Canada's Great War, 1914-1918

by Brian Douglas Tennyson

  Discipline was improved, if not to British military standards, at least to an acceptable level, aided by General Alderson’s decision to ignore Sam Hughes’s ban on alcohol in camp. Hughes may have been a teetotaler, but 31,000 men could not reasonably be expected to share his values. Alderson allowed beer but no hard liquor, and the impact on morale was apparent. Lieutenant Victor Tupper, a grandson of former Canadian Prime Minister Sir Charles Tupper, no doubt spoke for most of the troops when he said that Alderson “won the hearts of all ranks by fighting Sam Hughes and establishing wet canteens. He said, in short, that we had been treated as schoolboys long enough, and that in the future we should be handled like men.”[34] It was true, and the wet canteens became very important to the men, not just because of the beer but as social clubs.

  Alderson spent the bleak winter of 1914–15 doing what he could to prepare the Canadians for combat. He dismissed some of the officers chosen by Hughes who clearly were not suitable to lead men in battle and replaced the worse than useless Canadian-made Oliver equipment and cardboard boots with better British equipment. He also alienated Colonel J. W. Carson, Sam Hughes’s personal representative in Britain—and possibly would have alienated some of the men as well if they had known—when he declined the War Office’s offer to kick British troops out of their barracks and give them to Canadians, which Carson had pressured the War Office to do. Alderson saw no reason why his men should be given special treatment and recognized the bad feeling that it would generate.

  The Canadians were already less than popular with British military officials, who thought they were not only undisciplined but too informal. Harold Peat recalled that “as far as discipline was concerned, we did not even know it by name. The military authorities could not understand how it was that a major or a captain and a private could go on leave together, eat together and in general chum around together.”[35]

  Despite the appalling weather, Alderson established a rigorous training program for the men. “It was drill, drill, drill, all day long, rain or shine, and it was almost always rain.”[36] Training actually included instruction in field tactics and shooting practice, while night alarms “would see us sleepily but frantically struggling to don our equipment so that we would make a record for our company being first at the assembly post.”[37] Every day men were delegated to clean and groom the horses at a nearby camp. One day, when it was part of Baldwin’s duty

  to assist in taking a load of provisions for the men who were looking after the horses, we came upon a wondrous object, lying resplendent in all its native beauty, by the side of the road. Hardly believing our eyes, we bore down upon the stranger. It was real, and we rejoiced. Thirty-six gallons of good beer had wandered away from a jolting wagon. . . .

  That night . . . by the dim light of two stable lanterns we paid our respects to the delightful stranger until we had exhausted its hospitality, and at “Lights Out” we tacked homewards, after an affectionate farewell to one another.[38]

  There were more sober experiences as well. A few nights later, having gone to visit a friend who was serving in the Princess Pats, then training at a different camp, Baldwin was returning home across the hills when he

  suddenly became aware of the roll of men’s voices singing an old familiar hymn. The wind blowing in my direction carried the sound even above the swish of the rain; in fact, the solemnity of it all was intensified by the steady swish of the downpour. Every evening men by the thousands congregated in our only place of recreation, the YMCA marquee, and on this evening they were singing that old favorite of all civilization, “Nearer My God to Thee.” It sounded like a mighty requiem.[39]

  The final event before departing for France was a review attended by King George V and Queen Mary, Lord Kitchener—the famous general who was now British War Secretary—and other dignitaries on February 4, 1915. “Morning broke with the usual drizzle of rain,” Baldwin records, but “happily stopped later on, giving us instead a very fine day.” When the battalions arrived at the parade ground, the Highlanders were already there on the slope of a gently rising hill, “making the air hideous” with the “terrific skirling” of their bagpipes that “squealed their defiance of everything non-Scotch.”[40]

  As far as the eye could see, line after line of infantry stretched up the gently sloping hill. A massed band at our immediate rear did much to give one a curious feeling of elation. The huge Union Jack directly to our front surmounting the reviewing platform streamed grandly out in the breeze that was steadily blowing across the plain.[41]

  Eventually the royal party and attendant dignitaries arrived, and, after inspection, the march-past took place. It began with the artillery “thundering down the slope at a mad gallop,” then slowing down to walk “as proudly as horses ever did” past the reviewing stand. Next came the cavalry, wearing their Stetson hats and long yellow cloaks, followed by the battalions of infantry.

