Canada's Great War, 1914-1918 Read online

  22. Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 11; Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 231.

  23. John English, Borden: His Life and World (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1977), 106.

  24. The Globe, August 7, 1914, quoted in Tim Cook, Warlords: Borden, Mackenzie King, and Canada’s World Wars (Toronto: Penguin Books Canada, 2013), 46.

  25. Gordon, 203–04.

  26. Gordon, 212. When the battalion went overseas, 350 of its officers and men, including the colonel, were members of Gordon’s congregation. Gordon, 213.

  27. Quoted in Zuehlke, 7.

  28. Quoted in Zeuhlke, 7.

  29. Harold Baldwin, “Holding the Line” (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1918), 2.

  30. Quoted in Gwyn, 62.

  31. Baldwin, 3.

  32. Tim Cook, “‘He Was Determined to Go’: Underage Soldiers in the Canadian Expeditionary Force,” Histoire sociale/Social History, 41, no. 81 (May 2008), 48 note 5. On underage soldiers, see also Dan Black and John Boileau, Old Enough to Fight: Canada’s Boy Soldiers in the First World War. Toronto: James Lorimer, 2013.

  33. Harold E. Hartney, Up and at ’Em. 2nd ed. (New York: Ace Books, 1971), 15.

  34. Quoted in Gwyn, 51.

  Chapter 2

  Between Mother England

  and Uncle Sam

  Whether born here or elsewhere, the men from the Dominion are essentially Canadian in temper and outlook, organized by Canada, inspired by Canada, and of the very warp and woof of Canada.

  —The Times, 1915[1]

  Canadians were disappointed but not surprised when President Woodrow Wilson declared that the United States would adopt a policy of strict neutrality and called on Americans to be “impartial in thought as well as in action.” Wilson’s refusal to offer even moral support to the Allies was incomprehensible to Canadians—Borden privately thought Wilson “stupid and indifferent”[2] —convinced as they were that this was not merely a struggle between rival empires but a crusade to protect the weak (like Serbia and Belgium) from oppression and to preserve freedom and democracy.

  Some Americans quickly decided that, if their country would not do the right thing, they would do it themselves, and about 7% of the men in the first contingent were Americans. This might seem surprising but it was not unprecedented. Several Americans had been among the Canadian volunteers who served in the South African War.[3] Why did so many Americans want to serve in a foreign war, especially as they risked losing their citizenship by serving in a foreign army?

  As in Canada, some of them were recent British immigrants. George Bell, for example, was born in Liverpool but had emigrated to Detroit, where he worked as a printer and was only months away from receiving his citizenship papers when the war broke out. He crossed over to Windsor, Ontario, and enlisted on August 8.[4]

  Others, like Joseph Smith, had Canadian connections. He was born in Philadelphia, but his family had been long-established in eastern Ontario. Rather colorfully, he was working as a cowboy in British Columbia, and it was only when he rode into Dog Creek to treat himself to supper at the local hotel in late September that he learned that a war had broken out in the Balkans. Thinking at first that it was just “another one of those fights that were always starting in the Balkans” and, since he was from the United States, which was neutral, Smith thought “I ought to be neutral too.” But when he discussed the situation with other men in the dining room, he changed his mind. “While I was an alien, I had lived in Canada. I had enjoyed her hospitality. Much of my education was acquired in a Canadian school. Canadians were among my dearest friends.” In the end, he decided that the issues at stake were not important. Britain had asked its empire for help, Dog Creek “heard and was going to answer that call. Even if I were an alien I had been in that district for more than a year and I owed it to Dog Creek and the district to join up with the rest.”[5]

  Alexander McClintock of Kentucky thought that the United States “ought to be fighting along with England and France on account of the way Belgium had been treated, if for no other reason. As there seemed to be a considerable division of opinion on this point among the people at home, I came to the conclusion that any man who was free, white, and twenty-one and felt as I did, ought to go over and get into it single-handed on the side where his convictions led him, if there wasn’t some particular reason why he couldn’t.”[6] McClintock went to New York intending to join the Foreign Legion in France but while there met a Canadian who was in the Princess Pats and “decided to go up to Canada and look things over.” Two days later he enlisted in the 87th (Canadian Grenadier Guards) Battalion in Montreal.

  Others were just looking for adventure. William Ross Jones, who was born in Scotland but had emigrated to the United States, was working for the New York Central Railroad in Amsterdam, New York, when the war broke out. After a friend who had enlisted in the Royal Canadian Dragoons wrote to him saying “that if I wanted to see action now was the time,” Jones promptly went to Valcartier, Quebec, and enlisted in September 1914, leaving behind a wife and thirteen-month-old son. He was actually among the very first: his regimental number was 59.[7] Similarly, Herbert McBride, who was a lawyer in Indianapolis and an officer in the Indiana National Guard but had spent time in Canada before the war, confessed that it was not “the early reports of German atrocities, or the news of Belgium’s wanton invasion” that caused him to enlist. “No, it was simply that I wanted to find out what a ‘regular war’ was like. It looked as though there was going to be a good scrap on and I didn’t want to miss it.” McBride went to Kingston, Ontario, to enlist in October 1914 and went overseas with the 38th Battalion.[8]

  Canadian-American relations had been growing closer in recent years, reflecting a remarkably porous border that had long allowed people to move back and forth pretty freely to work and live. At the same time, Canadian-American trade had been growing significantly, as had American investment in Canada. The two countries shared a common language and were conscious, in this imperialist era, of their shared British heritage. There was much talk among the political and intellectual leaders of both countries, and even some in Britain, about the powerful influence on the world that the Anglo-Saxon or English-speaking peoples could wield if they worked together.

