Canada's Great War, 1914-1918 Read online

  Canada’s Great War, 1914–1918

  Canada’s Great War, 1914–1918

  How Canada Helped Save

  the British Empire and Became

  a North American Nation

  Brian Douglas Tennyson

  ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

  Published by Rowman & Littlefield

  A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

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  Copyright © 2015 by Brian Tennyson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tennyson, Brian Douglas.

  Canada’s Great War, 1914–1918 : how Canada helped save the British empire and became a North American nation / Brian Douglas Tennyson.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8108-8859-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-8860-9 (ebook)

  1. World War, 1914–1918—Canada. 2. Canada—History—1914–1945. 3. Canada—Foreign relations—United States. 4. United States—Foreign relations—Canada. I. Title.

  D547.C2T448 2015

  940.4’0971—dc23

  2014023379

  TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Chris, Lindsay, Jennifer, and Matt

  Oh, we come from the East

  And we come from the West,

  To fight for what we love the best;

  Jolly Canucks are we!

  —Excerpt from a popular song sung by Canadian soldiers, quoted

  in Joseph S. Smith, Over There and Back in Three Uniforms

  (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1918), 58

  Photo Credits

  All of the images reproduced in this book were scanned from sources believed to be free of copyright.

  The photographs of Robert Borden, Sam Hughes, Arthur Currie, Julian Byng, John McCrae, the 75th Battalion at Regina Trench, Canadian troops after capturing Vimy Ridge, General Pershing at Canadian Headquarters, Taking the Salute at Mons, and Crossing the Rhine are from Anon., Canada in the Great World War (Toronto: United Publishers, 1919–21), 2:26, 2:32, 3:frontispiece, 3:256, 6:110, 4:180, 4:148, 5:90, 5:228, 5:256, respectively.

  The photographs of Valcartier training camp and Lord Tweedsmuir at Arlington Cemetery are from the Library of Congress images collection, LC-DIG-ggbain-17228 and LC-DIG-hec-22480, respectively.

  The Facts for Canadians, the Heroes, the Happy Man, and the Priceless Gem Posters are from the Library of Congress image collection, LC-USZC4-12717, LC-USZC4-12562, LC-USZC4-12397, and LC-USZC4-12561, respectively.

  The photograph of the Vimy Memorial is by HTO3 [CC-BY-SA-3.0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vimy_memorial_from_the_north_side_of_the_face.jpg (downloaded on May 23, 2014).

  Introduction

  Many books, perhaps too many, have been written about World War I or what used to be known as the Great War until another one made it necessary to number them. This centennial year of the outbreak of the Great War will undoubtedly generate a flood of yet more books as well as documentary and dramatic films, television specials, academic conferences, and commemorative events.

  It is well that this should be so because the importance of the Great War to the history of Western civilization, and indeed of the whole world, really cannot be exaggerated. It remains with us still because it is one of the very few clear dividing lines in our historical evolution, a clear demarcation line between “before” and “after.”

  There is a considerable literature on Canada’s Great War experience, but not as much as that on other countries. This doubtless reflects the fact that the war was highly divisive: between the English- and French-speaking populations, rural and urban areas, and social classes. Several veterans did publish memoirs, either as books or magazine articles, and a number of regimental histories were published, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. Professional historians and popular writers showed little interest, however, until the 1970s, and since then the publication of books, journal articles, and fiction on the Great War and Canada’s role in it has become a modest industry.[1]

  Do we need another one? One is tempted to think not, but the existence of this book clearly demonstrates that I have responded in the affirmative. Why? Certainly not because I have anything new to say about the achievements of the Canadian Corps, about which Tim Cook has written so powerfully, or the Royal Canadian Navy, which has been covered very effectively by Roger Sarty and Marc Milner, or even the war in the air, which Sidney Wise has examined very fully in the first volume of the official history of the Royal Canadian Air Force.

  But there has not been a general account of Canada’s overall role in the war for several years. Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook published a still useful account in Canada 1896–1921: A Nation Transformed in 1974, and Desmond Morton and J. L. Granatstein’s Marching to Armageddon: Canadians and the Great War, 1914–1919 (1989) is still an excellent quick reference with many illustrations. Brown and Cook deal with the war in the context of a general history of Canada from 1896 to 1921, however, while Morton and Granatstein focus on the activities of the Canadian Corps in Europe. In 2004 Granatstein published Hell’s Corner: An Illustrated History of Canada’s War, an excellent brief account, but again focused on the Canadian Corps, which is especially valuable for its many illustrations reproduced from the Canadian War Museum’s outstanding collection.

