MOST CANADIAN TROOPS WERE SENT TO THE WESTERN FRONT IN France and Belgium, but as part of the British imperial forces, Canadians ended up in every theatre of the war: there were Canadian fighter pilots in Italy, Canadian river pilots and marine engineers in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Canadian sailors on all the world’s oceans. In October 1915 Private Lester B. Pearson, #1059, Canadian Army Medical Corps (who would one day become secretary of state for external affairs and then prime minister of Canada), landed in Macedonia in northern Greece with a new British expeditionary force. Britain and France had decided to violate Greek neutrality (rather like the Germans violated Belgian neutrality) in order to bring help to their Serbian allies against the Austrians and the Bulgarians, and Pearson was part of the help. He was eighteen years old.
My impressions of those first few days are of a vast muddy plain with our half dozen tents the only sign of human habitation; of ceaseless rain and fierce winds; of horse ambulances coming down the road with their loads of human agony; of the bugle blowing the convoy call; of the boom of guns; of struggling in the mire with wounded soldiers of the Tenth Division slung over our shoulders—we had no stretchers as yet.… They had been undergoing terrible experiences up in the hills. The weather was below freezing, but through official mismanagement, they had only tropical clothing. Practically all of them were frostbitten and some in addition badly wounded, but not one complained.
We pitched our tents, spread straw over the mud and laid the casualties down on that, till there would be forty or fifty in a tent. Then the medical officer would come around with his lantern, the dead and dying would be moved to one side, the dangerous cases would be attended to at once and the less serious ones simply cheered up. All the while the wind whistled over the Macedonian plain and the sleet beat against the canvas. Nightmare days when we all worked till we dropped … but the chance for real service, the goal of our months of training.
Letters home, October 1915, quoted in Lester Pearson, Mike: Memoirs, vol. 1
For the first time in Canada’s history, there were also women in uniform: 2,504 Canadian nurses served in every theatre of the war. The first Canadian women arrived behind the lines in France in early 1915, and by the autumn of that year hundreds of Canadian nurses were struggling to keep sick and wounded soldiers (and themselves) alive in the pestilential conditions of the Eastern Mediterranean theatres of war as well. In August Mabel Clint of No. 1 Canadian Field Hospital arrived on the island of Lemnos, just off the Gallipoli battlefield, to find “sanitary conditions appalling, food scarce and bad, heat great, small quantities of water, and a frightful plague of flies.”
Then one by one the Officers, sisters and orderlies succumbed to dysentery, till only three out of thirty-five nurses were on duty in No. 1. Canadians seemed to feel the change of climate particularly, but lack of food, water and the general environment was the determining factor.… No. 3 suffered still more.… Within a few days of each other, their Matron and a sister fell victim to the scourge. As the little cortège of those well enough to attend followed the flag-draped coffins on wheeled stretchers, with the Sisters’ white veil and leather belt laid on them, some of the patients in my ward were moved to tears.… It was expected that other nurses would die, and … the order went forth that other graves must be ready.… A trench to hold six was dug in the Officers’ lines. A laconic notice-board bore the legend: “For Sisters only.” At the moment, as one of our Mess remarked, you could almost “pick the names of the six.”
Nursing Sister Mabel Clint, Lemnos, 1915, Our Bit
In the end, only thirty-nine Canadian women died overseas, but it was nevertheless a sign of the times. Even the strict rules of a traditional male-dominated society were collapsing before the war’s voracious demands for manpower and, even more important, for total commitment.
They would have little flags in the window. I can remember one house with three flags, that they had sent people overseas. One flag for each son or husband.
Naomi Radford, Edmonton
It is difficult to place a limit on the numbers of men that may be required in this devastating war. No numbers which the Dominion Government are willing and able to provide with arms and ammunition would be too great.…
British War Office to Ottawa, May 1915
In July 1915 Prime Minister Robert Borden went to England to try to find out a bit more from the British about their war plans. They were vague. The war was consuming munitions in quantities far greater than anybody had anticipated in peacetime, and nobody was sure when the factories would be geared up to produce enough ammunition for a decisive offensive. Estimates of when the British would be ready to exert their full force ranged from a year to eighteen months, but it was clear that the numbers of men required for that great offensive would be far beyond anything that had been previously envisaged. So in October 1915 Borden passed an Order in Council increasing the Canadian force to 250,000 men.
In return for this great contribution to the imperial war effort, however, Borden wanted Canada to have a voice in determining the conduct of the war. After his visit to Britain in mid-1915 and his shock at the confusion that reigned there, he noted that the old relationship between Britain and Canada had “in some measure passed away. Once for all it has been borne in upon the hearts and souls of all of us that … the issues of war and peace concern more than the people of these islands.” The British colonial secretary, the Canadian-born Andrew Bonar Law, complacently informed Borden in late 1915 that he fully recognized “the right of the Canadian government to have some share in the control of a war in which it is playing so big a part. I am, however, not able to see any way in which this could practically be done.… If no scheme is practicable, then it is very undesirable that the question should be raised.”
