Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (7 page)

Borden did not have a high opinion of Hughes: “while he was a man of marked ability and sound judgement in many respects, his temperament was so peculiar, and his actions and language so unusual on many occasions, that one was inclined to doubt his usefulness as a Minister.” But whether because of his gentle heart or his fear of Hughes’s powerful allies in the “militia lobby” and the Ontario wing of the Conservative Party, Borden did not remove Hughes. Instead the “general” was left free to swagger around in uniform, blustering and posturing—and he did not even consent to organize the relatively few French-speaking volunteers who risked placing themselves in his power into a single francophone battalion. Out of some 33,000 men who sailed for Europe in the First Contingent on October 3, 1914, only 1,245 were French-speaking, and by the time the contingent reached France as the First Canadian Division, only one of its forty-eight infantry companies was French-speaking. French Canadians were profoundly unimpressed.

Out of personal conviction or self-interest, individual French Canadians tried to swim against the tide. Dr. Arthur Mignault of Montreal, for one, offered to contribute $50,000 toward raising a
French-speaking regiment. Borden’s government went along with the proposal, and Mignault’s efforts were blessed by Sir Wilfrid Laurier and a number of other French Canadian politicians. But it wasn’t quite enough. When the 22nd Battalion sailed from Quebec in 1915 with the Second Contingent, it had to be brought up to strength by drafting in French Canadian recruits from other units raised in Quebec.

But it wasn’t just the French Canadians who were reluctant. Right from the start, there were very big differences in the rate of volunteering: far more volunteers came from English-speaking areas than French, of course, but also more from the West than the East, and more from the rootless cities, where the newspapers had the greatest influence, than from the settled rural areas. In fact, native-born Canadians of every sort, apart from the very young, the adventurous and the economically desperate, seemed somewhat reluctant to go and fight the Germans.

At the start, too, it was easy to find socially acceptable reasons not to volunteer. In 1914, for example, farmers still needed their children’s labour, and since Britain depended heavily on Canadian agricultural products, they could always argue that their sons were more valuable to the war effort at home. And if all else failed, you could pretend you wanted to enlist and then get your mother to write you a note. In the early days of the war, volunteers would be turned away if their wives or mothers wrote a letter proving that their menfolk were needed at home.

But many Canadian women, blinded by selfishness, did not want their husbands and sons killed in order to protect Canada’s “independence.” Despite all the public oratory and flag waving, the imperialist
Montreal Star
noted with some dismay on August 10 that only 20 percent of the volunteers so far were Canadian-born. A month later the
Canadian Military Gazette
somewhat peevishly complained that there were 800,000 men eligible for military service in the country, so there should have been hundreds of thousands volunteering. There weren’t. In the Toronto area one regiment, the Mississauga Horse, was said to have only one native Canadian for every six or eight British-born volunteers. Montreal couldn’t meet its quota for the First Contingent at all and the difference had to be made up with men from Winnipeg and the West. And the pro-British establishment’s fears were correct: a large majority of those who joined the First Contingent were not Canadian-born.

George Turner survived the trenches and came back a devout Canadian (there’s nothing like a war for moulding a national identity), but people like him formed a very high proportion of Canada’s volunteers, especially in the early years. In fact, during the three years to October 1917, when all enlistments were voluntary, 49 percent of the people who joined the Canadian forces were British-born immigrants, although they were only 11 percent of the population. And that was why the West bore such a huge burden in the war. In 1914 there were barely a million and a half people in the four western provinces, a mere fifth of Canada’s total population, but almost two-fifths of the soldiers who served overseas came from the West: that was where the bulk of the recent British immigration had gone, so that was where the volunteers were.

The most extreme case was Alberta, which had been settled almost entirely during the preceding fifteen years. In the first year of the war Alberta contributed 22,325 men to the Canadian army (in addition to 5,600 British, French and Belgian reservists who went back to fight for the Old Country in its own army), out of a total population of less than half a million. From the Edmonton city area alone, seven thousand men enlisted, and the little town of Strathmore, east of Calgary, gained the distinction of being the most patriotic town in Canada. There,
every
eligible man joined the army in the fall of 1914, except one—and he went as soon as the harvest was over. But then Strathmore had only been settled nine years before, and most of the settlers were from Britain.

There was, in fact, a fairly consistent pattern in the rate of volunteering in Canada, a curve sloping down from west to east. The longer a region had been settled, the more aware people were of their own separate identity and interests as Canadians, and the less they tended to see Britain’s war as their own (however many flags they waved). The split between immigrants and native-born was very noticeable in a town like Paris, Ontario, where just about half the population was Canadian-born, while the remainder were English immigrants attracted by the booming textile industry there. By mid-1915 the English-born in the town were openly accusing the Canadian-born of being “slackers.” One person wrote to the local paper:

The clergymen of the Paris Ministerial Association did their best, organizing a great public rally as part of an approach that became known as “coercive recruiting”: coercion by public opinion. The drums banged, the buglers played, and the speech makers orated, but only twenty-eight more recruits marched up to the platform “as though at a revival meeting,” to be sent off with the usual “crisp 10-dollar bill” and a parcel of comforts from the Ladies’ Patriotic League.

Further east in the Maritimes, where there were virtually no recent English immigrants, recruiting was even harder.

Prince Edward Islanders might be “Loyalist” by tradition, but by 1914 they had been there long enough to notice which continent they lived in, and they did a lot less volunteering than British Columbians. As for the one big dip in the curve, Quebec—as Laurier said in Parliament,
defending the French Canadians’ evident reluctance to die for Britain: “Enlistment [varies inversely] with the length of time that the men have been in the country.… French Canadians … have been longer in the country than any other class of the community.”

After three months of training in England in the winter mud of Salisbury Plain, the Canadians began to move to France. The first unit to enter the trenches, in January 1915, was “Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry” (named after the daughter of the governor general). It was a special battalion made up mainly of ex-British regulars and Canadian veterans of the Boer War, which had been raised and equipped with $100,000 donated by Captain A. Hamilton Gault, a Montreal millionaire and militia officer who had fought in South Africa. (Gault served in France with the battalion himself, and eventually lost a leg in battle.) But even the large number of experienced soldiers in the PPCLI were at a loss for how to deal with this very new kind of battlefield, with its barbed wire and machine guns and crushing artillery barrages.

During the wettest English winter in living memory, the Canadian troops had already got rid of some of the more useless bits of equipment foisted on them by the political patronage that infested the Canadian militia organization (such as boots that disintegrated in the wet). But when the battalions of the First Canadian Division began to cross over to France in mid-February, their men were still carrying the Ross rifles that were Sam Hughes’s pride and joy. He’d been warned by the British army that they were excellent target rifles but useless for sustained fire in combat—but nobody could ever tell Sam Hughes anything. The Canadians first saw heavy fighting at Ypres in March: