While all this was going on, the Second Canadian Division arrived in England. Even before the first contingent had reached England in October 1914, the government had called for more volunteers. Like the First Division, the Second comprised twelve battalions organized into three brigades, plus supporting units such as cavalry, artillery, and engineers. Among them was the first francophone battalion from Quebec. The 22nd Battalion, which is still in existence today as the Royal 22nd Regiment or Van Doos—an English corruption of vingt-deuxième—would prove to be the only francophone battalion in the entire Canadian Corps throughout the war.
The first commander of the Second Division was the legendary Major General Sam Steele, a sixty-six-year-old Canadian professional soldier whose service went back as far as the Red River uprising in 1870.[6] Needless to say, this was a political appointment and an almost honorary one, as no one expected that Steele would actually take the division into combat.
Public enthusiasm for the war had not abated since August, and the new battalions had no difficulty in finding enough volunteers, although their composition differed significantly from that of the First Division. Whereas two-thirds of the men in the First Division had been British-born, the majority of men in the Second were Canadian-born. Taking the 25th (Nova Scotia) Battalion as an example, 39 of its 42 officers and 915 of the 1,300 men were born in Canada. Eighteen others were born in the United States, most being the sons of parents who had emigrated to New England in recent years.[7]
The organization and basic training of the Second Division was handled differently as well. Instead of having all the volunteers go to Valcartier, this time they remained in their respective military districts because Valcartier lacked winter quarters and training facilities. Nor did the Second Division cross the Atlantic in a dramatic convoy as the First had done. Instead, the battalions sailed separately on fast ocean liners, but not until May 1915 because British military authorities did not want them to arrive until the First Division had moved on to France, except for three battalions which went over in February to provide reinforcements for the First Division.
Quebec’s 22nd Battalion and Nova Scotia’s 25th Battalion sailed from Halifax on the Cunard Line’s Saxonia on May 20. Howard Johnstone, a lieutenant in the 25th Battalion, recalled that “all the way down the harbor we were cheered to the echo.”[8] While there must have been some trepidation about the voyage, as the Lusitania had been sunk by a German submarine with the loss of nearly 1,200 lives just two weeks earlier, the voyage was “uneventful.”[9] Happily, “the utmost cordiality” prevailed between the officers and men of the 22nd and 25th Battalions during the voyage.[10] Indeed, according to Johnstone the men of the 22nd “are learning to sing ‘Ho iero mho nighdean bholdeach’ in French, while we have translated ‘Alouette’ and ‘Ma Boule Roulante’ into Gaelic.”[11]
Upon arriving at Plymouth, the Second Division did not go to Salisbury Plain as the First Division had done, but to the British army camp at Shorncliffe, in the hills overlooking Folkestone in Kent. The British troops there had been moved to nearby Aldershot, the British army’s largest training camp. Most of the Canadian troops already in the country, with the exception of the Canadian cavalry depot at Canterbury, had already moved to Shorncliffe. One officer described Shorncliffe as “an enormous camp” that seemed like a Canadian city. “There are soldiers everywhere you go, all with the Maple Leaf on their caps, and the good word Canada on their shoulders. If you go into Folkestone in the evening, it is almost beyond description. The mass of khaki is bewildering.”[12]
Shorncliffe had the great advantage of being very close to the Channel ports such as Dover, Plymouth, and Southampton, but also fairly close to London. It possessed relatively modern brick housing for the troops, although there was not enough of it to accommodate the growing numbers of arriving troops. As a result, tents and “small waterproof huts” were provided, which Georges Vanier of the 22nd Battalion considered “excellent lodgings.”[13] As the war went on and the number of Canadians in England continued to grow, additional training camps were established at Bramshott, Crowborough, Hastings, New Shoreham, Otterpool, Seaford, and Witley, all of which were close to both Shorncliffe and Aldershot.
