Conn Smythe met Irene Sands after a disastrous football game against Parkdale Collegiate. Jarvis was a football powerhouse and the players were so certain of victory in the championship that Smythe joined others in a celebratory parade before the game even began. He bungled the first punt, though, and dropped the second as well, allowing Parkdale to score. After that, it was all downhill.
Afterwards there was a dance, and Irene was one of a group of Parkdale friends who called themselves the Nights of Gladness and specialized in getting involved in things that were fun. Smythe had noticed her before, but hadn’t managed an introduction. He finally arranged one that night, and she became his first and only girlfriend. “They say there is no such thing as love at first sight, not love that lasts, but there was for me.”1
He was almost seventeen, she was two years younger. “It just seemed that from the moment we met we talked the same language,” he recalled. She was pretty, dark-haired, friendly, and kind. Her father, like Polly Smythe, drank too much.
“Her mother was one of those quietly typical English wives, a slave to her husband, who treated her like a dog.”2 Both feared the other might come from a wealthier family and avoided revealing their own background. When Irene finally invited Conn home and led him up some stairs to a small apartment above a store, he was overwhelmed with relief, as was Irene when she discovered he was no better off.
Although Albert had been at the World for seven years, his financial situation hadn’t improved. He and Conn shifted from one rented address to another, rarely more than a room or two, each move feeding his sense of aggrievement. There was a place above a bank on Simcoe Street, another on Jarvis Street he remembered only because “the bedbugs were so big, they almost carried me off,” a building called the Ellington Apartments on Gerrard Street, and finally a two-storey gabled building on Bleeker Street, the first one big enough for Albert to store his books in a room of their own. Smythe remembered Bleeker Street as “a street of sex maniacs and murderers. I was ashamed and disgusted that we lived there.”3
His interest in Irene was a big reason he abandoned his homestead. When he made the Varsity hockey team at the university – Albert having cooled down and agreed to pay the tuition – Irene came to all his games. They took in football matches as well, plus theatre and movies and vaudeville shows. A diary he kept for several months in the winter of 1912–13 shows days split between schoolwork and evenings with Wreck and Irene. On February 1, his eighteenth birthday, he wrote:
Up at 830. Very cold. Went to [Varsity]. Drafted … Got ready and met I. Went to dance at Foresters Hall. About 50 couples there. Had great time. Evy and Wreck were there. Had dances with I. Shady Thompson. Home bed 1.00 [Note: Spelling as in original]
Feb. 3: Another dance at Hunt Club. Had great time. I and I had 5 [dances]. Good place. [Irene] had sore feet. Home bed. Wreck was there but Evy wouldn’t go.”
Feb. 5: Up 9.30. Cold. Went downtown got books … Went to nickel shows. Wreck came down bought sweater coat. Made $1.00. Home. Went to I’s. All went out.4
In his second year at university he was named captain of the junior team, which dressed in the blue and white colours he would later appropriate for the Maple Leafs. He noted proudly they’d played fifteen games, lost just three, and he’d scored thirty-three goals. Varsity made it to the semifinal round of the Ontario championship, where they came up against a team from the farm town of Berlin — later renamed Kitchener – managed by a tiny young man of serious demeanour and short-cropped hair named Frank J. Selke.
Barely two inches over five feet, Selke, twenty, came from a world as uncertain as Smythe’s own. Passionate about hockey, he realized at age thirteen he lacked both the size and the skill to succeed as a player and had considered himself a “manager” ever since. His father, a labourer who immigrated from German-controlled Poland when his wife was pregnant with their fourth child, had recently died, leaving Selke as head of the family. By day he worked at the Waterloo Furniture Manufacturing Co., making five cents an hour as a bandsaw apprentice. Nights he spent at an abandoned brickyard, where ice rinks formed in the craters left behind when clay was scooped out to make bricks. The ponds were crowded with hockey players, and Selke had put together a squad for the Berlin city league that did well enough to gain admittance to the Ontario Hockey Association (OHA).
