Canada's Great War, 1914-1918

by Brian Douglas Tennyson

  Borden was vastly out of touch not only with Canadian public opinion but even with the views of his own cabinet, most of whose members vigorously opposed the Siberian intervention. So did Gwatkin, the chief of the general staff.[18] To make matters worse, the troops that the government sent to Siberia were inexperienced, and many of them were French-Canadian conscripts who complained bitterly about being sent overseas when the war was over.

  Borden persisted, sending two infantry battalions, an artillery brigade, a machine gun company, and engineering and other support units totalling 4,000 men. The British provided 1,000 British troops and flattered Borden by suggesting that Canadian Major General James Elmsley command the whole force. Raymond Collishaw, the prominent Canadian pilot, commanded RAF 47 Squadron in the expedition.

  Some of the Canadian troops mutinied while marching from their barracks to the docks, provoking Lieutenant Colonel Albert Swift to draw his revolver—on the main street of Victoria, British Columbia—and fire a shot over their heads. This prompted some men to get back into line, but when several others still refused to proceed, two companies of troops from Ontario were ordered to take off their belts and whip them into line. This achieved the desired result, but as the French-Canadian troops marched to the docks, they chanted “On y va pas à Siberia!” [We won’t go to Siberia].[19]

  They did go, of course, but when they got to Vladivostok virtually all of the Canadians were confined to the port city, which Harold Steele of the 259th Battalion described as a “God forsaken hole.”[20] They trained White Russian officers and provided routine local security operations. Only one small contingent of fifty-five men was posted to Omsk as headquarters staff for the British battalion. Within a month, Borden recognized his error and told the War Office that Canadian troops were not “to engage in military operations” or to “move up country” without the Canadian government’s express consent, because the situation had changed, Allied policy was ambiguous, and public opinion was “strongly opposed to further participation.”[21]

  Borden, now seeking an escape from this fiasco, proposed at the Imperial War Cabinet on December 30, 1918, that a peace conference should be held with representatives of the rival forces in Russia to try to help them to work out a settlement. When this was agreed, Lloyd George mischievously suggested that Borden should serve as the chief British delegate. He, still keen to play a role on the international stage, foolishly agreed, but the meeting never took place. Borden then ordered the Canadian forces home, and the Red Army occupied Vladivostok a few months later.

  This pointless exercise could be regarded as a comic-opera affair except for the fact that it cost the lives of nineteen Canadian soldiers, none of them in battle. Sixteen died of diseases such as smallpox and influenza, two died in accidents, and one, Lieutenant Alfred Thring of the 260th Battalion, committed suicide.[22]

  The Allied interventions in Russia were ill-conceived, badly managed, and manipulated by a dying British government unable to accept the new reality of its reduced stature in the postwar world and apparently unaware that its citizens were thoroughly sick of imperialist adventurism based on their sacrifice. Like Canada’s Unionist government, the Lloyd George coalition would be annihilated at the next elections. As for Borden, one can only feel sympathy for a good, well-intentioned man who wore himself out in the service of his country but lost his way in the chaos of 1918–19. He could rightly be proud of the enhanced status which he had negotiated for Canada, but it had been earned—as he readily acknowledged—by the blood of thousands of young Canadian men and women. And while Canadians were generally proud of their military contribution to the war and the nation’s new status, Borden was seriously out of touch with the views of most Canadian attitudes when he thought they shared his ambition to play a significant role on the world stage.

  Canada was now an “autonomous” nation, but precisely what that meant was unclear because, as a member of the empire-commonwealth, it was also committed to the concept of a common imperial foreign policy. How autonomy could be reconciled with this commitment remained to be seen. Meanwhile, most observers, including Borden himself, recognized the apparent paradox in the fact that Canada was proclaiming its autonomy at the same time that it had sought membership in the League of Nations, whose covenant required members to promise to defend all other members from aggression. To Borden the important thing was to be accepted as a member of this new international organization. The problem of the League covenant’s Article X, which contained the commitment, could be addressed later.

  This commitment was, of course, why the United States Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. Most Canadians shared the American view that a commitment to defend all members of the League if attacked was not only an infringement of the nation’s autonomy but simply foolish in principle. Many also shared the widely held view of many, if not most, Americans that supporting the empire in the Great War had been a traumatic experience not to be repeated. In other words, they did not agree with Borden that establishing Canada’s autonomy should be the basis for playing a role in world affairs but quite the opposite: to enable Canada to mind its own business and avoid entanglements in international affairs. “Like their southern neighbors,” as Stacey concludes, Canadians “were rebounding from idealism into isolation.”[23]

  When Warren Harding was elected President of the United States in 1920, he campaigned—if that is not too strong a word—on the promise to return the country to “normalcy.” If he accomplished little in his brief presidency—he died in August 1923 shortly after becoming the first American president to visit Canada while in office—he did at least contribute a new word to the English language. But everyone knew what he meant, and most Americans agreed with the idea of turning their collective backs on what they regarded as Wilson’s misguided foray into European affairs. Few seemed aware that American participation in the war actually constituted the unfortunate culmination of America’s imperial adventure that had begun in the 1890s.

