by Gwynne Dyer
Robert Borden, Memoirs, vol. 2
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
John McCrae, Canadian Expeditionary Force (died 1918)
That never-to-be-forgotten day, 11 November 1918, saved the rest of my generation and gave the world not peace, but a reprieve.
1939 was only twenty years away; we did not keep the faith with those who died; the torch was not held high.
Lester Pearson, Mike: Memoirs, vol. 1
The First World War remains the most profound trauma in Canada’s history, although it all happened long ago and thousands of miles away. The names of our quarter-million dead and wounded are mostly forgotten now, but the effects of that collective act of self-immolation still reverberate in our national life today. However, keeping faith with the dead of the First World War has more often been interpreted by Canadians as an injunction to go and fight the Germans again (or the Russians, or whomever) than in Pearson’s sense, as a call for Canadians to play their part in the immense task of abolishing war.
The old international system should have died after the First World War—and there was certainly a determined attempt to kill it. Four years of the most devastating war in European history, over a Balkan quarrel whose protagonists had mostly disappeared by 1918, were enough to convince large numbers of people (and even their governments) that there was something dreadfully wrong with the traditional way of running the world. War had become far too costly a means of settling disputes between the great powers, and so the nations began to cast around for an alternative.
(1) Open covenants of peace openly arrived at.…
(2) Absolute freedom of the seas.…
(4) General disarmament consistent with domestic safety.…
(14) Creation of a general association of nations for the purpose of providing international guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity for all nations.
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, The Fourteen Points, January 8, 1918
The Lord God had only ten.
French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, about Wilson’s Fourteen Points
Woodrow Wilson’s formulation of Allied war aims for the U.S. Congress at the beginning of 1918 was light-years distant from what those aims had been in 1914, but the war had greatly changed the way people saw the world. The international system had staggered on for centuries, periodically producing a general war, but never doing irreparable harm to its major players, so the traditional attitude was: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” By 1918, however, the system was broke: it had delivered all the great powers into a war grotesquely out of proportion to the purposes for which they had entered it (insofar as they had any clear aims at all). They had fought the war to the bitter end because they did not know how to stop it, and dared not admit to their own peoples that it was not about anything worth fighting for.
But at the same time it was quite clear to both the leaders and the led that this must be “the war to end all wars,” and that defeating their enemies in this particular war would not suffice to abolish war itself. So many people were prepared to contemplate the radical idea that the international system itself would have to be changed.
The notion of an international organization to prevent war had been floating around for half a century, but it fell to Woodrow Wilson, the rigid and sanctimonious university professor who became president of the United States, to put it on the agenda of the world’s governments. His idea for a League of Nations was gravely flawed, but it was an idea that would never go away again. However reluctant governments and peoples might be to change their old ways, there was a general recognition that it had to be tried, because the alternative—a future of ever more destructive technological wars—was even worse.
As far as many English Canadians were concerned, however, the great lesson of the war was that international politics is a crusade of good nations against evil ones. Their consequent willingness to place the country at the disposal of Britain in the great-power struggle (a loyalty subsequently transferred virtually intact to the United States) has been the single most powerful influence on our foreign policy down to the present.
The First World War saw the birth of a distinctive English Canadian national consciousness, but French Canada was not present at the birth. The great irony is that a lot of English Canada wasn’t present either, although it later pretended it had been. Even after vigorous and repeated recruiting drives and the ultimate imposition of conscription had dragged many native-born English Canadians into the army, the proportion of native-born in the Canadian forces rose to only 51 percent by the end of 1918. The great bulk of the remainder were drawn from the relatively small fraction of first-generation British immigrants in the population, who volunteered for the war at a rate at least as high as that of the New Zealanders or the British themselves.
In Canada as a whole, the rate of enlistment was lower even than in Australia (with its large Irish population) or in English-speaking South Africa. English-speaking Canadians had, on average, been in their own country longer than the populations of the other “white dominions,” and had had the time to get their bearings. Their sentimental attachment to the “Motherland” remained, but they knew that their practical interests were different, so they did not volunteer as readily to fight for Britain. Nevertheless, the fact that so many people fought in Canadian uniform—and suffered so greatly—had a profound effect on English Canadians’ subsequent view of themselves and the world. The “British Canadians” who went off to the trenches, whether English-born or native-born, returned simply as Canadians—but they were a very different kind of Canadian from those who spoke French.
I venture to think that the French Canadians who have fought and died in France and Flanders are more truly representative of the spirit and ambitions of their race than those who, like [Bourassa], have remained in Canada and refused to share in the glory and agony of this our national birth. It was as a Canadian that I appealed to him, not as an Imperialist.
