, 347.

19. Quoted in Laura MacDonald, Curse of the Narrows: The Halifax Explosion, 1917 (Toronto: Harper Collins Canada, 2005), 134.

20. Quoted in MacDonald, 105.

21. The USS Von Steuben, named after Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Von Steuben, a German general who served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution, was actually a former German passenger liner, one of the fastest and most luxurious when it was launched in 1901 as the SS Kronprinz Wilhelm. It served as a commerce raider in 1914–15 running out of supplies, when it was interned at Portsmouth, Virginia. When the U.S. entered the war, it was seized and renamed and served as a troop and cargo transport.

22. The correct name of this vessel was Lot M. Morrill, because it was named after Lot Morrill (1812–83), who served briefly as Secretary of the Treasury in 1876–77 under President Ulysses S. Grant, but in general usage it was known simply as the Morrill.

23. MacDonald, 206.

24. Quoted in MacDonald, 225.

Chapter 12

The War at Sea

Stirring times bring stirring opportunities and these be great days for Halifax.

—Rudyard Kipling[1]

In the decade before 1914, Britain abandoned its traditional policy of attempting to keep the world’s sea lanes open and serving as policeman of the world in favor of concentrating its resources in the North Sea and eastern Atlantic to be ready to confront the German navy. The Royal Navy’s dockyards at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Esquimalt, British Columbia, were closed and their garrisons were withdrawn, and the North America and West Indies Squadron was reduced to a single cruiser based at Bermuda. This shifted the complete responsibility for local Canadian naval defense over to the Canadian government.

As we have already seen, the Canadian government replaced the British garrisons with Canadian troops and in 1910, after intense political debate (much of it rather hysterical), passed legislation creating a Canadian navy. The Laurier government was defeated only months later in the 1911 elections, however, and the new Borden government’s effort to provide a direct financial grant to the Admiralty was blocked by the Liberal-dominated Senate. As a result of this political deadlock, nothing had been done by August 1914, except that two cruisers had been purchased from the Royal Navy and a naval college had been established at Halifax.

The Royal Canadian Navy consisted of 350 regular personnel and 250 members of the Royal Naval Canadian Volunteer Reserve (RNCVR), a militia-type organization. As for its two ships, HMCS Niobe and HMCS Rainbow, most of their crews were sailors on loan from the Royal Navy. Borden, in what must have been a highly embarrassing reversal of policy, now asked the Admiralty to lend Canada destroyers and submarines, while the government built its own warships. The Admiralty refused to do so, mainly because it could not spare any warships but also because it knew that Canadian shipyards were not capable of building modern warships in the near future.

Actually, the situation was not as dire as it might appear at first glance because the Admiralty did not think there was any significant naval threat to Canada, and the Royal Navy would protect transatlantic shipping. It therefore recommended that Canada focus its war effort on contributing men to the British army. This was, in fact, what Canada did, but one cannot help speculating that if the navy had had a fleet in 1914 at least some of the thousands of men who fought and died in Europe would have served in it instead. As Marc Milner, Canada’s leading naval historian, has pointed out, “naval unpreparedness in 1914 left the Western Front [as] the only option for Canadian participation in the Great War. Perhaps the real cost for the failure to build Laurier’s fleet can be counted among the 60,000 Canadians who died on active army service between 1914 and 1918.”[2]

Still, the fledgling navy did what it could. It requisitioned ten small ships from other government agencies and purchased or chartered another ten, mostly private yachts, from private owners. One was the Waturus, which Toronto millionaire yachtsman Aemilius Jarvis purchased in the United States. It became HMCS Hochelaga in 1914. Another was the Tarantula, purchased from the Vanderbilts by Toronto businessman Jack Ross and renamed HMCS Tuna. A keen yachtsman, Ross donated the ship to the navy, got himself commissioned in the RNCVR, and commanded the Tuna until serious mechanical problems took it out of service in May 1917.

These ships were used as examining vessels at Halifax harbor, sweeping the immediate approaches for mines and mounting the occasional coastal patrol. Meanwhile, on the west coast, HMCS Rainbow and the two submarines purchased in Seattle patrolled the immediate waters around Vancouver Island. This little navy, which had quickly grown from two ships to twenty-two, was actually adequate until 1917 because the Royal Navy soon had the German navy bottled up in port and there was no real threat in the western Atlantic. Indeed, when the Niobe was declared no longer fit for service in July 1915, the Canadian government actually declined the offer of a replacement cruiser.[3]

At the same time, coastal fortifications were built at Halifax, the most important naval base on the east coast, and at Sydney, Nova Scotia, which not only had a spacious harbor on the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence but also was the site of most of the country’s coal mines and a major steel plant. Fortifications were also built at Saint John, New Brunswick, an important port on the Bay of Fundy.[4]

Although the risk was not considered great, the Admiralty warned Ottawa in June 1915 that German submarines might soon show up in Canadian waters and recommended that the Canadian navy increase its local patrolling, especially in the northern Gulf of St Lawrence. The St Lawrence Patrol was established, consisting of seven vessels operating from Sydney in the summer months and Halifax in the winter. These vessels included HMCS Canada, arguably Canada’s first real warship and its most heavily armed (excluding Niobe and Rainbow), with two twelve-pounder and two three-pounder guns. There was also the Margaret, transferred from the Canadian Customs Service, and the trawler Gulnare from the Fisheries Protection Service. Two other little Fisheries vessels, Constance and Curlew, served as minesweepers.

Once again prominent businessmen came to the navy’s aid. John Eaton—head of the T. Eaton Company, Canada’s largest chain of department stores—donated his yacht, the Florence, in July 1915. Armed with a single three-pounder gun, it guarded Saint John and patrolled the Bay of Fundy until 1916. Jack Ross again helped by purchasing the yacht Winchester for $100,000 on behalf of the government. Renamed HMCS Grilse, it was armed with two twelve-pounder guns and a torpedo tube and served throughout the war.

The St. Lawrence Patrol was Canada’s first wartime fleet. It was commanded by Captain Fred Pasco, a retired Royal Navy officer who arrived in Sydney in September 1915. A gruff man with high standards, Pasco knew the importance of common sense as well. Milner describes an occasion when Pasco found his men struggling to bring ashore a barrel of “sugar” that rather oddly clinked as they moved it. Instead of investigating, he simply reminded the men to “send some of that sugar to my cabin, too.”[5]

No submarines were encountered in 1915, but the situation changed dramatically in July 1916 when the Deutschland, a German cargo submarine, visited Baltimore, demonstrating that submarines were now capable of operating in North American waters. Then U-53, a combat submarine, visited Newport, Rhode Island, in October, after which it returned to sea—without refueling—and proceeded to sink five Allied merchant ships off Nantucket Island. This marked the beginning of the long anticipated submarine war in the western Atlantic. The New York Times probably spoke for many Americans when, somewhat incredibly, it observed of the warm welcome that U-53 had received at Newport that “no one had thought of the long gray visitor as a destroyer of shipping and perhaps of lives.”[6]

Allied shipping crossing the Atlantic from Canada and the United States now came under heavy attack, as Germany sought to starve Britain of food supplies and war materiel. In January 1917, Germany declared that it would carry out “unrestricted submarine warfare” on shipping going to Allied destinations, meaning that it would attack the ships of neutral—i.e., the United States—powers as well.

This was the critical point of the war in the Atlantic. As shipping losses mounted drastically, the Admiralty urged the Royal Canadian Navy to expand its coastal anti-submarine patrols as quickly as possible. Ottawa ordered the construction of twelve small submarine chasers, rounded up a few more local vessels, and also put the Acadia, a Fisheries research ship, into service. The Admiralty also ordered the construction in Canadian shipyards of 160 small anti-submarine vessels, promising that some of them would be made available to the Canadian navy if needed.

By 1917, Canada’s coastal patrol service was being commanded by Captain Walter Hose, a veteran of the Royal Navy who had transferred into the RCN and commanded the Rainbow on the west coast before being transferred to the more critical east coast.[7] By now the navy had almost 9,000 sailors, although many of them were on loan from Britain. But its twenty-two ships were “so poorly armed,” says Milner, “that the army had to keep the coast guns of the Halifax fortress fully manned because, if any German ship appeared, the navy would have to seek protection from the shore batteries.”[8]

The government did not seem unduly concerned about this situation, focused as it was by 1917 on the manpower crisis in the army. Indeed, it allowed the RNCVR to organize an overseas division, which by the spring of 1917 had provided nearly 1,200 recruits for the Royal Navy, in addition to the 47 RCN officers already in the service.[9] Among them were Lambert Griffith and Leslie Goodwin. Griffith at least was posted to HMCS Niobe in Halifax harbor,[10] but Goodwin was almost immediately sent to England and served on a Royal Navy minesweeper and at Gilbraltar.[11]

Submarines would undoubtedly have been helpful on the east coast but none were available. Even when Borden learned early in 1915 that the British were assembling American-made submarines at the Canadian Vickers shipyard in Montreal and asked that some of them be allocated to the east coast, he was turned down flat.[12] But when the government decided to move its two submarines from Esquimalt to Halifax, it was only in order to send them overseas. The Admiralty logically suggested that they be kept at Halifax for anti-submarine patrol work, however, and this was done. Because of on-going mechanical problems, however, they never became fully operational and were used primarily for anti-submarine training exercises with patrol vessels in the last few months of the war.[13]

Meanwhile, German submarines were sinking as much as 25% of the merchant shipping crossing the Atlantic, creating serious shortages of war materiel and food supplies. Because it was fully expected that 1917 would be worse than 1916 had been, the Admiralty recommended early in the year that Canada establish a naval air service, similar to the RNAS, to help the navy protect coastal waters and escort merchant shipping. J. D. Hazen, the minister of marine fisheries and minister of the naval service, agreed in February 1917 to do so, and Wing Commander J. W. Seddon, who had commanded Britain’s first seaplane base when it was established in 1912, was sent over to provide expert advice. He recommended that the navy establish air bases at Halifax and Sydney, with a force of 34 seaplanes and 300 men, but the government balked at the cost and placed in storage the 4 seaplanes which the admiralty had optimistically contributed for the service.

Two major developments that spring changed the situation dramatically. The first was that the United States entered the war in April, making it obvious that there must be Canadian-American cooperation in the defense of the shared Atlantic coast and the protection of merchant shipping. The second was that David Lloyd George, who had become prime minister in December 1916, finally succeeded in forcing the admiralty to organize merchant shipping in defended convoys.

Long resisted because the naval “experts” thought convoys just provided a larger target, this decision “proved to be the key to victory.”[14] Within three months, shipping losses fell from 25% to less than 1%, meaning that Britain was no longer in danger of being starved out. Germany, however, still was because the British naval blockade of its ports remained effective.

Transatlantic convoys began sailing from Hampton Roads (Virginia), New York, Halifax, and Sydney in July 1917. As the system developed, the Sydney convoys were reserved for slow vessels, while the fast troopships and merchant vessels sailed from Halifax. A reorganization of the convoy system in March 1918 transferred the Halifax convoys to New York and instituted convoys of medium-speed troopships and merchant vessels from Halifax. Meanwhile, the Sydney convoys were shifted to Halifax when the St. Lawrence froze up during the winter months. British and American cruisers escorted the convoys all the way across the Atlantic, and smaller anti-submarine vessels joined as the convoys approached the shores of Europe.

Coordination of the many authorities at convoy ports in both Canada and the United States was the responsibility of the commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy’s North America and West Indies Squadron, Vice Admiral M. E. Browning, who was succeeded in February 1918 by Vice Admiral W. L. Grant. Browning and Grant spent most of their time in Washington liaising with the U.S. Navy Department, but both visited Halifax and Ottawa regularly. Indeed, Roger Sarty says that “on many of the most important questions they, rather than Admiral C. E. Kingsmill, director of the Canadian Naval Service, acted as the senior naval advisors to the Canadian government.”[15]

The Admiralty attempted to avoid any potential difficulties with Canadian jurisdiction in local waters by keeping its command and control offices outside of the country. The Royal Navy’s main intelligence center for the northwest Atlantic was in St John’s, Newfoundland—not then part of Canada—even though its main operational base was in Halifax. This meant that the commander of the British cruiser force operating from Halifax had to have his signals relayed through St. John’s. At the same time, he discouraged local intelligence officers in Halifax from communicating directly with Ottawa. Thus, Kingsmill found himself trying to operate a navy in wartime in “something of an intelligence vacuum.”[16]

When British Rear Admiral B. M. Chambers was sent to Halifax to take charge of assembling the Halifax and Sydney convoys, he sensibly moved the regional intelligence center to Halifax, thus consolidating both intelligence and operational activities in one place, though still under Admiralty control. The Canadian government, determined by now to assert its autonomy at least to some extent, then promoted Rear Admiral William Story to Vice Admiral and made him superintendent of the Halifax Dockyard, in order to make clear that Chambers was not also in charge of local shore establishments and vessels.[17]

Early in January 1918, the Admiralty warned that it expected the Germans to launch a submarine offensive in the western Atlantic in the spring. When Grant frankly admitted that his ability to protect troopships and convoys was limited, the assembling of convoys going to Europe was moved from Sydney to Quebec City, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence Patrol and escort services at Sydney were strengthened. Troopships coming from Europe were similarly diverted to Quebec City, New York, and New England ports. Convoys sailing from Halifax now rendezvoused at sea beyond the danger area with American convoys assembled at New York and Hampton Roads.

The submarine offensive began in May and lasted into August, but little damage was done to the merchant convoys. One ship that the U-boats managed to locate was the Llandovery Castle, a Canadian hospital ship that was torpedoed and sunk by U-86 off the coast of Ireland on June 27, 1918. Attacking hospital ships was against international law, of course, and it was also against the standing orders of the Germany navy. Accordingly, the German government insisted that the ship had struck a mine, but there were survivors who reported the facts.

What made the incident worse than it might have been was that, after sinking the ship, U-86 surfaced and machine-gunned the survivors in their lifeboats. The result was that of the 258 crew and medical personnel on board, only 24 survived. Among the dead were Lieutenant Colonel Thomas MacDonald, the Canadian physician who commanded the ship, and all fourteen Canadian nursing sisters who had been on board. This was the worst Canadian naval disaster of the war and had a profound impact on public opinion not only in Canada but in Britain and the United States as well.[18]

It is clear that the effective management of merchant shipping, including the high level of British-Canadian-American cooperation, was remarkably effective. It was even reported that the captain of U-117 actually somewhat plaintively asked the captains of ships he did stumble across where the steamer routes were! Some of the credit for this success must go to the Canadian navy because, as Roger Sarty says, its existence helped to make the convoy system possible.[19] The fact that Admiralty had cracked the German navy’s wireless code and was therefore able to keep the Canadian and American navies well informed at all times on the movements of enemy submarines undoubtedly contributed significantly to this success.

Unable to attack convoys, the submarines attacked merchant vessels sailing alone and local fishing boats, easy but militarily worthless targets. This may explain why the 1918 anti-submarine campaign was virtually forgotten for many years and was not even mentioned in the official history of the navy published in 1952.[20] But the three U-boats that operated off the Atlantic coast certainly caused much concern in coastal communities and among fishermen. U-151, for example, attacked three American schooners south of the Delaware River in May 1918 and had destroyed twenty-two vessels by the time it returned home. Two more submarines, U-156 and U-140, were also active in the area. In addition to sinking ships, they laid mines, one of their victims being the USS San Diego, which went down near Sable Island in July. In all, 110,000 tons of shipping were sunk between Cape Hatteras and Newfoundland between May and October 1918.[21]

In view of the fear generated by submarines, it should be acknowledged that their attacks on fishing vessels were usually very gentlemanly affairs. They surfaced and came alongside the fishing vessels and allowed their crews to depart in their dories—sometimes after giving them a tour of the submarine and even lunch—before sinking the vessels. Because fishing boats did not have wireless, the first news anyone had of their fate came when their crews rowed into the nearest port, whereupon they regaled the local press with accounts of their adventure.

One dramatic case involving U-156 occurred in August when it stopped a steam trawler, the Triumph, near Canso. After allowing its crew to take to a lifeboat, it placed a German crew on board with two light guns, wireless equipment, and a supply of bombs. It then proceeded to sink five schooners on August 20 and two more the next day, after which it headed home, only to strike a mine in the North Sea, making it the only German transatlantic raider that failed to return safely from North American waters.

Before heading home, however, U-156 was involved in an incident that understandably caused considerable embarrassment to the Canadian navy. HMCS Hochelaga, leading a naval patrol, came across the surfaced submarine just south of St. Pierre in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Instead of immediately attacking, it turned away to wait for the other vessels in its patrol to catch up to provide assistance, the captain fearing that attacking the submarine alone might be suicidal. Needless to say, by the time the other vessels arrived, U-156 was gone. Thus, in the only direct confrontation between a Canadian naval vessel and a German U-boat during the war, the Canadian naval officer in charge failed to do his duty.

The Hochelaga’s captain, R. D. Legate, was promptly court-martialed and dismissed from the service. To be fair, the Hochelaga was only a converted yacht with very light armament, but at the same time a surfaced submarine was highly vulnerable and lightly armed as well. More significantly, Legate was not a professional navy officer. Before the war he had served as fourth officer on a ship that serviced the undersea telegraph cable.[22] As Milner points out, the leniency of the court martial suggests that he was treated “with some consideration” because his superiors understood the limits of their personnel, “both in quantity and quality.”[23] Still, as Sydney’s Daily Post commented, Legate had been given an opportunity “that is given to very few men more than once in a life time. It was within his grasp to bring honor not only to himself but to other members of the service,” but “he hesitated and—he lost.”[24]

By now the Canadian navy had sixty vessels based at Sydney, including those allocated to the St. Lawrence Patrol, and forty at Halifax. As well, the U.S. Navy lent Canada an old gunboat, the USS Yorktown, which patrolled the Grand Banks fishing grounds off Newfoundland. Most of these vessels were new; however, some did not yet have their guns mounted, and many of their personnel were newly recruited and had received little training. At the same time, however, the vessels were being better supplied with depth charges, and hydrophones were being installed as quickly as they became available.

Meanwhile, when representatives of the Royal Navy, Royal Canadian Navy, and U.S. Navy had met in Washington just after the U.S. declaration of war to draw up a comprehensive plan for coastal defense, they had all agreed not only that a beefed-up naval presence was necessary but that it should include the use of aircraft. Because Britain could not spare any planes and Canada didn’t have military aircraft, this meant that the U.S. Navy would have to play a major role in Canada’s coastal defense, at least temporarily.

At a second meeting that took place in Boston on April 23, 1917, attended by Rear Admiral Spencer Wood, commander of the U.S. First Naval District, and Admiral Kingsmill, it was agreed that the U.S. Navy would take responsibility for coastal patrols and anti-submarine operations as far north as Lockeport, Nova Scotia, and that two American torpedo boats and six sub chasers would be dispatched to Halifax and placed under the operational control of the Canadian navy.[25]

The Canadian government would obviously have to be consulted about any plan to have the U.S. Navy operating in Canadian waters and even establishing shore-based air patrol stations. The Admiralty’s approach was, however, somewhat devious. It cabled Ottawa advising that Flight Commander John Barron, a Canadian serving in the Royal Air Force but then stationed in Washington, could visit Ottawa to offer advice if the government was contemplating the use of aircraft in the anti-submarine campaign. This message completely surprised Canadian officials because they hadn’t been contemplating this matter at all. The Admiralty then followed up by offering a preliminary plan for coastal air patrols of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland to be undertaken by the U.S. Navy until Canada could get its own service organized. The Canadians may have been uninformed but they were not stupid, so they promptly agreed to form a Canadian naval air service. The British Air Ministry was asked to send over an officer to organize and command the coastal defense program, and Lieutenant Colonel J. T. Cull, who had served in the RNAS before the formation of the RAF, arrived in June 1918.

One of Cull’s first recommendations was that the government not call the new force the Royal Canadian Naval Air Service because he thought Canada should be thinking not just of supplementing coastal defense but of creating an air force that would contribute to Canadian defense generally. Nobody had bothered to tell him that the government had already decided to form a Canadian air force as well. As will be discussed in Chapter 13, this decision indicated that the government had decided to follow the American example of having separate air forces for the army and navy. The British had started the war with two separate organizations but had merged them into the Royal Air Force in the spring of 1918.

The RCNAS was not officially established until September 5, although recruiting began in August. More than 600 applications were received in short order, and 80 recruits were almost immediately sent to Boston for seaplane training and another 18 to England for airship instruction. Tragedy struck en route when the service suffered its first casualty with the death at sea of nineteen-year-old Flight Cadet Willet Vancleaf Bedell from acute pneumonia.[26]

While the air stations at Dartmouth (across the harbor from Halifax) and North Sydney were being built and the new Canadian naval airmen were being trained, the Americans provided aircraft and pilots. Lieutenant Richard E. Byrd, who later became famous as an aviator and polar explorer, commanded the Dartmouth base, over which he raised the stars and stripes on August 19. That fact, and Byrd’s designation as Officer-in-Charge, U.S. Naval Air Force in Canada, would have horrified Borden and most other Canadians even a year earlier.[27]

Six days later, two Curtiss HS2 flying boats made their first flights over Halifax, not only surprising the city’s residents but causing some consternation to the local coastal defense commander, who complained to his superiors that “no information has reached us regarding the addition of this service to the garrison. This I would be glad to get,” he commented dryly, “as the fortress is equipped with anti-aircraft defenses.”[28]

This lapse reflected a larger problem. While cooperation among the British, Canadians, and Americans was obviously desirable in principle, the task of organizing a Canadian naval air arm was complicated by the fact that Cull and his colleagues were ex-naval officers functioning under the British General Officer Commanding the RAF in Canada (with headquarters in Toronto) for discipline and the Canadian Director of the Naval Service in Ottawa for administration purposes. American authorities in Washington were also involved, of course, so communications were circuitous.

The situation was further complicated by the fact that the Canadian naval air service was of greater interest to the Admiralty than it was to the British Air Ministry, which gave the scheme rather low priority. According to Kealy and Russell, “general indifference and dilatoriness combined to give the officers the feeling that they did not belong to anybody and were fighting a losing battle. It is a tribute to the initiative and patience of Colonel Cull that he managed to achieve as much as he did.”[29]

U.S. Naval Air Service patrols began at once, and by the end of the war, six flying boats were in operation, escorting convoys for up to eighty miles from port and carrying out coastal searches, but the planned dirigibles and kite balloons never arrived. Although there were no contacts with enemy ships or submarines, there was one casualty: Lieutenant R. S. Johnson, who was serving at the North Sydney station, died in the Spanish influenza epidemic which swept North America at this time.[30]

The end of the war on November 11 aborted the development of the RCNAS. The men training in Britain and the United States were brought home, the RCNAS was disbanded on December 5, and the Americans were gone before Christmas. The distribution of costs still had to be worked out, however, and as a result of negotiations that took place in Washington, the U.S. donated twelve flying boats and four kite balloons to the Canadian government, which in turn purchased all American ground equipment. Complimentary messages were exchanged all round, “and it was generally agreed that the first joint U.S.-Canadian venture in the field of naval aviation had been highly successful.”[31]

Marc Milner argues that, while Canada’s status had been greatly enhanced as a result of the contribution made by the Canadian Corps in Europe, this could not be said of the Canadian navy. “Indeed, after four dreary years of effort, no Canadian warship had even traded shots with the enemy, no lasting traditions had been established, and no public consciousness or support had been won.” For the navy, he concludes, the war was “a wasteland of missed opportunity in all respects except one. All federal parties now accepted that Canada needed its own proper navy.”[32]

This seems rather harsh. While the Royal Canadian Navy had not destroyed any enemy submarines in coastal waters, neither had the U.S. Navy, and that was because the institution of merchant convoys with naval escorts—including ships of the Canadian navy—had essentially neutralized the submarines. It needs to be remembered too that, thanks to the politicians, the navy had virtually not existed in 1914, and it was never given any real warships that could be expected to engage in naval combat.