As its name suggested, Berlin was largely populated by German immigrants, who suffered increasing hostility as Europe approached war. Eager to reassure fans of their loyalty, Selke’s team was named the Union Jacks and sported elaborately patriotic jerseys in red, white, and blue, with crossed flags on the chest, the Union Jack on one side, and the Canadian Red Ensign on the other. The show of fervour did little good. The taunting was merciless. One Union Jack – a youth name Bialkowski – was so viciously treated he began playing under the alias Albert White.5
The fact that the Union Jacks had survived long enough to make the playoffs was something of an economic miracle. Selke and a friend financed the team themselves – Selke contributing his share from his nickel-an-hour job and some money he’d borrowed from his widowed mother. They quickly ran through their budget, though, and were more than $400 in debt at one point, rescued when a kindly supporter volunteered $72 to tide them through.6
Varsity was too much for them, winning the two-game contest by scores of 3–1 and 5–2. Smythe’s team went on to the finals, defeating Orillia 4–3 in the first game – all four goals scored by Smythe – before being crushed 10–3 in the second game and losing the series on total goals. A year later, Berlin was back for a rematch, this time when both teams made the finals. Canada by then was six months into the war in Europe, and the fans’ abuse of the Berlin team had escalated dramatically. The Union Jacks had to fight their way in and out of arenas, where fans serenaded them with calls of “Krauts,” “flatheads,” and “babykillers.” Berlin fans responded in kind, aiming streams of tobacco juice at opposing players. Smythe claimed he was hit by so much juice his sandy hair was streaked brown.
The first of the two-game series, in Berlin, ended in a tie. The all-important second match took place at Toronto’s Arena Gardens – often known simply as the Arena or the Mutual Street arena because it was the city’s premier rink – where a crowd of almost five thousand packed the stands for a contest hailed as one of the best of the year.
Hockey in 1915 was still played with seven men aside and no substitutes; in addition to the forward line and two defencemen, a “rover” lined up behind the centreman and did pretty much what the name implies. Players were on for the full sixty minutes. If someone was hurt and had to leave the ice, the other team dropped a player as well. If a goaltender got a penalty, he served it himself and the team made do without him.
Once again Varsity prevailed, but this time the game turned on a crucial moment that ended with Selke feeling foolish. A Berlin player named Irvin Erb had broken a blade and left the ice. Smythe, winded from a recent check, took himself off to even the sides. His absence gave Berlin a boost – though far from the best player, he was the driving force of the Toronto team, and without him Selke’s team fought back to a one-goal lead.
Although he had been warned to keep Smythe off the ice, Selke left the bench in the third period to keep an eye on the timekeeper – hometown officials being notorious for letting games “accidentally” run long when the local team was trailing. While he was away, a Toronto partisan produced a new pair of skates for Erb, who leapt back onto the ice. That allowed Smythe to follow. Varsity scored five goals in twelve minutes, two by Smythe, and won the crown.
The game was covered by Lou Marsh, a Toronto Star reporter who doubled as a referee and would track much of Smythe’s progress over the next twenty years. In this case he singled out the young captain for praise: “Conny Smythe, the Varsity centre, is a game lad. Even though his physical advantages are not as great as those of the majority of his opponents, he has them all faded when it comes to courage and daring,” he wrote. “In the Berlin final Smythe actually took a flying dive along the ice trying to prevent a Berlin shot. It was a regular football dive, and it must have almost caved Smythe’s ‘slate.’ ”7
Smythe informed Irene after the game that he intended to enlist in the army and hoped to be sent to Europe. The players had been discussing it for months; they had agreed to sign up as a group, and on the Monday following their hockey triumph nine of them presented themselves at a recruiting office, putting in their names for a pair of artillery units. It was the Ides of March 1915, and Smythe, who had just turned twenty, came home as a gunner in the 25th Battery, Canadian Field Artillery.*
His determination to enlist couldn’t have come as a surprise. Toronto, like much of the country, was awash in war fever, not yet sobered by the crushing death tolls that were still some months away. He had tried to sign up just weeks after Canada entered the war in August 1914, but had been turned away by a recruiter who suggested he come back when he was old enough to grow facial hair.
Like most of the male population of English Canada, Smythe took for granted that defending the Empire was a matter of duty. For a young man of his background and beliefs, it would have been inconceivable to be anything but desperate to get in on the fighting. He was a Canadian citizen and a British subject, and the two were inseparable in Canadian eyes. As Sir Wilfrid Laurier had declared: “When Britain was at war, Canada is at war, there is no difference at all.”8
Although free to make its own laws, Canada remained “a self-governing Dominion” under the umbrella of the British Empire. London, England, not Ottawa, controlled the country’s foreign affairs.9 Legal matters that couldn’t be settled in Canada went to a higher authority in London. Governor Generals all came from England and would for another two generations. Even Canada’s flag was the British flag, though the Red Ensign was widely used. Canadian schools taught British history; British heroes were Canadian heroes; Canadian politicians looked to England for guidance and direction.