While the locations of the training camps were much better than Salisbury Plain, relations with the local population do not appear to have improved. Canteen services at Shorncliffe proved to be a major aggravation because they were operated by a private British company whose provisions were, according to Robert Clements, a sergeant in the 25th Battalion, not only overpriced but “unbelievably bad and the beer poor and weak.” To make matters worse, the canteen manager was “loud mouthed, insolent and just plain ignorant.” In view of the fact that the nearest pub was at least two miles away, this situation was a ticking time bomb, and one night it exploded. Some of the men “escorted” the canteen’s manager and staff to the camp gates, then burned down the building with all its contents. Needless to say, this caught the attention of the officers, who investigated the situation and remedied it.[14]
There was also serious trouble in nearby Folkestone, where the soldiers spent most of their short leaves. Some shopkeepers were not above overcharging for goods or taking advantage of the fact that many Canadian soldiers did not understand that the British pound was equivalent to five Canadian dollars. This was a risky practice, however, because many soldiers, being themselves British, were quite familiar with the currency.
As with the canteen problem at Shorncliffe, a crisis was not long in coming. According to Clements, there was an “incident” in Folkestone on the weekend after the Second Division arrived at Shorncliffe. The town was full of Canadians, who had just received their first pay. The trouble began in a fish-and-chip shop on Tontine Street in the lower part of the town when a Canadian soldier paid for his food with a one-pound note and was given change for a ten-shilling note (i.e., half of one pound).
When the soldier, who happened to know the difference, asked for the correct change, an argument resulted and “the Canadian and his friends took the shop apart and distributed its contents, including the shopkeeper, in the street. This citizen called on his friends for support,” and soon a major riot was taking place. Canadians rallied to the support of their friends and not only “took charge of the whole street” but “badly damaged” several shop fronts and “some looting took place.” Eventually, two British cavalry regiments had to be called in to restore order.[15]
It was a dry summer, and the open fields at Shorncliffe and the nearby rolling Kentish countryside provided ideal training conditions. According to Ralph Lewis, a Newfoundlander in the 25th Battalion, “we had to work, and real hard, too, but undoubtedly the process made us better men and tended to increase our confidence as soldiers.”[16] It ended with the inevitable formal reviews by Borden and Hughes—now proudly “Sir” Sam Hughes—and by Andrew Bonar Law, Britain’s Colonial Secretary (and a Canadian by birth), another by Princess Alexander of Teck, and finally by the King and Lord Kitchener. As usual for inspections, it rained on the day that the king and Kitchener came, but Vanier still thought it “a moving spectacle, the most beautiful day of my military life.”[17] Reflecting the way the war had been going, this inspection was also “watched with interest by a large number of civilians and by many wounded soldiers and nursing sisters from hospitals close at hand.”[18]
The Second Division crossed the English Channel by night in stages between September 13 and 17, 1915. Vanier described the departure from camp as “very impressive and cheering. We got a rousing send-off” and “at every railway station where we stopped the people gave us a parting cheer.”[19] Clements later recalled that the ferry “was packed with just enough room to stand or lie down on the decks,” so the men “were unable to unload their gear to relax as much as the cramped quarters and the filthy ship would permit.” Many men were sick, “as much from the foul air and ship smells as from the motion of the sea.”
Then the fastenings on one of the side hatches gave
way and the doors swung open, so that the sea washed in when the ship rolled. For a brief time some fifty men near the doors were in danger of being washed overboard, but “they clung to each other while those further inside managed to pull them to safety.” After a struggle the ship’s crew got the doors closed, and happily, the distance across the Channel was not great.[20]
Upon arrival, the Second Division had to march to Bailleul, a small town southwest of Ypres, site of the Canadian headquarters. This was “the first real test” of its physical condition and morale,[21] and it didn’t get off to an inspiring start. “Through some brilliant staff work at the Battalion HQ level,” Clements recalled, the troops were actually sent in the wrong direction. “After several weary hours and becoming completely lost, a halt was called to wait for daylight and rescue from its wanderings. Meanwhile, Brigade HQ had been searching in all directions for their lost sheep, finally locating them soon after day break.”[22] The troops had to march back to their point of departure and proceed in the right direction, and they were expected to make up for the wasted time as well. “It was a sorry lot who came to rest in their proper place late that second night.”[23]
Another three days’ marching finally got them to their destination just over the Belgian border near the village of Locre. There they linked up with the First Division, which was already holding this front as the left sector of the British Second Army’s line north of Armentières, between Ploegsteert and Messines, facing the Germans who were entrenched along the Messines-Wytschaete Ridge.
