by John Buchan
The contingent ultimately numbered 367 — collected from Ottawa, Three Rivers, Caughnawaga, and Manitoba. The Manitoba draft included thirty Indians, the Ottawa party was divided equally between Canadians and French Canadians, and the Three Rivers men were all French Canadians. Major Frederick Denison, who had been Wolseley’s orderly in the Red River campaign, was appointed to the command. The Abbé Bouchard, a missionary in Egypt, who had visited Khartum and happened to be home on leave, went out as chaplain, and Colonel Kennedy was added as an unpaid foreman, because the Manitoba Indians would not go without him.
Melgund spent a hectic month, and his task was not facilitated by the British Government, who, after he had made all arrangements with the Allan and Dominion lines, suddenly announced that they had chartered a special ship to take the men straight to Alexandria. It was not easy to impress upon the authorities that Canadian boatmen had voracious appetites, and could not support life on army rations. But all difficulties were surmounted, and on Sunday, 14th September, the party embarked at Montreal on the Ocean King. Next day Lord Lansdowne inspected them at Quebec, and they began their journey towards that desert town where Gordon was waiting upon death. It was Canada’s first participation as a Dominion in an imperial war, and it was Melgund’s first important administrative task performed on his own responsibility, for Lord Lansdowne left all the details in his hands. From the correspondence and reports the reader gathers a strong impression of the good sense, tact, energy, and business capacity of the military secretary.
Three months later, on 13th December, his daughter Eileen was born at Ottawa. Sir John Macdonald happened to be dining that night at Government House, and proposed the toast of “La Petite Canadienne.”
Wolseley, through no fault of his own, was too late; Khartum fell on January 25, 1885, and Gordon died on the Dervish spears; the British expedition retraced its steps, and the Sudan was in the Mahdi’s hands. Shame and anxiety were universal throughout the Empire, and from the black clouds which overhung the Egyptian frontier might at any moment come the thunderbolt of a barbarian invasion. The possibility of military aid from the Dominions was mooted, and the Dominions themselves began to inquire into their military assets. As early as March 1884 Mr. Goldwin Smith had written to Melgund: “It looks almost as if your military service might be required on the other side of the water. A war, though terrible, would not be an unmixed calamity if it put a stop to the work of those wretched factions in England. But it would sadly undeceive the English people as to the armaments and military disposition of Canada, about which enormous falsehoods have been told them. One of our public men* did not shrink from assuring them that we had a force of 400,000 men, organized and ready for the field. He meant the ‘enrolled Militia,’ which can hardly be said to exist, even on paper.”
* Apparently Sir John Macdonald.
The dispatch of the voyageur contingent was followed by duties of a different type which gave Melgund a valuable insight into the problems of imperial defence. A committee was appointed in 1884, consisting of the Minister of Militia, Mr. Caron, the Deputy-Minister, Lieut.-Colonel Panet, Major-General Middleton commanding the Canadian Militia, and Melgund himself, with Mr. Colin Campbell as secretary, to go through the papers in the archives on the subject of Canadian defence, and report on their use. The committee confined itself to coast defence, and considered a vast mass of documents — reports of royal commissions, dispatches from Secretaries of State and Governor-Generals, official and private letters of admirals and generals, memoranda by all sorts and conditions of experts. In the voluminous correspondence on the subject we find Melgund sorting and arranging documents with the industry of a Record Office official. He had also an immediate and practical defence problem to face. In the spring of 1885 there were rumours of a Fenian raid from the United States across the Manitoba frontier to be directed against Winnipeg. The Clan-na-Gael saw in the troubles then threatening in the Canadian North-West a chance for their peculiar brand of patriotism, and the Canadian Government had before them the dossiers of the various firebrands who were believed to be implicated. Nothing came of the enterprise, but Canada was well prepared, and had the raiders marched they would have found a stern reception. Melgund’s memorandum on the subject works out in minute detail the nature of the welcome which awaited the invasion.
But the most interesting of the questions which during these months he had to consider was the possibility of Canada assisting the British Army in the Egyptian campaign. The whole earth was full of the rumours of war, no man knew where the Sudan entanglement might end, and the old suspicion of Russia on the Indian frontier had grown into active fear. Australia had sent troops to Egypt, and it was felt that Canada could not be eclipsed by New South Wales. The Egyptian campaign came to a close before active steps were taken, but it was fortunate for Melgund that he had to look into the matter, since the insight and knowledge which he thereby acquired were to be of the utmost value to him when fifteen years later, in a position of greater authority, he had to face the same question. On one point he was clear from the start. Any Canadian force must be enrolled for Imperial service and not as Canadian militia, and the selection must lie with the Imperial authorities. This was also the view of Sir John Macdonald, and of Colonel Otter, one of the chief militia officers. The latter believed that no militia regiment could take the field as it stood, or indeed could furnish more than twenty per cent, of its officers and men as fit for foreign service. But he also believed that it would be perfectly easy to recruit a force — say a brigade of three battalions — for a term of not less than a year’s service abroad, from Canadians and from Britons in the United States, and that such a force could be trained and got ready in less than a fourth of the time required for ordinary recruits. Proposals poured in for the undertaking. Major-General Winburn Laurie, an officer still on the British active list but resident in Nova Scotia, proffered a scheme for a force which he was willing to command; General Middleton had another; Mr. Goldwin Smith suggested the sending of a Canadian battery of field artillery, to which Melgund replied that no single Canadian battery was fit to take the field and that a composite battery would take too long to create. Early in 1885, while the Imperial need still seemed urgent, he wrote to his brother Fitzwilliam Elliot setting forth his views, and the letter was shown to Lord Wolseley. His brother, who had himself served in Canada, approved, and concluded with some gloomy prognostications of trouble in the Canadian North-West. That may have been done to make sure that the stormy petrel would not grow restless in a too pacific clime. “Don’t be in an infernal hurry to get out,” he wrote. “Every man ought to stick to his post now, where he knows the ropes, and he may be perfectly certain that he will have his work cut out for him.”
