The Massey Murder (31 page)

In the early days of the month, there was no large-scale Allied offensive, so casualties were intermittent, but the
Globe
began to list the dead and wounded on its front page. “Private Nugent of Toronto Wounded,” read a sober headline on March 1. “Official Casualty List Shows The First Expeditionary Force Has Been Under Fire. No Particulars Are Given.”

The
Evening Telegram
rang a different note in its war coverage: it echoed the euphoria of the “Britishers” at Carrie’s trial. “Canucks’ Warm Reception,” read the newspaper’s March 1 headline. “Union Jacks All Over.” The article quoted a letter from Percy Buttery, a former reporter from the
Hamilton Spectator
. Percy was still elated by the adventure. “We met with a great reception [from the French] and it was evident that the Dominion troops had established themselves in the affections of the French people, particularly the female portion thereof.” For families left in neighbourhoods like Cabbagetown and Islington, Percy Buttery’s cheerful account was a reassuring boost to Imperial triumphalism.

But even the jingoistic
Tely
couldn’t erase the horrors. Percy’s letter went on to mention, “We can hear the daily booming of the guns, while at night rockets are used by both sides … In the very field in which our horses are now picketed, nineteen Germans are buried and large numbers of others are in different places round about.” A few days later,
Tely
readers found in their papers an alarming letter from an English soldier to his brother in Toronto. “You cannot realize how it feels to have the shrapnel bursting in our trenches and whizzing past our heads. I have been hit three times … Our battalion has lost three hundred and twenty men in ten weeks out of fourteen hundred.”

In the field, Canadian soldiers kept their spirits up with songs like “Mademoiselle from Armentières,” “Keep Your Head Down, Fritzie Boy,” and “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty.” Their first major engagement occurred on March 10, when they were on the flank of a large attack by British and Indian troops at a small village called Neuve-Chapelle. For three hours, the Canadians kept up a heavy rate of fire from their trenches against the German trenches only two hundred feet away. The Canadians lost a hundred men: more worrying, several soldiers complained that their Canadian-made Ross rifles had jammed during the rapid-firing exercise. But Neuve-Chapelle was merely a preliminary taste of battle
horrors: the Canadian Division was soon moved into the Ypres Salient. Now Canadians were firmly on the front lines, sandwiched between a British division to the right and an Algerian division to the left, and with the medieval market town of Ypres behind them.

Nervous anticipation of German brutality proved justified on April 22, when the Germans began pounding the city of Ypres with enormous shells from large-calibre siege guns. Then a menacing green cloud seeped out from enemy lines. The gas cloud was formed from 160 tonnes of chlorine liquid, released from canisters via rubber hoses. The Allies had been warned that the Germans planned to use poison gas, but nobody knew exactly what kind. Once the cloud drifted into Allied trenches, its true effects were obvious. It smothered the Algerian line first, and soon Algerian soldiers were stumbling away from the front, choking, screaming, and dying of asphyxiation. The Canadians missed the full brunt of the gas cloud and fought on, trying to fill the gap on their left flank, even as the poisonous fumes triggered streaming eyes and hacking coughs. “Piss on your handkerchiefs and tie them over your faces,” yelled an officer at George Bell, a young Canadian soldier. Those who didn’t use handkerchiefs or strips from their puttees “rolled about, gasping for breath.” Bell’s comrades fought for two solid days “with no sleep, not even a chance to nod, feeling that every minute is our last, and with nothing to eat or drink.”

News of the battle that came to be called “Second Ypres,” and this horrific new weapon, appeared in Toronto newspapers a couple of days later. At first, the extraordinary courage of Canadian soldiers was treated with enthusiasm. “This contingent, out-numbered and forced to give way, covered themselves with glory and apparently saved the day,” commented the
Star
on April 24. The
Globe
was equally enthusiastic: “Every single evening newspaper [in London] contains the word ‘Canada.’” But bravery came at tremendous cost. Two hundred officers (one in six from Toronto) and almost six thousand other
ranks were killed, wounded, or missing—almost one-third of the total Canadian Division. Colonel Denison lost both a nephew and a grandson in the terrible mayhem—among the dead were thirty-six-year-old Lance Corporal Edgar Denison of the 16th Battalion (Canadian Scottish Regiment), and twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Alexander Kirkpatrick of the 3rd Battalion CEF. It is likely that this was the battle in which Carrie’s sweetheart fell, too. He would almost certainly have been at the front, along with other youngsters who had once demonstrated their marksmanship at the shooting gallery on Toronto Island.

