Canada's Great War, 1914-1918

by Brian Douglas Tennyson

  18. Thompson and Randall, 58. It rose again to $2.1 million in 1920. Thompson and Randall, 81.

  19. Quoted in Thompson and Randall, 83.

  20. Quoted in Thompson and Randall, 85.

  21. Jackie Robinson played for the Montreal Royals, farm team of the Brooklyn Dodgers, in 1946 before going on a year later to break Major League Baseball’s color bar. In 1969 Canada joined the major leagues when the Montreal Expos team was established. Toronto followed in 1977 with the Blue Jays, who won the World Series in 1992 and 1993.

  22. His reliability is perhaps confirmed by the fact that he served as counsel to the United States delegation in the northeastern fisheries arbitration with Britain at The Hague in 1910, then served from 1911 to 1914 on the International Joint Commission, the body created to resolve disputes regarding boundary waters between the United States and Canada.

  23. Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, 100.

  24. Kenneth G. Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 1815–1908 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 350.

  25. Stacey, 105.

  26. See James A. Woods, “The Good Neighbors and Their Undefended Fence: U.S.-Canadian Cross-Border Military Excursions before the First World War,” American Review of Canadian Studies 43, no. 1 (2013): 49–69.

  Chapter 3

  Answering the Call

  We are part of the British Empire. It’s a family affair. We’ve got to stand by each other.

  —Lucy Maud Montgomery[1]

  The men who volunteered in August 1914 spent their first week or more at the local armories where they had enlisted or in nearby temporary camps that had to be hastily prepared to accommodate them while they were processed and were introduced to army life. Inevitably, there was much marching drill, there were inoculations, and some, though not many, received uniforms. Then the order came from Ottawa that they were to proceed to the national training and assembly camp.

  To everyone’s surprise, including that of the army’s Chief of the General Staff (GCS), Sir Willoughby Gwatkin, this was not Camp Petawawa, the permanent force’s well-established camp north of Ottawa, but a new camp which didn’t actually yet exist, on the outskirts of the little town of Valcartier, northeast of Quebec City.

  This decision was, of course, made by Sam Hughes personally, and as bizarre as it initially seemed to many, it made some sense because Valcartier was just twenty miles from Quebec City, a major harbor at the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.[2] Fred Curry, a pharmacist from Brockville, Ontario, who joined the 2nd Battalion as a lieutenant, thought “a more picturesque site for a camp than ValCartier [sic] could hardly be imagined, situated as it was among the foothills of the Laurentian mountains along the banks of the Jacques Cartier River.”[3]

  The problem was that there was no army camp at Valcartier, although the Militia Department had already decided to build one there because of its more convenient location. But it had only recently acquired the land, and the camp had not yet been built. In normal times the clearing of the land and construction of the camp would have proceeded at the usual pace, but the sudden outbreak of war changed everything. Hughes saw no reason to wait and ordered that the camp be built and made operational immediately if not sooner.

  Hughes always believed that he could get what he wanted if he seized the initiative, provided the money, and hired one of his friends to do the work. In this instance, he hired William Price, a Quebec City businessman engaged in the lumbering, pulp and paper, and electrical generating industries who had also served briefly as a Conservative member of parliament from 1908 to 1911. Long active in the militia, he was now promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel as well.[4]

  Amazingly, Hughes did get what he wanted in this case. In less than two weeks, 12,000 acres of forest and farmland were transformed into a functioning military camp, complete with railway siding, roads, electricity, telephone system, running water, parade ground, barracks, and tents. Arthur Chute, who was among the first volunteers to arrive, recalled that “as the troops kept pouring in,” the tents

  marched farther across the plain, and each night I watched the myriad lights of a great city twinkling farther and farther down into the long darkness of the valley. . . . It was a moving sight to stand by the headquarters flagstaff by night, to look out upon the sea of camp-fires and far-shining lights; to hear the hum of its restless life and to breathe the air of vast adventure.”[5]

  The popular modern view that Canada was militarily unprepared for war in 1914 is a misconception. Much progress had been made since the South African War in reorganizing the Militia Department, the permanent force, and the militia. Sir Frederick Borden—Robert Borden’s cousin—who was Minister of Militia in the Laurier government, recognized that armies had become much more complex than in the past and created the Ordnance Stores Corps and Engineer Corps in 1903, the Medical Corps in 1904, and the Army Pay Corps in 1907. He also doubled the size of the permanent force from 2,000 to 4,000 men so that it could garrison the naval bases at Halifax and Esquimalt when the British withdrew their troops in 1904.