The navy that did emerge in the course of the war was designed to patrol coastal waters and escort merchant shipping, and, as Roger Sarty points out, its contribution must be measured

not only by the number of merchantmen that sailed safely and on schedule but also by the fact that Great Britain did not have to divert one major anti-submarine warship from the critical battle in the eastern Atlantic to protect the coastal waters of Canada and Newfoundland.[33]

At the same time, the Canadian navy carried out “the mundane and unobtrusive work of shore staffs, who organized shipping, developed defended ports and secure anchorages, regulated patrols, monitored wireless communications, and provided support for British cruisers that secured adjacent waters.”[34]

As for the RCNAS, it was created too late in the war to actually accomplish anything, but if the war had continued into 1919 or even 1920, as many thought it would, it would have made a useful if modest contribution to the ultimate victory. Kealy and Russell, perhaps struggling to find something positive to say, credit the government for its “foresight and determination in going ahead with the scheme at all.”[35] What can be said with certainty is that the cooperation between the RCNAS and the U.S. Naval Air Service constituted a remarkable and unprecedented instance of wartime military cooperation between Canada and the United States that few would have thought conceivable in 1914.

1. Halifax Morning Chronicle, August 8, 1914, quoted in Michael L. Hadley and Roger Sarty, Tin-Pots and Pirate Ships: Canadian Naval Forces and German Sea Raiders 1880–1918 (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 80.

2. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 45.

3. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 46.

4. For a detailed study of the coastal defenses around Sydney harbor and its role as a shipping and naval port in the war, see Brian Douglas Tennyson and Roger Sarty, Guardian of the Gulf: Sydney, Cape Breton, and the Atlantic Wars (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 113–88.

5. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 48.

6. Quoted in Hadley and Sarty, 155–56.

7. Regarded as one of the founders of the Royal Canadian Navy, Hose went on to succeed Kingsmill as Director of the RCN (redesignated Chief of the Naval Staff in 1928), serving from 1921 to 1934.

8. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 38.

9. Roger Sarty, “Hard Luck Flotilla: The RCN’s Atlantic Coast Patrol, 1914–18,” in The RCN in Transition 1910–1985, ed. W. A. B. Douglas (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1988), 105.

10. He was badly injured in the Halifax explosion in December 1917. See also Lambert Griffith, “Letters from Halifax: Reliving the Halifax Explosion through the Eyes of My Grandfather, a Sailor in the Royal Canadian Navy,” ed. John Griffith Armstrong, The Northern Mariner, 8, no. 4 (October 1998): 55–74; and John Griffin Armstrong, The Halifax Explosion and the Royal Canadian Navy: Inquiry and Intrigue. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002.

11. After the war, he moved to the United States and operated Undercliff Boatworks in Edgewater, New Jersey. In 1939 he bought the Cape Cod Shipbuilding Company in Wareham, Massachusetts, which built tugboats during the Second World War and later pioneered fiberglass sailboat construction.

12. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 46.

13. Sarty, “Hard Luck,” 111.

14. Sarty, “Hard Luck,” 107.

15. Sarty, “Hard Luck,” 108.

16. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 49.

17. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 50–51. William Oswald Story (1859–1938) was born in Ireland and pursued a career in the Royal Navy. He retired in 1911 with the rank of Rear Admiral but in 1911 was appointed superintendent of the Esquimalt naval dockyard in British Columbia. In 1914 he was appointed Senior Naval Officer West Coast. Three years later, he was promoted to Vice Admiral and superintendent of the Halifax naval dockyard, where he remained until the end of the war.

18. After the war, U-86’s captain, Helmut Brümmer-Patzig, and two of his lieutenants were charged with war crimes in what became known as the Leipzig trials. Brümmer-Patzig escaped justice by fleeing the country. The two lieutenants were convicted and sentenced to four years in prison but served only about four months before managing to escape.

19. Roger Sarty, Maritime Defence, 69, cited in Milner, Canada’s Navy, 51.

20. Gilbert Tucker, The Naval Service of Canada: Its Official History. Vol. 1. Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1952.

21. D. F. Kealy and E. C. Russell, A History of Canadian Naval Aviation 1918–1962 (Ottawa: The Naval Historical Section Canadian Forces Headquarters Department of National Defence, 1965), 5.

22. That vessel, the Mackay-Bennett, was the first to arrive on the scene to recover bodies after the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912. It retrieved 306 of the 328 bodies found from the 1,517 who died. The popular Canadian author Thomas Raddall based some of his short stories on his experiences as a wireless operator on the Mackay-Bennett.

23. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 54.

24. Sydney Daily Post, August 28, 1918.

25. S. F. Wise, Canadian Airmen and the First World War: The Official History of the Royal Canadian Air Force, Vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 604. The four aircraft provided by the Admiralty in 1917 were no longer available because when Admiral Kingsmill discovered them in storage in September 1917 he rather oddly had them sent to the U.S. Naval Reserve Flying Corps.

26. Kealy and Russell, 6.

27. Kealy and Russell, 3.

28. Quoted in Kealy and Russell, 4.

29. Kealy and Russell, 5.

30. Kealy and Russell, 4.

31. Kealy and Russell, 7.

32. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 56.

33. Sarty “Hard Luck,” 125.

34. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 39.

35. Kealy and Russell, 9.

Chapter 13

The War in the Air

It was the mud, I think, that made me take to flying. . . . The mud, on a certain day in July 1915, changed my whole career in the war.

—W. A. “Billy” Bishop[1]

Canada did not have an air force in 1914, but it almost did. In a bizarre episode which remains somewhat murky even a hundred years later, Sam Hughes—who has been described as the only Canadian politician who “had the faintest glimmering of the potentialities of aviation”[2]—seems to have personally but informally authorized the creation of an air force in August 1914. Not much is known about this episode, but what we think we know is this.

During the initial mobilization of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, which Hughes was attempting to manage personally, he cabled Lord Kitchener, saying that “many Canadians and Americans” were offering their services as pilots in the war, and asking what should be done. The War Office, clearly showing restrained enthusiasm, responded that it would accept six qualified men now and possibly more in future.[3]

Then, when Hughes went to Valcartier, the mobilization camp for the first contingent, a fast-talking entrepreneurial man called Ernest Lloyd Janney secured a meeting with him and offered to organize an air service that would be attached to the CEF. Hughes accepted the offer, unofficially commissioned Janney as a captain, and gave him $5,000 to buy an airplane in the United States. Thus was born the Canadian Aviation Corps with Janney as its commander. Typically, Hughes had neither consulted nor informed either the prime minister or the chief of the general staff, and he neglected to have Janney’s commission gazetted.

Janney bought a second-hand plane in Massachusetts and flew it to Valcartier, where he seconded two recruits, William Sharpe and Harry Farr, from among the CEF volunteers. All three, with their dismantled airplane, sailed to England in October with the first contingent. In due course, Janney presented General Alderson with the plan he had drawn up for an air force consisting of four airplanes, pilots, and support staff. Alderson was understandably dumbfounded because he had no idea who Janney was and no one had told him that the CEF was supposed to have its own air support.

Alderson logically cabled Militia Headquarters asking for an explanation and was told—presumably at the dictation of General Gwatkin—that there was no intention of forming an air unit and that Janney’s connection with the CEF was being severed. Janney returned to Canada in January 1915 and appears to have pursued other speculative schemes, including an abortive attempt to set up a flying school. Sharpe joined the Royal Flying Corps, and Farr was discharged from the CEF for unknown reasons in May 1915. So much for the first incarnation of a Canadian air force.

Despite this fiasco, there was considerable interest among young Canadian men—and Americans as well—in serving overseas in an air force. Until the spring of 1918, there were two British flying services: the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), which supported the army, and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS), which supported the Royal Navy. In time, things got a little more complicated when the RNAS posted squadrons to the Western Front and elsewhere, alongside the RFC, and eventually they merged to form the Royal Air Force.

Both services quickly became interested in attracting volunteers from Canada and the other Dominions, but they didn’t provide much encouragement. Candidates had to be of “pure European descent,” had to have already earned a basic flying license from a private flying school, and had to get to England at their own expense in order to enlist. The cost of a flying course was $400, a large sum at the time. As a result, only candidates who could afford the significant costs involved were recruited into the RFC or RNAS in the early part of the war, although both services did rebate $375 of the tuition to those whom they accepted.

There were very few flying schools in Canada at this time. The best-known one was at Long Branch, a community west of Toronto (now part of the city of Mississauga) and was operated by J. A. D. McCurdy, one of Canada’s most prominent pioneers of early flight. McCurdy had worked with Alexander Graham Bell on his aerial research in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and had piloted the Silver Dart in its flight over the Bras d’Or Lake in February 1909—the first powered flight anywhere in the British Empire. A year later he was the first Canadian to receive a pilot’s license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale of Paris through the Aero Club of America.

McCurdy’s school was associated with the Curtiss Aeroplane Company of Hammondsport, New York—founded by Glenn Curtiss, one of the leading flight pioneers in the United States—and used Curtiss aircraft with mostly American instructors. The first Canadians to graduate from McCurdy’s flying school in July 1915 were Frank Homer Smith of Sarnia, Ontario, and Arthur Strachan Ince of Toronto, both of whom joined the RNAS.[4]

Early in 1915, the War Office suggested to all the Dominions that they consider raising air units for service with the RFC. South Africa had already done so, contributing a squadron, and Australia now formed the four-squadron Australian Flying Corps. Borden showed little interest, however, and both Gwatkin and Lieutenant Colonel E. A. Stanton, the governor general’s military secretary, opposed the idea. Hughes, perhaps because of the Janney affair, quickly agreed with them.

The government did allow the RFC and RNAS to recruit men in Canada through the governor general’s office, agreeing that the Militia Department would attest volunteers and send them to England (at British expense). This decision had the merit of being “an expedient that satisfied British military requirements and yet averted the creation of a Canadian air force.”[5] S. F. Wise, the official historian of the Royal Canadian Air Force, describes this as “the single most important development in Canadian air history to that point” because Canadians, “under British tutelage, were now to be trained for the air war, and for the air age to come, not in hundreds but in thousands.”[6]

It has been estimated that about 700 men were recruited for the RFC and RNAS during 1915–16, more than half of them being trained at the McCurdy school at Long Branch. The rest took their training in the United States, either at the Curtiss school in Hammondsport or elsewhere.[7] Indeed, so many Canadians sought flying training in the United States in 1915–16 because it was not widely available in Canada that more than half of the pilot certificates issued by the Aero Club of America went to Canadians.[8]

Meanwhile, the Canadian government’s attitude toward the air services began to change in 1916, primarily because of Borden’s serious concern about the huge amounts being spent by the British government in the United States for war materiel. Borden applied a great deal of pressure on the British to shift more of that production to Canada, and even lent the British government $1 million so that it could acquire the assets of the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company in Toronto. A new company, Canadian Aeroplanes Ltd., was then created under the control of the Imperial Munitions Board, which employed hundreds of workers and “achieved—and with notable efficiency—the first mass production and large-scale export of aircraft in the history of Canadian aviation.”[9]

The government may have been influenced by the public fascination with the romanticized image of airmen as knights of the air and the publicity given to the exploits of British fighter pilots. It may also have been influenced by its awareness that an increasing number of those British pilots were actually Canadians. It has been calculated, for example, that 240 Canadian pilots participated in the extended battle of the Somme, and 63 of them were killed.[10]

The government was undoubtedly influenced by the campaign organized by Colonel William Hamilton-Merritt. A prominent mining engineer with a distinguished military career, Hamilton-Merritt had become convinced that aircraft were the new cavalry and were critical to modern warfare. He and other like-minded men therefore established the Canadian Aviation Fund, which organized public meetings, planted stories in newspapers across the country, and lobbied the government.

The government responded by agreeing to the RFC’s request to be allowed to establish a major pilot training program in Canada, a decision which Wise describes as “the single most important development in Canadian air history to that point.”[11] Controlled entirely by the RFC, which sent over a senior officer to organize and manage it, the creation of what became known as RFC Canada meant, in effect, that Canada had placed itself in a “posture of colonial dependency in the field of aviation” and “became host once again to an imperial military presence, on a scale the Cabinet could hardly have anticipated.”[12]

The contrast with Canadian policy regarding the CEF was striking, in view of Borden’s strongly held views on Canada’s evolving status as an autonomous nation. But, as we shall see, it was only the first of several major compromises made necessary by Canada’s unpreparedness for participation in a global war and its focus on the CEF. In the government’s defense, it can at least be said that by the end of the war Canadians had come to dominate RFC Canada. Canadians commanded two of the three wings and twelve of the sixteen training squadrons, as well as the School of Aerial Fighting and each of its four squadrons, the Cadet Wing, and the Mechanical Transport Section. About 70% of all flying appointments were held by Canadians. It seems likely, however, that this transformation did not so much reflect a Canadianization policy but a shortage of RFC personnel. About a third of the flying instructors in the training squadrons were Americans.[13]

One of the Canadians was Harold Hartney of Saskatoon, who, after serving overseas in the RFC, was brought home and seconded to the U.S. Air Service to command and train 27 Aero Squadron. He later commanded the five-squadron 1st Pursuit Group, which has been described as “the finest air combat force put into the field by the fledgling U.S. Air Service,”[14] and earned the American Distinguished Service Cross, the French Légion d’Honneur and Croix de Guerre, and the Italian Medaglia d’argento al valore militare.[15]

RFC Canada operated training stations at the former McCurdy school at Long Branch and others at Camp Borden, Desoronto, Beamsville, Hamilton, and North Toronto (Armour Heights and Leaside), all in southern Ontario. At the end of May 1917, shortly after the United States entered the war, Brigadier General George O. Squier,[16] Chief Signal Officer, U.S. Army, who commanded the American air service, visited Camp Borden and while there agreed that RFC Canada could open a recruiting office in New York City. We might well ask why he would agree to allow potential recruits for his own air service to be “poached” by the RFC. “The answer, in all probability,” according to Sebastian Cox, is that Squier “knew his own training organization was inadequate and thought it better to have Americans trained to fight with the British than not to fight at all.”[17]

Brigadier General C. D. Hoare, who headed RFC Canada, worked closely with the British-Canadian Recruiting Mission in 1917–18 and, while ostensibly seeking British citizens living in the U.S., in fact recruited American citizens. Indeed, by late September 1917 half of his cadet intake was American, and it was not until February 1918 that the U.S. State Department realized what he was doing and ordered him to stop.[18] Wise describes it as “a remarkable enterprise. Under the nose of the Canadian government, but apparently without its knowledge, a British officer, with the knowledge and consent of his superiors, had conducted from Canada a quasi-diplomatic operation utterly at variance with Canadian policy and, furthermore, had got away with it.”[19] By the time the New York office was closed, Canadians were enlisting in the RFC in greater numbers and the recruiting crisis had passed, so the need for clandestine measures had ended.

American military leaders, anxious to promote military cooperation, had not only condoned this recruiting venture but had also assured Hoare that there would be no interference with the supply of aircraft engines to Canadian Aeroplanes Ltd. In return, they were anxious to learn from RFC training methods. Lieutenant General John B. Bennett, Chief of the Aviation Section, and Major Benjamin D. Foulois,[20] later General Pershing’s Chief of Air Service, visited Toronto and Camp Borden to study RFC Canada’s organizational structure. They were followed by Major Hiram Bingham,[21] who was responsible for setting up a ground training program and later opened military flying schools patterned after the Canadian schools at six American universities.[22]

Meanwhile, Hoare was looking for a place to carry out winter training because it was generally thought that this could not be done in Canada. Squier offered an ideal solution by making available the military flying schools about to open in the U.S., which were short of instructors, if RFC Canada would train the American cadets in Canada during the summer months. As remarkable as this arrangement was, it appears to have been agreed without consulting or even informing the Canadian government, which was not aware “that the first substantial lodgement of American forces upon Canadian soil since 1814 was about to take place.”[23] This program quickly expanded to the point that RFC Canada trained enough air and ground personnel to organize ten squadrons, which received further training from the RFC in France.

Meanwhile, the winter training facilities in the United States were built to RFC specifications. The major site was at Fort Worth, Texas, and during the first year of operations, 1917–18, the agreement was extended to enable the Canadians to stay later than February as originally planned, in return for which the RFC agreed to train eight additional American squadrons. One of the instructors there was William Doré, from the little village of Arichat in Cape Breton, who had joined the 32nd Battalion as a lieutenant in January 1915 but transferred into the RFC in November 1915. Promoted to captain in April 1917, he returned to Canada to command 87 Squadron and served at the pilot training base in Fort Worth before returning to France with 107 Squadron in May 1918. As it happened, the training squadrons only spent the one winter at Fort Worth because it was decided in 1918 that winter training could in fact be done in Canada.

The RFC training program in Canada was a huge success.[24] By the end of the war, it had trained more than 16,663 personnel, including 4,800 Americans, some of whom were not actually Americans. Vivian Voss, for example, was a South African who had gone to Baltimore in 1914 to study at Johns Hopkins University. In May 1917 he went to Toronto and joined the RFC, then served in France and was awarded the MBE.[25]

The RFC Canada training program was so successful that it was replicated on a much larger scale during the Second World War as the Commonwealth Air Training Plan.[26] In expressing his appreciation, Major General W. L. Kenly, the newly appointed Chief of the U.S. Air Service, told Hoare that RFC Canada had “conferred a great and practical benefit on the United States Air Service.”[27] Needless to say, the benefits were mutual.

Not all Canadian pilots were trained by the RFC in Canada. Some, especially in the early part of the war, enlisted in the RFC directly. T. D. (Theodore) Hallam learned how to fly at the Curtiss school in Hammondsport even before the war broke out. He went overseas with the Canadian Automobile Machine Gun Brigade but promptly transferred into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and was attached to its armored car section. He served at Gallipoli with an RNAS machine gun unit until being wounded in July 1915, when he was invalided back to England. He then qualified as a pilot, was promoted to Major, and commanded the Felixstowe Air Station, which operated five flying boats engaged in anti-submarine patrolling until the end of the war.[28] Malcolm “Mickey” Bell-Irving went to England in 1914, joined the RFC, and was flying in France by March 1915. In December 1915, in the first recorded air battle involving a Canadian, he became the first Canadian to shoot down a German plane. Raymond Collishaw, who was an officer in the Canadian Fisheries Protection Service when he joined the RNAS in 1915, rose by April 1917 to command 10 (Naval) Squadron, all of whose members were Canadians. Known as the Black Flight because they painted their planes black, Collishaw’s squadron destroyed eighty-seven enemy planes during its first two months in action.[29] He went on to command bombing squadrons and became the second highest scoring Canadian pilot in the war, shooting down sixty aircraft and eight observation balloons.[30]

Others, especially if they had only recently emigrated from Britain, returned home and enlisted in the British army and subsequently transferred into the RFC. The brothers Wulstan and Edmund Tempest, for example, who had gone out to Canada in 1911 and were farming in Saskatchewan when the war broke out, immediately returned home and enlisted in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, then transferred into the RFC. Wulstan was serving in 39 Home Defence Squadron when he shot down L.31, a German zeppelin, in October 1916. He subsequently commanded 100 and 36 Squadrons. Edmund shot down seventeen German planes, remained in the RAF after the war, and was killed in December 1921 while serving in Mesopotamia.

Most Canadian flyers were unable to join the RFC directly, however, or even to train in Canada. They joined the army and subsequently transferred into the RFC, either because that was their original intention or because flying airplanes would liberate them from the horrors of trench warfare. The best known among them were William “Billy” Bishop and William Barker. Bishop joined the 4th CMR Battalion as a captain but soon transferred into the RFC. He became the top Allied ace of the war, having shot down seventy-two enemy planes, and was awarded the Victoria Cross. Barker went overseas as a machine gunner in the 1st CMR Battalion but then transferred into the RFC and served in France and Italy. He rose to command 9, 66, and 139 Squadrons, shot down fifty-three enemy planes, and became (and remains) the most highly decorated Canadian serviceman in history. He received not only the Victoria Cross but the Distinguished Service Order and Bar, the Military Cross with two Bars, the Medaglia d’argento al valore militare (twice), and the French Croix de Guerre.

A particularly interesting case was that of Harry Yates, who joined the Canadian Army Service Corps as a lieutenant in 1916 but transferred into the RNAS in January 1917. He trained pilots for Handley-Page long-distance bombers and in 1919 flew Harry St. John Philby, a Foreign Office official (and the father of the double agent Kim Philby) to Cairo for an important meeting, picking up T. E. Lawrence at Crete along the way. He set a record time of five days and was awarded the Air Force Cross. Yates also flew members of the British government between London and Paris during the 1919 peace conference.

In several cases, men transferred from the army because they had been wounded and either were no longer fit for service in the army or just wanted to try the new aerial technology. Ralph Bell, for example, went overseas as a captain in the 3rd Battalion but, after being hospitalized because of the effects of gas, transferred into the RFC. Horace Bray enlisted in the 7th CMR Battalion in 1915 but, after being wounded at Ypres, transferred into the RFC. John Caw went overseas as a lieutenant in the 32nd Battalion but transferred into the 5th Battalion and, after being wounded, joined the RFC in November 1917.

There being no Canadian air force, thousands of Canadians (and Americans)—roughly 23,000—served in the RFC and RNAS during the war. It was widely believed at the time that about a third of RFC pilots were Canadians, but the reality is that no one knew then or knows now exactly how many there were because of the wholly inadequate records kept by the flying services. Wise thinks that 35% “is probably much too high,” although he acknowledges that “in particular squadrons at certain stages in their operational life the proportion of Canadians was frequently as high as 35 per cent and occasionally substantially more than 50 per cent.”[31] William Barker’s biographer claims that when Barker was serving in Italy, more than 40% of the aircrew in the four RFC squadrons there were Canadians. Of that number, 1,563 were killed, and 3 earned the Victoria Cross.

Whatever the percentage, Canadians distinguished themselves in the air war. Aside from “Billy” Bishop and William Barker, mentioned above, Arthur Ince was the first Canadian pilot to shoot down a German aircraft, which he did off the coast of Belgium while serving in the RNAS in December 1915. Basil Hobbs, who took his flight training at the Wright school at Dayton, Ohio, before joining the RNAS, was the only Canadian pilot in the war who shot down a zeppelin (L.43 in June 1917) and sank a submarine (UB-32, on September 22, 1917).[32]

The first Canadian “ace,” meaning a pilot who had destroyed at least five enemy aircraft, was Redford Mulock, who also became the first RNAS ace. By the end of the war, four of the top twenty Allied aces were Canadians. Another five were British and one was Australian. The top Allied ace was “Billy” Bishop,[33] and the third was Raymond Collishaw. Other leading aces were Donald MacLaren, who had fifty-four victories, and William Barker with fifty-three.[34] The third VC awarded to a Canadian pilot went to Alan McLeod, who initially joined the Fort Garry Horse at the age of fourteen but was sent home. He then trained at the RFC school at Long Branch and was serving in France when he shot down four enemy planes in March 1918. Despite having suffered three wounds, he landed his own plane, which was in flames, and rescued his observer.[35]

A number of Canadian fliers encountered Manfred von Richthofen,[36] the so-called Red Baron, who was not only Germany’s top ace in the war but the top ace of all the belligerent powers, with eighty victories. Harold Hartney was shot down and badly injured by von Richthofen in February 1917, and Wilfred “Wop” May, a fighter pilot in 209 Squadron, participated in the dogfight on April 20, 1918, when von Richthofen was shot down while May was chasing his cousin, Wolfram von Richthofen.[37] Roy Brown, another Canadian, who had trained at the Wright brothers’ school in Dayton, Ohio, was credited with shooting down the Red Baron in the most famous air battle of the war. Although many now believe that shots fired by machine gunners of the Australian 14th Artillery Brigade actually disabled his plane and caused the crash, Brown was certainly engaged in combat with him at the time.