Bonar Law’s reply drove the normally gentle Borden to fury, but his method for forcing the British to reconsider was quixotic. In his 1916 New Year’s message, Borden doubled the planned strength of the Canadian Expeditionary Force to 500,000. Among the people who were astonished by this move (Borden had decided on it alone while bedridden with the flu) was the governor general: “His Royal Highness cannot but feel considerable doubt as to the possibility of increasing the Canadian Forces to 500,000 men. His Royal Highness understands that of the 250,000 men at present authorised some 50,000 are still deficient and he fears that the magnificent total of 500,000 may be beyond the powers of the Dominion of Canada to provide under voluntary enlistment.”
The Duke of Connaught was quite right in his assessment: Borden’s target, if maintained, would eventually require conscription. On the other hand, the prime minister was sure that the men would be needed, since the monthly “wastage” of troops showed no sign of decreasing. He also hoped that his announcement would end the criticism of his government by those English Canadians who didn’t think he was doing enough for the war. But above all, Borden believed that it would compel the British to give Canada a share in the direction of the war: “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 … than if we were toy automata.… It is for [the British] to suggest the method and not for us. If there is no available method and we are expected to continue in the role of toy automata the whole situation must be reconsidered.”
But in practice it could not be reconsidered. By announcing that Canada would raise half a million troops before London had even asked for them, Borden had given the imperialist establishment in English Canada a pledge from which it would never release him—and since Canada had offered the troops of its own accord, he had not really strengthened his bargaining position with London. The gesture was in any case unnecessary: by December of 1916 the new British prime minister, David Lloyd George, had realized that the Dominions must be granted a share in policy making. “We want more men from them,” he told the colonial secretary. “We can hardly ask them to make another great recruiting effort unless it is accompanied by an invitation to come over and discuss the situation with us.” He then invited the dominions and India to send representatives to London for an Imperial War Conference at which they could “discuss how best they could cooperate in the direction of the war. They were fighting not for us, but with us.”
What was never seriously discussed at these meetings of the Imperial War Cabinet, however, was the question of a compromise peace. The sheer scale of the losses incurred by all the combatants had changed the war into something new: a “total war” in which all the available manpower and resources were devoted to the sole aim of achieving military victory. The entire workforce of wealthy industrial societies—including millions of women who were drawn into industry for the first time—was mobilized for war production. And since everyone was at least theoretically involved in the war effort in one way or another, everybody, whether in uniform or not, soon came to be treated as a legitimate military target: the first air attacks on civilians came in 1915, with the Zeppelin raids on London.
It was not the supreme importance of the issues at stake that made the First World War the first total war: as a political phenomenon it was no different from all the preceding great-power world wars. It was simply the first time that that kind of war had occurred since the great powers had acquired the vast resources and the technological and organizational capabilities of fully industrialized states. Once these capabilities existed, it was inevitable that they would be used, since the side that showed restraint would surely lose. But the mass slaughter had such a powerful psychological effect on the combatants that it became impossible to end a world war in the old way.
After millions of ordinary citizens had died (most of them in uniform, but some not), the traditional outcome of such wars—a fairly modest reshuffle of territories and a readjustment of influence among the great powers—was no longer acceptable to the populations of the warring countries. It became necessary to elevate the war to the status of a moral crusade, or at least to define it as a struggle for sheer national survival, in order to justify the sacrifices that were being demanded. This was in the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy: as the only war aim acceptable to the people of each nation became total victory, the war did become something close to a life-and-death struggle for the European great powers, or at least for their governments. It was nothing of the sort for Canada, of course, but a great many English Canadians were also swept away by the rhetoric of the time.
Of the Mathieson family of Victoria, five brothers were on active service, and … Arthur Green and three sons of Victoria … seven boys of the Kerridge family of Vancouver were all at the Front. Of the George family, Victoria, in 1916, three were killed, one was missing, one a prisoner, two were at the Front, and two waiting till they were old enough to go.…
Canadian Annual Review, 1916
It was the English Canadian families whose sons and husbands had already volunteered in large numbers who welcomed Borden’s call for 500,000 men at the beginning of 1916: they rushed out and enlisted in even larger numbers. During the first three months of 1916, men were joining up at the rate of almost a thousand a day. The government heaved a sigh of relief: Canada might be able to raise half a million men without having to resort to compulsion. But then enlistment began dropping rapidly: in December 1916, there were only 5,791 enlistments for the entire month. At that rate the country would fall far short of the target of enlisting 30 percent of all males of military age.