  Also in 1904, he reorganized the army’s senior command structure, replacing the General Officer Commanding (GOC) with a Chief of the General Staff (CGS), and creating a Militia Council modelled on the British Army Council. At the same time, he agreed to standardize military training, organization, and equipment to make them compatible with the British army. Canadian militia units were also encouraged to establish formal linkages with British regiments and several did. Canadian military historian G. F. G. Stanley has described the Canadian militiaman in this era as “a replica of the British Territorial Tommy in arms, training, equipment, and habits of thought.”[6]

  All of this had required a significant increase in the department’s budget, which Borden obtained, and when the Conservatives took office in 1911, Hughes continued the work begun by Borden, almost doubling the department’s budget from $7 million in 1911 to $13.5 million in 1913. He was able to do this because both he and Robert Borden shared Winston Churchill’s view that war with Germany was coming, and probably within the next four years.

  Gwatkin had prepared a mobilization plan that would raise 25,000 volunteers through the commanding officers of the military districts into which Canada was divided. But when the government decided on August 6 to raise them, Hughes ignored Gwatkin’s plan and issued a dramatic call directly to the 226 militia commanders across the country, “like the fiery cross passing through the Highlands of Scotland or the mountains of Ireland in former days,”[7] inviting them to recruit the volunteers instead. He then, incredibly, set about organizing the contingent himself, creating the new battalions and personally choosing their officers—in short, making all the decisions himself.

  If this appears chaotic, it was. Hughes thrived on chaos, especially if he was the controlling force at the center of it. And while the natural tendency is to assume that such an unstructured approach to organizing a very large enterprise must be inefficient, Tim Cook, the historian of the Canadian Corps, concludes that Hughes’s approach was “surprisingly effective,” perhaps because it “caught the flavor of the time and the scramble to serve.”[8] Within two weeks Valcartier was basically ready and basic training began.

  When the volunteers boarded trains from wherever they were in Canada for the journey to Valcartier, large crowds gathered to watch them parade through the streets and gathered at the local train station to cheer them on their way. Colonel J. A. Currie claimed that 100,000 people crowded downtown Toronto to see the 48th Highlanders off. In Saskatoon, “a record crowd turned out” even though, in Harold Baldwin’s opinion, few of the volunteers had relatives there because “the majority of us were Britishers who had left the Old Country to try our luck in the new land.”[9]

  Baldwin was right, and not just about the men who volunteered in Saskatoon. Of the 36,267 men in the first contingent, 63% had been born in Britain or had immigrated to Canada from other parts of the empire. Only 1,245 of
them were French Canadians. There were no African Canadians or Asians among them because any who had volunteered had been rejected, although Natives were welcomed because of the popular belief that they innately possessed superior shooting and tracking skills and were likely to be more ferocious than white soldiers.

  Some British men, especially those with previous military experience, returned home to serve in the British army or navy, and some Canadian-born men who had strong British connections went with them. At the same time, some men from what were now the enemy nations were returning home as well, either because they had previously served in the armed forces and were still registered as reservists or just because they felt that it was their duty to do so. Austro-Hungarian reservists in Canada were called to duty as early as July 26, and Bishop Nicholas Budka of Winnipeg openly reminded the men in his Ukrainian congregation of their duty to their emperor.[10]

  One recent German immigrant who quickly crossed the border into the United States to catch a ship home was an elegant and personable Ottawa wine merchant who had been “much in favor” at Rideau Hall, the official residence of the governor general. Joachim Ribbentrop had emigrated to Montreal in 1911 but moved to Ottawa in 1913. His popularity at Rideau Hall did not reflect just his good looks and personality; the Duchess of Connaught was delighted to know someone in the small and relatively dull Canadian capital with whom she could converse in her native language. Ribbentrop left so quickly as the crisis unfolded that he was short of money and borrowed ten dollars from James Sherwood, a friend who happened to be the son of Colonel Percy Sherwood, head of the Dominion Police.

