by Conrad Black
Arthur Meighen, now Borden’s chief lieutenant (as Ernest Lapointe was now Laurier’s), gave a rather pettifogging reply, and Borden excused himself from giving Laurier notice of it because “in the stress of Parliamentary activities and under the strain of our war labours, there was no opportunity to discuss it with him.”80 Borden could not have imagined that posterity would accept that he was too busy to discuss conscription with the leader of the Liberal Party for the last thirty years, half of them as prime minister. There were further measures to assure the right of servicemen at the front to vote (who could be assumed to support the conscriptionist party, though it would be unfair to impute that motive to the government for going to such lengths, and Laurier refrained from doing so). Laurier did oppose a ragged voting act that gave some women, especially the wives of members of the armed forces, the right to vote, but denied it to the descendants of nationalities with which Canada was at war. In a fine flourish, the leader of the Opposition called it “a retrograde and German measure.” Cloture was imposed, and clear and very courteous and not overly lengthy letters were exchanged, for publication, by the leaders and released at once. Laurier was consistent that he could not join a coalition that would then propose conscription, and could not join one after the imposition of conscription, but that as long as an election was held on the issue, which he said as early as May 25 the government would win, he believed that Quebec would obey the law, and he would urge that course.
Borden wrote of Laurier, then seventy-seven, that “if he had been ten or fifteen years younger, I am confident that he would have entered the proposed coalition.… I am convinced that he underrated his influence and that Quebec would have followed him.”81 He credited Laurier with a patriotic distrust of Bourassa but thought Laurier exaggerated Bourassa’s influence. That was a bit rich considering that if it were not for Bourassa’s ability to stir up Quebec, Borden would probably not have been elected in 1911. Borden, in his memoirs, published twenty years later, apparently thought that he had had the better of the argument, but he had not, other than in the short term that Laurier had foreseen. He got his conscription, but it did not influence the outcome of the war; the Americans were providing all the fresh troops the Allies would need. With best will, but an almost Wilhelmine disregard for the political consequences, Borden put great strain on the country and handed Quebec to the Liberals, and with it thirteen of the next seventeen elections after the vote about to be held, not counting one that produced an unclear result: there would be fifty-one years of Liberal government between 1921 and 1984.
All through July and August, Borden engaged in intensive discussion to form a union (coalition) government, to the point that from September 4 to 9, he “was confined to the house by nervous prostration.”82 It was mid-October before Borden was able to organize a coalition with nine Liberals led by Newton Rowell of Ontario as president of the Privy Council. Parliament was dissolved (Connaught had left in 1916 and been replaced by the Duke of Devonshire, but the governor general’s role in these matters was diminishing), and the election took place on December 17, with little suspense about the result. The campaign had not been overly tumultuous; conscription was almost the only issue, though the Liberals criticized some of Hughes’s blunders and liberties in defence procurement.
