By March 1, there was close to $1,000 in the kitty. “Who is getting this money?” “C.H.J.” wrote to the Star. “Can it be that a public testimonial is being raised to reward Miss Davies for her courageous act in shooting in cold blood the man who some thirty-six hours before had made improper proposals to her? Has it come to this? That we regard murder as an act to be applauded and raise funds to enrich the one who kills? … Bah! The whole performance is sickening, and the sooner the newspapers of Toronto stop allowing themselves to be exploited, the sooner will one section of the public, at any rate, be satisfied.”
When the Bedfordshire Fraternal Association finally closed the fund on March 16, $1,100 had been collected. But even if this wasn’t enough to pay Hartley Dewart’s fee, it seems likely that the canny lawyer secured the balance from the Toronto Evening Star. J.H. Cranston, who had been city editor at the Star in 1915, commissioned a reporter to write a story about women who had walked away from murder charges—a story reflecting Joe Atkinson’s views of the Carrie Davies case. According to a memoir Cranston wrote several years later, the article was fine, “but the heading I put on it all wrong.” The headline, “Ontario is Easy on Murderesses,” immediately attracted a libel suit. Hartley Dewart, recalled Cranston, “had had no chance of collecting fees for the defence of his client [and now] jumped at the chance to make the Star Publishing Co. pay the shot.” Since Carrie had been found not guilty of murder, there was nothing for the Star to do but negotiate an out-of-court settlement.
Disquiet about the jury’s verdict on Carrie Davies has lingered through the years, although nobody ever suggested that she might resort to such behaviour again. It is tempting to assume that those twelve rural Ontario stalwarts on the jury were appalled by sexual harassment. But that is wishful thinking: the term had not even been coined yet. Did Bert Massey’s lecherous behaviour really justify his death? Carrie successfully repelled his advances. Had she really brooded for a day and a half about his behaviour, and then, in a panic, grabbed a gun and shot him point-blank? Today, although the idea that a man might be shot dead for trying to kiss a young woman is shocking, we might admire Carrie for sticking up for herself and asserting her rights. In 1915, such concepts were unknown.
Looked at through a twenty-first-century North American lens, it is hard to imagine a situation where a woman’s virginity is widely considered her most precious possession, where an eighteen-year-old has few legal protections, where a penniless girl who has “sinned” is as good as ruined. Today, it is unlikely that Carrie would be acquitted, given that she shot Bert Massey in cold blood. Today, we are more likely to be shocked by notions of “unwritten laws” or “honour killings.” But today, Carrie would have had more places to turn for domestic and legal protection.
More likely, it was a combination of chivalry and patriotism that shaped the jury’s decision. In the febrile wartime atmosphere, Dewart had managed to procure an unwritten gentlemen’s agreement that Carrie was a heroine because she had defended “British” values. “Character,” not facts, had determined the outcome. The hundreds of “Britishers” who cheered her and contributed to her defence were expressing a wider unease, to do with unspoken racial and class assumptions—rage against German brutes in the trenches, anger against wealthy employers who mistreated servants, frustration at the “foreigners” flooding into Canada and competing for blue-collar jobs in a booming city. Working-class wage-earning British men defended Carrie’s honour because, in doing so, they reaffirmed their own status. A nasty current of xenophobia underpinned the judgment.
There were plenty of women at the time, however, who looked at the case from a different angle. They knew that the only people women could trust in 1915 to look after their interests were themselves: vigilantism was the most effective defence against would-be rapists. Despite Du Vernet’s assertion, in his closing address, that Bert Massey could have been penalized in a court of law for his offence, since 1880, not a single Toronto domestic who had laid a complaint of indecent assault or rape against her employer had seen him punished. The law was an unreliable defender of their interests, and it took courage to challenge the status quo.