The fraternal prophecy was right. Fifteen years earlier the Red River rebellion under the half-breed Louis Riel had been broken by Wolseley’s expedition to Fort Garry, and Riel had fled to the United States and suffered sentence of outlawry. Since then things had changed; Fort Garry was now the rising city of Winnipeg, and the three months from Toronto to the Red River by boat and portage were now five days by the Canadian Pacific Railway. But the discontent of the half-breeds and the Indians remained; only the problem had shifted five hundred miles into the wilds. It was the story of the Great Trek in South Africa repeated; the half-breeds fell back before the advance of officialdom and discovered grievances when officialdom overtook them — land laws which offended their notion of justice, new regulations which they did not understand. It may fairly be said that there was nothing in the policy of the Canadian Government to give them ground for complaint, but they did not easily appreciate the complexities or the delays of the administrative machine, and they had the old dislike of a conservative people to any novelty. Moreover, there were white settlers to fan the discontent, men who had taken up land in the Edmonton, Battleford, and Prince Albert districts in the expectation that the new railway would follow them, and who, when the route chosen lay far to the south, found the
mselves en Vair. Also the Indians — the Cree nation — were out of temper. They had seen their hunting grounds broken up, and the buffalo, which was the backbone of their livelihood, exterminated. In 1883, 150,000 buffalo robes were sold in St. Paul, and next year only 300. The wonder is not that trouble broke out, but that, with so much inflammable material to hand, it proved such a flash in the pan.
The outbreak began in the fork of the North and South Saskatchewan Rivers, where lay a Cree reserve, nearly three hundred miles from the nearest point on the Canadian Pacific Railway. On March 22, 1885, news reached Ottawa that Riel, who had long ago been free to return to Canada, had seized the mail bags and cut the telegraph wires at a place called Duck Lake in the fork. General Middleton, commanding the Canadian Militia, left at once for Winnipeg in the hope that the rising might be quelled without bloodshed. The situation was sufficiently grave, for in that spacious North-West there were white women and children in the farms along the river banks dispersed among 30,000 Indians, with no protection except the scattered posts of the 500 Mounted Police. On the 28th came news of a fight between a detachment of Police and Riel’s rebels, in which the Police had over a dozen killed and were forced to retire to Fort Carlton on the North Saskatchewan. There they were joined next day by Colonel Irvine, commanding the Police, and after burning the fort they retired downstream to Prince Albert. This meant that all the white settlements were directly threatened, and the Militia were at once put in motion and a call sent out for volunteers. The 90th battalion at Winnipeg were the nearest troops; the rest must travel the better part of two thousand miles from Eastern Canada.
Melgund left Ottawa on the 26th, and was in Winnipeg on the 30th. Middleton had asked for him, and the Governor-General assented, with many injunctions to remember that he was a married man and not to run into needless danger. They left Qu’appelle station, the nearest on the Canadian Pacific line to the scene of hostilities, on 2nd April, having only between 300 and 400 men, mostly from the 90th regiment. On the 6th Melgund was appointed Chief of the Staff and the march began in earnest. It was the worst season of the year for campaigning, for the winter was breaking up, the snow was turning into slush, and the trails were quagmires. Rain, blizzards, and a perpetual high wind attended them, and their boots froze to the stirrup irons; yet the force did its twenty miles a day, and the Hudson Bay Company laboured manfully at transport and supplies.
On the 13th they were at Humboldt, and the next step was to secure Clarke’s Crossing on the Saskatchewan. This was done on the 17th, and the force, now increased to some 800, began its descent of the river, moving on both banks. News had come of Riel, who was at Batoche, thirty-three miles away, with one Gabriel Dumont, a famous rifle shot and buffalo-hunter, directing operations. On the 24th they came in touch with the enemy, who was strongly posted in a ravine called Fish Creek on the right bank of the stream. Melgund, who was on the left bank at the time, brought the troops across, and all day long the half-breeds in their rifle pits hung up the advance. The force engaged was barely 1,000 strong, and the losses that day amounted to 10 killed and 45 wounded. Middleton himself had a narrow escape with a bullet through his cap, while both his aides-decamp were wounded. The position was grave, and he decided not to expose his small volunteer force to needless losses. In pouring rain camp was made, and there the troops waited till 7th May, when considerable reinforcements arrived. Meantime the enemy had fallen back from Fish Creek to Batoche. Suspense prevailed at Ottawa as to the fate of that small force, composed as it was mainly of volunteers. To Melgund fell the duty of selecting each camping ground, of posting the sentries, and riding round the patrols, while the Indians from their rifle pits and hiding-places showed discrimination in trying to pick off the officers. A rumour which circulated in Ottawa that Melgund had been shot did not tend to allay the anxiety.