Outside Quebec, Canadians couldn’t wait to back the British against the Germans. Support for the war in Toronto, Selke recalled, was “almost fanatic.”10 Britain was the world’s greatest power, and English Canadians were immensely proud of their place in it. Probably nowhere was the British connection more revered than in loyalist, Tory Toronto. More than 85 per cent of the population gave their ethnic origin as British; almost 75 per cent gave their religious affiliation as Church of England, Church of Scotland, Methodist, or Presbyterian.11 To demonstrate Canada’s eagerness to contribute, Prime Minister Robert Borden had offered to spend $35 million building three warships to be handed over to Britain, to use as it saw fit.12
Smythe was as fervent a Canadian patriot as existed, but his devotion to the Crown, and the country’s British roots, ran equally deep. He wanted to belong, and he wanted to win, and Great Britain was the world’s surest bet at the time. He saw his country and its heritage as one and the same thing.
Even if he hadn’t been so inclined, it would have been difficult to resist the pressure to enlist that swept the city. Canadian men figured they’d be in Europe a few months, kill some Germans, and be home to bask in the glory of victory before anyone noticed they were gone. If he was like thousands of other recruits, Smythe’s worst fear was that the fighting might end before he could get to it. The country’s mood of blind optimism was bolstered by the swagger of the generals and a press eager to cheer them on. Far from a young country embarking on a journey for which it had little training, Canada was represented in the papers as if it was part of a military juggernaut rolling to an inevitable victory. On the day Smythe signed up, the Globe’s front page gave the impression the end was already at hand: “GREAT BRITISH VICTORY: SMASH GERMAN ARMY,” “TEN THOUSAND GERMANS ARE LOST IN THE BRITISH FIGHT FOR LILLE,” “BRITISH GIVE SMASHING REPULSE TO THE GERMANS; RUSSIA STEMS FOES ADVANCE IN POLAND,” “GERMAN ATTACK FAILS NORTH OF PRZASNYSZ.” A British vice-admiral in the Dardanelles offered assurances that the Turks would be easily handled at Gallipoli and the Allied troops would “hammer their way through” within three weeks. What could possibly go wrong?
Enlistees were signing up faster than they could be trained. Troops paraded through the streets accompanied by marching bands. Men in brand new uniforms stood on corners making fiery speeches and exhorting others to join in the fun. At the time he added his name to the list, Smythe said, the University of Toronto grounds “looked like an Army camp, with tents on the campus, marching bands, recruiting speeches almost every day.” It didn’t take much to win him over – he was dying to fight.13
Wreck Aggett had signed up too, as did another friend, George Walker, nicknamed “Squib” and even smaller than Smythe. Walker, who would become chief scout for the Maple Leafs, was nearly blind without his glasses. To sneak him through the eye exam Smythe and the others hid someone behind a door to hiss out answers as the doctor pointed at an eye chart. They were sent off to Ottawa for preliminary training, then on to Valcartier in Quebec, where Sir Sam Hughes, the mercurial minister of defence, had quixotically decided to concentrate his troops even though better facilities existed at Petawawa in Ontario. Valcartier had been built from scratch in three weeks and was jammed with eager young soldiers-to-be. Smythe soon grew disconsolate; at five-foot-seven he wasn’t viewed as officer material and found himself in the hospital after a horse stepped on his foot. While he recuperated, his friends were shipped overseas. He was “despondent, bored, upset and angry” and wrote a letter to Albert complaining about the injustice of it all. Albert got in touch with Smythe’s friend from North Street, Bay Arnoldi, whose uncle had some influence in Ottawa. Shortly after, Smythe was ordered to Kingston for officer training.
In Kingston, Smythe ran across Gordon Southam, son of William Southam, founder of a national newspaper chain. Southam was twenty-nine, a well-known athlete who played tennis, football, hockey, and cricket, and was recruiting his own battery to take overseas, filled with sports-minded young men like himself. Smythe leapt at the chance to join not only because it might get him to Europe, but also because Southam was assembling a hockey team while awaiting orders. Smythe recognized enough of the players to know it would be a competitive squad and got himself put in charge of organizing and managing it. Although he wouldn’t play, once again he could be the boss.