Mrs. Florence Huestis, with her knowledge of stigma, was one woman who knew this. The National Council of Women immediately began discussions on how to protect servants like Carrie from predatory employers. At the request of the Dominion conference of a moral reform group called the Canadian Vigilance Association, it floated the idea that there should be an office where domestics might bring complaints about their employers. The Vigilance Association had even made the startling suggestion that domestics be entitled to ask for testimonials of their employers’ characters, as well as being required to produce testimonials about themselves. There is no evidence that this suggestion went anywhere, but the notion of employment rights, even for the most defenceless of employees, began to gain ground.
Working-class women were more explicit about their attitude to Carrie, as demonstrated in a letter to the Star. “I am a married woman of 30 years,” wrote someone signing herself “F. L. M.” “At the age of 18 I was a Carrie Davies, and though there was no weapon in my favour, I sent my adversary down a flight of stairs, and he picked himself up with great difficulty. I presume if he had been killed [Carrie’s critics] would have cried: ‘Down with her! Hang her!’ There are only too few Carrie Davies in this world … As for the financial side of it, God bless the donors: there are heaps of charitable subscriptions not half so worthy.”
{ PART FOUR }
Aftermath
{ CHAPTER 17 }
Total War
MARCH 1915 TO NOVEMBER 1918
The military strength of Germany is now at its maximum. Her troops are not now so disciplined as the highly-trained soldiers first put into the field, but they are more numerous. She probably has a million more men on both fronts than she had in September last when her tide of victory reached its crest. But the allies have made even larger additions to their forces and have overcome nearly every disadvantage that told against them in the first two months of the struggle. And as nations now neutral are certain to join the allies during the next two months, the outlook for Germany is eminently black.
—Toronto Daily Star, Monday, March 1, 1915
SUFFRAGETS [SIC] AFTER PREMIER HEARST.
Open letter written by Canadian Suffrage Association to the Ontario Government… “It cannot be gainsaid that in social and moral reform work in which all good women are actively interested that valuable time is wasted, to say nothing of discouragement and defeat, when in order to bring about the desired results, Councils, Governments etc have to be ‘influenced’ by the indirect and frittering method of pleading, instead of by the direct method of the ballot, and thinking people feel that our country is the loser thereby.”
—Evening Telegram, Wednesday, March 3, 1915
The international story soon swamped the local story, and interest in Carrie Davies evaporated as the war in France gathered momentum. Canadians were now within range of German guns. The first few days on the Franco-Belgian border, in early March, were nerve-racking for the newly arrived soldiers. “Come out, you Canadians! Come out and fight!” Germans yelled at them across no man’s land; machine guns clattered during the chilly days and flares exploded at night; German snipers picked off several men who unwisely stuck their heads above the trenches. The front-line trenches were soggy ditches with inadequate latrines and crumbling walls that offered little protection from shrapnel. The rats were large, vicious, and ubiquitous. Lieutenant Colonel John J. Creelman from Toronto confided in his diary, “I expect that a lot of men will lose their minds out here and others their hearing because the noise made by a shell bursting alongside is terrific.”
In the early days of the month, there was no large-scale Allied offensive, so casualties were intermittent, but the Globe began to list the dead and wounded on its front page. “Private Nugent of Toronto Wounded,” read a sober headline on March 1. “Official Casualty List Sh
ows The First Expeditionary Force Has Been Under Fire. No Particulars Are Given.”
The Evening Telegram rang a different note in its war coverage: it echoed the euphoria of the “Britishers” at Carrie’s trial. “Canucks’ Warm Reception,” read the newspaper’s March 1 headline. “Union Jacks All Over.” The article quoted a letter from Percy Buttery, a former reporter from the Hamilton Spectator. Percy was still elated by the adventure. “We met with a great reception [from the French] and it was evident that the Dominion troops had established themselves in the affections of the French people, particularly the female portion thereof.” For families left in neighbourhoods like Cabbagetown and Islington, Percy Buttery’s cheerful account was a reassuring boost to Imperial triumphalism.
