True Patriot Love (10 page)

Through 1916 and 1917, William Grant lived through a moment of truth about the Canadian identity that his father would never have imagined possible. The Grants—and the Parkins—believed that loyalty to empire was at the core of being Canadian. The war in Europe now pulled the braided strands of loyalty to country and empire apart. French Canada simply did not see its identity in imperial terms. William was honest enough to acknowledge this. Ontario Orangemen might castigate the Québécois for cowardice, but Grant knew this was absurd and an evasion of the real issue: Could the empire keep demanding such sacrifice of its sons and daughters?

As for himself, whatever inner doubts began to prey, he knew his duty. When his turn came and his battalion was shipped to England for final training before dispatch to the front, he was ready to go. We shall soon be together, he told Maude, and “I shall see Miss Alison Grant,” the daughter he had not yet held in his arms. On arrival in England, however, there was little home leave. Instead, his days were filled with route marching through the Hampshire lanes and with weapons training, learning how to operate the Mills bomb, the hand grenade of its time, and mastering the operation of his pistol, his trench shovel and, the most fearsome instrument of all, the gas mask.

When he came home to see the family at Goring-on-Thames, he was in the uniform of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. The whole family was on a war
footing. Maude’s brother, Raleigh, only eighteen, was serving at Gallipoli. He would soon be wounded and invalided home. Alice Parkin—Lal, as she was known— had returned to Canada to marry William’s old pupil Vincent Massey, who was in a regiment in Toronto.

On June 1, 1916, the British launched the greatest single offensive of the war at the Somme. The thunder of the guns was heard at various places along the English coastline. In a single day, great regiments of the empire— the Newfoundland Regiment, the Ulster Regiment—were cut to pieces by German machine-gun fire or counter-barrage as they crossed no man’s land. Grant made the crossing to France, landing at Le Havre in early August, headed for the St. Eloi salient in Flanders.

His first impression of France was peaceful: the women on the quays throwing loaves of bread up to the Canadian soldiers on the troopships and then holding out their aprons to catch the coins thrown down in payment. At the train stations, as the soldiers were being ferried up to the front, children ran up and down the platforms shouting
“Biscuit! Biscuit!”
At another stop, he had time to get out, stretch his legs, walk to a bookshop and buy a copy of Montesquieu’s
Persian Letters
—soothing medicine for a quaking heart. In a letter to Maude, he said he could not tell her where he was exactly, because of wartime censorship—though it was near St. Eloi—but he noted in passing how close England was, just across the Channel. He wondered whether she could
hear the guns. As he drew closer, he could hear the thunder and rattle, the cascades and clouds of smoke rising in the sky. The troop trains passed burned-out houses with flattened roofs, the tiles scattered along the tracks. Spotter planes droned overhead, leaving behind white plumes in the August sky. At the front itself, he caught his first glimpse of the awe-inspiring devastation of the St. Eloi craters, a lunar landscape of terrible destruction caused by artillery bombardment.

As they left the trains and approached the reserve trenches behind the main lines, he ran into old friends from Queen’s or Upper Canada College or Kingston or Toronto and saw in their faces what awaited him. He heard brave men confess a shameful desire for a “blighty,” some flesh wound that would allow them out of the charnel house of battle and a safe passage home. He learned that an old friend had been shot through the stomach two days before and had died in agony.

His unit, the 59th battalion of the 20th regiment of the Second Canadian Division of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, was joining men who had been fighting, on and off, since 1915. They had been gassed and had lost wave after wave of men, and hatred of the Germans had taken hold of some of the officers. The medical officer of the division, for example, wrote in his daily reports, in the sector of the front where Grant was serving, that having seen men writhing in agony after a gas attack,
he believed the Canadians should take no more prisoners. “Extermination is the only remedy,” he wrote.