By now the unemployment of 1913 was long forgotten. Farmers needed all the help they could get, and munitions factories were employing a quarter of a million workers. The war had stimulated an unprecedented growth in Canadian industry: in 1914 Canadian arms manufacturers produced little other than small arms and ammunition, but in the last two years of the war the Imperial Munitions Board, created by Borden in late 1915, was spending more than the Government of Canada itself, and had 675 factories working for it in 150 different towns in Canada. By 1917 Canadian industries were turning out warships, military aircraft and between a quarter and a third of all the shells fired by British guns on the Western Front: twenty-four million shells were shipped to Europe that year. Arms production was probably the most effective use that could be made of Canadian manpower, but it caused great difficulties for the army recruiters.
Brigadier James Mason, the director of recruiting, presented the senate with a mass of statistics and a very depressing conclusion for the government. There were, he reported, one and a half million eligible men in Canada (half of them unmarried). By February 1916, 249,000 men had enlisted, but it was going to be much more difficult to get the next quarter-million:
Moreover, this large number, if and when sent to the Front, must be maintained, and it has been estimated that the casualties will not be less than five percent monthly of the total force. This means that we shall have to provide each month, to maintain our Army’s strength, at least 25,000 new men—or 300,000 a year.
There can be no question that the additional 250,000 to bring our quota up to 500,000, and the 300,000 required annually to keep it at that figure, will not be obtained under the present system of enlistment.
Brigadier James Mason, March 1916
By now the British tradition of voluntary enlistment was falling by the wayside elsewhere: in January 1917 Great Britain introduced conscription, and New Zealand had already done so. The feeling persisted in Canada that there was a great untapped mass of men of the right age, but no actual data existed: some parts of the country had only recently been settled, and until the war there had been no need for this detailed information. The obvious solution was a national registration system, so two million large cards were printed and distributed to all the post offices in the country. (Originally they were going to be mailed to every male citizen in the country, until somebody realized that if you already had the name and address of every male in Canada, you might not need a registration system.) But the government shrank from making registration compulsory, and it was estimated that about 20 percent of the males between eighteen and sixty-five didn’t fill in the cards. There was a strong suspicion that the government was moving toward conscription, even if it said it was not, and many men felt it prudent not to draw themselves to the army’s attention.
You have asked for an assurance that under no circumstances will Conscription be undertaken or carried out.… I must decline to give any such assurance. I hope that Conscription may not be necessary, but if it should prove to be the only effective method to preserve the existence of the State and of the institutions and liberties which we enjoy, I should consider it necessary and I should not hesitate to act accordingly.
Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden to labour leaders, December 27, 1916
Not only did many men not fill out the cards, but when the army, seeking volunteers, canvassed the men who had registered, most of them felt that they were doing their duty by working in industry. By now even the West had run out of young, single, unemployed men with strong British loyalties, and nobody thought the war was an adventure any more. In Winnipeg, out of 1,767 men registered, nobody was willing to volunteer. Out of a pool of 4,497 men registered in Quebec, four enlisted. Most eligible Canadian men seemed curiously unconvinced that there was any threat to “the existence of the State and the institutions and liberties” they enjoyed.
Meanwhile, nothing had improved in the management of the Canadian forces. Sam Hughes, now “Sir Sam,” emphasized that the goal of 500,000 men was a target for which the prime minister alone had to take responsibility, but he was scarcely a model of responsibility himself. In August 1916 he cabled Borden from England to suggest that Canada should put eight or ten divisions in the field (it then had four). His motive appeared to be the pure spirit of competition: Australia, with a much smaller population than Canada, already had five divisions in France, and it was rumoured that there were enough Australian troops in England and Egypt to form four more.
On the same day, as an afterthought, Hughes cabled asking to have “sixty or eighty thousand troops sent over immediately.” He assured Borden that this would still leave over one hundred thousand troops in Canada. Besides, Hughes added helpfully, more men could easily be made available if clergymen helped out in the fields to release more farmers’ sons for military service.
The worst thing about Sam Hughes—worse even than his venal “friends” in commerce and industry, his absurd pretensions to military genius, or his random enthusiasms for new models of service rifle or entrenching tool—was his relentless, reflexive determination to do favours for his friends in the militia. He was the epitome of the “good ol’ boy” politician whose sole method for extending his influence over his political environment is to create an ever-widening network of people who are indebted to him for their jobs. Professional military competence was therefore quite irrelevant to Hughes when he appointed officers to positions of command (and he had his “militia” ideology to rationalize his disdain for formal military qualifications). In the Post Office, this kind of management policy means that the mail gets delivered late and the organization runs a deficit; in an army at war, it means that large numbers of people get killed because of the incompetence of their superiors.
