Mr. Rowell had the gift and the energy of will to translate the Peace into Canadian language. He gave Canada a voice in Europe. He did try so far as one man might to play up to the voice given to Canada by the dead in Flanders. In the big occasion when great tumult of forces were rushing to a climax Rowell rose to the opportunity—as he always has done—and he earned the lasting gratitude of his country. We needed just that intellectual power and that moral audacity, not only in Europe but in Washington.
Yes, N. W. Rowell has made a big use of opportunity. He has even created it. But it was seldom the little simple thing at his door that roused his great qualities. It was the bigger issue that lay out among the mountain tops. He was overwhelmingly eloquent for the universal eight-hour day when he attended the International Labour Conference in Washington. The League of Nations had recommended it. But what of the cheap-labour competition in the Orient? And what did Mr. Rowell know about Industry and Democracy at all?
Mr. Rowell made a bold bid for recognition as a statesman of international repute. And he got it. His speeches on the Empire were consistently a greater voice than Borden ever could have had. The colleague of the Premier became his Imperial master because he had the power which Borden lacked, of making the British world-Commonwealth live in great public utterances.
What a journey had this man travelled now from "Is That You Daddy?" inQueen's Park!
And it may be sensibly asked—What was his great intention? Canada is interested to know what is "the big idea" in this man's mind. Corporation law cannot contain him now. He has tried his strength and knows it. He knows that other men know it.
Once during the derelict days of the Coalition it was rumoured that Rowell on a Western trip would sketch out a new leadership—for himself. But he was not a man to throw Borden overboard. He had a profound respect for the Premier, who had made great use of him.
Perhaps, if only Rowell had been born Conservative instead of a Win-the-War Liberal converted into a Coalitionist, the Premier might have called him to succeed. We know not. There was a predicament. White, Meighen, Rowell—all must be considered. There was the Washington post, if ever it should come to be. Did Mr. Rowell ever intimate that he wanted either of these? Nobody has said. But Sir Robert was wise at least not to have offered him the Premiership. Too long had that been the office of a man who could not lead. It was time for a leader. It is not surprising that Mr. Rowell should have stepped out of the Administration when Meighen went to the head of it. He could not comfortably serve under Meighen. Ambition is a tyrant. Self-sacrifice is usually easiest when great moral issues are uppermost. For more than one session he would not even retain his seat in the House. His retirement opens Durham, a safe constituency under Rowell, and may weaken the Government.
But what if it does? Mr. Rowell took office as a Coalitionist to win the war. The war is won. But his work—is only nicely beginning. How is he going to finish his work for this nation? He has not said. Not by making sundry speeches about the League of Nations.
If this country is to go ahead on its own native steam, it must be wise enough to find a big public place for the great talents of N. W. Rowell. And if Mr. Rowell, or any other disciple of opportunity in public affairs, wants to give Canada what she has a right to expect from him, he will do well to make his needed money now at corporation law, and when he comes back to public life have a constant eye single to the glory of his country.
To evolve men of that stamp is not easy. Rowell, like Meighen, is a product of the older studious days when youths buried themselves in books for the sake of getting on in the world without reference to mere money. He is now at an age when the best he has made of himself might be of incalculable good to the country if he could help the Government to go back to power and go with the National Liberal-Conservative Party as conscientiously as he entered the Unionist Government.
Conscience; Oratory; Opportunity. The greatest of these is Conscience; the least, Opportunity.
Canada has a national habit of veneration for the C.P.R. just as England used to have for Kitchener in Egypt. The travels of H. M. Stanley in Africa were not more wonderful than the everyday lives of Sandford Fleming's engineers routeing that great new line through the Rockies; and the legend of Monte Cristo scarcely more fabulous than the exploits of Van Horne in getting the money or the work done without it. The man who bought supplies for Van Horne (when there was money) and wrote letters or sent telegrams when there was none, got a finer preparation for being a great railwayman than most Premiers ever got for the duties of public life.