Back home, spring had finally arrived: magnolia trees in Rosedale backyards bloomed, chestnut trees along University Avenue were in bud, and the days were lengthening. But the families crowded outside newspaper offices on King Street, waiting for casualty lists to be posted, were filled with feverish anxiety and dread. Week after week, in Anglican churches throughout the city, organists led the congregation in the hymn “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”

Second Ypres was only the beginning, and for the next three and a half years the war roared on like a pitiless meat grinder. Canadian troops were involved in the battles of Festubert (May 1915), Givenchy (mid-June 1915), St. Eloi Craters (April 1916), Mount Sorrel (June 1916), and Courcelette (September 1916). After months of anxious speculation, the Americans finally entered the war in April 1917, but the carnage continued. Each engagement spawned its own grim casualty list; the five-and-a-half-month Battle of the Somme, conducted in a slough of clinging, caramel-coloured mud, was a glimpse of hell for the troops. According to a French corporal, the battlefield “resembled in places a rubbish dump in which there had accumulated shreds of clothing, smashed weapons, shattered helmets, rotting rations, bleached bones and putrescent flesh.” Back home, power brokers within Ottawa and Toronto were unnerved by the erratic behaviour of Sir Sam Hughes, the man who had run Canada’s war effort for the first
two and a half years as minister of militia and defence. The famous Canadian trenching tool invented by Ena MacAdam, Hughes’s secretary, proved useless, as did the boots he had ordered from Canadian factories and the Ross rifle with which he had insisted that Canadian troops be equipped. Yet the Canadian soldiers gradually established a battlefield reputation as “elite shock troops,” as Great War historian Tim Cook has put it, and the British High Command repeatedly turned to them to deliver victory.

In public, most Canadians clung to the belief that they were involved in an Imperial crusade against evil, that the hideous sacrifice of lives was justified, and that victory was just around the corner. At a giant rally in Massey Hall in January 1917, hundreds of Torontonians celebrated a Patriotic Fund drive that had yielded an astonishing $3.2 million (about $64 million in today’s currency)—an average of nearly ten dollars for every man, woman, and child. The
World
caught the mood: “For sheer patriotic, selfless, spontaneous, exuberant enthusiasm, … there never has been such another meeting in Toronto … They sang ‘Jolly Good Fellow,’ whenever they got the chance, and ‘God Save the King,’ ‘Rule Britannia,’ ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ …” For this audience, links to the mother country had never felt closer. The shared euphoria at such crowded occasions was similar to the mood two years earlier, in the City Hall courtroom when Carrie Davies was acquitted.

Carrie herself, however, had effectively disappeared. Who cared about the timid young woman who had shot a ne ‘er-do-well on Walmer Road, when real heroes were dying in France? The
Evening Telegram
had got everything it wanted out of her story, and Archie Fisher had moved on to other scandals.

Toronto men of all social classes continued to sign up. Two of Colonel George Denison’s sons volunteered. Bert Massey’s cousin Vincent Massey was in uniform by 1916, although he never went
overseas: he served as a staff officer in Canada and ultimately worked for the war cabinet in Ottawa. Bert Massey’s nephew Arnold, son of Arthur and Mary Ethel Massey, volunteered for the Canadian Field Artillery in 1916, when he was nineteen, and after training in England he served in the Royal Naval Air Service.

However, rousing public choruses of Imperial solidarity could not drown out private grief: the shocking slaughter and grim hopelessness of trench warfare ate away at the romantic view of warfare as a stage for gallantry and heroism. In April 1917, nearly 11,000 Canadians were mown down (3,598 fatally) over the course of the four-day battle at Vimy Ridge. Families lived in dread of the knock on the door and the telegram that began, “Regret to inform …” Mothers realized they would be raising their children alone. Farmers’ wives wondered who would help them keep the farms going. Single women looked around them and realized that, with a whole generation of young men lost, they themselves would be left adrift, their traditional dreams of marriage and children out of reach forever. They were condemned to lives as “spinsters” or “old maids”—the derogatory labels routinely applied to unattached women.

