Canada's Great War, 1914-1918

by Brian Douglas Tennyson

  It was not just a political revolution. As Galbraith puts it, Canada’s traditional ruling class, whose prestige and influence “came from its Englishness, its identification with the King, Empire and the Church of England,” had “invested its prestige heavily in the war. And as Canadians now reflected on what had been gained and at what price, and especially on the mindless emotion and propaganda that had sustained the slaughter, that prestige evaporated like the morning mist.”[37]

  Having paid this enormous price, what had been achieved? By November 1918, 99,561 men had been recruited through conscription but only 47,509 went overseas and only half of them—24,132 to be precise—joined battalions in France. To be fair, it needs to be remembered that political leaders like Lloyd George and Borden were assuming that the war would continue into 1919 if not beyond. But even if it did, would another 50,000 or even 100,000 Canadians really make a difference, given that American troops were beginning to arrive in Europe in the spring of 1918?

  1. Borden diary, September 25, 1917, quoted in Cook, Warlords, 119.

  2. By way of comparison, Australia, with a population of 4 million—about half that of Canada—raised 421,809 men, representing 38.7% of its male population between the ages of eighteen and forty-four. Australia did not, of course, have a large French population, but it did have a large Irish population, many of whom felt no affection for Britain. Australia held two referenda on conscription during the war, both of which were defeated.

  3. Philippe Panneton (writing as Ringuet), Trente Arpents (Paris: Flammarion, 1938), 144, quoted in Susan Fisher, “Canada and the Great War,” in The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature, ed. Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kroller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 230. The only francophone war novel published during the war was Ulric Barthe’s Similia Similibus ou La Guerre au Canada: Essai romantique sur un Sujet d’Actualité (Québec: Telegraph, 1916), which depicted an imagined German takeover of Quebec City.

  4. Ian Hugh Maclean Miller, Our Glory & Our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 114. See also Miller, 77–78.

  5. Quoted in Ross King, “White Feathers & Tangled Gardens,” Canadian Art Online (Winter 2009), 75–78, http://www.canadianart.ca/features/2009/12/01/white-feathers-tangeled-gardens (accessed October 21, 2013.

  6. See also King, “White Feathers.”

  7. On Aboriginal participation in the war, see Timothy C. Winegard, For King and Kanata: Canadian Indians and the First World War. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012.

  8. Quoted in Calvin W. Ruck, The Black Battalion 1916–1920: Canada’s Best Kept Military Secret (Halifax, NS: Nimbus, 1987), 9.

  9. Ruck, 10.

  10. Quoted in Ruck. 12. This account is based on Ruck, 8–12.

  11. By comparison, Ruck notes that 600 African Americans were commissioned in the American armed forces during the war. After the war, White resumed his pastoral career in Halifax. When Acadia University awarded him an honorary degree in 1936, it was the first ever given by any Canadian university to an African Canadian.

  12. Ruck, 29. In 1967 Phills was the first African Canadian to be inducted into the Order of Canada.

  13. Danielle Pittman, Moving Mountains: The No. 2 Construction Battalion and African Canadian Experience during the First World War. Unpublished BA honors thesis, Mount St. Vincent University, 2012, http://dc.msvu.ca:8080/fr/bitstream/handle/10587/1168/DaniellePittmanBAThesis2012.pdf?sequence=1 (accessed August 1, 2013).

  14. Cook, Shock Troops, 592.

  15. Ronald G. Haycock, “The American Legion in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1917: A Study in Failure.” Military Affairs, 43, no. 3 (October 1979): 117.

  16. Charles Botsford, Joining the Colors (Philadelphia: Penn Publishing, 1918), Fighting with the U.S. Army (Philadelphia: Penn Publishing, 1919), In the Trenches ((Philadelphia: Penn Publishing, 1920), and At the Front (Philadelphia: Penn Publishing, 1921).

  17. Lieutenant Colonel Warren Sage to Officer Commanding 14th Canadian Training Brigade, February 6, 1917, http://data2.collect.../e001472669.jpg (accessed April 11, 2014). Sage was himself originally an American from New York City, who had been living in Calgary for several years.

  18. Haycock, “American Legion,” 119.

  19. Nancy Gentile Ford, Americans All!: Foreign-Born Soldiers in World War 1 (College Station, TX: A&M Press, 2001), 44.

  20. For a complete list of the members of the Jewish Legion, see Leon Chaifetz, Album of the Jewish Legion, http://www.jewishpubliclibrary.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/JEWISH-LEGION.pdf (accessed May 5, 2014).

  21. Richard Holt, “British Blood Calls British Blood: The British-Canadian Recruiting Mission of 1917–1918,” Canadian Military History 22, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 29.