All the officers selected for the First Contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary Force were appointed by Hughes more or less as a personal favour, and many of them were not capable of organizing a piss-up in a brewery: the subsequently famous British military critic J.F.C. Fuller, then a young officer, remarked on seeing the 1st Canadian Division debark at Devonport in England in 1914 that they would be fine soldiers only “if the officers could all be shot.” Most of the officers of the 2nd Canadian Division, and many of those commanding subsequent contingents, also got their jobs through Hughes’s reflex cronyism: if you were a Canadian who wanted a combat command in the war, there was no other way. And yet, once they had actually seen battle, Hughes’s own appointees tended to turn against him.
From mid-1915 on there was unremitting guerrilla warfare between the Canadian divisions in France and the tangled web of competing Canadian military authorities in England that Hughes had created to administer them. It was much more than the usual friction between the front and the rear: the key question was always whether the commanders in France had the right to choose their own replacement officers (mainly by promoting them from the ranks of their own battle-wise troops), or whether they must accept replacements from among the horde of “supernumerary” officers—all promised a job by Sir Sam but utterly lacking in combat experience—who languished in England waiting for the call.
Combat experience changes people—and it also winnows them. The men whom Sam Hughes had chosen as officers for the Canadian divisions in France in 1914 and 1915 were almost all deficient at the start in the military knowledge they would need to do their jobs well, and there was a disproportionate number of sycophants among them. But time and battle weeded out the weak (there are almost always ways for an officer to escape the front, if he is determined to avoid it) and taught the survivors to act and think like real officers. The ex–lawyers and farmers and insurance salesmen turned into competent majors and colonels who understood exactly what it means to be responsible for your countrymen’s lives—and that while it is your duty as an officer to spend the lives of some of them in order to achieve your country’s objectives, the rate at which they die will be determined largely by your own military competence.
The toy soldiers turned into professionals, and they became contemptuous of Hughes’s bluster. More than that, they became determined to stop him from parachuting his new crop of patronage appointments (ironically, “officers” who had the very same defects they themselves had had a year or eighteen months before) into positions of command where by inexperience they might waste the lives of veteran Canadian soldiers who had survived the battles of Ypres and the Somme.
The first evidence of this transformation of perspective among Canadian officers at the front came right at the end of 1915, when Hughes made one of his typical gambits for finding more jobs at the front for his cronies. He proposed that all the British staff officers serving with the Canadian Corps should be replaced by Canadians, even though his own bias against professional military education for militia officers had prevented all but a handful of Canadian officers from being properly trained for staff appointments. Faced with the prospect of having incompetent Canadians replace the trained British officers who were currently doing the vital planning jobs in the Canadian divisions, however, the Canadian senior commanders at the front unanimously backed the British corps commander, Lieutenant General Sir Edwin Alderson, in protesting against it. Hughes’s proposal was dropped.
Hughes’s persistent meddling with the Canadian forces in England—he regarded them as his personal empire—was the biggest factor in finally bringing him down. He was so seldom in Ottawa that Borden was gradually able to hand over more and more of the administration of Hughes’s own department to other, more competent people. The final confrontation came when the prime minister decided to order Hughes home and create a new ministry for overseas service, to be run by Sir George Perley in London. Hughes was furious. In his own mind he was perpetually beleaguered by the plots of jealous rivals and incompetent subordinates, and now he accused Borden of being a plotter too. Borden had had enough: on November 9, 1916, he demanded Hughes’s resignation as minister of militia and national defence.
All of the men seemed to have gone. You had a tremendous rate of enlistment here, and my father at the newspaper was working overtime all the time, and he would come home absolutely exhausted.
You have to remember there was no TV, there was no radio, but a dispatch would come through that, say, the Somme Battle was in progress.… And the phone rang incessantly—these poor, anxious voices: “We’re so sorry to bother you, but is there any news?”
So at the age of, I suppose about eight or nine by then, I was part of the chain of communication, because I would let my father rest. And I remember what a dreadful time I had pronouncing the names of these various battles. And Daddy would tell me what dispatch had come through, and I’d just repeat it.
Naomi Radford, Edmonton
By the end of 1916 Canada was a divided country: divided between those families who had a son, a husband, or a brother serving overseas and those who were still essentially living in the atmosphere of peacetime. The latter group might follow the progress of the European war in the newspapers, but they could not share the quiet terror of those who spent their days waiting for the official message that it was time to dress in mourning.
The sight of a telegraph boy was a thing of horror … because they were never allowed to phone bad news. And you’d see the boy come down the street on his bicycle, and you’d watch what house he stopped at. And then, later, probably my mother would go over, one of the neighbours would go over.
Naomi Radford
The resentment against men who had not volunteered was greatest in the West, where a large majority of families had a close relative in the trenches. At times it had a very bitter edge.
The odd person, mostly old people, would go around, and they’d see a chap that they felt should be overseas, and they would bounce up and put a white feather on him.