From Kingston, Southam’s 40th Battery was moved to Toronto, where they joined three other teams in the OHA senior division. They quickly got involved in a heated series with a team named the Argonauts, which attracted considerable fan interest and money for the team. By the time they met for their third confrontation, both ticket sales and betting had taken off. Just before the game was to take place, Southam got word the troop would be heading overseas. He and Smythe kept the secret to themselves, but when they were approached by a man wanting to place a wager, Southam turned to Smythe and asked for the entire season’s receipts – which amounted to $2,800 – and they bet the whole thing.
When told of the bet, and the fact it would be their last match, the 40th came out like a house on fire, scoring four goals in the first nine minutes. It was a cakewalk: 8–3, and the team ended up with $7,000 in winnings, an enormous sum that was used to buy Christmas dinners for the entire battery – about two hundred men – throughout the duration of the war.14
It wasn’t the first time Smythe had bet on himself, but it was the biggest so far. He would take similar gambles again and again in the future, exhibiting a nonchalance toward the possibility of loss that both startled and impressed friends and colleagues. “All my life I have marvelled at Conn Smythe’s willingness to bet against seemingly insurmountable odds,” Selke confessed after years of watching Smythe take risks the cautious Selke would never have contemplated.15
The battery shipped out four days later, but not before Smythe asked Irene to marry him. She agreed. Smythe was turning twenty-one, and neither had any experience with sex, but they decided to postpone the ceremony and the consummation until after the war, a bit of chivalry that saved Irene from giving herself up to a man who might not come home. That Sunday Conn had dinner with his father, who was unaware of Irene’s existence even though his son had been seeing her for four years. After Polly’s death Albert had remarried, a woman named Jane Henderson, an Irish immigrant like himself. Conn resented her for the same reason he’d resented his sister – she was another rival for his father’s affections, an intrusion into the two-man household they’d shared since his mother had died a decade earlier.
Jane was understanding enough to leave father and son alone so they could talk, and two days later, to his surprise, Smythe received a letter from his father that poured out the warmth and affection he had never been able to express in person. Albert Smythe wrote thousands of letters in his life and kept almost all of them. But Conn’s files hold only two of them: one is an inconsequential note mailed near the end of Albert’s life, and the other is the letter he received that day as he waited for the train to take him off to war.
My dear boy, I suppose you find it hard to think of yourself twenty-one years ago, but the dear little chap who used to love me so much and put his arms around my neck, and climb up on my knee, and play ball and do all the other little things which you won’t think anything of til you have children of your own, are all in my mind. Well dearie, you are a man now, and your own master, as I have always tried to have you be. I may not have done as well by you as I had hoped, but you are all I could wish in the main things, clean, truthful, honest, brave and generous. I think you will have enough regard for the old days to keep these things in your heart all your life.
I do not know anything about the girl you were talking about Sunday night, but try and be all, in all things, that you can think she would wish you to be. If she is worth anything she will wish the best and highest for you.
You know I do not set much store by worldly possessions. Those who work hardest do not always get the greatest rewards. But no reward worth having or that will afford real satisfaction is to be had without hard work. I am looking forward to a life of great success for you, but success is only to be had on the old hard terms. You are not a shirker and I feel sure you will face the conditions and win the success.
… The war has interfered with many plans I had for you. You are going to England but not as I expected. I do not know what another year may bring, but we are all in the hands of the Eternal. I hope you won’t think this is a sermon or a screed. It is just a loving word from your old Daddy to wish you all the best things in the world and to kiss you goodbye as you go away and leave all the old times behind forever. Don’t forget, no one will ever love you better than I do. It makes me all the sorrier that I have such a poor way of showing it.
God bless you dear, now and always.… Love, my dear boy. Your loving Daddy.16
——
When Smythe set off for England he was entering a crucible that would help forge both Canada’s future and his own. Both would mature considerably over the next four years. Canada would emerge still proud of its British heritage, but less deferential and more independent-minded and demanding of the recognition due a country that had sacrificed the lives of sixty thousand of its sons and daughters.
Smythe would fight at four of the most storied battles of the conflagration, survive them all, and return home a man equipped with the confidence and drive to pursue the ambition he already felt.
Canada entered the contest as a junior member of Britain’s forces, there to supply men and money and take orders. But as the years passed, and the human price grew steeper, attitudes changed. With a quarter-million men in the field, Prime Minister Borden began demanding a say in their deployment. Initially given the brush-off, he persisted and by 1917 – after Ypres and the Somme and Vimy Ridge – he was a member of the Imperial War Cabinet and a driving force in the reorganization of postwar relations between the dominions and His Majesty’s government.
Smythe would go through an equally transformative experience, watching men die, killing some himself, and establishing the principles and beliefs by which he would live.