The sensations of the cured scriptural blind man who saw "men as trees walking" were repeated to Canadians of thirty-five years ago who read about those legendary Scots, Yankees and Canadians who flung thatchemin de ferover Canada to start a Confederacy into a nation. And there was noBoys' Own Annualin Canada to tell the tale, as it should have been done, along with the tales of the Northwest Mounted Police and the adventures of the Hudson's Bay Company. George Stephen, Donald A. Smith, Robert Angus, Sandford Fleming, John A. Macdonald, Van Horne, the young Shaughnessy—all seemed then to be not merely doers of the undoable, but men of mighty imagination and a sort of Old Testament morality. Even the Pacific Scandal seemed as necessary a part of the narrative as the story of Joseph's coat and of Jacob and Esau were of the epic of Israel.
Well, admittedly, most of that has faded from the Canadian Pacific. We read the annual address of the C.P.R. President with yawns. It all seems considerably like what is said and done at any directors' meeting of a rubber factory or a street railway. You read the names of the directors and few of them strike you with any sense of novelty or of awe. The room in which these magnates meet is—just a room; it used to be thought of as a sort of Doges' Palace of finance. You may even note that one of the directors is baggy at the knees, and any two of them may be talking along the corridor about that very ordinary thing—the cost of living.
Of all the men at any C.P.R. directors' meeting, Lord Shaughnessy knows most about the steep side of finance. He was the spender when there was nothing to spend. The romantic adversities of those days never left him. He came down to the presidency with the fear of no-funds in his soul. From the beginning until then he had felt all the ragged edges of C.P.R. life. He had grimly chuckled to Van Horne, the occasionally helpless wizard, over the hard times. And hard times never really left the road until Van Horne handed the C.P. over to Shaughnessy just at the edge of the era when the system was getting ready to handle phenomenal traffic arising out of stupendous immigration.
From then on till the day that he also went out was the epoch when traffic and travel became vaster than the road, and greater than the men. It was his to operate, and to build as well. But the operations were all of a system which had creaked into through traffic from Yokohama to Montreal as far aback as 1889; and the new lines built under Shaughnessy were just branches of the old trunk. Shaughnessy took over bulging receipts after he had spent years at painful expenditures. He took over a despotism and made it an autocracy.
It was not in his practical, unromantic temperament to play the Gargantuan role. He had not the mentality. Van Horne left the road when the road threatened to become bigger than its creator. Shaughnessy began to work on it when he knew that the bigger he made the system the greater would be his own executive authority, and the bigger the dividends to the holders of stock.
There was a radical contrast between these two men; and as much between the road built by Van Horne and the system operated and magnified by Shaughnessy. The former would not have his shadow dwarfed by the dimensions of his own creation. The latter had created nothing: he would have the shadow of the thing fling itself so vastly over the nation—and the nations—that whenever men spoke of C.P. they thought of Shaughnessy, and when they said his name they mentally took off their hats to the headship of the greatest system of its kind in the world.
This may or may not have been Shaughnessy's intention. It was certainly the effect. We have all gone through the era of profound respect for the cold autocrat of the twentieth century, as some of us did that of awesome veneration of the railway giants of the nineteenth. We have read newspaper stories—some of them buncombe—about this man's all-seeing eye as he travelled over the system, as we did of the peripatetic omniscience of James J. Hill and the Gargantuan humours of Van Horne. We have consented that the system perfected by Shaughnessy was the most marvellous known of its kind, and therefore the man at its head must be a phenomenal administrator.
Very likely we have been warped by our enthusiasm. Shaughnessy was no miracle man. He was a wonderfulmaestroof details, a clear-headed organizer of systems and a man to provoke high respect in those who had to deal with him at close range. But he had perhaps less sheer ability for detail than Van Horne, who as a rule despised the botheration of it. I have heard Van Horne dictating to his secretary a mass of intimate instructions to a contractor about how to build a rotunda in a hotel in Cuba, at the same time with his left hand on a drawer full of complicated notes on his philosophy of life, which with the other lobe of his brain he was traversing in order to engulf the interviewer as soon as the letter was finished. Shaughnessy never could have carried on such an interview, lasting four hours of a busy life. His talks to the press must be curt and comprehensive—or else elliptical. He had no exuding vivacity. When I talked to him—or listened to him—he was cold and exact. He left his chair only to walk erectly to the window. He deviated not a syllable from the subject in hand—the system. He worshipped that: as much as any Mikado ever did his ancestry. He paid passing veneration to Van Horne—when from the slant of his remark I surmised that he was critical even in his admiration for that epical character.
