by Gwynne Dyer
Leslie Hudd, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canadian Army
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.
Of course you have read about the trenches in the papers. Well, our battalion has had four spells in them. Three or four days is usual. No charges made or repulsed, but we have had a number of casualties.…
Our trenches are from 75 to 120 yards from the German trenches. Wise lads, too. The first night in, they called out to know if we were Canadians. How are things on Hastings Street? They also sang an English song or two.
The English Tommies that were here last fall are the ones who had it bad. We have come to trenches all prepared and drained, and in some places, paved with boards, brush, galvanized iron or even bricks. There are dugouts built and floored with straw.
The cooking and smoking, with a little would-be witticisms with Fritzies across the way … while away the tedious hours.
Jairus Maus (Paris, Ontario) Enlisted in PPCLI in Vancouver, January 1915 At the Forks of the Grand, vol. 2
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:
How the Germans knew a bunch of green Canadians were going to take over this part of the Ypres front, I don’t know, but … they opened up on us, and that was our first baptism of fire as a unit.
So the troops on our right, the British, put up this rapid fire with their Lee-Enfields. They were so disciplined that it sounded like a hundred machine-guns going off at one time. So at our front, the Canadian front, we tried to do the same thing [starts to cry].
Q. What happened?
Well, the boys were fighting away there and trying to do the rapid fire, but you see the Ross rifle had a lock bolt with grooves in it. So it went all right for a while, but then we noticed that we couldn’t bring the bolt back. When the rifles got hot, they jammed.
So what did we do? ’Course we were under cover, eh? We’d sit up and try to use our foot to push the bolt down. That’s when it started. Over that rifle I bet we lost about 1500 or 2000 men either wounded or killed, just over that silly damn thing. It was a lovely target rifle, but as an active service rifle, no, no.
Leslie Hudd
I have been seeing a bit of real warfare recently. Three nights ago we charged and took a German trench.
Under the flare of rockets they put up, they sent a terrific rifle fire into us. But almost immediately on our reaching their trenches, they fled. Our Battalion, the 16th, was only supposed to be supporting another battalion, which was to do the charging, but a great many of our boys reached the trench as soon as any. When we were first told to take a German trench, my nerves were a bit jumpy, otherwise one is warmed up and excited and doesn’t care. But it was a sad, sad roll-call. Half or more of my chums were missing. Some, no doubt, will recover.
After getting through this bout alright, I was mug enough to volunteer yesterday morning to leave a trench for a building some distance off, where the cook had some soup for our boys, who needed something bad enough. The shell fire was heavier than I anticipated, and so I’ll have a little holiday.… One in my right forearm and two in my left leg, but all clean wounds, although my leg is broken.… In all probability, I will convalesce in England.
Jairus Maus, letter home of April 1915 At the Forks of the Grand, vol. 2
Maus left the line just before the Canadians came to be among the first troops in the world to experience a new horror. From the middle of April there had been persistent warnings that the Germans were going to use poison gas. There were reports of a German rush order in Ghent for twenty thousand mouth protectors “to protect men against the effects of asphyxiating gas,” and Belgian intelligence estimated that the attack would come on the front where the German 26th Reserve Corps were dug in. “All this gas business need not be taken seriously,” replied French headquarters. And it wasn’t.
Facing the German 26th Reserve Corps were colonial troops: Canadians of the First Division and Algerian troops of the French African Light Infantry. When the Germans released the greenish-yellow gas on 22 April, the Algerians fled and the Canadians had to stretch their line out to cover that part of the front, too.
Instead of being two or three men every two or three feet, we were one man to about four or five feet.… I was gassed, but you see, we had no idea what it was.
We saw this stuff coming over, it was sort of mist. The wind was blowing our way, towards the trenches. So next we knew it was gas, chlorine gas. The only thing we could do, we covered our mouths. So we took a piece of shirt, anything you could get, and wet on it. I don’t know if I should say how we wet on it, but we wetted it, anyway, and wrapped that around our faces, and we had to take a chance on our eyes.
Anyway, it worked some, but we lost a lot of men over that. It was hell, that gas.… We did what we could, and when we were taken from the trenches, we got a big name over in England over this.… The papers were full of what the great, brave Canadians … [cries].
Leslie Hudd
It was a screeching of shells, men falling on all sides, Frenchmen retreating in disorder, yelling all kinds of things we could not understand, until they saw our gallant boys in khaki advancing in one thin line at the double, and they rallied with shouts of “Brave Anglaise”.… We drove the Germans back, a few hundreds of Canadians against thousands of Germans. But I don’t think they knew there was only such a small number of us. It was getting dark … anyhow, we gained the situation and dug holes into the ground, and neither the Germans nor their terrible shelling could move us, and wasted out and tired as we were, doing without sleep and not much food, we stuck to them five days and nights, until we were relieved.… We have now got pads to put over our nostrils and mouth, ready for the poisonous gas that those German curs use.…
You would hardly know me now. I have aged quite a bit in looks, also in feelings, and got very thin. It is all with the continued hardships and nerve-racking things we have to endure. Well, dear mother, I will close, hoping I am alive to receive your answer to this letter.
