Canada's Great War, 1914-1918

by Brian Douglas Tennyson

  20. Jones, 22.

  21. Worthington, 6–7.

  22. Benoit. Borden and Hughes apparently didn’t think that embarkation had been a fiasco because Price was knighted for his services in January 1915.

  23. Currie, 37.

  24. Quoted in Worthington, 18.

  25. Roger Sarty, The Maritime Defence of Canada (Toronto: Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies, 1996), 10, cited in Marc Milner, Canada’s Navy: The First Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 11.

  26. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 21.

  27. He was also the youngest Canadian to command a submarine, the first and only Canadian submarine commanding officer to be lost in action, and probably the last Canadian to be killed in the war while serving in the navy. His brother, Hamish Maitland-Dougall, was killed at Vimy Ridge in April 1917.

  28. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 22.

  29. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 25.

  30. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 28–30.

  31. Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, 160–61.

  32. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 29.

  33. Marc Milner, “The Original Rainbow Warrior,” Legion Magazine Online (May 1, 2004), http://legionmagazine.com/en/2004/05/the-original-rainbow-warrior (accessed September 27, 2013).

  34. Milner, “Rainbow.”

  35. Milner, “Rainbow.”

  36. Milner, “Rainbow.”

  37. Stacey, 160.

  38. Vance claims that the first Canadian to be killed in the war was Stanley Wilson “of Toronto,” who had served for fifteen years in the Royal Navy and was serving on HMS Amphion when the war broke out. Operating with two destroyers, the Amphion had just sunk a German ship laying mines off the German coast and was heading for port when it struck a mine and quickly sank—the first Royal Naval vessel to be sunk in the war—taking about 150 sailors with it. Vance, Maple Leaf, 43. There is, however, no Stanley Wilson listed in the Royal Navy records as one of those died on the Amphion, but there was a Stanley Gerald Wilson, born in England in 1887, who drowned accidentally on August 5 while serving on HMS Falmouth. His body was not recovered, but he is commemorated on the Chatham memorial in Kent. There is no indication that he had any connection with Canada, and when his will was probated, he left his effects to his widowed mother, who lived in England.

  Chapter 4

  Preparing for War

  None have written of the making of this force, but it is a story that richly deserves to be told.

  —Arthur Chute, 1918

  When the British warships arrived at Gaspé to escort the Canadian convoy to England, they were greeted “with rousing cheers, which were answered in kind by the men of the fighting ships. It was the most impressive sight I have ever witnessed,” Harold Baldwin of the 5th Battalion wrote, not merely because neither he nor anyone else in the first contingent had ever seen a naval squadron at sea but also because “up to that time nothing had so majestically expressed the sentiment of the Overseas Dominions hastening to the help of the mother country.”[1] He might well be impressed: the fleet carried the largest military force ever to cross the Atlantic to that point.

  The ten-day voyage was uneventful and increasingly boring to most men, although the officers organized lectures, physical exercises, and lifeboat drills. It took longer than it might have because the ships carrying the horses had to keep their speed down. Even so, the journey was hard on the horses. As Colonel Currie recalled, every now and then there would be a stir on one of the horse transports “and a horse that had succumbed to mal-de-mere would be unceremoniously dumped overboard. Such occasions were marked by a fusillade of pistol shots from each ship as the carcase drifted past, for, contrary to traditions, most of us carried revolvers for the first time in our lives and were anxious to display our prowess.”[2]

  There was also entertainment of sorts, put on by the men themselves that included singing, juggling, and boxing matches. Some battalions had brought a band, so there was music from time to time. There were also the Sunday church services, which may have had more meaning for the men than they had before they enlisted. According to Baldwin, these services

  were deeply impressive and will remain in my memory as long as I live. The majestic ship ploughing through the water and the swish of the spray mingling with the men’s voices as we sang the hymns we learned in childhood made a lasting impression on all of us, and I am sure that the emotion of those moments has stayed with every man throughout our campaign in France and since.[3]

  As the convoy approached England, concern about German submarine activity caused it to change its destination from Southampton to Plymouth, site of the Royal Navy’s great Devonport naval base. When the ships first sighted the southwestern tip of England, “a cheer went up from every throat on every ship. Men climbed into the riggings, bands began playing and everyone was happy to the limit.” By the time the ships arrived at Plymouth, “England was thoroughly awake to the fact that 33,200 men—British soldiers, loyal to the Motherland—had arrived from Canada.”[4]

  Well, not really, because when the ships slipped quietly into Plymouth harbor, the townspeople were clearly unaware that they had brought the Canadian contingent because there was no one at dockside to greet them. The truth was that British censors, rightly fearful of German submarines, had prohibited the publication of any information regarding its voyage or imminent arrival.