  When Canada went to war in 1914 but the United States remained neutral, a totally unprecedented situation was created. The United States had proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine in the early nineteenth century, warning European powers that it would not tolerate interference in hemispheric affairs, but this was intended to keep them out of the Caribbean and South America. No one had claimed that it applied to Canada, but Canada’s participation in the war might well result in German naval activity and actual fighting very close to the United States. Hypothetically at least, it could even result in a German invasion of Canada, although that was highly improbable.[9]

  J. A. Currie, who commanded the 48th Highlanders in Toronto, later recalled an American friend suggesting to him in August 1914 that Canada could stay out of the war because it was protected by the Monroe Doctrine. His response was telling: “Yes we believe in the Monroe Doctrine just the same as you do. We are going to fight for it on the Plains of Flanders.”[10]

  In 1914, Canada and the United States celebrated the century of peace that had followed the end of the War of 1812, initiating what they proudly—if inaccurately and somewhat smugly—described as the longest undefended border in the world. Speeches were made, magazine articles were written, and a general feeling of bonhomie prevailed. If people on both sides were viewing their shared history through rose-tinted glasses, this was no doubt because their relationship had improved considerably in recent years and people anticipated, or at least hoped, that this trend would continue. Certainly, their relationship was rapidly becoming more intimate.

  Canadian-American relations had ranged from
indifferent to hostile in the preceding century. The British colonies that originally became Canada had—with the exception of Quebec—largely come into existence as a result of the American Revolution. Those that had existed before that, notably Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, were small and thinly populated until thousands of Loyalists fleeing or expelled from the rebellious colonies settled in the remaining British colonies to the north. Even so, most people in Nova Scotia before the American Revolution, excepting the French-speaking Acadians, had moved there in the 1750s and 1760s from New England. The Acadians, of course, had a rather different relationship with the United States. After their expulsion from Nova Scotia in 1755, many of them had settled in Louisiana, whose “Cajun” population is directly descended from them.

  The Loyalists were soon followed by hundreds, if not thousands, of other people, who moved north and west into British territory after the American Revolution not for political reasons but because there was lots of good land available, especially in Upper and Lower Canada (now southern Ontario and Quebec). They were, it seems, indifferent to the new international boundary or to whether they lived in the new republic or returned to British territory.

  Only a few years later, in 1812, the United States, for a variety of reasons, declared war on Britain and invaded Canada, assuming that Canadians would welcome assistance in achieving their liberation from what they assumed to be oppressive British rule. While some of the more recent settlers, who actually constituted the majority of the population in Upper Canada by this time, did welcome the Americans, many did not, and they combined with the Loyalists and their descendants to repel the successive American attacks. The War of 1812 greatly strengthened conservative attitudes in Canada: suspicion of “democracy,” which was seen as mob rule that led inevitably to general corruption, rejection of republicanism, and of course increased distrust and fear of the United States. American politicians who spoke throughout the rest of the century of their nation’s manifest destiny to include all of North America unwittingly reinforced those attitudes.

  Most Canadians would have agreed with Principal G. M. Grant of Queen’s University when he said in 1898 that “we are Canadian, and in order to be Canadian we must be British.”[11] As illogical as this statement may appear today, it made perfect sense to Canadians until the middle of the twentieth century because the alternative appeared to be that Canadians “must be” Americans. There were some, however, especially in the 1880s when Canada was struggling through difficult economic times, who argued that Canada should just join the United States and share in its perceived greater prosperity.

  But most Canadians, even if they favored closer economic relations with the United States, did not share this view because they tended to regard American democracy with condescension. As the prominent Montreal physician and writer Andrew Macphail rightly observed in 1914, albeit with tongue in cheek, Canadians had for too long thanked God that they were “not like those republicans and sinners . . . with whom it was dangerous for simpleminded people like ourselves to have any truck or trade.”[12] While understandable in the past, he believed that this attitude had encouraged an unhealthy complacency and self-righteousness among Canadians.