Shaughnessy is essentially a system-man. When he travelled he had his practical jokes and his Irish stories and his fondness for the social side; but he was conventionally as correct as a time-table. Had there been a spark of genius in him he would have extinguished it for the sake of betterments to the most conventional Colossus in Canada. The C.P.R. was supposed to lead. It was built for dividends, and born in politics. It had craft at its cradle. The new policy under Shaughnessy was bigger. It had to do less with Asia, with spectacle, with carved gods; more with Europe, with immigration posters, with land settlement. Shaughnessy had taken over a system which could be used ostensibly as the agent of the Immigration Department and of the Interior; effectively as the base of population-supply on its own account.
As Shaughnessy worked it out the C.P. had a scheme of national expansion that acted independent of government; its own ships, trains, roads, docks, land offices, immigration agents, poster-advertising—until the average European looking for a way out of economic slavery believed that the C.P.R. was the owner and operator of Canada. A belief which was not contradicted, except officially, at home.
William Mackenzie set the pace for building; Shaughnessy for operation. But Shaughnessy built fast. He did it under a handicap of two systems against one. The difference was that an average new line under Shaughnessy paid dividends, or at least did not appreciably lower dividends already declared.
Under Lord Shaughnessy it was unofficially believed that the head of the C.P.R. was somehow overlord to governments. Shaughnessy the impenetrable was not the agent of a democracy, but an emperor. He had his counterpart in Japan. The Orientalism which Van Horne infused into the system even while he laughed it out of court, was solemnly accepted by the man who came after. But it was the Orientalism of efficiency. Shaughnessy was its symbol. Away from it he was of little consequence except as a benevolent citizen with statesmanlike views upon how governments should govern. Within it he was mighty. He felt himself the apex of a thing that knew no provincial boundaries. He consciously made it the instrument of Empire. He was inordinately proud of its morale. To him it was a complicated army. He felt it assimilating men who lived, moved and had their being in C.P.R.—as he had. He was the great human rubber stamp. He had extra power. He lived on fiats and papal bulls. Men learned to tremble at his nod—not at Shaughnessy, but at the man who personalized the infallible system. And as governments came up and capsized in the storms of public sentiment, the great system went on in its sullen but splendid way, a sort of solar system in which parties and governments gravitated.
It would have needed a greater soul than Shaughnessy to be cynical about C.P.R. It often needed his latent Irish humour to appreciate the larger cynicism which it expressed concerning the country. The pap-fed infants of Mackenzie and Hays served but to illustrate by contrast the perfection and the well-oiled technique of the dynamo operated by Shaughnessy. It became an obsession with him, as it did with Flavelle over a commercial company, that "the king can do no wrong." His annual report bristled with pride over the Company's achievements. He insisted upon the inherent morality of the thing and of the men who were its officials. And the older he grew the more Shaughnessy became absorbed in it. In his career the office of President reached its climax. It was shorn of much of its aspect of awe as soon as he left it.
His knighthood was a slight decoration on so august a personage; as though the king had decorated the Mikado. The baronage more nearly fitted the case. Shaughnessy was not too passionately a Home Ruler to take it. But he was never so good a president of the C.P.R. after he got it. He became particular over forms and etiquette. One almost looked for a change of guard at the gate when entering the President's office.
