by Gwynne Dyer
They would have little flags in the window. I can remember one house with three flags, that they had sent people overseas. One flag for each son or husband.
Naomi Radford, Edmonton
It is difficult to place a limit on the numbers of men that may be required in this devastating war. No numbers which the Dominion Government are willing and able to provide with arms and ammunition would be too great.…
British War Office to Ottawa, May 1915
In July 1915 Prime Minister Robert Borden went to England to try to find out a bit more from the British about their war plans. They were vague. The war was consuming munitions in quantities far greater than anybody had anticipated in peacetime, and nobody was sure when the factories would be geared up to produce enough ammunition for a decisive offensive. Estimates of when the British would be ready to exert their full force ranged from a year to eighteen months, but it was clear that the numbers of men required for that great offensive would be far beyond anything that had been previously envisaged. So in October 1915 Borden passed an Order in Council increasing the Canadian force to 250,000 men.
In return for this great contribution to the imperial war effort, however, Borden wanted Canada to have a voice in determining the conduct of the war. After his visit to Britain in mid-1915 and his shock at the confusion that reigned there, he noted that the old relationship between Britain and Canada had “in some measure passed away. Once for all it has been borne in upon the hearts and souls of all of us that … the issues of war and peace concern more than the people of these islands.” The British colonial secretary, the Canadian-born Andrew Bonar Law, complacently informed Borden in late 1915 that he fully recognized “the right of the Canadian government to have some share in the control of a war in which it is playing so big a part. I am, however, not able to see any way in which this could practically be done.… If no scheme is practicable, then it is very undesirable that the question should be raised.”
Bonar Law’s reply drove the normally gentle Borden to fury, but his method for forcing the British to reconsider was quixotic. In his 1916 New Year’s message, Borden doubled the planned strength of the Canadian Expeditionary Force to 500,000. Among the people who were astonished by this move (Borden had decided on it alone while bedridden with the flu) was the governor general: “His Royal Highness cannot but feel considerable doubt as to the possibility of increasing the Canadian Forces to 500,000 men. His Royal Highness understands that of the 250,000 men at present authorised some 50,000 are still deficient and he fears that the magnificent total of 500,000 may be beyond the powers of the Dominion of Canada to provide under voluntary enlistment.”
The Duke of Connaught was quite right in his assessment: Borden’s target, if maintained, would eventually require conscription. On the other hand, the prime minister was sure that the men would be needed, since the monthly “wastage” of troops showed no sign of decreasing. He also hoped that his announcement would end the criticism of his government by those English Canadians who didn’t think he was doing enough for the war. But above all, Borden believed that it would compel the British to give Canada a share in the direction of the war: “It can hardly be expected that we shall put 400,000 or 500,000 men in the field and willingly accept the position of having no more voice … than if we were toy automata.… It is for [the British] to suggest the method and not for us. If there is no available method and we are expected to continue in the role of toy automata the whole situation must be reconsidered.”
But in practice it could not be reconsidered. By announcing that Canada would raise half a million troops before London had even asked for them, Borden had given the imperialist establishment in English Canada a pledge from which it would never release him—and since Canada had offered the troops of its own accord, he had not really strengthened his bargaining position with London. The gesture was in any case unnecessary: by December of 1916 the new British prime minister, David Lloyd George, had realized that the Dominions must be granted a share in policy making. “We want more men from them,” he told the colonial secretary. “We can hardly ask them to make another great recruiting effort unless it is accompanied by an invitation to come over and discuss the situation with us.” He then invited the dominions and India to send representatives to London for an Imperial War Conference at which they could “discuss how best they could cooperate in the direction of the war. They were fighting not for us, but with us.”
What was never seriously discussed at these meetings of the Imperial War Cabinet, however, was the question of a compromise peace. The sheer scale of the losses incurred by all the combatants had changed the war into something new: a “total war” in which all the available manpower and resources were devoted to the sole aim of achieving military victory. The entire workforce of wealthy industrial societies—including millions of women who were drawn into industry for the first time—was mobilized for war production. And since everyone was at least theoretically involved in the war effort in one way or another, everybody, whether in uniform or not, soon came to be treated as a legitimate military target: the first air attacks on civilians came in 1915, with the Zeppelin raids on London.
It was not the supreme importance of the issues at stake that made the First World War the first total war: as a political phenomenon it was no different from all the preceding great-power world wars. It was simply the first time that that kind of war had occurred since the great powers had acquired the vast resources and the technological and organizational capabilities of fully industrialized states. Once these capabilities existed, it was inevitable that they would be used, since the side that showed restraint would surely lose. But the mass slaughter had such a powerful psychological effect on the combatants that it became impossible to end a world war in the old way.
