Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (10 page)

But still the infantry could not break through, though they died in their millions trying. The shells could destroy most of the enemy’s machine guns in the first-line trenches, and even the enemy’s guns behind the lines, but enough defenders always survived to make the advance a slow and costly business, and the bombardments turned the ground into a wilderness of shell holes across which any movement was very difficult. Eventually the attackers might take the enemy’s first-line trenches—and by the middle of the war these alone could be a belt up to three thousand metres wide—but by that time the enemy’s reserves would have arrived and manned a whole new trench system just to the rear. There was no way around the trenches, and seemingly no way through them either.

Trapped in a two-front war and seriously outnumbered, the Germans went over to the defensive on the Western Front in early 1915. It was the British and French who launched almost all the great offensives on the Western Front, which is why they usually lost more men attacking the German trenches than the Germans did in defending them. Yet in coldly rational terms it made sense, because they had more men to put into the field than the Germans. If enough people were killed, the Germans would eventually have to stop fighting because they would run out of men first.

This was such a horrifying concept that it was rarely articulated, but it is impossible to believe that the planners and managers of the battles did not understand it at some (perhaps unadmitted) level. What else can explain the grim determination with which British and French generals pursued apparently futile enterprises like the Battle of the Somme, in which the British imperial forces captured only 115 square kilometres in five months of fighting at a cost of 415,000 men killed and wounded, including 24,000 Canadians, 30,000 Australians and New Zealanders, 3,000 South Africans and 2,000 Newfoundlanders—3,600 men for each square kilometre? The territory gained and lost was not of any value, nor did any of these offensives ever come near to a decisive
breakthrough. What really mattered was that the Germans were compelled to sacrifice men and equipment at a comparable rate, although their total human and material resources were much smaller. And this extraordinary war of attrition continued for about forty months, from the end of 1914 to the spring of 1918.

M
OST
C
ANADIAN TROOPS WERE SENT TO THE
W
ESTERN
F
RONT 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.

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.”

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.

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.