by Gwynne Dyer
Our first duty is to win at any cost the upcoming elections, in order that we may continue to do our part in winning this war and that Canada not be disgraced.
Robert Borden, diary, September 1917
The election was held in December, six months after conscription had been introduced. The pro-Borden Colonist in Victoria warned voters against “Bolsheviki intoxicated with the hope of power” (the Liberals, presumably), and Toronto’s Daily News printed a map of Canada with Quebec outlined in black, labelled “The Foul Blot on Canada.” Meanwhile it was practically impossible for Union government candidates to get their views heard in Quebec. Albert Sévigny, a Quebec Conservative Party Member, was shot at, stoned, and unable to say a word at Saint-Anselme, in his former riding of Dorchester, and he was howled down even in Westmount. Another Union government meeting, this time in Sherbrooke, turned into a three-hour riot.
All the careful stacking of the deck paid off. In the December 1917 election, most of the female relatives of serving soldiers (who had been promised that none of the remaining men in their families would be conscripted) voted for the government. In the Prairie provinces, where most voters of Ukrainian, German, Austrian, Hungarian and Croatian descent had been disenfranchized, Unionist candidates swept the board, winning forty-one out of forty-three seats. Despite all Borden’s massaging of the voting lists, the Conservative majority among civilian voters was still barely a hundred thousand votes. But soldiers voted almost twelve-to-one for the government, tripling its majority and changing the outcome in fourteen ridings. In the end, Borden’s Union coalition of Conservatives and Liberal defectors took 268 seats—but only three of those seats were in Quebec. Laurier’s Liberals took 62 seats in Quebec, and only 20 in all the rest of the country. Canada had never been so divided.
Only one Liberal did well out of the 1917 election, and it would have taken some foresight to realize it at the time. Mackenzie King had wavered on the conscription issue for a time: he rebuffed an approach from the Union government, which was having great success at recruiting pro-conscriptionist Liberals, but did consider simply not running. But he finally returned to his original convictions and waged an apparently suicidal anti-conscription campaign in North York (the old seat of his grandfather, William Lyon Mackenzie, before the 1837 rebellion). Election day was the worst of King’s life: he was overwhelmingly defeated and his beloved mother died. But as he watched Laurier’s political destruction spelled out in the election returns, he was also aware that Quebec would remember the Conservative imposition of conscription long after the war was over: “This will make me prime minister,” he told a friend.
Just after the election, Sir Wilfrid Laurier wrote to a Liberal friend commanding a regiment in France to explain why the English-speaking Liberals who had deserted him had been wrong: “Your reason to take the stand which you took is: ‘To us speedy reinforcements seem to take precedence of all else.’ I appreciate the point of view, but you will see how far wrong you were. The conscription measure was introduced in the first week of June [1917]. We are now in the third week of January [1918] and not ten thousand men, if indeed half that many, have been brought into the ranks by this measure.”
The defect in the Military Service Act was the high number of exemptions that could be applied for—but without those exemptions, Borden would probably never have won the election. Of the 400,000 unmarried men in Canada aged between twenty and thirty-four—the “first class”—380,000 had claimed exemptions by the end of 1917 (and Ontario, for all its electoral support of the government, claimed more exemptions than Quebec: 118,000 for Ontario, 115,000 for Quebec). Exemption tribunals were staffed by local people and reflected local loyalties and prejudices. The Quebec tribunals were accused of granting almost blanket exemptions to French-speaking applicants, while “they applied conscription against the English-speaking minority in Quebec with a rigor unparallelled,” according to the chief appeal judge, Mr. Justice Lyman Duff of the Supreme Court. Military representatives took to appealing virtually every exemption, and in early 1918 the Military Service Act was toughened. Nineteen-year-olds were ordered to report for service, and men between twenty and twenty-two were exempted only if they were the sole remaining son of military age in the family. Every young man in the first class had to carry a written proof of exemption or be liable to arrest. All over the country, young men vanished into the woods:
A mounted policeman once told me of the men who had gone way deep into the Peace River country or the Athabaska country and hid out. He would be searching around, and find them in a cabin someplace or other. And I remember him telling me of a mother that practically scratched his eyes out—she had three sons hidden around the country, and saw that they got food.
Naomi Radford
In Quebec opposition to the new regulations was spectacular, especially since a hasty marriage was no longer a way out of the draft (men now had to have been married prior to July 6, 1917, to claim exemption). There were still thirty thousand appeals before the courts, but the minister of justice was making arrangements to speed up the process and feelings were reaching fever pitch: the popular resistance that seemed to have crested in August 1917, and to have been almost completely dissipated by the December election, came roaring back to life.
The delayed-action conscription crisis of 1918 was quite inevitable. During all the protests of 1917, the subject had been emotional but almost entirely theoretical: the machinery ground into action so slowly that few conscripts actually disappeared into the army before the end of that year. By early 1918, however, everybody in Quebec knew someone who had already been conscripted, or who was facing the near-certainty of conscription at any moment. It put the issue in a very different light, and things came to a head at the beginning of Easter weekend in Quebec City, when the Dominion Police detained a young man named Mercier who was unable to show proof of an exemption.
