by Conrad Black
The bellicose and juvenile German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, pushed Austria. France, unshakeably bent on recovering Alsace and Lorraine, encouraged Russian resistance as long as it was confident of British support, and Britain refused to be finessed or intimidated by Germany but urged caution on everyone. Russia ordered general mobilization and then reduced it to mobilization against Austria-Hungary only. Germany demanded cessation of preparations for war on the Russo-German frontier, and the czar rejected his cousin, the German emperor’s intervention and reverted to full mobilization. Germany declared war on Russia on August 1. Belgium declined to give Germany free passage through its territory, and Germany invaded Belgium and declared war on France on August 3. Britain declared war on Germany on August 4 in fidelity both to its Entente Cordiale with France and its guaranty of Belgium, which went back to Palmerston’s co-establishment of that country in 1830. Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia on August 6. Italy announced her neutrality, and a few weeks later Turkey joined the Central Powers against the Allies. Almost all the leaders of the five great powers were like children playing with dynamite, with no idea of what they were starting. It would be as complete a state of war as had existed in Napoleon’s time, but with mass armies and a new concept, developed in the American Civil War, of total war, engaging the whole population. The German and Russian emperors, Victoria’s grandsons and absolute monarchs, exchanged telegrams in English threatening war and signed “Willie” and “Nicky.” Wilhelm pushed the eighty-four-year-old Franz Joseph of Austria ahead of him, and the czar manipulated the Serbs. The French would take war to recover Alsace and Lorraine and their place as the greatest power in Europe, but knew they could not do it without the Russians and British. The British did not want war but could not tolerate Germany overrunning France again, or even Belgium. Wilhelm allowed war to break out in the east, dragging Germany into war with Russia. He had second thoughts at one point about assaulting the French and provoking the British, and told Helmuth von Moltke, nephew of the victor of the Franco-Prussian War and chief of the German general staff, to suspend mobilization, and Moltke responded that it was too late. The emperor replied, “That is not the answer your uncle would have given me.” That was undoubtedly true, but nor would the kaiser’s father or grandfather have accepted any such answer. Wilhelm had great energy and ambition, reasonable intelligence, but erratic judgment and was not brave. The combination was catastrophic in the most powerful national leader in Europe. Nicholas II was better natured but even less intelligent and was an unperceptive vacillator. Franz Joseph was the ancient, semi-comatose nursemaid for the last chapter of the seven-hundred-year Habsburg dynasty in Vienna. The British and French, as democracies, had more responsive and alert leaders, but Asquith and Viviani, though worthy liberal statesmen, were not of the metal to deal with the earth-shaking crisis that was coming and would eventually be replaced by war leaders in the highest traditions of both of Canada’s storied founding nations. Sir Edward Grey, sober and detached, said, as lamps were lit around Whitehall in the last hours of the British ultimatum to Germany, “The lights are going out all over Europe; we shall not see it again in our lifetime.”
In Ottawa, censorship and export controls were imposed, bank notes were declared full tender to prevent gold hoarding, and expansion of the money supply and detention of foreign ships were permitted. Borden, in the name of the governor general, who was on a summer tour in the West, exchanged peppy messages with the British government and confirmed, on his own authority, that if Britain was at war, so was Canada. The apocalypse had come.
* * *
Parliament opened on August 18. The governor general (like his staff) was in khaki as he delivered the speech from the throne. The Duke of Connaught initially imagined that he really was the commander of Canadian forces, and Borden had to apprise him gently of the constitutional fact that he was no more the commander in Canada than his nephew the king was in Great Britain. As Borden graciously allowed in his memoirs,
Sir Wilfrid was as eloquent as usual.… He said: “There is in Canada but one mind and one heart … all Canadians stand behind the Mother Country, conscious and proud that she has engaged in this war, not from any selfish motive, for any purpose of aggrandisement, but to maintain untarnished the honour of her name, to fulfil her obligations to her allies, to maintain her treaty obligations, and to save civilization from the unbridled lust of conquest and domination.…
“It is an additional source of pride to us that Britain did not seek this war.… It is one of the noblest pages of the history of England that she never drew the sword until every means had been exhausted to secure and to keep an honourable peace.