  Following the review, “line after line of infantry arranged itself on each side of the track, and as the train bearing our distinguished visitors steamed through, a roar of cheering echoed and re-echoed away over the plain.”[42] They presumably did not on this occasion sing the song that had become so popular among the Canadians on Salisbury Plain:

  We are Sam Hughes’s army

  No bloody good are we

  We cannot march, we cannot shoot

  No bloody good are we.[43]

  The next day, the troops marched to Amesbury to board a train that would take them to the coast, “a gruelling tramp of about an hour,” done in the rain, of course.[44] Five of the original battalions—the 6th, 9th, 11th, 12th, and 17th—were left behind, much to their disappointment, to form the basis of the Second Division already being recruited in Canada and to provide reinforcements to the battalions going to France. Thus, 18,517 men and 4,764 horses sailed to France in what was now being called the First Division. Some battalions had already acquired a mascot which led them on marches. Goats were popular for some reason, and the mascot of the 5th Battalion was “Billy,” a Rocky Mountain goat who served throughout the war and came home a much-loved veteran.

  They sailed from Avonmouth, landing at St. Nazaire in Brittany three days later. It was not an especially enjoyable voyage. “We slept where we could,” according to Baldwin, “and passed the days huddled together on the lower deck of the old cattle barge, for she was nothing else.” Many played poker, gambling all they had, not thinking there was much point in saving their meager resources as they went to war.[45]

  As the ships came into port on a beautiful spring morning, a crowd of French children was on hand singing “Tipperary,” which had become the unofficial “battle song of the British Army.”[46] The men responded with “a storm of cheering.” Oranges, bananas, grapes, and fruit of all kinds were thrown to them, “to which we replied by sending over buttons, badges, etc, these ‘Souvenirs Canadien’ being literally fought over by the crowd.”[47]

  After disembarkation, all the equipment had to be unloaded, which this time was done by the troops themselves, then they marched to the train station to move north. It was not an easy march because it was done in “heavy marching order,” meaning that the men were carrying a “rifle and bayonet attached to braces” that were attached “by self-locking buckles to the belt,” plus a knapsack or valise containing a shaving kit, towel, soap, change of underwear, socks, one pair of boots, mess tin, “and any other little convenience you may wish to carry.” They also carried Sam Hughes’s infamous—and useless—entrenching tool, hanging from their belt, and a water bottle. In pouches attached to their belt and braces, they carried 120 rounds of ammunition, and a blanket and oil sheet rolled on top of the knapsack. As if this was not enough, they had been given goatskin coats upon landing, a gift from the Tsar of Russia, which gave off a powerful odor “not unlike the presence of a skunk.”[48]

  At the station, the men had to load all the equipment onto the train, then boarded boxcars marked “Chevaux 8, Hommes 40,” meaning that they were designe
d to carry eight horses or forty men. It was here that the division suffered its first casualty, when Corporal John McMaster, a thirty-three-year old weaver from Hespeler, Ontario, fell under a train and had an arm and leg severed.[49]

  They spent the next three days in these boxcars and “not only could we not lie down, but there was not enough room to even sit down, and when we rested we took it by relays. However . . . in spite of our cramped quarters we managed to be happy and enjoy our first glimpse of ‘La Belle France.’”[50] Colonel Currie, who traveled comfortably as an officer, claimed that while the men “had to stand [for] 48 hours” of their journey, they “did it without a murmur.”[51]

  Three days later they detrained, “on a bleak, raw morning,” at Hazebrouck, on the Belgian border. This was the headquarters of Lieutenant General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien’s 2nd British Army, to which the Canadian contingent was attached because he had commanded Canadian troops in the South African War.

  Arriving in the battle zone was both exciting and disturbing because, as Baldwin observed, “the terrible toll of this conflict was brought home to us. Line after line of wooden crosses, with the names and regiments of the men who lay beneath, stretched for an appalling distance. . . . Later on I noticed the poppies that abound all through sunny France, waving their pretty heads between the crosses.”[52]

  A few days later, they began their march to Armentières, a distance of twenty-two miles. They were now just behind the front line at Ypres, the most bitterly contested sector throughout the entire war. “Before us [were] the roar of the guns and the scintillant flight of star-shells, and the first of the New World troops had come to take their place on the firing-line.”[53]

  1. Baldwin, “Holding the Line,” 22.

  2. Curry, From the St. Lawrence, 40.

  3. Baldwin, 28.

  4. Jones, Fighting the Hun, 27.

  5. Baldwin, 29.

  6. Cook, At the Sharp End, 70.

  7. Baldwin, 30.

  8. Curry, 42.

  9. Baldwin, 30.

  10. Chute, The Real Front, 17.

  11. Baldwin, 31.

  12. J. F. C. Fuller, Memoirs of an Unconventional Soldier (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1936), 7–8.

  13. Currie, The Red Watch, 65.

  14. Currie, 65–66.

  15. Fuller, 8.

  16. Fuller, 7.

  17. Currie, 67.

  18. Currie, 68; Baldwin, 34.

  19. Baldwin, 34.

  20. Currie, 69.

  21. Baldwin, 36.

  22. Chute, 16.

  23. Currie, 73.

  24. Baldwin, 36.

  25. Chute, 18.

  26. Chute claims that 400 Canadian soldiers died of spinal meningitis at Salisbury Plain, but this is not correct. Chute, 19.

