CHAPTER VITHE CIVILIAN AS WARRIORNot the least astonishing of the many surprises of the war to the Germans was the, to them, incredible capacity for swift preparation for war which was shown by the democratic and unmartial British nations under the spur of deep national feeling plus driving necessity. In their careful preparation for sudden war and overwhelming victory they had believed with reason, judging by all that the past could teach, that their margin of advantage, because of their mighty armies and the vast numbers of their trained officers, could never be overcome by those nations which in time of peace had failed to educate their people into a psychological readiness for the mass war and to equip them to wage it. They remembered how vain had been the rally of the French levies under Gambetta's leadership in 1871. For Kitchener's army, when Great Britain set herself to create out of nothing but the valor and willingness of the people a buckler to stem the German flood, the German chiefs expressed a contemptuous and pitying scorn; while they did not give even this measure of regard to the Dominions' contingents when they rushed overseas to take their part in the defence of civilization. These they regarded as mere mobs of untrained militia men, unkempt, undisciplined and without competent leaders, who would be scattered, like leaves before the tempest, by a mere handful of drilled and well-bullied German soldiers. At that time no German mind could have conceived the possibility of such an impossible fact as that within two years it would be a fixed rule of the German army that Canadian troops in the front line trenches must always be faced, across No Man's Land, by Prussian Guards or Bavarian shock troops.Nor was the low opinion of the military worth of these volunteer armies confined to arrogant Germans; there were doubters a-plenty at home. Thus a Canadian public man held forth despairingly to me at that time upon the hopelessness of opposing to the highly-trained German armies these hastily organized battalions of men summoned from civil occupations. For one thing was it not a fact, confirmed by all military experience and accepted as veritable holy writ, that an officer, capable of commanding men, could not be made in less than seven years? Unless the French, who were a military nation, had a sufficient surplusage of officers partly to equip the British armies it would be nothing but slaughter to pit these untrained hordes against the Prussian hordes. Nor was this Jeremiah alone in his gloom!One can recall that there was a certain nervous trepidation among Canadians when, the early months of 1915, it became known that the Canadian troops were in the front line and likely at any moment to be put to the test of actual fighting. The men of this first division were separated from their civilian pursuits by barely half a year of time; they were, by all the standards of European war as to training, mere militia. The test came in April, 1915, when the Germans under a rolling barrage of poison gas—a new and terrifying weapon of war—sought to break through the allied front in the Ypres salient at a point where it was held partly by French African troops and partly by the new levies from Canada. The story need not be re-told to Canadians. The gas terror broke the nerve for the moment of the African troops, and they fled in panic; the Canadians plugged the line and held it against all odds until reinforcements came up and the danger was past. It was said at the time that the reason why the Canadians held on was that they did not know enough about the rules of the war game to realize that they would be justified under the conditions in falling back. Of all the myriad emotions that filled the hearts of the Canadians during those days of sheer stark horror fear was the most absent. An officer, now of high rank, who talked with me in France about the battle of Ypres said that the first solid fact that emerged from the confusion of the surprise attack was the instant resolution by Canadians of all ranks to stand their ground whatever might betide. Non-combatants hurried to their officers to ask what they could do to help. "From that moment," said the officer, "I had no doubts whatever about the Canadian army; I knew that not potentially but actually they were troops of the first rank."In the War Memorials paintings shown in London in December—to be housed later in Ottawa in some fitting setting—there was a picture which, despite its cubist freakishness, put on canvas, for all men to see, the soul of Canada at war. Everything about the picture was wrong except its symbolism which was compelling in its truth. The canvas, shrieking with its high hues, was filled with Turcos in panic flight crowding one another in their terror, while over them billowed the yellow poison pall of death; but in the midst of the maelstrom the roaring Canadian guns stood, immovable and unyielding, served by gunners who rose superior alike to the physical terrors of the battle and the moral contagion of fear. The foundations of the world were rocking but the guns stood firm!Ypres, indeed, revealed the basic quality upon which the achievements of the Canadians in the field rested—that fortitude, moral and physical, which in the day of battle and the hour of trial triumphed over every human weakness and made them the implacable and irresistible vindicators of divine justice. In the early summer of 1918 when there was imminent danger of the whole western front being crushed under the weight of the German advance, Sir Arthur Currie, the commander of the Canadian corps, in a speech at a Canadian dinner in London, made a remark which shocked and thrilled his hearers. He said he was the proudest man in the world because he commanded the Canadian corps; and the saddest because it was doomed to die. Thus he gave notice that, if the line were overwhelmed, the Canadians would die fighting. That was the darkest hour that comes before the dawn. No such glorious but tragic fate awaited the Canadians. The future held for them not the guerdon of inexpugnable heroism in disaster but the bright badge of victory. When