After millions of ordinary citizens had died (most of them in uniform, but some not), the traditional outcome of such wars—a fairly modest reshuffle of territories and a readjustment of influence among the great powers—was no longer acceptable to the populations of the warring countries. It became necessary to elevate the war to the status of a moral crusade, or at least to define it as a struggle for sheer national survival, in order to justify the sacrifices that were being demanded. This was in the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy: as the only war aim acceptable to the people of each nation became total victory, the war did become something close to a life-and-death struggle for the European great powers, or at least for their governments. It was nothing of the sort for Canada, of course, but a great many English Canadians were also swept away by the rhetoric of the time.
Of the Mathieson family of Victoria, five brothers were on active service, and … Arthur Green and three sons of Victoria … seven boys of the Kerridge family of Vancouver were all at the Front. Of the George family, Victoria, in 1916, three were killed, one was missing, one a prisoner, two were at the Front, and two waiting till they were old enough to go.…
Canadian Annual Review, 1916
It was the English Canadian families whose sons and husbands had already volunteered in large numbers who welcomed Borden’s call for 500,000 men at the beginning of 1916: they rushed out and enlisted in even larger numbers. During the first three months of 1916, men were joining up at the rate of almost a thousand a day. The government heaved a sigh of relief: Canada might be able to raise half a million men without having to resort to compulsion. But then enlistment began dropping rapidly: in December 1916, there were only 5,791 enlistments for the entire month. At that rate the country would fall far short of the target of enlisting 30 percent of all males of military age.
By now the unemployment of 1913 was long forgotten. Farmers needed all the help they could get, and munitions factories were employing a quarter of a million workers. The war had stimulated an unprecedented growth in Canadian industry: in 1914 Canadian arms manufacturers produced little other than small arms and ammunition, but in the last two years of the war the Imperial Munitions Board, created by Borden in la
te 1915, was spending more than the Government of Canada itself, and had 675 factories working for it in 150 different towns in Canada. By 1917 Canadian industries were turning out warships, military aircraft and between a quarter and a third of all the shells fired by British guns on the Western Front: twenty-four million shells were shipped to Europe that year. Arms production was probably the most effective use that could be made of Canadian manpower, but it caused great difficulties for the army recruiters.
Brigadier James Mason, the director of recruiting, presented the senate with a mass of statistics and a very depressing conclusion for the government. There were, he reported, one and a half million eligible men in Canada (half of them unmarried). By February 1916, 249,000 men had enlisted, but it was going to be much more difficult to get the next quarter-million:
Moreover, this large number, if and when sent to the Front, must be maintained, and it has been estimated that the casualties will not be less than five percent monthly of the total force. This means that we shall have to provide each month, to maintain our Army’s strength, at least 25,000 new men—or 300,000 a year.
There can be no question that the additional 250,000 to bring our quota up to 500,000, and the 300,000 required annually to keep it at that figure, will not be obtained under the present system of enlistment.
Brigadier James Mason, March 1916
By now the British tradition of voluntary enlistment was falling by the wayside elsewhere: in January 1917 Great Britain introduced conscription, and New Zealand had already done so. The feeling persisted in Canada that there was a great untapped mass of men of the right age, but no actual data existed: some parts of the country had only recently been settled, and until the war there had been no need for this detailed information. The obvious solution was a national registration system, so two million large cards were printed and distributed to all the post offices in the country. (Originally they were going to be mailed to every male citizen in the country, until somebody realized that if you already had the name and address of every male in Canada, you might not need a registration system.) But the government shrank from making registration compulsory, and it was estimated that about 20 percent of the males between eighteen and sixty-five didn’t fill in the cards. There was a strong suspicion that the government was moving toward conscription, even if it said it was not, and many men felt it prudent not to draw themselves to the army’s attention.
You have asked for an assurance that under no circumstances will Conscription be undertaken or carried out.… I must decline to give any such assurance. I hope that Conscription may not be necessary, but if it should prove to be the only effective method to preserve the existence of the State and of the institutions and liberties which we enjoy, I should consider it necessary and I should not hesitate to act accordingly.
Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden to labour leaders, December 27, 1916
Not only did many men not fill out the cards, but when the army, seeking volunteers, canvassed the men who had registered, most of them felt that they were doing their duty by working in industry. By now even the West had run out of young, single, unemployed men with strong British loyalties, and nobody thought the war was an adventure any more. In Winnipeg, out of 1,767 men registered, nobody was willing to volunteer. Out of a pool of 4,497 men registered in Quebec, four enlisted. Most eligible Canadian men seemed curiously unconvinced that there was any threat to “the existence of the State and the institutions and liberties” they enjoyed.
Meanwhile, nothing had improved in the management of the Canadian forces. Sam Hughes, now “Sir Sam,” emphasized that the goal of 500,000 men was a target for which the prime minister alone had to take responsibility, but he was scarcely a model of responsibility himself. In August 1916 he cabled Borden from England to suggest that Canada should put eight or ten divisions in the field (it then had four). His motive appeared to be the pure spirit of competition: Australia, with a much smaller population than Canada, already had five divisions in France, and it was rumoured that there were enough Australian troops in England and Egypt to form four more.
