Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  Germany would evacuate all occupied territory, the left bank of the Rhine, and the bridgeheads of Mainz, Coblenz, and Cologne; the Allies retained a full right to claim war damages; the entire German fleet would be interned in British ports; the treaties of Brest Litovsk and Bucharest (which Germany had dictated to Romania when it occupied it in 1915*

  ) were abrogated; all German tanks, aircraft, and heavy artillery were to be destroyed; all prisoners of war and deportees were to be returned; and Germany was to hand over 150,000 railway cars, 5,000 locomotives, and 5,000 trucks.

  12. The End of the Laurier-Borden Era, 1918–1919

  The day before the armistice, Sir Robert Borden arrived in a Great Britain where Lloyd George had just prevailed upon King George V to dissolve Parliament for new elections. Although the parties remained distinct, the government stood for re-election as a coalition, and the Asquith Liberals ran as anti-coalition candidates and the Lloyd George coalitionists also ran as Liberals. The Liberal-Conservative coalition won 526 constituencies to barely a hundred opponents, between the Asquith Liberals and the Labour Party, but Bonar Law and Walter Long and Arthur Balfour’s Conservatives outnumbered the Lloyd George Liberals by almost three to one. Asquith was defeated personally, and it was a testimony to Lloyd George’s acuity and footwork that he was retained as prime minister. Lloyd George offered Borden the position of representing all the dominions at the Paris Peace Conference, which was soon to convene. Borden, with commendable but entirely typical selflessness, declined and said that the Australian, South African, and New Zealand prime ministers should all attend as well. Lloyd George and Lord Curzon, leader of the House of Lords but soon to be foreign secretary, favoured a trial of the kaiser, but the king, speaking of his first cousin, said he should be left to his “present condition of contempt and humiliation.”87 Unfortunately, George V was not as generous with his other recently disemployed imperial cousin, the czar, and denied him entry to Great Britain, which if granted might have spared the slaughter of the entire Russian royal family in a grim foretaste of the nature of communist rule.

  Borden dissented from an Imperial War Cabinet vote to prosecute Wilhelm II and urged that the United States be entreated to shed its isolation and join in close alliance with the British Empire, whether in the context of the League of Nations that President Wilson wished to establish or otherwise. Borden had a number of his ministers with him, and they met as the cabinet at home would and considered papers that had been cabled from Canada, and then Borden met with the Imperial War Cabinet and War Committee, and subcommittees of those groups, and with individual British and Empire officials. Because of his even personality, he became something of a go-between, joining intensely with Lord Reading and Balfour and others to try to defray anticipated problems between Wilson and Lloyd George. For a Canadian government leader, it was a position of heady proximity to the world’s most powerful statesmen. Macdonald, Laurier, and Borden had all moved quickly up the ladder in the international status of their office. Borden took equably in his stride the fact that he was suddenly being listened to apparently attentively by people (such as Curzon) who had the power, with a very few others, to decide the disposition of German colonies and the division of territories in Arabia and the Holy Land, and the frontiers of the emerging national states being carved out of the collapsed or subdued empires of the Romanovs, Habsburgs, and Hohenzollerns. Borden became a confidant of many of the conferring personalities, including the South African leader, Louis Botha, and faithfully recorded Botha’s high admiration for Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and did not demur in any way from it. Borden was a man of limited imagination but very high qualities of integrity and fairness and good sense, almost to a fault in a country so complicated internally and delicately placed internationally. For a Canadian prime minister, a talent for a ruse or occasional evasion was very useful, a quality possessed in abundance by Borden’s two illustrious predecessors, not to mention the man who would soon follow and lengthily hold the premier office of the state.

