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  In Hughes’s eyes the British Dominions should be equal partners with the United Kingdom, in no way subservient one to the other. It would be almost two decades before this autonomy was enshrined in the Statute of Westminster. In that sense, Hughes was a man ahead of his time-but only in that sense. Yet when Hughes is assessed these sentiments have to be taken into account and weighed against the mountain of gaucheries, barbarities, vulgarities, and blunders that have made him the laughing-stock of history. Hughes was an impossible man; yet without his single-minded and often belligerent posturing it is doubtful whether the Canadian Corps would have come into being as a united national force to fight and win the Battle of Vimy Ridge.

  He must also bear most of the burden for the fact that the first contingent left Canada without any real training. Hughes’s own military philosophy was antediluvian and his refusal to listen to the regular British staff officers in Canada was tragic. He had no use for the Royal Flying Corps – didn’t believe that airplanes had any military value – and his personal tactics seemed to hark back to Waterloo. A group of the Governor General’s Bodyguards was being taught drill at Valcartier one day when Hughes, resplendent in red tabs and on horseback, arrived with an escort of cavalry, lances poised (“He’s not entitled to that,” one old soldier whispered). Hughes wheeled his horse, turned to the troops, and cried: “Form square!” The men looked at him blankly. The manoeuvre had long since been struck from the training manual, yet nothing would do but that the corporal in charge must shuffle his men around and get them kneeling with bayonets fixed.

  “Now,” rapped Hughes, looking straight at Private Frank Yates. “What do you do after that?”

  Yates looked at him blankly.

  The corporal kicked Yates in the rear and whispered: “Unload.”

  “Unload, sir,” said Yates, and Hughes seemed satisfied.

  Later that night Yates and the others discussed the incident. “Good God,” said one. “What sort of army are we in?”

  Trained or not, the first contingent was ready to leave for England early in October of 1914. Hughes was convinced against all evidence that the Canadians were fighting fit. Sitting astride his horse, addressing the men on the eve of their departure overseas, he launched into a speech, later damned by Borden as “flamboyant and grandiloquent,” that was clearly based on Napoleon’s famous address to the armies of Italy. “Soldiers!” cried Hughes. “The world regards you as a marvel.… Within six weeks you were at your homes, peaceful Canadian citizens.… Today [you] are as fine a body-Officers and Men-as ever faced a foe.…”

  This was laying it on pretty thick. There was no evidence that the world had any regard for these eager but innocent young Canadians in their ill-fitting uniforms and badly made army boots. But there was much more, for Hughes went on and on, reeling off a long list of his accomplishments at Valcartier, announcing that there would be “no faltering or temporizing” (whatever that meant) and praising the “indomitable spirit” with which they would “triumph over the common enemy of humanity.”

  At one point, to the bafflement and astonishment of the troops, Hughes broke into a long stream of sentimental poetry before telling them the one thing they didn’t want to hear: that some would never return. No matter: “The soldier going down in the cause of freedom never dies. Immortality is his. What recks he whether his resting place may be bedecked with the golden lilies of France or amid the vine clad hills of the Rhine? The principles for which you strive are eternal.”

  Even in that era of purple oratory this was too much. Hughes had expected the plaudits of the nation. Instead, all he got was merriment. The Prime Minister put it concisely enough in his diary that same evening. “Everybody laughing at Sam’s address,” he wrote.

  But now, to his dismay, Borden found that Hughes was determined to accompany the first contingent to Britain. The Governor General was as much opposed to that as the Prime Minister. The prospect of the gauche and posturing minister loose among the stiff-necked and proper English sent shivers down their spines. Hughes would be seen as representing the Canadian government when, in fact, he rarely bothered to check with anybody to avoid committing a gaffe.

  Yet Hughes had every reason to want to shake up the British. He was convinced, rightly, that Lord Kitchener wanted to separate the Canadian battalions and dovetail them into the regular British forces. If that happened the Canadian identity would be lost, swallowed up in an ocean of Tommy Atkinses.

  In the end he got his way, but not before he had, in his fashion, arranged for the embarkation of the troops. He refused to allow anybody but himself to organize this task and, in a speech a few weeks later, claimed that if it hadn’t been for him, the entire convoy of thirty ships might have been sunk by German submarines. Modesty was never one of Hughes’s failings.

  In fact, the embarkation had been badly muddled. In the words of Colonel J.F.C. Fuller, who handled the Southampton end, one of the transports, S.S. Manhattan, “closely resembled a Noah’s Ark.” Scores of officers and men, having missed the ships they were supposed to sail in, simply climbed aboard the Manhattan, whose holds were already jammed with baggage that had arrived late. To Fuller’s absolute bafflement, some units actually disappeared and others were created while at sea. One infantry battalion, for example, finding time heavy on its hands, looted the Manhattan’s hold, discovered several cases of spurs, and arrived in England as an untraceable cavalry regiment.

  Thus did the vanguard of the Canadian Corps arrive on British shores. If somebody had told Fuller that these same men would form the nucleus of the small force that gave Great Britain its first victory of the war, one might have pardoned him for smiling.

