Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (6 page)

The Power Law describes how so-called critical systems like those that produce earthquakes and forest fires are completely undiscriminating about the scale of the event. Most events will be on the smaller side, of course, but you don’t need special causes to get a huge one: an event of any size can happen literally at any time.

A critical system is one that is inherently unstable, and locks in more and more instabilities as time goes by. Think of the accumulating stresses along a fault line between two continental plates, or the accumulation of inflammable debris on the forest floor. From time to time there will be earthquakes and forest fires, but most of them will be small. The Power Law says that any one of them could be the Big One.

To know if a particular class of events is subject to the Power Law, you just graph the scale of the events against their frequency. If it turns out to be a straight relationship where doubling the size of the event decreases the frequency by half—or makes it four times less likely, or sixteen times, or any other power of two—then you are dealing with a critical system, and you can forget about seeking major causes for bigger events. A random pebble is sixteen times less likely to cause a huge avalanche than a little one, but it
can
cause either.

British physicist Lewis Richardson was the first to notice that wars are subject to the Power Law, and it was confirmed in 1983 by Jack Levy, currently Board of Governors’ Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, in a massive study entitled
War in the Modern Great Power
System
, which spanned the entire period 1495–1975. If you measure the size of every war by its casualties, then doubling the size exactly halves the frequency. This means that great wars do not need great causes. Once sufficient strains have accumulated in a critical system, a world war can strike out of a clear blue sky, as it did in the summer of 1914.

All that stuff you read in conventional accounts of 1914 about the interlocking military alliances and the even more intricately interlinked railway timetables that delivered millions of mobilized troops to the frontiers of the great powers is perfectly true: the great powers really had built a system that was bound to fail catastrophically sooner or later. But those were precisely the instabilities and strains that made international politics into a critical system in the early twentieth century. The question of whether we still live in a critical system today will have to wait until later.

P
ARIS
, O
NTARIO WAS, IN
1914,
A
S
TEPHEN
L
EACOCK SORT OF TOWN:
credulous, not too wise in the ways of the world, but enthusiastic and eager to please. It would be wrong to say that the news of the outbreak of war that August struck Paris like a bolt from the blue. That would imply threat. Rather the war in Europe (not yet the Great War, let alone the First World War) came as a welcome diversion at the end of the summer.

In Montreal on 1 and 3 August, when it was already clear that France, at least, was going to be fighting Germany, huge crowds paraded in the streets waving British and French flags and singing “La Marsellaise” and “Rule Britannia.” When Britain formally declared war on Germany on 4 August (automatically taking Canada with it), thousands of people came out to cheer in Winnipeg, Regina, Edmonton, Vancouver and Victoria. In the other Paris, in France, the newspaper
Le Temps
saw something deeply poetic in the fact that English Canadian blood would now be shed for France, while French Canadians bled for England.

Two weeks later in the House of Commons in Ottawa, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the former prime minister, stood up and declared: “We are British subjects, and today we are face to face with the consequences which are involved in that proud fact.” By then the Conservative government of Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden had already offered to send one division (22,500 men) to Europe. It had secretly bought two submarines that had just been built for the Chilean navy, and had placed Canada’s two decrepit training cruisers at the disposal of Britain’s Royal Navy. Maybe Borden’s government could have responded a little less eagerly, but it could not really have stayed out of the war unless it had decided to declare Canada independent then and there. Nobody had that in mind, not even the most ardent of Quebec Nationalists.

Canada was a very different country a century ago: the great majority of its eight million people were actually of British or French descent, and few English Canadian families had been in the country for more than two or three generations. Nevertheless, sentimental ties are not the same as “vital interests,” and there were no practical reasons why Canada’s long-term interests depended on the maintenance of British power and prestige (except for the old but fading concern about American expansionism). However, plenty of short-term interests were in play—many Canadian and British business interests were linked, for example—and in any case Canada was not a fully independent nation in 1914. Henri Bourassa, whose newspaper was the strongest public voice of French Canadian nationalism, would probably have preferred to copy the policy of the United States and declare Canada neutral in the war, but he understood that emotional, commercial and legal factors meant that Canada had to support the Entente powers (Britain, France and Russia). However, he stressed that it should do so “to the measure of its strength, and by appropriate means”—which did not, in his opinion, include sending Canadian troops to Europe.

