True Patriot Love

by Michael Ignatieff

  They were finally married in June 1911 in the parish church at Goring-on-Thames, she in a high-necked white lace dress with a train, he in a wing-necked collar and tail coat. In their wedding pictures, they look happy and a little frightened.

  After a honeymoon in northern Italy, they returned to Kingston in the autumn of 1911. In the three years that followed, he shared the grumbling that Queen’s was not what it had been in his father’s day, but he was also proud that Queen’s mattered mightily in the Dominion. With his colleagues O.D. Skelton and Adam Shortt, he set about training the men who created Canada’s first fully professional civil service in Ottawa. At home, he discovered in himself a love of family life he never expected. He shouted his happiness from the rooftops, telling one of his friends that “the desire of men for women is heaven born.”

  As for Maude Grant, there is little doubt that she loved him and flowered in domestic intimacy, but Kingston was no match for Goring and her new life was more confining than the old. She had enjoyed professional respect at the University of Manchester. Now she was the dutiful wife of Principal Grant’s son, having to make conversation with every Kingston matron who remembered the grand old man and who had an opinion about the less spectacular son. Soon she was pregnant, and within three years, she had two infant daughters, Margaret and Charity, to care for. She was in her mid-thirties when the children were born, and, although the births went well, her life was swallowed up by domestic chores.

  The summer of 1914 found the family in England, she with the children at her parents’ house at Goring, he in London, working at the Royal Colonial Institute on a biography of his father’s idol, Joseph Howe, colonial orator and the first man to achieve responsible government for a British colony.

  When the European crisis broke out with the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo and the subsequent Austrian ultimatum to Serbia on July 28, 1914, Grant was putting the finishing touches on his biography of Howe. As the European powers rushed to war, Grant put away his books and went down to the House of Commons to listen to the speeches. In a letter to Maude at Goring, he confessed that the political situation “grips me, overwhelms me.” The prospect of war put him, he said, “in the same state that I was in when, in the hope of keeping my independence, I fought against telling you of my love and was at last swept away.” The war fever gripping the capital had seized hold of him, too.

  He stopped going to the archives and joined the crowds in Trafalgar Square and Whitehall. He anxiously discussed the situation with a friend, Maurice Hankey, soon to become secretary to the War Cabinet. With his father-in-law, George Parkin, one August afternoon, he walked through the streets, noticing the broken windows at the German embassy and the frenetic excitement of the crowds. On Whitehall, they noticed that the National Union of Women’s Suffrage had set up a stand and was enlisting women for war work. Sentries were posted at Charing Cross Railway Station. He and Parkin bumped into Lord Sydenham, who told them that Parliament had adjourned. Parkin and Grant elbowed their way down Pall Mall to Buckingham Palace, until they were right in front of the iron gates amid the clamouring crowd. As he reported to Maude that night,

  Just then out came the King, Queen and Prince on the balcony. We cheered and waved and they waved and bowed standing for about 5 minutes. Pandemonium; some cheering, some singing God Save the King, others Rule Britannia!

  His first thought was to enlist. He had already, while a master at Upper Canada, done service in a reserve regiment, so he was officer material, but his chief worry was that at forty-two years of age, he might be judged too old for active duty. At Canada House, he was told to get back to Canada and enlist there.

  Few Canadians would have been as susceptible to the drum beat of martial patriotism as William Grant. He believed in the cause of empire; he thought of citizenship as service and sacrifice; and now at last the empire had sounded the call to arms. In a letter to Maude written in August 1914, William said that looking into his own heart was like peering through smoked glass into the white heat of a furnace. Inside him, he admitted, he could feel the “fierce, hellish spirit of this war.”