  Canada’s Great War attempts to present the whole story in light of the tremendous amount of scholarship that has been undertaken in the last two decades. Its account of the military involvement includes not just the army but the usually neglected navy and Canada’s major contribution to the British flying services. At the same time, it examines the profound economic and social impact of the war on Canada.

  More significantly, it addresses the cliché familiar to all Canadians that Canada entered the war as a colony and emerged as a nation. Canada was not a colony in 1914, nor was it a nation in 1918. Because it was a Dominion in 1914 and therefore self-governing in domestic affairs, Canada’s status was significantly different from that of crown colonies governed from London. And while it clearly had achieved a new enhanced status by 1918, few would have agreed with Prime Minister Robert Borden when he claimed that Canada was now a nation. The fact that he always used the adjective “autonomous” rather than “independent” and thought in terms of nationhood within an empire sharing common foreign and defense policies makes clear that Borden’s sense of nationhood was quite different from the modern meaning of the word and was controversial even in his own time.

  Another objective is to demonstrate that the traditional tendency to treat Canada’s evolution toward nationhood only in terms of its relationship with Britain tells only part of the story. There is no aspect of Canadian history that can be properly understood without taking into account the country’s close proximity to and relationship with the United States, the giant neighbor with which it shares
the North American continent. Nineteenth-century Canadians understood this, but perhaps because we have become so economically, socially, and culturally integrated with the United States over the past century, we are inclined not to realize that this development was a modern one that mirrored the loosening of our ties with Britain.

  It was a transformation of enormous significance, because for a very long time Canadians tended to believe that destiny offered them two choices: they could remain British or they could become American. That is not to say that Canada had to remain under some degree of British control or that, alternatively, it had to become part of the United States, although many Canadians thought those were indeed the options. But for most people the issue was orientation, values, and interests, and a concern for security in a dangerous world.

  For a long time Canadians—at least English Canadians—tended to look down their noses at the United States because of its seemingly chaotic democracy, the perception that its public life was far more corrupt than that of Britain and Canada, and its “common” culture, to employ a derogatory term that used to carry great weight. But the extraordinary economic growth of the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century eventually and inevitably overflowed into Canada in terms of trade and investment, which included cultural influence through books, newspapers, magazines, films, radio, and television. Much to the dismay of the English-Canadian elite, whose orientation was solidly British, American cultural products were warmly welcomed by most people.

  The situation in French Canada was more complex. While few French Canadians—to use the traditional term—favored joining the United States, many joined their English-Canadian counterparts in voting with their feet, emigrating in large numbers in order to share in the prosperity of the northeastern states. Like francophones in Canada outside of Quebec, they adapted to the melting-pot environment while struggling to maintain their language and culture. Those who remained at home welcomed American trade and investment but did worry about the impact of a Protestant Anglophone culture on the survival of their language and identity.

  The point here is that Canada did not emerge from the Great War just with a greater national consciousness, the sense that it was now a nation psychologically and emotionally, if not quite yet constitutionally. The experience of the war shattered the illusions of many Canadians about their “mother country” and the superiority of all things British to all things Canadian, or American for that matter. This, combined with the remarkable level of Canadian-American cooperation that developed during the war and the dramatic growth of Canadian-American economic integration, meant that Canada came out of the war with not just a sense of itself as a nation but a sense of itself as a North American nation, no longer fearful of its great neighbor and embracing the economic benefits and its “common” culture. Although it took another generation for Canadians to complete the psychological transition from looking to Mother England to looking to Uncle Sam, the shift had begun and the Great War had much to do with it.

  It should be emphasized that this book makes no effort to address the entire history of the Great War. Because it is only examining Canada’s role, it focuses on the Western Front, where most Canadian soldiers and nurses served, although it does briefly discuss Canada’s involvement in the Allied interventions in Russia in 1918–19. It should also be understood that because Newfoundland did not join Canada until 1949, this book does not discuss its role in the war, although there are occasional references to the Newfoundland Regiment.

  I am tempted to say that this book almost wrote itself, but my wife would protest quite vigorously, considering the many hours almost daily for the past year that I have spent working on it. Canada’s Great War seems, however, the logical culmination of my research over the past twenty years, which has focused on Canada’s experience in the war. Last year I published a biographical bibliography of publications written by Canadian men and women who served in the war which prepared the way for this book. But the writing was easy in the sense that I knew I had a good story to tell and a theme which has been touched on by other historians but never really developed.

  I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the veterans who published accounts of their experiences, and also to Canada’s Great War historians who in recent years have written so many wonderful books and journal articles on the Canadian experience. I have leaned heavily on them. The select bibliography at the end of this book lists only some of the many recent books and articles which will reward further reading.