And of course, as the war went on these were often chaps who’d come back wounded, or had a heart condition or something. It was a very cruel thing to do.…
Oh no, there was no organisation as far as I know. They were just “public-spirited” people.
Naomi Radford
But far more than for the “shirkers” in their own communities, English Canadians with relatives in the forces reserved their deepest feelings of resentment for French Canadians. It was universally felt in English Canada that French Canadians were not carrying their share of the burden—and of course they weren’t, for they didn’t think it was their burden.
Canada being part of the British Empire, it is the sacred duty of the Canadian people to assist Great Britain in her heroic defence of liberty. This was the position taken by the Episcopacy of French Canada at the outbreak of the War, and this is the attitude Bishops … will continue to maintain to the very end. The obligations we owe the British Crown are sacred obligations.
Archbishop Bruchési of Montreal, Laval, January 7, 1916
The Catholic hierarchy in Quebec almost unanimously supported the British cause during the war, in fulfilment of the church’s part in the old bargain: you don’t meddle in our empire, and we’ll support yours. However, it was fighting an uphill battle against its own curés, who shared the general conviction that the Kaiser was not casting lascivious eyes on Trois-Rivières and that the war was none of French Canada’s business. But there were some French Canadians who joined up anyway.
4.15 a.m.
Only ten minutes now before zero. The horizon shows a line of grey. Dawn is coming; and my heart is filled suddenly with bitterness when I realize that the day may be my last.… A shell bursts in our trench, breaking the leg of a man a few yards away. Stretcher-bearers apply a dressing and carry him to the rear. “There goes one man who won’t die in the attack,” remarks a soldier, almost enviously.
Our company commander, Capt. J.H. Roy, appears. “Ten rounds in your magazines and fix bayonets!” he orders. There is a click of steel on steel. Only two minutes now remain.… Yesterday, I believed I could die with something approaching indifference. Now I am aware of an intense desire to live. I would give anything to know beyond doubt that I had even two whole days ahead of me.… I see things—differently than I did yesterday.
Signaller Arthur Lapointe, 22nd Battalion, CEF, Soldier of Quebec: 1916–1919
At one time or another thirteen battalions destined to join the CEF strove to attract French Canadian recruits in Quebec, but apart from the 22nd Battalion, only the 163rd “Poil-aux-Pattes” and the 189th (recruited mostly in the Gaspé) reached Europe—and after the dreadful losses suffered by the 22nd Battalion at Courcelette in September 1916, the others were broken up to refill its ranks. The 22nd was a remarkable formation, with possibly the most distinguished fighting record in the entire Canadian army, but there were scarcely enough French Canadian volunteers to keep that single battalion up to strength.
Zero hour! A roll as of heavy thunder sounds and the sky is split by great sheets of flame.… Through the deep roaring of the guns I can hear the staccato rat-a-tat of machine-guns. I scramble over the parapet and, with Michaud, am one of the first in No Man’s Land. Our company is forming up and the moments of delay seem endless.… A shell strikes a few yards away, and Lieut. Gatien is seriously wounded. We are not allowed to help him; that is the stretcher-bearers’ duty. The noise of the barrage fills our ears; the air pulsates, and the earth rocks under our feet. I feel I am in an awful dream and must soon awake.…
We reach the enemy’s front line, which has been blown to pieces. Dead bodies lie half buried under the fallen parapet and wounded are writhing in convulsions of pain.… Through clouds of smoke, I catch sight of German soldiers running away. Shall I fire at them? I pity the poor devils and have seen enough dead lying in the mud; but this is war, so I open fire. A German soldier falls. Did one of my bullets find a mark, or was he struck down by a shell? I shall never know.
Soldier of Quebec: 1916–1919
There were some practical reasons why so few French Canadians joined the forces: they tended to marry younger, and the army that was seeking their services had become an almost entirely “English” institution (among some eighty Canadian brigadier generals in the First World War, only four were French Canadian). But these obstacles were unimportant compared to the fundamental French Canadian disinclination to die for the British empire.
As far as most French Canadians were concerned, the sentimental tie to France was not strong enough to justify dying for her, and loyalty to the British empire did not oblige its Canadian subjects to die in Britain’s wars in other continents. So English Canadians were coming to see all French Canadians as cowards or traitors, while French Canadians who had enlisted found themselves regarded as dupes by many of their own people. After a year at the front Talbot Papineau sent an open letter to his cousin, Henri Bourassa:
Can a nation’s pride be built upon the blood and suffering of others? … If we accept our liberties, our national life, from the hands of the English soldiers, if without sacrifices of our own we profit by the sacrifices of the English citizen, can we hope to ever become a nation ourselves? … Yet the fact remains that the French in Canada have not responded in the same proportion as have other Canadian citizens.… For this fact … you will be held largely responsible. You will bring dishonour and disfavour upon our race, so that whoever bears a French name in Canada will be an object of suspicion and possibly of hatred.
