Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (17 page)

Military machines everywhere were starting to show the strain. In 1917 both the French and the Italian armies had come close to disintegration, and the Russian army had collapsed utterly. The Germans were moving large numbers of troops from the former Eastern Front to the Western Front for a make-or-break offensive, but at home the Allied blockade was causing severe shortages of food and raw material. With British forces worn down by the Passchendaele offensive (which had been launched partly to distract the Germans from noticing the terrible state of the French army), Prime Minister Lloyd George of Britain sent a request to Borden on Easter weekend 1918 for still more Canadian troops. In France General Currie broke his own rule and sent Canadian reinforcements to British units. And in England Lester Pearson, recently commissioned a lieutenant after two years’ service in the ranks, was recuperating from an accident that had interrupted his training in the Royal Flying Corps.

For Germany, the spring of 1918 was the last chance for victory. By March 1918, when the Communists who were fighting to establish their control over Russia signed a peace treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk, half a million German troops had already been moved west. For the first time the Germans had something like numerical parity with the Allies on the Western Front, but it would not last long. It was a year since the United States had entered the war on the Allied side in April 1917, and by the summer of 1918 there would be 300,000 American troops arriving in France every month. So the Germans went for broke in the spring, hoping to achieve a breakthrough that would divide the British and imperial troops from the French and drive the British back onto the Channel ports. Then, with a quick peace before American strength built up, maybe Germany could get away with a draw in the west and even keep its conquests in the east.

Colonel Bruchmüller had arrived on the Western Front at the very end of 1917, and in the first couple of months of 1918 hundreds of thousands of Germany’s best remaining troops were stripped from their units and retrained as storm-troops who would attack using his new infiltration tactics. At Arras in 1918, 6,608 German guns opened fire on the first
day of the offensive without any advance warning—and the German offensive gained more ground in the next two weeks than the Allies had gained in every offensive in the whole war. Further fast-moving offensives followed, and the Allies feared that they were going to lose the war in the spring of 1918.

In Canada, Borden called a secret session of Parliament to explain the peril, and passed an Order in Council effectively cancelling all exemptions for single men, including farmers. In mid-May, five thousand farmers arrived in Ottawa to protest the new policy. Troops prevented them from approaching the Houses of Parliament, but Borden spoke to them and told them bluntly that the government had taken a solemn pledge to reinforce the Canadian Corps. As long as he was prime minister, that pledge would be fulfilled. But long before any further reinforcements reached the Canadian Corps, the Germans’ spring offensive ran out of steam.

The Germans lost a million men between March and July 1918, but they never managed to split the Allies apart and roll the British lines up. It was the Canadians and Australians, attacking side by side near Amiens, who made the great breakthrough on August 8, the longest advance that any Allied attack had yet achieved in the war. Ludendorff called it “the black day of the German army.” From August on, the Germans were in almost constant retreat—and the Canadian and Australian divisions, whose condition was still far better than most of the British units, were consistently used to spearhead the attacks. Between August 22 and October 11, 1918, the Canadian Corps lost over fifteen hundred officers and thirty thousand casualties in the other ranks.

On November 11, 1918, Robert Borden was at sea, on his way to England to discuss with Lloyd George and the Imperial War Cabinet what position the British delegates to a peace conference should take after the war was won:

The First World War remains the most profound trauma in Canada’s history, although it all happened long ago and thousands of miles away. The names of our quarter-million dead and wounded are mostly forgotten now, but the effects of that collective act of self-immolation still reverberate in our national life today. However, keeping faith with the dead of the First World War has more often been interpreted by Canadians as an injunction to go and fight the Germans again (or the Russians, or whomever) than in Pearson’s
sense, as a call for Canadians to play their part in the immense task of abolishing war.

The old international system should have died after the First World War—and there was certainly a determined attempt to kill it. Four years of the most devastating war in European history, over a Balkan quarrel whose protagonists had mostly disappeared by 1918, were enough to convince large numbers of people (and even their governments) that there was something dreadfully wrong with the traditional way of running the world. War had become far too costly a means of settling disputes between the great powers, and so the nations began to cast around for an alternative.

Woodrow Wilson’s formulation of Allied war aims for the U.S. Congress at the beginning of 1918 was light-years distant from what those aims had been in 1914, but the war had greatly changed the way people saw the world. The international system had staggered on for centuries, periodically producing a general war, but never doing irreparable harm to its major players, so the traditional attitude was: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” By 1918, however, the system
was
broke: it had delivered all the great powers into a war grotesquely out of proportion
to the purposes for which they had entered it (insofar as they had any clear aims at all). They had fought the war to the bitter end because they did not know how to stop it, and dared not admit to their own peoples that it was not about anything worth fighting for.

But at the same time it was quite clear to both the leaders and the led that this must be “the war to end all wars,” and that defeating their enemies in this particular war would not suffice to abolish war itself. So many people were prepared to contemplate the radical idea that the international system itself would have to be changed.

The notion of an international organization to prevent war had been floating around for half a century, but it fell to Woodrow Wilson, the rigid and sanctimonious university professor who became president of the United States, to put it on the agenda of the world’s governments. His idea for a League of Nations was gravely flawed, but it was an idea that would never go away again. However reluctant governments and peoples might be to change their old ways, there was a general recognition that it had to be tried, because the alternative—a future of ever more destructive technological wars—was even worse.

As far as many English Canadians were concerned, however, the great lesson of the war was that international politics is a crusade of good nations against evil ones. Their consequent willingness to place the country at the disposal of Britain in the great-power struggle (a loyalty subsequently transferred virtually intact to the United States) has been the single most powerful influence on our foreign policy down to the present.

The First World War saw the birth of a distinctive English Canadian national consciousness, but French Canada was not present at the birth. The great irony is that a lot of English Canada wasn’t present either, although it later pretended it had been. Even after vigorous and repeated recruiting drives and the ultimate imposition of conscription had dragged many native-born English Canadians into the army, the proportion of native-born in the Canadian forces rose to only 51 percent
by the end of 1918. The great bulk of the remainder were drawn from the relatively small fraction of first-generation British immigrants in the population, who volunteered for the war at a rate at least as high as that of the New Zealanders or the British themselves.

In Canada as a whole, the rate of enlistment was lower even than in Australia (with its large Irish population) or in English-speaking South Africa. English-speaking Canadians had, on average, been in their own country longer than the populations of the other “white dominions,” and had had the time to get their bearings. Their sentimental attachment to the “Motherland” remained, but they knew that their practical interests were different, so they did not volunteer as readily to fight for Britain. Nevertheless, the fact that so many people fought in Canadian uniform—and suffered so greatly—had a profound effect on English Canadians’ subsequent view of themselves and the world. The “British Canadians” who went off to the trenches, whether English-born or native-born, returned simply as Canadians—but they were a very different kind of Canadian from those who spoke French.