“If my words can be heard beyond the walls of this House in the province from which I come, among the men whose blood flows in my own veins, I should like them to remember that in taking their place today in the ranks of the Canadian army to fight for the cause of the allied nations, a double honour rests upon them. The very cause for which they are called upon to fight is to them doubly sacred.”70
Borden responded and thanked the leader of the Opposition for his eloquent words and the spirit which prompted them. In a quintessentially Canadian touch that was also typical of Borden, profoundly decent and thoughtful man that he was, he went out of his way to praise the German people: “They are not naturally a warlike people, although unfortunately they are dominated at this time by a military autocracy. No one can overestimate what civilization and the world owe to Germany. In literature, science, art and philosophy, in almost every department of human knowledge and activity, they have stood in the very forefront of the world’s advancement.” He praised the half-million German Canadians: “No one would … desire to utter one word … which would wound the self-respect or hurt the feelings of any of our fellow citizens of German descent.” Borden continued, “While we are now upborne by the exaltation and enthusiasm which comes in the first days of a national crisis, so great that it moves the hearts of all men, we must not forget that days may come when our patience, our endurance and our fortitude will be tried to the utmost. In those days, let us see to it that no heart grows faint and that no courage be found wanting.”71
These were the statesmanlike utterances of decent, realistic, and strong men, leaders of a mature country in a world crisis of unprecedented gravity, easily comparable, in the quality of their reflections and the clarity with which they were expressed, with analogous personalities in the ancient great powers of Europe.
9. Canada and the Great War, 1914–1917
The German war plan, devised by Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, the former chief of the German general staff, was to advance in overwhelming strength along the Channel coast of Belgium and France (“Let the last man on the right touch the Channel with his sleeve”) and encircle Paris from the north and the west, severing Britain from France and France from its capital. Von Schlieffen was an authority on the Punic Wars and wrote a treatise on Hannibal’s encirclement of the Romans at Cannae, which was emulated in his plan for France and was somewhat revived in the great German blitzkrieg in France a generation later. The French plan, Plan XVII, devised by their commander, (future) Marshal Joseph Joffre, was to advance into the former provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which had been lost in 1871, and then into Germany. The Germans aimed at a quick knockout of France while holding the Russians in the east with relatively light forces. Although von Schlieffen’s last words allegedly were “Keep the right wing strong,” his successor, Moltke, weakened the right wing and revised the German plan to move south before Paris and cut it off from the main French armies by moving to the east of Paris. After about two weeks of the war it was clear that the Germans were moving to the west of the French and the French attack in Alsace and Lorraine was repulsed. Recognizing the great danger in which France now was, Joffre imperturbably discarded the plan he had worked on for twenty years and made a hasty but orderly retreat toward Paris, which would be defended to the last man. Moltke considered a French recovery impossible by
the first week in September, and even detached a few divisions to be sent to Russia. The Germans arrived on the Marne, just thirty miles north and east of Paris and were suddenly attacked by French armies totalling over a million men from the north, west, and south on September 5, and though the Germans had nearly one and a half million men, they were caught off balance, and in six days of very heavy fighting, in which nearly five hundred thousand casualties were taken by the two sides combined, and the French were reinforced by one hundred thousand British and by the Paris militia sent forward in six hundred requisitioned Paris taxis, the Germans were forced to fall back forty miles. The armies then extended their fronts to the English Channel and the Swiss border and settled into more than four years of horribly bloody trench warfare where the advantage was with the defence and attacks were in the face of massed machine gun and artillery fire on both sides. There would be decisive fighting on the Russian and Turkish fronts, but in the greatest theatre, France, bloodletting would be without precedent and beyond imagination. The first Battle of the Marne was a ghastly prefiguring of the courage and sacrifice to come.