they struck camp and unfurled their banners for the new campaign they marched not to Thermopylae but to Waterloo.But much more than the capacity to conquer in the actual clash of the battlefield went to the making of the victorious Canadian army. These civilians, called from the bench, the office, the farm and the forest showed an aptitude for war—exemplified also in varying degrees by all the democratic armies—that must have seemed uncanny to the German High Command, hopelessly committed by training and inclination to the view that great and conquering armies could only be created in nations as the result of precedent and long-continuing conditions: among them the constant familiarizing of the popular mind with the idea of war as a weapon of national policy, the universal training of men of military age, the careful cultivation of an officer class, the maintenance of a general staff of highly equipped experts and strategists who devoted their lives to the art of war. Considering their environment and viewpoint it was inevitable that they should regard it as simply preposterous that a civilian army officered and commanded by men of their own type and class—farmers, artisans; clerks, bankers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, journalists, real estate agents—should be able to dispute the field with the disciplined legions of Germany. They could not realize what this war has established beyond all question, that the general principles upon which war is waged are simple and easily grasped.War is a proposition to apply to a very definite and distinguishable object, all available power. It thus becomes in its essence a huge business problem, fundamentally one of engineering and organization. It was speedily demonstrated in the war that the qualities which make for success in civilian life in almost every field of endeavor are also the qualities which are necessary for successful leadership in war. The civilian mind with its initiative, its readiness to improvise means to an end, its disregard for precedent as such, its willingness to subordinate venerable sacred theories to modern hard facts, did not suffer in the clash with the stereotyped military mind despite its larger equipment of technical knowledge. All the democratic armies were fertile in inventions and expedients, which were gradually incorporated in the practice of the armies to their great good. A lengthy article—or a book—could be filled with a record of Canadian contributions to the art of war—many of them rapid improvisations when issues turned on minutes. One hears much about them as he goes about in France—and not always from Canadians either.Thus I was much entertained at Arras by a British officer of artillery who told me how one of his fellow-officers, a young Canadian, had pitted his profound knowledge of artillery fire, which he brought from an insurance office in Winnipeg, against the inherited and assembled wisdom of the higher-ups to their ultimate conversion after an actual test had vindicated his theory. I shall not here recount how the Canadian soldiers at Ypres were supplied with ready-made gas masks upon the occasion of the first gas attack though it will doubtless be duly recorded in some grave history of the war. The trench raid, which came to be one of the constant factors of the war, was a Canadian invention. It was a Canadian doctor, transferred from civil practice to the front, who first showed the way to cope with trench feet, a war disease which at one time threatened to destroy the British army. The Canadian army led the way in the skilful application of machine-gun power to the necessities of attack and defence; and its system of massing the machine-guns in units instead of distributing them through companies, with their accompanying employment for barrages and indirect fire, would have been extended to the whole army if the war had continued. These are noted only as illustrations; the whole question of Canadian resourcefulness in the field, with its possibilities of infinite interest, cannot be dealt with here.One lesson of this war is thus of vast significance to Canada and to all democracies. It is in brief that a country of free men, engaged and proficient in the countless occupations of civil life, is always potentially formidable in war. When we build our country for peace we build it for war, too, if the need arises. Our sure defence is not the soldier in his uniform but the patriot citizen in his plain civilian attire. The vindication of this profound truth has been upon a scale of such magnitude that it is difficult to think that ever again in the history of the human race any aspiring kaiser or Napoleon—white or yellow—will dream that he can, by enslaving his own people, provide himself with a weapon with which to conquer the world.CHAPTER VIICOMPENSATIONSI rode out to the Canadian battlefields from a city where for seven weeks there had been going on a determined, though partly hidden, tug-of-war between conflicting ambitions, some of them far from high-minded; and, after my pilgrimage over the grounds where men by the hundreds of thousands died for an idea, which many of them only vaguely realized though they felt its influence in their hearts, I returned to the same atmosphere of controversy where the keenest discussions turned upon the degree of the reward that should be allotted to this or that country for the services of the men who had made for themselves the utter and complete sacrifice. The contrast could not but suggest reflections upon the relative contributions to the future security of the world—which was supposed to be their common object—of the soldiers who won the war and the statesmen who were building a peace upon their achievements. There was some satisfaction in recalling that the Prime Minister of Canada was reported to have said, at a certain meeting, that not a single Canadian soldier had died in order that any country might add a mile of land to its territory.In one of his addresses to the Plenary Conference President Wilson made a striking reference to the United States soldiers. "As I go about the streets here," he said, "I see