The advance on Batoche began very early on 9th May, with the steamer Northcote in attendance. By 8 a.m. it had reached the township, and found the rebels strongly ensconced in rifle pits and a thick belt of bush. Middleton, personally most gallant but very careful of his men, hesitated to rush the place, and all day futile skirmishing continued. In the afternoon, Melgund to his disgust was sent off to the telegraph station at Humboldt with dispatches, and so missed the last stage of the campaign. For on the morning of the 11th the General was persuaded by his officers to allow them to carry the position by storm, and in an hour or two the rebellion was over. Dumont escaped across the frontier, and Riel was captured four days later, and was eventually tried and hanged.
It was a curious little war, one of the smallest in recent history, for there were never as much as 2,000 men in action on both sides. But its importance was not to be measured by its size. It was the first campaign in which a purely civilian and volunteer force was in action, and so must be read as the opening page of a famous chapter. The transport difficulties, which were the core of the problem, were brilliantly surmounted. All the troops, except the 90th battalion and some of the mounted scouts, were brought from Lower Canada, and the feat was a commentary upon the progress of Canadian communications. To quote Melgund: “From Ottawa to Qu’appelle is 1,685 miles. From Qu’appelle to Batoche is a march of 243 miles. Wolseley left Toronto on the 21st May 1870, and arrived at Fort Garry on the 24th August — three months. In 1885 the last troops ordered out left Montreal for the front on the 11th of May, and arrived at Winnipeg on the 20th of May — nine days. So much had fifteen years of civilization and a railway done for Canada.” The expedition was a first-rate advertisement to the world of the agricultural riches of the North-West, and, by making immigrants safe, it hastened its settlement. Also it compelled an inquiry into the grievances of the Indians and the half-breeds, and the whole system of administering the new provinces. The rebels were in revolt against the Dominion Government but not against Britain, and at their feasts drank the health of Queen Victoria before that of Riel.
One part of the system which needed overhauling was the Mounted Police. Lord Lansdowne, in a letter to Melgund during the expedition, stated some of the reforms which he thought essential: an increase in numbers, and a first-class man in command who could himself undertake the direction of a “little war.” The Government of Canada was of the same opinion, and in the summer the post of commandant of the North-West Police was offered by Sir John Macdonald to Melgund. It was a high compliment, as was shown by the later refusal of Canada to consider a British officer for the post, and it proved that Melgund had the confidence of the Dominion. It offered him the active open-air life which he loved, and a problem of first-rate military importance to solve, and he was sorely tempted to accept. In the end he declined, and one of his chief reasons was his wife. He would have been compelled to leave her for weeks at a time alone in the prairie at Regina while he visited his outland stations.
General Middleton returned home to be officially thanked for his work, and to receive the K.C.B. which he well deserved, and in his report he laid stress upon Melgund’s services and asked that they should be recognized. In the following year Queen Victoria invited Melgund to Windsor, and proposed to decorate him with the C.B. for his work in the North-West. The recommendation had, however, to go through the Colonial Office, and, since the Dominion authorities considered that jealousy might be created by the special honouring of a British officer in a campaign which Canada regarded as peculiarly her own, the matter was dropped.
By the autumn of 1885 Melgund had resolved to return to England, several private reasons contributing to his decision; so early in January 1886 he was home again with his small household, taking with him the memory of many friendships and a warm interest in Canada’s future. How keen was this interest may be seen from his correspondence after his return with Lord Lansdowne and many Canadian friends, and his efforts to induce the Times to give more attention to Canadian news. What Canada thought of him may be gathered from Sir John Macdonald’s farewell. “I shall not live to see it” said the Prime Minister; “but some day Canada will welcome y
ou back as Governor-General.”
CHAPTER 5. SOLDIERING AND POLITICS AT HOME
FOR twelve years after his return from Canada Melgund was content to cease from foreign wanderings. His whole attitude of mind had changed; he was no longer restless, but eager to fling his whole energies into the task which came first to his hand. Canada had accustomed him to service, and he was now in the mood to forgo glittering and adventurous enterprises and work hard and soberly at what appeared to be his immediate vocation. He found that vocation awaiting him. Having long been an enthusiast for the Volunteer auxiliary forces, he had now an opportunity of pushing their cause and perfecting their organization. Those twelve years were strictly a period of professional soldiering. He toiled at the work of his command, he preached the gospel of the Volunteer with voice and pen, and his laborious activities brought him no reward except the approval of other soldiers and the satisfaction of his own mind. He had reached that stage when the ambitions of youth are not forgotten, but the impatience of youth is curbed, and a man schools himself to tasks which may not kindle the fancy but approve themselves to the reason.