As a young lieutenant, his mind was chiefly on the glory he could attain. But Canada went into the war ill prepared and ill equipped, stumbling through the early months by dealing with each crisis as it arose. In those days men were plentiful and Ottawa raised its commitment to five hundred thousand troops. But by the time Smythe landed at Plymouth in February 1916, the horrors of the initial battles at Ypres had sunk in and enlistment was falling off dramatically. Not only were the realities of war making themselves apparent, but the government’s massive wartime spending had fired up the economy and made it far more attractive to skip the fighting and stay home to earn money.17
Once in Britain, Major Southam’s battery marched around country lanes for a few months, then headed to Salisbury Plain – the great forging ground for Britain’s imperial forces – and practised shooting their big guns. On July 1, they were inspected by the King himself, giving off a little extra sparkle thanks to nickel-plated stirrups Southam had acquired for their horses. Two weeks later they left for France, landing at Le Havre, where all their fancy stirrups were stolen on the first night.
They left immediately for Belgium, occupied by the Germans, save for an arc around the ancient city of Ypres. There had already been two costly battles as the Germans sought to seize the town and continue toward the sea. Although little if anything was gained, the casualties were horrific. In the second battle, in April and May of 1915, the Germans used poison gas for the first time, unleashing green clouds of chlorine gas into the French lines on April 22 that killed thousands of men within minutes. Two days later they sent a second cloud drifting toward Canadian troops near the village of St. Julien. When Smythe arrived near the southern end of the arc in July 1916, fighting had settled down into a humdrum routine: the Germans on the higher ground rained down shells during the day; the Canadians would fire back at night. Stagnation had set in and trenches criss-crossed the broken, barren landscape. For a time Smythe’s “bed” consisted of a ledge on a bunker wall, where rats would land on him in the middle of slumber. “They didn’t bother me,” he said. “They got so much to eat from the dead that they left the living alone.” After a couple of months, Smythe concluded he was an expert at war and got into a shouting match with Major Southam, who he felt could learn a few lessons. “I wanted to get promoted and the war seemed very slow and I told him he wasn’t running the battery right.” He challenged Southam to a punch-up, but was pulled away by another man before the much stronger Southam could take him up on it.18
In October, he got his wish for greater excitement. The battery was withdrawn from Ypres and sent on a hundred-kilometre march to the Somme, where a bloodbath of unprecedented proportions had been under way for three months. When the slaughter finally ended around Christmas, more than 250,000 men would be killed between the two armies. The 40th Battery arrived October 7 near the town of Courcelette, about fifty kilometres from Amiens near the Belgian border, which had been seized by the Canadian Corps in mid-September, one of the first times tanks had been used.19 Canadian officers were trying a new approach to cut down on losses: they would send a “creeping barrage” of shells at the enemy, advancing behind the moving wall of fire ninety metres at a time across no man’s land as the enemy sheltered from the fusillade. The attack worked so well the Canadians, who had only been meant to capture the remnants of a sugar factory nearby, overran the entire ruined village.
A few days after arrival the battery set up its guns and began aiming a steady fire at the German lines. The soil was chalky and easily spotted from afar, and the battery’s shelling went on so long the German gunners were able to pinpoint their location and began sending return fire directly at the Canadian guns. Southam ordered the gunners to take cover and began shepherding them into bunkers, Smythe close behind, when someone grabbed him and dragged him into another dugout. Inside were three corpses, all Canadian, that had been mouldering since the initial attack several weeks earlier. One of the bodies was still upright, wrapped around a stovepipe where it had fallen. Despite the overwhelming smell, the men huddled from the bombardment until a sergeant came along and abruptly informed Smythe he was now the acting head of the unit.
Both Southam and the sergeant major who had been with him had been killed by a direct hit while getting men into the bunkers; Smythe was convinced he would have been killed too if he hadn’t been hauled into the dugout with the three corpses. He remained in charge briefly until a senior officer could be sent to replace him, then faced the task of removing the battery’s twelve guns to a new location without getting killed by the withering German fire. “I was never so scared in my life,” he confessed, describing how the guns – each of which was hauled by six horses – had to be moved at night down the only available road, a fact of which the Germans were well aware, subjecting the road to constant shelling. Although he survived that ordeal, a short time later he was shifting the guns to yet another location when a gunner, a talented hockey player from Regina, was hit by a shell and lay – still alive – in a water-filled shell hole with his insides spread around him. Smythe was shocked at the sight and the agonized moaning of the man; a sergeant sent Smythe away for a few moments while he pulled out his service revolver and ended the man’s suffering.20
In another close call, Smythe found himself isolated near a series of trenches that had traded sides several times. He had been sent to an observation post to watch as shells landed on the German lines, calling back by telephone to provide direction to the gunners. When the phone went dead he was trapped for hours as the Germans once again laid down a heavy bombardment. Intensive shelling usually signalled an attack was coming and, terrified, Smythe began collecting guns and ammunition from corpses in bomb craters and shell holes around him, watching as shadows began to move toward him in the smoke and fog.