The Canadian Corps was not involved in any major fighting after the vicious battles in the spring because the First Division required rest and rebuilding and the Second Division needed time to learn about modern war from the surviving veterans of the First Division. They were lucky because they avoided the first major offensive launched by the British in September 1915. The objective was to capture Loos, a strategically situated city on the Douai Plain overlooked by Vimy Ridge. The offensive failed, even though the British preceded it by launching 5,000 cylinders of the chlorine gas that they had denounced four months earlier as an immoral weapon, but at the cost of 100,000 casualties. Coming, as it did, at the end of a very bad year for the Allies, Loos was the last straw, and Sir John French was replaced as British commander-in-chief by Sir Douglas Haig, who had in fact conceived and led the attack on Loos.
The decision had already been made that when the Second Division got to France it would be joined with the First to form an army corps. As part of this restructuring, the Princess Pats and the Royal Canadian Regiment, which had arrived from garrison duty in Bermuda, were included as well, giving the new Canadian Corps a total strength of 1,354 officers and 36,522 other ranks. Australia and New Zealand had already established the precedent of having a Dominion formation, so the British were agreeable as long as a British general commanded it.
Sir Edwin Alderson, who had commanded the First Division, was promoted to command the Canadian Corps, and Arthur Currie, who had commanded the Second Brigade, was promoted to command the First Division. Clearly, Sam Steele, who had taken the Second Division overseas, could not actually command it in active service because of his age, so he now stepped aside, and Richard Turner was promoted to command it. Garnet Hughes, son of Sam Hughes, was promoted to command the First Brigade, replacing Malcolm Mercer, who was promoted to Major General commanding the Corps Troops, a miscellaneous collection of units that included the Canadian Cavalry Brigade, two unassigned infantry brigades, six regiments of Canadian Mounted Rifles, and supporting units. Lord Brooke,[24] who had commanded the Canadian forces at Petawawa in 1913, was given the Fourth Brigade. David Watson was promoted to command the Fifth and H. D. B. Ketchen got the Sixth.
The British War Office lent many officers to help the Canadian Corps develop the expertise needed to manage an organization of this size and complexity and to help it become an effective fighting force. While some Canadian nationalists, including Sam Hughes, wanted to replace British officers with Canadians, the reality of the situation was that there were few Canadian officers at this early stage of the war who had the training and experience to take over. As Arthur Currie, who strongly favored having the Canadians operating as a national formation, wrote, the question was not “whether a man is a Canadian or otherwise, it is one of the best man for the job.”[25]
Meanwhile, the government had agreed in June 1915 to recruit a third division, in addition to supplying 5,000 reinforcements a month to sustain the two divisions already overseas. Borden had reservations about the country’s ability to raise so many men, as indeed did Gwatkin, the Chief of the General Staff, but they accepted Hughes’s assurances that it could be done on the dubious grounds that, as Alderson had allegedly explained to him, the third division in an army corps was usually kept in reserve and therefore suffered no casualties. The Third Division was created not by another recruiting campaign, however, but by transferring the six mounted rifle battalions, the Princess Pats, and the Royal Canadian Regiment into it and adding other battalions from those already in England. Malcolm Mercer was promoted to command it.
