Canada's Great War, 1914-1918

by Brian Douglas Tennyson

  But the situation could have been much worse, and almost certainly would have been if the Canadians had not been there, a fact recognized by both British and French commanders. While it was undoubtedly overstating the facts to say, as one British staff officer did, that they had prevented “one of the greatest disasters in the history of the British army,” they had, as Sir John French acknowledged, definitely “saved the situation.”[24] According to Baldwin, they were greeted by the British troops when they withdrew with “a terrific cheer,” which meant “more to us than all the eulogies of generals or newspapers.”[25]

  What was impressive was not just that the Canadian division had shown extraordinary steadiness and courage in a very bad situation, but that the division was made up of amateur, inexperienced officers and men. As Vance says, “a more experienced formation might have recognized the impossibility of the situation and pulled back.” This, in fact, was what General Horace Smith-Dorrien, the commander of the British Second Army, had recommended, but the French “thought him weak and sacked him.”[26] The Canadians, “perhaps because they did not know any better . . . stuck in and fought” and “when they gave ground, it was only when there was no one left who could hold a rifle or [had] no more bullets left to fire.”[27] Henceforth, British commanders would show them more respect, as indeed would the Germans, and the word “colonial,” which had been used condescendingly, became “a mark of distinction.”[28]

  The first Victoria Crosses awarded to Canadian soldiers in the war were earned during this battle, and there were four of them. Fred Fisher of the 13th Battalion earned the first Canadian VC at St. Julien on the 23rd, and Fred Hall of the 8th Battalion—Winnipeg’s “Little Black Devils”—earned the second on the 24th while trying to rescue wounded men. Both had to be awarded posthumously. Lieutenant Edward Bellew of the 7th Battalion and Captain Francis Scrimger, a medical officer, also received VCs. Bellew was captured in the battle, the first Canadian soldier to be captured in the war.[29]

  If it was a tremendously impressive performance for inexperienced troops, it was also an extravagant waste of men. Of the 18,000 men it had in the field, the division sustained about 6,000 casualties, many of them survivors of the gas attack. As Canadian writer Pierre Berton has written, “in the years that followed, old soldiers in military hospitals would cough themselves to death, a grim reminder of those desperate moments in the green hell of the Ypres Salient.”[30]

  One casualty of the spring fighting was the 10th Battalion’s Colonel J. A. Currie. “Gassed, exhausted, and having seen his men shot to bits” at the Second Battle of Ypres, “he snapped, and deserted from the front. He was found in a rear dugout, insensible, perhaps drunk, and definitely shell-shocked.”[31] Currie was only one of several pre-war militia officers who raised and led regiments overseas but proved unable to cope with modern warfare. Most didn’t crack, as Currie did, but had to be replaced because they simply lacked the technical or leadership skills required.

  Surprisingly, many of the pre-war officers adapted well and proved to be courageous, effective leaders. Of the twelve battalion commanders who served at the Second Battle of Ypres, three—Arthur Birchall of the 2nd, William Hart-McHarg of the 7th, and Russell Boyle of the 10th—were killed, and Currie collapsed. The remaining eight rose through the ranks as the war continued, and every officer who later became a divisional commander had fought at the Second Battle of Ypres. So, too, had most of the brigadier generals, while many junior officers and NCOs who survived the battle rose to command battalions. In short, the Second Battle of Ypres veterans went on to fill most of the senior command positions in the Canadian Corps.[32]

  Germany’s use of poison gas at the Second Battle of Ypres reinforced the impression among people in the Allied countries, which their governments naturally encouraged, that it was a nation of barbarians. This was, of course, hypocritical because Lord Kitchener, while denouncing the use of gas as barbaric, promptly asked the Cabinet to authorize the British army to use it as well. This was done, and it was used, not only by the British but by Canadian troops as well.

  Hypocrisy trumps reason during wartime, however, and British and Canadian propagandists worked hard henceforth at encouraging people to see the war not as a clash of rival empires but a crusade, a war between Christian civilization and Hun barbarism. The mass circulation newspapers, which had learned how to manipulate public opinion, fully cooperated in the propaganda campaign either because their proprietors actually believed what they were saying or—more probably—because it was good for circulation. As important as it was to convince the civilian population that the war was justified, it was even more important to convince people in the United States. And American public opinion was already becoming increasingly sympathetic to the Allies because of ill-conceived German actions, such as torpedoing the Lusitania, a passenger liner, while the Second Battle of Ypres was raging, with the loss of nearly 1,200 lives, including 128 American men, women, and children.

  Possibly the most powerful piece of propaganda that came out of the Second Battle of Ypres was a poem. “In Flanders Fields” was written during the battle on May 2 by Canadian Major John McCrae, a doctor serving as medical officer of the First Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery. Working in a dressing station near the Ypres Canal, McCrae wrote the poem after his friend, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was killed in the battle. According to Colonel E. W. B. “Dinky” Morrison, his commanding officer, McCrae read the poem to him one day but then tossed it into a waste basket, from which Morrison rescued it and sent it to Punch magazine in London. Morrison, it should be noted, was only one of several men who claimed the credit for getting the poem published.