  While Canadians for the most part felt the same way, they had greater cause for regret because they had gone into the war automatically, not as a result of a decision made by their own parliament. They had been at war much longer than the United States, and they had suffered many more casualties. They too wanted, as Voltaire had famously put it, to tend their own garden and leave the Europeans—including the British—to their own devices. Nowhere was this feeling stronger than in Quebec, but it was a view widely held throughout the country. At the same time, Canadians were conflicted because they genuinely felt the need to honor those who had served, and especially those who had given their lives in the war. But many couldn’t help suspecting that it had all been unnecessary, which made the sacrifice even more unbearable.

  As Thomas Wolfe famously observed in his 1940 novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, it was not possible to return to the way things were before 1914. Despite the efforts of the Canadian and American governments to return to prewar normality, the world had irrevocably changed. As the novelist Sebastian Faulks has observed, the war was not just a major historical event; it had “irrevocably cut [people] off from the past.”[24]

  This is not the place to discuss the vast impact of the Great War on Western civilization, but, essentially, everything had changed. Most fundamentally, what had changed were attitudes. What had been acceptable before the war, whether in regard to the social responsibilities of governments, the status of women, or the very meaning of democracy was no longer acceptable, at least not to a very large part of the population.

  The thousands of veterans who came home, many of them having been away for more than four years, were not the same young men who had gone overseas. They could not have been, given what they had experienced. Eddie Cantor’s popular 1923 song “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?” spoke to a reality that everyone recognized. Reintegration into civil society was hard for many of them, impossible for some. When the Canadian Legion was formed at the end of t
he war, it became a large but very exclusive club to which the price of admission was not only high but beyond the ability of anyone who had not served to pay. Many promises were made to the veterans, but, inevitably, as politicians sought to slash postwar budgets, few were kept, at least not without a struggle.

  Many thought that a cataclysm of this magnitude, which had swept away empires and emperors, obsolete social values and behavior, and very nearly wiped out a generation of young men, cried out for the creation of a new society. And this could only be achieved by a stronger, more centralized government which expressed the nation’s will and drew out the best in its citizens.[25] Certainly, the Canadian and provincial governments had taken on responsibilities during the war that most people would not have dreamed of before 1914; they had conscripted men to fight overseas, managed the economy and nationalized railways, set up employment offices, and introduced technical education. At the same time, agrarian and labor leaders were calling for radical reforms not just in the social safety net but in the political system itself. Perhaps for the first time, some were asking why government could spend billions on war but seemed unable to afford old age pensions or other social legislation. A lot of disgruntled veterans agreed with them.

  Meanwhile, the war and its immediate aftermath shattered the optimism of the prewar years when Laurier’s famous declaration that the twentieth century would belong to Canada had been accepted as a reasonable and rather obvious statement of fact. Despite the popular impression that the 1920s was a decade of prosperity and liberation, they were turbulent years in Canada and the United States, as in Europe, because the social, economic, and political adjustment to a postwar society was very difficult for many people.

  John English cites the career of James Shaver Woodsworth as an excellent example. The son of a Methodist minister in western Canada, he too became a minister. Before the war, he embraced the social gospel, but by 1918 he had left the church because he opposed not only conscription but the war itself. He participated in the Winnipeg general strike in 1919, was elected to parliament as an independent labor candidate in 1921, and in 1932 became the leader of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), Canada’s first socialist party.

  While most Canadians did not become as radical as Woodsworth as a result of the war, there were certainly many who did, especially in western Canada. Some radical labor leaders praised the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, agreeing that their struggle was not just for better wages and working conditions but against capitalism itself. More days were lost to labor disputes in 1919 than in any other year in Canadian history, before or since. The situation was much the same in the United States.

  A Royal Commission on Industrial Relations appointed by the government to investigate the situation recommended reforms including minimum wages, the eight-hour day, unemployment and health insurance, and recognition of the right to free collective bargaining. The government ignored these proposals, however, and proceeded to withdraw from the social programs in which it was already involved. Price controls were abolished in April 1919, the Wheat Board and the Grain Exchange were closed down, and even the employment offices set up to help returning veterans were discontinued. The government was now focused on reducing its involvement in the economy and cutting spending so that it could reduce the massive national debt built up during the war. Thus, the immediate postwar period in Canada was less a time of liberation from the stresses of war and a return to prewar normality than a new era of high unemployment, rapidly emerging regional economic disparities, social unrest, and simmering hostility between Quebec and the rest of Canada.

