Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (15 page)

He must have thought so too, because he aimed his tattered Snipe at one of the D-VIIs and flew straight toward it as if to ram, firing as he went. But at the last instant it disintegrated and Barker hurtled through the wreckage; in the clear for a moment, he dove for the British trenches and crossed them at treetop height, finally crashing into the barbed-wire entanglements around a British balloon site just behind the lines.

“The hoarse shout, or rather the prolonged roar, which greeted the triumph of the British fighter, and which echoed across the battle front, was never matched … on any other occasion,” recalled Colonel Andy McNaughton, a militia officer who had risen to command the Canadian Corps Heavy Artillery and watched the fight from his advanced headquarters near Valenciennes. (McNaughton became commander of the entire Canadian army in the next war.)

Billy Barker’s lonely last fight, in which he added four more aircraft to his score, won him the Victoria Cross and failed to dampen his ebullience even slightly. “By Jove, I was a foolish boy, but anyhow I taught them a lesson,” he told the newspapers from his hospital bed near Rouen ten days later. Although his leg wounds never properly healed and he had to walk with canes for the rest of his life, Barker stayed in aviation after the war, founding Canada’s first (spectacularly unsuccessful) commercial airline in collaboration with another Canadian ace and Victoria Cross winner, Billy Bishop, briefly becoming director of the new Royal
Canadian Air Force, and continuing to fly personally until he was killed in a crash at Ottawa’s Uplands Airport in 1930.

The exploits of Barker and men like him, in a kind of combat that seemed to retain some of the honour and glory that had traditionally been associated with warfare, provided Canadians with virtually the only relief from the bitter news arriving daily from the trenches. But it was on the ground that the war would ultimately be won or lost, and by late 1917 the demand for fresh cannon fodder had become so great that the government was knocking on the door of every family in Canada.

Prime Minister Borden’s decision in May 1917 to bring in conscription was greeted with grim satisfaction in much of English Canada. The enthusiasm of the early days was long gone—too many families had already lost a son or a husband—but in its place, especially in the homes of the bereaved, was an inflexible determination to win the war and to make sure that the suffering was shared by all.

Borden could in all honesty argue that the voluntary system was no longer working. In the fighting of April and May 1917 the Canadian Corps in France suffered 24,000 casualties, and recruitment at home was only 11,000. At that rate the army would run out of men fairly soon, so compulsion seemed to him the only solution. But Borden’s problems
were greatly eased by the serious split over conscription that now began to tear the Liberal opposition apart.

French-speaking Liberals unanimously opposed conscription, but most of the prominent English-speaking Liberals were conscriptionists by conviction, and the rest were hedging out of political necessity. Even William Lyon Mackenzie King, Laurier’s protégé and likely successor, who had opposed conscription all along precisely because it would split both the Liberal party and the country, was starting to waver, fearing that there might be no future for an English-speaking politician who didn’t line up with the English-speaking majority on this issue. “I have changed my views on conscription as the war has progressed and I have seen freedom threatened,” he announced.

Borden’s Conservatives split on English-French lines over conscription, too: the few remaining prominent French Canadian Conservatives in his cabinet warned him that if the Conservative Party brought in conscription, it would be destroyed in Quebec for twenty-five years. But the Conservatives depended much less heavily than Laurier’s Liberals on French Canadian votes, and Borden was under too much pressure from conscriptionists in the rest of the country—and from the war itself—to back down. Moreover, he was convinced that conscription was what the men at the front wanted. Indeed, that
may
have been his most powerful motive:

Both Borden and Laurier realized that the country was heading into a crisis, and Borden hoped to weather it by forming a coalition government. However, Laurier’s unwavering opposition to conscription made that impossible, and he demanded a referendum on the issue (like the one that had recently rejected conscription in Australia).

In English Canada, there was an impression that if the French Canadians would only stop listening to Bourassa—if only Laurier would give them a lead—then they would see the error of their ways and start joining the army in large numbers. But that was nonsense: Laurier was compelled to oppose conscription both by his own long-held political principles and by the urgent need to provide some legitimate political voice for the very large number of Canadians (not all of them French Canadians, by any means) who vehemently disapproved of conscription. It was a bitter end to Laurier’s lifelong role as a bridge between English and French Canada, but it was perhaps the greatest service he ever did for the country.