No pomp, however, could undo such efficiency, and in the main such national sanity. Shaughnessy always liked to have a voice in national affairs. That was partly tradition. It also kept the public from remembering that the railway after all was a creature of government and of politics. It sometimes deflected public attention from the "melon" patch which was theToronto World'ssobriquet for the C.P.R. "pork barrel," and from the ever potential lobby maintained by the company at Ottawa. Of course lobbies are always repudiated. No self-respecting railway ever knows it by that name. There is no department of lobbyage in the head offices. The art is never taught. But it is childish to dodge the public necessity of a great corporation being represented at the centre of national legislation. In fact, C.P. has loomed so large in public affairs that a member of Parliament for the Company would sometimes have been scarcely ridiculous. Whenever Lord Shaughnessy went to Ottawa, it was public news. He never went for his health, seldom without some issue too big for a subordinate to handle. Had the Minister of Railways gone to Montreal to see Mr. President, it would have seemed quite as natural.
The war gave Lord Shaughnessy for a time almost equal prominence with Sir Sam Hughes. His quite sensible speech criticizing the haphazard and costly methods of recruiting made Hughes retort that to raise the First Contingent was as great a task as building the C.P.R. Lord Shaughnessy earned that absurd retort because of his announcement to the Government that he meant to make the speech; as though the nation would be waiting to hear it. There was room for one super-governmentarian at Ottawa; never for two. It was Hughesvs.Shaughnessy.
Lord Shaughnessy's retirement from the presidency was not sudden. He had reached his zenith. His eyesight was bad. But he had not lost his grip. The war threw such an unusual load on the system and so changed its complexion that it became necessary to have a younger man. There is reason to believe that the war rudely upset much of the Imperial dignity of the great system. The C.P. was no longer a law unto itself. It was part of the national pool. The President was no longer a sublime autocrat; he was a public agent. The life blood of a globe-girdling system was drained by the war, even while it retained its supremacy as the greatest railway and more than held up its end compared with the railway muddle in the United States. Never again could the C.P. recover its splendid isolation of greatness. Public ownership was being thrust upon the nation by the bankruptcy of the other roads. Shaughnessy had no real fear that it would ever absorb the C.P.R. But he had reason to suspect that a huge Government system would be more or less of a menace to the system which he had spent his life to build up. There was no better way than to retire, leaving the chief administration to a man of his own choice and retaining the post of Chairman along with the room occupied by the old President. Even here the old autocrat survives. The proposal made by Baron Shaughnessy to pool all the railways, except the Grand Trunk, and to put them all under C.P. administration with a guarantee of dividends to C.P. shareholders—was a magnificent play to the gallery. The other roads were undeniably bankrupt, when even the splendid showing made by the management could not make their records palatable to the public. It was a strategic time to advertise once, finally and for all, the unequalled efficiency of the old Transcontinental.
But Canadian railwaydom is dominated by C.P.R. as naturally as tides by the moon. The Railway Association, once the Railway War Board, are now a junta of dividendists and of paid chiefs of the Government system, to oppose—whenever necessary—the adverse judgments of the Government's Railway Commission. The road which was the tangible nexus of Confederation was built by two Americans, one of whom became a high-tariff Tory and a knight, the other an Imperialistic baron who believed in Dominion Home Rule for Ireland when the average Canadian considered Home Rule as treasonable as annexation. It is the prerogative of any robust Canadian to oppose either infection from Broadway or domination from Downing Street. But, regarding the strategic position of Canada in the misnamed "British Empire," we might all take a cue from Lord Shaughnessy, who has had all the internationalizing emotions of which any man is normally capable, and can challenge any man to shew where he has ever compromised conscience or country.
Whatever may be done by the Washington Conference to the League of Nations, there still live two men to whom it is and shall be the hub of the world. Lord Robert Cecil and Sir Herbert Ames at least will never admit that the League was a mere Wilson-Democrat device for making the world safe for humanity, and that the alternative is a Harding-Republican expedient for making Washington the new hub of the world.