  But what could a forty-two-year-old professor contribute to the war effort? While waiting to return to Canada, he persuaded the Royal Colonial Institute and Heinemann Publishers to let him produce a short pamphlet on the causes of the war. In late August and early September, as German armies poured into Belgium and the French struggled to hold them at the Marne, Grant immersed himself in the works of the key ideologists of German expansion, von Treitschke and von Bernhardi, Kaiser Wilhelm and Prince von Bulow. Grant’s idea was to provide the general public, especially the enlisted soldier, with a pocket compendium of quotations that would illustrate the righteousness of the cause. Grant set out to convict German militarism, using only its own words. In the final pages of Our Just Cause, he argued that the Allies were at war because of the “swelled head” of the German militarist classes, because of “our plighted word to France and Belgium” and “in the cause of civilization and of liberty and of international law.” In the final paragraph, written as news of German atrocities in Belgium were filling the British and French press, he concluded that the empire must fight to the finish to avenge Belgium, to extirpate Prussian militarism and, finally, “to vindicate our character as a fighting race.”

  A fighting race. Just two years before, Grant might have shrunk from such language. Now it came naturally. Our Just Cause was a stirring, if bellicose, performance from a scholar. It was successful enough to go through at least two editions.

  The question that he and so many Canadians had debated in those years of peace—whether if Britain were at war, Canada would be at war as well—was now moot. The empire had called. Canada—proud member of the fighting race—could only answer yes. It never occurred to Grant to think otherwise.

  Neither Maude nor William doubted that she should stay in England with her parents and that he should return as soon as he could to enlist in Canada. Raleigh, Maude’s teenage brother, immediately enlisted and the Cottage was busy with sending him off. Goring, it should be noted, was near the southeast coast of England and, by the autumn of 1914, it was not hard to imagine that one could hear the distant thunder of the guns on the battlefields of France across the Channel.

  Finally, William returned to Canada. From late 1914 through the winter of 1916, he trained in Gananoque and other Canadian army camps, writing Maude sometimes twice and three times a day, letters that he used as a diary of the grinding routine of camp life: route marches, parade drills, weapons inspections, delousing details, censorship of recruits’ letters and court martial sessions for violations of discipline, mostly drunken escapades in the local towns. He missed Maude and the children, and sometimes a note of raw sexual longing enters the correspondence. He managed a leave early in the summer of 1915 and visited them all in Goring, and the encounter revived their physical passion for each other. In February 1916, Maude proudly announced the arrival of Jessie Alison Grant, their third daughter. Maude was worried that William would have wanted a boy, and William admitted that he might have preferred it, hastening to add, “just for the variety, no feelings whatever about the superior sex.”

  In the muddy, often frozen training camps at Gananoque, he discovered a capacity for leadership he had not suspected. He joked that army life was not supposed to suit an old professor, but he was used to motivating young men half his age. He told Maude, rather proudly, that they called him Daddy. When his contingents were ready to be shipped off to France, he was there waving at the platform at Gananoque station, choked up to see them heading off to battle and to God knew what prospects of survival.

  And so they went, drunk and sober, rough necks and gentlemen—and how many of them shall I see again? One loves one’s men, the rougher they are, the simpler they are, the more one loves them. We started Auld Lang Syne but after about a line and a half, Daddy Grant had to stop and turn away.

  By early 1916, the Canadian newspapers carried columns
of the names of the dead. His classmates at Queen’s were dying. Balliol College sent him the lists of the college men who had been lost and his heart tightened to see how many of them, the bright sparks of the 1890s, were no more. The boys he had taught at Upper Canada and at St. Andrew’s were also falling. He went on recruitment drives to the small towns of eastern Ontario and noticed, with fury and resignation, that the boys were no longer coming forward to serve. He wrote Maude,

  We have almost reached the limits of the voluntary system even with the high pay and other inducements which we offer. The native-born Canadian especially in the small country village is very slack and when he does come forward, his woman kind do all they can to dissuade him.