Talbot Papineau to Henri Bourassa, March 21, 1916
But Papineau was as much English Canadian as French Canadian (his father, like Henri Bourassa’s, was descended from Louis-Joseph Papineau, but his mother was American and he was brought up in Montreal mainly in English). Bourassa replied in another open letter, pointing out that even in English Canada it was the relatively recent arrivals, the “blokes” from Britain, who had done much of the volunteering. Moreover, he added, “the floating population of the cities, the students, the labourers and clerks, either unemployed or threatened with dismissal, have supplied more soldiers than the farmers,” whose roots were in the land. Even if he changed his personal position, Bourassa said, he could not persuade French Canadians to enlist. French Canadians “look upon the perturbations of Europe, even those of England or France, as foreign events. Their sympathies go naturally to France against Germany, but they do not think they have an obligation to fight for France.”
I have just found Michaud safe and sound.… We have taken the German second support line and captured about fifty prisoners, all haggard and wild-eyed, as though they had traversed a hell on earth. Most of them are wounded. One young lad with a badly torn face is raising awful cries. Another, with a leg torn away, is groaning; and his moans rend one’s heart. Further away lies one of our men, a young soldier, a comrade of mine from the old 189th. He is terribly wounded, and holds his beads in his one remaining hand. Time and again he calls for his mother, and when his sufferings are more than he can endure prays for death. I can’t stand the sight of his suffering, and walk away, with a great lump in my throat.
Soldier of Quebec: 1916–1919
Apart from the 22nd Batallion, however, it had become an almost entirely English Canadian war, and as the casualties mounted, so did the pressures from English Canada to compel French Canadians to “do their share.” Only a few English Canadian politicians, like R.B. Bennett, the director of national service, whose recruiting work brought him into regular contact with French Canadians, were fully aware of the dangers this entailed. Bennett frankly told his English Canadian audiences that for the sake of national unity it might be better if the burden of sacrifice remained unequal: “We don’t want to have our forces spent in quelling riots at home.” But that was not what the audiences wanted to hear, nor were there many English Canadian politicians with the wisdom or the courage to say it to them.
The Canadians played a part of such distinction [on the Somme in 1916] that thenceforward they were marked out as storm troops; for the remainder of the war they were brought along to head the assault in one great battle after another. Whenever the Germans found the Canadian Corps coming into the line they prepared for the worst.
David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, vol. 6
Once we got there we were strictly Canadian—there was no fooling around at all. We thought we were quite superior to everybody else, you know.
George Turner, Sergeant, CEF
By the end of 1916, despite all the political infighting and the disastrous losses (the Canadians had 24,029 casualties during the Battle of the Somme), the Canadian Corps in France had become a competent, highly professional army—and despite the very large proportion of English-born volunteers in its ranks, everybody in the corps developed a strong Canadian identity. But as the politicians at home struggled to find enough men to send to the front as replacements, the Canadians in the field ran into a new problem. The reinforcements were sent out so hastily that they were sometimes virtually untrained.
I found myself in a shell hole with some infantryman, and looking over a hundred yards or so away there was a German who was standing up out of a shell hole and shooting as if he was shooting at rabbits. I don’t know whether he hit anybody, but any rate he was there. And I sort of said: “Why don’t you shoot? Why don’t you fire at that man?”
“Oh, I don’t know how to fire.…”
He just couldn’t use a rifle. So I took the rifle from him and took a shot, and the man disappeared. I don’t suppose I hit him, but at any rate he wasn’t there anymore.
“Tommy” Burns (later general, then a junior officer in the 11th Brigade)
The rate of losses in the Canadian army was already the major problem, and in 1917 it became critical. The last straw, ironically, was the most famous Canadian success in the war, the capture of Vimy Ridge. It was a long escarpment dominating an industrial plain, from which “more of the war could be seen than from any other place in France,” and no significant advance was possible along the most important part of the British front as long as it stayed in enemy hands. The Germans had held most of the ridge since October 1914, and 200,000 had already been killed or wounded in previous British and French attempts to capture it. In April 1917 the job of taking it was given to the Canadian Corps.
It was the first time that all four Canadian divisions had fought together as a corps, and the Canadians prepared for the assault with the meticulous care that was becoming their trademark in battle. They spent weeks studying a scale model of the battle area and practising the planned manoeuvres. More than a million artillery shells—50,000 tons—fell on the Germans in the week before the attack (they called it “the week of suffering”). Even now Vimy looks like a partially reclaimed moonscape, and signs still warn of unexploded shells.