Many Americans joined the RFC as well, especially before the U.S. entered the war in April 1917. One prominent example was Frederick Libby, a cowboy from Colorado who moved to Calgary in May 1914 and enlisted in the Canadian Army Service Corps in September, drolly describing himself as a chauffeur. He subsequently transferred into the RFC and flew two American flag streamers from the struts of his airplane. He quickly became an ace, with twenty-four victories to his credit,[38] and was awarded the Military Cross. After the United States entered the war, Libby transferred into the U.S. Air Service but was unable to continue flying because of illness. In October 1918 he auctioned the two flag streamers at Carnegie Hall and New York City’s Public Library, raising an astonishing $4,000,000 in Liberty Bond subscriptions.[39] Similarly, if less dramatically, Eldridge Roberts, who was from Duluth, Minnesota, but had been living in Canada for a number of years when the war broke out, enlisted in the 10th Battalion but transferred into the RFC after being wounded in 1916.[40]

If these two men were not colorful enough, there was also James Warner Bellah. Born in New York City, he was attending the University of Maine when he crossed into Canada in 1917 and joined the RFC. He served in 117 Squadron until 1919, then became a journalist and popular writer, publishing nineteen novels and many short stories, three of which—“Fort Apache,” “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” and “Rio Grande”—were made into films directed by John Ford. Another interesting example was Raymond Chandler, an American journalist who was born in Chicago but was living in Los Angeles when he went to Victoria, British Columbia, in August 1917 and enlisted in the Canadian army.[41] After being wounded while serving in the 7th Battalion, Chandler transferred into the RFC in the summer of 1918 and was training when the war ended. After the war, he worked in the oil industry until the 1930s, when he turned his hand to writing fiction and became the highly successful author of the Philip Marlowe detective series.

Other Americans were sent directly to England to serve in the RFC after the United States entered the war. One of them was Clayton Knight, a commercial artist, who was one of the original 150 American pilots sent to England in the summer of 1917. He served in 44 Squadron, a home defense unit that pioneered the use of the Sopwith Camel fighter aircraft for night operations and achieved its first victory on January 28/29, 1918. The commanding officer of 44 Squadron was Major Arthur Harris, who rose to become Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris in the Second World War. Knight subsequently served in 206 Squadron on the Western Front, flying bombing raids and carrying out reconnaissance. He was shot down and wounded on October 5, 1918, but survived and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner in a German hospital.

In the spring of 1917, by which time the Canadian Corps had established itself as a formidable fighting force, Borden changed his mind on the idea of a Canadian air force. The catalyst appears to have been “representations . . . placed before me which indicate that Canadians in [the] Flying Service are not receiving reasonably fair pay or adequate recognition.” In other words, he was being told that Canadians serving in the RFC were not being promoted at the same rate as British officers. He also complained about the fact that a British officer, Cuthbert Hoare, had been sent out to command the RFC training program in Canada. “The question of establishing a Canadian Flying Corps demands immediate and attentive consideration,” he concluded, adding that “I am inclined to believe that the time for organizing an independent Canadian Air Service has come.”[42]

This was a remarkable about-face, and it reflected a number of factors. Certainly Borden had received a few complaints, which the RFC investigated and insisted were unfounded. Perhaps its senior commanders did not look hard enough. William Barker complained that none of the four RFC squadrons operating in Italy when he was there had a Canadian commanding officer, even though 40% of their aircrew were Canadians.[43] And it cannot be denied that only two Canadians rose above operational rank in the British air services.

The highest ranking Canadian in the RFC was Alfred Critchley, who commanded cadet training in Britain with the rank of Brigadier General, making him the youngest Brigadier General in the British army at the age of twenty-seven.[44] The next highest ranking Canadian in the RFC—actually the highest ranking officer, because Critchley was only on loan to the RFC—was Redford Mulock, who had gone overseas with the Canadian Field Artillery in 1914 but transferred into the RNAS in 1915.[45] By 1918 he was commanding 3 Squadron, half of whose members were Canadians, and when the RFC and RNAS were merged into the RAF in April, he was promoted to Wing Commander—the equivalent of a Lieutenant Colonel in the army—to command 82 Bomber Wing. Arthur Bishop, son of Billy Bishop, later described him as “the most experienced combat pilot, aerial leader, administrator, and organizer of any Canadian” in the war, and “by the war’s end he was the RAF’s chief bomber commander.”[46]

In other words, from approximately 23,000 Canadians who served in the British flying services during the war, only one rose to a rank equivalent to that of the commanding officer of an army battalion, which contained approximately 1,000 officers and men. Clearly, something was wrong. At the same time, the Canadian Corps now consisted of four divisions, each of which was commanded by a Major General. Given the number of Canadians serving in the RAF, it was not illogical to suggest that they should be formed into an equivalent organization that would operate in support of the Corps and would be led by a Canadian of appropriate rank. Loring Christie, Borden’s chief advisor on imperial and international relations, pointedly asked his chief why his position on aviation would be any different from his position on the army. Generals Currie and Turner supported the idea of a Canadian air force because they understood the importance of air support in army operations. Public opinion also played a role, as a distinct Canadian air force would build on the national pride already engendered by the work of the Canadian Corps.

Sir George Perley, the Minister of Overseas Forces, was not keen on the idea, however, and delayed matters in England simply by not pursuing it. By May 1918, however, Sir Edward Kemp, the Minister of Militia and Defence, had decided that Borden was right and that public opinion required that action be taken. He now demanded a distinct Canadian unit within the RAF, and the Air Ministry accepted the inevitable, albeit reluctantly.[47]

No doubt one reason it did so was that the other Canadian air unit, the RCNAS, was already in the process of being established, so the principle had already been conceded. Remarkably, Kemp and his senior officials had not been made aware of this by the Minister of the Naval Service and remained completely unaware of it “for some time.”[48] This was typical of the Canadian government’s handling of the air service issue throughout the war, which Wise has described as “variously negative, indifferent, inconsistent, and puzzling” and “almost always ill-informed.” This “small-mindedness, a species of unimaginative colonialism,” was “out of keeping with its strong stand over command control of the Canadian Expeditionary Force and with its political and constitutional thrust for recognition and status within the councils of the British Empire.”[49]

In any event, by the end of the summer the Canadian Air Force had been established. Its first commander was “Billy” Bishop, who had been working on this project in London for some time and was now promoted from Major to Lieutenant Colonel. The CAF consisted of two squadrons intended to operate, like the Canadian Corps, as a distinct unit within the Royal Air Force. Six additional squadrons were planned as well, but the war came to an end before they could be organized or the CAF could actually become operational, so it was, as Wise puts it, “virtually stillborn.”[50]

The obvious question which needs to be asked is why Canada decided in 1918 to establish not just an air force but two separate air forces. It certainly was not following the example of the British, who had merged the RFC and the RNAS into the Royal Air Force in April 1918. In fact, the example it was following was that of the United States, which had both an army air corps and a naval air service. We can only assume that Canada emulated the American example instead of the British in this instance because of Borden’s belief that Canada’s circumstances were more compatible with those of the Americans than those of the British. In view of the fact that the war was drawing to a close, this decision was of no real significance, although it did indicate that even staunch imperialists like Borden no longer thought the British were always right.

The Canadian Air Force began in a farcical manner and only came into existence in the final days of the war, too late to actually participate, after some 23,000 Canadians had served in the British flying services. If the war had continued past November 1918, as many expected it would, it would undoubtedly have contributed to the ultimate victory, but more importantly, it would also have brought together in a distinct unit like the Canadian Corps at least some of the Canadian airmen who had already played a significant role in the British air services. That would have enhanced Canada’s new status as an Allied nation rather than a subordinate Dominion and heightened the pride of Canadians in their overall role in the war.

1. W. A. Bishop, Winged Warfare: Hunting the Huns in the Air (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), 1.

2. Wise, Canadian Airmen and the First World War, 21.

3. Wise, 26–27.

4. Smith was the son of a wealthy businessman who owned oil wells and a refinery in southwestern Ontario. His service overseas proved to be brief. Apparently because of ill health, he returned to Canada in May 1916 and spent the rest of the war on the staff of Admiral Kingsmill. He subsequently pursued a career in banking in New York but joined the RCAF in September 1939 and worked with Billy Bishop and Clayton Knight, a prominent American commercial artist who had served in the RFC during the First World War, to recruit American pilots for the RCAF before the U.S. entered the Second World War. He was awarded the British OBE and the U.S. Order of Merit. Ince was the son of a prominent Toronto manufacturer and merchant. For a good contemporary account of flight training at Long Branch, see George Fleming, “Training Men to Fly,” The Canadian Magazine, 46, no. 1 (November 1915): 215–23. Born in London, Ontario, Fleming studied engineering at the University of Toronto and was employed in his father’s business when he joined the RNAS in August 1915. For a time, he ferried aircraft from England to France, then served in 3 Wing on bombing missions. He returned to Toronto on leave in December 1916 but returned to France in January 1917, was shot down on April 14, 1917, and died three days later.

5. Wise, 75.

6. Wise, 75.

7. Wise, 39.

8. Wise, 42.

9. Wise, 45.

10. Wise, 392.

11. Wise, 75.

12. Wise, 75.

13. Wise, 113.

14. Stanley M. Ulanoff, Introduction to Hartney, ix.

15. He remained in the U.S. Army Air Service after the war, moved to Washington in 1918, and became an American citizen in 1923. See also Hartney, Up and At ’Em. His brother, James Cuthbert Hartney, was killed on May 1, 1917, while serving in the RFC.

16. Major General George Owen Squier (1865–1934) attended the United States Military Academy and earned a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1893. He wrote and edited many books and articles on radio and electricity. He was also an inventor, who, with Albert Cushing Crehore, developed a magneto-optical streak camera that measured the speed of projectiles both inside cannon and directly after they left the barrel. He also invented telephone carrier multiplexing, for which he was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1919. He was instrumental in the creation of the Aeronautical Division, U.S. Signal Corps, which evolved into the U.S. Air Force, and was responsible for the first purchase of airplanes by the U.S. Army in 1909. From 1912 to 1916, he was military attaché to the American embassy in London, where he studied European military aviation. From May 1916 to February 1917, he was Chief of the Aviation Section, U.S. Signal Corps, then was promoted Chief Signal Officer with the rank of Brigadier General. In 1922, he created Wired Radio, a service that piped music to businesses and subscribers over wires, which he later renamed Muzak. See also Arthur E. Kennelly, “Biographical Memoir of George Owen Squier, 1865–1934,” Biographical Memoirs, Vol. 20 (Washington: National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 1938), 151–59.

17. Sebastian Cox, “Aspects of Anglo-US Co-Operation in the Air in the First World War,” Air and Space Journal 18, no. 4 (Winter 2004) http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles//apj/apj04/win04/cox.html (accessed May 1, 2014).

18. Wise, 90–91.

19. Wise, 91.

20. From March to September 1917, General Foulois was responsible for the production, maintenance, organization, and operations of all American aeronautical material and personnel in the United States. In March, he worked with General Squier and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics to detail plans for appropriations of $54 million to support sixteen airplane squadrons, sixteen balloon companies, and nine aviation schools. When the French government asked the U.S. to provide 4,500 trained pilots by the spring of 1918, 4,900 training aircraft, and 12,000 combat planes, Congress voted $640 million, the largest appropriation for a single purpose in the history of Congress to that time. Foulois was promoted from Major to the temporary rank of Brigadier General to oversee this project, then was transferred to France in October 1917, where he became Chief of Air Service, American Expeditionary Forces.

21. Hiram Bingham (1875–1956) attended Yale University and the University of California, then earned a PhD at Harvard. He taught at Yale and Princeton and became a well-known amateur archaeologist, working in South America. In 1917, he became an aviator and organized the United States Schools of Military Aeronautics at eight universities to provide ground school training for aviation cadets. He served the Aviation Section, U.S. Signal Corps, and the Air Service, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel. In France, he commanded the 3rd Aviation Instruction Center, the Air Service’s largest primary instruction and pursuit training school. He was elected Governor of Connecticut in 1924 but resigned immediately to enter the Senate, where he served until 1933. He published several books, including a memoir entitled An Explorer in the Air Service (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920).

22. Wise, 91.

23. Wise, 93.

24. For an account of the training program, see Hartley, 85–97.

25. After the war he pursued an academic career, teaching at the University of Pretoria. See Vivian Voss, Flying Minnows: Memoirs of a World War One Fighter Pilot, from Training in Canada to the Front Line, 1917–1918. London: John Hamilton, 1935.

26. The BCTAP trained more than 130,000 Allied aircrew during the Second World War, including Americans, serving as President Roosevelt said, as the “aerodrome of democracy.” Although the plan was created to train aircrew from Commonwealth countries, the RCAF began recruiting Americans in 1940. So many crossed the border that Roosevelt ordered that they should be granted exemption by the U.S. draft board. Indeed, training centers were made available to the RAF in the United States prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and by the end of the war, 16,000 RAF aircrew had been trained in the United States. After Pearl Harbor, almost 4,000 American members of the RCAF transferred into U.S. forces, while about 5,000 completed their service with the RCAF.

27. Wise, 95. Kenly became the first Chief of Air Service of the American Expeditionary Force in France on September 3, 1917, effectively taking control away from the Aviation Section, U.S. Signal Corps. When he was replaced in this position by Brigadier General Foulois, he returned to the United States to become Director of Military Aeronautics and titular head of the newly established U.S. Army Air Service from May through August 1918. He retired in 1919 and was appointed a Companion of the Bath (CB) by the British government.

28. Cf. The Spider Web and the Submarines: A Year with the Flying Boats (Felixstowe, UK: s.n., 1919), also published anonymously by “PIX” as The Spider Web: The Romance of a Flying-Boat War Flight. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1919. This publication date is problematic because Hallam concludes the book by saying that he spent ten years after the war “lotus-eating down among the South Sea Islands” (245). It is probably a misprint and should be 1929.

29. By October 1918, he had been withdrawn from combat service, was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, and worked with Billy Bishop on organizing the Canadian Air Force. He remained in the RAF after the war, commanded the Desert Air Force in North Africa, and rose to the rank of Air Vice Marshal.

30. Four zeppelins were shot down by Canadian pilots serving in the RNAS: L.43 off Vlieland in June 1917 by B. D. Hobbs, L22 and L.70 by Robert Leckie in 1917, and L.53 by S. D. Culley (now RAF but formerly RNAS) in August 1918. Collishaw remained in the RAF after the war and in the Second World War commanded 14 Fighter Group, retiring as an air marshal. See Raymond Collishaw, Air Command: A Fighter Pilot’s Story (London: William Kimber, 1973), reprinted as The Black Flight: The Memoir of Legendary First World War Fighter Ace, Raymond Collishaw, CB, DSO, DSC, DFC (Ottawa: CEF Books, 2008).

31. Wise, 590 note. William Barker’s biographer claims that when he was serving in Italy, more than 40% of the aircrew in the four RFC squadrons there were Canadians. Wayne Ralph, William Barker VC: The Life, Death & Legend of Canada’s Most Decorated War Hero (Toronto: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 102. When pressed for a figure in the spring of 1918, the RFC reported that, as of April 1, 13,345 Canadians had served in the RFC and NSAS and that there were at that point 10,990 in the newly formed RAF, which combined those two services. This figure is clearly low, however, because it didn’t include non-Canadians who had joined the RFC in Canada or had transferred from the CEF or had been born elsewhere but lived in Canada for years. The Canadian War Records unit in 1919 claimed that 22,812 Canadians had served in the British air forces, but this is known not to be complete either, although it is probably fairly close to being correct. See Wise, 593–94. For a detailed analysis of the numbers of Canadians who served in the RFC/RAF and RNAS, see Wise, Appendix C: “Statistical Analysis of Canadians in the British Flying Services,” 633–49.

32. Wulstan Tempest shot down L.31 in October 1916 while serving in the RFC, but he had only moved to Canada in 1911, so may not be considered Canadian.

33. For a highly critical view of Bishop’s self-promotion, see Brereton Greenhous, “The Sad Case of Billy Bishop, VC,” Canadian Historical Review, 70, no. 2 (June 1989): 223–27, and “Billy Bishop—Brave Flyer, Bold Liar,” Canadian Military Journal, 3, no. 3 (Autumn 2002): 61–64; and Greenhous, The Making of Billy Bishop: The First World War Exploits of Billy Bishop, VC (Toronto: Dundurn, 2002). For an understandably sympathetic account of how Bishop won the Victoria Cross, see Arthur Bishop, Our Bravest and Our Best: The Stories of Canada’s Victoria Cross Winners (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1995): 54–6. Arthur Bishop was Billy Bishop’s son.

34. See Ralph. For a complete annotated list of Canadian aces in the war, see www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_I_aces_from_Canada.

35. He was sent home to recuperate but died in the Spanish flu epidemic in November 1918 at the age of nineteen.

36. Manfred Albrecht von Richthofen, popularly known as the Red Baron, was the leading German air ace during the war, being credited with eighty victories. He was shot down and killed on April 21, 1918, while engaged in combat with a Canadian pilot, Wilfred Reid May. The RAF credited the Canadian pilot, Arthur “Roy” Brown, with shooting down Richthofen, but it is now generally believed that he was killed by a shot fired from the ground.

37. May shot down eighteen enemy planes in the war and was awarded the DFC. See Sheila Reid, Wings of a Hero: Canadian Pioneer Flying Ace Wilfrid Wop May. St. Catharines, ON: Vanwell, 1997.

38. He is officially credited with only fourteen because he shot down the first ten while an observer/gunner in a two-seater airplane.

39. See Libbey, Horses Don’t Fly. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000.

40. Wounded again, he was demobilized and returned to Duluth. See E. M. Roberts, A Flying Fighter: An American Above the Lines in France. New York/London: Harper, 1918.

41. He had lived in England with his divorced mother from 1895 to 1912 and became a naturalized British subject in 1907. He did not regain his American citizenship until 1956.

42. Quoted in Wise, 583.

43. See Ralph, 102.

44. On Critchley’s life and career, see A. C. Critchley, Critch! The Memoirs of Brigadier-General A. C. Critchley, CMG, CBE, DSO. London: Hutchinson, 1961.

45. He was only the second Canadian to do so. The first was Francis Gilmer Tempest “Wuffy” Dawson, whose father, John Tempest Dawson, was born in Nova Scotia but spent most of his life in England. He married Nannie Hutchison, who came from a wealthy family in Georgia but was living in England. Major General Jeremy F. Gilmer, Chief Engineer of the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War, was her cousin. Dawson killed his wife and himself in a murder/suicide in the National Portrait Gallery in London on February 26, 1909. Stephen Adams, “Gruesome murder-suicide revealed in National Portrait Gallery archive.” The Telegraph Online, February 3, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/7147540/Gruesome-murder-suicide-revealed-in-National-Portrait-Gallery-archive.html (accessed January 27, 2014). Francis Dawson appears to have been born in Austria, presumably while his parents were on vacation, but he lived in Montreal from 1899 to 1912 and subsequently claimed to be Canadian, although he lived in England for the rest of his life.

46. Arthur Bishop, Courage in the Air (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1992), 6. When the Canadian Air Force was established in August 1918, he was the government’s first choice to command it, an offer that he declined because he wanted to return to civilian life.

47. Wise, 600.

48. Wise, 602.

49. Wise, 21.

50. Wise, 580.

Chapter 14

Canada’s Hundred Days

You cannot meet and defeat in battle one-quarter of the German Army without suffering casualties.

—Arthur Currie, 1918[1]

It made a great lump come in my throat to look at them and think of what they had gone through.

—Canon Frederick George Scott[2]

In March 1918, recognizing that it was near exhaustion, that the collapse of Russia had come too late, and that American money, industrial capacity, and manpower were coming into play, the German army gathered its resources and launched Operation Michael—its final massive offensive on the Western Front. It focused at the point on the Somme where the British and French lines joined, hoping to divide them, causing the British to retreat north to protect the Channel ports while the French retreated south to protect Paris. The goal was to destroy the British army in the hope that if this were achieved the French would seek peace terms.

It began on March 21, less than six weeks after the Third Battle of Ypres, and initially was very successful because, even though the Allies had been expecting it, they were surprised by its scale and ferocity. After an artillery barrage by 6,000 guns, the most ever employed in the war, half a million Germans then attacked. The British fell back, giving up more ground than at any time in the war. On April 9, another half million Germans attacked at Hazebrouck, a vital rail center just south of Ypres, following up the next day by launching the Fourth Battle of Ypres.

The situation seemed truly desperate, and the normally inarticulate Haig sent out a message to all British troops telling them, in an effort to be inspiring, that “every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the freedom of mankind alike depend on the conduct of each one of us at this crucial moment.”[3] Foch, the commander-in-chief of the Allied forces, agreed, declaring that “every foot of ground must be defended.”[4]

Eight days later, the Germans attacked the British line at Langemarck, just outside of Ypres, but were driven back with heavy losses. It was only a temporary setback, however, and when they attacked again at the end of the month, they recaptured places like Mount Kemmel and St. Eloi that the Allies had held since 1916. By now the British were “rushing every available soldier across the Channel to the front: half trained, untrained, overaged, underaged, and, in some cases, near cripples.”[5] So were the Germans. Among those who served in these battles was the young Adolf Hitler, who was wounded—by mustard gas—at Wervick, near Passchendaele.

But the end was in sight. The cost of these gains to the German army was very high: it was exhausted, and the reinforcements needed to continue the offensive in the face of the determined Allied resistance simply did not exist. Nevertheless, in a final throw of the dice, General Ludendorff launched a diversionary attack toward Paris, hoping that this would cause the French to pull some of their troops out of Flanders. But Foch understood Ludendorff’s intentions and kept his troops at Ypres, relying on the newly arriving American divisions to defend Paris. The Germans got to within thirty miles of the city, but no closer.

The Canadian Corps, which was holding the line around Vimy Ridge at the time, was not directly involved in this stupendous affair. On the opening day of the German offensive, it fired hundreds of chemical shells into the German lines, but the Germans did not attack. Other Canadian units, particularly the Canadian Cavalry Brigade and General Raymond Brutinel’s Motor Machine Gun Brigade, supported the British and French in the crisis.

A French geologist, Brutinel had emigrated to Alberta before the war and quickly became a millionaire. He had long been interested in the significance of the machine gun in modern warfare, which he was one of the few to grasp, but he also recognized the importance of mechanized mobility. Combining the two, he conceived the idea of mobile machine gun units and when war broke out convinced Sir Clifton Sifton, the influential publisher and former politician, of their importance. Together, they solicited funds from several other wealthy men and in September 1914 offered to raise and equip an automobile machine gun unit, an offer which Sam Hughes had the good sense to readily accept.

The first Canadian Automobile Machine Gun Brigade (soon renamed the First Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigade), consisting of two batteries with twenty machine guns and eight armored automobiles, sailed with the first contingent in October 1914. It was the first fully mechanized unit in the British army, and Brutinel commanded it. He also organized machine gun companies to be attached to each division in the Corps, which eventually became the Canadian Machine Gun Corps, comprising four battalions with Brutinel as brigadier general. At the same time, he also continued to command the Motor Machine Gun Brigade, which remained a separate unit because of its mobility and was known as the Canadian Independent Force.

Neither the cavalry nor the machine gun brigade had found a very useful role during the years of trench warfare, although both had deployed their forces as infantry to support the Corps. Now, however, they finally got their opportunity in the open mobile fighting of the last months of the war. When the German offensive began, the Motor Machine Gun Brigade drove the ninety-three miles north from Vimy to provide critical firepower covering the British withdrawal.