  After serving in the German army during the war and being awarded the Iron Cross, Ribbentrop became a prominent figure in the Nazi party and served first as Hitler’s ambassador to Britain, then as foreign minister in the fateful 1930s. During the Nuremberg trials after the war, in which he was convicted of war crimes, he wrote a memoir in which he said that if war had not broken out in 1914 he might well have spent the rest of his life in Ottawa.[11]

  By September 4, there were 32,000 men and 8,000 horses at Valcartier, far more than anyone had expected, and it was an impressive sight. When William Jones arrived he was surprised to see “miles and miles of tents” and “the great white city spread out before me populated with men only, was surely a wonderful and impressive sight. All was activity. Everyone was busy. Wooden houses were being built, roads constructed and everything being done to provide a place to receive and quarter the soldiers.”[12]

  The camp reminded Arthur Chute of gold-rush cities like San Francisco in 1849 or Dawson City in 1898 because “here was the same spontaneous and sudden springing up, and here was the same restless blood of a new country, bringing with it an air of imminence and adventure.[13] Like many others, Chute—in the innocence of 1914—thought that “the spirit in which [they] came to fight” was “the Empire’s greatest glory . . . a touchstone of British devotion, a proof of an Empire that must endure.”[14]

  The first task, aside from housing and feeding so many men, was to organize them into the new overseas battalions. Initially, Hughes had intended the battalions to combine men from various parts of the country, but some were made up of men from particular regions and others were made up almost entirely of men from single militia regiments because so many of their members had volunteered and been accepted. The 1st Battalion, for example, comprised men from southwestern Ontario, while the 8th was made up almost entirely from Winnipeg’s 90th Rifles. The 16th Battalion, which became known as the Canadian Scottish, was made up of volunteers from several Highland regiments. The twelve artillery batteries, eleven militia engineering units, and medical service corps were all formed from militia units.[15]

  The first sixteen battalions constituted a division (approximately 20,000 men), organized into three brigades, plus artillery and support units. The First Brigade was made up of four Ontario battalions under the command of Colonel Malcolm S. Mercer, a Toronto lawyer. The Second Brigade included four western battalions under the command of Arthur Currie, a real estate developer in Victoria, British Columbia, who had long been active in the militia. The Third Brigade—a Highland unit made up of the 48th Highlanders, the Royal Highlanders, the Royal Regiment of Canada, and the 16th (Canadian Scottish) Battalion—was commanded by Colonel Richard E. W. Turner, a veteran from a Quebec City merchant family who had been awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery in South Africa. Command of the artillery was given to Colonel E. W. B. Morrison, the editor of the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, but again, a man with lengthy militia experience and a strong reputation.

  Aside from qualifications and experience, being a Conservative was definitely an asset for militia officers seeking senior appointments or hoping for promotion. Turner was certainly a Conservative, although Currie was well known to be a Liberal, but he was also a close friend of Garnet Hughes, Sam Hughes’s son. But if Hughes took care of his friends, both personal and political, he took particular care of his family. Garnet, who had attended the Royal Military College and was active in the militia, was appointed Brigade-Major of the Third Brigade under Turner, and later rose to the rank of Major General. John Hughes, Sam’s older brother, who also had long experience in the militia, briefly commanded Valcartier in 1915, then became Inspector General of the army in Canada, also with the rank of Major General. Another brother, William St. Pierre Hughes, who had spent his career in the penitentiary system but was also active in the militia, commanded the 21st Battalion at the beginning of the war and briefly commanded the Tenth Brigade in 1915–16 before being retired shortly after Sam left the government.

