Vimy (6 page)

“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 gaucherie 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.

In addition, in spite of Sam Hughes’s boast that Canadian goods were “in nearly every instance better than the British,” much of the Canadian equipment was defective. Horse transport vehicles had to be replaced because of the weakness of the materials or the lack of interchangeable parts. Harness was generally unsuitable. Motor lorries broke down. Only five battalions had the superior British Webb equipment; the rest were equipped with the inferior leather Oliver equipment-Sam Hughes’s choice-which meant that the soldiers had no packs and no means of carrying an entrenching tool. Hughes had even allowed his secretary to take out a patent for a so-called trench spade with a hole in the blade so that soldiers could protect themselves while peering at the enemy. The government ordered a quarter of a million; none was used.

Worst of all were the Canadian-made boots. In the words of the London
Truth
, they “soaked up water like blotting paper” and were soon replaced with British footwear. It was the same with the cloth made for Canadian uniforms; it was so inferior that all Canadians in Britain had to be refitted. Two members of parliament were forced to resign over the “boots scandal.” Profiteering, greed, patronage, and political cronyism, together with Hughes’s misplaced nationalism, were conspiring to sabotage the Canadian forces. It was not an auspicious beginning.

In the face of this, the troops remained irrepressibly cheerful and eager to exchange the mud of the training fields for the gumbo of Flanders. They simply had no idea of what they were in for. Nobody told them. The reports from the front, written by jingoistic correspondents or filtered through army censors, gave few hints of the horrors that lay ahead. Only when they landed in France did they get an inkling of what was coming, and only then did the schoolboy enthusiasm start to flag.