  On December 28, Borden agreed with Botha to make common cause for governors general representing the British monarch in any country to be of the nationality of that country rather than British. (Lloyd George purported to agree, but slippery as he was, neither he nor anyone else did anything about it for more than thirty years.) Borden sat at the grand occasion to welcome President Wilson to London with Haig, who denounced the French and preferred the Germans, testimony to the difficulties of intimate alliance. (Foch famously said at about this time, “I have less respect for Napoleon now that I know what a coalition is.”) Wilson claimed that the American public favoured his League of Nations, though the British were not convinced. Wilson was very impressive in speeches in London, where he had just arrived, but most who met with him found him rather desiccated, though extremely intelligent. Borden spoke cogently of the utter impracticality of some of the ideas for German reparations and said that even with the burden reduced to scale, Canada could not sustain 10 per cent of what they were planning to lay on Germany.88 Lloyd George outlined to the war cabinet on December 29 the gist of his first very extensive conversation with Woodrow Wilson. It had gone quite well, as they had agreed on the League, on not returning German colonies, and on the imposition of armament limits on Germany. Wilson opposed armed intervention in Russia, sided with the Yugoslavs over the Italians, whom he regarded as tantamount to pickpockets (although they had just taken over two million casualties in the common cause), and did not want the peace conference to be a farce, its participants called to attendance to rubber-stamp pre-agreed deals cooked up between the Big Three. The British bore some resentment of the power and confidence of the American latecomers to the war, and Borden sagely warned them that no one knew better than Canadians the foibles of the United States and its statesmen but that the greatest success that could come from the peace conference was a close and solid relationship between the United States and the British Empire.89 Borden was instrumental in assuring that while the five convening powers – the four chief Western Allies and Japan – would have five delegates each at the peace conference, the dominions, including India, would each have two, as would smaller participants such as Romania, and New Zealand, because of its small population, would have one. Borden had made it clear that if Britain did not support the dominions in this requirement of suitable direct representation, the consequences to the Empire would be extremely grave. He declined to take an occupation zone in Germany for more than a short period.

  The entire British delegation went en bloc to Paris on January 11 and stayed in the Majestic Hotel, where the British, suspecting the regular Majestic staff to be packed with French government informants, brought in London hotel staff. Starting on January 20, 1919, Borden began taking daily French lessons from a Mlle. Perret to brush up his conversational French. Australia’s Billy Hughes proved very cantankerous in demanding Australian annexation of German islands in the Pacific. Wilson was opposed to annexation and wanted League of Nations mandates, as he regarded all these arrangements as being of questionable legality. Lloyd George heatedly told Hughes that Britain would not go to war with the United States in pursuit of Australia’s right to the Solomon Islands. Wilson was undiplomatic, but his intellect and articulation, as well as the power of his country, gave him great influence. Clemenceau was suspected by Lloyd George of intending to drag his feet until Wilson returned to the United States, while Borden became friendly with Wilson’s grey eminence, the powerful and mysterious (honorary) Colonel Edward Mandell House. At one point, Lloyd George, who was a tricky negotiator, dangled the colonial government of the British West Indies before Borden, but unfortunately Borden was “deeply imbued with the Americans’ prejudice against the government of extraneous possessions and peoples.”90 It would have been a good way of bulking up Canada’s population, saving foreign exchange spent during Canadian winters in Florida, and rationalizing a navy.

  In early February, Lloyd George offered Borden the position of British ambassador
in Washington, and Borden, astonishingly, said he would accept it if his colleagues could spare him; it could not, at this stage, have been anything but a demotion, though potentially a very important position for a year or so. Apart from the hierarchical implications, the notion that a British prime minister would invite a Canadian prime minister to represent British interests in Washington is very odd, but, imperialist as Borden was, he does not seem to have been anything but flattered by it.