A new note of Canadian nationalism seeped into the thinking of both soldiers and politicians. In France, the commander of the Canadian Corps after June 1917, Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Currie, was ordered by General Haig, the British commander-in-chief, to move his divisions north to fight in the Passchendaele campaign. Currie did not trust Haig’s strategic judgment and objected to his foolhardy battle plan. Haig insisted on sticking to the plan, although Currie managed to secure additional heavy guns to support his troops. Against the odds, the Canadian Corps captured what was left of the ridge and established a reputation within the German military command as the Allies’ most effective troops. But once again, the cost in lives was appalling: 16,041 casualties, including 3,042 killed.

By now, even the mild-mannered Canadian prime minister had had enough. Sir Robert Borden was no longer prepared to give unquestioned deference to the mother country’s needs and was increasingly exasperated by the lack of Canadian input into British military strategy. Did Westminster regard colonials as simply cannon fodder in the desolate landscapes of northern France? Borden expressed Canadian frustration at a meeting of the Imperial War Cabinet in London in June 1918. After a furious description of the ineptitude of British generals, he strode across the room and announced that no more Canadian soldiers would cross the Atlantic if such incompetence continued. When peace came five months later, Borden insisted that Canada sign the Treaty of Versailles in her own right, and take her own seat at both the new League of Nations and the International Labour Organization.

The war had been transformational: a different country was emerging in the northern half of North America. Thousands of families had lost loved ones: more than sixty thousand Canadian soldiers, airmen, and nursing sisters were dead. Every third man in uniform had been mutilated in mind or body: every tenth man had been killed. Bert Massey’s half-brother, Lieutenant Clifton Manbank Horsey, was killed in 1916 at St. Eloi and was buried in a military cemetery in Belgium. George Taylor Denison Jr., the forty-eight-year-old son of Colonel George Denison, died on May 8, 1917, after being wounded a month earlier at Vimy Ridge. There was no sudden “Birth of a Nation” moment, as the troops went over the top at St. Eloi, or Vimy, or Passchendaele. There was no suggestion that Canada was still anything but the most loyal as well as the oldest dominion in the British Empire. But there was now daylight between Ottawa and Westminster.

People whose families had crossed the Atlantic from the British Isles began to rethink their identity and define themselves as “Canadians.” The survivors of the bloodbaths of the Somme or Vimy Ridge came home with a new pride in their own as well as the mother country.
Raw-boned Canadian lads, working alongside British troops as they tunnelled, charged, fired, bayonetted, or flew, had discovered that Canadians
were
different and were just as good on the battlefield as more experienced men. Harold Innis, who would become one of the country’s most renowned historians, wrote a thesis on “The Returned Soldier” while recovering in Surrey from wounds sustained at Vimy. He stammered out his personal mission and his burgeoning Canadian nationalism: “Work, work of brain and of brawn, co-operation, organization and determination to heal the sores … and to start again along the lines of sound national progress, is the hope of the Canadian people … that she may take her place among the nations of the world for the privilege of which her best blood had been shed.”

Even in Toronto, the centre of Canada’s Anglo-Celtic culture, a new generation began to feel the stirrings of a pro-Canadian sentiment. Such sentiment did not translate into greater tolerance of immigrants from non-British backgrounds: in August 1918, returned soldiers smashed fifteen restaurants in downtown Toronto that were suspected of employing enemy aliens rather than veterans. For seven days, there were repeated clashes between police and civilians, and although there were many arrests, most charges were dismissed. Nevertheless, the “Britishers” who had cheered the little girl from Sandy were now starting to define Canada as home and were eager to inject their own values into their country. They wanted a Canada where a wealthy elite could not expect unquestioning deference, and where men with diamond stick pins did not take advantage of eighteen-year-old servants.

At the same time, another seismic shift in attitudes was occurring close to the surface of Toronto society. For four years on the home front, women had played a vigorous and visible part in the war effort. In the
early months of the war, the first duty of women was to allow loved ones to serve the Empire, but that soon ramped up into a fever of knitting to provide soldiers with socks, gloves, and scarves. The Toronto Patriotic League reported: “Lonely women on farms are knitting long into the night. Society women take their knitting to theatres and concert halls. Everywhere women have got back to their needles.”