Talbot Papineau, after he had read Bourassa’s reply to his open letter, August 1916
Talbot Papineau was a gallant figure, but desperately out of step with his compatriots. French Canada’s war was waged mostly at home, against the demands that it fight in Britain’s war in Europe. The exact figures cannot be determined, but of the more than 600,000 men and women who served in the Canadian forces during the war, only around 35,000 were French Canadians (a proportionate share would have been around 200,000) and fewer than half of the French Canadians who did enlist ever saw the front. Moreover, although Quebec contains about seven-eighths of Canada’s French-speaking population, almost half of the 15,000 French Canadian volunteers serving in April 1917 (before conscription began to distort the figures) were from French Canadian communities outside Quebec, which were much more exposed to the influence of English Canadian public opinion.
June 9, 1918
In the trench, wrecked by the bombardment of last night, all is now quiet and peaceful. The gunners are now taking things easily.
Several men are lying in a shelter, thinking probably of the strange vicissitudes of a soldier’s life. I recognize some of the conscripted men who joined us yesterday. I am sorry for them from the bottom of my heart. They have been sent out here against their will, while the rest of us have voluntarily assumed our task. A dozen of the conscripts were killed last night, their first night in the line. They lie now in a corner of the trench, waiting until someone moves them to the rear for burial.
Soldier of Quebec: 1916–1919
Conscripts, including a handful of F
rench Canadian conscripts, began to reach the army in France only in the closing months of the war. For all the tumult it caused, the Military Service Act had raised only 83,355 men by November 1918, of whom 7,100 were absent on compassionate leave and 15,333 on agricultural leave. Seventeen months’ operation of the conscription law therefore produced only 61,000 soldiers, most of whom never reached France.
The many delays and errors involved in the application of conscription were certainly a blessing, for if the war had lasted long enough for conscripts from Quebec to begin dying in the trenches in large numbers—and the British generals were planning for a war that continued into 1920—then the events of Easter Monday 1918 in Quebec City might have been repeated and magnified a hundredfold. By 1920 the war might really have come to Canada, and Quebec might have been occupied territory. As it was, French Canada’s legacy from the war was bitterness at having been isolated and reviled for taking a position that even English Canadians would now concede to have been justifiable. French Canadians owed their loyalty to Canada alone, and would have fought to defend it, but the European war did not threaten Canada.
Although few conscripts from Quebec actually died, the bitterness of that memory has never quite gone away. As for those French Canadians who did volunteer for the war, out of a sense of adventure or a misplaced idealism, they are simply forgotten.
Dear Madam,
In confirmation of my telegram to you of yesterday’s date, I regret exceedingly to inform you that an official report has been received to the effect that Captain A/Major T.M. Papineau, M.C., P.P.C.L.l. was killed in action on October 30, 1917.
Yours truly,
J. M. Knowles, Lieut.
* The Dominion Police were founded in 1867 to provide security in Ottawa, but they were pressed into service during the First World War to supervise the enforcement of conscription. They were ultimately amalgamated with the RCMP in 1921.
EXCURSION 4
WOULD A GERMAN VICTORY HAVE BEEN WORSE?
THE FIRST WORLD WAR INVOLVED FEW FULLY DEMOCRATIC countries on either side. In France all adult males had had the vote since 1792 and in Germany since 1871, while in Britain about 60 percent of adult males also had the vote; but in both Germany and the United Kingdom the actual government was still dominated by the old moneyed elite and (especially in Germany’s case) the monarch. Russia and Austria-Hungary were autocracies with only the sketchiest facade of a parliamentary system. Yet even at the time, the war was portrayed in France and the English-speaking countries as a battle in defence of democracy, with the implication that a dark night of tyranny would descend on the world if the other side won. A hundred years later, the same rhetoric is still trotted out every Remembrance Day.
A dark night of tyranny already prevailed over most of the world in 1914, of course, in the sense that almost everybody in the world who was not of European descent was the involuntary subject of some European empire. At the end of the war, some of them got a change of oppressor (the German colonies and the Arabic-speaking parts of the Ottoman empire were all divided up among the victors), but they still had no voice in what happened to them. Different people in some other parts of Africa and Asia might have had a change of rulers if the Central Powers had won, but on the whole it wouldn’t have made much difference to them.
As far as the European countries themselves are concerned, however, the question of whether a German victory would have made a lot of difference rarely gets posed. It is taken for granted that the history of the next few decades really would have been a lot worse if the other side had won the First World War, because that was always the victors’ story, and it was reinforced when the same alliance won the Second World War as well. But it is not actually a self-evident truth, and there is some value in making a brief excursion into “counter-factual” history. Just how different would the world actually have been if Germany had won the war in 1918?