“That’s when I knew I could be as scared as anyone living. I was shaking so much I could hardly put a cartridge in a gun at all. The firing got worse and worse and all of a sudden out of the fog I could see men crouched over moving toward me and I thought, my God, here goes the last of the Smythes and nobody’s ever going to know what happened to me.”21 When one of the men suddenly stood up, Smythe could see he was Canadian. Although relieved, he sat for some time in his battered post wondering whether he would have had the nerve to kill if the troops had proved to be German. He would find out soon enough.
After two months at the Somme the 40th Battery was transferred out and given some leave time. No sooner did they return to duty than they were sent to the battle that would cement Canada’s new status among the top rank of fighting men, at Vimy Ridge.
Vimy would be the first time all four divisions of the Canadian expeditionary force – almost one hundred thousand men – fought together as one.22 They were grouped into the Canadian Corps, assisted by a British division and led by a British commander, Lt.-Gen. Sir Julian Byng, who would later serve as Canada’s Governor General and whose wife would donate the Lady Byng Trophy, awarded, ironically enough, to the NHL’s most gentlemanly player. It was a meticulously planned operation, including a scale model built so the men would understand the overall plan and their part in it. The task was to seize a strategic slope that had been captured by the Germans in 1914, fortified heavily and held against earlier assaults by the British and French. The Canadians would have to attack over open ground against German artillery and machine-gun fire, against three defensive lines protected by trenches, tunnels, gun embankments, and immense coils of barbed wire.
In the weeks leading up to the assault, Smythe volunteered for an experimental approach to guiding artillery. Rather than wait back near the guns, he would accompany the infantry as they attacked the enemy, tracking the effectiveness of the shelling from up close and sending back reports. As they approached the German trenches he advised the gunners to shorten their range, thinking they were overshooting the target. Soon after, he saw puffs of smoke nearby and feared that the range had been shortened too much and Canadians were being killed by their own artillery. Thinking it might be his fault, he rushed to join the infantry troops and found himself in a pitched battle. Grenades, gunfire, and artillery exploded all around. Diving into a trench, he quickly shot two German soldiers and rounded a corner to see another on a parapet. “He just had time to look at me when I jammed my revolver in his stomach and pulled the trigger. He slid down into the trench, cursing me in German all the way. I don’t know German, but I know what he thought of me.”23 Smythe met up with some of the men from his unit and together they helped an injured officer and two prisoners back to Canadian lines. Not until later did he realize the bullet he’d fired into the German’s stomach had been his last. If he’d run into any more of the enemy, he’d have been finished.
His bravery won him the Military Cross. On his official war record back in Ottawa, it was noted dryly: “17/4/17: Awarded the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. He organized some men and led them forward with great dash, thereby dispersing an enemy party at a critical time. He himself accounted for three of the enemy with his revolver. He has previously done fine work.”24
The attack on Vimy was preceded by twenty days of constant shelling, varying in intensity to prevent the Germans from guessing when the main assault would begin. On the morning of the attack, the battery began a barrage at 5:30, laying down cover for the men to proceed behind. One of Byng’s tactics had been to dig tunnels enabling the troops to break through unexpectedly, close to the German lines. It worked spectacularly and the Canadians made rapid progress, often seizing prisoners and territory at a faster pace than expected. Smythe and his gunners worked feverishly. The morning had been freezing, but as the fighting went on it began to sleet and snow, turning the battlefield into a quagmire and rendering a plank road – set up to move men, guns, and ammunition – useless. Horses were slipping and sliding, wagons were tipping. The gunners fired all day and slept with the rats at night. They moved forward methodically – advancing, setting the guns, firing, and reloading. The attack began April 9; on April 15, Smythe and his battery reached the ridge itself. He could look down the far side and see Canadian troops in the town of Vimy, surrounded by rubble and wreckage, still under fire. The next day he moved his own guns down to join them and spent several dangerous days shuttling back and forth to ammunition dumps, picking up shells, and ferrying them down the ridge to the town square where the battery was dug in.
