Vimy (5 page)

The Scots were the first to arrive, men from the various Highland units who would form the new 16th Battalion, Canadian Scottish. They were unusual in that most were old soldiers. Three out of four had seen service in one of ninety-five different units, ranging from the Australian militia to the Chinese army. It was as well that they had had some military experience because the training at Valcartier was almost non-existent.

Physically, the camp itself was a remarkable accomplishment. In less than a month this wretched piece of bush land, bisected by the Jacques Cartier River, had been transformed into a bustling military camp, complete with roads, water mains, railway sidings, stores, showers and movies for the troops, three miles of rifle range, and twenty-eight thousand feet of drain pipe.

There was only one problem: nobody seemed to know from day to day what was going on. There was little time for training, and the organization of the troops was chaotic; after all, the men had poured in from some two hundred militia units. Every officer was kept in doubt as to whether or not he would go overseas. One battalion had three lieutenant-colonels on strength; another had four prospective seconds-in-command and only one horse for all. A third battalion arrived fifteen hundred strong and was broken up for reinforcements. Still another turned up with eleven officers and only fourteen rank and file. One adjutant who suddenly found himself without a staff had to type out orders himself and in doing so got the carbon paper reversed. His orders could be deciphered only by holding them before a mirror.

Some of the volunteers’ early enthusiasm was badly shaken at Valcartier and not just because of the inadequate tents, the lack of greatcoats, or the incredible mix-up of stores and equipment. It was Sam Hughes himself who helped shatter morale among all ranks but especially among the officers.

As one of them noted, most of their time seemed to be taken up listening to Hughes, sitting on his horse, haranguing the troops and berating their officers. That was, of course, an exaggeration. Yet that image-the posturing figure in the red-tabbed uniform, the chill blue eyes, the hard, square jaw, the pompous phrases-was one that would remain with them and, in later years, symbolize Valcartier.

For Valcartier was Hughes’s creation, a memorial to his single-minded ability to get things done and to the personal idiocies and imbecilities that forced the nation’s leaders to question his sanity. From the Governor General, Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, on down the consensus was that Hughes was mentally unbalanced – “off his base,” to use Prince Arthur’s phrase. Borden’s deputy, Sir George Foster, believed it. “There is only one feeling about Sam. That he is crazy,” he wrote in his diary on September 22. Claude MacDonell, a prominent Tory M.P., believed it. “The man is insane,” he told Borden in November. Joseph Flavelle, a leading financier who encountered Hughes in 1916, believed it. Hughes, he concluded, was “mentally unbalanced with the low cunning and cleverness often associated with the insane.” And Borden himself believed it. In his memoirs he described Hughes’s conduct and speeches as “so eccentric as to justify the conclusion that his mind was unbalanced.”

By mid-September, 1914, the Prime Minister was receiving “astonishing reports as to Hughes’s language and conduct” at Valcartier. Borden’s informants were impeccable; they included the Governor General himself. The King’s son felt it necessary to tell the Prime Minister that Hughes’s language to his own officers in front of the troops was “violent and insulting” and that they were “generally enraged.”

It boggles the mind that this posturing and bigoted Orangeman, who ran the army as his own personal fiefdom, should have remained in office for more than two years after the war began, insulting everybody from the King’s representative to the entire French-Canadian community (and thereby exacerbating a widening split in the country that would lead, after Vimy, to a major national crisis).

Why didn’t Borden fire him? The blunt answer is that Hughes scared him silly. The mild and courteous prime minister couldn’t summon up the courage to have it out with a Tory stalwart who bullied, blustered, lied, and bluffed his way out of the tightest corner. Hughes fought back at the slightest reproof with long, vituperative letters of self-vindication refusing ever to apologize for his sins, announcing that he was “loved by millions” and comparing his critics to yelping puppy dogs vainly chasing an express train.

He insulted everybody from the secretary of the Toronto Humane Society to the Anglican Bishop of Montreal. When the Bishop complained about the lack of Anglican padres in the forces, Hughes unleashed a string of profanity at him. When the animal lover inquired about the mistreatment of horses at Valcartier, Hughes called him a damn liar and physically ejected him from his office.