At about the same time, when the British government abandoned its disastrous attack on the Dardanelles and shifted nine divisions from Egypt to Europe, it asked Canada to send twelve battalions to replace them. The government declined to do so partly because it was determined to keep its forces together but also because it suspected that public opinion would support sending troops to Europe more readily than sending them to the Middle East. It did, however, promise that the Third Division would be followed by the Fourth, which was duly authorized in the spring of 1916.
The Canadian Corps spent the “cold, wet winter” of 1915–16 guarding the southern flank of the “sacred and cursed Ypres salient.”[26] That winter in Flanders was very challenging, both physically and psychologically. Constant rain filled the trenches “with dirty, stinking water” and turned Flanders into “a solid mass of brown clay,”[27] and there was no respite for the men, who stood for days in thigh-deep water while trench shelters caved in, leaving no protection from the teeming skies. Conditions were little better in the billets, “where roofs leaked and it was all but impossible to coax more than a noxious smoke from the damp coke and charcoal that came up with the rations.”[28] Inevitably, there were many cases of influenza and other respiratory ailments, as well as “trench foot,” a condition like frostbite caused by the continued cold wetness which could lead to gangrene.[29]
The situation was not relieved by the food services. Rations consisted of bully beef, hard-tack, and water. Dry tea was issued along with “tommy-cookers,” small cans of fuel that could boil water. Unfortunately, too often the water was brought up to the trenches in cans that had previously been filled with gasoline, so the flavor of the tea left much to be desired. Francis MacGregor recalled that tea leaves were saved and “boiled over and over” and that there was no milk or sugar.[30] As a result, men scrounged the countryside in search of vegetables and livestock, which they purchased or “appropriated,” according to circumstances, and looked forward to their return to rest billets, where they could purchase meals in local restaurants and bars.
What was more demoralizing, undoubtedly, was the realization that after months of this there was no apparent end in sight. Thus, like the men of the First Division in 1914, those of the Second in 1915 found their first overseas Christmas “most depressing,” not only because the war was dragging on but because, in George Nasmith’s words, “the leaden atmosphere and lowering skies” of winter in northern France and Belgium were so different from the “blue cloudless skies, and crisp sparkling snow” of home.[31]
Despite the claim in the official history of the Canadian Expeditionary Force that there was none of the large-scale fraternization that had characterized the unofficial Christmas truce between British and German troops in 1914,[32] there definitely was fraternization, albeit on a smaller scale. Christmas Day “dawned peacefully” with only occasional gunfire, which “di
ed down as the day advanced.” By early afternoon, shelling and rifle fire ceased completely, and soon German soldiers were seen lifting heads and shoulders cautiously over the parapet of their front line trench. Encouraged by the lack of fire from the Canadians, a number of them climbed over the top, advanced into No Man’s Land, and, making signs of friendship, invited the Canadians to join them to celebrate the occasion.[33] “Conversation proved difficult at first, but a number of the Germans spoke English fluently and others, having rehearsed for the occasion, one must judge, endeavoured to establish their benevolence by constant repetition of the phrase ‘Kaiser no damn good.’”[34] For nearly an hour the Canadians and Germans exchanged gifts of cigarettes, food, uniform buttons and badges, and beer. But news of this totally unacceptable behavior had reached headquarters, and the Canadians were ordered to return to their trenches immediately. “When all had reported back, a salvo of artillery fire, aimed carefully to burst at a spot where no harm to friend or foe would result, warned the Germans that the truce was over and that hostilities had been resumed.”[35]
Nineteen-fifteen had been a brutal introduction to modern warfare, but the Canadians had, on the whole, met the challenge successfully, performing at least as well as, if not better than, British troops, despite being mere “colonials.” Canada’s commitment to the war had grown profoundly, from the initial division to three, and a fourth was being contemplated. And while they were officially part of the British army, the Canadians were now organized into a distinct Canadian Corps, enabling most Canadian troops to serve together as almost a distinct army within the British army.
Canada's Great War, 1914-1918 Page 12