  The new reality was reflected in Canada’s relationship with both Britain and the United States. The British connection remained important to most Canadians, both emotionally and because of the ties of kinship. Indeed, those ties became even stronger because of the flood of British immigrants fleeing desperate economic and social conditions at home. At the same time, Canada’s relationship with the United States had grown in extent and intensity during the war years. The United States was now the most powerful industrial and military power in the world, and Sir Clifford Sifton, the prominent newspaper publisher and former Cabinet minister, was not far wrong when he suggested that “the main business of Canada in foreign relations is to remain friendly with the United States while preserving its own self-respect.”[26]

  The Borden government understood this and therefore maintained the Canadian War Mission in Washington while considering the establishment of a permanent mission of some sort. In October 1919, it proposed to appoint a minister in Washington, attached to the British embassy, to deal with Canadian concerns. The British government was agreeable, proposing in the interests of imperial unity that the Canadian minister take charge of the embassy when the ambassador was absent. The U.S. government was also agreeable, but William Lyon Mackenzie King, the new leader of the Liberal Party, was not. He signalled his rejection of Borden’s concept of autonomy by opposing the arrangement on the grounds that mixing up Canadian and British representation in this way would inevitably lead to problems. The government did not pursue the idea.

  The 1921 Imperial Conference, the first since the end of the war, presented two challenges to the concept of a common foreign policy. Both concerned the Anglo-Japanese defense agreement. The British government, supported by Australia and New Zealand, proposed to renew it for another ten years. The Canadian government, playing the self-appointed “linchpin” role which it had identified as its destiny, argued that it should be terminated because the United States government opposed it and U.S.-Japanese relations were already somewhat strained. If the United States and Japan ever went to war, what would Britain do? Under the terms of the treaty, it would be required to support Japan against the United States, which was obviously unthinkable.

  Arthur Meighen—who had succeeded Borden as prime minister in July 1920—ultimately argued that, if the empire was going to maintain a common foreign policy, the views of those countries most directly concerned with an issue should trump the views of others, and in this case, Canada had “a special right to be heard because we know, or ought to know, the United States best.”[27] Australia and New Zealand, not surprisingly, thought that they had the primary interest in the issue because they were isolated in a Far East becoming increasingly dominated by Japan. The fundamental flaw in the practical management of a common foreign policy was evident.

  In the end the British government decided that the treaty did not have to be renewed but would remain in effect unless or until one of the signatories actually renounced it. In the meantime, a conference of Pacific powers would be held in Washington to work out a solution. This was agreeable to the United States, and Borden and other Dominion representatives attended as members of the British Empire Delegation. The result was that the Anglo-Japanese treaty was replaced by a naval limitation treaty signed by the United States, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy.

  Whatever the impact of Canada’s stand at the 1921 Imperial Conference was, and that remains a matter of debate, Canada had made clear less than three years after the end of the war that relations with the United States were a high priority in its international relations and that the imperial relationship “had to be accommodated to that basic consideration.”[28] Arguing for the termination of the Anglo-Japanese alliance dramatically reflected Canada’s recognition that Britain could no longer maintain a credible global defense policy. Canada would have to rely on the United States in any future crisis. Come to that, so would Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.

  1. Borden telegram to Lloyd George, 28 October 1918, cited in Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, 241.

  2. Lloyd George telegram to Borden, 27 October 1918, cited in Stacey, 240,

  3. Borden telegram to Lloyd George, 28 October 1918, cited in Stacey, 241.

  4. Quoted in Brown, Borden, 251.

  5. Quoted in Cook, Warlords, 141.

  6. Stacey, 249.

  7. Quoted in Stacey, 250.
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  8. Stacey, 256.

  9. LAC, Borden Papers 35998–9. Borden to Francis Keefer, January 1, 1919, Confidential. Keefer served as Parliamentary Undersecretary for External Affairs from 1918 to 1920.

  10. David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference, Vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), 367–68.

  11. See Brian Douglas Tennyson, “Canada and the Commonwealth Caribbean: The Historical Relationship,” in Canadian-Caribbean Relations: Aspects of a Relationship, ed. Brian Douglas Tennyson (Sydney, NS: Centre for International Studies, 1990), 33–37.

  12. He is buried in the Kirkee Military Cemetery at Poona, near Bombay, very likely the only Canadian there among the more than 1,800 servicemen and women who died in India during the First World War.

  13. MacLaren, Canadians in Russia, 37.

  14. MacLaren, 58.

  15. Born in England, Sharman had emigrated to Canada and joined the Royal North West Mounted Police. He served in the 5th Canadian Mounted Rifles in South Africa, then joined the militia, and commanded artillery batteries on the Western Front until being wounded during the Second Battle of Ypres. He then served as chief instructor of the Canadian Reserve Artillery at Witley, England, until going to Russia.