  * * *

  On February 17, 1919, in Ottawa, Sir Wilfrid Laurier fainted in his office but recovered quickly and by himself and determined that he should go home. Rather than call for his chauffeur and possibly cause concern, he left unobtrusively and took a streetcar home to his comfortable house on Laurier Avenue. He went to bed for the night, and was dressing in the morning when he again fainted. He recovered consciousness to find himself back in bed, being ministered to by Sister Marcelline, who had cared for him before when he was unwell. He smiled and said, “It is the bride of the Divine Husband who comes to help a great sinner.” Though he declared himself to be “only a little weak,” he received the sacrament of the dying. Amid “a murmurous hush,” he felt another constriction, tightened his hand on that of Zoé, his wife of fifty-one years, impassively uttered his valedictory “C’est fini,” and passed on.91 He was seventy-seven. Borden sent a generous cable to Lady Laurier and ordered a state funeral that would render maximum homage to one who, as Borden said in a statement from Paris, “was from the first a commanding figure, and during a long period the chief figure in our public life” (in fact from the death of Macdonald to the moment he died, nearly twenty-eight years). After a laborious testimony to his grasp of public issues and political “dexterity,” Borden came closer to the essence of the deceased: “His personality was singularly attractive and magnetic; and with this he combined an inspiring eloquence, an unfailing grace of diction in both languages and a charm of manner which gave him a supreme place in the affection and respect of … all Canada.”92 He lay in state in the improvised Parliament at the Victoria Memorial Museum, where all the desks and chairs were cleared except the place for one, symbolic both of the position of prime minister and of leader of the Opposition, positions he had occupied for a total of thirty-two years. A suitably grand but tasteful funeral ensued, and he was buried in Ottawa.

  Apart from what he achieved as prime minister, and especially the rapid growth of the country and its population, Laurier, by the power and integrity of his own personality, alone preserved the character and potential of Canada as a bicultural confederation. It was illustrative of his tolerance that when the Salvation Army began marching through Quebec cities and there were demonstrations and attempts to ban them, he said, “If need be, I will march at the head of their processions with them.”93 He had fought the largely symbolic school issue as it moved west from the Ottawa River to the North-West Territories and through Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, and did what he could to preserve the nature of the original arrangements respecting both founding cultures, even though the inexorable march of events between France and Britain, and the difference in scale of the accretions of the English- and French-speaking peoples, made French schools in such chronically minority conditions a difficult proposition. But he had kept alive and had strengthened – as only a statesman of his felicity and comprehension of the cultures and psychology of both founding races which he possessed, by inheritance, intuition, and study, could do – the spirit of mutual respect, and even of reciprocal need, that alone could be the basis of the great nationality he foresaw in rich imagination, and pursued with unwavering idealism and faith, for fifty years.

  Laurier’s stance in reluctantly accepting conscription if it was the subject of a referendum or election and accepting to go down to defeat, while the country divided sharply along French and English (by ancestry or assimilation) lines, is all that saved a party that could serve as an ark for the conservation and safe maturation of the original bicultural spirit of Confederation until the virtue of the original vision was generally appreciated and Canada was free to fulfill its potential. Laurier could have been a virtual co-prime minister in a grand coalition, as he could, years before, have become a member of the House of Lords. He knew what he had to do to preserve himself as a force of national legitimacy, to preserve his party as the continuator of the Great Ministry of Baldwin and LaFontaine and of the Great Coalition of Macdonald, Brown, Cartier, and the others, and to prevent French Canadians from being hijacked by Bourassa in permanently embittered separation, longing and scheming for actual independence.

  Without Laurier, there would have been two parties, one French and one English, with a permanent English majority, a climate of permanent hostility between the two communities, and a completely dysfunctional country. Because of him, there was either a Quebec prime minister of Canada or a de facto Quebec co-prime minister for French-Canadian affairs for seventy of the eighty-five years following the next election after his death, in 1921. As leader of the government, he always struck the right compromise in education as in the navy, and as he did in opposition over participation in the war.

