Vimy Page 3

  Like Fred Holm, another immigrant, whose family came from Bristol in 1910 because there was no work in England, they joined because, in Holm’s words, “it’s in the blood … it was the right thing to do.” That attitude was general and was echoed in the words of the youngest son of Nellie McClung, the well-known novelist, who told his mother: “I want to go-I want to help the British Empire-while there is a British Empire!”

  But not all of those who fought at Vimy joined for reasons of patriotism, though most used that excuse. In many ways, the stampede to the recruiting offices in 1914 resembled another stampede, seventeen years before. When the Klondike fever struck, thousands rushed off to the frozen North, not because they really believed they were going to get rich (as they pretended), but because they were active young men, bored with life, seeking adventure in a distant clime- and also because everybody else was going, and so it was “the thing to do.”

  The thing to do! It is a phrase that reoccurs in the reminiscenses of Vimy veterans. Everybody, it seemed, was going. Nobody wanted to be left behind. If your entire college class or church club was signing up, would you want to be the only holdout? As Gordon Shrum was later to admit, he went because everybody he knew was going, and he feared that if he didn’t follow the crowd he’d be ostracized. A gunner with the 29th Battery at Vimy, Shrum went on to a distinguished career in science, education, and public service in British Columbia.

  That was it: if you didn’t go you were an outcast or something close to it. The fever was epidemic, especially in the West. In Vancouver the men’s club of a local Presbyterian church signed up en masse. In Moose Jaw, one hundred members of the Legion of Frontiersmen simply took possession of an east-bound train, with or without paying the fare, and were carried to Ottawa, where they joined the newly formed Princess Pats. In Winnipeg an entire baseball team enlisted; in Kamloops all the carpenters building a local hospital walked off the job and joined up; in Saskatoon, twenty-six members of the city band signed on.

  Whole communities were ravaged by mass enlistments. The saddest, perhaps, was the little town of Walhachin, B.C., which became a ghost village in the post-war years because every able-bodied man had joined the army and few had returned. An empty cricket pitch suggested the Imperial make-up of the community.

  These early volunteers did not fear death; they feared that the great adventure would end before they could take part in it. The worst conditions failed to damp their ardour. In Winnipeg, the old Horse Show building used as a barracks was so cold that several young recruits, unable to get decent clothing, died of pneumonia. In spite of that the troops continued to sing the sardonic verses of “When the War Is Nearly over We’ll Be There.”

  As late as 1916, when some young women who had no real notion of what the war was about were handing out white feathers to shame the reluctant, the fever was still raging, in spite of- or perhaps because of-the news from the front. The universities were combing their classrooms to raise special battalions of students and graduates who would fight shoulder to shoulder and thus retain some of the camaraderie of campus life. When Dr. William Boyd, a veteran of the field ambulance in France, returned to recite John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields,” twenty members of the graduating class of Manitoba College rushed to the recruiting office to become ambulance drivers themselves.

  Others joined for reasons that might be described as selfish, though in the mud of Flanders that didn’t matter a hoot. A great many simply wanted a free ride across the water, a chance to visit their homeland, a quick holiday before the war petered out, as it most certainly would in a few months. Harold Barker, an eighteen-year-old from Gloucestershire, was one of these. He’d come to Canada in 1911, spotted an orchard near Winchester, Ontario, got off the train, and taken a job picking apples. Since that moment he’d thought only of returning home. He didn’t join the army to fight for his country; he knew nothing about his country! He joined the army because he was homesick. He got more than he’d bargained for. On the morning of the Vimy battle, Corporal Harold Barker, a scout with the Royal Canadian Regiment, was hit by one of his own shells and dragged off the field bleeding from wounds in the mouth, chest, legs, and back.

  Ben Case joined the army because he hadn’t studied for his exams. He couldn’t face the prospect of failing and he didn’t have a job prospect, so at 9 A.M. when the examinations started at the University of Toronto, he was standing at the Dufferin Gate of the Canadian National Exhibition grounds, waiting to enlist. On the morning of the Vimy battle, Ben Case, by now a telephone lineman, was crouching in a pit, half deafened by the barrage, aware only that his comrade, “Tubby” Turnbull, had been killed by a splinter of shrapnel.