Meanwhile, the cavalry was ordered on the morning of March 30 to support the British troops at Moreuil Wood, south of Amiens. It proved to be an interesting experience. The Royal Canadian Dragoons attacked first but in the face of heavy fire dismounted and charged on foot. Then “C” Squadron of Lord Strathcona’s Horse, commanded by Lieutenant Gordon Flowerdew, circled around the woods and launched a 300-yard charge with swords drawn in the finest tradition of nineteenth-century cavalry.

The stunned Germans naturally responded with withering machine gun fire, and the slaughter was terrible. Even so, the audacity of the attack unnerved the Germans, and when the remnants of the squadron wheeled around for a second charge, they broke and ran. Of the seventy-five men who participated in this extraordinary affair reminiscent of the famous charge of the Light Brigade, thirty-nine were killed, including Flowerdew, and most of the rest were wounded. Flowerdew was awarded the Victoria Cross, posthumously, for his courageous but foolhardy leadership. Cook offers some defense of the action, arguing that the cavalry “had stabilized the front and had, with their lives, purchased precious time for the retreating British forces to establish a new defensive line to the rear.”[6]

Meanwhile, Haig had transferred the First and Second Divisions to Byng’s Third Army to help defend the area southeast of Arras. On March 26 he seized the Third and Fourth Divisions as well, leaving Currie in the unusual position of being a corps commander without a corps. To be fair, Haig was facing a desperate situation and was short of men because the British line had been extended to make up for the weakness of the French. As well, it was normal practice in the British army for divisions to be moved about as necessary. But Haig had guaranteed the integrity of the Canadian Corps, and, crisis or no crisis, Currie was not having it. The Canadian Corps had fought as a unit since its creation and was virtually a separate Canadian army, albeit within the overall structure of the British army.

Currie protested to Haig, which was a waste of time, but he also went over his head to Sir Edward Kemp, the former minister of militia and defence who had replaced Perley as minister of overseas military forces in London. Kemp intervened with the War Office, which ordered Haig to restore the Canadian Corps. By then the German attack on the morning of March 30 had failed badly, eliminating the threat to Arras and re-establishing the front.

Haig was understandably annoyed by this political interference, something that he had had to contend with since Lloyd George had become Prime Minister, but this time his contempt was aimed at the Canadians. “I could not help feeling,” he commented, “that some people in Canada regard themselves rather as allies than as fellow citizens of the Empire.” He was out of touch. The more realistic Lord Derby, Lloyd George’s secretary of state for war, had wisely advised the prime minister some months earlier that “we must look upon them [the Canadians] in the light in which they wish to be looked upon rather than in the light in which we would wish to do so.”[7] Indeed.

Currie did regard himself more as the leader of an Allied army than just a corps commander in the British army because the reality was that the Canadian Corps had not only a unique identity but also an esprit de corps that it had earned the hard way. Currie was convinced, and made no secret of the fact, that on the whole he thought Canadian troops were superior to the British, and he had reservations about the competence and judgment of many senior British officers. Borden agreed, declaring in June 1918 that the Canadian Corps was not only “the most formidable striking force in the Allied armies” but “probably it is the best organized and most effective unit of its size in the world today.”[8]

Currie was especially enraged by Haig’s decision to abandon Passchendaele Ridge in the spring offensive because a year earlier, and against Currie’s better judgment, the Canadians had suffered 16,000 casualties capturing it after Haig had insisted that it must be taken at all costs. When Borden arrived in London for Imperial War Cabinet meetings, Currie vented his frustrations to a very sympathetic listener, and on June 15 Borden cabled Sir Thomas White that he was “convinced that the present situation is due to lack of organization, lack of system, lack of preparation, lack of foresight and incompetent leadership.”[9]

Meanwhile, Kemp had wasted no time after his arrival in London in reorganizing the management of Canadian military forces, partly to increase efficiency but partly also to mark Canada’s transition from subordinate to ally. He began by establishing the Overseas Military Council, which he chaired, and made clear that all Canadian generals except Currie answered to him. He also abolished the position of general officer commanding in England, replacing it with a chief of general staff. Currie did not report to Kemp because he necessarily reported to Haig, but Currie did not command the large number of Canadians serving in France who were not part of the Canadian Corps. These included the 19,000 Canadian Railway Troops, who played a major role in building and operating the British army’s railways, the 12,000 men in the Canadian Forestry Corps, as well as tunneling companies and field hospitals, and troops training in England. At the same time, Kemp persuaded the War Office to establish a Canadian Section at General Headquarters in France to oversee the troops not serving under Currie and to serve as the link between the Overseas Ministry and the Canadian Corps.

The Canadian Corps was being reorganized as well. A Canadian tank battalion was established, and Currie expanded the new machine gun battalions in each division from sixty-four to ninety-six guns. He also used his pioneer battalions and men from the aborted Fifth Division to give each division a brigade of three battalions of engineers and a bridging company because he anticipated—rightly—that engineers would be essential as the fighting shifted to more mobile, open warfare.

The spring offensive ran out of steam by summer. While the Germans had overrun the Allied lines in places, they had suffered 800,000 casualties and failed to break through in any significant way. The Allies had nearly as many casualties, it is true, but the Americans were now arriving to replace them. By August there were a million U.S. troops in France, and 300,000 more were arriving each month. The war, in reality, was over, although it pointlessly dragged on into November.

Germany’s desperation by now was demonstrated by its attacks on unprotected hospitals. On May 19 German aircraft bombed No. 1 Canadian General Hospital at Étaples, causing fifty-six fatalities, including four nurses. Ten days later, on the 29th, No. 3 Canadian Stationary Hospital at Doullens was bombed, killing two more nurses. It will be recalled that a month later, on June 27, the Canadian hospital ship Llandovery Castle was torpedoed and sunk, killing all fourteen nursing sisters on board.

The Allies went on the offensive in July at the Marne, where fifty-seven British, French, and American divisions, led by 225 tanks, began pushing the Germans back. To their credit, the Germans put up a fierce resistance, losing 168,000 men in two weeks. On August 8 Foch launched the Amiens offensive, the opening battle of what came to be known as the Last Hundred Days—so-called after Napoleon’s hundred-day resurrection in 1814–15—during which the Allies steadily pushed the Germans back toward their homeland.

Canadians at the time referred to this period as “Canada’s Hundred Days.” It was also the Canadian Corps’ “finest hour” because, while four divisions “cannot determine the outcome of a great war,” it “unquestionably played a disproportionate role.”[10] Some Canadian soldiers thought it played too prominent a role because of its high cost: 45,835 casualties, equivalent to 20% of all the Canadian casualties suffered during the war and 45% of the Corps’ strength on August 8.[11]

The Allied campaign began on August 8 with an attack on Amiens. In an effort to surprise the Germans, the 900-gun artillery barrage was delayed until the troops were leaving their trenches. Another surprise was that most of the Canadian Corps managed to move up to take part in this battle without being detected by the Germans. Some 580 tanks participated as well, making this the first battle in which they played a major role. Even so, the hard work was done, as usual, by the infantry.

It was a typically brutal affair in which the Canadian Machine Gun Brigade shored up the crumbling British Fifth Army, at heavy cost, and all three regiments of the Canadian Cavalry Brigade helped drive the Germans back from the city. Robert Clements later recalled that “it was momentarily a wonderful sight to watch the squadrons coming up from the rear on the trot, then break into smaller groups and finally roaring into a charge at full gallop.” Wonderful to watch, no doubt, but suicidal, and the cavalry was “cut to pieces.”[12] As well, battalions of Canadian railway troops, caught in the offensive, fought and died as infantry.

After three days of hard fighting, the city was taken, at a cost of 40,000 casualties, including nearly 12,000 Canadians, but the Germans had sustained almost double that number. More significantly, some 15,000 Germans were taken prisoner and 400 German guns were captured. Ludendorff rightly called August 8 the blackest day of the war. Byng told Currie that Canada’s attack at Amiens was “the finest operation of the war,” an assessment shared by historian Denis Winter.[13] Ludendorff sensibly decided that the war must be ended, and the Kaiser agreed.

Robert Clements of the 25th Battalion later said that, while the men had never doubted that they would win the war, they now “sensed the kill. The whole Canadian army was eager to get on with it and clean up the whole bloody mess once and for all.”[14] Remarkably, ten Canadians earned Victoria Crosses at Amiens. One of them was Thomas Dinesen, a Dane who had only come to Canada to enlist in the 42nd Battalion.[15]

With Amiens behind them, the Allies now had to break through the Hindenburg Line, which Currie described as “without doubt one of the strongest defenses on the Western Front.”[16] While Byng’s Third Army advanced on Bapaume and Cambrai, the Canadian Corps joined Sir Henry Horne’s First Army to advance up the Scarpe River and attack the Drocourt-Quéant section of the Hindenburg Line, which would open up the rolling country behind Cambrai. This was familiar territory, of course. The British had previously lost 158,000 men, including huge numbers in the Royal Newfoundland Regiment at Monchy-le-Preux in 1917, trying to force their way up the Scarpe from Arras.

The attack by the Second and Third Canadian Divisions, supported by the Fifty-First British Highland Division, took place early on the morning of August 26 and went well, a highlight being the extraordinary action of Lieutenant Charles Rutherford, who single-handedly persuaded a German officer and his eighty men to surrender to him. A dairy farmer from southern Ontario, Rutherford later said he simply said to the German officer, “you fellows are my prisoners,” and they surrendered. It was a courageous act that might have been suicidal, but many German soldiers, whether Rutherford knew this or not, were more than ready to end their war. Rutherford was awarded the VC.

The next day, fighting in heavy rain and mud, was harder and little progress was made. The struggle continued on the 28th, when Major Georges Vanier—a later governor general of Canada—who was commanding the 22nd Battalion, lost a leg, while Lieutenant Colonel William Clark-Kennedy was badly wounded and earned the VC while leading the 24th Battalion. Lieutenant Colonel A. E. G. Mackenzie of the 26th Battalion and most of his officers were killed. Currie sent in three fresh divisions—the First and Fourth, supported by the British Fourth—on September 2, and they finally succeeded in establishing a bridgehead in the Drocourt-Quéant Line.

During the fierce fighting, Lance Corporal Bill Metcalf, a barber in Waite, Maine, who had gone to Valcartier to enlist in September 1914, actually walked in front of a tank with a signal flag, directing it along a trench to a German machine gun post, and survived to tell the tale. He too was awarded the Victoria Cross, one of only six given to Americans in the War. Cyrus “Cy” Peck, his colonel in the 16th (Canadian Scottish) Battalion, also received the Victoria Cross for his extraordinary cool-headed bravery and leadership during the battle. Born in 1871, he was the oldest recipient of the VC in the war.[17] Three more Canadians earned the VC in the battle as well.

Metcalf was not the only American contributing to the gains made in August. American battalions had participated in the fighting throughout August, and Borden, writing in his diary that “the victories of the last four weeks would have been impossible but for the Americans.”[18] It was undoubtedly true, but the raw American troops, who had not received adequate training after their arrival in France, endured a costly initiation into modern warfare.

This was true throughout the Hundred Days period, when the inexperienced Americans suffered an average of 2,170 casualties per German division defeated, compared to 975 for the Canadians. Similarly, the Americans advanced thiry-four miles and captured 16,000 prisoners, while the Canadians advanced eighty-six miles and captured 31,537 prisoners.[19] Indeed, Ryan Goldsworthy claims that, despite the fact that the American Expeditionary Force was six times the size of the Canadian Corps, Currie “outstripped the AEF on every single tactical level.”[20] None of this implies that the American troops were inferior; they were just inexperienced compared to the Canadians, which made all the difference, especially at the command level.

The battle finally ended when the Germans withdrew across the Canal du Nord, which, because it had not yet been completed, was in effect a huge, partly flooded ditch. After a break to rest and bring in reinforcements—many of them conscripts—preparations were made for the attack across the canal. While this was being done, the Germans kept up a steady fire on the Canadians. Brigadier General Odlum and Lieutenant Colonel Pearkes, senior officials of the 116th Battalion, were wounded, again disproving the oft-repeated cliché that generals kept well out of danger, and General Lipsett was shifted to command the British Fourth Division. (He was killed at Cambrai only weeks later.)[21] When he was replaced by Major General F. O. W. Loomis,[22] Canadians now finally commanded all four divisions in the Canadian Corps.

Currie was reluctant to launch a frontal assault that involved crossing the canal with the Germans entrenched on the other side, so he moved two divisions to the south where they could more easily cross a dry section. The plan was to seize a narrow bridgehead, then expand outward and get behind the German defenses on the canal, while the other two divisions attacked in the north. It was a complicated plan, which Byng called “the most difficult operation of the war.”

The attack began on September 27 behind a heavy artillery barrage that included 17,000 gas shells. As Granatstein notes, the Canadian Corps had become “the major user of gas shells on the Western Front.”[23] After fierce fighting, ending on October 1, the canal was secured and the Canadian and British divisions got across. As usual, casualties were heavy—2,089 men, including the First Division’s beloved senior chaplain, Canon Frederick Scott, the best-known Canadian chaplain of the war, who was wounded.[24]

The battle for the Canal du Nord has been described as “arguably the single greatest achievement of the Canadian Corps. An all but impregnable position had been taken.”[25] It was also the most savage and sustained battle in the history of the Corps, and some soldiers were beginning to wonder if Currie was taking on the toughest jobs in order to promote his own career. Certainly, the bitter Sam Hughes and his followers were making this accusation at home, but the reality was that Currie did not believe that massive casualties must always be the price of achieving battlefield victories. Because he was always painfully aware of the price being paid by his men, he refused to send them into battle until he was satisfied that thorough planning had been done and all necessary logistical support was in place. At the Canal du Nord, he had delayed the assault until there was overwhelming artillery support, thereby saving hundreds if not thousands of lives. As Schreiber puts it, the Corps “paid the price of victory in shells, not in life.”[26]

The next objective was Cambrai itself, the main German rail center in northern France. The British and Canadians attacked again from both the south and northeast on October 8, as the Germans were withdrawing from the city, and took it by the end of a long difficult day, but casualties were light. That same day, the Canadian Cavalry Brigade took part in its last and most successful operation of the war, southeast of Cambrai. This was cavalry country, and the brigade swept through, liberating enemy-held villages in the Le Cateau region and capturing 400 prisoners. It was the last cavalry charge of the war for the Canadians and, although many may not have realized it at the time, the end of cavalry as a meaningful component of modern armies.

Although the Germans were being pushed steadily eastward, they fought a strong rearguard action, with the British and Canadians in close pursuit, as they withdrew to the more heavily built Hermann-Stellung Line—the last German defensive line—which stretched from the Dutch border through Valenciennes to the Oise River, dominating an area criss-crossed by canals which the Germans flooded. When the British Fifty-First Highland Division, with Canadian support, took nearby Mont Houy, the Allies held the high ground overlooking Valenciennes, the last major French city still in enemy hands.

Inevitably, the Canadian Corps was ordered to capture the city, and it faced a German force that was two or three times larger than the single brigade assigned to the task. And even though morale in the German army was understandably very low by now, its leaders had decided to make their final stand here, so the fighting was bound to be fierce even if pointless.

Currie had been ordered to conserve artillery shells in case the war continued into 1919. Typically, he refused, saying that shells were expendable but men’s lives were not. Accordingly, when he told Brigadier General Andrew McNaughton, who commanded the Corps artillery, that this would probably be the last barrage he would fire in the war, McNaughton replied, “Well, by Jove, it will be a good one.”[27] And it was. McNaughton’s 303 guns delivered what he claimed was “the heaviest weight of fire ever to support a single infantry brigade in the whole war.”[28] Even so, the attack on November 1 cost 501 Canadian casualties, including 121 killed or listed as missing. Among them was Lance Corporal Harold Tallis, the fourth of five members of the Tallis family of Borden, Saskatchewan, who had enlisted during the war.[29] Sergeant Hugh Cairns of Saskatoon earned Canada’s last Victoria Cross of the war at Valenciennes. Sadly, he was wounded in the battle and died the next day.

That broke the Hermann-Stellung Line, and the war was effectively over. Germany and the Allies were discussing the terms of an Armistice, the German army was in disarray, and more American troops and equipment were arriving daily. Indeed, their numbers had risen from nine divisions in April 1918 to forty-two divisions by October. On November 6 the Germans were driven out of Elouges, a town almost within sight of Mons, where the first shots of the war had been fired in 1914, and the Canadians entered Belgium on November 7.

Currie was determined to take Mons, but the Germans, for whatever reasons, were equally determined not to give it up without a struggle. The result was that as the Canadians approached and encircled the town, they sustained 645 unnecessary and pointless casualties. Sporadic fighting continued during the night of the 10th/11th, and early on the morning of the 11th, three more Canadians were killed at just about the time—6:30 a.m.—that Currie received the official word that an armistice agreement had been signed and would take effect at 11:00 a.m. At this point the 42nd Battalion was clearing the town, which the Germans had largely if not totally abandoned, and its pipe band marched through the streets of Mons announcing its liberation.

It was not all over yet, however. To the east of the town, there were still pockets of resistance that the Canadians had to clear, at a cost of at least one hundred more casualties. The last was twenty-five-year-old George Price of the 28th Battalion, who was killed just minutes before 11:00 a.m. by a sniper at Ville-sur-Haine, a village nine miles east of Mons. A native of Falmouth, Nova Scotia,[30] who had been living in Moose Jaw, Price was the last Canadian and the last soldier from the British Empire killed in the war, a dubious distinction to be sure. Fittingly, the conscript from the overseas empire was buried in what is now St. Symphorien Cemetery, just a few feet from sixteen-year-old John Parr, the first British soldier to die on the Western Front, who was killed on August 21, 1914.[31]

Ironically, news of the Armistice provoked spontaneous celebrations in towns and cities throughout Canada, as elsewhere in the Allied countries, not unlike those that had cheered the declaration of war in August 1914. The reaction among the men in the field was, as Robert Clements recalled, “strangely different.” The “sudden silence as the fighting ceased seemed to communicate itself to the men.” A “few” got drunk, but there wasn’t much alcohol of any kind readily available other than hidden supplies of wine that were dug up by recently liberated civilians who happily shared them with the Canadians. “The general mood,” however, “was one of relief and quiet thanks for delivery from further battle hazards.”[32]

Leonard McGill’s experience was somewhat different. A law student in Vancouver when he enlisted in 1915, McGill was a lieutenant in the 29th Battalion in 1918. His battalion had spent the morning marching toward Mons and was at Ciply, three miles south of the town, resting at the side of the road as eleven o’clock approached. It was raining and “all were cold and wet, and huddled together getting what protection they could from ground-sheets and trees along the edge of the field.” They had heard the rumors, of course, but many were skeptical, and some worried that, having survived this long, they might be killed in the final minutes of the war. When the Armistice was confirmed—not until noon—“the spell was broken, and pent-up feelings, repressed for months, asserted themselves in cheer after cheer that echoed and re-echoed across the narrow valley.”[33]

Some, but almost certainly not many, may have agreed with the fire-breathing McNaughton, who was furious that the Allies had agreed to an Armistice without conquering Germany. “Bloody fools!” he snorted. “We have them on the run. That means we shall have to do it all over again in another twenty-five years.”[34] And he did, commanding the Canadian army from 1939 to 1944 in the Second World War.

The vast majority of officers and men just wanted to get home as quickly as possible. And that inevitably led to thoughts of the future. Some men, according to Clements, “even experienced a feeling of dread toward return to civilian life.” Despite the danger, army life provided food, clothing, and decent spending money, with no need to make decisions on anything significant, and civilian life offered all kinds of uncertainty. “The truth was that these men were dreadfully tired, almost beyond human endurance.”[35]

Haig’s last communiqué rightly acknowledged that Mons had been captured by the Canadians. But like a scramble for spoils, tension immediately developed between the British and Canadians. Major General Loomis, whose Third Division troops had taken the town, invited Currie to stage a triumphal entry at 11:00 a.m. on the 11th. He was not merely being gracious; he was trying to make a point. A week earlier the mayor of Valenciennes had invited the Canadians to celebrate that city’s liberation, but Sir Henry Horne, who commanded the British First Army of which the Canadian Corps was a part, had intervened to insist, perhaps not entirely unreasonably, that British troops should also be honored, so he took the salute at the march-past.

This was annoying to Currie, who was always sensitive to British slights, but he was even more annoyed when the British troops were given precedence over the Canadians in the parade because the plain fact was that the Canadian Corps had spearheaded the last Allied offensive of the war. Indeed, as John English has rightly observed, “never before or since have Canadian troops played such a crucial and decisive role in land operations.”[36]

At Mons, which was infinitely more important symbolically than Valenciennes, it was a Canadian show with only token British participation. Currie rode into town with an escort provided by the British 5th Lancers, the British cavalry regiment that had retreated from Mons in 1914, but the 1,500 troops drawn up in the town square, where Currie took the salute, were all Canadians.

A week later, on the 17th, a great service of thanksgiving took place in Mons Cathedral with a host of generals and dignitaries, including the Prince of Wales, in attendance. Currie was presented with a gold medal bearing the inscription: “La Ville de Mons au Lieut-général Sir Arthur Currie, en souvenir de la libération de la cité pars le Corps Canadien” [The City of Mons to Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Currie, in memory of the liberation of the city by the Canadian Corps], and the cathedral carillon played “O Canada.” A few days later, Belgium’s King Albert formally entered the town and congratulated Currie on the Canadian Corps’ achievement, which he described as “unsurpassed by [that of] any Corps in Europe.”[37]

But if the war was over, army life and its obligations were not. Currie had agreed to contribute two divisions to the Allied army that would occupy Germany over the next few months, and on November 18 the First and Second Divisions—chosen for this dubious honor because they had been the first in the field—began the 250-mile march into Germany. The whole distance had to be covered on foot, in full gear, and at a time of year when the persistent rain and mud were at their worst. Adding to the misery of the task was the fact that billets were poor or non-existent and food supplies did not always keep up with the troops. “Too often,” as Worthington observes, men were ordered to march off in the morning without breakfast[38] and on a number of occasions some of them refused to start until they had been fed. The fact that the Spanish influenza hit the Canadians as well, killing hundreds, did not help.

They crossed into Germany at Boho on December 4. Robert Clements of the 25th Battalion later proudly recalled:

Led by Robert the Bruce [the battalion’s mascot goat] ahead of the pipe band playing “Blue Bonnets over the Border” and with an honor guard proudly carrying the Union Jack, the battalion marching at attention with bayonets fixed swung grandly past a small reviewing stand. For a brief few minutes heads went up, shoulders were squared and sore feet were forgotten. They . . . meant every German in sight . . . to recognize what it meant to them that day to be Canadians.[39]

Eight more days of marching took the Canadians to the Rhine, which they crossed at Bonn on the 13th in parade order despite the heavy rain, this time with Currie taking the salute. This was Currie’s first ceremonial parade since assuming command of the Corps in 1917, and he was deeply moved, saying to Brigadier General Brutinel “I never realized till today, Bruty, what an irresistible force they are. There is nothing so impressive and so powerful anywhere!”[40] It was true, of course, but many of his men had had more than enough of war and, in Cook’s words, “cared not a whit for the symbolic event.”[41]

Although Brutinel was there with Currie on the 13th, his Motor Machine Gun Brigade did not participate in the official crossing of the Rhine because it had been sent ahead, in response to appeals for help from German local authorities in dealing with bands of Bolsheviks who were terrorizing the German countryside in the highly unstable days that followed the Armistice.[42]

Mercifully, the Canadians were only in Germany briefly before returning to Belgium—this time by train—then on to Le Havre, where they took ship for England, arriving on April 10, 1919. While awaiting transportation back to Canada, the Corps participated in the great peace parade in London on May 3, with King George V taking the salute at the march-past. Repatriation to Canada, an enormous logistical problem, began in April, but it was not until the autumn of 1919 that the demobilization of the Canadian Corps was complete.