  22. Holt, 35, note 2.

  23. Following the war, he moved to Kenya where he worked as a farmer and civil engineer, until returning to Denmark in 1925 to pursue a literary career. See also Merry Hell: A Dane with the Canadians (London: Jarrolds, 1930), first published in Copenhagen in 1929. His sister, Karen Dinesen, also lived in Kenya for several years and wrote books, including Out of Africa (London, 1937).

  24. Holt, 31.

  25. Holt, 35.

  26. Holt, 35.

  27. Cook, Shock Troops, 368.

  28. Quoted in Morton and Granatstein, Marching to Armageddon, 145.

  29. Borden diary, September 25, 1917, quoted in Cook, Warlords, 119.

  30. Toronto Daily News, December 14, 1917, cited in Mason Wade, The French Canadians 1760–1967 (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1968), 752

  31. Allen, Ordeal by Fire, 157.

  32. Quoted in Allen, 159.

  33. Allen, 158.

  34. Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 159.

  35. William Stewart, “Frustrated Belligerence: The Unhappy History of the 5th Canadian Division in the First World War,” Canadian Military History 22, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 31.

  36. Quoted in Stewart, 31.

  37. Galbraith, 159.

  Chapter 10

  Demanding a Voice

  It can hardly be expected that we shall put 400,000 or 500,000 men in the field and willingly accept the position of having no more voice and receiving no more consideration than if we were toy automata. Any person cherishing such an expectation harbors an unfortunate and even dangerous delusion.

  —Robert Borden, 1916[1]

  Closely related to the manpower problem was the problem of Canada’s relationship with Britain. While Canada had been automatically committed when Britain declared war because of its Dominion status, it had—with the exception of most French Canadians and some others—gone in not just willingly but enthusiastically, determined not merely to support the mother country but to show what it could do. Borden later wrote that “the people of Canada entered this war from a profound conviction of duty to the Empire and to the civilized world” and “probably no part of the Britannic Commonwealth was more disinterested in reaching a decision as to that duty.”[2] This was true, at least at the outset of the war in 1914, but it was no longer true by 1916.

  Britain’s relationship with its Dominions had been evolving in the years before the war, because of the political and economic development of the Dominions, their growing sense of identity, and the emergence of a highly vocal and influential movement promoting imperial unity. The advocates of imperial unity exploited the tremendous growth in British—some would say English—nationalism in the later years of the nineteenth century, which celebrated Britain’s rich heritage and culture, its industrial supremacy, its status as the policeman of the world, and the “civilizing” influence of its global empire.

  And who could deny it? British finance and industry dominated the world, and the resurgence of imperialism in the second half of the century had added large chunks of Africa, as well as islands in the Pacific and concessions in China, to an empire that already included Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and virtually countl
ess other bits and pieces around the world. As well, Britain dominated the Middle East and in the 1870s got control of the newly built Suez Canal, the strategic short route between Europe and Asia.

  The reality, however, was that British industrial supremacy had peaked by the 1890s, and other countries such as the United States, France, and Germany were catching up and even surpassing Britain. Coal, vast quantities of which Britain possessed, was already being challenged as the dominant source of energy by oil, which the United States and the Middle East possessed but Britain did not. In other words, the imperial unity movement did not reflect British supremacy but awareness that that supremacy was in decline, an attempt to bolster Britain’s position in the world by somehow combining its economic and military resources with those of its Dominions, as well as its colonial empire.

  The first major test came with the outbreak of the South African War in 1898, and, because that experience is vital background to understanding the First World War experience, it needs to be briefly reviewed. When the British government, with Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain leading the charge, went to war with two small isolated Afrikaner republics in southern Africa, it claimed to be defending human rights, which it asserted were being abused by the “backward” Afrikaners. In fact, the British government was being manipulated by powerful business interests because the world’s greatest deposits of both gold and diamonds had been discovered in the Transvaal, and those business interests, already involved, wanted control. The only thing “backward” about the Afrikaners was that they valued their culture, independence, and lifestyle more than the gold and diamonds, the exploitation of which they could see clearly would lead to their being swamped by English and other foreign immigrants and interests.

  Britain foresaw no difficulties in conquering Transvaal and the neighboring Orange Free State, but to display to the world that the mighty British Empire was a united force when it went to war, it asked the Dominions to contribute troops. This, it was thought, would send an important message to France, Germany, or any other power that did not wish Britain well.

  In Canada, that posed a problem. Canadians were generally agreed that they should support Britain if it ever needed military assistance in a crisis. But they were divided on the idea of providing military assistance that was not actually needed but was desired just to display imperial unity. Imperialists, of course, supported the idea, nationalists—especially French-Canadian nationalists—opposed the idea, and what might be described as the moderate majority had mixed feelings.

  In the inevitable political firestorm that ensued, Laurier sought a compromise: the Canadian government would recruit volunteers who wanted to serve in the war and would transport them to South Africa, where they would serve in the British army at British expense. More than 7,000 Canadians did serve in South Africa before that “little” war was finally won three years later.

