Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (2 page)

I
T WAS
J
UNE
18, 1900,
AND IT WAS THE FIRST TIME THAT A CANADIAN
military unit had ever gone into battle outside North America—in South Africa, of all places, 13,000 kilometres from home. The temperature did not drop below a hundred degrees Fahrenheit that day until late in the afternoon, and there was no way of getting water to the troops. There was no cover from the lethally accurate fire of the Boers’ Mauser rifles except tiny undulations in the terrain and the occasional anthill (and the Mauser bullets went right through the anthills without losing force). On this first day of battle the Canadian battalion lost eighty-three men killed and wounded—one-tenth of its total strength—and the Canadians were only able to withdraw from their exposed position after night had fallen. But what were they doing in South Africa in the first place?

Even at the very end of the nineteenth century, the colonial wars that the British army fought from time to time put no serious strain on British manpower or resources. What preoccupied the British government was
the growing possibility of a war with its European rivals—and even Britain’s thirty-seven million people might be inadequate to meet the demand for military manpower in that kind of war. The ten million people in the white dominions were an extra source of manpower that might be needed in the ultimate crisis, and they had to be accustomed to the idea beforehand. Britain asked Canada to send troops to the South African war because it needed to set a precedent—and the Canadian government, of course, tried to avoid setting that precedent.

The war in South Africa was caused by London’s decision to bring back under imperial control the Afrikaans-speaking Boers (farmers) who had escaped British rule by trekking inland from Cape Colony in the 1830s. The landlocked Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State might have been left alone, but then the world’s richest goldfields were discovered in the Rand district of the Transvaal in 1885, and English-speaking miners and speculators poured in. They soon constituted a majority of the local population, but these Uitlanders (foreigners)
were denied the vote and heavily taxed by the Transvaal government. They petitioned Queen Victoria for help—and their plea for intervention was backed by powerful British interests eager to gain direct control of the wealth now pouring out of the Rand.

As war approached in 1899, Israel Tarte, Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s right-hand man in Quebec, asked in his newspaper,
La Patrie
, why French Canadians should be expected to fight the Boers, who were struggling to preserve “their independence, language and peculiar customs”: the analogy with French Canada’s own situation was painfully clear. But English Canada was burning with enthusiasm for the empire. On September 30, 1899, less than two weeks before the Boer War began, (militia) Colonel T. Denison, a prominent Toronto lawyer and founding member of the Imperial Federation League, told a special meeting of the Toronto Military Institute (in the presence of the provincial lieutenant-governor) why Canada should volunteer to fight in South Africa. It was not right to depend on Britain for defence without giving anything in return, Denison said—and besides, Canada could hardly expect to succeed in the dispute with the United States over the Alaska boundary “if we had not behind us the power of the empire.” So the Canadian government should send a military contingent to South Africa at once: “We have been children long enough, let us show the empire that we have grown to manhood.”

Lord Minto, the governor general, had only been in Canada a year, but he already knew too much about the country’s politics to imagine that it would be a simple task for Laurier’s government to send Canadian troops to South Africa. Moreover, Minto knew enough about South Africa to suspect that “money was playing a large part in the game,” and to believe that a war against the Boers, if it came, would be “the most iniquitous we had ever engaged in.”

However, Minto knew where his loyalty lay: he kept his doubts to himself and dutifully pressed the colonial secretary’s demands for Canadian troops on Prime Minister Laurier. He had an eager accomplice in Major-General Edward Hutton, the British officer commanding the Canadian militia, who as early as July had drawn up a secret draft plan for the dispatch of a Canadian contingent of about twelve hundred men to South Africa.

On October 6 General Hutton wrote confidently to Lord Minto: “Considering that the Laurier Gov’. are expecting the Imperial Gov’. to force the Alaska Boundary Question upon the U.S. Gov’., and that Sir Wilfrid himself referred to arbitration or war (which latter can only mean armed intervention by the Imperial Gov’.), I do not understand how they can hold aloof from giving material support to the Imperial Gov’. in the present Crisis.”