1. Quoted in Robert J. Sharpe, The Last Day, the Last Hour: The Currie Libel Trial (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 26.

2. Frederick George Scott, The Great War as I Saw It (Toronto: F. D. Goodchild, 1922), 319.

3. Quoted in Groom, A Storm in Flanders, 240.

4. Quoted in Groom, 241.

5. Groom, 242.

6. Cook, Shock Troops, 394.

7. Quoted in Berton, Marching as to War, 204.

8. Borden to Sir Thomas White, June 15, 1918, quoted in Borden, Letters to Limbo, 60.

9. Quoted in Borden, Letters to Limbo, 59.

10. J. L. Granatstein, Hell’s Corner: An Illustrated History of Canada’s Great War (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004), 177.

11. Granatstein, Hell’s Corner, 180.

12. Clements, Merry Hell, 206.

13. Byng quoted in Vance, Maple Leaf, 108; Winter, Haig’s Command, 271.

14. Clements, 213.

15. When the war broke out, Denmark remained neutral, so Dinesen tried to enlist in the British and French armies but was rejected by both. He traveled to New York City in 1917 but was rejected by the U.S. army as well. He finally succeeded when the Canadian recruiting office in New York accepted him in June 1917. He served overseas in the 42nd (Royal Highlanders) Battalion and earned both the Victoria Cross and the Croix de Guerre for extraordinary bravery at Parvillers in August 1918, then was promoted to lieutenant for a daring raid on a series of German trenches at Amiens.

16. Quoted in Berton, 209.

17. While happily risking his life in combat, Pick was also a member of parliament, having been elected in the 1917 federal election. His Victoria Cross is on display at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

18. Cited in Winter, 207.

19. John Swettenham, To Seize the Victory: The Canadian Corps in World War I (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), 238.

20. Ryan Goldsworthy, “Measuring the Success of Canada’s Wars: The Hundred Days Offensive as a Case Study.” Canadian Military Journal 13, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 50.

21. Victor Wentworth Odlum was a journalist and newspaper editor in Vancouver when he joined the 7th Battalion with the rank of Major in August 1914. He rose rapidly and was a Brigadier General before the end of the war. He was often in the front lines with his men, personally led several attacks with pistol in hand, and was wounded three times. Because he was a strict teetotaler, he would not allow his men their daily rum ration, substituting fruit juice, which earned him the derisive nicknames “Pea Soup Odlum” and “Old Lime Juice.” Born in England, George Pearkes emigrated to Canada in 1906 and settled near Red Deer, Alberta, then joined the North West Mounted Police. He enlisted in the 2nd CMR Battalion in March 1915, was awarded the Military Cross in 1916, was wounded five times, and earned the Victoria Cross at Passchendaele. In 1918 he was given command of the 116th Battalion, and at the end of the war he was awarded the DSO and Croix de Guerre. Following the war, he remained in the army reserve and, in the Second World War, was appointed Brigadier General commanding the Second (Seaforth Highlanders of Canada) Armored Brigade. In November 1941 he was promoted to Major General and replaced General A. G. L. McNaughton as commanding officer of the Canadian Corps. His opposition to the Dieppe raid resulted in his being returned to Canada in August 1942, when he became GOC Pacific Command. He received the CBE and the U.S. Order of Merit. He also opposed the government’s decision to deploy conscripts overseas and retired from the army when the government decided not to send Canadian troops to the Pacific theatre in 1945. He served in the House of Commons 1945–60 and was Minister of National Defence, 1957–60, when he recommended terminating the AVRO Arrow program and joining NORAD. He served as Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia 1960–68. See R. H. Roy, For Most Conspicuous Bravery: A Biography of Major-General George R. Pearkes, VC, Through Two World Wars. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1977. Louis James Lipsett was born in Ireland and became a professional soldier. From 1911 to 1914 he served in Canada, then commanded the 8th Battalion when it went overseas. He rose to command the Third Division after Malcolm Mercer was killed. He was transferred to command the British Fourth Division in September 1918 but was killed on October 14, making him the last British general to be killed in the war.

22. Born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Frederick Oscar Loomis was active in the militia before the war. In 1914 he was given command of the 13th Battalion, rose to command the Third Division, and was awarded the DSO and bar, CMG, and KCB.

23. Granatstein, Hell’s Corner, 169.

24. Born in Montreal, Scott became an Anglican priest and served St. Matthew’s Church in Quebec City from 1896 to 1933, except for the war years when he was senior chaplain of the First Division with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He was wounded at Cambrai in 1918 and was awarded the CMG and DSO. He was also a well-known poet, perhaps best known for his collection of war poems, In the Battle Silences: Poems Written at the Front. London: Constable, 1916. Three of his five sons also served in the war and one of them, Henry Hutton Scott (1890–1916), was killed on October 21, 1916, while serving as a captain in the 87th (Canadian Grenadier Guards) Battalion. Another son was F. R. (Francis Reginald) Scott, who became a prominent lawyer, civil rights advocate, and poet.

25. Granatstein, Hell’s Corner, 171.

26. Shane B. Schreiber, Shock Army of the British Empire: The Canadian Corps in the Last 100 Days of the Great War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 87.

27. Quoted in Berton, 212.

28. Quoted in Berton, 212.

29. William Henry Tallis and two of his four brothers, all of whom had emigrated to Borden, Saskatchewan, in 1904, enlisted, and both brothers, Edgar Alfred and Victor Kirk, were killed, in September 1916 and February 1917. William’s son, Arnold John, was also killed, on September 2, 1918, as was his cousin, Harold William, on November 1. All appear to have served in the 46th (Saskatchewan) Battalion. Some sources incorrectly state that these four men were brothers.

30. Virtually all references to Price say he was a native of Canning, Nova Scotia. In fact, he was born at Falmouth but grew up in a community known as Church Street, which lay between Port Williams and Canning.

31. John Parr is almost always described as being twenty years old when he died, and this is inscribed on his tombstone. In fact, he lied about his age when he enlisted in 1914 and was only sixteen.

32. Clements, 220, 221.

33. Leonard McGill, “How the 29th Received News of an Armistice,” The Gold Stripe 3 (June 1919): 51.

34. Quoted in Berton, 213. He was, without realizing it, expressing exactly the same opinion as the British Cabinet and War Office, which, recognizing that the German army had not actually been defeated in the field, expected a resumption of “the same war with the same allies within twenty years.” Winter, 239.

35. Clements, 221.

36. John English, “Foreword” in Schreiber, xi.

37. Worthington, Amid the Guns Below, 158.

38. Worthington, 159.

39. Clements, 222.

40. Quoted in Worthington, 159–60.

41. Cook, Shock Troops, 585.

42. Worthington, 160.

Chapter 15

The New Reality

New conditions must be met by new precedents.

—Robert Borden, 1918[1]

When the war ended on November 11, 1918, Borden was already at sea on his way to London to help plan for the peace conference. Lloyd George had alerted him on October 27 that the end of the war was imminent and thought it “very important” that he and the other Dominion leaders “should be here to participate in the deliberations” regarding the terms of the Armistice.[2]

In his response, Borden alerted Lloyd George that “the press and people of this country take it for granted that Canada will be represented at the Peace Conference” and cautioned him that “a very unfortunate impression would be created and possibly a dangerous feeling might be aroused” if this were not the case. “We discussed the subject today in Council and I found among my colleagues a striking insistence which doubtless is indicative of the general opinion entertained in this country.”[3]

He didn’t need to persuade Lloyd George of the validity of the Dominions’ claim to representation, but he knew there would be difficulties with President Wilson and Premier Georges Clemenceau of France. Indeed, what France initially proposed was that each of the major powers (Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States) should have five delegates, the “smaller” Allied powers three, new states recognized as Allies two, states in course of formation and neutral states one each.

What this implied was that the Dominions would have one representative each, while small powers like Belgium and Portugal would have three. This was totally unacceptable to Borden and the other Dominion leaders. As he forcefully told the Imperial War Cabinet on December 31, Canada had lost more men in the war than Portugal had put in the field, and if Portugal were given greater representation than Canada, the reaction “would be such as he did not care to suggest, or even contemplate.”[4]

Lloyd George took the battle to Clemenceau and Wilson. When he explained that the Dominions collectively had contributed a million soldiers, Clemenceau yielded, saying “Come—and bring your savages with you.”[5] The Americans were more difficult. When Secretary of State Robert Lansing wondered why Canada should be involved in the settlement of European affairs, Lloyd George bluntly reminded him that Canada, with a tenth of the population, had lost more men in the war than the United States. Wilson was more sympathetic but did suspect that the British were just trying to increase “imperial” representation at the Conference. Not unreasonably, he wondered why Canada and the other Dominions were entitled to separate representation if they were being included in the British Empire Delegation.

In the end, a compromise was reached: the larger Dominions would each have two representatives, but New Zealand would have only one, and Newfoundland would be represented through the British Empire Delegation. Because all of the Dominions were also represented in the British Empire Delegation, they (along with India) actually enjoyed dual representation at the conference, separately as powers in their own right and collectively as members of the British Empire Delegation.

The reality was that there was no clear principle or logic in the way that representation at the peace conference was finally determined. India, which no one claimed was an autonomous nation, received equal representation with the larger Dominions on the grounds that it had made a very significant contribution to the war effort, while Belgium and Serbia were allowed three representatives, and Brazil was raised to three because Wilson hoped this might offset the German influence in that country!

In the end, it really didn’t matter, except symbolically, because all the major issues were dealt with by the Council of Five: Britain, France, Italy, the United States, and Japan. Indeed, all the major issues were decided privately by Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Wilson. There were few plenary sessions, and they were not much more than formalities. In Stacey’s words, the conference was “in many respects a gigantic sham.” Because nothing was settled by voting, “the complicated apparatus of representation on which so much time and ink had been spent was meaningless.”[6] When it came time to sign the treaty, the Dominions were only allowed to sign it under Britain’s name.

Even so, Borden saw this as a significant advance in Canadian autonomy. Perhaps just as important, at least to him, was that the Dominions were able to play a larger role at the conference than other small powers because they were part of the British Empire Delegation. This gave them, as Loring Christie rightly observed, “a peculiarly effective position.”[7] Borden personally played a very active role in the Delegation, because he was the most respected of the Dominion leaders, and served as its chairman whenever Lloyd George was unable to attend.

Canada’s autonomy was also recognized when it was allowed to join the International Labour Organization, and more importantly, the new League of Nations. The real significance of this was qualified, however, by the fact that India was also admitted to the League despite being governed from London.

The importance of Borden’s role at the Paris peace conference has not been generally recognized outside of Canada, either then or since. More than any other person, he was responsible for the new status that the Dominions achieved there. Borden was not a boastful man, but he did subsequently claim that Canada had led the way among the Dominions in insisting on their rights, for the most part “without active assistance” from the other Dominions.” As Stacey says, “if this was an exaggeration, it was not a very great one, and there is a good deal of evidence to support Borden’s statement.”[8]

Canada’s contribution to the Paris peace conference was more significant than that, however, because Borden was also deeply committed to doing whatever he could to preserve the Anglo-American alliance. The British government shared this goal, but its achievement was sorely tested by Australian, New Zealand, and South African territorial ambitions. They had captured and occupied German territories in the South Pacific and southwestern Africa and were determined to keep them. President Wilson was equally determined that colonialism should be replaced in the postwar world by a new concept of international trusteeship.

This issue proved to be the most dangerous threat to Anglo-American harmony at Paris. Britain, while prepared to accept the American position, understandably felt obliged to support the three Dominions in the interest of imperial unity. Borden, however, playing a mediating or “linchpin” role in the Imperial War Cabinet and in the British Empire Delegation, did much to persuade Britain and the other Dominions of the wisdom of accepting Wilson’s point of view. The result, which applied to British and French territorial ambitions in the Middle East as well, was to transfer the areas in question to the League of Nations, which then assigned them to the various governments to administer on its behalf. Instead of colonies, these places became mandated territories.

Throughout these discussions, Canada self-righteously proclaimed that it had no territorial ambitions of its own, but this was not quite true. In 1916 Borden had shown real interest in a proposal by a Canadian business group that Canada should take over the administration of the British West Indies. And during a meeting of the Imperial War Cabinet’s Sub-Committee on Territorial Desiderata in April 1917, the Canadian representative, J. D. Hazen—Minister of Marine, Fisheries, and the Naval Service—expressed Canadian interest in acquiring St. Pierre, Miquelon, Greenland, and the Alaska Panhandle. In view of the fact that these places all belonged to Allies or a neutral power—France, the United States, and Denmark—this curious proposal obviously went nowhere.

In August 1918, Leo Amery, assistant secretary of the Imperial War Cabinet (he was also a member of parliament and a future first lord of the admiralty, colonial secretary, and secretary of state for India), revived the idea of Canada taking over the British West Indies, throwing in Newfoundland and the Falkland Islands for good measure. Borden was still interested, believing that their acquisition would be “some recognition of if not compensation for Canada’s sacrifice in this war,”[9] and Lloyd George later claimed to have had “many a talk” with him on the subject.[10] Although Lord Milner, the Colonial Secretary, was not supportive, Borden persisted even after the peace conference. He only finally abandoned the idea in the spring of 1920 because he had reservations about potential racial problems and declining public support for imperialism, and feared the possible negative American reaction to the consolidation of British colonies in the Caribbean region under Canadian control.[11]

Meanwhile, even though the war had ended in November 1918 and Allied leaders were formulating the peace treaty, Canadian troops continued to serve overseas and engage in combat until the autumn of 1919. Indeed, troops were actually sent overseas in December 1918, a full month after the war had ended. It is worthwhile to examine briefly this largely forgotten footnote to the war.

Three Allied interventions in Russia took place in 1918–19, and Canada participated in all of them. These interventions were initially prompted by the collapse of the Eastern Front in February 1918 when the new revolutionary government in Russia signed a peace treaty with Germany. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk gave Germany major territorial gains in the east and enabled it to transfer large numbers of soldiers, equipment, and supplies to the Western Front, making possible the massive spring offensive discussed in the last chapter. The treaty also gave Germany access to critical resources such as wheat and coal in Ukraine, oil in the Caspian region, and large stockpiles of military equipment and supplies that had been sent by the Allies to Archangel in northwestern Russia.

Allied leaders claimed that their goal was not to bring down the Bolshevik government because it was communist but only to support those in Russia who were committed to carrying on the war. This argument might have been more persuasive if the military interventions had terminated with the Armistice in November 1918. They did not, and there can be little doubt that Lloyd George, Wilson, and Borden saw Bolshevism as a threat to the established order not just in Russia but in their own countries. Social and political unrest was rampant in 1918–19 because of the horrendous cost of the war in human lives, conscription, inflation, and wage controls, but politicians preferred to blame it on the subversive influence of Bolshevism or radical socialism. While many, including Borden, did believe that the war should lead to a better world, they certainly didn’t have communism or socialism in mind.

Thus, when the War Office called in January 1918 for volunteers to serve in a military intervention in Azerbaijan, 41 Canadian soldiers were among the approximately 1,000 soldiers who formed the unit, which became known as Dunsterforce after its commanding officer, Major General Lionel Dunsterville. Canadian pilots served in RAF units operating in the area at this time as well. These were not the first Canadians to serve in the region during the war. Five officers and twenty-five men from the Canadian Pioneer Depot in England had served in Britain’s Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force.

Dunsterforce’s task was to prevent both revolutionary Russia and Turkey (which was allied with Germany) from seizing control of the Baku oilfields. The mission proved to be a farce because when a Turkish force attacked Baku in September the British promptly evacuated the city. A week later Turkey signed an Armistice with the Allies. Baku was then reoccupied by a British-Indian force until 1920, when the Soviet Union established the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic with Baku as its capital. Farce or not, one Canadian was left behind: Sergeant Donald MacDonald of Calgary, formerly of the 10th Battalion, had contracted smallpox and was evacuated to Bombay, where he died on December 5, 1918.[12]

Meanwhile, Allied troops were also sent into northwestern Russia to occupy Murmansk, a town established during the war on the White Sea near Archangel because its ice-free harbor could receive Allied shipments of war materiel. At the end of 1917 there was believed to be more than 163,000 tons of materiel at Archangel which had neither been delivered to the Russian army nor paid for.[13] When the Bolsheviks began to ship these supplies south in February 1918, but obviously not to support the war, the Allies decided to occupy Murmansk. This, they rather vaguely hoped, would prevent the Germans from occupying the port and would also encourage a reopening of the Eastern Front. The North Russian Expeditionary Force (NREF) comprised 13,000 troops from Britain, the United States, and France, along with smaller numbers of Serbs, Finns, Poles, Australians, Italians, and even Chinese.[14]

When invited to contribute troops to the NREF, Borden naturally agreed. Volunteers were called for, and twenty-seven officers and NCOs were seconded from units in England, particularly the 18th Reserve Battalion of the Canadian Railway Troops Corps. Another ninety-three officers and NCOs joined a “special mobile force” that was being organized to instruct the White Russian (i.e., Russians opposed to the Bolsheviks) troops. They were commanded by Lieutenant Colonel John Leckie of Vancouver, who had commanded the 16th Battalion in France. Then, when it was discovered that the American troops participating in the NREF were taking no artillery with them, Borden agreed to send the Sixth Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel C. H. L Sharman as well.[15]

By this time, the Germans were in full retreat on the Western Front, and there was no need to reopen an Eastern Front. The intervention carried on, however, its justification now being that the White Russian forces had to prevail over the Bolsheviks if a lasting peace and the new boundaries of Eastern Europe were to be secured. How serious the British and American leaders actually were seems questionable, however, in view of the fact that the troops sent by the British were “B” category men (i.e., men not deemed fit for combat), while none of the Americans had ever seen action. The Canadians were the only combat veterans. The expedition was supported by eight RAF aircraft operated by thirty pilots and observers, but the aircraft were obsolete and most of their crew had just completed their training in England and therefore had no experience. Almost half of them were Canadians.

In contrast to the Baku affair, real fighting took place during the North Russian intervention. It began on November 11, 1918, when two Canadians, Walter Conville and Stanley Wareham, were killed along with twenty-six other Allied soldiers. Sporadic fighting continued through the winter, even as it became increasingly obvious that the anti-Bolshevik forces were in retreat everywhere. The United States decided in February 1919 to withdraw its forces as did the Imperial War Cabinet in March. It was not until June that the Canadians actually pulled out, however, and their artillery instructors remained in Russia until September 18. The last Canadian killed in Russia was Dugald MacDougall of Lockport, Manitoba, an RAF captain seconded to the Royal Navy, who died near Archangel on August 25, 1919.

Meanwhile, the third Allied intervention had taken place when Vladivostok on the Pacific coast of Siberia was occupied by 73,000 Japanese troops plus 35,000 more from thirteen other countries, including Britain, Canada, and the United States. Its mission, according to the War Office, was “to restore order and a stable government” in Siberia, provide assistance to the hapless Czech Legion which was thought to be fighting its way through Siberia to reach Vladivostok, and—of course—help to reopen the Eastern Front.

Newton Rowell, the senior Liberal in the Unionist government, inadvertently revealed the absurdity of the Siberian venture when he told the Canadian Club in Victoria, British Columbia, in September 1918 that failure to intervene in Siberia would allow Vladivostok to fall into the hands of Germany, giving it a base of operations on the Pacific and threatening the security of Canada’s west coast.[16] In September 1918, the German army was in full retreat on the Western Front.

Clearly, this made no sense. As with the two other interventions, the true explanation appears to be that the Allies hoped that the anti-Bolshevik forces could regain control of Russia if supported by the Western powers, although Borden’s motivations with respect to all three interventions were somewhat more complicated. In addition to agreeing that Bolshevism should be suppressed, he also believed that Canadian autonomy within the empire involved not just a meaningful voice in determining imperial foreign policy but a willingness to play a role in carrying out that policy. Thus, he warned Canadians that the country’s “present position and prestige would be singularly impaired . . . unless we proceed with [the] Siberian Expedition.”[17] There is also some evidence to suggest that Canada hoped to develop significant economic benefits from trade with and investment in Siberia if Bolshevism could be defeated.

Borden was vastly out of touch not only with Canadian public opinion but even with the views of his own cabinet, most of whose members vigorously opposed the Siberian intervention. So did Gwatkin, the chief of the general staff.[18] To make matters worse, the troops that the government sent to Siberia were inexperienced, and many of them were French-Canadian conscripts who complained bitterly about being sent overseas when the war was over.

Borden persisted, sending two infantry battalions, an artillery brigade, a machine gun company, and engineering and other support units totalling 4,000 men. The British provided 1,000 British troops and flattered Borden by suggesting that Canadian Major General James Elmsley command the whole force. Raymond Collishaw, the prominent Canadian pilot, commanded RAF 47 Squadron in the expedition.

Some of the Canadian troops mutinied while marching from their barracks to the docks, provoking Lieutenant Colonel Albert Swift to draw his revolver—on the main street of Victoria, British Columbia—and fire a shot over their heads. This prompted some men to get back into line, but when several others still refused to proceed, two companies of troops from Ontario were ordered to take off their belts and whip them into line. This achieved the desired result, but as the French-Canadian troops marched to the docks, they chanted “On y va pas à Siberia!” [We won’t go to Siberia].[19]

They did go, of course, but when they got to Vladivostok virtually all of the Canadians were confined to the port city, which Harold Steele of the 259th Battalion described as a “God forsaken hole.”[20] They trained White Russian officers and provided routine local security operations. Only one small contingent of fifty-five men was posted to Omsk as headquarters staff for the British battalion. Within a month, Borden recognized his error and told the War Office that Canadian troops were not “to engage in military operations” or to “move up country” without the Canadian government’s express consent, because the situation had changed, Allied policy was ambiguous, and public opinion was “strongly opposed to further participation.”[21]

Borden, now seeking an escape from this fiasco, proposed at the Imperial War Cabinet on December 30, 1918, that a peace conference should be held with representatives of the rival forces in Russia to try to help them to work out a settlement. When this was agreed, Lloyd George mischievously suggested that Borden should serve as the chief British delegate. He, still keen to play a role on the international stage, foolishly agreed, but the meeting never took place. Borden then ordered the Canadian forces home, and the Red Army occupied Vladivostok a few months later.

This pointless exercise could be regarded as a comic-opera affair except for the fact that it cost the lives of nineteen Canadian soldiers, none of them in battle. Sixteen died of diseases such as smallpox and influenza, two died in accidents, and one, Lieutenant Alfred Thring of the 260th Battalion, committed suicide.[22]

The Allied interventions in Russia were ill-conceived, badly managed, and manipulated by a dying British government unable to accept the new reality of its reduced stature in the postwar world and apparently unaware that its citizens were thoroughly sick of imperialist adventurism based on their sacrifice. Like Canada’s Unionist government, the Lloyd George coalition would be annihilated at the next elections. As for Borden, one can only feel sympathy for a good, well-intentioned man who wore himself out in the service of his country but lost his way in the chaos of 1918–19. He could rightly be proud of the enhanced status which he had negotiated for Canada, but it had been earned—as he readily acknowledged—by the blood of thousands of young Canadian men and women. And while Canadians were generally proud of their military contribution to the war and the nation’s new status, Borden was seriously out of touch with the views of most Canadian attitudes when he thought they shared his ambition to play a significant role on the world stage.

Canada was now an “autonomous” nation, but precisely what that meant was unclear because, as a member of the empire-commonwealth, it was also committed to the concept of a common imperial foreign policy. How autonomy could be reconciled with this commitment remained to be seen. Meanwhile, most observers, including Borden himself, recognized the apparent paradox in the fact that Canada was proclaiming its autonomy at the same time that it had sought membership in the League of Nations, whose covenant required members to promise to defend all other members from aggression. To Borden the important thing was to be accepted as a member of this new international organization. The problem of the League covenant’s Article X, which contained the commitment, could be addressed later.