Even with Laurier’s Liberals providing a legitimate political vehicle for opposing conscription, the customary Quebec phenomenon whereby political moderates are outflanked in public by Nationalist extremists soon made itself felt with a vengeance at the anti-conscription political meetings and demonstrations that proliferated in Quebec’s cities. From the start these were marked by blood-curdling threats and occasional street violence. On May 25 Colonel Armand Lavergne, a former commander of the militia regiment at Montmagny and a well-known Nationalist, told a great throng in Quebec City: “I will go to jail or be hanged or shot before I will accept [conscription]. The Conscription of 1917 had its origin in 1899, when Canada sent men to assist in crushing a small nation in the Transvaal.… It is not for Canada to defend England, but for England to defend Canada.” The crowd cheered lustily, and then went and smashed the windows of the
Quebec Chronicle
and
L’Événement
, the two pro-government papers in the city.

Throughout the long summer of 1917, as the Military Service Bill dragged its slow way through Parliament, the political atmosphere in Quebec grew steadily more poisonous. Almost every warm evening during June and July, crowds of young men surged through the streets in the French-speaking quarters of Montreal breaking windows, firing off blank rounds and shouting “
À bas Borden
” and “
Vive la Révolution
.”

Tancrède Marsil, whose antiwar newspaper
Le Réveil
had closed down in March 1917 after a warning from Ottawa, got his second wind from the government’s decision to bring in conscription, and soon exercised a powerful influence through his new paper
La Liberté
and his impassioned speeches. In late June in Waterloo, in the Eastern Townships, he told the crowd: “before we have conscription, we will
have revolution,” and added that the people of Quebec would prefer to see “two or three thousand men killed in the streets rather than send three hundred thousand men to Europe.” His angry audience responded by breaking nearby windows and cursing the Quebec Conservatives.

Talk like that made people very nervous in 1917, when real revolutions were breaking out in some other parts of the world: it was scarcely a year since the Easter Rising in Dublin, and only a couple of months since the Russian Revolution in Petrograd in February. And the pressure in Quebec just went on building: on July 15 Colonel Lavergne declared before fifteen thousand people at Quebec City:

On July 24 Ottawa moved to close down Marsil’s newspaper
La Liberté
after it had called for a general strike, a run on the banks and, if necessary, a revolution—but by that time a certain Élie Lalumière, a dealer in electrical fixtures and one of Marsil’s many rivals in street rhetoric, was claiming to have five hundred men under training in Montreal to resist conscription by force of arms.

The first phase of the crisis peaked in August, as Borden’s Military Service Bill finally passed into law with the support of more than twenty English-speaking Liberals who had deserted Laurier to vote for it. Lord Atholstan, the publisher of the
Montreal Star
and a vocal supporter of conscription, had received numerous threats, and at four o’clock on the morning of August 9 his house at Cartierville, a rural part of Montreal Island, was dynamited. It was a large stone house and none of the family or servants was hurt, but the explosives were found to be from a load of 350 pounds of dynamite that had been stolen from a quarry by a gang of masked men at the beginning of the month. A terrorist campaign was
feared, and so the Dominion Police
*
were brought in. They offered a large reward for the culprits, twelve men were arrested—and one of them turned out to be the regular anti-conscription speaker, Élie Lalumière.

Lalumière detailed plots to blow up the
Star
offices, the
Gazette
and the Mount Royal Club, and to assassinate Sir Robert Borden and other well-known political figures. The English-language press described his associates as “desperadoes, cocaine fiends, wanted for several murders and crimes.” By the end of the summer of 1917 many members of the public in Montreal were signing an anti-conscription “Declaration” which warned that “if the Bill is enforced Borden and his men will have to suffer the penalty of death,” and on August 30 the city was swept by demonstrations, marches, outbreaks of looting and clashes with the police during which revolvers were freely used and at least seven men were wounded.

But the proto-insurrectionary character of the street violence and the growing number of attacks on property in the anti-conscription protests began to worry the French Canadian establishment. The higher clergy of the Catholic church in Quebec, in accord with tradition, had supported the British from the start and now reluctantly backed conscription too, but hitherto the French Canadian political and cultural elites (and the business elite, such as it was) had mostly turned a blind eye to what was happening in the streets because of their sympathy for the anti-conscriptionist cause. Matters were now clearly getting out of hand, however—and at the same time they were offered a safer and more moderate way of opposing conscription, in the form of an imminent federal election. For there did, after all, seem to be a chance of defeating conscription through the ballot box.

By October 1917 Prime Minister Borden had succeeded in forming a “Union” government, which incorporated most of the English-speaking Liberals, especially from Ontario and the West, as well as his own Conservatives. However, he had failed to win bipartisan support for an extension of Parliament past its normal term. That meant he had to call an election before the end of 1917, and he was by no means certain of winning that election. Even in English Canada, organized labour and farmers were dead against conscription, and the popular magazine
Everywoman’s World
found that a six-to-one majority among its readers opposed it (although that mattered less, since women didn’t have the vote). What worried Borden’s government most, however, was “French, foreigners, slackers.”