Canada's Great War, 1914-1918

by Brian Douglas Tennyson

  Less well received was a general income tax, which would have been unthinkable before the war. The government was understandably very reluctant to take this step, but it needed the money, and, as the issue of conscription came to the forefront in 1917, there was much public support for a tax on those with high incomes. The rate of the tax was only 4% except for those whose incomes exceeded $6,000, and there were also generous exemptions. Because the incomes of most people were well below $2,000, most people paid little or no income tax during the war.

  But the fox was in the chicken coop, so to speak. Even though the government promised that income tax was only a temporary wartime measure, it survives to this day. But the government did manage to finance the war effort, although it did build up what was then thought a monstrous national debt in the process. Much of that debt was owed to foreign investors, especially in the United States, but a lot of it was owed to Canadians who had purchased government bonds.

  The impact of the war on women and their place in society was profound. In addition to replacing men in many jobs previously thought unsuitable to females or unavailable to them, women formed the backbone of organizations like the Canadian Patriotic Fund, which raised money to support the families of soldiers, and the Canadian Red Cross, which raised money but also produced bandages and other items needed by the soldiers. As well, perhaps rather surprisingly, women played a prominent role in the recruiting campaigns across the country. Inevitably, many of them began to ask why they were denied equal civil rights. The suffrage movement had been in existence for several years before the war, but the contribution which women made to the war effort in so many ways shattered the standard argument that their proper role was in the home as mothers and wives.

  The Rev. Charles Gordon—whom we have met already as Ralph Connor, an internationally known best-selling novelist and chaplain of the 43rd (Cameron Highlanders) Battalion—recognized the change in his 1917 novel, The Major. When the protagonist, a Canadian who had been working in Chicago, met a former female classmate, he “could hardly believe his eyes and ears, so immense was the change that had taken place in Jane during these ten months [of war].” Larry naturally wondered what had “released those powers of mind and soul which he could now recognize as being her own, but which he had never seen in action,” and immediately recognized that “the mighty change was due to the terrible energising touch of war.”[15] Clearly a modern man, Larry later married Jane.

  Politicians, primarily on the provincial level, began to pay attention, especially when the newly elected provincial Liberal government of T. C. Norris in Manitoba quickly enfranchised women in 1916. Manitoba was the first province in Canada to do so, but within six years, women in every province except Quebec could vote in provincial elections and all could vote in federal elections. The enfranchisement of women was a significant step forward in Canadian social values, but it was not an isolated event. The war had very quickly taken on the aura of a crusade by “civilized” nations against German “barbarism,” but it had also somehow connected with the prewar reform movements of what had become known as the progressive era that advocated a variety of social or moral reforms.

  The moral reform movement was led by the Methodist and Presbyterian churches, which were the two largest Protestant churches in English Canada. In the years before the war, many of their clergy and laity had begun advocating a “social gospel,” meaning that Christians should not focus entirely on their personal salvation but should also address society’s myriad social problems. As the General Council of the Methodist Church declared in 1906, Christians had a responsibility to “set up the Kingdom of God among men . . . a social order founded on the principles of the Gospel.”[16]

  The outbreak of the war strengthened the moral reform movement, as it seemed to some to present an obvious opportunity to reconstruct society. As Canadian historian John English puts it, “Protestant leaders became Christian soldiers who identified the Canadian role in the war with the Church’s struggle against evil.”[17] The Rev. James Henderson of Timothy Eaton Memorial (Methodist) Church in Toronto, once told mothers whose sons had been killed that their sons had “accomplished far more for Canada, for the Empire, for the world, for Christ, done more to bring about a new order of things in a few months than you or I could ever do if we lived a thousand years.”[18] In other words, the sacrifices made in the war would create “a new order of things” in which “social justice, faith, and service would be pre-eminent values.”[19]

  Unquestionably, the most controversial aspect of the social reform movement related to the sale and consumption of alcohol. The temperance movement had been growing in strength for several years before the war. It was not, as many think today, a puritanical movement which objected to alcohol on moral grounds; it was a reform movement which saw the very real harmful social impact of too much, too cheap, too readily available alcohol in an era when most men were paid weekly in cash and walked to and from work.

  In 1898 the Laurier government had held a national plebiscite on prohibition, which showed a fairly large majority in favor in English Canada but much less support in Quebec. Not surprisingly, Laurier chose not to take any action, but the strength of the temperance movement had continued to grow, and when King George V pledged publicly in 1914 that he would abstain from alcohol for the duration of the war, he provided an important impetus to the movement. An old navy man, he quickly regretted having made the commitment, but he did strike an important chord, and during the war, the temperance movement was reinforced by the argument that the consumption of alcohol negatively affected the efficiency of workers, while its production diverted grain from food production. The result was that by 1916 every province except Quebec had prohibited the sale of alcohol. Although there was clearly much public support for prohibition, Stephen Leacock, the McGill economics professor and humorist and a man who made no secret of his appreciation of alcohol, no doubt spoke for many Canadian men when he sadly commented, “I wish somehow we could prohibit the use of alcohol and merely drink beer and whiskey and gin as we used to.”[20]