Sir Herbert is much too cordial a cosmopolitan to begrudge Washington any eminence she can get from imitating the League. He is too charitable even to admit that if Dr. Wilson had stood for peace first and covenant second, no Washington Conference would have been needed. He is also Canadian enough to realize that transferring the centre of the Peace propaganda to the leading Capital of the New World is a good way to remind the Old World that Ottawa has more to do with Washington than even London has. Out of the Washington Conference may arise the Canadian envoy. Whatever happens in the Pacific zone of the world-open diplomacy can never hurt Ottawa—-nor disturb the complacent optimism of Sir Herbert Ames, Financial Director of the Secretariat to the League of Nations. The time may come when even Ottawa is considered a better place than London or Geneva for the conduct of world-peace agenda.
When Sir Herbert Ames was chosen Financial Director of the League Secretariat he was chosen less to please Canada than to vindicate his own ability. When he spoke in Canada on how the League works he showed his remarkable optimism by extolling its operations at a time when Europe was more anarchic than at any time since the war.
Every forward nation should have its Ames. This one justified his existence in Canada long before he became a knight or even an M.P. for St. Antoine, Montreal. At one time in his citizenship he was the incarnation of what a large number of people would be anxious to avoid; in the days when he used to pack his grip from Montreal and go forth on lectural pilgrimages over Ontario and other parts. On a platform he always seemed like a long, lean schoolmaster. Sometimes he used a blackboard. One of his pet subjects was prohibition. He looked entirely like it. One could scarcely recollect having heard quite so dry a man on any subject. He looked like the genius of self-denial—like a man who long ago should have gone into a monastery, doing penance for the uplift of the world as mirrored in his own conscience, instead of remaining at large a common Presbyterian and a very uncommon sort of Tory.
I was agreeably startled to find Sir Herbert in 1920 one of the most cordial and amiable men on the roster of Who's Who. He was no longer dry, bigoted, or pedagogical. In fact he was almost benignly human, even humourous. And I concluded that if intimacy with the League of Nations could work such a change in the average man connected with it, there is surely some function for the League as a cheerful solvent for the world.
Sir Herbert Ames' previous work as Hon. Chairman of the National Patriotic Fund of course did a good deal to reclaim him. Of all war work this was among the most destructive of personal bigotry and political prejudice. If Sir Herbert imbibed the real philosophy of the Patriotic Fund he must be, speaking humanly, one of the wisest men in Canada. It was a scientific fact that at a time when men in the army were displaying incredible heroism, certain people at home were exhibiting unbelievable meanness. The people who used to attempt graft on the Patriotic Fund were the kindergarten of the college of national profiteers who came later. They were happily out-numbered by the people who were thankful for all they got and who in the greatest losses that life can inflict showed almost sublime fortitude and patience.
Preparation for some form of public service by doing it as he went along has always been Ames' strongest characteristic. He had eyes for the homely, sometimes mean, job under his nose. There was an evangelism about him. Why? Because he was a citizen. Where did he live? In Montreal. No man can be a reforming citizen in Montreal unless he has plenty of time, and some money. Mr. Ames has always had both. He also has endless patience.
Perhaps the most remarkable proof that he intended to be a practical philanthropist is the fact that for eight years he was one of the feeble Anglo-Saxon minority in the Montreal City Council. An artist in search of contrast could never have found a finer example than a comparative study of the leader of the English section Ames, and the French boss, the late L. A. Lapointe. In the bilingual Legislature of an incorrigible city Mr. Ames spoke two languages. If he had mastered twenty he never could have equalled Lapointe, who in my recollection of a long conversation some years ago could genially and grandly boast that the fad for reforming the City of Montreal would never make much headway so long as he remained boss of the French section in Council. Lapointe was Montreal's Tammany. He held Montreal under his patronage and executive thumb before Mederic Martin had begun to achieve any fame beyond that of a maker of cigars. He knew every cranny of Montreal as intimately as the late John Ross Robertson used to know Toronto. Mr. Ames' knowledge of the big town was fairly complete. But if Mr. Ames and Mr. Lighthall, the genie of civic information in Montreal, could have been one two-headed man, they never could have matched Lapointe in the expert business of knowing where to plant a man to give him a civic job or how to create a job to suit a man in need of it.