It’s hard to argue that the spring offensives of 1918 could have won the war for Germany even if they had decisively broken through the Allied front and separated the British army from the French. The Allies would have hung on grimly, perhaps with the British army in an enclave on the Channel coast, knowing that the scheduled arrival of more than two million American troops by the end of the year would swing the balance back in their favour. Germany would still have lost in the end: the American declaration of war in 1917 cancelled out the advantage that Germany derived from the Russian exit from the war after the revolution, and Germany was still hugely outmatched both in men and in industrial resources.
It would have been different if Germany had not resumed the campaign of unrestricted U-boat warfare in 1917, knowing full well that the sinking of neutral shipping, including American ships, was almost bound to bring the United States into the war. Admiral Henning von Holzendorff, who wrote the key memorandum in December 1916, claimed that unrestricted submarine warfare would sink 600,000 tons of shipping a month and starve Britain into submission within five months, well before the Americans could act. Holzendorff promised the Kaiser, “not one American will land on the continent.” It was an act of desperation, as the German military authorities could see no other chance for a German victory.
At first the submarine campaign was a great success, with fully a quarter of all British-bound shipping being sunk in March 1917, but the campaign began to fail as soon as the Royal Navy brought back the old system of convoys of merchant vessels escorted by warships (which it had previously resisted) in April. And in the same month, the United States declared war on Germany—which meant that by March 1918 its huge new army had been conscripted and trained and was beginning to enter the trenches in France. In that month there were still only 300,000 American troops in France, but they then began to arrive in Europe at the rate of 10,000 a day, and by August there were 1.3 million American soldiers deployed overseas, with another million due by the end of the year. Germany could not really have won the war in 1918, although many on the Allied side, shocked by the success of the first great German offensive in March, were convinced that it might.
On the other hand, only a two-month delay in Germany’s fatal decision in January 1917 to launch unrestricted U-boat warfare might have caused the decision to go the other way, for in March the revolution in Petrograd overthrew the Tsar and raised the hope (though not yet the accomplished fact) that Russia might leave the war. And if Germany had not decided to gamble everything on the unrestricted U-boat campaign, then the United States would almost certainly not have declared war in 1917. In that case, Germany just might have won the war.
It would not have been a resounding victory, for the opponents were too evenly matched, but with a bit more luck on the German side and a bit worse generalship on the Allied side the Germans could have made a big breach in the Western Front at the point where the British and French armies met. They might then have rolled up the open British flank and driven the empire’s troops back into an enclave based on the Channel ports, while further south the French army tried to stretch out into a thinly manned new front that reached the sea somewhere near the mouth of the Seine. There would have been no march on Paris: the German troops would have been far too exhausted for that, and the breakthrough would only have been achieved at a huge cost in casualties. But the psychological impact of the defeat might still have been enough to make the Allies ask for an armistice, especially since there would have been no Americans coming and the signature of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March would have just confirmed that the Russians were out of the war for good. So what would the peace treaty between a (barely) victorious Germany and the remaining Allied powers have looked like?
If it looked anything like the Brest-Litovsk treaty, it would have been a dreadful document. The Bolsheviks, who were still struggling to extend their control over Russia, were helpless in the face of the Germans, and so, to gain time to defeat their internal enemies, the new Soviet regime signed away Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. That effectively moved
Russia’s old imperial border east by 300 to 400 kilometres everywhere except in Ukraine, where it retreated twice as far. The treaty stated that “Germany and Austria-Hungary intend to determine the future fate of these territories in agreement with their populations,” but they were clearly destined to become satellites and client states of Germany and Austria-Hungary.
A 1918 or 1919 peace treaty after a narrow German victory in the west could not have been as severe. Germany’s priority in the west would have been a peace that stabilized the situation and gave it time to assimilate its gains in the east. It urgently needed an end to the British naval blockade, for civilians in Germany were starting to die of malnutrition in significant numbers. Having seen Red revolution in Russia, the collapse of the Italian army and the near-collapse of the French army in the previous twelve months, it would have wanted to end the war quickly before there were mutinies in the German army and revolution in the streets at home. And in any case, the strength of the German army, although it was in a temporarily dominant position, would not have been great enough for Berlin to enforce extreme demands on the Allied powers. The peace treaty, as a result, would have been considerably gentler than the one that the Allies actually imposed on Germany at Versailles.
There would have been no reparations and “war guilt” clause imposed on France and Britain; those were luxuries that Germany’s precarious military superiority would not have allowed it to indulge in. There would probably have been no border changes in Western Europe; the only region really in dispute was Alsace-Lorraine, and Germany owned that already. There would doubtless have been a requirement for the British army to withdraw from France and never return, and limits would have been placed on the future size of the French army, but Germany would not have been able to impose the kind of limits on the size and composition of Britain’s navy that the Treaty of Versailles actually imposed on the German navy. Germany would have got its existing overseas colonies back (they had all been conquered by Britain and France during the war), and perhaps some new ones as compensation for all its trouble. Then everybody would have gone home and lived bitterly ever after.