  The ships had to sit at dockside for some time before disembarkation could begin, and it was not until some of the men from Lord Strathcona’s Horse “displayed a huge pennant from the ship . . . that our identity was disclosed.” Within minutes—mere seconds according to Baldwin—the local population realized that the Canadians had arrived “and in less than half an hour the harbor was alive with every conceivable kind of craft, loaded near to the sinking point with cheering humanity.”[5]

  Secrecy about the convoy’s arrival apparently extended to the local British military authorities as well. While they “sweated out how to unload the ships,”[6] the troops had to remain on them for another nine frustrating days. The tedium and frustration may have been somewhat relieved when riveters working on a battleship under construction nearby chalked “Bravo Canadians” in huge letters on its plating, and people on the dock responded to appeals from the trapped soldiers by throwing “cigarettes, tobacco, food, candy—in fact, everything that could comfort a soldier’s heart”—onto the decks.[7]

  The British were understandably thrilled by the arrival of the Canadians, whom they imagined to be all “pioneers and backwoodsmen” from a frontier land occupied by Indians, fur trappers, and Mounties, a delusion that the troops, most of whom were office clerks, factory workers, and farmers—and British-born—did not think it necessary to correct.[8] At least some of them, even if British-born, did think of themselves as Canadians. One of them, Harold Baldwin, later recalled “the thrill within me” when the band played “O Canada” and it was “echoed back by the glorious hills of Devon.”

  There was also an undercurrent of wonderful feeling that made me proud, not only that I was a Britisher, but that our grim old mother-nation was nursing there in one of her great harbors the robust manhood of a virile daughter-nation that had heard the call and answered and that I was a part, however small, of that answer.[9]

  That feeling was not uncommon among the Canadians, whether British-born or not. It was not long, however, before they discovered that the imperialist sentiment which was so strong in Canada—in English Canada at least—appeared to be much weaker in Britain, a fact that was somewhat disconcerting to men who had crossed an ocean to defend that empire.

  It was now that the Canadians first learned who would command the CEF in Europe. Happily, it would not be Sam Hughes, who had rushed across the Atlantic to plead his case with Lord Kitchener one final time, but Lieutenant General Edwin Alderson, an experienced British officer who had commanded Canadian troops in the South African War. Arthur Chute thought him “an ideal commander for Colonial troops” because he was
“a hard rider in the hunting-field, a keen sportsman, a deep student of military science, progressive in his views, firm in his discipline, broadened by a world-wide experience, and hardened by many campaigns.”[10]

  After what Baldwin described as a “thoroughly profane and good-natured farewell with the burly British sailors and a rousing welcome from the people,” the troops marched through crowded streets of cheering civilians to the train station to travel to the British army’s training camp on Salisbury Plain.[11] Captain J. F. C. Fuller, the British army’s Deputy Assistant Director of Railway Transport, was responsible for getting the Canadians and their baggage onto the trains for Salisbury Plain and recalled that they were “assaulted by every young and old harlot in the dual city. Men fell out or were pulled out of the ranks to vanish down side streets. A few reached the railway station, but the remainder painted Devonport and Plymouth pink, red, and purple.”[12]

  Colonel Currie claimed that the trouble began while the men were waiting to board the train at the station because “quite a crowd gathered at the station, and everybody wanted to give my men bottles of whiskey and gin. I stopped it as well as I could,” but Hughes had not allowed any alcohol at Valcartier, so the men “had not had a drink for two months” and “a few . . . fell by the wayside.”[13] On reflection, Currie thought that “we should have tried out our men in Canada, and given them a free hand, so that the drinkers would be weeded out before coming over.”[14]

  Next day the pubs were closed early but by then the town was “swarming with drunks.” Requisitioning an empty building, Fuller turned it into a prison in which drunken Canadians were locked for twenty-four hours. A train labelled Drunkard’s Special left each morning for Salisbury Plain until they were all gone, although a few went AWOL and only showed up days later.”[15]

  Fuller also had to transport the division’s baggage, but because it had not been loaded onto the ships in any coherent order, nor been unloaded in any order, it was not delivered in any order either. The Canadian troops did not impress Fuller when they refused to load the baggage, arguing that “they had come to fight, not to do coolie work.” Fuller therefore had to round up British soldiers to do the job. Upon arrival, it took weeks to sort it all out.[16]

  The Canadians arrived at Patney railway station, “shivering and blinking sleepily,” at one o’clock in the morning. There was no transport there to meet them, so they had to march eleven miles to the camp, each man carrying 100 to 125 pounds of equipment, guided through the country roads by “a constable with a lantern and a bicycle.”[17] Currie claims that it was “an ideal night for marching, neither too hot nor too cold,” but he was not carrying a heavy pack. Baldwin described it as “a truly murderous hike [that] blistered our feet [and] spoiled our tempers.”[18]

  They arrived at dawn to discover tents flapping “sadly against tent poles as if sympathizing with our woeful plight.” The tents had simply been erected and left loosely staked for the Canadians to tighten and make habitable, but despite the rain, “we were too weary to bother with them; we simply dropped on the ground and slept the sleep of utter exhaustion.”[19] This was their introduction to Salisbury Plain, an area noted, as Currie laconically explained, “for its historical associations and its bad climate.”[20]

  The winter of 1914–15 was exceptionally bad, and Salisbury Plain became “one seething quagmire of mud.” Indeed, Baldwin declared that “words are powerless to describe our continual conflict with that mud; it was everywhere—in our eyes, our hair, our tents, our clothes, our grub; we often had to swallow it as well as wallow in it.”[21] Arthur Chute described it as “a nightmare” which “the few surviving veterans still in the front line speak of . . . with greatest horror.”[22] To be fair, Salisbury Plain had been established as a summer camp, which explains why the men had to spend the winter in tents made of linen “so thin you could count the stars through them”[23] rather than thick waterproof canvas. It could be argued, of course, that living and training in fields of mud, while unplanned, proved to be useful preparation for what was to come in Flanders.