On the same day, as an afterthought, Hughes cabled asking to have “sixty or eighty thousand troops sent over immediately.” He assured Borden that this would still leave over one hundred thousand troops in Canada. Besides, Hughes added helpfully, more men could easily be made available if clergymen helped out in the fields to release more farmers’ sons for military service.
The worst thing about Sam Hughes—worse even than his venal “friends” in commerce and industry, his absurd pretensions to military genius, or his random enthusiasms for new models of service rifle or entrenching tool—was his relentless, reflexive determination to do favours for his friends in the militia. He was the epitome of the “good ol’ boy” politician whose sole method for extending his influence over his political environment is to create an ever-widening network of people who are indebted to him for their jobs. Professional military competence was therefore quite irrelevant to Hughes when he appointed officers to positions of command (and he had his “militia” ideology to rationalize his disdain for formal military qualifications). In the Post Office, this kind of management policy means that the mail gets delivered late and the organization runs a deficit; in an army at war, it means that large numbers of people get killed because of the incompetence of their superiors.
All the officers selected for the First Contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary Force were appointed by Hughes more or less as a personal favour, and many of them were not capable of organizing a piss-up in a brewery: the subsequently famous British military critic J.F.C. Fuller, then a young officer, remarked on seeing the 1st Canadian Division debark at Devonport in England in 1914 that they would be fine soldiers only “if the officers could all be shot.” Most of the officers of the 2nd Canadian Division, and many of those commanding subsequent contingents, also got their jobs through Hughes’s reflex cronyism: if you were a Canadian who wanted a combat command in the war, there was no other way. And yet, once they had actually seen battle, Hughes’s own appointees tended to turn against him.
From mid-1915 on there was unremitting guerrilla warfare between the Canadian divisions in France and the tangled web of competing Canadian military authorities in England that Hughes had created to administer them. It was much more than the usual friction between the front and the rear: the key question was always whether the commanders in France had the right to choose their own replacement officers (mainly by promoting them from the ranks of their own battle-wise troops), or whether they must accept replacements from among the horde of “supernumerary” officers—all promised a job by Sir Sam but utterly lacking in combat experience—who languished in England waiting for the call.
Combat experience changes people—and it also winnows them. The men whom Sam Hughes had chosen as officers for the Canadian divisions in France in 1914 and 1915 were almost all deficient at the start in the military knowledge they would need to do their jobs well, and there was a disproportionate number of sycophants among them. But time and battle weeded out the weak (there are almost always ways for an officer to escape the front, if he is determined to avoid it) and taught the survivors to act and think like real officers. The ex–lawyers and farmers and insurance salesmen turned into competent majors and colonels who understood exactly what it means to be responsible for your countrymen’s lives—and that while it is your duty as an officer to spend the lives of some of them in order to achieve your country’s objectives, the rate at which they die will be determined largely by your own military competence.
The toy soldiers turned into professionals, and they became contemptuous of Hughes’s bluster. More than that, they became determined to stop him from parachuting his new crop of patronage appointments (ironically, “officers” who had the very same defects they themselves had had a year or eighteen months before) into positions of command where by inexperience they might waste the lives of veteran Canadian soldiers who had survived the battle
s of Ypres and the Somme.
The first evidence of this transformation of perspective among Canadian officers at the front came right at the end of 1915, when Hughes made one of his typical gambits for finding more jobs at the front for his cronies. He proposed that all the British staff officers serving with the Canadian Corps should be replaced by Canadians, even though his own bias against professional military education for militia officers had prevented all but a handful of Canadian officers from being properly trained for staff appointments. Faced with the prospect of having incompetent Canadians replace the trained British officers who were currently doing the vital planning jobs in the Canadian divisions, however, the Canadian senior commanders at the front unanimously backed the British corps commander, Lieutenant General Sir Edwin Alderson, in protesting against it. Hughes’s proposal was dropped.
Hughes’s persistent meddling with the Canadian forces in England—he regarded them as his personal empire—was the biggest factor in finally bringing him down. He was so seldom in Ottawa that Borden was gradually able to hand over more and more of the administration of Hughes’s own department to other, more competent people. The final confrontation came when the prime minister decided to order Hughes home and create a new ministry for overseas service, to be run by Sir George Perley in London. Hughes was furious. In his own mind he was perpetually beleaguered by the plots of jealous rivals and incompetent subordinates, and now he accused Borden of being a plotter too. Borden had had enough: on November 9, 1916, he demanded Hughes’s resignation as minister of militia and national defence.
All of the men seemed to have gone. You had a tremendous rate of enlistment here, and my father at the newspaper was working overtime all the time, and he would come home absolutely exhausted.