Borden graciously almost failed to refer to the accuracy of his predictions that the Grand Trunk Railway would be a difficult financial proposition. The government had agreed to pick up six hundred thousand treasury shares for a price to be settled by arbitration, but after taking account of a government cleanup of twenty-five million dollars’ worth of loans and debts. In wartime, the accounts did not look so disquieting. On December 17, for a Parliament expanded from 221 to 235 constituencies, the Conservative-Liberal coalition raised their numbers from 132 conservatives in 1911 to 153, and their vote from 48.5 per cent for the Conservatives in 1911 to 56.9 per cent for the coalition candidates. Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberals lost only 3 seats to emerge with 82, and won 38.8 per cent of the vote, down from 45.8 per cent. It was certainly a clear mandate for Borden, but Laurier had taken every predominantly French district in Quebec and held a respectable number of constituencies elsewhere, actually winning in Prince Edward Island and running well in the prime minister’s home province of Nova Scotia, though Sir Robert Borden was returned safely enough in his home district. The nationalist opposition had not tried to sideswipe Laurier, and when the conscription issue passed and normalcy returned, the Liberals seemed likely to regain their previous competitive position in English Canada, and also to retain Quebec for a long time, as they did. The issues of Catholic school funding in Ontario, the navy, and conscription sank the Conservative Party in Quebec for two whole generations. Borden did produce legislation giving full suffrage to women (though this would not apply to Quebec until 1940). Canada was relatively advanced in these matters, and there was no significant resistance to women’s rights. There had been municipal voting rights for women and Married Women’s Property acts from the 1880S. “In Canada no such feminist movement as later developed in England [and the United States] could get under way, simply because there was not the requisite resistance to it.”83
The Bolshevik Revolution led by Lenin chased out Kerensky on November 8, 1917, wound down the war effort, and Trotsky negotiated a Carthaginian peace with Germany at Brest Litovsk on March 3, 1918. France, as the ultimate trial approached, installed its greatest and fiercest political leader, Georges Clemenceau, on November 24, 1917. Clemenceau was a physician, a former schoolteacher in the United States when a fugitive from Napoleon III (his first wife was an American), a veteran of the upheavals after the Paris Commune, a mayor of Montmartre, the editor who published Émile Zola’s defence of Captain Dreyfus, a cultural eminence, and a former prime minister and member of the National Assembly and Senate for more than thirty years before he was invested with practically unlimited authority to win the war. He was seventy-six and universally known as “the Tiger.” The advantage was with the Allies unless the Germans could score a quick knockout before the Americans were very numerous in France. The French general, soon marshal, Ferdinand Foch, was named supreme Allied commander on the Western Front. He was a soldier intellectual of Bergsonian élan and immoveable determination, and was equal to the task of matching wits and wills with the German commanders, Field Marshals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. As a cadet writing his graduating examinations at the military school in Metz in 1871, Foch learned from the celebratory booming of German guns that Metz had become a city of the German empire. It had been his dream for forty-seven years to restore Metz to France, and now that was his formal, and in his view, his sacred, mission. And with the sly and efficient Welsh shaman Lloyd George, the gigantic intellect and forceful executive Wilson, and now the ferocious Clemenceau, the leadership gap in favour of the Western Allies over the often hare-brained kaiser would be decisive, if the imminent German lunge could be contained even for a few months.
Woodrow Wilson presented to Congress on January 8, 1918, what became known as the Fourteen Points. It was a world-shaking charter for a new postwar order: open and openly negotiated covenants of peace; absolute freedom of the seas; tariff reductions and equality of trade; reduction of national armaments to the point required for domestic security; impartial adjustment of all colonial claims with equal weight to the native people and colonizing powers; evacuation of Russia by foreign forces and her self-determination;* evacuation of Belgium, Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro by foreign forces; restoration of Alsace-Lorraine to France; access to the sea for Serbia and the opening of the Dardanelles; self-determination for the peoples governed by Turkey, but a secure and sovereign Turkey; an independent Poland with access to the sea; and a general association of nations on the basis of an equality of rights for all nations regardless of size and strength.
Borden had a very satisfactory visit to Washington at the end of February, where he was graciously received by President Wilson, Secretary of the Treasury
William G. McAdoo (who was Wilson’s son-in-law), Secretary of State Robert Lansing, Secretary of War Newton Baker, and the War Industries Board chairman, financier Bernard Baruch, as well as the British ambassador, Lord Reading. A good deal was achieved in integrating defence production arrangements and assuring conservation of some of Canada’s $500 million annual wartime balance-of-payments deficit with the United States. The bilateral and trilateral relations between the countries were now, in the light of the common cause, on a completely new footing, and the patronization of Canada as a virtual foundling was over at last.