  In any event, “In Flanders Fields” was published in the December 1915 issue of Punch, and it almost instantly achieved astonishing popularity, undoubtedly becoming the best-known poem to emerge from the war. In 1919, Moina Michael, who taught at the University of Georgia, began wearing a poppy because of McCrae’s poem, and two years later the American Legion Auxiliary adopted the poppy as a symbol of remembrance for war veterans. Former President and Mrs. Wilson wore poppies on Armistice Day in 1921 when the body of the Unknown Soldier was laid to rest in Arlington Cemetery.[33]

  The practice quickly spread throughout the United States, Britain, and Canada and continues to this day in connection with Remembrance Day. The sale of the poppies over the years by the Royal Canadian Legion has raised millions of dollars to support its work on behalf of veterans. John McCrae did not, however, live to see any of this. He died of pneumonia in a Canadian military hospital at Boulogne in January 1918. His family home in Guelph, Ontario, has since become a national historic site.

  A less attractive impact of the Second Battle of Ypres and the demonization of the Germans was the emergence of the claim that a Canadian soldier had been found crucified on a barn door with bayonets through his hands and feet. The story spread like the proverbial wildfire among the Canadian troops and in Canada, with many soldiers claiming that they had personally seen the victim. Later, investigators were never able to confirm the truth of the story, and many men eventually admitted that they had not actually seen the crucified soldier but had been told about him by trusted sources. This Christ-like image of the martyred Canadian reinforced the importance of crusading against a barbaric enemy and seemed to justify Canadian troops when they showed no mercy to Germans or opted not to take prisoners in future battles.[34]

  Remarkably, the Canadians began developing a reputation for not taking prisoners as early as the spring of 1915, when they first entered the trenches. Robert Graves, the British poet and writer who served in the war, later claimed that the Canadians had “the worst reputation for acts of violence against prisoners,” which they justified as revenge for the alleged crucifixion. “How far this reputation for atrocities was deserved,” he concluded, “and how far it could be ascribed to the overseas habit of bragging and leg-pulling, we could not decide.”[35]

  While Graves’s memoir of his war experie
nces “is generally regarded as being as much fiction as genuine memoir,”[36] the Canadians did undoubtedly develop a nasty reputation, as did the Australians. Canadian troops did capture some 43,000 German soldiers during the war, however, and it needs to be remembered that surrendering on a battlefield when men were under great stress and emotions were running high was inevitably dangerous. Cook concludes, judiciously but perhaps just a little defensively as well, that the Canadians “likely performed no more executions than any other troops on the battlefield,” although they may have “tended to be more vocal about those executions they did commit . . . because this image suited their emerging reputation as elite fighting troops.”[37]

  1. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977), 111.

  2. Winston Groom, A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient 1914–1918 (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002), 34.

  3. Groom, 35.

  4. Groom, 35.

  5. Quoted in Cook, At the Sharp End, 67.

  6. Quoted in Groom, 98.

  7. Baldwin, “Holding the Line,” 155.

  8. Currie, The Red Watch, 173.

  9. Cook, At the Sharp End, 107.

  10. Currie, 219.

  11. A. Fortescue Duguid, Official History of the Canadian Forces in the Great War, 1914–1919. Vol. 1 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1938), Appendix no. 180, 227–28.

  12. Peat, Private Peat, 146.

  13. Quoted in Groom, 99.

  14. Kitcheners Wood was not, as might be expected, named after Lord Kitchener. It was so-called because it was where the cooks for French troops previously posted in the area had prepared their meals.

  15. Groom, 100.

  16. Baldwin, 168.

  17. Cook, At the Sharp End, 143.

  18. Cook, At the Sharp End, 128.

  19. Quoted in Pierre Berton, Marching as to War: Canada’s Turbulent Years 1899–1953 (Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2002), 146.

  20. Cook, At the Sharp End, 151.

  21. This was Denis Winter’s interpretation. Denis Winter, Haig’s Command: A Reassessment (London: Penguin, 2001), 41.

  22. Cook, At the Sharp End, 157.

  23. Groom, 116.

  24. Quoted in Berton, 147.

  25. Baldwin, 176–77.

  26. Many agree with Worthington that he was “one of the ablest generals on the Western Front.” Worthington, Amid the Guns Below, 28.

  27. Vance, Maple Leaf, 63.

  28. Vance, Maple Leaf, 64.

  29. He was one of more than 1,400 Canadians captured at the Second Battle of Ypres. In total, 132 Canadian officers and 3,715 men were taken prisoner during the war. See also Desmond Morton, Silent Battle: Canadian Prisoners of War in Germany, 1914–1919. Toronto: Key Porter, 1992.

  30. Berton, 147.

  31. Cook, At the Sharp End, 148. Currie was sent to England, promoted to full colonel, and sent home. Not surprisingly, he does not talk about this in his war memoir. According to him, he was sent to England on medical leave because his lungs had been damaged by gas inhalation, then he was returned to Canada because “the Minister of Militia would like me . . . to lecture to the officers in training and assist in recruiting.” Currie, 286. He went on to express mild surprise that his name was not included in the list of honors earned at the Second Battle of Ypres.