everywhere the American uniform. Those men came into the war after we had uttered our purpose. They came as crusaders, not merely to win a war but to win a cause." This language applies still more aptly to the soldiers of Canada. No participant in the war has so clear a record of disinterestedness as Canada. The United States came in late after repeated and deliberate attacks upon its national honor really left no alternative to a proud nation; but Canada, in keeping with a deep and true instinct, drew her sword at the first blast of the war trumpet. There was no calculation about Canada's entrance into the war; nor was there ambition for territory or trade or glory. There was an intuitive recognition that this was Armageddon; and that if the powers of hell were not to overturn the world there would be need of us.There is much idle discussion as to who won the war. The answer is that it was won by the allies; and that the help of every one of them was essential to the final result. During the war we were told, by little Canadians and would-be-shirkers, that in a conflict of such range and violence the contribution of Canada, however great it might be in relation to the country's resources, could not be a deciding factor; and that, therefore, our canny course was to turn the war to our advantage by supplying goods and war materials to the allies at war prices. That counsel of infamy was spurned by a generous people, and Canada made her sacrifice of life and treasure to the last ounce of her power. The war is over and won, and the cost is known—a huge debt that will long burden us, a great army of maimed men and sixty thousand Canadian graves in France and Flanders. Was the sacrifice worth while? Are there compensations for our grief and loss? There is an answer to these questions from the battlefields and it is one of consolation.It would be ludicrous to say that Canada won the war; but the view that if Canada had kept out or had limited her contribution to a mere nominal participation the war would not have been won, can be held with a clear mind by every Canadian. The war was almost lost many times; it was saved on occasions by the narrowest of margins, both as to time and force. It was saved by the defence of Liege by the Belgians; by the miraculous rally of the allied forces at the Marne; by the holding of the line by the British in the first battle of Ypres; by the repeating of this achievement at the second battle of Ypres by the Canadians; by the glorious resistance by the French at Verdun; by the tenacity with which the bent line was held a year ago; and by that marvelous rally of all the allied powers, in which Canada joined, after the narrow escape from disaster last year, which supplied as though from inexhaustible reservoirs the resources in men and material that crushed the Germans in the summer offensive. Canada has the compensation of knowing that the first object of her war contribution—the infliction of complete and overwhelming defeat upon Kaiserism—was fully realized in part by her exertions. But the soldiers—not only of Canada but of all the democratic countries—were inspired by something more than a determination to defeat and punish the Germans. They all had in some measure the feeling that they were engaged in a crusade for the making of a better world in which wars of aggression should cease. They fought, many of them consciously, for a peace which should endure because it would rest upon justice and fraternity. It rests with the statesmen of Paris to keep faith with the aspiration which turned millions of peace-loving men into militant crusaders. If they succeed only in patching up the old order under a pretentious false front, it will be only too true that much of the sacrifice will have been in vain. But though the conditions in Paris are far from cheerful, it is still possible to hope for a peace that will achieve the immediate object of the war—the just punishment of Germany and her allies; and will have in it, as well, the healing qualities that will safeguard the world against the repetition of these horrors. The responsibility that rests upon the world's elder statesmen, in session in Paris, is immeasurable; and pitiful will be their place in history if, in the judgment of posterity, they turn to base uses the high devotion that strewed the battlefields of Europe with the bones of the generous youth of their countries.The national compensations to Canada for her participation in the war would not in themselves justify the sacrifices; but they are a substantial reinforcement to the considerations that supply the actual justifications. We have won a new status among the nations of the world; which is the outward sign of that strong national spirit, evoked by the war, which is to-day vitalizing our common life in all its manifestations—political, commercial, intellectual, spiritual. It is something, too, to have learned in the sternest of tests, that we have been building our nationhood on sound lines; that our conception of a democratic people, with equality of opportunity and status, endures while autocracy, based upon the subjection of man, has crumbled in the fierce fires of war. We know now that everything that makes the normal and happy citizen in peace—good schools in youth, just living conditions, opportunities for advancement to honest work, wise laws, the cultivation of the spiritual life—makes also the unconquerable soldier when he is called upon to defend his home. Canada derives from the war the profound satisfaction that she gave essential help in protecting the world from a political and spiritual reaction that would have set the clocks of human progress back a thousand years; the hope, still confident, that she has helped to usher in a new international order under which democratic institutions can have a peaceful and fruitful evolution to better things for all; and a knowledge of her own capacities and possibilities which gives her confidence to go forward to a great career amongst the nations of the world.The financial burdens of the war, heavy though they be, need give us little concern. They can be borne—or better