  Jack Quinnell joined up because it would mean one less mouth to feed back home. He was sixteen years old when he enlisted, a gangling redhead with innocent blue eyes, one of seven children in a family where money was tight and food scarce. Who, in his position, would not have signed up? The private soldier’s pay of a dollar ten a day sounded like a small fortune, and in addition there was free food, free clothing, free travel, and the prospect of adventure. Like the others, Jack Quinnell hadn’t the slightest idea what he was in for. But on the afternoon of April 9, 1917, when his regiment was blown to pieces in a vain attempt to seize the highest point of the ridge, and Jack Quinnell lay half buried by an explosion, he knew that he had earned his pay.

  To these men, raised on Tennyson and Kipling, war was all dash and colour, evoking words like “gallantry,” “courage,” and “daring.” War was men in brilliant costumes galloping about on splendid horses. War was an arm temporarily in a sling, a bandage draped rakishly across a forehead, a sabre scar ennobling a cheek.

  Canadians of 1914 had never been exposed to war-only to the romantic paintings reproduced in school texts or the dramatic engravings in the illustrated magazines. War to them was Wolfe expiring gracefully on Abraham’s Plain or Brock dashing up the Queenston slopes, sword flashing in the sunlight. War was the Métis driven from the gun-pits of Batoche, or the Bengal Lancers jousting with the hill tribes of the Punjab, or the Welsh holding out against the fuzzy-wuzzies at Rorke’s Drift. War was Gunga Din and the Soldiers of the Queen, all in scarlet and gold. In 1914, the only memories Canadians had of war were the reminiscenses of the rough-riders who returned from South Africa with tales of derring-do, chasing the Boers across the veld.

  There was no organized pacifist movement in Canada; in fact war was not necessarily thought of as a bad thing. Arthur Lower, who was to become the country’s leading social historian, remembered discussing the subject in June, 1914, with a friend. They decided that “a nice little war would be just what the country needed to cap its development and give it a sense of corporate unity.” Lower lived to regret that prescient remark, which came true in the grisliest manner.

  War, then, was an adventure, and it is safe to say that most, if not all, of the young men who fought at Vimy saw it that way. To William Pecover, the Manitoba schoolteacher, it was just that: something he couldn’t afford to miss-going overseas on a ship! When two of his school pals joined up in Brandon he didn’t waste a minute in joining them. Leslie Hudd, a former Barnardo boy and a member of the Sherbrooke Militia, who was only seventeen, put his name in for the cyclist company even though he’d never ridden a bicycle because it sounded suitably dashing and because he knew that the cyclists were being sent to France quickly. His attitude changed drastically after he was gassed at Ypres.

  Like the young men who swarmed to the recruiting offices, terrified of missing out on the “fun” (as more than one termed it), the army brass was convinced that the conflict would end quickly. In the early months of the war, the army was rigorously selective. One man was turned down because he weighed only a hundred pounds, another because he had a job and the orders were to sign up the unemployed first, a third because his chest expansion wasn’t ample enough. (This was the determined Fred Holm, who worked out for weeks at the Toronto YMCA to build himself up.)

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p; Will Bird, a future novelist from the Maritimes, was turned down because he already had a brother in the service and it was thought unfair to his widowed mother to hazard both sons. But by 1916, when the war was gobbling up the flower of Canada’s youth, considerations like these were tossed aside, and all these men found themselves fighting at the Battle of Vimy Ridge. This change of attitude was brought home graphically to Dodge Rankine, a young McGill student who, to his disgust, was turned down in 1914 because he’d once had typhoid. Two years later, when Rankine encountered the same doctor at the recruiting office, things were radically different.

  “What do you want, Dodge?” the doctor asked.

  “I want to join the artillery.”

  “Open your shirt,” said the doctor, briefly applying a stethoscope to his chest. That was the end of the medical. “The boat leaves at four o’clock,” the doctor explained.