John Carroll (Paris, Ontario), machine-gunner, 3rd Brigade, CEF
The 1st Canadian Division did all that was asked of it and finished with a desperate bayonet charge. But the cost was terrible. Hundreds of good, willing lads gave up their lives without a murmur. Personally, I suffered from a bullet wound in the right side of my body and two in my right leg. Those in my leg are healing fine, but the one through my body, of course, is not doing well.… I was lying on my side firing when I got the first bullet through my leg, followed shortly after by another in the right side, and a second in the leg.…
Ask Lorne to find out for me how Knill, Larin, Cullum and Murray are. Never saw any of them after the fight started, and am anxious about the fellows. I do hope that the P
aris boys come through alive, for it was terrible work.
I heard a good joke while lying on the road at Ypres. One of our stretcher bearers asked a severely wounded Irishman if there were many dead on the field, and he answered, “Sure, it’s alive with dead men.”
A.D. Fraser (Paris, Ontario), April 1915 (Napoleon Larin and A.E. Cullum were wounded, and Ivor Murray was dead. Fraser survived the war.)
The Canadians lost 6,341 men at Ypres, and two weeks later, at Festubert, they were asked to do it again. They were short of high-explosive shells and the map of the objective was printed upside down, so Brigadier-General Arthur Currie, the ranking Canadian officer, asked for a postponement of the attack. He was refused. The Canadians managed to advance six hundred yards and captured the eastern hedge of an orchard. Their casualties were 2,468.
Prime Minister Borden stood up in the House of Commons and said: “They have proved themselves equal to any troops in the world, and, in doing so, they have brought distinction and renown to the Dominion.” It was all true, but the gap in comprehension between those at home and those at the front was growing as wide as the Atlantic. Talbot Papineau (grandson of the leader of the 1837 rebellion), who was serving in Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, did not think in terms of distinction and renown any more:
I hate this murderous business. I have seen so much death—and brains and blood—marvellous human machines suddenly smashed like Humpty Dumpties. I have had a man in agony bite my finger when I tried to give him morphine. I have bound up a man without a face. I have tied a man’s foot to his knee when he told me to save his leg and knew nothing of the few helpless shreds that remained. He afterwards died.
I have stood by the body of a man bent backward over a shattered tree while blood dripped from his gaping head. I have seen a man apparently uninjured die from the shock of explosion as his elbow touched mine. Never shall I shoot duck again or draw a speckled trout to gasp in my basket—I would not wish to see the death of a spider.
Talbot Papineau letters, Public Archives of Canada
In early December 1915 Jairus Maus died of the “clean” wounds he had received at Ypres about seven months earlier while going for soup. His mother and sister, who had gone over to Britain to be with him, brought his body home to Paris, Ontario, for burial.
On the 9th. January [1916] the final evacuation took place off Cape Helles. Thirty-two of the Newfoundland Regiment were honoured as rear-guard to remain in the trenches, and rifles and flares continued to go off at intervals. But it was recognised that the element of surprise would not serve and the rear-guard was thought doomed. The Turks would be apt to take toll for their former napping. But they proved sportsmen.
Our men said they stood four ranks deep on a narrow strip of beach which could have been enfiladed from the heights with great slaughter. Not a shot was fired, however. The Turks had called across the hill the previous day: “Goodbye. We know you’re going. So are we. Good luck!” … They were a decent foe. They cared for British graves and there were no atrocities. Of the 32 [Newfoundlanders] who had been dedicated to an almost certain fate, all escaped.
Nursing Sister Mabel B. Clint, No. 1 Canadian Field Hospital, Lemnos (near Gallipoli), 1916. (Our Bit)
The traditional role of Newfoundland politics has been to make Canadian politics look good by comparison, and it positively shone in that role in the First World War. Not all of Sam Hughes’s pals profited directly from their work in recruiting and equipping the Canadian Expeditionary Force, although one of the honorary colonels, J. Wesley Allison (whose shady business activities were partly responsible for Hughes’s ultimate downfall), boasted publicly of the wonderful profits he had made in his dealings with the British government. In most cases, Canadian businessmen and politicians who exhorted other men to join up for the war (and sometimes spent their own money to help found new regiments) were not so much out for profit, but just aware that their efforts might be rewarded with British knighthoods, honours and distinctions, which still played a large part in social advancement in Canada at the time. Not one of them, however, could match the social-climbing ambitions and skills of Sir Edward Morris, the prime minister of Newfoundland.