Yet for eight consecutive years Mr. Ames with no other desire than to do his duty, to study Montreal, and perhaps qualify for larger service later, remained a member of the City Council. And he did his work there before the English-speaking element undertook to clean up the city—the most genial, sarcastic failure of modern times. He wrote little books about Montreal. He mastered French by studying it first-hand in France. Those who used to listen to his evangelical speeches in his own tongue sometimes wished he had learned a few nuances and inflexions in English. He was for some time Chairman of the Municipal Board of Health, in a city where infant mortality is such a constant epidemic that babies' coffins are displayed in shop windows. In 1907 he wrote a tractate on the housing of the working classes, just on the eve of the period when Montreal began to be the worst city in America for high rents, extortionate charges for moving and intolerable congestion. The publication of his views on the subject, however, showed that he had the courage to point out what was wrong, even though he had no concrete constructive proposal which any municipal government in Montreal or any Legislature in Quebec would ever accept as a working basis for putting the thing right. As far back as 1901 he indited a treatise on The City Problem, What Is It? Twenty years later, after all Mr. Ames' burnings on the subject, Montreal has slumped back into sheer mediaevalism in civic government under the wheedling despotism of Mederic Martin, who presided at the public funeral of the only effort the city ever made to establish a real business administration. In that Quixotic eruption of public virtue in 1912, Mr. Ames, after all his publicity on the subject of redeeming Montreal, was not even considered as a candidate for the Board of Control.
On the whole scarcely a public man, or even a reforming editor, in Canada has talked so consistently and so cheerfully for so long a period and to so little apparent purpose, on the need for cleaning up civic government. The difference between Mr. Ames and the average public-service expert in Montreal on this question is that Mr. Ames has never been worldly-wise enough to become an avowed cynic on the question. He probably knows as well as anybody that to clean up Montreal is in the same category as making Europe safe for the League of Nations; a much harder city to regenerate than even Philadelphia. Muck-raking has no effect, when two-thirds of the population read French papers which never use the rake, and when the boss of three-fourths of the rest is himself often a target for the yellows. Mr. Ames should long ago in this connection have propounded a thesis, Hugh Graham, What Is It? He would then be free to dissect the ethics of Mederic Martin and the late L. A. Lapointe.
Martin rules Montreal in spite of Lord Atholstan, the Archbishop and the International Union, because in his own person he interprets the distinction between Anglo and Franco. In Montreal a dominant minority controls three-fourths of the commercial wealth. A couple of dozen men control big industries, railways, electric and water powers, finance and newspapers. When these men want the City Hall they consult the directory. To them Montreal is a convenient sea-wharfing spot to conduct big business; otherwise a French Canadian city and so, hopeless. The chief common bond between this group and the city at large is the labour market. The elections are a mere superficial disturbance. The old courteous alternative of a French mayor, an English mayor, and an Irish mayor has been discarded. The mayors are all French now. The population is overwhelmingly French. The City Hall is as French as the courts. The civic jobs are given to Frenchmen. As a rule there are plenty of jobs. It is a fair compromise—that if the Anglos will monopolize most of the big productive business, the civic administration must go to the Francos who are the elective majority.
Sir Herbert Ames, who was born in Montreal and is the only man who has ever undertaken to theorize openly as to its redemption, knows exactly why the place is so absorbing to the cynical mind. He understands that a man cannot have the same geometrical and diligent enthusiasm for Montreal as he has for Toronto. To be a thoughtful citizen of Montreal stimulates the imagination and disgusts the economic sense. For the past ten years Sir Herbert has been too much absorbed in Ottawa and the League of Nations to care much about the city where he spent so much of his earlier zeal for reclamation. The member for St. Antoine has a larger orbit—to negotiate which he has resigned his seat in the House.
One is tempted to consider whether there are not enough secretarial minds in Europe from which to take a man as Financial Secretary for the League of Nations, and let Sir Herbert come back to Canada to finish his work. He has had world experiences enough to come back and be of some real use to the country. He is not yet sixty. He has ahead of him twenty years in which he could do a great deal more for the Empire about which he is so earnest by working in Canada than by occupying a conspicuous post somewhere in Europe. It is not the fashion for ex-Canadians who have had political or other experiences abroad to come back here for anything but speeches and banquets. Sir Herbert may be permitted to change the fashion. With his versatility in French, his knowledge of Europe, his acquaintance with large public questions of finance and his generalsavoir faire, he seems to be just the kind of man who could head a movement to nationalize Montreal.