This commitment was, of course, why the United States Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. Most Canadians shared the American view that a commitment to defend all members of the League if attacked was not only an infringement of the nation’s autonomy but simply foolish in principle. Many also shared the widely held view of many, if not most, Americans that supporting the empire in the Great War had been a traumatic experience not to be repeated. In other words, they did not agree with Borden that establishing Canada’s autonomy should be the basis for playing a role in world affairs but quite the opposite: to enable Canada to mind its own business and avoid entanglements in international affairs. “Like their southern neighbors,” as Stacey concludes, Canadians “were rebounding from idealism into isolation.”[23]

When Warren Harding was elected President of the United States in 1920, he campaigned—if that is not too strong a word—on the promise to return the country to “normalcy.” If he accomplished little in his brief presidency—he died in August 1923 shortly after becoming the first American president to visit Canada while in office—he did at least contribute a new word to the English language. But everyone knew what he meant, and most Americans agreed with the idea of turning their collective backs on what they regarded as Wilson’s misguided foray into European affairs. Few seemed aware that American participation in the war actually constituted the unfortunate culmination of America’s imperial adventure that had begun in the 1890s.

While Canadians for the most part felt the same way, they had greater cause for regret because they had gone into the war automatically, not as a result of a decision made by their own parliament. They had been at war much longer than the United States, and they had suffered many more casualties. They too wanted, as Voltaire had famously put it, to tend their own garden and leave the Europeans—including the British—to their own devices. Nowhere was this feeling stronger than in Quebec, but it was a view widely held throughout the country. At the same time, Canadians were conflicted because they genuinely felt the need to honor those who had served, and especially those who had given their lives in the war. But many couldn’t help suspecting that it had all been unnecessary, which made the sacrifice even more unbearable.

As Thomas Wolfe famously observed in his 1940 novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, it was not possible to return to the way things were before 1914. Despite the efforts of the Canadian and American governments to return to prewar normality, the world had irrevocably changed. As the novelist Sebastian Faulks has observed, the war was not just a major historical event; it had “irrevocably cut [people] off from the past.”[24]

This is not the place to discuss the vast impact of the Great War on Western civilization, but, essentially, everything had changed. Most fundamentally, what had changed were attitudes. What had been acceptable before the war, whether in regard to the social responsibilities of governments, the status of women, or the very meaning of democracy was no longer acceptable, at least not to a very large part of the population.

The thousands of veterans who came home, many of them having been away for more than four years, were not the same young men who had gone overseas. They could not have been, given what they had experienced. Eddie Cantor’s popular 1923 song “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?” spoke to a reality that everyone recognized. Reintegration into civil society was hard for many of them, impossible for some. When the Canadian Legion was formed at the end of the war, it became a large but very exclusive club to which the price of admission was not only high but beyond the ability of anyone who had not served to pay. Many promises were made to the veterans, but, inevitably, as politicians sought to slash postwar budgets, few were kept, at least not without a struggle.

Many thought that a cataclysm of this magnitude, which had swept away empires and emperors, obsolete social values and behavior, and very nearly wiped out a generation of young men, cried out for the creation of a new society. And this could only be achieved by a stronger, more centralized government which expressed the nation’s will and drew out the best in its citizens.[25] Certainly, the Canadian and provincial governments had taken on responsibilities during the war that most people would not have dreamed of before 1914; they had conscripted men to fight overseas, managed the economy and nationalized railways, set up employment offices, and introduced technical education. At the same time, agrarian and labor leaders were calling for radical reforms not just in the social safety net but in the political system itself. Perhaps for the first time, some were asking why government could spend billions on war but seemed unable to afford old age pensions or other social legislation. A lot of disgruntled veterans agreed with them.

Meanwhile, the war and its immediate aftermath shattered the optimism of the prewar years when Laurier’s famous declaration that the twentieth century would belong to Canada had been accepted as a reasonable and rather obvious statement of fact. Despite the popular impression that the 1920s was a decade of prosperity and liberation, they were turbulent years in Canada and the United States, as in Europe, because the social, economic, and political adjustment to a postwar society was very difficult for many people.

John English cites the career of James Shaver Woodsworth as an excellent example. The son of a Methodist minister in western Canada, he too became a minister. Before the war, he embraced the social gospel, but by 1918 he had left the church because he opposed not only conscription but the war itself. He participated in the Winnipeg general strike in 1919, was elected to parliament as an independent labor candidate in 1921, and in 1932 became the leader of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), Canada’s first socialist party.

While most Canadians did not become as radical as Woodsworth as a result of the war, there were certainly many who did, especially in western Canada. Some radical labor leaders praised the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, agreeing that their struggle was not just for better wages and working conditions but against capitalism itself. More days were lost to labor disputes in 1919 than in any other year in Canadian history, before or since. The situation was much the same in the United States.

A Royal Commission on Industrial Relations appointed by the government to investigate the situation recommended reforms including minimum wages, the eight-hour day, unemployment and health insurance, and recognition of the right to free collective bargaining. The government ignored these proposals, however, and proceeded to withdraw from the social programs in which it was already involved. Price controls were abolished in April 1919, the Wheat Board and the Grain Exchange were closed down, and even the employment offices set up to help returning veterans were discontinued. The government was now focused on reducing its involvement in the economy and cutting spending so that it could reduce the massive national debt built up during the war. Thus, the immediate postwar period in Canada was less a time of liberation from the stresses of war and a return to prewar normality than a new era of high unemployment, rapidly emerging regional economic disparities, social unrest, and simmering hostility between Quebec and the rest of Canada.

The new reality was reflected in Canada’s relationship with both Britain and the United States. The British connection remained important to most Canadians, both emotionally and because of the ties of kinship. Indeed, those ties became even stronger because of the flood of British immigrants fleeing desperate economic and social conditions at home. At the same time, Canada’s relationship with the United States had grown in extent and intensity during the war years. The United States was now the most powerful industrial and military power in the world, and Sir Clifford Sifton, the prominent newspaper publisher and former Cabinet minister, was not far wrong when he suggested that “the main business of Canada in foreign relations is to remain friendly with the United States while preserving its own self-respect.”[26]

The Borden government understood this and therefore maintained the Canadian War Mission in Washington while considering the establishment of a permanent mission of some sort. In October 1919, it proposed to appoint a minister in Washington, attached to the British embassy, to deal with Canadian concerns. The British government was agreeable, proposing in the interests of imperial unity that the Canadian minister take charge of the embassy when the ambassador was absent. The U.S. government was also agreeable, but William Lyon Mackenzie King, the new leader of the Liberal Party, was not. He signalled his rejection of Borden’s concept of autonomy by opposing the arrangement on the grounds that mixing up Canadian and British representation in this way would inevitably lead to problems. The government did not pursue the idea.

The 1921 Imperial Conference, the first since the end of the war, presented two challenges to the concept of a common foreign policy. Both concerned the Anglo-Japanese defense agreement. The British government, supported by Australia and New Zealand, proposed to renew it for another ten years. The Canadian government, playing the self-appointed “linchpin” role which it had identified as its destiny, argued that it should be terminated because the United States government opposed it and U.S.-Japanese relations were already somewhat strained. If the United States and Japan ever went to war, what would Britain do? Under the terms of the treaty, it would be required to support Japan against the United States, which was obviously unthinkable.

Arthur Meighen—who had succeeded Borden as prime minister in July 1920—ultimately argued that, if the empire was going to maintain a common foreign policy, the views of those countries most directly concerned with an issue should trump the views of others, and in this case, Canada had “a special right to be heard because we know, or ought to know, the United States best.”[27] Australia and New Zealand, not surprisingly, thought that they had the primary interest in the issue because they were isolated in a Far East becoming increasingly dominated by Japan. The fundamental flaw in the practical management of a common foreign policy was evident.

In the end the British government decided that the treaty did not have to be renewed but would remain in effect unless or until one of the signatories actually renounced it. In the meantime, a conference of Pacific powers would be held in Washington to work out a solution. This was agreeable to the United States, and Borden and other Dominion representatives attended as members of the British Empire Delegation. The result was that the Anglo-Japanese treaty was replaced by a naval limitation treaty signed by the United States, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy.

Whatever the impact of Canada’s stand at the 1921 Imperial Conference was, and that remains a matter of debate, Canada had made clear less than three years after the end of the war that relations with the United States were a high priority in its international relations and that the imperial relationship “had to be accommodated to that basic consideration.”[28] Arguing for the termination of the Anglo-Japanese alliance dramatically reflected Canada’s recognition that Britain could no longer maintain a credible global defense policy. Canada would have to rely on the United States in any future crisis. Come to that, so would Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.

1. Borden telegram to Lloyd George, 28 October 1918, cited in Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, 241.

2. Lloyd George telegram to Borden, 27 October 1918, cited in Stacey, 240,

3. Borden telegram to Lloyd George, 28 October 1918, cited in Stacey, 241.

4. Quoted in Brown, Borden, 251.

5. Quoted in Cook, Warlords, 141.

6. Stacey, 249.

7. Quoted in Stacey, 250.

8. Stacey, 256.

9. LAC, Borden Papers 35998–9. Borden to Francis Keefer, January 1, 1919, Confidential. Keefer served as Parliamentary Undersecretary for External Affairs from 1918 to 1920.

10. David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference, Vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), 367–68.

11. See Brian Douglas Tennyson, “Canada and the Commonwealth Caribbean: The Historical Relationship,” in Canadian-Caribbean Relations: Aspects of a Relationship, ed. Brian Douglas Tennyson (Sydney, NS: Centre for International Studies, 1990), 33–37.

12. He is buried in the Kirkee Military Cemetery at Poona, near Bombay, very likely the only Canadian there among the more than 1,800 servicemen and women who died in India during the First World War.

13. MacLaren, Canadians in Russia, 37.

14. MacLaren, 58.

15. Born in England, Sharman had emigrated to Canada and joined the Royal North West Mounted Police. He served in the 5th Canadian Mounted Rifles in South Africa, then joined the militia, and commanded artillery batteries on the Western Front until being wounded during the Second Battle of Ypres. He then served as chief instructor of the Canadian Reserve Artillery at Witley, England, until going to Russia.

16. Quoted in Isitt, From Victoria, 77.

17. Quoted in Isitt, From Victoria, 90.

18. Quoted in Isitt, From Victoria, 91, 95.

19. Isitt, From Victoria, 2. Forty soldiers were arrested and marched at bayonet point into a shed, where they received summary sentences ranging from seven to twenty-eight days’ field punishment. A dozen others were remanded into custody and court martialed after arrival in Vladivostok. All but one were convicted and sentenced to prison at hard labor for periods ranging from one to three years, but as the Canadians prepared to return home and questions were being raised in parliament over the legality of deploying conscripts, their sentences were quietly commuted. Isitt, 104.

20. Quoted in Isitt, From Victoria, 177.

21. Quoted in Isitt, From Victoria, 223.

22. An immigrant from England, he had been in the army since December 1914 and died on March 13, 1919.

23. Stacey, 284.

24. Sebastian Faulks, The Tragic Englishman (London: Random House, 1997), 200.

25. English, Borden, 128.

26. Quoted in Thompson and Randall, Canada and the United States, 103.

27. Quoted in Brown and Cook, Canada 1896–1921, 292.

28. Brown and Cook, 293.

Chapter 16

North American Nation

The main business of Canada in foreign relations is to remain friendly with the United States while preserving its own self-respect.

—Sir Clifford Sifton[1]

Everything changed with the federal election in September 1921, when the Liberal Party led by William Lyon Mackenzie King returned to office after ten years in opposition. The Liberals did not win a majority in parliament, however, but only a plurality, their strongest support being in Quebec. The second largest group was the Progressive Party, which had only come into existence in the previous couple of years. It was largely comprised of farmers—many of them disillusioned Liberals—workers, and others who were angry about the Borden-Meighen government’s wartime policies and proposed postwar economic policies.

King was an ambitious young man from Kitchener (formerly Berlin), Ontario. He earned a PhD in economics from Harvard University and served as the first deputy minister when Laurier created the federal Department of Labour in 1900. Elected to parliament in 1907, he became the first full-time minister of labour but went down to defeat in the 1911 election. He sought re-election in a Toronto suburban constituency as an anti-conscription Laurier Liberal in the notorious 1917 federal election and, not surprisingly, was defeated. Taking the long view, which King did throughout his career, he knew he would be rewarded for this sacrificial act when Laurier died or retired, because the next leader of the Liberal party would have to be someone who had been loyal to the old man in 1917 but was not French. There weren’t many men who met those qualifications.

King had spent the war years working as a labor relations consultant, mostly in the United States, where he advised and became a trusted friend of John D. Rockefeller, most notably and effectively after the notorious Ludlow massacre at Rockefeller’s coal mines in Colorado in 1914. King turned down the presidency of the Rockefeller Foundation because he was biding his time until the Liberal leadership became vacant, but Rockefeller helped him to obtain consulting contracts and was a generous supporter for many years.[2] When King became prime minister in 1921, he was and remains the best educated man to hold that office. He was also the one with the best knowledge and practical experience of the United States.

King emphatically did not agree with Borden’s view of autonomy within the empire, or with Meighen’s slightly more daring concept of autonomy with special conditions. Like Laurier, he believed that autonomy could not be shared, either by Britain or by Canada. He was also determined, as he said repeatedly over the years, that Canadians would make their own decisions, although that did not preclude cooperation. This view extended to Canada’s relationship with the League of Nations, membership in which also infringed on Canadian autonomy. And he was always well aware that he was operating in the 1920s, not in the prewar or war years, and was leading a minority government dominated by Quebec and dependent on the support of the western agrarian Progressives. There was very little taste in Quebec or western Canada after the war for imperial cooperation or an active foreign policy.

Within months of taking office, King went to Washington to negotiate revisions to the Rush-Bagot Treaty, an 1817 Anglo-American agreement that limited naval armaments on the Great Lakes and other shared waterways. In the end, the revisions were not made, but King had made it clear to the British government that, if they were, he expected full powers, without British participation, to sign agreements that only concerned Canadian issues. Two years later, Canada did negotiate an agreement regulating the Pacific halibut fishery, and King again insisted, over vigorous British objections, on having his Minister of Marine and Fisheries sign it alone on behalf of Canada. The British yielded, fearing that if they did not King would go further and establish diplomatic relations with the United States, thereby destroying the concept of a common foreign policy.

That came four years later anyway, when the 1926 Imperial Conference agreed that Britain and the Dominions were all fully autonomous nations equal in status, linked together in what was now being called the commonwealth only by history and allegiance to a common Crown. King immediately followed up by appointing a minister to Washington, and, because the 1926 conference had also redefined the role of the governor general so that he represented the Crown but not the government, Canada and Britain exchanged high commissioners—the title given to intra-Commonwealth ambassadors—in 1928. Other diplomatic appointments soon followed.

While most Canadians took pride in what they now thought was their very clear sovereign status, achieved without a revolution, Americans could be forgiven if they found the situation confusing, assuming that they thought about it at all. Was Canada part of the British Empire or was it an independent nation? The answer, which was not very helpful, was that it was both, although the empire was morphing into the commonwealth. Britain and the Dominions doubtless confused matters when they described themselves as “autonomous” rather than independent, which Americans and others would have understood. But that word was too politically charged in the 1920s because it implied total separation, and it was not quite accurate anyway because all members of the commonwealth shared the common Crown.

The first Canadian minister in Washington, Vincent Massey, was a member of a wealthy manufacturing family, a prominent Liberal (and the brother of Raymond Massey, the actor). “Travelling widely and speaking often, Massey argued for Canada’s position as a new North American nation with an ancient British allegiance, uniquely qualified to act as an interpreter and peacemaker in Anglo-American affairs.”[3] Washington responded by appointing William Phillips as the U.S. minister in Ottawa. A former undersecretary in the State Department and ambassador to Belgium, his posting to what many Americans would have regarded as a minor posting indicated that the United States government understood the importance of its relationship with its northern neighbor.

The new importance to Canada of the United States had a profound impact upon Canada’s view of the world after the war. It sought not only to avoid conflict with the United States but to limit commonwealth and League of Nations commitments which might cause complications with the United States. Thus, just as the U.S. Senate refused to join the League because of the collective security clauses, the Canadian government worked assiduously throughout the 1920s to weaken them. In fact, if Canada can be said to have played any significant role on the world stage in the 1920s, it was in helping to destroy collective security.

To be fair, it was only leading the other powers, with the understandable exception of France, in the direction in which they fervently wished to go. So if pulling the League’s teeth in the 1920s contributed significantly to the outbreak of the Second World War, Canada is certainly guilty of displaying excessive zeal in wielding the pliers, but almost every other government, including that of the United States, was cheering it on.

At the same time, Canada’s postwar governments continued to believe that Britain and the United States—the Anglo-Saxon powers as they were then called—represented the greatest force for peace and good values in the world. If the League could not guarantee peace, it was thought that Britain and the United States, acting in concert, could. And since Canada liked to think that it understood the Americans better than the British and the British better than the Americans, it clung for many years to the belief that it had a unique role to be the linchpin, or interpreter and mediator, between them. It should be noted that neither Britain nor the United States ever encouraged Canada to play this role and always dealt directly with each other, although Canada often sought to be helpful.

The old days, when Canadians thought the only threat to their security came from the United States, were clearly over. Well, perhaps not quite. The Department of National Defence continued into the 1930s to have only one war plan, which assumed an American invasion. It proposed Canadian counterattacks on American border cities that might serve as bases for an invasion, while waiting—no doubt with fingers firmly crossed—for the British army to arrive. If this sounds ludicrous, the U.S. army also still had a plan for the conquest of Canada in the event of war with Britain, after which Canada would be absorbed and carved up into new states and territories.

But the existence of these plans should not be interpreted to mean that anyone seriously thought that either an Anglo-American or a Canadian-American war was even conceivable. And anyone in Canada who thought the British army would come to the defense of Canada in the event of an American attack clearly had not been paying attention since the turn of the century. These plans were in reality—perhaps not the ideal word in this context—just hypothetical planning exercises. Military staff needed practice in forward planning, and both countries felt very secure from the rest of the world, from which they believed they were protected by vast oceans.

Meanwhile, Canada’s economic integration with the United States continued apace. American investment in Canada rose dramatically from about $750 million in 1914 to almost $4 billion by the end of the 1920s, double the level of British investment. Much of this investment was going into natural resource industries, the basis of the Canadian economy, because increasingly the United States needed to import natural resources like wood pulp, iron ore, and nickel. This meant that Canadian prosperity, such as it was in the 1920s, largely reflected rising exports of these products to the United States. American investment enabled U.S. firms to circumvent the protective tariff but also, more importantly, to gain access to the British market at the preferential tariff rate which member states of the commonwealth granted to each other.

Often overlooked, especially by nationalistic Canadians who worried about the political implications of heavy American investment, was the fact that Canadians were investing significantly in the United States as well. In fact, on a per capita basis, Canadians invested more heavily in the United States than Americans did in Canada. W. C. Clark, the long-time Deputy Minister of the Canadian Department of Finance, later described this situation as “the most extraordinary example in world history of the financial interrelationship of two countries,” which he regarded as a good thing because it must certainly lead “to a better mutual understanding and a closer fellowship between the two countries.”[4]

It was not just money that was moving in greater volume between the two countries. About 150,000 Canadians emigrated to the United States in the 1920s, encouraged to do so by the U.S. government, which excluded Canadians from its immigration quota system. By the end of the decade, there were 1.3 million Canadian-born people living in the United States. As J. W. Dafoe, editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, once ruefully observed, one of Canada’s major industries appeared to be “the equipping of young men in our universities for opportunities in the United States.”[5]

Americans continued to move to Canada as well, although in lower numbers than in the prewar years. The 1931 census reported 334,574 American-born permanent residents living in Canada, out of a total population of 10.4 million, representing about 3%. It has been calculated, however, that if American temporary workers, tourists, and other travelers in Canada—according to the U. S. Department of Commerce, more than three million cars crossed into Canada for a day or more in the year 1928 alone[6]—had been included, Americans in Canada would actually have constituted about 10% of the Canadian population.[7] Whatever the precise numbers, the extraordinary free movement of people back and forth between the two countries meant that Canadians and Americans by the 1920s were “more intermarried and interrelated than any other two peoples with an international boundary between them.”[8]

Canada was integrating culturally with the United States as well, as could be seen in the growing popularity of American magazines, radio broadcasting, and films. British immigrants to Canada in the 1920s were often surprised to discover how “American” Canada was in many ways, although the ties of kinship to the “old country” clearly remained strong as well. Some people worried about the implications of “the invasion of materialistic and low-minded Americanism,”[9] as 50 million copies of American magazines were being bought annually in Canada in the mid-1920s, outselling Canadian magazines by a large margin. Ladies Home Journal, for example, sold 152,011 copies, compared to Canadian Home Journal’s 68,054, and Saturday Evening Post sold 128,574 copies compared to Saturday Night’s 30,858. Put another way, eight American magazines were imported for every one published in Canada.

Canadian publishers naturally complained of what they considered unfair competition because the American magazines being sold in Canada were just the surplus of large print runs. They also complained of what the long-term impact of so many American magazines might be on Canada. “Without the slightest notion of flag-waving or sloppy patriotism,” the editor of Saturday Night wrote, “it must be apparent that if we depend on these United States centers for our reading matter we might as well move our government to Washington, for under such conditions it will go there in the end. The press is a stronger cohesive agent than Parliament.”[10]

Somewhat surprisingly, the government agreed and allowed Canadian magazine publishers to claim a substantial rebate on the tariff paid for certain paper imports; in 1931 the new Conservative government went further and slapped a protective tariff on imported magazines. The result was that American magazine sales dropped significantly and Canadian magazine sales rose. Nevertheless, when King returned to office in 1935, his government revoked the tariff, and American magazine sales quickly bounced back.[11]

Meanwhile, radio broadcasting was the latest communication and entertainment technology in the 1920s, and the number of stations was growing rapidly throughout North America, as was the sale of radio receivers. If anything, this was an even more important cultural issue for Canadians than magazines because almost all of the major urban centers in the country were situated close to the border, meaning that American radio transmissions were easily received by most Canadians.

In the course of the 1920s, American broadcasting became organized into national networks, giving them greater financial resources that enabled them to build more powerful transmitters and to create increasingly attractive programs. What was Canada to do? It did nothing in the 1920s, but in 1932, after much public debate, the government created the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, forerunner of today’s Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and by 1937 its transmissions were reaching 76% of the Canadian population.[12] It was, however, up to Canadians which programs they chose to listen to, and American programs were very popular.

The situation was similar with the film industry. In the early days of film, there were several companies making and distributing films in Canada, but in the course of the 1920s, the Hollywood film companies acquired control of most of the movie theatres throughout Canada and naturally used them to show only their own films. The government chose not to intervene, with the result that the Canadian film industry died, and Canadians have since lived on a steady diet of American films.[13]

Ironically, some of the biggest film stars from the earliest times have actually been Canadian. Eminent examples include Mary Pickford, Norma Shearer, Marie Dressler, Raymond Massey, Vincent Price, and, more recently, Donald Sutherland, Jim Carrey, Michael J. Fox, William Shatner, Christopher Plummer, and Ryan Gosling, not to mention directors like Norman Jewison, James Cameron, and David Cronenberg.

Some Canadians have worried since the 1920s that the increasingly intimate Canadian-American relationship may have dangerous political ramifications in view of the obvious inequality in population and financial, economic and military power of the two countries. Curiously, however, in the ninety-six years since the end of the Great War, the Canadian sense of identity and distinctiveness from the United States has actually grown, despite all the modern complexities of trade, finance, and external threats. Americans no longer talk about seizing Canada, or even muse about gradually absorbing it, nor do many Canadians now debate the possible advantages of joining the United States. Each nation seems content with the relationship they have developed: close friends with much in common but an appreciation of their differences, sharing the North American continent.

