by Gwynne Dyer
The Canadian territory is nowhere exposed to the attacks of the belligerent nations. As an independent nation, Canada would today enjoy perfect security.… It is then the duty of England to defend Canada and not that of Canada to defend England.
Henri Bourassa, Le Devoir, September 8, 1914
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.
Q. Do you remember why you joined up?
Spirit of adventure, mostly, I think, at that time. Because I don’t think one knew, had any idea what was ahead, you know. And I think that was the only thing that interested me then, was to see the world.
Nursing Sister Mabel Rutherford, Toronto
Q. Did you feel at the time that there was any distinction between Canada and Great Britain?
No, no. The Empire was at stake.… They were peace-loving people, but the thing was on the barrel-head, and you almost unquestioningly said: “Well, if they need me, I’ll go.”
Ted Watt, Victoria, Royal Canadian Navy
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.
From time to time during the mobilization and training of the First Contingent at Valcartier, there were disturbing reports as to the conduct of the Minister of Militia at Valcartier. On September 16, the Governor-General reported to me that Hughes’ language to his officers had been violent and insulting.
Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden, Memoirs, vol. 1
Mr Borden is a most lovely fellow, as gentle-hearted as a girl.
Minister of Militia Sam Hughes, 1914
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 Fren
ch 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.
Our Canadian women should realise that their objections, unless made for good cause, are highly unpatriotic. The privilege of objection was granted to prevent abuse in enlistment by married men, but if Canada is to maintain her independence the Canadian soldier must do his duty and his wife should not restrain him from selfish motives.
Colonel E.W.B. Morrison, in a public protest, August 19, 1914
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.
I came from England, Folkestone, down in Kent. I came in ’12.
Q. And when did you join the army?
In ’14.
Q. Did you go overseas at once?
At once, yes, the First Contingent. We went down to Montreal and we shipped from Quebec—thirty-two boatloads. At that time, we were one of the biggest convoys that had ever crossed the Atlantic.
Q. Why did you join in ’14?
Well, I think it was, as I look back at it, genuine patriotism. Maybe I changed my mind afterwards, after we got there. But at the time it was genuine.
Q. But you’d only been in Canada two years.
Two years, yes. So I was looking at it probably from an English point of view.
George Turner, Edmonton, Canadian Army
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.
Yes, I was at the station, because l can remember how far they leaned out of the windows, waving to the people. And the way the mothers and the wives tried to clasp their hands as they went, as the train drew out very slowly, and this lament going on in the background: “Will ye no’ come back again?”
Naomi Radford, Edmonton
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.
I remember the start of it. I remember when they assassinated the Archduke. And I remember all the boys around, you know, joining up—the older ones.
There were an awful lot of people from the town went.… My people were all very patriotic about the whole thing, and that. But I don’t think anyone expected it to go on as long as it did. I think, you know, in those days people thought the British Empire was pretty well invincible.
Serres Sadler, Strathmore, Alberta (too young for the First World War, so he went next time)
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:
In the present great war for the freedom of our beloved Empire, it behooves us in Canada to spring up from this drowsy slumbering attitude that the Canadian born are assuming towards our Motherland.… What is our little town of Paris doing in its share to win from the uncivilized, barbarous Hun? They, if we are beaten in this war, would come over from the United States and Germany in their millions, to take everything over from a pin to our federal government.
If the Germans are victorious, the very first thing they would do would be to take over Canada.… They would fill every city, town and village, and hold drunken, debauching orgies, in celebrating their victory, and our women and children would be the victims of these drunken, barbarous wretches.
Every minister of the church, every woman and girl, should do all they can to encourage all young men who have any grit in them to put on the King’s uniform.…
At the Forks of the Grand, vol. 2
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.
Must we say hereafter with bated breath that this is the city and Province of the Loyalist? Must we say at this momentous period, fraught with the gravest responsibilities ever cast upon British people, that there e
xists within the borders of this Province at least 5,000 men, physically fit, and from whom a bare 800 have displayed sufficient courage and patriotism to unsheath the sword in defence of their homes?
M. Frink, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, June 29, 1915
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.”
Q. Were you excited at the time, about going to war?
Oh yes, it was an adventure, you know. We were all a bunch of young people, eh? I was about the youngest in the crowd, but I took it as an adventure, you see. Because the story was that we’d never see the war, because it would be all over by the time we got to England.