still, largely removed—if Canadians in grappling with this problem, show, in any degree, the qualities of patriotism, unity and sacrifice which gave so sharp an edge to their war effort. We all helped in the war but the actual fighting was done by the men who could fight. We shall all help to carry the war debt but most of the paying will have to be done by those who can pay. The war debt may be no calamity whatever if we are driven by necessity to juster methods of taxation, greater co-ordination of national energies and wise development of the country's resources.The hard question is where the recompense is for the men who will never come back—who rest in the countless cemeteries which dot the battlefields of France. The answer—if answer there be—must be given by fighting men themselves who counted in advance the cost and accepted the price with proud humility; let them speak! Julian Grenfell, before going into battle to his death, put the case of the young man to whom duty calls in two ever memorable lines:"He is dead who will not fight,And who dies fighting has increase."The passion of man for his country which makes death in her defence a high honor burns in Vernede's "Petition"—a prayer that was granted:"Grant thou one thing more;That now when envious foes would spoil thy splendor,Unversed in arms, a dreamer such as IMay in thy ranks be deemed not all unworthyEngland, for thee to die."It must be a deep instinct, not to be judged by finite tests, that sent the young men to battle with joyous hearts and shining faces. "Now God be thanked that has matched us with His hour!" cried Rupert Brooke, now asleep in Scyros in the far Aegean seas. And the stoicism with which the young soldier foresaw death on the battlefield was never expressed in finer terms than by the British officer in the letter which he wrote to his parents the night before his death:"It is impossible to fear death out here when one is no longer an individual but a member of a regiment and an army. I have been looking at the stars and thinking what an immense distance they are away. What an insignificant thing the loss of, say, 40 years of life is compared with them! It seems hardly worth talking about!"Here are four voices, all now from the shades! Do they not, taken together, tell us something of the high exaltation with which the young hero makes his sacrifice. He welcomes the hour that makes his arms his country's shield, scorning the recreant who shuns the test; and measuring time by eternity he renounces life as a garment to be laid aside. If the poet and the seer can speak for them, the lost do not ask us for pity or for hopeless grief:"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.At the going down of the sun in the morningWe will remember them."For those who mourn for the unreturning brave there are secret springs of consolation! The ending of the full-lived life is not tragic; the symbol of poignant grief is the broken column that bespeaks the day that ended in the morning. But for those who die for their country there is not this sense of irremediable loss, this feeling of the unlived life, the unfulfilled dream. There is an instinct deep-hidden in human life which tells the mourner that for the man who falls upon the field of honor his life has come full circle whatever the tale of his years; and that somewhere in the divine scheme of things there is compensation for the lost experiences and achievements.If the dead gave their lives without bitterness and the living are consoled Canada, the common mother of both, is richer for all time for their sacrifice. In the life of the race a single generation passes like a heart-beat; but the chosen few from this generation, whose names are in the lists of the lost, are secure in their fame and in their power. They have set for all time for Canada the standards of service and of sacrifice; their example will, now and forever, sweeten our civic life and if the occasion calls will nerve the youth of Canada to emulate their deeds on the stricken field. A thousand years from now Canadian youths will read the story of their deeds with hearts uplifted and with kindling eyes. Safe in such an immortality what matters it that they sleep far from Canada upon the battlefields of France!Warwick Bro's & Rutter, Limited,Printers and Bookbinders, Toronto, Canada*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOKOVER THE CANADIAN BATTLEFIELDS***
CHAPTER VI
THE CIVILIAN AS WARRIOR
Not the least astonishing of the many surprises of the war to the Germans was the, to them, incredible capacity for swift preparation for war which was shown by the democratic and unmartial British nations under the spur of deep national feeling plus driving necessity. In their careful preparation for sudden war and overwhelming victory they had believed with reason, judging by all that the past could teach, that their margin of advantage, because of their mighty armies and the vast numbers of their trained officers, could never be overcome by those nations which in time of peace had failed to educate their people into a psychological readiness for the mass war and to equip them to wage it. They remembered how vain had been the rally of the French levies under Gambetta's leadership in 1871. For Kitchener's army, when Great Britain set herself to create out of nothing but the valor and willingness of the people a buckler to stem the German flood, the German chiefs expressed a contemptuous and pitying scorn; while they did not give even this measure of regard to the Dominions' contingents when they rushed overseas to take their part in the defence of civilization. These they regarded as mere mobs of untrained militia men, unkempt, undisciplined and without competent leaders, who would be scattered, like leaves before the tempest, by a mere handful of drilled and well-bullied German soldiers. At that time no German mind could have conceived the possibility of such an impossible fact as that within two years it would be a fixed rule of the German army that Canadian troops in the front line trenches must always be faced, across No Man's Land, by Prussian Guards or Bavarian shock troops.