Very early on April 9, Easter Monday (having spent Sunday at church services), the men of the four Canadian divisions were given a stiff tot of rum and began moving forward under cover of a heavy barrage. For once the weather was in their favour: the snowstorm in which the Canadians crept forward across no man’s land was unusual for April, but the snow was flying into the Germans’ faces, concealing the Canadian advance. The Canadian Official History says the attack “went like clockwork,” but nothing in battle goes like clockwork: some regiments in the 11th Brigade, which had suffered heavy losses in other recent fighting, had just “lost their confidence” (as the saying went):
When they were supposed to get up, out over the top and go forward, they tended, after some casualties had occurred, to just not go on any further. And actually, with many of the troops being quite green, you couldn’t expect them to do any better than that. When you got a bit forward, you found that the advancing troops had sort of stuck in the mud, somehow or other, and the attack as planned just fell apart.
“Tommy” Burns
Nevertheless, the bulk of the Canadian army swarmed up over the ridge and seized the German trenches. Although the Germans were very well dug in, a lot of the forward positions were taken by surprise, but the attackers were taking heavy losses.
I got bowled over nearly at the start, but picked myself up and ran on with the boys towards the German trenches, and believe me it was some fighting. It was like hell let loose. I was through the Somme but that was nothing compared to this one.… It was at the second line that I was knocked out by the concussion of a high explosive shell that burst right near me. By this time there were only two of us left of our machine gun crew.
The shock of the explosion threw me into a shell hole. Corporal Lang … came into the hole after me and gave me a drink of rum and water, which soon pulled me around and we started off for Fritz’s third line. By this time the enemy were calling for quarter and surrendering fast.
J.M. Thompson, Paris, Ontario, April 1917
We went over Vimy Ridge just at dusk. The Canadian attack … had left it a jungle of old wire and powdered brick, muddy burrows and remnants of trenches.…
Two hours later we found Fourteen Platoon, hardly recognising it. The sergeant was there, and MacDonald, but most of the others were strangers.… MacDonald told us our company had gone straight through to the objective in spite of sleety snow and mud and confusion, but a flanking fire from the left, where the 4th Division had been held up, had taken a heavy toll. Belliveau and Jenkins and Joe McPherson had been killed in one area. One shell had wiped out Stevenson and two others.
MacMillan had been shot in the stomach and had died after waiting hours in the trench. Gilroy and Westcott and Legge had been killed by machine-gun fire. Herman Black had run amuck. They found him almost at the bottom of the Ridge, near a battery position, with eight dead Germans about him, four of them killed by bayonet.
Will R. Bird, Ghosts Have Warm Hands
After two days of futile counterattacks the German commander, Crown Prince Rupprecht, ordered the withdrawal of his troops onto the plain below. He had lost a dominating position, and 4,000 Germans had been taken prisoner. But the Canadians had suffered 10,602 casualties, including 3,600 dead.
On April 10, word reached us of the splendid victory of the Canadians in taking Vimy Ridge on the preceding day.
Fine tribute from Haig [the British commander-in-chief]. Some mention in editorials, but none in “Times,” which is disgraceful.…
Dispatched telegrams of congratulations to General Byng. Robert Borden, Memoirs, vol. 2
It was partly in recognition of the Canadian Corps’ achievement at Vimy that it was finally given a Canadian commander in the early summer of 1917, and so became the first completely Canadian field army in the country’s history. But while Lieutenant General Sir Julian Byng, the British officer who had commanded the Corps since May 1916, was well liked by the troops, his Canadian successor, General Sir Arthur Currie (who had been an insurance agent and part-time militia officer when the war broke out), was not. Leslie Hudd, by now a seasoned veteran, met Currie after he was recommended for a French Croix de Guerre and a British Military Medal for single-handedly taking a German machine-gun post.
I was just a buck private. So the [French] General came down and he embraced us all, and I was kissed on both cheeks. Currie came, and he shook hands with the officers and sergeants, but he just pinned it on the privates.… I never had much use for Currie. I thought it was his job to congratulate us the right way. All the privates thought that; thought they were worth a handshake from their commander. Not that I’ve got anything against him as a general, but you could say he wasn’t too popular.
Leslie Hudd
Currie was a shy, ungainly man who had none of the actor’s skill at currying favour with the troops that is cultivated by so many successful generals. But although his later life was blighted by a campaign of slander directed by Sam Hughes and his cronies, who claimed that he wasted men’s lives needlessly, Currie actually worked very hard at keeping them alive. He was an excellent and conscientious commander who was once considered by Prime Minister David Lloyd George as a possible replacement for Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief in France.
However, despite Currie’s success in his unending struggle to keep the Canadian Corps together and prevent it from being frittered away in small packets by the British High Command to plug weaknesses in various sectors of the front, he could exercise little control over the way the Corps as a whole was actually used. Nor was there any senior Canadian military voice in Ottawa to give Prime Minister Borden strategic advice from the point of view of Canada’s own interests: during the entire war the chief of staff of the Canadian army was a British officer, Major General Sir Willoughby Gwatkin. As in all Canada’s wars down to the present, the strategic thinking was being done elsewhere.
