Canada's Great War, 1914-1918 Read online

  The outbreak of war a month later came, as Leacock put it, “out of a clear sky.”[7] Gordon and his family were at their summer camp on an island in Lake of the Woods in northwestern Ontario. “With our canoes and boats, with our swimming and tennis, with our campfires and singsongs our life was full of rest and happy peace. It was a good world,” at least until Thursday, July 30, when their boat “returning with supplies from the little town brought back a newspaper with red headlines splashed on its front page.”[8]

  Canadians might be forgiven if the crisis was a complete surprise to them because it was almost as much of a surprise to Europeans, including many of their political leaders. The great alliance system, which was later blamed for making the war inevitable, had surely made it unthinkable because any act of aggression would trigger an all-out conflagration. The system obviously didn’t work and as a minor regional issue became intractable and dragged in all the major powers, the crisis came to a head over the Bank Holiday weekend at the beginning of August. The newspapers now began to pay attention, as did their readers.

  While it was apparent that Europe was on the verge of war, it was less clear if Britain would be involved. Germany and Austria-Hungary were bound by a defense alliance, as were France and Russia, but Britain had only an “entente” with France and few, including most ministers in the British government, actually knew what that meant. In retrospect it remains an interesting question what the British government would have done in August 1914 if Germany had not forced its hand—some would say provided the perfect opportunity—by invading France through neutral Belgium.

  The problem in 1914 was that the German army had prepared only one war plan after France and Russia became allies, and it called for an immediate invasion of France that bypassed the French fortresses along the German border by going northwest through Belgium. This made eminent sense militarily because the French had not fortified their border with Belgium, but it involved violating Belgian neutrality, unless of course Belgium agreed to allow the German army to pass through. But that would have constituted a violation of its neutrality and Belgium refused to allow it.

  And so when Germany invaded Belgium in order to get to France, it violated Belgium’s neutrality, which all the European powers had guaranteed in 1834, and that took the British government into the war. In fact, it probably would have gone in anyway because senior ministers in the British government had been assuring France for several years that, in the event of war with Germany, Britain would come to its aid, and the British and French armies had been holding talks and making joint plans for some time.

  But if Britain went to war in 1914, what would Canada do?

  Canada was a Dominion in the British Empire, the senior Dominion in fact, created in 1867 by the union of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Other provinces and territories had subsequently joined over the years so that by 1873 Canada encompassed the entire northern half of North America with the exception of Alaska, which the United States had acquired in 1867, and Newfoundland, which did not join Canada until 1949.

  As a Dominion in the British Empire, Canada’s head of state was the British monarch, but because he or she obviously lived in Britain, Canada had a governor general, who was appointed periodically to represent the monarch. The governor general in 1914 was Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, Queen Victoria’s youngest son. Connaught had pursued a military career and married Princess Louise of Prussia, a great-niece of the German emperor, but also enjoyed an extramarital relationship for many years with Leonie Leslie, wife of an Irish cavalry officer, who was one of the three daughters of Leonard Jerome of Baltimore. Leonie Leslie’s sister, Jennie Jerome, married Lord Randolph Churchill, giving her a title and status and giving him a significant replenishment of financial resources, and therefore became Winston Churchill’s mother. Connaught had arrived in Canada in 1911 and, rather unusually, was planning to return home in September after only three years in office, perhaps because King George V wanted to appoint his brother-in-law, the Duke of Teck, in his place. With the outbreak of war, however, Connaught’s term was extended until 1916 because of his military background. Teck, having changed his name to Athlone because of anti-German hysteria during the war, later served as governor general of Canada during the Second World War.[9]

  Dominions were not the same as colonies in the British Empire. Dominions were self-governing in domestic affairs but remained bound by British foreign policy and largely relied on the British army and navy for defense. It followed, therefore, that if Britain went to war, as it did in South Africa in 1899 and with Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914, Canada and the other Dominions were automatically at war as well.

  It had been well understood for many years, however, that the Dominions were not expected to participate in every British war, because Britain, rather like the United States in the late twentieth century, seemed always to be involved in a regional conflict somewhere in the world. But Canadians could volunteer to serve in the British forces, and in the event of a significant conflict, public opinion in Canada would almost certainly compel the government to provide some level of official support.

  Thus, for example, when the British government sent an expedition to Egypt in 1885 to rescue General Charles Gordon, who was under siege in Khartoum, it recruited several Canadian voyageurs—boatmen—to transport the relief force up the Nile River. More significantly, when Britain went to war against two Afrikaner republics in South Africa in 1899, public enthusiasm in English Canada forced the government to officially recruit more than 7,000 volunteers, although they served in the British army, not as a Canadian force.