The initial Canadian Expeditionary Force of twenty thousand was organized by Sam Hughes, who was, as Borden informed him, “beset by two unceasing enemies. Expecting a revelation, he was intensely disappointed when I told him that they were his tongue and his pen.”72 The Canadian division sailed from the Gaspé on October 3 in a heavily escorted convoy and made a safe passage to Plymouth. “Hughes delivered [and later published] a flamboyant and magniloquent address to the troops, based apparently on Napoleon’s famous address to the Army of Italy. It did not enhance his prestige and indeed excited no little mirth in various quarters.”73 Rumours shortly arose and persisted that cronies of Hughes were milking defence procurement contracts and Borden set Solicitor General Arthur Meighen to look into it. Two more of Borden’s French-Canadian ministers resigned, Louis-Philippe Pelletier and W. B. Nantel. Pelletier, who had replaced Monk, blamed his departure on “a swelling of the feet.”74
On April 22, 1915, the Germans attacked the Canadians at Ypres and introduced their latest weapon, chlorine gas. Two battalions were virtually wiped out, and three-quarters of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry were killed, but the Canadians fought on in the most unbearable conditions and held until British and French reinforcements relieved them. The action cost the lives of over six thousand men and brought universal commendations, including from King George V, and great recognition for Canada in the media of the world and from all the allied governments.
Canadian war production steadily stoked up, and recruitment continued to be good, although it was clear by mid-1915 that it was likely to be a long war and that it was a relentless struggle with very heavy casualties on a narrow front. In June 1915, Borden sailed for Britain from New York, though on a Canadian ship. The great British liner Lusitania had been torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on May 7 off the coast of Ireland with the loss of 1,198 lives, including 124 Americans. President Wilson demanded an apology, reparations, and an assurance from the Germans that they would desist from unrestricted submarine warfare. The Germans tried to justify the sinking by claiming that the Lusitania was armed (it wasn’t) and that it carried contraband. There was a small number of rifles on board, but that was not a significant purpose for the voyage of one of the world’s greatest ships, and Wilson made further demands on the Germans that evidently carried the implicit threat of war. The Germans backed down and renounced unrestricted submarine warfare, but Wilson’s secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, considered the German policy not greatly more provoking than the British practice of searching ships on the high seas and blockading German ports and resigned. On a more positive note for the Allies, Italy accepted Anglo-French promises of a generous carve-out of Austro-Hungarian territory and entered the war on the side of the Allies on May 22, 1915. Borden was naturally received with great respect and sincere gratitude in Britain, especially by the king, on July 13 and again on July 28. Borden had set himself the goal of seeing every single wounded Canadian serviceman in British and French hospitals. He did not quite succeed in that but visited fifty-two hospitals, almost entirely unpublicized, and his solicitude was warmly appreciated. He met with the ninety-four-year-old Sir Charles Tupper, still very sensible, and with two influential Canadians who were British MPs, Max Aitken (later Lord Beaverbrook) and the future British prime minister Andrew Bonar Law. He agreed with the former British ambassador in Washington, the well-respected Lord Bryce, that after the war there would either be a common foreign policy in which the dominions would be seriously consulted, or each would have its own foreign policy.
In the horrible stresses of war, it was becoming clear that Canada, in particular, was a fully sovereign state that could no longer be a subject of British tutelage or considered by the United States a tentative or derivative British suzerainty. Borden met with Lloyd George, now the minister of munitions, who outlined to Borden his plans for an Imperial Munitions Board which coordinated all production of ordinance in the Empire, and to which Canada made a very sizeable contribution. The chairman of the Bank of Commerce, the National Trust Company, and the Simpsons department store chain, Joseph Flavelle (1858–1939) proved an exceptionally efficient director of munitions production in Canada.