This was the man, in charge of the nation’s military defences since 1911, who announced blandly at the war’s outset that he could personally raise forty divisions to fight the Germans, who wore his uniform to cabinet meetings and exclaimed that if the war wasn’t over by spring he would take the field himself, a prospect that terrified and appalled his colleagues.

It is a democratic tradition that the military should always be under civilian control and that generals should have no politics. The problem was that in Hughes’s case there was no such division. He had made himself a lieutenant-colonel in the militia and after a few months had promoted himself to major-general. As such he ran the army and thought nothing of promoting his political friends as honorary colonels.

He could not abide being wrong, for his ego was monumental. Encountering an officer on leave he mistakenly addressed him as captain and when told the man was only a lieutenant promoted him on the spot. “Sir, I know what I’m talking about,” said Hughes. He was out of line, of course: politicians can’t promote officers, but then Hughes was always out of line. He paid no more attention to military etiquette than he did to cabinet solidarity. He broke the rule that officers should never be dressed down in front of their troops. “Pipe up, you little bugger, or get out of the service!” he shouted at one who spoke too quietly. He created new battalions, scrapped old ones, moved others about like puppets, decided who would go overseas with the first contingent, who would stay behind.

He hated the British Army and especially the permanent force, whom he referred to publicly as a bunch of barroom loafers. He had been a staunch militia man since the days of the Fenian raids. He’d run afoul of the British brass hats in the South African War and felt aggrieved because he hadn’t been awarded the Victoria Cross-indeed, he seems to have believed that he should have had
two
V.C.s. He refused to take any advice from the regulars and, in his laudable but misplaced nationalism, was convinced that the untrained Canadians were better than their seasoned British counterparts. He publicly told one man who wore four decorations on his chest that it would be a crime to allow him to lead men to the front.

Hughes could not stand being under the thumb of the British. He would later help to lever the British commander of the 1st Division, and later of the Canadian Corps, out of his job. Lieutenant-General Sir Edwin Alderson was a hero of the South African War but no match for Hughes, who shot off a “poisonous telegram” (in the words of the CPR’s Thomas Shaughnessy) attacking the new divisional leader and suggesting that it would be better if he himself took command. The insult was aggravated by the fact that the telegram, which went to his London agent, Colonel John Wallace Carson, was not sent in code.

In Hughes’s eyes the British Dominions should be equal partners with the United Kingdom, in no way subservient one to the other. It would be almost two decades before this autonomy was enshrined in the Statute of Westminster. In that sense, Hughes was a man ahead of his time-but only in that sense. Yet when Hughes is assessed these sentiments have to be taken into account and weighed against the mountain of gaucheries, barbarities, vulgarities, and blunders that have made him the laughing-stock of history. Hughes was an impossible man; yet without his single-minded and often belligerent posturing it is doubtful whether the Canadian Corps would have come into being as a united national force to fight and win the Battle of Vimy Ridge.

He must also bear most of the burden for the fact that the first contingent left Canada without any real training. Hughes’s own military philosophy was antediluvian and his refusal to listen to the regular British staff officers in Canada was tragic. He had no use for the Royal Flying Corps – didn’t believe that airplanes had any military value – and his personal tactics seemed to hark back to Waterloo. A group of the Governor General’s Bodyguards was being taught drill at Valcartier one day when Hughes, resplendent in red tabs and on horseback, arrived with an escort of cavalry, lances poised (“He’s not entitled to that,” one old soldier whispered). Hughes wheeled his horse, turned to the troops, and cried: “Form square!” The men looked at him blankly. The manoeuvre had long since been struck from the training manual, yet nothing would do but that the corporal in charge must shuffle his men around and get them kneeling with bayonets fixed.

“Now,” rapped Hughes, looking straight at Private Frank Yates. “What do you do after that?”

Yates looked at him blankly.

The corporal kicked Yates in the rear and whispered: “Unload.”

“Unload, sir,” said Yates, and Hughes seemed satisfied.