  Meanwhile, even before the war Chamberlain had invited the Dominion prime ministers who would be in London to participate in the celebration of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897 to meet with British ministers to discuss imperial foreign and defense policy, making clear at the same time that a voice in policy-making implied accepting a share of the responsibility for that policy. Some Dominion leaders, notably the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand, welcomed this initiative. Canada’s Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier did not, however, because in his opinion shared responsibility for common policies conflicted with Canada’s gradual but inevitable transition to independent nationhood and would be politically unacceptable to French Canadians and indeed to many in English Canada as well.

  Laurier did attend, however, and the 1897 meeting of British and Dominion leaders set the precedent for a series of what became known as imperial conferences, at which information and opinions were exchanged. British political leaders, especially the imperialists, used these conferences to try to seduce Laurier—he was given a knighthood in 1897—and in 1902 he actually seemed to encourage them by saying publicly that if Britain wanted Canadian assistance it should “call us to your councils.” This was profoundly encouraging to the imperialists, who didn’t realize that Laurier was only speaking hypothetically; Laurier had no desire to participate in any kind of imperial council, and certainly didn’t intend to share responsibility for British foreign and defense policy. It didn’t seem to matter, however, because the Liberal government that took office in Britain three years later shared Laurier’s reservations about the implications of power-sharing.

  Thus, when New Zealand’s Prime Minister Joseph Ward called at the 1911 imperial conference for the creation of an “imperial parliament of defense,” British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith responded bluntly that the British government’s power to manage its foreign policy “cannot be shared” and any attempt to do so would “be absolutely fatal to our present system of responsible government.”[3] This was Laurier’s view precisely.

  Laurier was defeated in the 1911 Canadian election, however, and his successor, Robert Borden, was convinced, as he had stated in the House of Commons in November 1910, that Canadians would not tolerate having no voice in “the councils of the Empire” if they were going to “take their part . . . in the defense of the Empire.”[4] This was the essential difference between the views of Borden and Laurier—and the Canadians that they represented—on the imperial relationship. Both accepted that Canada was moving gradually toward complete autonomy, but Laurier interpreted that as traditional independence, while Borden thought Canada could be autonomous within a new imperial framework in which the Dominions shared in both the decision-making and responsibility for imperial foreign and defense policy.

  More than a century later, we may well ask why people like Borden sought what clearly appears in retrospect to be less than complete independence. The explanation lies in Borden’s distinction between traditional nationalism and imperial nationalism, in which there was no difference between British subjects living in Britain and those living overseas. The position taken by Asquith and Laurier, he argued, “seems to proceed upon the assumption” that the only British citizens who could “properly be entrusted” with control over imperial foreign policy were those who lived in Britain, but he saw no reason why those living in the overseas Dominions should be excluded from the process.[5]

  Although he was not likely aware of it, Borden’s attitude was remarkably similar to that of Benjamin Franklin in the 1750s and 1760s. Franklin predicted in 1751 that the population of the Thirteen Colonies was growing so rapidly that it would soon be greater than that of Britain, but he did not think this would lead to separation. As Gordon S. Wood has explained, he thought that “the growth of British subjects in America could only benefit the entire empire” and that America should remain “at least as connected to England as Scotland.”[6] Well into the political crisis that ended in revolution, Franklin was advocating American representation in parliament or some other form of closer imperial union because he believed that the British Empire “was the greatest phenomenon of the eighteenth century, and . . . he wanted very much to be part of it.”[7] Like Franklin, Borden was “feeling his way towards some intermediate mechanism of consultation that would not involve the destruction of the autonomy of the individual countries of the Empire such as would inevitably result from the creation of an imperial Parliament or an imperial executive. This was the goal; how it was to be reached he did not know.”[8]

  It was not insignificant that Borden reorganized the Canadian Department of External Affairs in 1912 so that it reported to the prime minister rather than the secretary of state, as Laurier had arranged when he created the department in 1909. The Department of the Secretary of State was a minor department in Canadian governments, so Borden’s change signalled that he intended to pursue a more active international policy than Laurier had done. Less than a year later he made another important change. The elderly Sir Joseph Pope remained Undersecretary of the Department of External Affairs, but the young Loring Christie was ap
pointed its legal advisor and quickly became the dominant figure and Borden’s closest advisor.

  Like Borden, Christie was a Nova Scotian, but he had studied law at Harvard University, where he edited the Harvard Law Review, and he had practiced law in New York City in the firm founded by Elihu Root. In 1910 he had been appointed an attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice, and from 1911 to 1913 was assistant to the solicitor general of the United States. Despite—or perhaps because of—his American experience, however, Christie was a keen advocate of imperial federation, although he probably was also influential in encouraging Borden to improve Canada’s relationship with the United States. What Christie represented was the ambivalence of Canadians to the two countries most important to them.