  Despite the conditions, Baldwin claimed that “we were healthy and happy and, in consequence, were grumbling all the time. We roundly cursed our officers, anathematized the mud, swore we would mutiny—all done sotto voce. But we were very, very happy.”[24] Chute agreed that “no matter how gloomily the day began, dinner always found us gay, masters of our spirits. Hard exercise and ceaseless training prevented repining, and brought forth strong bodies and brave spirits.”[25]

  Perhaps so, but one suspects that both men, writing while the war was still on, were not being entirely forthright with their readers. It is certainly not entirely true that the men were healthy. An epidemic of spinal meningitis spread through the camp that winter, making many men sick and killing twenty-eight of them.[26] “Those were the saddest, bluest days that I experienced in my two and a half years of soldiering,” Chute recalled. “Every day I could look out of my tent in the melancholic blur of mist and rain and see the draped gun-carriage moving to the ‘Dead March’ from Saul, while one battalion or another slowly followed their comrade to his grave.”[27]

  Because so many of the first contingent were British men who had only emigrated to Canada in recent years, returning in 1914 was in a sense a free trip home, and they were received enthusiastically because they had returned to help the motherland. The transition from Canada to England was easier for them than for Canadian-born men because they had families to visit and knew their way around.

  At the same time, the experience of returning “home” made many if not most of them realize that they “had become Canadianized” to the extent that Britain’s flaws—dirty industrial cities, crowded countryside, and the entrenched class system—and Canada’s advantages were now perhaps clearer to them than they had been.[28] As The Times later wrote, “whether born here or elsewhere, the men from the Dominion are essentially Canadian in temper and outlook, organized by Canada, inspired by Canada, and of the very warp and woof of Canada.”[29]

  At the same time, however, several Canadians—obviously only those who could afford the luxury—arranged for their wives and children to move to England so that they could be close to their husbands until they went to France. The Manchester Guardian reported in July 1915 that a passenger liner had recently arrived with nearly a thousand such people.[30] According to Jonathan Vance there were 3,000 wives in England by May 1916, a number that rose to an astonishing 30,000 by early 1917.[31]

  Most Canadians found the British people friendly and welcoming, and many stories were told of invitations to private homes for meals, especially during holidays like Christmas. At the same time, British shopkeepers and taxi drivers too often took advantage of the fact that the Canadians found the British sterling currency confusing—this was long before Britain adopted the decimal currency system used by Canada and the United States—and overcharged or cheated them when giving change. The Canadians often thought a one pound note was the equivalent of a dollar, when in fact it was worth five dollars. They were often confused as well about the value of a half-crown or a shilling.[32]

  One is reminded of a story—a joke with a little bite to it—popular in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, years ago when many Cape Bretoners migrated to the Boston area in search of jobs. One time a man from Inverness who was among them went to the train station and asked when the train would arrive from Inverness. When the clerk said he had no idea but would check the schedules, the man from Inverness expressed great surprise that the clerk would not know when the train from Inverness would arrived because everyone in Inverness knew when the train from Boston would arrive.

  The point is that Canadians, as they became more exposed to the world beyond their borders, began to learn that while they found it interesting and even important to be familiar with Britain, and later the United States, the citizens of those major powers, with their much larger populations and complex global interests, did not generally find it important to be especially fam
iliar with Canada.

  In other words, the center of empire, when viewed and experienced first-hand, proved not to be the idealized wonderful place that many Canadians had been taught to believe it was. This was hardly surprising, really, and reflected no fault on either side. It was just the almost inevitable discovery that reality cannot always meet the unrealistic expectations that advertisers, promoters, and propagandists create in those they seek to influence. This was not entirely a surprise or an original discovery, although it probably was to most of the Canadians in Britain during the war. As early as 1904, Sara Jeannette Duncan, a Toronto journalist, had published a novel entitled The Imperialist that described the disillusionment of a typical English-Canadian imperialist when he went “home.”[33]

  Shortly after their arrival, the Canadians were granted a week’s leave. They went off in groups, large and small, some to visit family and some just to see the sights. Many naturally headed for London, but others went elsewhere, and some got no farther than the local village pubs. Inevitably, some of them drank too much and got into brawls or were just generally rowdy. The authorities, while somewhat sympathetic to the men’s high spirits and the fact that they had just been released from more than two weeks’ confinement on ocean transports, recognized that they had to ensure that the Canadian troops were not thought to be, and weren’t in fact, a mob of wild semi-civilized colonials.