But of course he never will do it.
The career of the late Sam Hughes is a tragic reminder that no man in public life can afford to regard himself as bigger than his suitable job. When a nation has to retire a genius for the sake of enthroning what remains of common democracy the nation's loss is nobody's gain. In the jungle book of our aristocracy Sam Hughes should have been Lord Valcartier. Not that a democratic country cares at all to be given any more lords, even if Parliament had not asked the King to abolish the custom. But while peerages and baronetcies were being handed about for honour, Hughes was the kind of man that should have got his—except that he made it impossible.
However, it is more interesting to record the shortcomings of Hughes than to report the success of mediocrities. Canada had in Hughes a name with which for a year or so to poster almost any part of the Empire, especially England. We are in danger of forgetting at this distance—five years now since he resigned office—just what were the conditions that made him such a tremendous figure.
Sam Hughes, M.P., born in County Durham, Orangeman from the town of Lindsay, editor, soldier, adventurer, school teacher who once taught English and who never could make a speech, though he talked in public—what was there about him up till 1914 to make any nation wonder? The first time I saw Hughes, in 1910, a man whose office he had just left said, as though imparting a State secret:
"There goes the next Minister of Militia."
Up till that moment if anybody had asked me, "Do you know Hughes?" I should have said, "Oh, yes, everybody knows Jim Hughes, the School Inspector."
The story of Canada's Army is immortal. It is yet to be truly told. When it is told by the right man—whether historian or poet—the name Hughes, as we know it at its best and biggest, will shine out like a great fixed star that tried to play being a comet. On April 22nd, from the sick bed that even he probably knew he never would leave of his own will, in memory of St. Julien, he sent the army boys a brief message, that he still believed in them as he always had.
Simple little message, it meant much. It would have meant a million times more if the "boys" could have flashed back a helio to the wan old General who used to be such a noise in the world—"Same to you, General." The boys somehow liked him. The defects of Sam Hughes were of the sort that soldiers love. He was a man's man.
"Tipperary" was just becoming popular to whistle when a camera man authorized by the Government of Canada took one of the most striking pictures in our part of the war outside the zone of the shell areas. Gen. Sam Hughes, jack boots and oilskin cape flung back by the gale to show his belt and the flap of his khaki, wide-legged on a rope ladder, coming down forward from a troopship in the Gulf, almost baring his teeth to the October wind; bidding farewell to the First Contingent 33,000 strong, that steamed out of the Gulf into the convoy.
You recognize in such a picture a man who perhaps understood the sensations of Alexander. Sam Hughes had finished his first job for the war. Among all the war achievements that thrilled nations when big men suddenly took hold of them in after years, this one holds its own. Hughes never could match it again. Here was the greatest army that had ever put out to sea at one time; an army forty per cent bigger in three months than the total force that Gen. Ian Hamilton estimated Canada could send as her whole contribution to a great war. This was Hughes' answer to Hamilton. Not only were the men Canadian—if not many of them Canadians—but their uniforms, boots, kits, rifles, horses, tents, artillery, machine gun batteries, army waggons, cook waggons, engineering outfits and munitions, were as far as possible produced in Canada. Troop trains and transport steamers were Canadian. The money that paid for the army was Canadian. The pay of officers and men was Canadian. And we know what Hughes was.
But the moment Hughes let go the rope ladder that should have made himLord Valcartier, he began to undo his own career.
In a misguided speech afterwards Sam reminded Lord Shaughnessy that to raise, equip and dispatch the First Contingent from Canada was a heavier contract than building the C.P.R. The comparison was foolish, but very human. Shaughnessy had provoked it by announcing to the Government that he intended to make a speech in condemnation of Hughes' methods of recruiting.