Nor was the low opinion of the military worth of these volunteer armies confined to arrogant Germans; there were doubters a-plenty at home. Thus a Canadian public man held forth despairingly to me at that time upon the hopelessness of opposing to the highly-trained German armies these hastily organized battalions of men summoned from civil occupations. For one thing was it not a fact, confirmed by all military experience and accepted as veritable holy writ, that an officer, capable of commanding men, could not be made in less than seven years? Unless the French, who were a military nation, had a sufficient surplusage of officers partly to equip the British armies it would be nothing but slaughter to pit these untrained hordes against the Prussian hordes. Nor was this Jeremiah alone in his gloom!
One can recall that there was a certain nervous trepidation among Canadians when, the early months of 1915, it became known that the Canadian troops were in the front line and likely at any moment to be put to the test of actual fighting. The men of this first division were separated from their civilian pursuits by barely half a year of time; they were, by all the standards of European war as to training, mere militia. The test came in April, 1915, when the Germans under a rolling barrage of poison gas—a new and terrifying weapon of war—sought to break through the allied front in the Ypres salient at a point where it was held partly by French African troops and partly by the new levies from Canada. The story need not be re-told to Canadians. The gas terror broke the nerve for the moment of the African troops, and they fled in panic; the Canadians plugged the line and held it against all odds until reinforcements came up and the danger was past. It was said at the time that the reason why the Canadians held on was that they did not know enough about the rules of the war game to realize that they would be justified under the conditions in falling back. Of all the myriad emotions that filled the hearts of the Canadians during those days of sheer stark horror fear was the most absent. An officer, now of high rank, who talked with me in France about the battle of Ypres said that the first solid fact that emerged from the confusion of the surprise attack was the instant resolution by Canadians of all ranks to stand their ground whatever might betide. Non-combatants hurried to their officers to ask what they could do to help. "From that moment," said the officer, "I had no doubts whatever about the Canadian army; I knew that not potentially but actually they were troops of the first rank."
In the War Memorials paintings shown in London in December—to be housed later in Ottawa in some fitting setting—there was a picture which, despite its cubist freakishness, put on canvas, for all men to see, the soul of Canada at war. Everything about the picture was wrong except its symbolism which was compelling in its truth. The canvas, shrieking with its high hues, was filled with Turcos in panic flight crowding one another in their terror, while over them billowed the yellow poison pall of death; but in the midst of the maelstrom the roaring Canadian guns stood, immovable and unyielding, served by gunners who rose superior alike to the physical terrors of the battle and the moral contagion of fear. The foundations of the world were rocking but the guns stood firm!
Ypres, indeed, revealed the basic quality upon which the achievements of the Canadians in the field rested—that fortitude, moral and physical, which in the day of battle and the hour of trial triumphed over every human weakness and made them the implacable and irresistible vindicators of divine justice. In the early summer of 1918 when there was imminent danger of the whole western front being crushed under the weight of the German advance, Sir Arthur Currie, the commander of the Canadian corps, in a speech at a Canadian dinner in London, made a remark which shocked and thrilled his hearers. He said he was the proudest man in the world because he commanded the Canadian corps; and the saddest because it was doomed to die. Thus he gave notice that, if the line were overwhelmed, the Canadians would die fighting. That was the darkest hour that comes before the dawn. No such glorious but tragic fate awaited the Canadians. The future held for them not the guerdon of inexpugnable heroism in disaster but the bright badge of victory. When they struck camp and unfurled their banners for the new campaign they marched not to Thermopylae but to Waterloo.