  The British born had come forward, but not the immigrants and the native-born Canadians. As the carnage continued, as the waste of young life carried on, month after month, the cause that was sacred to him ceased to be sacred for millions of Canadians. The spectre of conscription brought these divisions out into the open. Laurier and the Liberals supported the war but opposed conscription, knowing that while many French Canadians were fighting in France, Quebec as a whole would never accept forced participation in a war for king and country. Prime Minister Borden and his Cabinet believed conscription was necessary if Canada was to keep its pledge to the empire.

  Through 1916 and 1917, William Grant lived through a moment of truth about the Canadian identity that his father would never have imagined possible. The Grants—and the Parkins—believed that loyalty to empire was at the core of being Canadian. The war in Europe now pulled the braided strands of loyalty to country and empire apart. French Canada simply did not see its identity in imperial terms. William was honest enough to acknowledge this. Ontario Orangemen might castigate the Québécois for cowardice, but Grant knew this was absurd and an evasion of the real issue: Could the empire keep demanding such sacrifice of its sons and daughters?

  As for himself, whatever inner doubts began to prey, he knew his duty. When his turn came and his battalion was shipped to England for final training before dispatch to the front, he was ready to go. We shall soon be together, he told Maude, and “I shall see Miss Alison Grant,” the daughter he had not yet held in his arms. On arrival in England, however, there was little home leave. Instead, his days were filled with route marching through the Hampshire lanes and with weapons training, learning how to operate the Mills bomb, the hand grenade of its time, and mastering the operation of his pistol, his trench shovel and, the most fearsome instrument of all, the gas mask.

  When he came home to see the family at Goring-on-Thames, he was in the uniform of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. The whole family was on a war footing. Maude’s brother, Raleigh, only eighteen, was serving at Gallipoli. He would soon be wounded and invalided home. Alice Parkin—Lal, as she was known— had returned to Canada to marry William’s old pupil Vincent Massey, who was in a regiment in Toronto.

  On June 1, 1916, the British launched the greatest single offensive of the war at the Somme. The thunder of the guns was heard at various places along the English coastline. In a single day, great regiments of the empire— the Newfoundland Regiment, the Ulster Regiment—were cut to pieces by German machine-gun fire or counter-barrage as they crossed no man’s land. Grant made the crossing to France, landing at Le Havre in early August, headed for the St. Eloi salient in Flanders.

  His first impression of France was peaceful: the women on the quays throwing loaves of bread up to the Canadian soldiers on the troopships and then holding out their aprons to catch the coins thrown down in payment. At the train stations, as the soldiers were being ferried up to the front, children ran up and down the platforms shouting “Biscuit! Biscuit!” At another stop, he had time to get out, stretch his legs, walk to a bookshop and buy a copy of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters—soothing medicine for a quaking heart. In a letter to Maude, he said he could not tell her where he was exactly, because of wartime censorship—though it was near St. Eloi—but he noted in passing how close England was, just across the Channel. He wondered whether she could hear the guns. As he drew closer, he could hear the thunder and rattle, the cascades and clouds of smoke rising in the sky. The troop trains passed burned-out houses with flattened roofs, the tiles scattered along the tracks. Spotter planes droned overhead, leaving behind white plumes in the August sky. At the front itself, he caught his first glimpse of the awe-inspiring devastation of the St. Eloi craters, a lunar landscape of terrible destruction caused by artillery bombardment.

  As they left the trains and approached the reserve trenches behind the main lines, he ran into old friends from Queen’s or Upper Canada College or Kingston or Toronto and saw in their faces what awaited him. He heard brave men confess a shameful desire for a “blighty,” some flesh wound that would allow them out of the charnel house of battle and a safe passage home. He learned that an old friend had been shot through the stomach two days before and had died in agony.

  His unit, the 59th battalion of the 20th regiment of the Second Canadian Division of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, was joining men who had been fighting, on and off, since 1915. They had been gassed and had lost wave after wave of men, and hatred of the Germans had taken hold of some of the officers. The medical officer of the division, for example, wrote in his daily reports, in the sector of the front where Grant was serving, that having seen men writhing in agony after a gas attack, he believed the Canadians should take no more prisoners. “Extermination is the only remedy,” he wrote.