  Sam did not neglect himself, of course. Upon the outbreak of war, he began wearing his militia uniform on a daily basis, and in the autumn of 1914, he went to England and pleaded—unsuccessfully—to be allowed to lead his “boys” into battle. He also promoted himself from Colonel to Major General, was awarded a knighthood in 1915, and ultimately was made an honorary Lieutenant General in the British army.

  Meanwhile, uniforms, equipment, and weapons had to be found because despite the prewar planning no one had thought to stockpile such things. Thirty thousand rifles were ordered from the Ross Rifle Company in nearby Quebec City, and 50,000 uniforms and sets of boots were ordered from clothing and shoe factories. Newly built farm wagons were purchased to serve as divisional transport, and a variety of motor vehicles arrived as well. This was all done in typical Hughes fashion, with no tendering for contracts, which were handed out to contractors who supported the Conservative party and/or were friends of the minister.

  Not surprisingly, the quality was often low: uniforms made of poor quality fabric, boots actually made of cardboard that dissolved when they got wet, and most famously, the controversial Ross rifle, which was excellent for target shooting and sniping but overheated and jammed in battle conditions and was incompatible with rain and mud. Hughes also ordered Colt machine guns from the United States, even though he knew that the British water-cooled Vickers was a better weapon. But to be fair, Vickers had all it could do to meet the demands of the British army. As it happened, most of the Colts didn’t arrive until after the first contingent had gone to England, so it didn’t make any immediate difference.

  Hughes also insisted that the troops be provided with the Canadian-made Oliver-pattern equipment, which consisted of a heavy pack with stiff leather harness and huge brass buckles that dug into the shoulders. Because a leather yoke in front rode up under the chin and choked the wearer as weight dragged the pack down, Canadian troops when marching soon developed a distinctive convulsive heave of the shoulders to prevent strangulation.[16]

  Nevertheless, Hughes thought by the middle of September that the Canadian Expeditionary Force, to use its official name, was ready to be paraded before the governor general and prime minister. This great event took place on Sunday, September 20, in brilliant sunshine. If the dignitaries were impressed, so were at least some of the men themselves. William Jones—a Scot who had emigrated to the United St
ates and was working for the New York Central Railroad in Amsterdam, New York, when he went to Valcartier to enlist—recalled that he “had never before seen such a fine looking body of men.” The sight “was wonderful and inspiring,” and “I felt I was the proudest boy in the whole of Canada. I still hold the opinion that look where you will, you can never find a like number of finer or more soldierly looking boys than made up that first Canadian contingent to which I found myself attached.”[17]

  Incredible as it may seem, Hughes had originally intended not to include the permanent force in the mobilization in August 1914. Needless to say, this was impracticable and two cavalry regiments, the Royal Canadian Dragoons and Lord Strathcona’s Horse, as well as two batteries of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, were mobilized and included in the first contingent. But the Royal Canadian Regiment, the country’s only permanent infantry regiment, was dispatched not to England or France but to Bermuda to provide local defense in the unlikely event of an attack, relieving a British regiment so that it could participate in the war.

  The Princess Pats did not attend the training camp at Valcartier, but mobilized separately at Lévis, a town situated directly across the St. Lawrence River from Quebec City. Virtually all of its men—1,049 out of 1,098—had previously served in the British army or the South African War. The Princess Pats went to France as part of the British 80th Brigade in December 1914, making them the first Canadian soldiers to see active duty.[18]

  The move to England came a month later, when the troops rode and marched from Valcartier to Quebec City to board their transport ships. Jones recalled that “bands were playing, caps were raised and waved” and the excitement “filled each one of us with enthusiasm and unbounded happiness.”[19] In Quebec City, “people [were] cheering, laughing and crying, and waving handkerchiefs, flags and caps. Kisses were wafted to us from windows, flowers [were] showered upon us, and . . . I, for one, certainly felt giddy and already quite like a hero.”[20]