The victory at Vimy Ridge confirmed Borden’s belief that the Canadian army was the finest of the allied armies and made it even more difficult for him to contemplate reducing the Canadian commitment. However, no army could afford to go on taking such losses unless it received a steady flow of reinforcements, and voluntary enlistments were drying up. The prime minister had also been much affected by his visit to the front, where he was shocked by what he saw, and by the nerve-racking visits he insisted on paying to all the Canadian military hospitals. (He visited fifty-seven during his 1915 trip.)
On the one hand, I was inspired by the astonishing courage with which my fellow-countrymen bore their sufferings, inspired also by the warmth of their reception, by a smile of welcome, by the attempt to rise in their beds to greet me. In many cases it was difficult to restrain my tears when I knew that some poor boy, brave to the very last, could not recover.
On the other hand, the emotion aroused from these visits had an exhausting effect upon one’s nervous strength: and frequently I could not sleep after reflecting upon the scene through which I had passed.
Robert Borden, Memoirs, vol. 2
He felt a tremendous obligation to the troops in this army.… He thought that having “his boys” reinforced was necessary for Canada’s defence, which he regarded as being across the ocean.
On the other hand, he also, being the man he was, felt what a terrible disgrace it would be to Canada and the people of Canada if this wonderful army that had been built up, that had fought at the Somme, at Ypres and Vimy, and so forth, had to be disbanded, in effect, because of the terrible casualties which they had suffered.
Henry Borden (nephew of Robert Borden)
As much as Borden’s solicitude for “his boys,” the deteriorating military situation of the Allies in general was now pushing him very strongly toward conscription. He spent from the middle of February to early May 1917 in England attending the first Imperial War Cabinet meetings. He was appalled by what he learned. The Allies’ situation was growing worse: they might even be losing the war.
Astonishing news of the abdication of Czar and revolution in Russia. Evidently due to dark forces, the Monk Rasputin, the pro-German Court and bureaucratic influences, the meddling of the Empress, the weakness of the Czar, and his inability to realize or comprehend the forces of liberty and democracy working among the people.
Robert Borden, Memoirs, vol. 2
The early optimism that the Russian Revolution would improve matters soon turned to fears that Russia would withdraw from the war. If that happened the whole weight of the German army could be concentrated on the Western Front, and things were bad enough there already. The French offensive that had begun at the same time as Vimy Ridge in the spring of 1917 had pushed their army past the breaking point. One French regiment went to the front making bleating noises like lambs being led to slaughter, and when the offensive collapsed, fifty-four divisions—almost half the French army—mutinied. It took 100,000 courts martial to restore discipline, and even after that the French army seemed to be finished as an offensive weapon, perhaps for years.
Meanwhile, German submarines were sinking a million tons of Allied shipping a month, and the first sea lord, Admiral John Jellicoe, had concluded: “It is impossible for us to go on with the war if losses continue like this.” Only one bright spot loomed on the horizon: the German campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare, by sinking neutral shipping, was pushing the United States into the war on the side of the Allies. (Washington declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917.) But it would take almost a year before American troops reached Europe in large numbers, and meanwhile France, Britain and the colonies had to hold out somehow on the Western Front. There was only one solution, and Lloyd George put it very bluntly to the Imperial War Cabinet on March 20, 1917:
Let us look quite frankly at the position. [Germany] has more men in the field than ever she had.… She is in a very powerful military position.…
The Allies are depending more and more upon the British Empire.… We started with 100,000 men, we now have 3,000,000 in the field.… What is it necessary for us to do in order to achieve the very sublime purpose which we have set before us? The first thing is this: we must get more men.
Lloyd George’s “very sublime purpose,” of course, was to make sure that the British empire won the war—no matter what the cost to Britain or anybody else. By 1917 the first total war had brought a new breed of men to power in Britain, France and Germany: Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau and Erich Ludendorff owed their positions to promises that they would wage the war unrelentingly and uncompromisingly until total victory. In fact, there was probably no choice by 1917: it was not only in Russia that revolution was a danger. After so much sacrifice, any major European government that stopped the fighting short of victory now faced the risk of overthrow by an angry and disillusioned populace: only victory could make them safe. Even in Britain the cabinet was seriously worried about domestic political stability.
In Canada there was no danger of revolution, but the English-speaking majority would not forgive any government that failed to prosecute the war to the utmost, while the French-speaking minority would not forgive any government that resorted to compulsion. Four days after he returned to Ottawa from the Imperial War Cabinet meeting, Borden made his decision: he announced that the government would impose conscription.