But even the jingoistic Tely couldn’t erase the horrors. Percy’s letter went on to mention, “We can hear the daily booming of the guns, while at night rockets are used by both sides … In the very field in which our horses are now picketed, nineteen Germans are buried and large numbers of others are in different places round about.” A few days later, Tely readers found in their papers an alarming letter from an English soldier to his brother in Toronto. “You cannot realize how it feels to have the shrapnel bursting in our trenches and whizzing past our heads. I have been hit three times … Our battalion has lost three hundred and twenty men in ten weeks out of fourteen hundred.”
In the field, Canadian soldiers kept their spirits up with songs like “Mademoiselle from Armentières,” “Keep Your Head Down, Fritzie Boy,” and “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty.” Their first major engagement occurred on March 10, when they were on the flank of a large attack by British and Indian troops at a small village called Neuve-Chapelle. For three hours, the Canadians kept up a heavy rate of fire from their trenches against the German trenches only two hundred feet away. The Canadians lost a hundred men: more worrying, several soldiers complained that their Canadian-made Ross rifles had jammed during the rapid-firing exercise. But Neuve-Chapelle was merely a preliminary taste of battle horrors: the Canadian Division was soon moved into the Ypres Salient. Now Canadians were firmly on the front lines, sandwiched between a British division to the right and an Algerian division to the left, and with the medieval market town of Ypres behind them.
Nervous anticipation of German brutality proved justified on April 22, when the Germans began pounding the city of Ypres with enormous shells from large-calibre siege guns. Then a menacing green cloud seeped out from enemy lines. The gas cloud was formed from 160 tonnes of chlorine liquid, released from canisters via rubber hoses. The Allies had been warned that the Germans planned to use poison gas, but nobody knew exactly what kind. Once the cloud drifted into Allied trenches, its true effects were obvious. It smothered the Algerian line first, and soon Algerian soldiers were stumbling away from the front, choking, screaming, and dying of asphyxiation. The Canadians missed the full brunt of the gas cloud and fought on, trying to fill the gap on their left flank, even as the poisonous fumes triggered streaming eyes and hacking coughs. “Piss on your handkerchiefs and tie them over your faces,” yelled an officer at George Bell, a young Canadian soldier. Those who didn’t use handkerchiefs or strips from their puttees “rolled about, gasping for breath.” Bell’s comrades fought for two solid days “with no sleep, not even a chance to nod, feeling that every minute is our last, and with nothing to eat or drink.”
News of the battle that came to be called “Second Ypres,” and this horrific new weapon, appeared in Toronto newspapers a couple of days later. At first, the extraordinary courage of Canadian soldiers was treated with enthusiasm. “This contingent, out-numbered and forced to give way, covered themselves with glory and apparently saved the day,” commented the Star on April 24. The Globe was equally enthusiastic: “Every single evening newspaper [in London] contains the word ‘Canada.’” But bravery came at tremendous cost. Two hundred officers (one in six from Toronto) and almost six thousand other ranks were killed, wounded, or missing—almost one-third of the total Canadian Division. Colonel Denison lost both a nephew and a grandson in the terrible mayhem—among the dead were thirty-six-year-old Lance Corporal Edgar Denison of the 16th Battalion (Canadian Scottish Regiment), and twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Alexander Kirkpatrick of the 3rd Battalion CEF. It is likely that this was the battle in which Carrie’s sweetheart fell, too. He would almost certainly have been at the front, along with other youngsters who had once demonstrated their marksmanship at the shooting gallery on Toronto Island.