Borden returned to Canada in September, and after extensive discussion and correspondence with Laurier, it was agreed to extend the term of Parliament from September 1916 by a year, subject to further deferral. Borden was always careful to speak in both official languages wherever it was appropriate; his French was accented but comprehensible and reasonably fluent, and he always referred to “our two great founding races.” He didn’t know much about Quebec politically, but was not at all offensive to French sensibilities in his own personality. Connaught, who had considerably less understanding of the French Canadians than Borden did, had urged him to censure Le Devoir at one point earlier in the year, but Borden pointed out that that was exactly what Bourassa would wish and that the British press had been much more obstreperous during the South African War.
In his address to the country on New Year’s Eve 1915, Borden expressed the intention of increasing the Canadian forces – which had sent a second contingent and now had about 60,000 men overseas – to 500,000. Between September 1914 and October 1915, 171 new infantry battalions were formed, as well as many other units, including naval forces. In Canada’s population of eight million, it was astonishing that about 500,000 did volunteer, including 234,000 infantry – though from July 1916 to October 1917, fewer than 3,000 men went overseas as volunteer infantry. But there was a great variety of other forces, including forestry, signals, and medical units, navy, and the new flying corps. Unemployment had dried up by 1915, and defence industries employed ever-larger numbers of people. Federal government expenses tripled to almost $600 million from 1913 to 1917, and Thomas White, the rather unimaginative finance minister, was running deficits of up to half the spending budgets, though he did, starting in 1916, retroactively tax supplementary war profits. The London financial markets were absorbed by British needs and New York was usurious, so, almost by accident, Canada started to finance itself and backed into Victory bond drives. It was hoped that $150 million would be raised, but more than $500 million came in on the first try, and then twice as much again as the war continued. Canada was suddenly a sophisticated and self-sufficient financial market.
In January 1916, an eight-month campaign by 570,000 British, French, Australian, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and Indian troops to crack open the Dardanelles and knock Turkey out of the war had been repulsed by 315,000 Turks led by their future reforming president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Each side took about 250,000 casualties, and it temporarily derailed the career of Winston Churchill, who was demoted from the Admiralty to the non-portfolio of chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. It was, in retrospect, a poor idea, poorly executed, and the thirty divisions involved could have been better used in France. Fortunately,
no Canadians were involved, but it did not raise dominion confidence in the British high command. From February 17 to 20, the Australian prime minister, William “Billy” Hughes, visited Ottawa and had very cordial discussions with Borden and Laurier and Connaught. He agreed with the Canadian political leaders, and said so in subsequent weeks when he went on to London, that the dominions must have their own foreign policy. Any thought of the dominions as colonies had already been buried with their valorous volunteers who had died in France and elsewhere.
For most of 1916, from February 21 almost to Christmas, the supreme battle of the Western Front raged at Verdun in northeastern France. German armies totalling 1,250,000 men attacked the military centre of Verdun, surrounded and honeycombed with forts, including Douaumont, allegedly the greatest single fortress in the world. It was entirely a French-German contest, and each side lost approximately 350,000 dead and about 200,000 wounded, the greatest battle in the history of the world. The French were cut down to a single supply road, and there were some desertions, but the defence was stabilized by General Henri-Philippe Pétain and at the end of the year the Germans disengaged. Whole villages were destroyed, a vast acreage was deforested and pockmarked with a lunar devastation of artillery craters. The ground was covered with the dead for miles around, and when the scene was cleaned up after the battle, the remains of 180,000 French soldiers were consolidated in one eerily majestic site, the Douaumont ossuary, on the height of land over the battlefield.
While the Battle of Verdun was raging, as a diversion the British and Canadians and Australians, and then the French as well, launched an offensive on the Somme. It lasted from July 1 until November 18 and was fought by 1,200,000 Allied soldiers against 1,375,000 Germans, and although fewer men were killed than at Verdun, the total casualties were higher, about 624,000 Allied soldiers and 450,000 Germans. The British took 60,000 casualties on July 1 alone, and the overall result was, like everything on this front, inconclusive. By early 1917, Canada had endured 25,000 dead and 45,000 wounded.