But it was no use arguing. The national mood, at least in English Canada, would not have stood for anything less than full Canadian military commitment to the war. There was probably not a single person in Canada in August 1914 (indeed, there were not even very many in
Europe) who genuinely understood how the war had come about, but that didn’t make any difference.

Although there was a tiny handful of pacifists in Canada, English Canadian popular culture was quite overtly militarist and jingoist. The young had no doubts about the war; nor did most of their elders. In 1914 they were not just English Canadians; they were
British
Canadians.

But the response of ordinary French Canadians was another story entirely. It was not a question of language or culture, basically, but simply of geographical perspective—of where people thought they lived in the world. When the call for volunteers went out, recent immigrants from France enlisted just as readily as the most enthusiastic English Canadians: the town of Trochu in Alberta, which had been settled by French ex-cavalrymen in the years before the war, virtually emptied in 1914 as the men went back to fight for their mother country. But French Canada itself had long ago abandoned the delusion that it was part of Europe, and few
French Canadians saw any reason to fight in its wars. They also soon became aware of a particularly good reason for remaining civilian: the minister of militia and national defence, Colonel Sam Hughes.

Hughes was a bullying Ontario Orangeman who neither knew nor trusted French Canadians. Colonel Willoughby Gwatkin, on loan from the British army as chief of the General Staff, had prepared careful mobilization plans in 1912 that would have included French Canadian participation, but Hughes was determined to do everything his own way: finally he had a real war and the power to run it.

Casting aside the existing mobilization plans, which would have carried out the first phase of the process at the local militia centres, Hughes simply sent telegrams directly to every battalion in the militia, inviting the hundred-odd part-time colonels who commanded them to show up with as many volunteers as they could find. They were invited to bring them, moreover, not to the perfectly adequate training area already in existence at Camp Petawawa in the Ottawa valley, but rather to a wilderness area at Valcartier near Quebec City. (This served no military purpose, but it did serve the business interests of Sir William Mackenzie and Donald Mann, two good friends of Hughes who happened to own the only railway link to Valcartier.)

Hughes personally supervised the creation of a central training depot at Valcartier, transforming woods and sandy valleys into a huge training camp with streets, buildings, telephones and four miles of rifle ranges in about three weeks: his ability to bring order out of chaos was almost as great as his propensity for creating chaos in the first place.

Hughes considered himself a military genius, despite the fact that he had no serious military training or experience. Indeed, he considered his ignorance of conventional military procedures and practices to be a positive virtue, since he completely believed the southern Ontario myth, a hallowed relic of 1812, which maintained that the sturdy, independent-minded Canadian volunteer, however lacking in training, was intrinsically superior to the over-trained and unimaginative regular soldier.
Throughout his career he seized every opportunity to demean and publicly humiliate Canada’s relatively few professional soldiers—so in 1914, instead of using the Royal Canadian Regiment, which contained most of the trained infantrymen in Canada’s three-thousand-strong Permanent Force, to train the flood of volunteers, he immediately sent it to Bermuda to replace a British regiment heading for France. (It did not reach France itself until 1916.)

At Valcartier, therefore, it was the blind leading the blind, and Hughes largely ignored even the structures and skills that were available in the militia. He simply disregarded the existing militia units and their traditions, creating entirely new battalions for the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) that were identified solely by their numbers and trained from scratch at Valcartier. In his appointments of commanders, personal favouritism was the only visible criterion: at least one-third of all the officers who went overseas in 1914–15 had not yet met even the very modest militia training standard for their rank. And since many more militia officers and men had shown up at Valcartier than would be needed for the single infantry division that was to sail for Europe in October, there was tremendous chaos.

In fact, one rather suspects that it was Sam Hughes’s instinct to create chaos quite deliberately, since that was the environment that afforded the greatest scope for the kind of behaviour he revelled in. The autumn of 1914 presented him with the opportunity to dispense patronage on a scale that he had never previously dared to imagine, and he seized it with both hands. The relatively scarce jobs for officers in the First Canadian Division were allocated almost entirely on the basis of friendship rather than professional competence (with the inevitable result that “everybody was at everybody’s throat,” as one militia officer put it), and Hughes even created an entire parallel structure of “supernumerary officers” who would go overseas with the division although they had no jobs to do. He spent most of his time at Valcartier, and when he wasn’t holding court to receive the petitions of officers seeking posts
of command he was often to be found galloping around the camp, shouting orders and impartially cursing everybody as he went.