Back home, spring had finally arrived: magnolia trees in Rosedale backyards bloomed, chestnut trees along University Avenue were in bud, and the days were lengthening. But the families crowded outside newspaper offices on King Street, waiting for casualty lists to be posted, were filled with feverish anxiety and dread. Week after week, in Anglican churches throughout the city, organists led the congregation in the hymn “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”
Second Ypres was only the beginning, and for the next three and a half years the war roared on like a pitiless meat grinder. Canadian troops were involved in the battles of Festubert (May 1915), Givenchy (mid-June 1915), St. Eloi Craters (April 1916), Mount Sorrel (June 1916), and Courcelette (September 1916). After months of anxious speculation, the Americans finally entered the war in April 1917, but the carnage continued. Each engagement spawned its own grim casualty list; the five-and-a-half-month Battle of the Somme, conducted in a slough of clinging, caramel-coloured mud, was a glimpse of hell for the troops. According to a French corporal, the battlefield “resembled in places a rubbish dump in which there had accumulated shreds of clothing, smashed weapons, shattered helmets, rotting rations, bleached bones and putrescent flesh.” Back home, power brokers within Ottawa and Toronto were unnerved by the erratic behaviour of Sir Sam Hughes, the man who had run Canada’s war effort for the first two and a half years as minister of militia and defence. The famous Canadian trenching tool invented by Ena MacAdam, Hughes’s secretary, proved useless, as did the boots he had ordered from Canadian factories and the Ross rifle with which he had insisted that Canadian troops be equipped. Yet the Canadian soldiers gradually established a battlefield reputation as “elite shock troops,” as Great War historian Tim Cook has put it, and the British High Command repeatedly turned to them to deliver victory.
In public, most Canadians clung to the belief that they were involved in an Imperial crusade against evil, that the hideous sacrifice of lives was justified, and that victory was just around the corner. At a giant rally in Massey Hall in January 1917, hundreds of Torontonians celebrated a Patriotic Fund drive that had yielded an astonishing $3.2 million (about $64 million in today’s currency)—an average of nearly ten dollars for every man, woman, and child. The World caught the mood: “For sheer patriotic, selfless, spontaneous, exuberant enthusiasm, … there never has been such another meeting in Toronto … They sang ‘Jolly Good Fellow,’ whenever they got the chance, and ‘God Save the King,’ ‘Rule Britannia,’ ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ …” For this audience, links to the mother country had never felt closer. The shared euphoria at such crowded occasions was similar to the mood two years earlier, in the City Hall courtroom when Carrie Davies was acquitted.
Carrie herself, however, had effectively disappeared. Who cared about the timid young woman who had shot a ne ‘er-do-well on Walmer Road, when real heroes were dying in France? The Evening Telegram had got everything it wanted out of her story, and Archie Fisher had moved on to other scandals.
Toronto men of all social classes continued to sign up. Two of Colonel George Denison’s sons volunteered. Bert Massey’s cousin Vincent Massey was in uniform by 1916, although he never went overseas: he served as a staff officer in Canada and ultimately worked for the war cabinet in Ottawa. Bert Massey’s nephew Arnold, son of Arthur and Mary Ethel Massey, volunteered for the Canadian Field Artillery in 1916, when he was nineteen, and after training in England he served in the Royal Naval Air Service.
However, rousing public choruse
s of Imperial solidarity could not drown out private grief: the shocking slaughter and grim hopelessness of trench warfare ate away at the romantic view of warfare as a stage for gallantry and heroism. In April 1917, nearly 11,000 Canadians were mown down (3,598 fatally) over the course of the four-day battle at Vimy Ridge. Families lived in dread of the knock on the door and the telegram that began, “Regret to inform …” Mothers realized they would be raising their children alone. Farmers’ wives wondered who would help them keep the farms going. Single women looked around them and realized that, with a whole generation of young men lost, they themselves would be left adrift, their traditional dreams of marriage and children out of reach forever. They were condemned to lives as “spinsters” or “old maids”—the derogatory labels routinely applied to unattached women.
A new note of Canadian nationalism seeped into the thinking of both soldiers and politicians. In France, the commander of the Canadian Corps after June 1917, Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Currie, was ordered by General Haig, the British commander-in-chief, to move his divisions north to fight in the Passchendaele campaign. Currie did not trust Haig’s strategic judgment and objected to his foolhardy battle plan. Haig insisted on sticking to the plan, although Currie managed to secure additional heavy guns to support his troops. Against the odds, the Canadian Corps captured what was left of the ridge and established a reputation within the German military command as the Allies’ most effective troops. But once again, the cost in lives was appalling: 16,041 casualties, including 3,042 killed.
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