  Another dimension of the government’s attempt to regulate society during the war was its strict censorship policy. Initially, it focused on news reports from Europe, fearing—no doubt rightly—that if people knew how bad things really were, men would never enlist, nor would their families encourage them to do so. Newspapers and magazines were forbidden to describe the high level of casualties or even to report on defeats in battle. The chief censor, Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Chambers, became especially agitated by the graphic reports published in the Ottawa Journal by Robert W. Service, the internationally acclaimed Canadian poet who was working as a civilian ambulance driver in France. Chambers ordered the Journal to stop publishing Service’s accounts or to sanitize them, which the Journal did without protest. Chambers went much further, however, with foreign language publications, prohibiting 253 of them from entering Canada from the United States and banning 19 Canadian newspapers published in foreign languages. In November 1916 he banned the importation from the United States of all newspapers published by William Randolph Hearst because of their notoriously anti-British editorial policy.

  Chambers’s office also monitored the telephone and telegraph systems and eventually assumed control over movies, photographs, and even gramophone records. As Pierre Berton summed it up, “Allied soldiers must be depicted as unfailingly cheerful, the trenches must appear to be as clean and dry as a kitchen floor, and death had to seem as peaceful as an afternoon nap.”[21] When an American film entitled Peace at any Price was banned because it emphasized the barbarity of the war by showing heaps of bodies, Chambers commented scathingly that it was the sort of thing one could expect from an industry controlled by “disloyal Germans, Poles, and Jews.”[22]

  Combined with censorship was the effective propaganda campaign, organized and led primarily by Max Aitken, a Canadian who had made his first fortune in the investment business, then moved to England, where he became a powe
rful newspaper owner and political manipulator and in 1917 became Lord Beaverbrook. In January 1915 Borden authorized Aitken to establish the Canadian War Records Office in London and to serve as Canada’s official “eye-witness” on Canadian activities in Europe. An extraordinarily focused, energetic, and unscrupulous man, Aitken sent a stream of invariably positive dispatches on the Canadian army’s activities to both British and Canadian newspapers and in 1916 published Canada in Flanders, a glorified account of the Canadian army’s exploits, which he claimed was based on his own personal observations and interviews with Canadian soldiers. This was so well received that two more volumes were published as well.

  Aitken’s propaganda campaign was very successful, to the point that British leaders complained that the public was being given the impression that the Canadians were fighting the war all on their own! The British, it need hardly be said, were not far behind in developing their own propaganda apparatus, hiring several successful writers including John Buchan, Rudyard Kipling, and John Galsworthy to work on their behalf. At the same time, British and other writers published novels during the war portraying the Germans as uncivilized barbarians. Rudyard Kipling, who lost his only son in the war, undoubtedly expressed the view of many Britons and Canadians when he said “there are only two divisions in the world today: human beings and Germans.”[23]

  Canadian writers wrote patriotic novels as well. Most notable among them were S. N. Dancey’s The Faith of a Belgian (1916), which condemned Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality, Robert Stead’s The Cowpuncher (1917), which blatantly encouraged enlistments, and Charles W. Gordon’s The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land (1919), which sought to exploit the fast-fading sentimental idealism of the earlier years by having his young Protestant chaplain die a sacrificial death.[24] Even Nellie McClung, the popular novelist and prominent feminist leader in Alberta who had been an outspoken pacifist before the war, supported the war and participated in the propaganda campaign after her son enlisted.

  Hugh Eayrs claimed in 1919 that Canadian publishers had distributed “probably at least one thousand different war books” during the war years, “old books and new books, wise books and foolish books, books intimately connected with and bearing on the Great War and books that had no possible relation whatsoever.” While the vast majority of these were not Canadian books and, as Eayrs notes, many had nothing to do with the war, he nevertheless expressed pride in the fact that Canadian publishers “had done their part as propagandists at a time when propaganda counted.”[25]

  To some extent, the Canadian propaganda campaign was aimed not so much at Canadians as at the United States, as part of the effort to bring that country into the war. Coningsby Dawson, who was born in England but emigrated to the United States in 1905, is a good example of how British and Canadian efforts overlapped, as indeed did their perceptions of their identity and interests. Dawson’s parents and two brothers subsequently emigrated as well. Dawson’s parents settled in Taunton, Massachusetts, but the two brothers—both of whom served in the Royal Navy during the war—bought and managed a fruit farm near Nelson, British Columbia.