There was severe anti-conscription rioting in Quebec City starting on March 29, which the municipal police ignored, and which included the destruction of the registrar’s office. Four thousand troops were dispatched, although only one thousand were deployed, but on April 1 fire was exchanged and several soldiers were seriously wounded and four rioters killed. What amounted to martial law was imposed by order-in-council. There were some anti-French reflections by private members in Parliament (by Conservatives Colonel John Allister Currie and Henry Herbert Stevens), and Laurier replied judiciously, supporting the imposition of the law but strenuously rebutting what amounted to ethnic slurs from Currie and Stevens. Borden followed and rebuked his own caucus members in unambiguous strictures. It is generally believed that there were about thirty-five thousand French-Canadian volunteers in the armed forces. There was a perceptible gap in war enthusiasm between French and English Canadians, but that is neither surprising nor discreditable.84
The Germans launched their supreme play on March 21, 1918, with an attack in great strength toward Amiens, at the hinge of the British and French armies, with the goal of wheeling northward and forcing the British into the sea. Foch reinforced the British, who held, although the force of the attack pushed them back up to forty miles. The Germans renewed their offensive with another very heavy blow on April 9, west of Lille, but still aiming to crack open the Allied line, and wheel north to the sea. The British commander, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, had prepared a deeper defensive position and held the German advance to seventeen miles, and those at heavy cost. The Germans renewed the offensive on May 27, to the south of Amiens, now at last marching on Paris, from whose gates they had been beaten back nearly four years before. They captured Soissons and closed to within forty miles of the French capital, but the French lines did not break at any point, and every inch of ground was contested with extreme tenacity. The German offensive resumed with intense attacks of massed infantry, heavily supported by artillery, from June 9 to 15, east and north of Paris, against fanatical French resistance. Paris, as the symbol of freedom and of the great alliance of the French and English-speaking peoples, and at the hour of the historic coruscation of French culture and civilization and martial bravery, had become in the minds of much of the world almost a holy city of light. The Germans reached the Marne again, less than thirty-five miles from the Arc de Triomphe, at the end of June, as Foch declared, “We will fight before Paris, within Paris, and beyond Paris,”* and demanded of all units to hold their ground at any cost; that is, to the last man. The supreme climax of the Great War had come at last.
The Second Battle of the Marne was fought between July 15 and August 6 by fifty-eight Allied divisions (forty-four of them French, eight American, four British, two Italian) and fifty-two German divisions, about one million soldiers and over a thousand heavy guns on each side. The Allies had several hundred tanks, and both sides had hundreds of primitive warplanes. The Allied lines held, and Foch counterattacked; the Germans had no more reserves and gradually gave way. The main salient that had threatened Paris between Soissons and Rheims was eliminated by August 6. Paris was safe; the tide was turned. The Allies had taken 133,000 casualties (95,000 French, 17,000 British, 12,000 American, and 9,000 Italians from only two divisions), but had inflicted 160,000 German casualties. The German offensive was broken, and Foch became marshal of France. The British, Canadian, and Belgian armies, supported by 50,000 Americans, surged forward on August 8 and pushed the Germans back from Amiens, and Foch ordered a series of offensives along the entire front, from the English Channel to the Swiss border, to win the war.
11. Victory, 1918
From late May to mid-August, Borden was in London and Paris. He was feted by all the leading figures of the British government from the king down, and met Clemenceau twice. He did forcefully object, supported by some of the other dominion figures, to incompetent British commanders, an opinion to which Lloyd George was generally receptive, but Borden seemed almost oblivious to the Second Battle of the Marne, apart from being up until midnight on the evening of July 14 with Lloyd George, Smuts, Milner, and Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, and agreeing to tell Haig that if Foch’s order to place four divisions at the disposition of the French army near Rheims put the British Army in jeopardy, he didn’t have to obey the order. The order was not pressed by Foch and was overtaken by events. Borden undoubtedly gave a good account of himself by the simple display of the qualities which came naturally to him: intelligent, good-humoured, articulate, and consistent support of the collective goal. But the Imperial War Cabinet obviously was more of a sop to the dominions than a decision-making group. The British talent for marshalling their Imperial flock had evolved from the peremptory to the collegially discursive, progress certainly, but the dominion leaders were still to a large degree being snowed with an illusion of collective authority. The outcome of one of the decisive battles of world history Borden records in his memoirs, drawing from his diary, thus: “In the morning [of August 4, 1918] we received confirmation of the German retreat to the Aisne.”85 Admittedly, Canadian units were not engaged in the battle, and Canada was providing about 6 per cent of the forces under Foch’s command as generalissimo of the Allied armies.