  I am particularly grateful to Roger Sarty, who shared information on the naval war with me, and to Gordon Greavette, who kindly allowed me to consult his recent doctoral dissertation on the Shell Committee. I am grateful also to the Canadian War Museum and Library and Archives Canada, whose holdings vastly enriched my knowledge of the subject. As always, I am grateful to South Shore Libraries, particularly their Bridgewater branch, whose interlibrary loan service gave me access to many books not otherwise available in a small town.

  I am particularly grateful to Bennett Graff, acquisitions editor at Rowman and Littlefield, who first proposed that I write this book. It was not something I had planned to do, but after thinking about it for a while, I concluded that there was indeed a need for another book on Canada’s role in the Great War, and I thought I might enjoy the challenge of trying to write it. I can only hope that Bennett’s faith in me will prove to have been justified. I also want to thank Kellie Hagan, whose helpful and patient editorial guidance in the final preparation of this book was much appreciated.

  Finally, I want to acknowledge the extraordinary support of my wife, Sandra Atwell-Tennyson. She always encourages me in these projects, although I suspect she does sometimes tire of dinner-table conversations about long-dead politicians, soldiers, and battles. In addition to moral support, she used her impressive computer research skills to help clarify obscure points on which I tend to fixate. She also proofread the manuscript and asked many pointed questions. As a result, this book is without a doubt better written than it might otherwise have been. For this and much else I am grateful.

  Because this book is being published in the United States, I have used American spellings where they differ from Canadian usage, as in such words as “defense” and “labor,” except when they are part of official names such as Department of Defence and Department of Labour. Similarly, distances are given in miles rather than kilometres.

  1. On Canadian literature on the war, see Tim Cook, Clio’s Warriors: Canadian Historians and the Writing of the World Wars (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006) and The Canadian Experience of the Great War: A Guide to Memoirs, ed. Brian Douglas Tennyson (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2013).

  Chapter 1

  The Summer of 1914

  The north wind blew wildly all night. War was on it, blowing all over the world.

  —Ethel Chadwick, 1914[1]

  The summer of 1914 was, by all reports, an outstanding one, the best in living memory. Stephen Leacock, professor of economics at McGill University, better known as the country’s most popular humorist, later recalled “the glory of the Canadian summer, of summer cottages and bush camps; and for the city population the soft evening sky, the canopy of stars over the merry-go-round resorts in the cool of the summer evening.”[2] Having fled the oppressive heat and humidity of Montreal, he spent the summer at his home on Lake Couchiching, near Orillia, Ontario, the town he had made famous as the fictional Mariposa in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

  Most Canadians did not take a great interest in international affairs, and this was reflected in their newspapers, which focused largely on domestic and local news. When they did report international news, it was usually to report on the political situation in Britain—the mother country of most Canadians—or political scandals, disasters, or colorful crimes in the United States. Europe and the rest of the world were pretty much ignored.

  And so when the assassination of an Austrian archduke—whatever an archduke was—occurred in late Ju
ne, it was not headline news and was only reported briefly on the inside pages of most newspapers. Robert Borden, the prime minister, did not mention it in his diary. Assassinations and minor squabbles between usually obscure states somewhere in eastern Europe seemed to occur frequently and were obviously of no importance and little interest to most Canadians. Even an educated, well-traveled man like the Rev. Charles W. Gordon, better known to the world as the popular novelist Ralph Connor, recalled that, while he had seen the announcement of the assassination, he had paid little attention to it because “I had never heard of Serajevo” and “assassinations seemed to be one of the chief outdoor sports of the semicivilized peoples of those Central European countries.”[3]

  He, like most Canadians, was almost certainly unaware that Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian politician who had brought about the unification of Germany in the 1860s, had once predicted that “one day the great European war will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.”[4] But who precisely was Bismarck and where were the Balkans? And surely the very idea of a great European war was unthinkable in these progressive modern times anyway, wasn’t it?

  Canada in 1914 was “a land of hope and sunshine,” as Leacock described it, “where little towns spread their square streets and their trim maple trees beside placid lakes almost within echo of the primeval forest.”[5] The Bulletin, the weekly newspaper in Bridgewater, a little mill-town southwest of Halifax in Nova Scotia, was probably representative of most small-town newspapers when it reported the assassination on page five, then had nothing further to add on the subject for another month. More typical of its news stories was the announcement of the first garden party of the summer season, which was to take place on the evening of July 6. “A special effort,” readers were assured, had been made “to make this even more attractive than usual.” One no doubt popular attraction was Madame Babette, who would “give a forecast of the future.”[6] Sadly, we have no record of how accurate she proved to be.