  As the situation deteriorated during that first weekend in August 1914, therefore, the question was what kind of support Canada would provide, and how much. As Tim Cook, Canada’s leading historian of the First World War, puts it, “the question on everyone’s lips was whether Canadians would embrace the war beyond waving flags and singing songs or allow the European great powers to embrace their suicidal solution alone.”[10]

  Canada did not actually have an army in 1914. It did, however, have the nucleus of an army. The Royal Military College at Kingston, Ontario, trained officers, there was an artillery school at Quebec City, and there was what was called the permanent force, which comprised about 3,000 men, around which an army could be built in time of need. The men who would be called upon to form this army were members of the militia, which had about 43,000 men organized in infantry regiments and artillery, cavalry and hospital and nursing units throughout the country.

  On the whole, the Canadian militia was more of a social organization which Colonel William Hamilton Merritt, a prominent mining engineer and long-time active militiaman, described as “perhaps the most expensive and ineffective military system of any civilized community in the world.”[11] But to be fair, nobody seriously thought there was any real military threat to Canada.

  The militia was a part-time activity for virtually all of its members, who had regular jobs, so the level of their training was pretty basic, although many had served in the British army before emigrating to Canada. Each summer the militia gathered at Camp Petawawa, north of Ottawa, for its annual two-week training camp. The highlight of the 1914 camp, which took place in early July and was presided over by the Duke of Connaught, was a three-day mock battle in which 10,000 militiamen divided into two opposing forces engaged in manoeuvres that, according to the obviously uninformed Ottawa newspapers, constituted “the nearest approach to real battle ever staged for men in training.”[12]

  Many people probably assumed that the government would do what it had done in 1899: offer a battalion of volunteers, thereby showing support for the British cause but not risking too large a commitment because that would inevitably become politically divisive, as the South African commitment had done. This assumed, of course, that a larger commitment wasn’t necessary anyway because Britain, France, and Russia could surely handle what was expected to be a brief war.

  But the wo
rld had changed a lot since 1899, and Germany and Austria-Hungary could hardly be compared with the Transvaal and Orange Free Colony in South Africa. Germany had the largest standing army in Europe, and it was also the best trained and equipped. Germany was also the major industrial power on the Continent and possessed the most efficient railway network. France, while clearly a weaker military power, was determined to avenge its 1871 defeat and to regain the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. France also had the massive Russian Empire on its side, threatening Germany from the east, although Russia’s primary interest was in gaining control of Constantinople and the strategic Bosphorus Strait linking the Black Sea with the Mediterranean Sea.[13] Despite the naïve belief among the general public in Britain, Canada, and elsewhere that this war, if it came, would be brief, Lord Kitchener, the Chief of Staff of the British army, knew better and so did Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary.

  The European crisis in 1914 was, in reality, the climax of the extraordinary wave of nationalism/imperialism that had swept over Europe and North America—and even in Japan, although few noticed—in the second half of the nineteenth century. While it was undoubtedly driven by the ambitions of business and financial interests, politicians joined in for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was a rising literacy rate that combined with the spread of low-priced newspapers to make mass public opinion a significant factor in public affairs for the first time in history. The pseudo-Darwinian idea that the superior people of the world should rule the inferior peoples for their own good in order to “civilize” and Christianize them, while serving the financial and business interests of their states of course, was not only generally accepted but trumpeted as a noble obligation that Rudyard Kipling called “the white man’s burden.”

  British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli had delighted Queen Victoria back in the 1870s by proclaiming her Empress of India, then had succeeded in getting control of the Suez Canal, the essential strategic link between Europe and the Far East. The government of Lord Salisbury had gone to war in 1899 to get control over the Transvaal and Orange Free Colony in South Africa, nominally to protect the civil rights of British immigrants in those countries but really because the world’s greatest deposits of gold and diamonds had been discovered there. Almost simultaneously, the United States, similarly manipulated and pressured by imperialist politicians like Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt and powerful newspaper magnates like William Randolph Hearst, went to war with Spain to “liberate” Cuba, which it subsequently occupied, along with Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam.

  Canada was hardly in a position to engage in imperialist expansionism. With a population of less than eight million in 1914, it occupied a territory larger than the United States—as Canadians always liked to remind Americans—although much of it was barely habitable, and it had all it could handle just to build the essential infrastructure such as railways to make it manageable. It also had a culturally diverse population, with about a third of its people being French-speaking Catholics, mostly but not entirely living in the Province of Quebec. French Canadians—as they were then called—saw themselves as the real Canadians because they had been cut off from France since the middle of the eighteenth century, while most English Canadians still clung to the British connection. Most French Canadians had no interest in international affairs except in relation to the Catholic Church and felt no loyalty to or affinity with modern France.

  Further complicating the situation was that Canada had shared in the tremendous wave of European immigration since the 1890s that had increased the size of the population by about a third. While many of these new arrivals were also British, a sizeable minority came from places like Italy, Germany, Russia, and territories in eastern Europe that were then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There were enough of these recent European immigrants that assimilating them was increasingly being seen as a problem by many English Canadians because of their cultural and religious differences.

  English Canadians—a broad term applied to pretty much everybody who was not French Canadian—retained close emotional ties to Britain. It was the mother country of most of them, and they took great pride in being part of the greatest empire the world had ever known, an empire that in their minds was a positive civilizing force in the world, an attitude generally attributed today to Americans.