  By the end of the month, Rankine was in France. The following spring he was helping to operate one of the big siege guns in the great barrage at Vimy.

  By the time he joined the army, Rankine was twenty-one, but thousands of others had not yet reached voting age. The impression left by the contemporary photographs and paintings and also by the later Hollywood war movies is deceptive. We think of the soldiers of the Great War as grown men, mature in years and experience. In fact, this war was fought to a considerable extent by teenagers. The moustaches, the sunken eyes, the hollow cheeks mask the truth-that many of these youths, trained to kill and be killed, would in normal times still have been in high school. They badgered their parents for permission to go until the parents gave in.

  A young Regina teenager named Bob Owen was one of these. Twice he ran away from home to join the army. Twice his widowed mother brought him back. Finally, after pleading and cajoling on his part, she reluctantly agreed to let him enlist. The local postmaster confronted him as he boarded the train to the East, the cars full of teenagers like himself, all eager for the adventure of their lives. But young Owen-he was just seventeen-had a release signed by his mother in his pocket. He looked out of the window as the train started to pull away and witnessed a spectacle that became affecting only in retrospect. There on the platform were other mothers, all crying. As the train moved slowly out of the station the women began to run along the platform beside it, clutching their sons’ hands, refusing to let go until the train had to be stopped to disengage them. Finally, the train puffed away, the mothers still weeping and waving goodbye to their children, in many cases forever.

  3

  On August 24, the first militia units began to straggle into the new camp in the township of Valcartier, Quebec. Here, on a sandy plain covered in scrub bush sixteen miles northwest of Quebec City, some thirty-three thousand members of the Canadian militia were to be trained for overseas service.

  The Scots were the first to arrive, men from the various Highland units who would form the new 16th Battalion, Canadian Scottish. They were unusual in that most were old soldiers. Three out of four had seen service in one of ninety-five different units, ranging from the Australian militia to the Chinese army. It was as well that they had had some military experience because the training at Valcartier was almost non-existent.

  Physically, the camp itself was a remarkable accomplishment. In less than a month this wretched piece of bush land, bisected by the Jacques Cartier River, had been transformed into a bustling military camp, complete with roads, water mains, railway sidings, stores, showers and movies for the troops, three miles of rifle range, and twenty-eight thousand feet of drain pipe.

  There was only one problem: nobody seemed to know from day to day what was going on. There was little time for training, and the organization of the troops was chaotic; after all, the men had poured in from some two hundred militia units. Every officer was kept in doubt as to whether or not he would go overseas. One battalion had three lieutenant-colonels on strength; another had four prospective seconds-in-command and only one horse for all. A third battalion arrived fifteen hundred strong and was broken up for reinforcements. Still another turned up with eleven officers and only fourteen rank and file. One adjutant who suddenly found himself without a staff had to type out orders himself and in doing so got the carbon paper reversed. His orders could be deciphered only by holding them before a mirror.

  Some of the volunteers’ early enthusiasm was badly shaken at Valcartier and not just because of the inadequate tents, the lack of greatcoats, or the incredible mix-up of stores and equipment. It was Sam Hughes himself who helped shatter morale among all ranks but especially among the officers.

  As one of them noted, most of their time seemed to be taken up listening to Hughes, sitting on his horse, haranguing the troops and berating their officers. That was, of course, an exaggeration. Yet that image-the posturing figure in the red-tabbed uniform, the chill blue eyes, the hard, square jaw, the pompous phrases-was one that would remain with them and, in later years, symbolize Valcartier.

  For Valcartier was Hughes’s creation, a memorial to his single-minded ability to get things done and to the personal idiocies and imbecilities that forced the nation’s leaders to question his sanity. From the Governor General, Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, on down the consensus was that Hughes was mentally unbalanced – “off his base,” to use Prince Arthur’s phrase. Borden’s deputy, Sir George Foster, believed it. “There is only one feeling about Sam. That he is crazy,” he wrote in his diary on September 22. Claude MacDonell, a prominent Tory M.P., believed it. “The man is insane,” he told Borden in November. Joseph Flavelle, a leading financier who encountered Hughes in 1916, believed it. Hughes, he concluded, was “mentally unbalanced with the low cunning and cleverness often associated with the insane.” And Borden himself believed it. In his memoirs he described Hughes’s conduct and speeches as “so eccentric as to justify the conclusion that his mind was unbalanced.”