  32. Cook, At the Sharp End, 166.

  33. Gene Smith, When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson (New York: William Morrow, 1964), 201.

  34. Cook, At the Sharp End, 163.

  35. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London: The Folio Society, 1981; First published 1929), 163.

  36. Cook, At the Sharp End, 309.

  37. Cook, At the Sharp End, 309.

  Chapter 6

  Building the Corps

  This war is the suicide of civilization.

  —Robert Borden, 1915[1]

  The terrible spring of 1915 wasn’t over yet, because the Allies responded to the Second Battle of Ypres with their own offensive southwest of the city in Artois. The goal was for the French to capture Vimy Ridge, an exceptionally high escarpment in the generally flat country in this area that overlooked Lens and the Douai Plain and the important German railway lines that ran through it. If Vimy Ridge could be taken, possession of the Plain would become untenable, and it might even be possible to push the Germans out of Belgium altogether. The Canadians marched southeast and were reattached to Douglas Haig’s First Army to support the French by attacking the German line between Neuve Chapelle to the north and the village of Festubert to the south.

  The first attack, carried out mainly by Indian troops against Aubers Ridge on May 9, went badly, but Haig naturally decided to try again. The second attack, on the 15th, made rapid initial progress despite the failure of a four-day artillery bombardment by more than 400 guns firing 100,000 shells to effectively destroy the German defenses. The Germans fell back to a line directly in front of the village, at which point Haig, sensing a breakthrough, ordered the Canadians to finish the job.

  There were two problems, however. Haig’s staff officers had not actually surveyed the battlefield and were using maps that had been printed geographically backward and upside down. This may not have mattered much, in fact, as the heavy bombardment had destroyed many landmarks. What did matter was that light rain had become heavy, turning the battlefield which had already been churned up by the artillery barrage into a muddy quagmire.

  The Canadians attacked early on the evening of the 18th and succeeded in reaching their objective, which was an orchard that became known as Canadian Orchard because it was the furthest point reached by the British in the battle for Festubert. But they were now trapped on the battlefield in full view of the Germans, unable even to get supplies from the rear. Currie was now ordered to launch a supporting attack. Convinced that it was a futile mission, he sent in only two companies of infantry and a small party of grenadiers—a force too weak to accomplish much, but as many men as he was prepared to waste. The only way forward was through a narrow communications trench, on which the Germans had naturally trained a machine gun. After considerable slaughter, the attack, which Currie admitted was “a complete failure,” was called off.

  The outspoken Currie attributed the foolishness of the mission to the fact that the “son of a bitch who wrote this order never saw a trench.”[2] Haig—who was earning the title of “Butcher Haig”—naturally blamed the failure of the attack on the Canadians, claiming that they had not tried hard enough and should try again. Meanwhile, the Germans were bringing in reinforcements. After a weak barrage, the third Canadian attack took place early on the evening of the 21st, while it was still daylight. Inevitably, the Germans inflicted huge losses on them, then, as was their habit, withdrew and counterattacked the next day, supported by an artillery barrage.

  As at the Second Battle of Ypres, the Canadians held their position, albeit at huge cost—18 officers and 250 men from the 10th Battalion alone—and then Haig, annoyed at the apparent weakness of the colonial troops, ordered yet another attack. It took place on the 24th, even though the ground was so chewed up that the troops had to carry footbridges to lay across the swamp. Recognizing the futility of the exercise, battalion commanders, with Currie’s “tacit approval,” committed only limited resources to the operation.[3] Surprisingly, however, this attack succeeded and the Germans withdrew from Festubert. It was a significant if minor victory for the Canadians, but it cost 2,605 casualties, 661 of them killed, for which they had gained 600 yards on a mile-long front. Put another way, four men had been killed for every yard gained. The battle was, as Turner said, a “pure bloody mess,” the result of confusion and incompetence both at and behind the front.[4]

  Three weeks later, on June 15, Mercer’s First Brigade was ordered to repeat the exercise a few miles south, at Givenchy, where, again, troops attacked without adequate artillery support. While it was true that this assault was supported by the explosion of underground mines, the blast killed at least fifty Canadi
ans as well as many Germans, and communications between those supposedly directing the operation and those doing the fighting were again inadequate and intermittent. The attack was a failure, resulting only in more pointless casualties, and the Canadians withdrew after only three hours’ fighting. By now, the French had given up trying to capture Vimy Ridge after sustaining huge losses, so the British and Canadians could stop trying to support them.

  Alderson and his divisional staff, virtually all of whom were British, had certainly given the impression of being not only incompetent but callous, and apparently “out of touch with troops at the front,” an impression that had been growing among the Canadians since the beginning of the war.[5] To be fair, Alderson was under heavy pressure from Haig, who in turn was under heavy pressure from General Joseph Joffre—the commander-in-chief of the French army—and at this point in the war the British were still functioning as a junior ally of the French. Still, relations between the British and Canadian forces, and their governments, would soon be strained if this sort of thing continued.