  Hughes was already in London. He did not travel with the contingent but, having seen the troops off, boarded a fast liner and reached England ahead of the soldiers. There, resplendent in his tailored whipcord and red tabs, he headed for the War Office to beard Lord Kitchener in his den.

  Only a man of Hughes’s temperament and ego could have stood up to the terrifying victor of Khartoum, whose steel blue eyes and monstrous moustache dominated the recruiting posters in London. Kitchener had already overruled Hughes’s three suggestions for a Canadian commander, appointing instead his own choice, General Alderson. Now he proposed to take complete control of the Canadians.

  Kitchener talked to the Canadian like a stern uncle reproving an errant youth.

  “Hughes,” he said, “I see you have brought a number of men from Canada; they are of course without training and this would apply to their officers. I have decided to divide them up among the British regiments; they will be of very little use to us as they are.”

  “Sir,” said Hughes, “do I understand you to say that you are going to break up these Canadian regiments that came over? Why, it will kill recruiting in Canada.”

  “You have your orders,” said Kitchener, shortly. “Carry them out.”

  “I’ll be damned if I will,” said Sam Hughes and, turning on his heel, marched out.

  According to Hughes, Kitchener had the agreement of the Canadian High Commissioner, Sir George Perley, that the troops would be regarded as purely British and that Canada should have nothing to say in their management. Indeed, when Hughes met Perley a day or so later, the High Commissioner asked him, “You do not pretend, surely, to have anything to do with the Canadian soldiers in Britain?”

  To this Hughes replied that the entire British government and the War Office must understand that the officers and men, being in the pay of Canada, should be controlled in Canada, in Britain, and at the front by the Canadian government, except for the command. As he wrote to Borden some years after the affair: “I determined that Canada was not to be treated as a Crown Colony and that, as we paid the bill and furnished the goods, which in nearly every instance were better than the British, I would act.”

  This was Sam Hughes’s finest hour. There would be no more. Over the next two years he would stumble from blunder to blunder, from scandal to scandal, from g
aucherie to gaucherie before he was finally forced out of office. And yet for all his braggadocio, for all his political cronyism, for all his incredible egotism, his slanderous insults, his barefaced prevarications, this strangest and most eccentric of all Canadian politicians had one last achievement to his credit. The united Canadian Corps stood as a symbol of a nation emerging from the colonial shadows. The victory at Vimy would confirm the growing realization that Canada had, at last, come of age.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Ribbon of Deadly Stealth

  1

  On Thursday, October 14, 1914, England got its first proof that the Empire was responding to the call to arms. The Canadian contingent had arrived unexpectedly at Plymouth to provoke a welcome that resounded across the kingdom. When the news spread over the seaport the British went crazy. For two days as the Canadians disembarked, people swarmed to the dockyard waving hats, flags, and any other patriotic emblem available, showering the soldiers with cigarettes, chocolates, apples, and bottles of whisky and gin, and singing an unfamiliar song called “Tipperary.” On the quayside, the riveters aboard a dreadnought under construction had chalked huge letters on the plating: “Bravo Canadians!”

  As the men tramped through the streets to the waiting trains that would take them to the training fields on Salisbury Plain, cheering crowds marched alongside. At every station, throngs were on the platform shouting themselves hoarse. It was widely reported that the hated Kaiser was in a rage over the new arrivals. When told that Canada had sent her sons in thirty ocean liners to the help of the mother country he was said to have shouted, “Sons! Slaves! They will go back in thirty rowboats!” No one revealed how this remarkable piece of military intelligence had got through so quickly to the Kaiser’s enemies.

  The Times made much of the fact that the Canadians were different from the English, though “British in the best sense.” They were, the paper reported, sterner and sturdier than the typical English recruit, “the type of strong clean limbed Briton at whom one instinctively takes a second look in the street.”

  In the months that followed other differences were noted with less enthusiasm, especially by the British staff officers. In the eyes of many Englishmen, the Canadians were a wild, undisciplined lot and therefore ineffective by British Army standards. There was nothing sheep-like about them. At the Valcartier camp, when the same movie was shown once too often, they had gone crazy, torn down the YMCA tent and set it afire. Now, in the Old Country, they refused to conform to the rigid class lines that divided privates, NCOs, and officers into watertight social compartments-as in the railway coaches and in the pubs, with their three segregated bars.

  Military etiquette based on social class was foreign to the young men from the farms and the forests – including those who had fled the strictures of British society to enjoy the open-handed style of the frontier. It was difficult to call a man “sir” when he’d held a job similar to yours in civilian life. Saluting-which seemed very like a peasant’s knuckle to the forehead – did not come easily. The British tommies saluted every officer they saw, even across a broad roadway; the Canadians saluted only when they felt like it.

  When Sergeant Cassels, a newly promoted NCO in the 16th Battalion, was told he couldn’t walk down the streets with a private soldier, he tore off his stripes. “I’m not a sergeant any more,” he declared. Others were just as appalled by class divisions. Captain Hal Wallis, a Westmount man from 7th Brigade headquarters, came back from officers’ school shaking his head over his encounter with an outcast from that group. Why, asked Wallis, would the other officers have nothing to do with him? “I am not a gentleman,” came the reply. “I worked for the post office.”