Mercier finally managed to get permission to go home and produce his papers, and he was then duly released—but meanwhile a crowd of several thousand had gathered, angered by “the tactless and grossly unwise fashion in which the Federal Police in charge of the Military Service Act did their work” (as the jury put it at the subsequent inquest). To vent their anger, the crowd proceeded to burn down the police station. The mayor tried to get them to disperse—but the mob, singing O Canada and La Marseillaise, attacked the offices of the Quebec Chronicle and L’Événement instead. The following evening another mob attacked the offices of the registrar of military service and burned all the files.
In an act of singular ineptitude, the local military authorities then brought in a battalion of Toronto soldiers as reinforcements. The officer in charge of the operation was one of the army’s few senior French Canadians, Major General E.L. Lessard, but mutual incomprehension and suspicion between francophone crowds and anglophone troops did not help matters—nor did charging at the crowds with bayonets. On Sunday, March 31, the army also resorted to cavalry charges, driving back the crowds with axe handles. By then, military discipline was breaking down and some soldiers were firing at the mobs. Charles “Chubby” Power, the young Liberal MP for Quebec South, a veteran who had served overseas, reported hearing an officer from his own regiment admit that he had been unable to prevent some of his soldiers from opening fire. He had not seen any wounded, he said.
On Easter Monday, the Old Town looked like a battlefield. Using snowbanks and ice barricades for shelter, the crowds were throwing bricks, stones, blocks of ice or whatever else they could lay their hands on at the soldiers. A few shots were heard from the direction of the mob, and the troops at first replied with volleys over their heads.
After the second volley fired in the direction of Bagot St., they said: “Come on, you French sons of bitches, we’ll trim you!” The soldiers were quite spread out. They were saying: “Go back, you French Cock-suckers” and “Go back, you French Cunt-lickers.” And then, during a lull, an officer arrived. He said: “I will fix the machine gun. We will do bet
ter work.”
Testimony of Wilfrid Dion at the Coroner’s inquest, Quebec, April 12, 1918
So I started the machine gun, and stopped it just like that (the witness snaps his fingers). It ran about three-quarters of the drum: so 36 shots were fired.
Testimony of Major George Rodgers, Quebec, April 10, 1918
There were two more bursts of machine-gun fire. An estimated thirty-five civilians were wounded, and four were killed. One of them was only fourteen years old. It was not exactly the storming of the Bastille, but the authorities feared insurrection in Quebec, and on April 4, 1918, the Governor in Council was given the power to call out the troops whether the civil authorities asked for them or not. In such a situation martial law would be declared; habeas corpus would be suspended and “persons disobedient to such military orders shall be tried and punished by court martial.”
Bailleulval. May 18, 1918
I got up at 3 o’clock this morning. The rear details of the battalion were ordered to take part in one of the saddest scenes I have ever witnessed, the execution of a soldier, guilty of desertion and cowardice in [the] face of the enemy.
After marching for an hour and a half, we reached a little village whose name I do not know. We entered a big court-yard, surrounded by a stone wall. In a house at one end of the yard were military police. The condemned man appeared suddenly between two policemen. In passing, he cast a glance at us, so hopeless that the tears rose in my eyes. He disappeared behind a screen, erected to conceal him from sight. Behind this screen, the firing squad was in place. All of a sudden, a volley rang out.…
Now, we have to march past the body of the executed man, who is still tied to the chair in which he died. Blood has stained his tunic and his head has fallen on his chest. His face reveals complete resignation and on his lips is the trace of a smile.
Arthur Lapointe, Soldier of Quebec: 1916–1919
Twenty-five Canadian soldiers were executed in the field during the First World War, all but two of them for desertion or “misbehaviour before the enemy.” The executions were a direct measure of the mounting strain on the Canadian army. Until the war was almost two years old, Canadian soldiers convicted of desertion or cowardice all had their sentences commuted to terms of imprisonment, but then, after the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, there were seven executions in seven weeks. Executions “to encourage the others” then continued at a steady pace until the war’s end—with one particular group standing out: seven of the twenty-five men executed had French names, and five of them were from the sole French-speaking battalion, the 22nd.
Military machines everywhere were starting to show the strain. In 1917 both the French and the Italian armies had come close to disintegration, and the Russian army had collapsed utterly. The Germans were moving large numbers of troops from the former Eastern Front to the Western Front for a make-or-break offensive, but at home the Allied blockade was causing severe shortages of food and raw material. With British forces worn down by the Passchendaele offensive (which had been launched partly to distract the Germans from noticing the terrible state of the French army), Prime Minister Lloyd George of Britain sent a request to Borden on Easter weekend 1918 for still more Canadian troops. In France General Currie broke his own rule and sent Canadian reinforcements to British units. And in England Lester Pearson, recently commissioned a lieutenant after two years’ service in the ranks, was recuperating from an accident that had interrupted his training in the Royal Flying Corps.