  When the war broke out, Coningsby Dawson immediately went to Ottawa and met with Sam Hughes, who, because of Dawson’s social status—his father, William J. Dawson, was a prominent clergyman and author of twenty-one books—offered him a commission in the Canadian Field Artillery. After completing his training, Dawson served in France until being wounded in 1917. He then returned to the United States and spent the remaining war years writing articles in American popular magazines and lecturing around the country. He also published The Glory of the Trenches (New York, 1918), an extended essay expressing “the spiritual processes which worked behind the grim offence of war,” claiming that soldiers faced death with serenity, knowing that those who fell in a righteous cause earned the right to “hang beside Christ.”[26]

  The Canadian propaganda campaign was part of the much larger British effort in the United States carried out under the direction of Sir Gilbert Parker, a popular novelist originally from Canada whose wife was American. Parker actually developed a mailing list of 260,000 influential American individuals, newspapers, libraries, YMCAs, and other organizations to which he sent “personal” letters and copies of British documents—never revealing that he was in fact working for the government—so that they might better understand the British point of view. It is generally agreed that his work was masterful and helped to sway American public opinion in favor of the Allies.

  Germany’s reliance on submarines to stop, or at least reduce, the number of merchant ships carrying desperately needed foodstuffs and war materiel to Britain had a major impact on American public opinion as well. After backing off somewhat in its attacks on neutral shipping in 1916, Germany announced in January 1917 that it was resuming unrestricted submarine warfare. By the spring, its U-boats were destroying 500,000 tons of merchant shipping a month, including American ships. This led President Wilson to sever diplomatic relations with Germany in February.

  Three weeks later, the British forwarded a telegram sent by German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmerman to the German ambassador in Mexico—which British Naval Intelligence had decrypted—to Wilson. This extraordinary telegram asked Mexico to support Germany in the war, in return for which Germany would help Mexico to recover the territory it had ceded to the United States following the Mexican-American War. It was the final straw, and the United States finally declared war on April 2, 1917. This meant, in effect, that the outcome of the war was certain because once American manpower, financial, and industrial resources were mobilized in support of the Allies, Germany could not possibly win the war.

  1. Brown and Cook, Canada 1896–1921, 262.

  2. Brown and Cook, 234.

  3. English, Borden, 159.

  4. Quoted in Brown and Cook, 236.

  5. John A. Turley-Ewart and Robert Craig Brown, “Sir Albert Edward Kemp,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/kemp_albert_edward_15E.html (accessed April 16, 2014).

  6. The Shell Committee has traditionally been regarded as a failure, but a recent study argues convincingly that it achieved a great deal, making possible the undeniable success of the Imperial Munitions Board. See Gordon Errnest Ira Greavette, The Shell Committee: A Study in Canadian Industrial Mobilization and Politics in War, September 1914–November 1915. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2013. I am indebted to Dr. Greavette for giving me access to his thesis.

  7. Cook, Warlords, 58. At the same time, however, having the IMB operate at arms-length from the government shielded Borden from the political attacks that he had had to endure when the Shell Committee was in existence.

  8. Brown and Cook, 239.

  9. English, Borden, 159.

  10. Brown and Cook, 240.

  11. Brown and Cook, 243.

  12. Brown and Cook, 248, 249.

  13. English, Borden, 110.

  14. Cook, Warlords, 54.

  15. Cited in English, Borden, 127.

  16. Quoted in English, Borden, 125.

  17. English, Borden, 125.

  18. Quoted in English, Borden, 125.

  19. English, Borden, 125.

  20. Stephen Leacock, Frenzied Fiction (New York: John Lane, 1920), 201.

  21. Berton, 164.

  22. Quoted in Berton, 164.

  23. Quoted in Berton, 166.

  24. On Canadian war novels, see Dagmar Novak, Dubious Glory: The Two World Wars and the Canadian Novel (New York: Peter Lang, 2000) and Eric Thompson, “Canadian Fiction of the Great War,” Canadian Literature, 91 (Winter 1981): 81–96.

  25. Hugh Eayrs, “Canadian publishers and war propaganda,” Canadian Bookman (January 1919), 47. Hugh Smithurst Eayrs (1894–1940) was president of the Macmillan Company of Canada from 1921 to 1940.

  26. Dawson also published The Unknown Soldier (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1929), a sentimental religious novella suggesting that Christ lived and died anew within the pers
on of each nation’s Unknown Soldier. Other relevant publications included two collections of his wartime letters home, entitled Carry On: Letters in Wartime (New York: John Lane, 1918) and Living Bayonets: A Record of the Last Push (New York: John Lane, 1919), The Test of Scarlet: A Romance of Reality (Toronto: Ryerson, 1919), a novel about Canadian artillery troops in the war, and Fugitives from Passion (Garden City: Doubleday, 1930), a novel about a Canadian officer in the war.

  Chapter 9

  Conscription

  Our first duty is to win, at any cost, the coming election in order that we may continue to do our part in winning the War and that Canada not be disgraced.

  —Robert Borden[1]

  The profound losses suffered by the Canadian Corps in 1915 and 1916 shocked and surprised the country. And what made the unexpected cost of loyalty even worse was that there was no reason whatever to think that anything was being accomplished by this level of sacrifice. What was to be done? When would it end? No one knew, certainly not the generals or the politicians in Britain and certainly not Robert Borden and his colleagues in Ottawa.