Into this cauldron of fear and violence was thrown a sensitive, middle-aged professor, equipped with a gas mask, a pistol, a steel helmet and the determination to see it through. By day, he kept his and his men’s morale going. At night, when the shelling died down and he was able to write, head down in a dugout behind sandbags in the sodden and rat-infested trenches, he described to his wife the ground-shaking thump of the artillery, the rat-tat-tat of the machine guns and the sudden illumination of the Very flares overhead. In the middle of this infernal commotion, he blurted out, “Dearest, I yearn for you so, and for the babies and for peace and to cut the grass; and all the little homely things of home.”

He kept these desperate longings for safety and home under control. There was no choice: Close friends, nearby, were facing the same strain. His brother-in-law, Jim Macdonnell, already married to Maude’s sister Marjorie, was serving in the same salient as an artillery officer, and William went up to watch his battery fire forty-nine eighteen-pound shells in three minutes in an earth-shattering display. Afterward, when the guns were still, he reported to Maude, “we had much good talk, political, philosophical, military.” He was determined to sound calm and sanguine.

In the days that followed, he struggled to accustom himself to the nightmarish normality of life around him, reporting to Maude that he would wake, thinking he was still back in England at the training camp, and pick up his toothbrush from the nightstand and go out to wash his teeth, only to step over a covered body, shot through the head, on a stretcher, which would make him realize he was not in England at all.

After just four days to get his bearings, he and his platoon were ordered forward to repair a parapet of trenches that had been knocked down by shellfire, giving the Germans an angle of fire into Canadian lines. Coolly, he drew Maude a picture of the parapet so that she could see what they were being asked to do. He crawled out through a hole in the parapet with another officer and, keeping their heads down, they crawled into a listening post near the German lines. “We could hear Fritz working away behind his parapet about 60 yards off.” He could not shake the feeling of the unreality of it all, as if the front were just the firing range at the base back home, but the machine-gun fire sweeping over his head was real enough. The sortie was a success: the parapet was repaired and his superiors congratulated him for a successful mission. He wrote Maude to say that he was hopeful of a battlefield promotion. He had been at the front a week.

The next letter Maude received was not in his hand, but in the hand of a battlefield chaplain in a British dressing station behind the lines.

My dear Maude

I ought to write with my own hand but I am feeling so weak lying here day after day that our good Chaplain who has already written to you for me is going to be my amanuensis.

This is an Imperial Hospital. The one next to it is the Canadian.… We have had all sorts of celebrated visitors. The King and the little Prince were the first. The King smiled upon me graciously and I hope had a fellow feeling for one wounded by a fall from his horse; but seeing I was so weak that day he had the discretion not to speak.

I am not quite sure how my own accident occurred. I was galloping with a loose rein and I think the horse stepped into a shell hole, but as the ground over which I was riding is frequently traversed by spent bullets, one of these may have come in.

When Maude received this letter, she might have thought William would recover quickly. It was only a riding accident, after all. As letter followed letter, first in the handwriting of the chaplain, then in the disjointed scribbles of William himself, she realized that he had suffered serious injuries. His head and chest were in bandages. The horse
had been shot out from under him, and had rolled over him, crushing his upper body. He had broken his ribs and there was fluid in his lungs, and for some time both his heart and his liver gave the doctors concern. In the letters the chaplain continued to write on his behalf, William confessed that he was in pain, alone at night in a field hospital with the groans and cries of the wounded around him. He was to remain in the field hospital for two weeks until he was strong enough to be moved to a rear field hospital on the French coast. There George Parkin, using his connections, managed to visit him and reassure his daughter that her husband, though thin as a wraith, was going to pull through.

He was repatriated to Goring to recuperate. Through the autumn of 1916, he was at home with his wife and the little girls, Margaret, Charity and baby Alison. He was soon well enough to derive pleasure from the sight of Alison crawling rapidly and then, with the comic concentration of the very small, pulling herself up and standing at his knee. The doctors told him his lungs would not come right inside of three months, but by Christmas he was well enough to go up to London alone and to stay the night. He went up to see his publisher William Heinemann, who tempted him with heady visions of the profits to be made from a history of the empire. Grant turned him down. Indeed, he was never to write another book. Chapters, speeches, articles continued to come from his pen, but the war brought his scholarly writing career to a close.