Minto applied the screws, sending Laurier a letter warning of the impression that may be produced in the Old Country by a decision on the part of Canada not to offer troops: “It may be taken perhaps to
indicate a certain want of loyalty here, which would be all the more unfortunate at a time when we are relying a good deal upon Imperial support in the Alaska question.”

J. S. Willison, the editor of the Liberal
Globe
, warned Laurier privately that he had only two alternatives: “either send troops or get out of office.” Laurier travelled on to Ottawa and on the evening of October 13 held a meeting with leading members of the Liberal Party to try to find some solution that would not hopelessly alienate either English Canada or French Canada. A federal election was due within a year, and Laurier could not possibly regain office without the support of both Ontario and Quebec Liberals. Yet his Quebec lieutenant, Israel Tarte, and most other Quebec cabinet members were vehemently opposed to sending Canadian troops to the Boer War, while Postmaster General William Mulock, of the Ontario Liberals, stormed out of the meeting in fury when Laurier appeared to be hesitating on the question.

The prime minister had a compromise up his sleeve that he hoped would mollify all the conflicting demands on him—English Canadian, French Canadian and British—though it would not fully satisfy any of them. He proposed that the Canadian government should authorize the formation of a Canadian contingent and pay for its equipment and transportation to South Africa, after which the British government would pick up its costs. Moreover, rather than sending regular troops or an existing militia unit, which would give the proceedings too official a character, it should be a special force made up entirely of volunteers who wanted to go to this particular war. It was pure hairsplitting, of course, but that is what most politicians reckon they are paid to do.

Mulock and the Ontario Liberals accepted Laurier’s compromise, and so did Israel Tarte, who had previously been threatening to resign from the cabinet if troops were sent. (Tarte did, however, insist on a public statement that this decision would not constitute a precedent for future Canadian actions.) So Laurier proceeded to
authorize a force for South Africa without calling Parliament. The Order in Council, dated October 14, 1899, read:

Laurier fully understood Britain’s long-range purpose in seeking Canada’s agreement to send troops overseas to this little war: that was why the announcement stressed that it did not imply any future commitments. But four days later Henri Bourassa, his close friend and political confidant, who quit his seat in Labelle in protest (and was re-elected by acclamation), summed up all the forebodings of French Canada in his public letter of resignation to Laurier. Bourassa wondered, somewhat ironically, whether the British empire was really in danger:

Among English Canadians, swollen by “racial” pride and urged on by imperialist propaganda, there was little concern as to where this exciting little war might eventually lead Canada. The real debate was among French Canadians, who knew perfectly well where it was
leading and didn’t want to go there at all. But most of them still believed that their old bargain with Britain was essential to their national survival, even if the terms were being unilaterally changed by the British and the English Canadians. Laurier was considerably more than just an adroit political fixer, and there was real anguish in his reply to Bourassa’s letter of resignation: “Tell me what attitude should the French Canadians take in the Confederation? … It is necessary that we choose between English Imperialism and American Imperialism. I see no other alternative. If there is one I wish you would indicate it to me.” There probably was no alternative, given the state of English Canadian opinion at the time. But Bourassa was right: a precedent had been set.

As soon as the proclamation had been issued the volunteers flocked in, and 1,061 men on a one-year enlistment sailed for South Africa from Quebec City on October 30, 1899, as the 2nd (Special Service) Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment. During the month-long voyage to Cape Town on the cramped little ship S.S.
Sardinian
(renamed the “Sardine” by the troops), the battalion commander discovered that few of his supposedly trained militiamen knew more than the rudiments of military drill. Lieutenant-Colonel William Otter, a native-born Canadian regular officer, had commanded militiamen in battle once before, during the North-West Rebellion of 1885, and he was determined not to lead raw troops into battle again. Although the Boer armies had inflicted a number of major defeats on the British by the time the Canadian troops arrived in South Africa, he managed to get two months at Belmont, near Kimberley, to turn his enthusiastic Canadians into soldiers before they were committed to battle. And they did quite well in their first big battle, at Paardeberg.