Newfoundland was an independent country then, of course, but it had not had any military forces for almost a century. Nevertheless, on 7 August 1914 Prime Minister Morris sent a telegram to London offering an entire regiment for service overseas. Two days later London accepted Newfoundland’s offer. Morris and the British governor, Sir Basil Davidson, then created the Newfoundland Patriotic Association to raise, equip, and finance the contingents dispatched from Newfoundland. The governor made himself chairman of the association and controlled committee appointments: in effect, he directed Newfoundland’s war effort. It was a highly unusual arrangement for a self-governing dominion, but Morris needed the Governor’s support to stay in power, and Davidson needed an eminent Newfoundlander who was willing to trade colonial soldiers for imperial honours. As he explained in a dispatch to London in 1914:
The bulk of His Majesty’s subjects in Newfoundland had then been steeped in ease for hundreds of years and imbued with an instinctive aversion to war, albeit the bravest of people in their own seafaring conditions. Neither did they understand the causes which compelled His Majesty’s Government to declare war, nor did they consider themselves directly interested in the issue.
The larger part … were on the whole inclined—living in the misty atmosphere of past centuries—to side with the King of Prussia, as the champion of Protestantism, and they remembered France only as the traditional enemy. The old memories of the press-gang still lived in the outports, and the recollection of soldiering was that the wastrels of the hamlets enlisted for life and never returned home.
Sir Edward Morris, it seemed to the governor, was the man who could get past all that: an Irish Catholic politician who had prospered mightily by trimming his sails to catch the prevailing wind from Britain (he had a standing order in London for the latest guide to the British peerage), but who knew how to play the local game. And the war looked a lot like salvation to Morris: if he played along with Governor Davidson, he might be able to use the war as a stepping-stone to better things than Newfoundland politics.
So the Newfoundland Patriotic Association duly raised a contingent for overseas service, and the “First Five Hundred,” recruited mainly from St. John’s—baymen tended to be more doubtful about the whole enterprise—sailed for England in the steamship Florizel in October 1914. They then spent ten months training in England—and they had only volunteered for a year. In August 1915, as they were being reviewed by the king and by Lord Kitchener, the British war minister, they were given the option of returning home or enlisting for the period of the war. Most of them, unable to face the social disgrace of quitting, chose to stay, whereupon Kitchener announced that they were just the people he needed in Turkey. A week later they were sent to the Gallipoli peninsula, where imperial forces had landed earlier in the year in an attempt to break through the straits at the Dardanelles and capture Istanbul.
By now, the legendary early battles between the Turks and the Anzacs (Australians and New Zealanders) were largely over. What the Newfoundlanders had to face was four months of grinding, stalemated trench warfare where more men died from disease and exposure than from enemy action.
All over the Peninsula disease had become epidemic, until the clearing stations and the beaches were choked with sick …
By sickness and snipers’ bullets we were losing thirty men a day. Nobody in the front line trenches or on the shell-swept area behind ever expected to leave the Peninsula alive.
John Gallishaw, Royal Newfoundland Regiment, Trenching at Gallipoli
Those who survived Gallipoli and were unlucky enough still to be fit for war were then sent to the Western Front, where the Royal Newfoundland Regiment was virtually wiped out at the battles of Beaumont Hamel and Gueudecourt in 1916. But Morris survived: aware that public opinion was turning against
the war and that he had no chance of winning the 1917 election, he postponed the election on the grounds that he would be absent attending the Imperial War Cabinet in London. But his real reason for being in England was rather different. Sir Basil Davidson had written a letter for him.
Sir Edward Morris … now feels weary of the burden of leadership … and he has expressed to me his hopes that he may shortly retire from public life and reside in England.
[By 1914, in Newfoundland], the proud tradition of attachment to the King and the Royal House had become almost lip service, not involving the conception that loyalty might involve sacrifice. Despite these discouraging conditions Sir Edward never hesitated, but offered his people to the Army and Navy and pledged the Colony’s credit for their maintenance.
[I wish] to press for your advocacy before the King in granting to Sir Edward Morris the unprecedented Honour of a Peerage, as a fitting reward for a man who has so well served the Cause of the British Empire. Sir Edward has sufficient means to maintain the Dignity of a hereditary title and a seat in the House of Lords.
Governor Davidson to the colonial secretary, September 1917
Morris was already in London by September of 1917. On Christmas Eve he finally wrote to two of his former colleagues to announce his resignation as prime minister of Newfoundland. A few days later he received his peerage, and a grateful imperial government arranged for him to be appointed to the boards of a British insurance company and an aircraft-building firm. His heir still sits in the House of Lords today.
“I’d like to know,” said one chap, “why we all enlisted.”
“I wish you fellows would shut up and go to sleep,” said a querulous voice from a nearby dug-out.