But much more than the capacity to conquer in the actual clash of the battlefield went to the making of the victorious Canadian army. These civilians, called from the bench, the office, the farm and the forest showed an aptitude for war—exemplified also in varying degrees by all the democratic armies—that must have seemed uncanny to the German High Command, hopelessly committed by training and inclination to the view that great and conquering armies could only be created in nations as the result of precedent and long-continuing conditions: among them the constant familiarizing of the popular mind with the idea of war as a weapon of national policy, the universal training of men of military age, the careful cultivation of an officer class, the maintenance of a general staff of highly equipped experts and strategists who devoted their lives to the art of war. Considering their environment and viewpoint it was inevitable that they should regard it as simply preposterous that a civilian army officered and commanded by men of their own type and class—farmers, artisans; clerks, bankers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, journalists, real estate agents—should be able to dispute the field with the disciplined legions of Germany. They could not realize what this war has established beyond all question, that the general principles upon which war is waged are simple and easily grasped.
War is a proposition to apply to a very definite and distinguishable object, all available power. It thus becomes in its essence a huge business problem, fundamentally one of engineering and organization. It was speedily demonstrated in the war that the qualities which make for success in civilian life in almost every field of endeavor are also the qualities which are necessary for successful leadership in war. The civilian mind with its initiative, its readiness to improvise means to an end, its disregard for precedent as such, its willingness to subordinate venerable sacred theories to modern hard facts, did not suffer in the clash with the stereotyped military mind despite its larger equipment of technical knowledge. All the democratic armies were fertile in inventions and expedients, which were gradually incorporated in the practice of the armies to their great good. A lengthy article—or a book—could be filled with a record of Canadian contributions to the art of war—many of them rapid improvisations when issues turned on minutes. One hears much about them as he goes about in France—and not always from Canadians either.
Thus I was much entertained at Arras by a British officer of artillery who told me how one of his fellow-officers, a young Canadian, had pitted his profound knowledge of artillery fire, which he brought from an insurance office in Winnipeg, against the inherited and assembled wisdom of the higher-ups to their ultimate conversion after an actual test had vindicated his theory. I shall not here recount how the Canadian soldiers at Ypres were supplied with ready-made gas masks upon the occasion of the first gas attack though it will doubtless be duly recorded in some grave history of the war. The trench raid, which came to be one of the constant factors of the war, was a Canadian invention. It was a Canadian doctor, transferred from civil practice to the front, who first showed the way to cope with trench feet, a war disease which at one time threatened to destroy the British army. The Canadian army led the way in the skilful application of machine-gun power to the necessities of attack and defence; and its system of massing the machine-guns in units instead of distributing them through companies, with their accompanying employment for barrages and indirect fire, would have been extended to the whole army if the war had continued. These are noted only as illustrations; the whole question of Canadian resourcefulness in the field, with its possibilities of infinite interest, cannot be dealt with here.
One lesson of this war is thus of vast significance to Canada and to all democracies. It is in brief that a country of free men, engaged and proficient in the countless occupations of civil life, is always potentially formidable in war. When we build our country for peace we build it for war, too, if the need arises. Our sure defence is not the soldier in his uniform but the patriot citizen in his plain civilian attire. The vindication of this profound truth has been upon a scale of such magnitude that it is difficult to think that ever again in the history of the human race any aspiring kaiser or Napoleon—white or yellow—will dream that he can, by enslaving his own people, provide himself with a weapon with which to conquer the world.
CHAPTER VII
COMPENSATIONS
I rode out to the Canadian battlefields from a city where for seven weeks there had been going on a determined, though partly hidden, tug-of-war between conflicting ambitions, some of them far from high-minded; and, after my pilgrimage over the grounds where men by the hundreds of thousands died for an idea, which many of them only vaguely realized though they felt its influence in their hearts, I returned to the same atmosphere of controversy where the keenest discussions turned upon the degree of the reward that should be allotted to this or that country for the services of the men who had made for themselves the utter and complete sacrifice. The contrast could not but suggest reflections upon the relative contributions to the future security of the world—which was supposed to be their common object—of the soldiers who won the war and the statesmen who were building a peace upon their achievements. There was some satisfaction in recalling that the Prime Minister of Canada was reported to have said, at a certain meeting, that not a single Canadian soldier had died in order that any country might add a mile of land to its territory.