I spent much of that sick leave with a Canadian friend, Clifford Hames, who had just finished his abbreviated flying training and was on leave before going to France. We spent hours trying to get some understanding of what we were being asked to do; to bring some reason to the senseless slaughter. For what? King and country? Freedom and democracy? These words sounded hollow now in 1918 and we increasingly rebelled against their hypocrisy. Cliff Hames and I came closer together in that short time than I have ever been with any person since, outside my family. He knew where he was bound within a few days. He could not know it was to his death within the month. I did not know what was to happen to me.
We both assumed that our generation was lost. The war was going badly in France. The great German March offensive was about to begin. The fighting would go on and on and on. We, who were trapped in it, would also go on and on until we joined the others already its victims. All this had to be accepted. It never occurred to us that we could do anything about it. We might as well make the best of it, getting what pleasure we could.
Lester Pearson, Mike: Memoirs, vol. 1
For Germany, the spring of 1918 was the last chance for victory. By March 1918, when the Communists who were fighting to establish their control over Russia signed a peace treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk, half a million German troops had already been moved west. For the first time the Germans had something like numerical parity with the Allies on the Western Front, but it would not last long. It was a year since the United States had entered the war on the Allied side in April 1917, and by the summer of 1918 there would be 300,000 American troops arriving in France every month. So the Germans went for broke in the spring, hoping to achieve a breakthrough that would divide the British and imperial troops from the French and drive the British back onto the Channel ports. Then, with a quick peace before American strength built up, maybe Germany could get away with a draw in the west and even keep its conquests in the east.
Colonel Bruchmüller had arrived on the Western Front at the very end of 1917, and in the first couple of months of 1918 hundreds of thousands of Germany’s best remaining troops were stripped from their units and retrained as storm-troops who would attack using his new infiltration tactics. At Arras in 1918, 6,608 German guns opened fire on the first day of the offensive without any advance warning—and the German offensive gained more ground in the next two weeks than the Allies had gained in every offensive in the whole war. Further fast-moving offensives followed, and the Allies feared that they were going to lose the war in the spring of 1918.
In Canada, Borden called a secret session of Parliament to explain the peril, and passed an Order in Council effectively cancelling all exemptions for single men, including farmers. In mid-May, five thousand farmers arrived in Ottawa to protest the new policy. Troops prevented them from approaching the Houses of Parliament, but Borden spoke to them and told them bluntly that the government had taken a solemn pledge to reinforce the Canadian Corps. As long as he was prime minister, that pledge would be fulfilled. But long before any further reinforcements reached the Canadian Corps, the Germans’ spring offensive ran out of steam.
The Germans lost a million men between March and July 1918, but they never managed to split the Allies apart and roll the British lines up. It was the Canadians and Australians, attacking side by side near Amiens, who made the great breakthrough on August 8, the longest advance that any Allied attack had yet achieved in the war. Ludendorff called it “the black day of the German army.” From August on, the Germans were in almost constant retreat—and the Canadian and Australian divisions, whose condition was still far better than most of the British units, were consistently used to spearhead the attacks. Between August 22 and October 11, 1918, the Canadian Corps lost over fifteen hundred officers and thirty thousand casualties in the other ranks.
I guess you have heard now of the Big Push, of the battle of Amiens, in which the Canadians took a prominent part.… It was a terrible battle, our Division winding up the advance and holding the ground gained. Our battalion took the last objective. The Company I am with went into the attack 140 strong, and when the roll was called, only 32 answered. I am sorry to say I lost two dandy chums—one missing and one killed. I tried to help bandage Aubrey but it was no use, as the bullet had gone through his head.…
Corporal Walter Cullen (Paris, Ontario), August 1918 Donald A. Smith, At the Forks of the Grand, vol. 2
I got wounded on the Saturday, and the War ended on the Monday morning. I had a rather nice ti
me during the war: I was in the Cycle Corps, we weren’t up the line, we weren’t in the mud all the time. We were mobile infantry, and they started to use us at the last, so I had a rougher time towards the end than I did earlier on in the war.
I was on a patrol that was trying to get into Mons, and there were four on the patrol. Two were killed, I was wounded, and one got away scot-free—he’d been sent back with a message.
George Turner, Edmonton
The Third Canadian Division, at the price of many sacrifices, penetrated the city at three o’clock in the morning, avenging thus by a brilliant success the retreat of 1914. Glory and gratitude to it.
Proclamation of the Town Council of Mons
On November 11, 1918, Robert Borden was at sea, on his way to England to discuss with Lloyd George and the Imperial War Cabinet what position the British delegates to a peace conference should take after the war was won:
At 12:30 ship’s time purser in tremendous excitement came to my room with startling announcement that Germany signed armistice at 5 a.m.; hostilities to cease at 11 a.m. today.… This means complete surrender. The Kaiser is reported as seeking refuge in Holland, but the Dutch don’t want him. Rumours that several of German princelets and kinglets have abdicated or fled. Revolt has spread all over Germany. The question is whether it will stop there.