  Canadians, at least English Canadians but certainly also some French Canadians, took pride in being Canadian but also generally were proud of being British. Indeed, the distinction was immaterial to most of them. Their flag was the Union Jack, their national anthem was “God Save the King,” and school textbooks included British patriotic poetry by Kipling, Tennyson, and others; Canadian boys, like their British counterparts, read the Boy’s Own Annual and the patriotic action novels of G. A. Henty.

  While this may seem contradictory or illogical to modern readers, it seemed perfectly logical at the time, just as one can identify oneself as both a Nova Scotian and a Canadian or both a Texan and an American. The point is that Canadians, at least some of them—and this group usually included a lot of prominent people who influenced public opinion—thought Canada could and should play a role in the British imperial enterprise. Even Henri Bourassa, the most prominent French-Canadian nationalist of the time, who founded and edited the influential Montreal newspaper Le Devoir, acknowledged that Canada, as “an Anglo-French nation,” was “tied to England and France by a thousand ethnic, social, intellectual and economic threads” and had “a vital interest in the maintenance of the prestige, power and world action of France and England.”[14] As can be seen, however, Bourassa’s dream was of a bicultural and bilingual Canada, not the English-speaking Protestant Dominion of 1914.

  Thus, when the crisis came in August 1914, most Canadians would have agreed with Toronto’s Globe newspaper when it said that if Britain went to war “it also means war for Canada,” which meant that Canadians must unite not just for the defense of Canada but “for the maintenance of Empire integrity, and for the preservation in the world of Britain’s ideas of Democratic Government.”[15] Montreal’s Daily Star expressed a similar view. “If we are beaten in this struggle against two of the greatest armies ever seen in the world,” it warned, “we will pass finally from the roster of great Nations, and our Empire will become one of the defaced mileposts which mark the tragic road by which the human race has journeyed.”[16] By “we,” the Daily Star clearly made no distinction between Britain and Canada.

  As the European crisis unfolded in the early days of August, the Canadian government was at no point consulted or even kept informed of developments. Prime Minister Borden, like other Canadians, got his information from what he read in the daily newspapers. In mid-July he and his wife had fled the oppressive humidity and searing heat of Ottawa for a golfing vacation at Port Carling in Ontario’s beautiful Muskoka resort country, and, unlike political leaders today, he made no effort to keep in close touch with his office. Normally, his best source of information would have been the Governor General, but Connaught and his family were enjoying a vacation at Banff Springs Hotel in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta.

  Borden first mentioned the European crisis in his diary on July 27, noting that Austria had declared war on Serbia and that stock markets were “in panic.” On the 28th, he thought that a general European war was “exceedingly probable” and that it would be “almost impossible for us [meaning the British Empire] to keep out if France is involved.”[17] Accordingly, when the British government alerted the Dominions to the seriousness of the situation on the 29th, the government mobilized militia units on the coasts to guard wireless stations and undersea cable landing sites, while the Royal Canadian Garrison Artillery and the Royal Canadian Regiment were placed on active duty at Quebec City and at the naval bases at Halifax and Esquimalt.

  On the 31st, Borden somewhat reluctantly abandoned his holiday, leaving his wife in Muskoka in the hope that he would be able to return in a few days, and r
eturned to Ottawa. He displayed no undue anxiety, however, traveling first to Toronto, where he spent the night, arriving in Ottawa on the morning of Saturday, August 1. The Cabinet had been summoned, but even before it met Borden sent a message to London assuring the imperial government that if it went to war Canadians would be “united in a common resolve to put forth every effort and to make every sacrifice necessary to ensure the integrity and maintain the honour of our Empire.”[18]

  After Germany invaded Belgium, the British government issued an ultimatum on August 4, demanding that it withdraw its forces by 11:00 p.m.—7:00 p.m. in Ottawa—that evening or it would go to war. The story has been told many times of the senior ministers of the British government sitting glumly around the Cabinet table in Downing Street that evening as the sun set and the streetlights were lit—it was done by hand in those days—hoping for but not expecting a favorable response from Germany. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, had alerted the Royal Navy to be prepared for action, and Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, observed that the lights of Europe were going out, not to be relit in their lifetime.

  The mood in the Cabinet room may have been somber that evening, but a large crowd had gathered in front of Buckingham Palace to wave flags, sing patriotic songs, and cheer the prospect of going to war. It was the same in cities elsewhere, including in Germany. In Ottawa, Borden reported in his diary that “crowds on [the] streets cheered me,” reflecting the “great excitement in all Canadian Cities.”[19] Crowds—mostly men, to be sure—marched up and down Sparks Street singing the “Marseillaise,” the “Maple Leaf Forever,” and “God Save the King,” and four thousand people gathered in front of the city’s premier hotel, the Chateau Laurier, which is situated just across the Rideau Canal from the parliament buildings, singing, shouting, and waving Union Jacks.