In one of his addresses to the Plenary Conference President Wilson made a striking reference to the United States soldiers. "As I go about the streets here," he said, "I see everywhere the American uniform. Those men came into the war after we had uttered our purpose. They came as crusaders, not merely to win a war but to win a cause." This language applies still more aptly to the soldiers of Canada. No participant in the war has so clear a record of disinterestedness as Canada. The United States came in late after repeated and deliberate attacks upon its national honor really left no alternative to a proud nation; but Canada, in keeping with a deep and true instinct, drew her sword at the first blast of the war trumpet. There was no calculation about Canada's entrance into the war; nor was there ambition for territory or trade or glory. There was an intuitive recognition that this was Armageddon; and that if the powers of hell were not to overturn the world there would be need of us.
There is much idle discussion as to who won the war. The answer is that it was won by the allies; and that the help of every one of them was essential to the final result. During the war we were told, by little Canadians and would-be-shirkers, that in a conflict of such range and violence the contribution of Canada, however great it might be in relation to the country's resources, could not be a deciding factor; and that, therefore, our canny course was to turn the war to our advantage by supplying goods and war materials to the allies at war prices. That counsel of infamy was spurned by a generous people, and Canada made her sacrifice of life and treasure to the last ounce of her power. The war is over and won, and the cost is known—a huge debt that will long burden us, a great army of maimed men and sixty thousand Canadian graves in France and Flanders. Was the sacrifice worth while? Are there compensations for our grief and loss? There is an answer to these questions from the battlefields and it is one of consolation.
It would be ludicrous to say that Canada won the war; but the view that if Canada had kept out or had limited her contribution to a mere nominal participation the war would not have been won, can be held with a clear mind by every Canadian. The war was almost lost many times; it was saved on occasions by the narrowest of margins, both as to time and force. It was saved by the defence of Liege by the Belgians; by the miraculous rally of the allied forces at the Marne; by the holding of the line by the British in the first battle of Ypres; by the repeating of this achievement at the second battle of Ypres by the Canadians; by the glorious resistance by the French at Verdun; by the tenacity with which the bent line was held a year ago; and by that marvelous rally of all the allied powers, in which Canada joined, after the narrow escape from disaster last year, which supplied as though from inexhaustible reservoirs the resources in men and material that crushed the Germans in the summer offensive. Canada has the compensation of knowing that the first object of her war contribution—the infliction of complete and overwhelming defeat upon Kaiserism—was fully realized in part by her exertions. But the soldiers—not only of Canada but of all the democratic countries—were inspired by something more than a determination to defeat and punish the Germans. They all had in some measure the feeling that they were engaged in a crusade for the making of a better world in which wars of aggression should cease. They fought, many of them consciously, for a peace which should endure because it would rest upon justice and fraternity. It rests with the statesmen of Paris to keep faith with the aspiration which turned millions of peace-loving men into militant crusaders. If they succeed only in patching up the old order under a pretentious false front, it will be only too true that much of the sacrifice will have been in vain. But though the conditions in Paris are far from cheerful, it is still possible to hope for a peace that will achieve the immediate object of the war—the just punishment of Germany and her allies; and will have in it, as well, the healing qualities that will safeguard the world against the repetition of these horrors. The responsibility that rests upon the world's elder statesmen, in session in Paris, is immeasurable; and pitiful will be their place in history if, in the judgment of posterity, they turn to base uses the high devotion that strewed the battlefields of Europe with the bones of the generous youth of their countries.
The national compensations to Canada for her participation in the war would not in themselves justify the sacrifices; but they are a substantial reinforcement to the considerations that supply the actual justifications. We have won a new status among the nations of the world; which is the outward sign of that strong national spirit, evoked by the war, which is to-day vitalizing our common life in all its manifestations—political, commercial, intellectual, spiritual. It is something, too, to have learned in the sternest of tests, that we have been building our nationhood on sound lines; that our conception of a democratic people, with equality of opportunity and status, endures while autocracy, based upon the subjection of man, has crumbled in the fierce fires of war. We know now that everything that makes the normal and happy citizen in peace—good schools in youth, just living conditions, opportunities for advancement to honest work, wise laws, the cultivation of the spiritual life—makes also the unconquerable soldier when he is called upon to defend his home. Canada derives from the war the profound satisfaction that she gave essential help in protecting the world from a political and spiritual reaction that would have set the clocks of human progress back a thousand years; the hope, still confident, that she has helped to usher in a new international order under which democratic institutions can have a peaceful and fruitful evolution to better things for all; and a knowledge of her own capacities and possibilities which gives her confidence to go forward to a great career amongst the nations of the world.
