Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (3 page)

Military historians depict battles in terms of logic and purpose, so Rayne Kruger’s version of the final phase of the Battle of Paardeberg, written in 1959, is somewhat different from Albert Perkins’s version, written in his diary on the day it happened. In fact, Colonel Otter didn’t volunteer his regiment to do anything, and there was no planned attack. The Boer army of five thousand men was outnumbered six-to-one by the British, and it had been surrounded in open country and shelled incessantly for ten days. The Boers were hungry and demoralized by the time the Canadians went stumbling off into the dark to dig new trenches, and General Cronje had already decided to surrender. The Canadians just happened to be in the right place at the right time. But Paardeberg was the first British victory after four miserable months during which the British army had suffered one humiliating defeat after another at the hands of the Boers, so the imperialist press turned the Canadians into heroes, not just in Canada but throughout the empire.

After Paardeberg, the Royal Canadian Regiment took part in the great British advance that captured the capitals of both Boer republics by June 1900. A second contingent of one thousand men, once again raised at the Canadian government’s expense, arrived in time to participate in the grim guerrilla war that followed the surrender of the main Boer armies, in which the Boers’ farms were burned and their women and children rounded up and put in concentration camps, where about twenty thousand of them died of disease (or from being fed ground glass, according to the version still believed by most Afrikaners). Other Canadian units followed, although these were paid for not by Ottawa but by Britain or by private individuals like Lord Strathcona, the Canadian high commissioner in London, who spent £200,000 of his own money to raise and equip a six-hundred-strong cavalry regiment called (of course) Lord Strathcona’s Horse.

In a guerrilla war the whole population is the enemy, including women and children, and like most of the British empire’s troops in South Africa the Canadian soldiers frequently indulged in looting.
Small portable items were especially popular: “We had no trouble getting up at the right hour. You could hear alarm clock bells in nearly every heap of blankets and the veldt hummed like a telephone office. (When a soldier loots a house the first thing he grabs is the clock.)” Nevertheless, most of the Canadians felt a certain sympathy for the people they were fighting, and often their rural instinct to help out people in distress mingled strangely with the ruthless nature of modern counterinsurgency warfare. One of the most vivid accounts of the confused behaviour that often resulted was a long letter published in the Ottawa
Citizen
by its editor, Lieutenant E.W.B. Morrison, who was serving in South Africa with the Canadian Artillery. He described an attack on the village of Dullstroom in the northern Transvaal by Canadian troops.

In all, over seven thousand Canadians enlisted for the South African war, of whom about five thousand arrived in time to see active service there. For most English Canadians at home the war began as an exciting distraction and ended at least as a successful demonstration of Canada’s military prowess and its unbounded loyalty to the empire. But there were a few nagging details that detracted from this cheery view of the war: of the eight companies of the Royal Canadian Regiment that had enlisted in the first rush of enthusiasm, for example, six flatly refused to extend their service when their year’s contract expired in September 1900.

Even in English Canada the war was not without its critics (although the criticism tended to be limited to farmers’ weeklies and radical labour journals). Journalist and historian Goldwin Smith was
appalled by the brutalization of Canadian society. He particularly disliked the war toys being given to children: “puppets made by their distortions and squeaking to resemble the agonies of dying Boers.” But the mainstream English-language press was overwhelmingly jingoist, and its readers had no quarrel with its view of war as a morally positive and virtually cost-free spectator sport.

But five volunteers was actually not a very impressive total for a town of over four thousand people. In fact, the average native-born English Canadian man was not nearly so eager to go off and die for
the empire as his political leaders, his social betters and his newspapers assumed.

Almost 30 percent of Canada’s volunteers for the Boer War were British immigrants, though they made up only 7 percent of the total population. Even more significantly, Canada’s total contribution lagged far behind that of the other white dominions: it had a larger population than the Australian and New Zealand colonies put together, but they raised over three times as many men for the war. As for French Canadians—the “fine French company” of the Royal Canadian Regiment had francophone officers, but two-thirds of its men were actually English speakers. Only 3 percent of those who served in South Africa were French Canadian, although francophones comprised 30 percent of the Canadian population.

Individual French Canadians went to South Africa for the sorts of personal motives that will induce some men, at certain times in their lives, to go to a war almost regardless of what it is about, and once there they fought just as well as anybody else. But the war was almost universally unpopular in French Canada, where some of the young wore buttons bearing the name of Kruger, the Boer leader, to show where their sympathies lay. In March 1900 there were three days of rioting between English and French students in Montreal, and the militia had to be called out. Meanwhile, the more rabid sections of the English Canadian press called the French Canadians scoundrels and traitors and warned of civil war. Lord Minto, the governor general, reported that some eastern Ontario farmers went to bed at night with guns by their sides because they feared a French Canadian invasion.

Nevertheless, Laurier’s compromise had succeeded. He won the 1900 election comfortably, and the country moved on to other concerns. In January 1903 the Alaskan boundary dispute was decided entirely in favour of the United States (because the British representative on the arbitration tribunal voted for the American case in order to avoid a clash with Washington). There was great fury in Ottawa and
across the country, and the two Canadian representatives on the tribunal refused to sign the decision in protest, but Laurier’s government survived. By then the South African War had been over for six months, and all the Canadian volunteers had come home except for the 224 who were buried there. It was a gentle enough introduction to the business of fighting foreign wars—and not too many Canadians were bothered by a little thing like a precedent.

Having persuaded the colonial prime ministers to contribute troops to the Boer War, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain invited them all to another Imperial Conference in 1902. He now wanted to make the arrangement permanent by getting them to commit some of their forces to a special “Imperial Reserve” that would be available for service anywhere in the world.

Canada’s contribution to the proposed Imperial Reserve would be one infantry brigade and one artillery brigade (about 4,500 men). That was only half the size of Australia’s, but Chamberlain charitably explained the discrepancy by observing that Australia didn’t have to worry about its own territory being invaded, whereas Canada had the United States next door. However, Laurier objected strongly to the whole idea, and the conference ended with no formal Canadian commitment.