  The absence of distinctive class was, however, an asset for the Canadians. It meant that ability won out over élitism. Neither birth nor marriage nor social position counted in the selection of Canadian officers. By 1916 political clout didn’t help, either.

  In Britain, class was everything. The command and fabric of the regular British army has been described by one critic as having “stiffened into a sort of Byzantine formalism.” The other ranks, who belonged to the lower class, were expected to obey orders without question and without any real knowledge of the military situation, which was considered too deep and complicated for them to grasp. Such was the gap between officers and men that any private soldier who did try to ask a question of his seniors was considered by his own fellows a traitor to his class – “cosying up to the toffs.” Even in 1917, when the British army had been bled white, promotion from the ranks was not usual.

  Canadian private soldiers thought nothing of entering a saloon or a private bar in a British pub. In one fashionable West End restaurant, the shocked patrons were treated to the spectacle of a company sergeant-major parading between the tables accompanied by a private playing the pipes.

  The hierarchy took a dim view of such shenanigans. Captain Andrew Macphail, a medical officer with the first contingent and a distinguished McGill academic, whose letters home were studded with wry comments, was told by a British staff officer that the Canadians were being kept out of action because they were unruly and mutinous. The Canadians, for their part, were often intolerant of the English to the point where the courtly fifty-year-old doctor found that, as a Canadian, he must be extremely guarded aboard buses and trains lest he leave himself open to insult. Macphail had two brothers also serving in the forces, both as officers. These members of a well-to-do, literary family (for Macphail was an essayist and an editor as well as a professor of the history of medicine) were bemused by the roughness of the troops under them and also their own colleagues. Jim Macphail found he had to restrict passes by as much as 20 per cent because so many Canadians were drunk in public places. As he wrote to his brother John, “many of the officers are quite uncouth, often showing hilarious amusement at English customs, money, food and drink.”

  The troops had to be lectured constantly on the subject of discipline. It took considerable patience to teach men used to the wide open spaces of prairie, mountain, and seacoast that they couldn’t leave camp on a whim without a pass, that they mustn’t overstay their leave, and that each soldier had a duty to keep his conduct sheet clean. At Plymouth, scores had tumbled off the ships and headed for the nearest pub, so many that in the days that followed, special trains – “Drunkards Specials” – had to be requisitioned to take the absentees on to Salisbury after the Military Police rounded them up. It wasn’t easy to get such men to conform. At one point the 1st Division was warned that if discipline didn’t improve, the entire unit would be broken up.

  The Canadians improved, but they were never subservient. When the 2nd Division arrived similar problems came up. On the Sardinia, the entire company revolted and wrecked three canteens after it was discovered that one of the bakers aboard had spat tobacco juice into his flour bin. Pay night in the lines of the Nova Scotia Rifles was described as such a shambles that no officer attempted to control his troops; the Cape Bretoners were allowed to run wild until hangover time the following day.

  No wonder, then, that some British staff officers looked down on the Canadians as little more than a rabble. After all, they were colonials, weren’t they-what could one expect? Moreover, they were inexperienced. Kitchener didn’t believe that any Canadian officer was fit to command a unit larger than an infantry brigade, and no one can fault him for that, although he conceded they might later command divisions if they proved themselves as brigade commanders in action. That is exactly what happened after the Second Battle of Ypres.

  Douglas Haig himself was baffled by the independence of the Canadians – and not just by the unruliness of the ordinary soldiers. It was the publicly expressed insistence on an independent command that perplexed the British commander, who later confided to his diary that “some people in Canada regard themselves rather as ‘Allies’ than fellow citizens of the Empire.” That, of course, was the exact point being made to Kitchener by the unspeakable Hughes. But to Haig, a Dominion was
still a colony. Indeed, in those early months, the line of responsibility was more than a little muddy. As first commander of the Canadians, the British general, Alderson, found himself in the bewildering position of being responsible to Kitchener, who had appointed him, and also to the Canadian government in the person of Hughes, who didn’t want him. Legally, the men he commanded were members of the Canadian militia – volunteers on active service defending their country abroad. Thus there was a basis for the Canadian control that was gradually assumed as the war lengthened. Canadian divisions were not to be shuffled like cards into the British corps. Well before the troops moved into the Vimy sector it had become clear that the Canadians actually were allies and not Haig’s “fellow citizens” – and that they had no intention of being treated as lesser mortals.

  2

  Salisbury Plain was a horror, but the Canadians didn’t complain. “It’s all a blooming picnic to me now,” wrote one private in the Canadian Scottish to his family. “I only wish you were with us to share the fun.”

  The fun took place on a wasted plain, empty of fences, houses, or people. The season was the wettest in years-in a seventy-five-day period there were only five dry days. The chalky soil had long since been trodden into a quagmire. The huts and tents were overcrowded, illness was widespread; everyone, it seemed, suffered from ’flu, and there were 1,249 cases of venereal disease. Snow and heavy mists curtailed training. The food was terrible, roads were often rendered impassable by blizzards, and the troops spent more time rebuilding the camp than they did in training. The Canadian Scottish, for example, spent 130 days in England but trained for only 40.