The financial burdens of the war, heavy though they be, need give us little concern. They can be borne—or better still, largely removed—if Canadians in grappling with this problem, show, in any degree, the qualities of patriotism, unity and sacrifice which gave so sharp an edge to their war effort. We all helped in the war but the actual fighting was done by the men who could fight. We shall all help to carry the war debt but most of the paying will have to be done by those who can pay. The war debt may be no calamity whatever if we are driven by necessity to juster methods of taxation, greater co-ordination of national energies and wise development of the country's resources.
The hard question is where the recompense is for the men who will never come back—who rest in the countless cemeteries which dot the battlefields of France. The answer—if answer there be—must be given by fighting men themselves who counted in advance the cost and accepted the price with proud humility; let them speak! Julian Grenfell, before going into battle to his death, put the case of the young man to whom duty calls in two ever memorable lines:
"He is dead who will not fight,And who dies fighting has increase."
"He is dead who will not fight,And who dies fighting has increase."
"He is dead who will not fight,
And who dies fighting has increase."
The passion of man for his country which makes death in her defence a high honor burns in Vernede's "Petition"—a prayer that was granted:
"Grant thou one thing more;That now when envious foes would spoil thy splendor,Unversed in arms, a dreamer such as IMay in thy ranks be deemed not all unworthyEngland, for thee to die."
"Grant thou one thing more;That now when envious foes would spoil thy splendor,Unversed in arms, a dreamer such as IMay in thy ranks be deemed not all unworthyEngland, for thee to die."
"Grant thou one thing more;
That now when envious foes would spoil thy splendor,
Unversed in arms, a dreamer such as I
May in thy ranks be deemed not all unworthy
England, for thee to die."
It must be a deep instinct, not to be judged by finite tests, that sent the young men to battle with joyous hearts and shining faces. "Now God be thanked that has matched us with His hour!" cried Rupert Brooke, now asleep in Scyros in the far Aegean seas. And the stoicism with which the young soldier foresaw death on the battlefield was never expressed in finer terms than by the British officer in the letter which he wrote to his parents the night before his death:
"It is impossible to fear death out here when one is no longer an individual but a member of a regiment and an army. I have been looking at the stars and thinking what an immense distance they are away. What an insignificant thing the loss of, say, 40 years of life is compared with them! It seems hardly worth talking about!"
Here are four voices, all now from the shades! Do they not, taken together, tell us something of the high exaltation with which the young hero makes his sacrifice. He welcomes the hour that makes his arms his country's shield, scorning the recreant who shuns the test; and measuring time by eternity he renounces life as a garment to be laid aside. If the poet and the seer can speak for them, the lost do not ask us for pity or for hopeless grief:
"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.At the going down of the sun in the morningWe will remember them."
"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.At the going down of the sun in the morningWe will remember them."
"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun in the morning
We will remember them."
We will remember them."
For those who mourn for the unreturning brave there are secret springs of consolation! The ending of the full-lived life is not tragic; the symbol of poignant grief is the broken column that bespeaks the day that ended in the morning. But for those who die for their country there is not this sense of irremediable loss, this feeling of the unlived life, the unfulfilled dream. There is an instinct deep-hidden in human life which tells the mourner that for the man who falls upon the field of honor his life has come full circle whatever the tale of his years; and that somewhere in the divine scheme of things there is compensation for the lost experiences and achievements.
If the dead gave their lives without bitterness and the living are consoled Canada, the common mother of both, is richer for all time for their sacrifice. In the life of the race a single generation passes like a heart-beat; but the chosen few from this generation, whose names are in the lists of the lost, are secure in their fame and in their power. They have set for all time for Canada the standards of service and of sacrifice; their example will, now and forever, sweeten our civic life and if the occasion calls will nerve the youth of Canada to emulate their deeds on the stricken field. A thousand years from now Canadian youths will read the story of their deeds with hearts uplifted and with kindling eyes. Safe in such an immortality what matters it that they sleep far from Canada upon the battlefields of France!
Warwick Bro's & Rutter, Limited,Printers and Bookbinders, Toronto, Canada
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