1. Quoted in Thompson and Randall, Canada and the United States, 103.

2. On King’s involvement with Rockefeller, see Kirk Hallahan, “W. L. Mackenzie King: Rockefeller’s ‘Other’ Public Relations Counselor in Colorado,” Public Relations Review 29 (2003): 401–14.

3. Granatstein and Hillmer, For Better or For Worse, 83.

4. Quoted in Granatstein and Hillmer, 86.

5. Quoted in Granatstein and Hillmer, 88.

6. Cited in Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (New York: Perennial Books, 1964, First published 1931), 151.

7. Granatstein and Hillmer, 88.

8. Douglas MacKay, “The Americanization of Canada,” The Century Magazine 112, no. 2 (June 1926): 193.

9. Granatstein and Hillmer, 88.

10. Quoted in Granatstein and Hillmer, 89.

11. Granatstein and Hillmer, 89.

12. Granatstein and Hillmer, 90.

13. In recent years, both federal and provincial governments have provided subsidies and tax incentives to encourage film production in Canada. Many millions of dollars have been spent, and there is no denying that a vibrant film industry does now exist, but a complicated and sometimes controversial set of regulations has been required to determine what constitutes a “Canadian” film. Because most films made in Canada are made for television and are really aimed at the much larger and more lucrative American market, they generally avoid any distinctive Canadian references. Meanwhile, Canadian theatres rarely show Canadian films, for the same reasons that applied in the 1920s.

Afterword

The world has drifted from its old anchorage and no man can with certainty prophesy what the outcome will be.

—Robert Borden, 1918[1]

The Great War was a rare dividing line in the history of Western civilization. By 1918 empires had been destroyed or fatally weakened, long-established dynasties toppled, and the map of Europe redrawn. At least thirteen million people had died, Bolshevism—soon renamed Communism—had become a powerful and to many a threatening force in world affairs, and the very concept of peace and security was gone, never to be recovered.

The world of 1919 was radically different from the world of 1914, not just because of the destruction and slaughter, but because values had changed. No doubt values would have changed over time anyway, but the war dramatically accelerated the process, not just in Europe but in North America, and even in Africa and Asia. Many hoped and even tried to rewind the world back to where it had been before the war, but it was an impossible task. Rather incredibly, the nostalgia for that era, which realistically was not a golden age for the vast majority of people, lingers even today, a response to the turbulent century that followed.

The war encouraged people to think that a cataclysm of this magnitude must have some meaning or must be made to have some meaning. Surely the incomprehensible slaughter and destruction should produce a new and better world—hence the enormous appeal of Wilson’s declaration that this was a war to end war—and many were prepared after 1919 to try to make sure that it did. And so politics would never be the same, at least not in Canada, where since 1921 there have always been three and sometimes more political parties offering their visions to the voters.

While the 1920s were difficult, unstable years, not the prosperous carefree era so often portrayed in novels and films, the political and social history of Canada since 1919 has been one of significant progress in terms of government intervention in the economy and the evolution of social programs. The Liberal Party dominated the next half century, the socialist CCF (later New Democratic Party) won control of three provincial governments, and even the Conservative Party eventually thought it wise in 1942 to rename itself the Progressive Conservative Party.

A total of 619,636 men and women served in the Canadian armed forces in the war, but this figure does not include the 15,000 British reservists living in Canada who returned home to serve in their units or the approximately 23,000 Canadians who enlisted directly in the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service.[2] Nor does it include men and women from Newfoundland, because it was not part of Canada until 1949. These are remarkable numbers for a country which had only 1,526,133 men of military age in 1914.

Of those 619,636 men and women, 424,589 served overseas and another 8,825 served in the Royal Canadian Navy. Of the 424,589 men and women who served overseas, 60,932 lost their lives, killed in action or dying from wounds, accidents, and illness. More than 300 of them were Aboriginals. Another 1,388 others died while serving in the British flying services. As well, 172,950 were wounded or injured.

In other words, 235,270 of the 424,589 men and women who served overseas—55.4%—were killed, wounded, or otherwise injured in the war. In fact, the casualty rate was even higher than this because only about 345,000 of the Canadians who went overseas ever made it to France. Using this number, the effective casualty rate was really 68.1%.[3]

Clearly, Canada had made a huge contribution to the Allied war effort, much larger than anyone had expected in 1914 when it was hoped that the war would be brief. The country’s pre-eminent military historian, C. P. Stacey, later declared that “the creation of the Canadian Corps was the greatest thing Canada had ever done.”[4] This achievement reflected the fact that most Canadians became convinced that the very survival of the British Empire and the values which they believed it represented were threatened. The idea of victory by Germany and the values which it was thought to represent was simply unacceptable. It is worth noting, however, that about half of the men who volunteered to serve in the Canadian army during the war were recent British immigrants going home to fight for “their” country. More than 57,000 others were Americans.[5]

Canadians frequently repeat the shop-worn cliché that the war stimulated Canadian nationalism. The reality is that it stimulated two nationalisms: English Canadian and French Canadian. English-Canadian nationalism had evolved considerably since the prewar years and was more inclined now to see Canada as an autonomous nation within the commonwealth. But its sense of identity remained English-speaking, predominantly Protestant, and consciously not American. French-Canadian nationalism reflected a sense of isolation not only within Canada but also within North America, and a profound conviction that its rights and values were under continual attack by the English-speaking Protestant majority. While there were many on both sides who appreciated the other’s language and culture and worked to bridge the gap between them, it was undoubtedly true that Canada had become, as the novelist Hugh MacLennan put it, a nation of “two solitudes.”[6]

Even so, English and French Canadians shared a stronger sense of their unique identity. Many French Canadians might have said that English Canadians were finally catching up to them in their recognition that they were not British or French but Canadian. In the spring of 1919, Sir Arthur Currie told King that the Canadian troops were returning home “with feelings for England and affection for her; but with a feeling also that they are just as good as any men they have found on this side.”[7]

Canada had played a significant role in saving the empire, even if the empire emerged from the war seriously weakened. Borden clearly reflected the wishes of most Canadians when he used that massive contribution as leverage to press Canada’s claim to be recognized as a sovereign autonomous state. Borden readily acknowledged that it was “the valor, the endurance and the achievement of the Canadian Army in France and Belgium which inspired our people with an impelling sense of nationhood never before experienced.”[8]

What Borden sought and largely achieved was autonomy within the imperial structure, an idea that seems incomprehensible today but made sense to many people at that time. But what Borden also sought was for Canada to use that status to play a major role in imperial foreign and defense policy as a middle power on the global stage. This, it was clear, would help to maintain the empire as a major power but would also enable Canada to be more influential than it could be on its own. Most Canadians supported Borden’s first objective, but not his second, which was out of tune with the times.

King, the Laurier Liberal who governed Canada almost continuously from 1921 to 1948, demonstrated in the 1920s that he was more in tune with postwar attitudes when he dedicated himself to establishing Canada’s right to determine and conduct its own foreign policy. The point was not that he wanted a different foreign policy, but that he wanted an independent foreign policy, even if that policy was to adhere closely to British foreign policy. Thus, he refused throughout the troubled 1930s to guarantee Canadian support if another war should break out, and when it did, King waited a week after Britain went to war to issue Canada’s declaration of war, primarily to make clear to the world that it was acting independently.[9]

The 1920s and 1930s, in Canada as elsewhere, were a period of mourning for and commemoration of the staggering sacrifices made by so many Canadian men and women in the Great War. Memorials were built in virtually every city, town, and village throughout the country, and, following the British lead, November 11 became an annual day of national remembrance known as Armistice Day until 1931, when it was renamed Remembrance Day. The extraordinary popularity of the Canadian John McCrae’s 1915 poem “In Flanders Fields” throughout the English-speaking world led Canadian veterans to adopt the red poppy as their emblem in 1922, and millions of Canadians continue to wear them every November.

Also in 1922, the French government ceded to Canada 250 acres of land at Vimy Ridge, where a spectacularly moving memorial monument was subsequently built to commemorate the sacrifices made by Canadians not just at Vimy but throughout the Great War. The Vimy memorial is not the only Canadian monument in France (or Belgium), of course, but it is the most important one. It is the one to which Canadians are the most attached because the battle for Vimy Ridge was the first major battle fought by the entire Canadian Corps and Canadians tend to see that victory as marking their country’s true birth as a nation.

The Vimy memorial was unveiled in July 1936 by King Edward VIII—who abdicated the throne five months later—in the presence of thousands of visitors, including 6,000 Canadian veterans. As Tim Cook describes it, “the twin soaring pillars of stone reach to the skies, representing France and Canada joined together in friendship, as well as forming, along with the sculpture’s base, an unmistakable upper portion of a cross. On and around the memorial are twenty figures representing faith, justice, peace, honor, charity, truth, knowledge, and hope, as well as the allegorical mother, Canada, mourning her fallen sons.”[10] On its ramparts are inscribed the names of 11,285 of the Canadian soldiers who died in the war and have no known grave.[11]

Nine years earlier, on November 11, 1927—Remembrance Day—a much smaller and less publicized ceremony had taken place to unveil another significant memorial. This monument was situated in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, the final resting place of American veterans. The purpose of this ceremony was to unveil a monument commemorating the 2,138 Americans[12] who lost their lives while serving in the Canadian forces during the Great War.

Prime Minister Mackenzie King had requested permission in the spring of 1925 to erect this monument, and President Calvin Coolidge had promptly given it. Now, two years later, the Canadian minister of national defence, J. L. Ralston—a veteran—was there, along with Vincent Massey, Canada’s newly appointed minister in Washington and Canada’s first international diplomatic representative. So too were President Calvin Coolidge, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, and Secretary of War Dwight Davis.

The Canadian government sent more than 200 soldiers, representing the Royal Canadian Regiment and the Royal 22nd Regiment, the pipe band of the 48th Highlanders, and six trumpeters from the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery and the Royal Canadian Dragoons. The American honor guard was made up of men from the 12th Infantry Regiment and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment.

The ceremony was not widely reported at the time, and unlike the Vimy Ridge memorial, most people—Canadians and Americans alike—are unaware of the monument and what it represents.[13] However neglected, it stands proudly in America’s national military cemetery, and more names have been added over the years to commemorate more Americans killed in later wars while serving in the Canadian armed forces. As Dwight Davis said in his remarks at the unveiling of the monument, it will “always be a source of pride to the citizens of the United States,” a symbol “of that friendship which has been sealed by the blood of our heroic sons.”[14]

1. Borden diary, November 11, 1918, quoted in English, Borden, 157.

2. It is a curious fact that no two sources agree on just how many men served in the Canadian army during the war or even how many were killed. These figures are from Cook, Shock Troops, 611–12. The problem, particularly with regard to fatalities, is complicated by the fact that some only count those who died during the war, while others count men who died not long after the war as a result of injuries received during the war. The Canadian government’s official cut-off date for counting casualties is April 30, 1922. As odd as it sounds, names are still being added as relevant post-war deaths are discovered. Thus, the current official total is actually 66,755 men and women who died during the war or up to April 30, 1922, from war-related causes. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission further complicates the situation by including men who served in militia regiments but never left Canada and died in accidents or from illness.

3. As well, 3,846 Canadians were taken prisoner during the war, almost all of whom (3,478) returned home, many of them having survived brutality, food shortages, and heavy (illegal) labor in German mines and labor camps. Morton and Granatstein, Marching to Armaggedon, 250.

4. Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, 238.

5. More than 18% of all the men recruited for the CEF between June 1917 and September 1918 were recruited in the United States. Richard Holt, “British Blood Calls British Blood: The British-Canadian Recruiting Mission of 1917–1918,” Canadian Military History 22, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 27.

6. This was the title of his 1945 novel based on the conflicting values and attitudes of French Catholics in Quebec and English-speaking Protestants in the rest of the country during World War I. Two Solitudes (Toronto, 1945) won the Governor General’s Award and remains MacLennan’s best-known novel.

7. King diary, quoted in Stacey, 238.

8. Borden, Letters to Limbo, 6.

9. This was not his only motive. During that week, Canada purchased huge quantities of military supplies from the United States, which was only possible under U.S. neutrality laws because Canada was not yet a belligerent power.

10. Cook, Shock Troops, 627.

11. The names of another nearly 7,000 Canadian soldiers who have no known grave are inscribed on the Menin Gate Memorial at Ypres. It is not, I think, generally realized by most people that because of the extraordinary use of artillery in the war and the appalling physical conditions, huge numbers of soldiers simply disappeared, either blown to pieces or lost in the mud.

12. Fred Gaffen, Cross-Border Warriors (Toronto: Dundurn, 1996), 39.

13. In another of the many usually minor cultural misunderstandings which frequently bedevil the two nations, Arlington National Cemetery provided no maintenance over the years and eventually the Canadian Department of Veteran Affairs had to assume responsibility for it.

14. Quoted in Gaffen, 39. Heroic they were: of the seventy-one Victoria Crosses awarded to Canadians in the war, five actually went to Americans serving in the Canadian army. Lieutenant George Harry Mullin of Portland, Oregon, earned his at Passchendaele in October 1917 while serving in the Princess Pats. Corporal Frederick George Coppins of San Francisco and Sergeant Raphael Louis Zengel of Faribault, Minnesota, earned VCs at Amiens in August 1918 while serving in the Alberta Dragoons and 5th Battalion respectively. Captain Bellenden Hutcheson of Mount Carmel, Illinois, and Lance Corporal William Henry Metcalf of Waite Township, Maine, both earned the VC during the battle for the Drocourt-Quéant Line in September 1918, Hutchison while serving in the CAMC attached to the 75th Battalion, and Metcalf while serving in the 16th Battalion.

Notes

Select Bibliography

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———. “‘He Was Determined to Go’: Underage Soldiers in the Canadian Expeditionary Force,” Histoire sociale/Social History 41, no. 81 (May 2008), 41–74.

———. Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917–1918. Toronto: Viking, 2008.

———. “The Blind Leading the Blind: The Battle of the St. Eloi Craters,” Canadian Military History 5, no. 2 (Autumn 1996): 24–36.

———. “The Politics of Surrender: Canadian Soldiers and the Killing of Prisoners in the Great War,” The Journal of Military History 70, no. 3 (July 2006): 637–65.

———. Warlords: Borden, Mackenzie King and Canada’s World Wars. Toronto: Penguin Canada Books, 2013.

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Goodspeed, D. J. The Road Past Vimy: The Canadian Corps 1914–1918. Toronto: Macmillan, 1969.

Gordon, Charles. Postscript to Adventure: The Autobiography of Ralph Connor. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1938.

Gough, Barry Morton. “The End of Pax Britannica and the Origins of the Royal Canadian Navy: Shifting Strategic Demands of an Empire at Sea,” in The RCN in Transition 1910–1985, ed. W.A.B. Douglas. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1988, 90–102.

Granatstein, J. L. Hell’s Corner: An Illustrated History of Canada’s Great War 1914–1918. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004.

Granatstein, J. L., and Norman Hillmer. For Better or For Worse: Canada and the United States to the 1990s. Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1991.

Groom, Winston. A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 1914–1918: Tragedy and Triumph on the West. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002.

Gwyn, Sandra. Tapestry of War: A Private View of Canadians in the Great War. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1992.

Hadley, Michael L., and Roger Sarty. Tin-Pots and Pirate Ships: Canadian Naval Forces and German Sea Raiders 1880–1918. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991.

Harris, Stephen. “From Subordinate to Ally: The Canadian Corps and National Autonomy, 1914–1918,” Revue internationale d’histoire militaire 51 (1982): 109–30.

Hartney, Harold E. Up and At ’Em. 2nd ed. New York: Ace Books, 1971.

Haycock, Ronald G. “The American Legion in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1917: A Study in Failure.” Military Affairs 43, no. 3 (October 1979): 115–19.

Holt, Richard. “British Blood Calls British Blood: The British-Canadian Recruiting Mission of 1917–1918,” Canadian Military History 22, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 27–37.

Iacobelli Teresa. Death or Deliverance: Canadian Courts Martial in the Great War. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013.

Isitt, Benjamin. From Victoria to Vladivostok: Canada’s Siberian Expedition, 1917–19. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.

Jones, William R. Fighting the Hun from Saddle and Trench. Albany, NY: Aiken Book Company, 1918.

Kealy, J. D. F., and E. C. Russell. A History of Canadian Naval Aviation 1918–1962. Ottawa: The Naval Historical Section Canadian Forces Headquarters Department of National Defence, 1965. http://www.cmp-cpm.forces.gc.ca/dhh-dhp/his/docs/Naval_av_hist_e.pdf (accessed February 15, 2013).

Keenleyside, Hugh L. Canada and the United States: Some Aspects of their Historical Relations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952. First published 1929.

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Lewis, R. Over the Top with the 25th: Chronicle of Events at Vimy Ridge and Courcellette [sic]. Halifax: H. H. Marshall, 1918.

MacDonald, Laura. Curse of the Narrows: The Halifax Explosion, 1917. Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2005.

MacGregor, Francis. Days That I Remember. Windsor, NS: Lancelot Press, 1976.

MacKay, Douglas. “The Americanization of Canada,” The Century Magazine 112, no. 2 (June 1926): 190–94.

MacLaren, Roy. Canadians in Russia 1918–1919. Toronto: Macmillan, 1976.

Mathieson, William D. My Grandfather’s War: Canadians Remember the First World War. Toronto: Macmillan, 1981.

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Milner, Marc. Canada’s Navy: The First Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

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Nasmith, George Gallie. Canada’s Sons and Great Britain in the World War. 2 vols. Toronto: J.C. Winston, 1919.

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Ruck, Calvin W. The Black Battalion 1916–1920: Canada’s Best Kept Military Secret. Halifax: Nimbus, 1987.

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———. “The Origins of Canada-US Defence Cooperation: The Naval Defence of the Northwest Atlantic, 1914–18,” in Canada and the Great War: Western Front Association Papers, ed. Briton C. Busch. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003, 122–46.

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Stacey, C. P. Canada and the Age of Conflict. Vol. 1. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.

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Wetherbe, Karl. From the Rideau to the Rhine and Back: The 6th Field Company and Battalion Canadian Engineers in the Great War. Toronto: Hunter-Rose, 1928.

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Index

A

Aboriginal soldiers, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4

Adamson, Agar, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4

African Canadians, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5

agriculture, 1 , 2 , 3

See also farmers

Ahrens, Carl, 1

airplanes, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20

Aitken, Max

See Beaverbrook, Lord

Alaska boundary dispute, 1.1-1.2

Albert, 1 , 2

alcohol, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4

See also Prohibition

Aldershot, Camp, 1 , 2

Alderson, Edwin, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15

Allison, J. Wesley, 1

Alverstone, Lord, 1

American Civil War, 1.1-1.2

American cultural impact on Canada, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2

American Expeditionary Force, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4

American Legion, 1

American Red Cross, 1 , 2.1-2.2

American Revolution, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Americans in British flying services, 1 , 2.1-2.2

aces, 1.1-1.2

Amery, Leo, 1

Amiens, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4

Anglo-Japanese alliance, 1 , 2.1-2.2

Archangel, 1 , 2 , 3

Arlington National Cemetery, 1 , 2.1-2.2

Armentières, 1 , 2

Armistice, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4

Armistice Day

See Remembrance Day

Arras, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4

artillery, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26.1-26.2 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48

artists, 1 , 2 , 3

Asquith, Herbert, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Athlone, Earl of

See Teck, Duke of

Aubers Ridge, 1 , 2

Australian Corps, 1 , 2

Australian Flying Corps, 1

Azerbaijan, 1.1-1.2 , 2

B

Bailleul, 1

Baker, George, 1

Baker, Newton D., 1

Baku, 1 , 2

Baldwin, Harold, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13.1-13.2 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19

Balfour Declaration, 1

Balfour, Arthur, 1

Bantam soldiers, 1

Bapaume, 1

Barker, William, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4

Barron, John, 1

Baruch, Bernard, 1

baseball, 1 , 2

Bay, Aaron, 1

Beaumont-Hamel, 1

Beaverbrook, Lord, 1

Bedell, Willet Vancleaf, 1

Bell, Alexander Graham, 1

Bell, George, 1

Bell, Frederick McKelvey, 1

Bell, Ralph, 1

Bellah, James Warner, 1

Bellew, Edward, 1

Bellinger, Henry, 1

Ben-Gurion, David, 1

Bennett, John B., 1

Ben-Zvi, Yitzhak, 1

Bingham, Major Hiram, 1

Birchall, Arthur, 1

Bird, Will R., 1 , 2

Birnbaum, Joseph, 1

Bishop, W. A. “Billy,” 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Bismarck, Otto von, 1

Board of Grain Supervisors

See Canadian Wheat Board

Boho, 1

Bonar Law, Andrew, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Borden, Camp, 1 , 2

Borden, (Cpl.) Robert, 1

Borden, Henry, 1

Borden, Sir Frederick, 1.1-1.2

Borden, Sir Robert, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23.1-23.2 , 24 , 25.1-25.2 , 26 , 27.1-27.2 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40.1-40.2 , 41.1-41.2 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46.1-46.2 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 56 , 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 , 61.1-61.2 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68.1-68.2 , 69 , 70 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79

Boston Christmas tree, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8

Botha, Louis, 1

Botsford, Charles, 1 , 2

Bouchard, William, 1

Bourassa, Henri, 1 , 2 , 3

Bourlon Ridge, 1 , 2

boy soldiers

See underage soldiers

Boyle, Russell, 1

Brant, Cameron, 1

Bray, Horace, 1

Bridgewater (Nova Scotia), 1

British reservists in Canada, 1 , 2

British-Canadian Recruiting Mission, 1.1-1.2 , 2

See also recruitment

Brodeur, Louis-Philippe, 1

Brodeur, Victor, 1

Brooke, Lord, 1 , 2

Brooke, Alan, 1

Brooks, William A., 1

Brown, Roy, 1

Browning, M. E., 1

Brümmer-Patzig, Helmut, 1

Brutinel, Raymond, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2

Bryan, William Jennings, 1 , 2

Budka, Nicholas, 1

Buller, H. C., 1 , 2

Bullock, C.S., 1

Burns, Jonas (Jonnie) Willard, 1

Byng, Sir Julian, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10

Byrd, Richard E., 1

C

Cairns, Hugh, 1

Caiserman, Moishe, 1

Cambrai, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Campbell, John, 1

Canada

attitudes towards the United States, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2

Constitutional relations with Britain, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10.1-10.2 , 11.1-11.2 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15.1-15.2 , 16.1-16.2 , 17 , 18.1-18.2 , 19.1-19.2 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24.1-24.2 , 25.1-25.2 , 26.1-26.2

emigration to the United States, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

financial management of the war, 1.1-1.2

regulation of economy, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3

representation in Washington, 1 , 2.1-2.2

Canadian army, 1 , 2

American Legion, 1.1-1.2

American volunteers, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9

equipment, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Field Artillery, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Forestry Corps, 1 , 2 , 3

German prisoners of war, 1 , 2.1-2.2

Independent Force, 1

Medical Corps, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Pioneer Depot, 1

Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13

prisoners of war, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13

Railway Troops, 1 , 2 , 3

relations with British army, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9 , 10 , 11.1-11.2 , 12.1-12.2 , 13.1-13.2

relations with civilians, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2

Royal Canadian Engineers, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Royal Canadian Regiment, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Sanitary Corps, 1

Service Corps, 1

Canadian army Automobile Machine Gun Brigade, 1

Machine Gun Brigade, 1

Machine Gun Corps, 1

Motor Machine Gun Brigade, 1.1-1.2 , 2

Canadian army battalions

1st, 1

1st CMR, 1

2nd, 1 , 2 , 3

2nd Construction, 1.1-1.2

3rd, 1

4th CMR, 1

5th, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

5th CMR, 1

6th, 1 , 2

7th, 1 , 2 , 3

7th CMR, 1

8th (Little Black Devils), 1 , 2

9th, 1

10th, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

11th, 1

12th, 1

13th (Black Watch), 1 , 2

16th (Canadian Scottish), 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

17th, 1

21st, 1 , 2 , 3

22nd, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7

25th, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12.1-12.2 , 13 , 14.1-14.2 , 15 , 16