Twelve days before the attack, the 40th had been amalgamated with another gun crew and a new commander. Smythe liked the old boss, Capt. Bill Wilson, and took an instant dislike to his replacement, a Major Syre. His attitude hardened once fighting began and Syre spent too much time, in Smythe’s view, hunkered in the safety of his bunker rather than out with the men. One morning after the battery had reached Vimy, Smythe was picking up more ammunition when he learned two of his fellow lieutenants had been hit by German shells and seriously wounded. He hustled back, raced into Syre’s dugout, and demanded to know how they were, only to be told they were still out on the square where they had been hit.
Smythe exploded. “You mean to say that they’ve been out there wounded all this time, and you’re still sitting down in this dugout?”25
He ran out to the square, where both men were lying, one dead, the other moaning in pain. He was fishing for the wallet of the dead man to send home to his family when the man’s leg fell off. He got some help and they picked up the second man, who was calling for his mother, and carried him to safety, where he died soon after. Smythe, unable to control himself, confronted Syre, who he felt had left the men to die when they could have been saved. He shouted that he would no longer serve in a battery run by a man like him and demanded a transfer. It was a mistake: the major was soon replaced and Bill Wilson – now also a major – reinstated. But it was too late for Smythe, whose transfer came through, and he was forced to leave his old unit and the men to whom he had become so close. He realized the error he’d made soon after when his life was saved by a batterymate who’d come looking for him during a nighttime gas attack, found him sleeping in an abandoned house, and put a gas mask on him.
Smythe’s transfer to the Royal Flying Corps meant a summer in Britain training to observe artillery from the air and obtaining his own wings. One of his instructors was Lt.-Col. W.G. Barker – “Billy” Barker – a hero of the first order who was the main challenge to Billy Bishop’s status as Canada’s greatest wartime flying ace. Barker would survive an epic airborne battle against a German squadron, in which he fainted twice from injuries before managing to crash land his plane. But he wasn’t happy in his job training rookies like Smythe and succeeded in getting out of it after buzzing the airfield and flying his plane in one end of a hangar and out the other, sending senior officers scrambling for their lives. Smythe admired his daring and would remember Barker when he began building his hockey empire a decade later. His own stay in England proved to be an idyll that ended when he was shipped back to Belgium as an artillery spotter in the sodden, grinding, corpse-strewn effort to capture the village of Passchendaele.
The ground around Passchendaele was marshy at the best of times, and that summer had been cold and wet. It had been fought over for three years by then, the combatants pummelling one another relentlessly with neither side able to move the other more than a few kilometres at a time. The battlefield was a morass of shattered trees, shell holes, empty villages, and broken ground – one great long sea of muck that could, and did, swallow tanks and their crews, who sometimes drowned before they could escape. Smythe flew above it in his RE8, a rickety two-seater biplane with a single propeller, watching artillery and radioing back instructions. He and an observer named Andrew Ward manned the plane, which had a maximum speed of just over one hundred miles an hour and usually came equipped with one gun in the front and one or two more in the rear cockpit. The RE8 had only recently been introduced and was designed for speed and stability, but quickly became known as a death trap, prone to bursting into flame or spinning out of control, especially when flown by inexperienced pilots like Smythe. There were so many fatalities in the first few months of service that pilots began exchanging them for the earlier model, which it had been intended to replace.26
On October 14, he and Ward took off into a grey sky with low-hanging cloud – too low for effective reconnaissance. Instead of returning to the airfield Smythe flew down below the cloud, making himself an easy target. While zigzagging between German observer balloons they took a hit in the rudder and began to spin. He put the nose down and shut off the engine. It was, he said, like a leaf falling to the ground in the autumn, drifting downward in widening circles as he tried to steer away from some shattered trees pointed upward like the spikes on an iron fence. As he looked for a place to land, Ward – a Roman Catholic – tapped him on the shoulder “very coolly” and asked, “What’s going to happen now?”