  One thing that Canadians and Americans had in common in the early twentieth century was a smug sense of moral superiority over Europe. While Europe had a long and continuing history of national rivalries and warfare, Canadians and Americans had learned to share an entire continent peaceably, resolving disputes through negotiation and arbitration rather than force. This was, as William Lyon Mackenzie King, then Minister of Labour in the Canadian government, claimed in a speech in New York in 1910, the Canadian-American way, “the answer of the new world to the war talk of the old.”[13]

  James Macdonald, managing editor of the Toronto Globe—the largest newspaper in the country—believed that the system of civilized internationalism that Canada and the United States had evolved was the hope of the world. Working himself up to an almost hysterical fervor in the highly emotional year 1917, he wrote that “for more than a hundred years . . . while the boundary lines of every other continent have blazed in war and dripped with blood, the internationalism of North America has held,” providing the world with “the unbroken pledge of a far greater peace for all the world through a millennium yet to come.”[14]

  This sort of talk was all well intended, of course, but represented an ignorance or denial of historical reality. While it is true that the War of 1812 was the last time the United States attacked Canada, there were a number of occasions when unofficial military assaults took place and times when war seemed imminent. American sympathizers supported the 1837 rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada and even launched cross-border raids, for example, and some rebels sought and received sanctuary in the United States when the rebellions failed.

  The American Civil War demonstrated vividly the complexity of the Canadian-American relationship. Most Canadians opposed slavery and supported the Union, despite the British government’s ambivalence, and approximately 40,000 Canadians served in the Union army, compared to the few hundred who enlisted in the Confederate army. Most of these men had already emigrated to the United States, but they were joined by volunteers enlisted in Canada by Union recruiters. At least twenty-nine Canadian-born men were awarded the Medal of Honor during the Civil War. At the same time, some 15,000 American draft dodgers and deserters fled to Canada, which declined American requests to send them back.

  One of the Canadians who served in the civil war was actually a woman pretending to be a man. Sarah Emma Edmonds, a Canadian living in Michigan, served as a male nurse in the 2nd Michigan Infantry, calling herself Frank Thompson, then was a Union spy before working as a female nurse in a hospital in Washington.[15]

  Notwithstanding Canadian sympathy for the Union cause, Anglo-American relations deteriorated sharply during the war because of episodes such as the Trent affair, when the U.S. navy stopped a British ship on the high seas, and the St. Albans raid, when a group of Confederates in Montreal attacked St. Albans, Vermont.[16] The situation was not improved by the fact that the Confederacy was purchasing warships in Britain and Confederate ships were welcomed in Nova Scotia ports.

  By the end of the war, there was widespread talk in the United States, even at high political levels, of punishing the British by invading and seizing Canada. This didn’t happen, but the American government clearly chose to look the other way when the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish-American nationalist organization, launched a series of military raids across the border in the delusional hope that Britain would free Ireland in exchange for Canada. These incursions involved actual battles between the Canadian militia and the Fenian raiders, in which men were killed and significant damage was done to property. In April 1868, a Fenian even assassinated Thomas D’Arcy McGee, an Irish Canadian politician who was one of the Fathers of Confederation.

  Fear of the United States was a major factor in the decision of the Canadian colonies to join together in a confederation in 1867, in the rather naïve belief or hope that they could resist an American invasion more effectively together than separately. Given that their combined population was only about 10% that of the United States and that the Maritime colonies were not even connected to Canada by a railway or road, this seemed unlikely, but something had to be done because the British government was making it very clear in the 1860s that it could no longer be expected to defend Canada from external military threats.

  The primary objective of Confederation, however, was to unite the existing colonies in the east with the vast British territory in the northwest, then being governed by the Hudson’s Bay Company, to create a transcontinental political and economic union. The urgency of achieving this as quickly as possible was underlined in 1867 when the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, thereby cutting off the northern half of the Pacific coast from British—soon to be Canadian—territory. Meanwhile, American settlers at Red River (Winnipeg) and in British Columbia were calling on
the U.S. government to include those regions in the American union.

  Britain was determined, after the difficulties of the 1860s, to improve its relationship with the United States and the latter, emerging from a devastating civil war, was equally anxious to improve its relations with Britain. At the same time, some prominent Americans—including Charles Sumner, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the 1860s, and Hamilton Fish, President Grant’s secretary of state—still hoped to somehow take over the vast Hudson’s Bay Company territories in the northwest and thought Britain should simply hand Canada over to the United States as compensation for its grievances. Grant, while wanting to improve relations with Britain, actually agreed with them and delayed resolving those grievances, hoping that Britain might prove to be agreeable.

  In the end, in the Treaty of Washington signed in 1871, both sides resolved all their outstanding issues, either through direct negotiations or by agreeing to arbitration. What was really important about the Treaty of Washington was that by agreeing to resolve its issues with the British, the United States was in effect indicating its acceptance of the new Dominion. In truth, the era of reasonably good feeling between Canada and the United States and the undefended border dates back not to 1814 but to 1871.

  Inevitably, problems would arise between two governments sharing a vast continent, but both sides were committed to resolving them through negotiations. There were, however, two problems with this. In the first place, negotiations between a large and powerful nation and its small (in population) weak neighbor were bound to be difficult if the issue was of any importance to the large nation. Equally importantly, as a Dominion, Canada’s foreign relations were handled by the British government, which was never going to risk damaging its relationship with the United States for the sake of a Canadian concern.