  By mid-September, 1914, the Prime Minister was receiving “astonishing reports as to Hughes’s language and conduct” at Valcartier. Borden’s informants were impeccable; they included the Governor General himself. The King’s son felt it necessary to tell the Prime Minister that Hughes’s language to his own officers in front of the troops was “violent and insulting” and that they were “generally enraged.”

  It boggles the mind that this posturing and bigoted Orangeman, who ran the army as his own personal fiefdom, should have remained in office for more than two years after the war began, insulting everybody from the King’s representative to the entire French-Canadian community (and thereby exacerbating a widening split in the country that would lead, after Vimy, to a major national crisis).

  Why didn’t Borden fire him? The blunt answer is that Hughes scared him silly. The mild and courteous prime minister couldn’t summon up the courage to have it out with a Tory stalwart who bullied, blustered, lied, and bluffed his way out of the tightest corner. Hughes fought back at the slightest reproof with long, vituperative letters of self-vindication refusing ever to apologize for his sins, announcing that he was “loved by millions” and comparing his critics to yelping puppy dogs vainly chasing an express train.

  He insulted everybody from the secretary of the Toronto Humane Society to the Anglican Bishop of Montreal. When the Bishop complained about the lack of Anglican padres in the forces, Hughes unleashed a string of profanity at him. When the animal lover inquired about the mistreatment of horses at Valcartier, Hughes called him a damn liar and physically ejected him from his office.

  This was the man, in charge of the nation’s military defences since 1911, who announced blandly at the war’s outset that he could personally raise forty divisions to fight the Germans, who wore his uniform to cabinet meetings and exclaimed that if the war wasn’t over by spring he would take the field himself, a prospect that terrified and appalled his colleagues.

  It is a democratic tradition that the military should always be under civilian control and that generals should have no politics. The problem was that in Hughes’s c
ase there was no such division. He had made himself a lieutenant-colonel in the militia and after a few months had promoted himself to major-general. As such he ran the army and thought nothing of promoting his political friends as honorary colonels.

  He could not abide being wrong, for his ego was monumental. Encountering an officer on leave he mistakenly addressed him as captain and when told the man was only a lieutenant promoted him on the spot. “Sir, I know what I’m talking about,” said Hughes. He was out of line, of course: politicians can’t promote officers, but then Hughes was always out of line. He paid no more attention to military etiquette than he did to cabinet solidarity. He broke the rule that officers should never be dressed down in front of their troops. “Pipe up, you little bugger, or get out of the service!” he shouted at one who spoke too quietly. He created new battalions, scrapped old ones, moved others about like puppets, decided who would go overseas with the first contingent, who would stay behind.

  He hated the British Army and especially the permanent force, whom he referred to publicly as a bunch of barroom loafers. He had been a staunch militia man since the days of the Fenian raids. He’d run afoul of the British brass hats in the South African War and felt aggrieved because he hadn’t been awarded the Victoria Cross-indeed, he seems to have believed that he should have had two V.C.s. He refused to take any advice from the regulars and, in his laudable but misplaced nationalism, was convinced that the untrained Canadians were better than their seasoned British counterparts. He publicly told one man who wore four decorations on his chest that it would be a crime to allow him to lead men to the front.

  Hughes could not stand being under the thumb of the British. He would later help to lever the British commander of the 1st Division, and later of the Canadian Corps, out of his job. Lieutenant-General Sir Edwin Alderson was a hero of the South African War but no match for Hughes, who shot off a “poisonous telegram” (in the words of the CPR’s Thomas Shaughnessy) attacking the new divisional leader and suggesting that it would be better if he himself took command. The insult was aggravated by the fact that the telegram, which went to his London agent, Colonel John Wallace Carson, was not sent in code.