“We’ve done a lot of arguing about religion, Wardsy,” Smythe responded. “In about five seconds we’re going to find out who’s right.”27
They hit ground in the middle of no man’s land, the plane skidding through the mud until it dropped into a shell hole and turned on its nose. Smythe had been hit twice by rifle fire, in the leg and in the calf, neither shot striking bone. They climbed from the plane and dodged from crater to crater, heading for a man who was waving at them, ducking bullets as they went. When they finally reached the man, Smythe realized with a shock that he was German. He’d been leading them directly to his gun placement. Irrational and upset, Smythe erupted in anger, cursing until the German pulled out his revolver and fired twice at his chest, from just inches away. Somehow, miraculously, the bullets missed, one passing through his flying jacket on the left, the other on the right. Before his aim could improve the German was halted by a comrade who preferred dealing with live prisoners rather than corpses.
A few days later a notice appeared in the pages of the Toronto World.
Reported Missing: Mr. A.E.S. Smythe, of The World editorial staff, received word this morning from Ottawa that his son, Lieutenant ‘Conny’ Smythe, who left with the Flying Corps last May, has been missing since the 14th. The young aviator was well known in sporting circles, having been captain of the Varsity Hockey Club, winners of the Junior OHA championship in 1915. He also played with the 40th Battery team in the senior series.
In the school photograph used with the item Smythe looked about ten years old.
At some point in the next several weeks, Albert was told his son had been killed. He presumably shared the information with Irene. It wasn’t until almost a month later that they learned he was alive and being held in a prisoner of war camp, at which point another notice was printed in the World sharing the happy news: “His many friends in Toronto will be pleased to learn that the previous news received was unfounded, and the best wishes of all will go out to this youthful and gallant member of the brave air service.”28
If Albert was relieved, Conn was miserable. Immediately after being captured he was taken to a lice-ridden hospital just beyond the German lines, filled with wounded enemy troops and under constant bombardment. The German doctors ignored him, and three weeks after arriving he was unable to walk. Moved to another hospital, his wounds were finally treated and he spent four months recuperating “amid fair comfort.”29 From there he was moved to Karlsruhe, a town on the eastern side of the Rhine. A few weeks later he was moved again, heading north this time to Magdeburg, where he ended up in solitary confinement after running afoul of the censors who scrutinized prisoners’ mail. Once his status as a prisoner had been confirmed he was able to send and receive letters and parcels. Irene kept him supplied with biscuits and other food he liked, and they kept in touch regularly throughout his ordeal.
He was only in Magdeburg a few weeks before being moved to Halle, near Leipzig, and a week after that to Blankenburg, where he learned his friend Wreck Aggett had been killed at Passchendaele. It was at Blankenburg that Smythe and another flyer named Seaton Broughall made an escape attempt, deciding they could catch the guards by surprise if they made a run for it in broad daylight. They planned to clamber over two barbed-wire fences with the help of some accomplices and blankets to cover the barbs, then outrun any bullets directed their way. “Even if we got shot at, the guards by 1918 were oldtimers, we didn’t think they could hit us if we moved fast enough.”30 They got over the fences, but Broughall tore most of his pants off in the process and they raced across a field with guards firing as they ran. Near a river they hid in some bushes and took a moment to repair Broughall’s pants. They were busy at the repair job when a guard with a dog tracked them down.
Smythe’s reward was a trip farther east to Poland, where he was returned to solitary at a tougher camp at Schweidnitz, a town in Silesia near the border with today’s Czech Republic. He arrived in April 1918 and remained there until the end of the war, passing the time by trying to teach himself the harmonica until a guard levelled a rifle at him to indicate he’d heard enough. Although conditions in the camp were bearable, Smythe was a witness one day when a group of fifty British men returned from forced labour in a local mine. “They bore every evidence of starvation and rough treatment,” he said. “We gave them all we could lay hands on and pretty soon they picked up splendidly and were becoming really strong and healthy when the commandant of the camp sent them back to the mines. When they were sent back another batch of fifty men was returned from these same mines to the camp, and in just as unfit a condition.”31
When the war ended in November, the Canadian prisoners were taken to a port and put on a boat to England, landing on Christmas Eve to discover British repatriation officials had gone home. They commandeered a locomotive in a nearby rail yard and drove it to town, where Smythe caught a train to Manchester to spend the holiday with his mother’s relatives. The immense crowds of returning soldiers in England created a backlog that delayed his return to Canada for two months; he finally arrived in Toronto in February, and Irene and Albert met him at the station. He stayed that night with Irene, watched over closely by her father “as if there might be something going on between us.”32
There wasn’t. “We’d waited that long and we weren’t going to make any mistakes.” If Smythe was anything, he was a man of discipline.
* Although Smythe insisted he and the other players signed up the Monday after their victory, his papers are dated March 16, 1915, a Tuesday.