  Into this cauldron of fear and violence was thrown a sensitive, middle-aged professor, equipped with a gas mask, a pistol, a steel helmet and the determination to see it through. By day, he kept his and his men’s morale going. At night, when the shelling died down and he was able to write, head down in a dugout behind sandbags in the sodden and rat-infested trenches, he described to his wife the ground-shaking thump of the artillery, the rat-tat-tat of the machine guns and the sudden illumination of the Very flares overhead. In the middle of this infernal commotion, he blurted out, “Dearest, I yearn for you so, and for the babies and for peace and to cut the grass; and all the little homely things of home.”

  He kept these desperate longings for safety and home under control. There was no choice: Close friends, nearby, were facing the same strain. His brother-in-law, Jim Macdonnell, already married to Maude’s sister Marjorie, was serving in the same salient as an artillery officer, and William went up to watch his battery fire forty-nine eighteen-pound shells in three minutes in an earth-shattering display. Afterward, when the guns were still, he reported to Maude, “we had much good talk, political, philosophical, military.” He was determined to sound calm and sanguine.

  In the days that followed, he struggled to accustom himself to the nightmarish normality of life around him, reporting to Maude that he would wake, thinking he was still back in England at the training camp, and pick up his toothbrush from the nightstand and go out to wash his teeth, only to step over a covered body, shot through the head, on a stretcher, which would make him realize he was not in England at all.

  After just four days to get his bearings, he and his platoon were ordered forward to repair a parapet of trenches that had been knocked down by shellfire, giving the Germans an angle of fire into Canadian lines. Coolly, he drew Maude a picture of the parapet so that she could see what they were being asked to do. He crawled out through a hole in the parapet with another officer and, keeping their heads down, they crawled into a listening post near the German lines. “We could hear Fritz working away behind his parapet about 60 yards off.” He could not shake the feeling of the unreality of it all, as if the front were just the firing range at the base back home, but the machine-gun fire sweeping over his head was real enough. The sortie was a success: the parapet was repaired and his superiors congratulated him for a successful mission. He wrote Maude to say that he was hopeful of a battlefield promotion. He had been at the front a week.

  The next letter Maude received was not in his hand,
but in the hand of a battlefield chaplain in a British dressing station behind the lines.

  My dear Maude

  I ought to write with my own hand but I am feeling so weak lying here day after day that our good Chaplain who has already written to you for me is going to be my amanuensis.

  This is an Imperial Hospital. The one next to it is the Canadian.… We have had all sorts of celebrated visitors. The King and the little Prince were the first. The King smiled upon me graciously and I hope had a fellow feeling for one wounded by a fall from his horse; but seeing I was so weak that day he had the discretion not to speak.

  I am not quite sure how my own accident occurred. I was galloping with a loose rein and I think the horse stepped into a shell hole, but as the ground over which I was riding is frequently traversed by spent bullets, one of these may have come in.

  When Maude received this letter, she might have thought William would recover quickly. It was only a riding accident, after all. As letter followed letter, first in the handwriting of the chaplain, then in the disjointed scribbles of William himself, she realized that he had suffered serious injuries. His head and chest were in bandages. The horse had been shot out from under him, and had rolled over him, crushing his upper body. He had broken his ribs and there was fluid in his lungs, and for some time both his heart and his liver gave the doctors concern. In the letters the chaplain continued to write on his behalf, William confessed that he was in pain, alone at night in a field hospital with the groans and cries of the wounded around him. He was to remain in the field hospital for two weeks until he was strong enough to be moved to a rear field hospital on the French coast. There George Parkin, using his connections, managed to visit him and reassure his daughter that her husband, though thin as a wraith, was going to pull through.