  Robert Borden was the best of the well-disposed, rather righteous, always upright English gentlemen who contributed so much to Canada. He took French lessons in Paris, and thought the French Canadians were likeable and simple people who were shortchanged by not being English but were welcome fellow citizens. But he had little realistic notion of what would be necessary to impress the French Canadians sufficiently with Canada for them actually to believe in it; or to convince English Canadians adequately of the uniqueness of Canada for them to think of themselves as completely independent of the British; or to make all Canadians adequately self-confident to deal with the United States evenly, with neither reactive chippiness nor fawning submission. If invited to resign the headship of the government of Canada for the British embassy in Washington, Laurier, unlike Borden, would have had no interest in it. Less politically cynical than Macdonald but armed with the flair and romantic inspiration of a Latin statesman, as opposed to a canny Scottish realist, he was a providential successor to Macdonald. Between them, they had brought Canada from the craving for autonomy in local affairs of the responsible government debates in the 1850s, to honoured, if not overly influential, participation in an epochal international conference that sixty-five years later would remake the world. Their thoroughly unlikely successor, who claimed Sir Wilfrid had wished him to be his successor as soon as his mentor was interred, was visible, but not prominent, in the wings, like the nanny in an Edwardian family photograph.

  Robert Borden was a very solid figure of the second rank, and he soldiered on in the country’s interest at Paris, with which, like all visitors, he was very impressed as a splendid capital of great boulevards and elegant facades, beautiful women, and high culture, a world where he was not completely at ease but which he recognized for its gracious wit and style. He became the vice chairman, to Clemenceau, of the Greek Committee, and took the chair for a time following an assassination attempt on the French leader. Though seventy-eight and with a bullet in his lung, Clemenceau survived and returned, completely unfazed, after a few weeks. Borden met and was impressed by Marshal Foch on March 1, 1919.

  On March 8, there were riots among Canadian troops impatient to return home, and twelve were killed and twenty-one wounded.* Borden recorded in his diary that “this is very distressing and sad” and demanded “an exact report of these serious and unfortunate events,”94 but does not otherwise refer to them in his memoirs. Apparently, it was routine grousing of infantrymen that was incompetently managed and allowed to get seriously out of hand, and not indicative of the morale of the army, which, though the men were impatient to return home, was quite strong.

  Borden remained in Paris for most of the time until May 14, when he departed for London and then for Canada. A great range of questions had been wrestled with, and Borden was clearly a popular and emollient figure. His performance presaged the intern
ational lot of Canada for the whole interwar period and into the era that followed: he was courteous, sensible, could be taken anywhere and sat next to anyone, and would not rock the boat (unlike the Australian Hughes, who at one point in a discussion of the rights of colonial natives expressed preparedness to seat cannibals in the Australian parliament). There was vigorous and unsuccessful debate on a Japanese motion for a rule of racial equality. Borden offered equality between nations; Smuts diluted it to open, equal, and honourable relations between nations and just treatment of their nationals within the territories of other nations. Lord Robert Cecil, undersecretary of foreign affairs and chairman of an Imperical Committee on the League of Nations, diluted it further to equal treatment to all foreign residents being nationals of other members of the League of Nations, within their territories.95 This, of course, was not what the Japanese sought at all, and it was impossible to get the kind of declaration that would have distinguished the lead conferenciers as racial egalitarians. (Wilson, for all his pacific idealism and intellectual love of freedom, was a Virginian Presbyterian who had little regard for non-whites, especially African Americans.) The Paris Peace Conference did agree on the covenant and basic arrangements for the League of Nations before adjourning in May to permit the national leaders to go back to their jobs. There was no spirit of euphoria, but at least a sensation of having achieved something, when they broke up. Europe had seven new states: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.

  Borden sailed on RMS Aquitania, a hundred feet longer, ten thousand tons heavier, a deck taller, but four knots slower than the Mauretania, on May 19 for New York and arrived in Ottawa on May 27, after an absence of six months and three weeks. The Treaty of Versailles was signed, with Canada signing with the other dominions, with the United Kingdom under the heading “British Empire,” Canada was thus assured a place in the League of Nations. Canada had sought to profit nothing from the peace, and did not, apart from a token payment of German reparations.