26th, 1

27th, 1 , 2

28th, 1 , 2

29th, 1 , 2

31st, 1

32nd, 1

38th, 1

78th, 1

41st, 1

42nd (Black Watch), 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

43rd (Cameron Highlanders), 1 , 2 , 3

46th, 1

52nd (Bull Moose), 1

54th, 1

57th, 1

9th, 1

75th, 1

87th (Canadian Grenadier Guards, 1

85th (Highlanders), 1 , 2

97th, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

104th (New Brunswick), 1

106th, 1

107th (Timber Wolf), 1

114th (Brock’s Rangers), 1

116th, 1

143rd, 1

150th, 1

155th, 1

163rd, 1

165th, 1

167th, 1

178th, 1

189th, 1

206th, 1

211th, 1 , 2

212th, 1 , 2

216th, 1

230th, 1

233rd, 1

236th (MacLean Highlanders), 1

237th, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

258th, 1

259th, 1

260th, 1

Canadian army cavalry, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11.1-11.2 , 12 , 13 , 14

Alberta Dragoons, 1

Brigade, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5

Fort Garry Horse, 1 , 2 , 3

Lord Strathcona’s Horse, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2

Royal Canadian Dragoons, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Canadian Aeroplanes Ltd., 1

Canadian Air Force, 1.1-1.2

Canadian Aviation Corps, 1.1-1.2

Canadian Aviation Fund, 1

Canadian Fisheries Protection Service, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

See also Royal Canadian Navy

Canadian Grain Exchange, 1

Canadian Orchard, 1

Canadian Patriotic Fund, 1

Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, 1

Canadian Territorial demands, 1.1-1.2

Canadian Vickers Shipyard (Montreal), 1 , 2

Canadian War Mission in Washington, 1.1-1.2 , 2

Canadian War Records Office, 1

Canadian Wheat Board, 1 , 2

Canadian-American relations, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9.1-9.2

economic relations, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2

military cooperation, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2

Canadians in British flying services, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2

aces, 1

Canal du Nord, 1.1-1.2

Cann, Malcolm, 1

Cantor, Eddie, 1

Caporetto, Battle of, 1

Carnegie, Andrew, 1

Carson, J. W., 1

Carvell, Frank, 1

Caw, John, 1

censorship, 1.1-1.2

Chamberlain, Sir Joseph, 1 , 2 , 3

Chambers, Ernest, 1.1-1.2

Chambers, B. M., 1

Chandler, Raymond, 1

Chaplains, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12

Chinese Canadians, 1

Christie, Loring, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3

Christmas truce (1915), 1.1-1.2 , 2

churches, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8

Churchill, Lord Randolph, 1

Churchill, Winston, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Chute, Arthur, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9

Ciply, 1

Clark, W. C., 1

Clark-Kennedy, William, 1

Clemenceau, Georges, 1 , 2 , 3

Clements, Robert N., 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14.1-14.2

coastal defense, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10.1-10.2 , 11 , 12 , 13.1-13.2 , 14

Collishaw, Raymond, 1 , 2

Committee of Prime Ministers, 1.1-1.2

Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 1

Connaught, Duchess of, 1 , 2

Connaught, Duke of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7

Connaught, Princess Patricia of, 1

Connor, Ralph

See Gordon, Charles W.

conscription, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9

See also recruitment

Conville, Walter, 1

Convoys, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2

Coolidge, Calvin, 1

Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, 1 , 2

Coppins, Frederick George, 1

Courcelette, 1 , 2.1-2.2

Cradock, Sir Christopher, 1

Critchley, Alfred, 1

Cruikshank, E. A., 1

Cull, J. T., 1.1-1.2 , 2

Culley, S. D., 1

Currie, J. A., 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12

Currie, Sir Arthur, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27.1-27.2 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35.1-35.2 , 36 , 37

Curry, Fred, 1 , 2

Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company (Toronto), 1

Curtiss Aeroplane Company, 1

Curtiss Flying School, 1

Curtiss, Glenn, 1

D

Dafoe, J. W., 1

Dalhousie University, 1

Dancey, S. N., 1

Dardanelles, 1 , 2 , 3

Dartmouth (Nova Scotia), 1

Davis, Dwight, 1 , 2

Dawson, Coningsby, 1.1-1.2

Dawson, William J., 1

Day-Gingras, Jules-Olivier, 1

Dennis, J. S., 1

Derby, Lord, 1

Dinesen, Thomas, 1 , 2

Disraeli, Benjamin, 1

doctors, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6

Doran, George, 1

Doré, William, 1

Douai Plain, 1 , 2 , 3

Doullens, 1

Doyon, Constant, 1

Drocourt-Quéant Line, 1.1-1.2 , 2

Duff, Lyman, 1

Duncan, Sarah Jeannette, 1

Dunsterville, Lionel, 1.1-1.2

E

Eaton, John, 1

Eayrs, Hugh, 1

Edmonds, Sarah Emma, 1

Egypt, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

elections, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Electric Boat Company, 1

Elouges, 1

Emsley, James, 1

Endicott, Henry B., 1

enemy aliens in Canada, 1 , 2

detention camps, 1

reservists, 1.1-1.2

Eshkol, Levi, 1

Esquimalt, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Etaples, 1

F

Fabeck, General Gustav von, 1

Falls, Cyril, 1

farmers, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11.1-11.2 , 12 , 13

Farquhar, Francis, 1 , 2

Farr, Harry, 1 , 2

Felixstowe Air Station, 1

Ferry, Edmond, 1

Festubert, 1.1-1.2

films, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3

Finkelstein, Sam, 1

First Nations

See Aboriginal soldiers

Fish, Hamilton, 1

Fisher, Fred, 1

Flavelle, Sir Joseph, 1

Flowerdew, Gordon, 1.1-1.2

flying schools, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5

Foch, Ferdinand, 1 , 2 , 3

Folkestone, 1

riot, 1.1-1.2

Forrest, Edward, 1

Fort Edward (Nova Scotia), 1

Foulois, Benjamin D., 1

Fowler, George, 1

Franklin, Benjamin, 1

Fraser, Donald, 1

French, Sir John, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Frezenberg Ridge, 1.1-1.2

Fry, Norman, 1

Fuller, J. F. C., 1 , 2 , 3

G

Gallipoli

See Dardanelles

Galsworthy, John, 1

gas, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13

Gault, Hamilton, 1 , 2

German spring offensive (1918), 1.1-1.2

Givenchy, 1

Gompers, Sam, 1

Goodwin, Leslie, 1

Gordon, Charles, 1

Gordon, Charles W., 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7

Grant, G. M., 1

Grant, Ulysses S., 1

Grant, W. L., 1 , 2

Gravenstafel Ridge, 1 , 2

Graves, Robert, 1.1-1.2

Grey, Sir Edward, 1 , 2

Griffith, Lambert, 1

Guthrie, Percy, 1

Gwatkin, Sir Willoughby, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11

H

Haig, Sir Douglas, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31

Halifax, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34

Halifax explosion, 1.1-1.2

Halifax Ladies College, 1

Halifax Relief Commission, 1

Halifax Relief Expedition, 1

Halifax-Massachusetts Relief Associates, 1

Hall, Fred, 1

Hallam, T. D., 1

Hampton Roads (Virginia), 1 , 2

Hanna, W. D., 1

Harding, Warren, 1

Harris, Lawren, 1

Harris, Lloyd, 1 , 2

Harris, Arthur, 1

Hart-McHarg, William, 1

Hartney, Harold, 1 , 2 , 3

Hatheway, John, 1

Hazebrouck, 1 , 2

Hazen, J. D., 1 , 2

Hearst, William Randolph, 1 , 2 , 3

Helmer, Alexis, 1

Henderson, James, 1

Henty, G. A., 1

Hermann-Stellung Line, 1.1-1.2

Hill 70, 1.1-1.2 , 2

Hilliam, Edward, 1

Hindenburg Line, 1 , 2.1-2.2

Hitler, Adolf, 1

Hoare, Cuthbert, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3

Hobbs, Basil, 1 , 2

Hodgins, W. E., 1

Hollebeke, 1

Hooge, 1

Hoover, Herbert, 1

Horne, Sir Henry, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Hose, Walter, 1 , 2

hospitals, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

hospital ships, 1 , 2 , 3

Hughes, William St. Pierre, 1

Hughes, Garnet, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2

Hughes, John, 1

Hughes, Sir Sam, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36

Hutcheson, Bellenden, 1

I

immigrants, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

See also enemy aliens

Imperial Conferences, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4

Imperial defense, 1.1-1.2

Imperial Munitions Board, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4

Imperial Recruits Depot (Halifax), 1

Imperial War Cabinet, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7

Ince, Arthur Strachan, 1 , 2

International Labor Organization, 1

isolationism, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2

J

Jackson, A. Y., 1

Janney, Ernest Lloyd, 1.1-1.2 , 2

Japanese Canadians, 1 , 2

Jarvis, Aemilius, 1

Jerome, Jennie, 1

Jerome, Leonard, 1

Jewish Legion, 1.1-1.2

Joffre, Joseph, 1

Johnson, R. S., 1

Johnstone, Howard, 1 , 2

Jones, William Ross, 1 , 2 , 3

K

Kellogg, Frank, 1

Kemp, Sir Edward (A. E.), 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Kenly, W. L., 1

Kenora Trench, 1

Ketchen, H. D. B., 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Kiggell, Launcelot, 1

King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7

Kingsmill, Sir Charles, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Kipling, Rudyard, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Kitchener, Lord, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7

Kitcheners Wood, 1 , 2

Knight, Clayton, 1

L

La Bassée, 1

labor unrest, 1.1-1.2

Ladd, William Edwards, 1

Langemarck, 1 , 2 , 3

Lansing, Robert, 1 , 2

Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13.1-13.2 , 14.1-14.2 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27

Lawrence, T. E., 1

Le Cateau, 1

Leacock, Stephen, 1 , 2 , 3

League of Nations, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Leckie, John, 1

Leckie, Robert, 1

Legate, R. D., 1

Lenin, Vladimir, 1

lens, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3

Leslie, Leonie, 1

Lessard, François-Louis, 1

Lewis, Ralph, 1 , 2

Libby, Frederick, 1

Lipsett, Louis, 1 , 2

Lismer, Arthur, 1

literature, 1.1-1.2 , 2

Lloyd George, David, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22

Lockeport (Nova Scotia), 1

Locre, 1

Lodge, Henry Cabot, 1 , 2

Logan, J., 1

Longboat, Tom, 1

Loomis, F. O. W., 1 , 2

loos, 1

Ludendorff, Erich von, 1 , 2

Lusitania

See ships

M

MacDonald, J. E. H., 1

Macdonald, James, 1

Macdonald, John A., 1

MacDonald, Thomas, 1

MacDonald, Donald, 1

MacDougall, Dugald, 1

MacGregor, Francis, 1

machine guns, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22

Mackenzie King, William Lyon

See King, William Lyon Mackenzie

Mackenzie, A E. G., 1

MacLaren, Donald, 1

MacLennan, Hugh, 1

MacNeil, John Angus, 1

Macphail, Sir Andrew, 1 , 2

Maitland-Dougall, Hamish, 1

Maitland-Dougall, William, 1

Martin, Peter, 1

mascots, 1 , 2

Mason, John, 1

Massachusetts Committee on Public Safety, 1.1-1.2

Massachusetts State Guard, 1

Massey, Raymond, 1

Massey, Vincent, 1 , 2

May, Wilfred “Wop,” 1 , 2

McAdoo, William, 1

McBride, Herbert, 1

McBride, Sir Richard, 1

McCall, Samuel, 1.1-1.2

McClintock, Alexander, 1 , 2

McClung, Nellie, 1

McCrae, John, 1.1-1.2 , 2

McCurdy, J. A. D., 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

McElhenny, Gerald, 1

McGee, Thomas D’Arcy, 1

McGill, Leonard, 1

McMaster, John, 1

McNaughton, A. G. L., 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Meighen, Arthur, 1 , 2 , 3

Melba, Nellie, 1

Menin Gate Memorial, 1 , 2

Mercer, Malcolm S., 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Merritt, William Hamilton, 1 , 2

Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, 1 , 2

Messines-Wytschaete Ridge, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Metcalf, William Henry, 1.1-1.2 , 2

Mexico, 1

Michael, Moina, 1

military districts, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Military Service Act, 1 , 2

militia, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9

48th Highlanders (Toronto), 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

79th Cameron Highlanders (Winnipeg), 1.1-1.2

90th Rifles (Winnipeg), 1

Royal Canadian Garrison Artillery, 1

Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, 1 , 2

Royal Canadian Dragoons, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Royal Highlanders, 1

Royal Regiment of Canada, 1

Royal 22nd Regiment, 1

Royal Naval Canadian Volunteer Reserve (RNCVR), 1 , 2 , 3

Milner, Lord, 1

mines, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8

Monchy-le-Preux, 1

Mons, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Mont Houy, 1

Montgomery, Bernard, 1

Montgomery, Lucy Maud, 1.1-1.2

Moors, John, 1

Moreuil Wood, 1

Morrison, Sir E. W. B., 1 , 2 , 3

Moses, Stanford, 1

Mount Kemmel, 1

Mount Sorrel, 1 , 2 , 3

movies

See films

Mullin, George Harry, 1

Mulock, Redford, 1 , 2

munitions, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8

Murmansk, 1.1-1.2

mutinies, French army, 1

N

Nasmith, George Gallie, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

naval air bases, 1 , 2

naval bases, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

See also Esquimalt and Halifax

Nelles, Percy, 1

Neuve Chapelle, 1 , 2

New York Times, 1 , 2

Newfoundland Regiment, 1 , 2 , 3

Nivelle, Robert, 1 , 2 , 3

North Russian Expeditionary Force, 1.1-1.2

North Sydney (Nova Scotia), 1 , 2

nurses, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8

O

O’Donnell, Eugene, 1

Observatory Ridge, 1

occupation of Germany, 1.1-1.2

Odlum, Victor, 1

Ogilvie, Alexander, 1

Oise River, 1

Omsk, 1

Operation Michael, 1

Overseas Military Council, 1

P

pacifists, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Palmer, William, 1

Pankhurst, Emmeline, 1

Panneton, Philippe, 1

Papineau, Talbot, 1

Paris peace conference, 1 , 2.1-2.2

Parker, Sir Gilbert, 1

Parr, John, 1

Parvillers, 1 , 2

Pasco, Fred, 1

Passchendaele, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9

Pearkes, George, 1

Pearson, A. G., 1

Peat, Harold, 1 , 2 , 3

Peck, Cyrus, 1

Perley, Sir George, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7

Pershing, John, 1

Pétain, Philippe, 1

Petawawa, Camp, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Phelan, James, 1

Philby, Harry St. John, 1

Philby, Kim, 1

Philips, William, 1

Phillips, Arthur, 1

Phills, Isaac, 1

Pilckem Ridge, 1 , 2 , 3

Ploegsteert, 1 , 2

Plumer, Sir Herbert, 1 , 2 , 3

Polish Training Camp, 1

Polygon Wood, 1

Pope, Sir Joseph, 1

Poperinge, 1

Price, George, 1

Price, William, 1 , 2

Prince of Wales, 1

prisoners of war

See Canadian army

progressive party, 1 , 2

Prohibition, 1.1-1.2

See also alcohol

propaganda, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3

R

racial discrimination, 1.1-1.2 , 2

railways, 1.1-1.2

Ralston, J. L., 1

Ratshesky, Abraham C., 1 , 2 , 3

recruitment, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11.1-11.2 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18.1-18.2 , 19.1-19.2 , 20 , 21 , 22

See also conscription

Regina Trench, 1 , 2 , 3

Remembrance Day, 1 , 2

Resolution IX, 1.1-1.2

Ribbentrop, Joachim, 1.1-1.2

Richthofen, Manfred von, 1

Richthofen, Wolfram von, 1

Roberts, Eldridge, 1

Rockefeller Foundation, 1

Rockefeller, John D., 1

Roosevelt, Theodore, 1 , 2 , 3

Root, Elihu, 1 , 2 , 3

Ross rifle, 1 , 2 , 3

Ross, A. E., 1

Ross, Jack, 1 , 2

Rowell, Newton, 1

Royal Air Force, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

See also Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service

Royal Canadian Legion, 1 , 2

Royal Canadian Navy, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2

Royal Naval College (Halifax), 1 , 2 , 3

Royal Canadian Navy Air Service, 1.1-1.2

Royal Commission on Industrial Relations, 1

Royal Flying Corps, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 , 11.1-11.2 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15

training in Canada, 1.1-1.2

training in the United States, 1.1-1.2

Royal Military College (Kingston), 1 , 2

Royal Naval Air Service, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9 , 10.1-10.2 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16

Royal Naval Canadian Volunteer Reserve (RNCVR)

See militia

Rush-Bagot Treaty, 1

Russia

Allied interventions, 1.1-1.2

revolution, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Ruth, Babe, 1

Rutherford, Charles, 1

S

Sage, Warren, 1

Saint John (New Brunswick), 1 , 2

Salisbury Plain, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4

Sanctuary Wood, 1

Scarpe River, 1

Schlieffen Plan, 1.1-1.2

Scott, Frederick G., 1 , 2

Scott, Henry Hutton, 1

Scott, Francis Reginald, 1

Scott, Harry, 1

Scrimger, Francis, 1

Seddon, J. W., 1

Service, Robert W., 1

Shand, David, 1

Sharman, C. H. L., 1

Sharpe, William, 1 , 2

Shell Committee, 1 , 2 , 3

Sherwood, Percy, 1

Sherwood, James, 1

ships, American

USS Agamemnon, 1

USS Morrill, 1

USS Old Colony, 1

USS San Diego, 1

USS Tacoma, 1 , 2

USS Von Steuben, 1

USS Yorktown, 1

ships, British

HMS Amphion, 1

HMS Good Hope, 1

ships, Canadian

HMCS Acadia, 1

HMCS Canada, 1

HMCS Constance, 1

HMCS Curlew, 1

HMCS Florence, 1

HMCS Grilse, 1

HMCS Gulnare, 1

HMCS Hochelaga, 1 , 2 , 3

HMCS Margaret, 1

HMCS Niobe, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7

HMCS Rainbow, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7

HMCS Tuna, 1

HMCS Waturus, 1

ships, German

Gneisenau, 1

Scharnhorst, 1

ships, other

Imo, 1 , 2

Llandovery Castle, 1 , 2

Lusitania, 1 , 2

Mont Blanc, 1 , 2

Saxonia, 1 , 2

Triumph, 1

Shorncliffe, Camp, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Siberia, 1.1-1.2

Sifton, Sir Clifford, 1 , 2 , 3

Silver, Arthur, 1

Smith, Frank Homer, 1

Smith, Joseph, 1

Smith-Dorrien, Sir Horace, 1 , 2 , 3

Smuts, Jan, 1

Snow, Thomas, 1.1-1.2

social reform movements, 1.1-1.2

social unrest, 1 , 2.1-2.2

Somme, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4

South African War, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17.1-17.2

Spanish influenza, 1 , 2 , 3

Spanish-American War, 1

Sponagle, John Addy, 1

Squier, George O., 1

St. Eloi, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3

St. John’s (Newfoundland), 1

St. Julien, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8

St. Lawrence Patrol, 1 , 2 , 3

Stanton, E. A., 1

Stead, Robert, 1

Steele, Harold, 1

Steele, Sir Sam, 1 , 2 , 3

Story, William, 1

Strachan, Harcus, 1

submarines, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12.1-12.2 , 13 , 14 , 15.1-15.2 , 16 , 17

Sumner, Charles, 1

Sutherland, Daniel, 1

Swift, Albert, 1

Sydney (Nova Scotia), 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10

See also North Sydney

Symington, Powers, 1

T

Taft, William Howard, 1

Tallis, Edgar Alfred, 1

Tallis, Harold William, 1

Tallis, Harold, 1

Tallis, Victor Kirk, 1

Tallis, William Henry, 1

Tanks, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6

Taylor, Clement, 1

Teck, Duchess of, 1

Teck, Duke of, 1

Tempest, Edmund, 1

Tempest, Francis Gilmer, 1

Tempest, Wulstan, 1

Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 1

Thompson, Frank

See Edmonds, Sarah Emma

Thomson, Tom, 1

Thring, Alfred, 1

Tilley, Leonard, 1

Trade unions, 1 , 2

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 1

Treaty of Versailles, 1 , 2

Treaty of Washington, 1

Trench conditions, 1.1-1.2

Trotsky, Leon, 1

Tupper, Victor, 1

Tupper, Sir Charles, 1 , 2

Turner, Richard E. W., 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10.1-10.2 , 11

Turner, George, 1

U

underage soldiers, 1.1-1.2

United Farmers of Canada, 1

United States Air Service, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3

United States Department of Military Relief, 1

United States entry into the war, 1 , 2 , 3

United States Food Administration, 1

United States Fuel Administration, 1

United States Naval Air Force in Canada, 1

United States Naval Air Service, 1

United States neutrality, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2

United States Ordnance Department, 1

United States Railroad Administration, 1

United States Signal Corps, 1

United States Steamboat Inspection Service, 1

United States War Industries Board, 1

V

Valcartier, Camp, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17

Valenciennes, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2

Vanier, Georges, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Verdun, 1

veterans, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18

Victoria Cross, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17

Vierstraat, 1

Ville-sur-Haine, 1

Vimy Memorial, 1.1-1.2 , 2

Vimy Ridge, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6

Vladivostok, 1.1-1.2 , 2

Voluntary Aid Detachment, 1

Voss, Vivian, 1

W

War of 1812, 1 , 2 , 3

War Purchasing Commission, 1

Ward, Sir Joseph, 1

Wareham, Stanley, 1

Washington Treaty, 1

Watson, David, 1 , 2

Wervick, 1

Westhoek, 1

Wetherbe, Karl, 1

White, William, 1

White, Sir Thomas, 1 , 2 , 3

Whiteman, F. C., 1

Williams, Victor, 1 , 2

Willmot, Percy, 1

Wilson, Harold, 1

Wilson, Stanley, 1

Wilson, Woodrow, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14

Winnipeg general strike, 1

women and recruitment, 1.1-1.2

women’s roles, 1.1-1.2

Wood, Spencer, 1

Woodsworth, James Shaver, 1.1-1.2

Wright brothers flying school (Dayton), 1 , 2

Wyld, Harold, 1

Wytschaete

See Messines-Wytschaete Ridge

Y

Yates, Harry, 1

YMCA, 1

Ypres, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10.1-10.2 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18

Yser Canal, 1

Z

Zandvoorde, 1

Zengel, Raphael Louis, 1

Zeppelins, 1 , 2 , 3

Zillebeck, 1

Zimmerman, Arthur, 1

Zonnebeck, 1 , 2

About the Author

Brian Douglas Tennyson is a graduate of the University of Toronto and the University of London. He taught history for many years at Cape Breton University in Sydney, Nova Scotia, where he is now emeritus professor of history. He has written or edited more than a dozen books, including most recently Percy Willmot: A Cape Bretoner at War, Merry Hell: The Story of the 25th Battalion 1914–1919, and The Canadian Experience of the Great War: A Guide to Memoirs.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Photo Credits

Introduction

The Summer of 1914

Between Mother England and Uncle Sam

Answering the Call

Preparing for War

Discovering Modern Warfare

Building the Corps

Shock Troops of the Empire

The Home Front

Conscription

Demanding a Voice

Partners in a Common Cause

The War at Sea

The War in the Air

Canada’s Hundred Days

The New Reality

North American Nation

Afterword

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

About the Author