Later that night Yates and the others discussed the incident. “Good God,” said one. “What sort of army are we in?”

Trained or not, the first contingent was ready to leave for England early in October of 1914. Hughes was convinced against all evidence that the Canadians were fighting fit. Sitting astride his horse, addressing the men on the eve of their departure overseas, he launched into a speech, later damned by Borden as “flamboyant and grandiloquent,” that was clearly based on Napoleon’s famous address to the armies of Italy. “Soldiers!” cried Hughes. “The world regards you as a marvel.… Within six weeks you were at your homes, peaceful Canadian citizens.… Today [you] are as fine a body-Officers and Men-as ever faced a foe.…”

This was laying it on pretty thick. There was no evidence that the world had any regard for these eager but innocent young Canadians in their ill-fitting uniforms and badly made army boots. But there was much more, for Hughes went on and on, reeling off a long list of his accomplishments at Valcartier, announcing that there would be “no faltering or temporizing” (whatever that meant) and praising the “indomitable spirit” with which they would “triumph over the common enemy of humanity.”

At one point, to the bafflement and astonishment of the troops, Hughes broke into a long stream of sentimental poetry before telling them the one thing they didn’t want to hear: that some would never return. No matter: “The soldier going down in the cause of freedom never dies. Immortality is his. What recks he whether his resting place may be bedecked with the golden lilies of France or amid the vine clad hills of the Rhine? The principles for which you strive are eternal.”

Even in that era of purple oratory this was too much. Hughes had expected the plaudits of the nation. Instead, all he got was merriment. The Prime Minister put it concisely enough in his diary that same evening. “Everybody laughing at Sam’s address,” he wrote.

But now, to his dismay, Borden found that Hughes was determined to accompany the first contingent to Britain. The Governor General was as much opposed to that as the Prime Minister. The prospect of the gauche and posturing minister loose among the stiff-necked and proper English sent shivers down their spines. Hughes would be seen as representing the Canadian government when, in fact, he rarely bothered to check with anybody to avoid committing a gaffe.

Yet Hughes had every reason to want to shake up the British. He was convinced, rightly, that Lord Kitchener wanted to separate the Canadian battalions and dovetail them into the regular British forces. If that happened the Canadian identity would be lost, swallowed up in an ocean of Tommy Atkinses.

In the end he got his way, but not before he had, in his fashion, arranged for the embarkation of the troops. He refused to allow anybody but himself to organize this task and, in a speech a few weeks later, claimed that if it hadn’t been for him, the entire convoy of thirty ships might have been sunk by German submarines. Modesty was never one of Hughes’s failings.

In fact, the embarkation had been badly muddled. In the words of Colonel J.F.C. Fuller, who handled the Southampton end, one of the transports, S.S.
Manhattan
, “closely resembled a Noah’s Ark.” Scores of officers and men, having missed the ships they were supposed to sail in, simply climbed aboard the
Manhattan
, whose holds were already jammed with baggage that had arrived late. To Fuller’s absolute bafflement, some units actually disappeared and others were created while at sea. One infantry battalion, for example, finding time heavy on its hands, looted the
Manhattan’s
hold, discovered several cases of spurs, and arrived in England as an untraceable cavalry regiment.

Thus did the vanguard of the Canadian Corps arrive on British shores. If somebody had told Fuller that these same men would form the nucleus of the small force that gave Great Britain its first victory of the war, one might have pardoned him for smiling.

Hughes was already in London. He did not travel with the contingent but, having seen the troops off, boarded a fast liner and reached England ahead of the soldiers. There, resplendent in his tailored whipcord and red tabs, he headed for the War Office to beard Lord Kitchener in his den.

Only a man of Hughes’s temperament and ego could have stood up to the terrifying victor of Khartoum, whose steel blue eyes and monstrous moustache dominated the recruiting posters in London. Kitchener had already overruled Hughes’s three suggestions for a Canadian commander, appointing instead his own choice, General Alderson. Now he proposed to take complete control of the Canadians.

Kitchener talked to the Canadian like a stern uncle reproving an errant youth.