On his unsteady first visit to London he went to Harrods, a superior department store, walking around dazed in the bright lights until a female floorwalker took pity on him—“Poor country cousin! Wounded hero if you prefer”—and piloted him to what he was looking for, the racks of military trench coats. By then, the first Zeppelin raids were terrifying London and the city was in blackout. He left the store and stumbled along the Brompton Road in darkness, bumping into strangers, feeling, as he said, “weird and eerie.” In the darkened streets, he felt bloodlust rise within him. If he had to endure a month in the blackout, he told Maude, he would “revert to the ape man or the cave-dweller and suddenly club some inoffensive person over the head for sheer lust of lawlessness and desire of blood.” The tone is jaunty, but the feeling is taut and strained. It was to take him much longer to recover than he imagined.

He might well have asked to be sent home to Canada. He was forty-four years old. He had been wounded. He had done his duty. But the whole idea was out of the question. At home in Toronto, Vincent Massey, his brother-in-law, was criticized behind his back for rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel without serving in France. William insisted on returning to his unit and, by January 1917, was at a training camp in Hampshire, preparing more boys for their ordeal at the front. Indeed, in the spring of 1917, he was back in France, delivering a unit for service to the front lines, though he never saw combat again.

His own unit, the 20th (Central Ontario) battalion, had moved from the St. Eloi salient up to the base of Vimy Ridge, and between the 9th and 12th of April 1917, it was among the units that made the awe-inspiring ascent of the ridge under fire, capturing a dominating position that had defied the best efforts of other Allied units. Grant would have known many of the men who fought at Vimy—one of his closest friends died there—and he followed the course of events from the Hampshire camp, reporting to his wife on the evening of the 10th of April, “isn’t the news from France terrible and splendid?” His battalion was in the thick of the action and its men won eighteen battle honours and two Victoria Crosses in the course of the war. No Canadian unit had a prouder record of service. Eight hundred and fifty-five of the men that Grant trained with, and briefly fought with, never came home.

Ypres, Vimy, Passchendaele. In the horror of these places, Canada’s soldiers earned their country its final independence from the British Empire. At the Imperial War Conference of 1917, Canada was recognized as one of the “autonomous nations of the Imperial Commonwealth,” and its independent voice in war councils, as a major contributor of men and munitions, was affirmed.

Canadians like Grant entered World War I as loyal colonials. Having fought for the mother country, they slowly realized they were actually fighting for Canada, for its right to be considered a sovereign nation. In the
cauldron of war, a new identity was born and an old identity died away. Imperial federation, the ideal for which William’s father and his father-in-law gave all their energy, did not survive World War I. In the Imperial conferences of 1926 and in the Statute of Westminster of 1931, Canada secured the right to conduct a fully independent foreign policy and the right to decide for itself whether it would ever be at war again.

By the summer of 1917, William, still in the training camp in Hampshire, received an intriguing offer. Through the intermediary of Vincent Massey, he was offered the principalship of Upper Canada College. At first he told Massey that he couldn’t take up the offer until the war was over. In late October, General R.E.W. Turner released him from duty. He had done his part. In November he sailed for Canada, and, in December 1917, having driven a hard bargain with the board of governors—requiring sales of college land in order to boost masters’ salaries, plus a substantial salary for himself and housing—he accepted. Maude and the children arrived after him.

Upper Canada College still had its reputation, but by 1917 it was in debt and in decline. Before the war, Grant might have wondered whether he was up to the challenge. But the war had given him confidence. The school turned out to be the place in which he found his true vocation. In his first speech on his installation in December 1917, he
made it clear that he was going to transform UCC, beginning with a determined attack on its habit of imitating British ways: “We are and must be a Canadian school and if to be so, we must in any way or in many ways depart from the Etonian tradition, then the break must be made.”