Borden spent a great deal of time in commendable visits to troops and military hospitals and giving undoubtedly well-formulated speeches at overpowering banquets and luncheons in historic places, but seems to have had minimal contact with those who were actually running the war. Canada had at least graduated to the point where it was received with courtesy and measured gratitude, but it was not at the top table. The one useful agreement for Canada to come from these sessions was the agreement that postwar emigration from the United Kingdom would be encouraged to go to Empire destinations. (Macdonald had agitated for that in visits to London thirty-five years before and been ignored by Gladstone.) After a last visit to 10 Downing Street and a luncheon given by the mighty press proprietor Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Times and the Daily Mail, Borden embarked on August 17 on the Mauretania, the illustrious holder of the Blue Riband for fastest transatlantic passage and sister of the tragic Lusitania, escorted by five destroyers. On board, he made the cordial acquaintance of aid administrator and future president of the United States Herbert C. Hoover.
In an address to twelve thousand people at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto on September 2, Sir Robert Borden certainly spoke for most of the country when he spoke of his pride at the dispatch of 414,000 Canadian soldiers to Europe to fight “the Huns,” as he called them for the first time publicly. He concluded,
Fiends incarnate would shrink from the nameless outrages by which [Germany] has deliberately degraded the name of humanity; they would blush for the barbarous and brutal cynicism with which she has scorned and broken every decent convention of public law and international usage.… There is no desire to crush or humiliate the German people but they have stamped themselves as brutal, uncivilized, and barbarous; and they must prove themselves regenerate before they can be received again on equal terms within the world’s commonwealth of decent nations. And this is the message I bring you from the Canadian army. Stand fast to your purpose; abide the issue and vindicate the cause of justice and humanity.86
As wartime oratory goes, this was well above average and was well-received.
Foch’s great offensive was irresistible. By early November, the Allies were at a ragged line from Brus
sels to Namur, Luxembourg, Metz, and Strasbourg, and the Germans had been cleared from Alsace and half of Lorraine. The Italians, reinforced by eleven French and British divisions, had decisively defeated the Austro-Hungarians at Vittorio Veneto in late October. The Central Powers disintegrated. Bulgaria surrendered on September 30, and on October 2, a new German government, through the Swiss, asked President Wilson, as did Austria on October 7, for an armistice based on his Fourteen Points. The French and the British explained that they had not been consulted about the Fourteen Points and did not agree with all of them, and Wilson declined to deal with the kaiser, who he believed did not represent the German people. The German navy, ungrateful although most of its surface ships had in the last four years spent only two days at war, mutinied at Kiel on November 3; Austria-Hungary surrendered on November 4; a revolt broke out in Bavaria on November 7; the kaiser abdicated and fled to the Netherlands on November 9; and a German republic was declared on November 11. It was only twenty years since the death of Bismarck.
After Wilson threatened Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and the Italian premier, Vittorio Orlando, with a separate peace, they accepted on November 5 the Fourteen Points as a basis of negotiation, provided that they would determine what “freedom of the seas” meant and that Germany would be required to pay reparations. Wilson accepted this and communicated these conditions via the Swiss to the Germans, whose government was in a state of chaos. The Germans requested an armistice, and Marshal Foch was authorized by the Allied powers to receive German peace representatives. Foch, who now commanded the greatest host in human history, over six million battle-hardened soldiers, did this in his mobile command headquarters, his famous wagon-lits train on a siding in the Compiègne Forest on November 8, and an armistice was signed by which all hostilities would end at 11 a.m. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.