  27. Chute, 19.

  28. Vance, Maple Leaf, 56.

  29. The Times, May 22, 1915, quoted in Vance, Maple Leaf, 65.

  30. Cited in Vance, Maple Leaf, 55

  31. Vance, Maple Leaf, 86.

  32. There were twenty shillings in the pound, making a shilling worth about twenty-five cents in Canadian currency. The half-crown coin was worth two and a half shillings, making it worth about sixty-three cents.

  33. Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Imperialist (New York: Appleton, 1904, reprinted Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1961).

  34. Quoted in Cook, At the Sharp End, 76.

  35. Harold R. Peat, Private Peat (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1917), 19.

  36. Currie, 86.

  37. Baldwin, 43.

  38. Baldwin, 45–47.

  39. Baldwin, 54.

  40. Baldwin, 60, 61.

  41. Baldwin, 62.

  42. Baldwin, 65, 66.

  43. Cook, At the Sharp End, 100.

  44. Baldwin, 66.

  45. Baldwin, 69.

  46. Baldwin, 70.

  47. Baldwin, 71. Oddly, Harold Peat says “the populace could not have known of our coming, for there was no scene, nor was there a reception.” Peat, 34.

  48. Baldwin, 72–74.

  49. Cook, At the Sharp End, 96.

  50. Baldwin, 75.

  51. Currie, 116.

  52. Baldwin, 76.

  53. Chute, 23.

  Chapter 5

  Discovering Modern Warfare

  Men must have a fairly elevated motive for getting themselves killed. To die to protect or enhance the wealth, power or privilege of someone else, the most common reason for conflict over the centuries, lacks beauty.

  —John Kenneth Galbraith[1]

  As is probably well known, when the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was assassinated on June 28, 1914, by a Bosnian Serb with high-level support in the Serbian government, the Balkans entered a crisis which quickly dragged in all the major powers in Europe. Austria-Hungary determined that it was time to eliminate the Serbian problem—a decision that was unacceptable to Russia for a variety of reasons. Russia’s mobilization triggered the Franco-Russian alliance, bringing France into the war, while Germany felt obliged to join in because of its alliance with Austria-Hungary.

  Because Germany’s greatest fear was having to fight a war on two fronts, the German army had developed a war plan that addressed this danger. Assuming that Russia would be relatively slow to mobilize its potentially vast army, the Schlieffen Plan—named after Field Marshal Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, Chief of the Imperial German General Staff who designed it—called for an immediate attack on France designed to knock it out of the war quickly so that German troops on the Western Front could then be moved to the Eastern Front to help Austria-Hungary face the Russian behemoth.

  It was a good concept and made eminent sense, at least in theory. The problem was that after the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 the French had built an extensive network of powerful fortifications along its border with Germany. While they might not have been strong enough to prevent the Germans from getting through, they certainly were strong enough to slow them down considerably.

  The Schlieffen Plan got around this difficulty by proposing to invade France through Belgium because France had not built strong fortifications on the Franco-Belgian border. The reason they had not done so was not just that Belgium was not seen as a threat but also because Belgium had maintained a position of neutrality since becoming an independent nation in 1830. The Germans hoped, probably not too seriously, that Belgium would allow their army to travel through its territory in order to reach France, but if Belgium refused, regarding it as a violation of its neutrality, the Germans would invade Belgium.

  This had the very significant result of bringing Britain into the war. Although it had formed an entente with France, which seemed non-committal, in fact it had guaranteed France that it would come to its aid if it were attacked by Germany, and the British and French armies had organized joint maneuvers for several years before 1914. When the crisis came, British politicians and public opinion were divided, but Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality proved to be the decisive issue, with the British going to war at least nominally in protest against Germany’s callous repudiation of a guarantee it and the other major powers had made in the Treaty of London in 1839.

  The German army opened the war by sweeping through Belgium into northeastern France, with a view to moving westward, then swinging south to encircle and capture Paris, then turning eastward to attack the French army, which was supporting the Belgians in the north and had invaded Lorraine in the south. Britain sent the cream of its small professional army across to support the French in the north, where it first collided with sixty-one German divisions near the Belgian city of Mons.

  Badly outnumbered and with the French troops already shaky, the British were badly mauled and began retreating southward. Then the Germans made a very serious mistake. Because the Russian army had mobilized much more quickly than expected, the German High Command shifted some of its forces in France to the Eastern Front to bolster its armies there. This endangered the Schlieffen Pl
an, which was based on overwhelming superiority of firepower and manpower.

  With his advance slowing down because his forces had been weakened, German General von Kluck now decided not to encircle Paris but to make his southern swing east of the city, a decision that may well have been one of the turning points in the war. The Allied armies stopped retreating and turned to face the Germans at the Marne River, all available reserves were mobilized in Paris, and the German advance was stopped. The Schlieffen Plan had failed.