The author of Canada in Flanders describes exactly what the work of organizing that Contingent was. A few extracts will do:
"In less than a month the Government, which had asked for 20,000 men, found almost 40,000 at its disposal. . . General Hughes devised and ordered the establishment of the largest camp that had ever been seen on Canadian soil. The site at Valcartier was well chosen. . . ."
"The transformation effected within a fortnight by an army of engineers and workers was a remarkable triumph of applied science. Roads were made, drains laid down, a water supply with miles of pipes installed, electric lighting furnished from Quebec and incinerators built for the destruction of dry refuse. A sanitary system second to none that any camp has seen was instituted. Every company had its own bathing place and shower baths: every cook-house its own supply of water. Troughs of water for horses filled automatically so that there was neither shortage nor waste. The standing crops were garnered; trees cut down and the roots torn up. A line of targets 3 1/2 miles long—the largest rifle range in the world—was constructed. . . . . Camp and army leaped to life in the same hour. Within four days of the opening of the camp nearly 6,000 men had arrived in it. The cloth mills of Montreal began to hum with the manufacture of khaki, which the needles of a great army of tailors converted into uniforms, greatcoats and cloaks. The Ordnance Department equipped the host with the Ross Rifle. Regiments were shuffled and reshuffled into battalions; battalions into brigades. The whole force was inoculated against typhoid. There were stores to accumulate; a fleet of transports to assemble; a thousand small cogs in the machine to be nicely adjusted."
Sir Max Aitken did not mention the message to "My Soldiers" in every man's knapsack, an imitation of Kitchener's knapsack message to the "Old Contemptibles"; or that he himself had applied to Sam Hughes for a "job" in Canada's army.
Hughes was Minister of War, not a Minister of Defence. In the tramp of battalions down the street he felt Canada to be a young nation, not an overseas Dominion only. Yet the First Contingent was the work of one of the most scientifically unprepared-for-war peoples in the world. Valcartier was the glorification of Hughes, who was always personally prepared for war; what or where he was not always sure, except that it would involve the Empire, that when it came, the sand-bags of Canada's front line would not be in Canada, and the Canada Militia Act would be as useful in the case as a page from Pickwick Papers.
Allow for the British-born majority in the First Contingent, the patriotic enthusiasm of Militia officers, the commandeering of national resources and the great work of subordinates; the fact remains that had he not been as much his own enemy as he was a soldier born and bred, Sam Hughes should have been Lord Valcartier.
The sad fact about Hughes is that he did not estimate what Canada did and did not in her first impact upon the war. He could not see Canada except as the shadow of Sam Hughes. In the light of the war as he stood in front of it, that shadow of Hughes seemed to him to cover the country. For two years, it seemed to grow. Then it flickered. In 1916 it went out. And there never was in Canada a going out like it.
Hughes was the embodiment of force without power. He began to mobilize a nation, not merely as battalions on parade, but as an army equipped by Canadian science, industry, transportation, intelligence, and citizenship. So far as he carried that out, the editor of theLindsay Warderand M.P. for Haliburton and Victoria had no superior in organizing force in this country. Up till 1916 he was a patriotic cannon-cracker exploding without any particular objective, except that he wanted a Canadian Army in Canada, not an overseas Contingent, or an Imperial Army. between 1914 and 1916 he was a great organizing soldier, at his best comparable to any men who were doing wonders at the front. As Nationalist as Quebec, he thought of Canada as a unit in the Empire, most of which he had seen for military reasons. Canada could not declare war; but in the mind of Hughes the force that held Canada and other overseas dominions within the Empire was not in trade and tariffs, but in ships, armies and victories.
Sam Hughes failed to translate his force into power because he failed to estimate the elements which carried him to success, and therefore could not measure the energies that would defeat him. He never understood what Bismarck called the "imponderables". Nature gave him the energy; Fate the ambition: Destiny denied him the vision.
The electric energy of this nation in response to the call of war made a flash that blinded Hughes. He seemed to think that he was the man who was running the cataract. He had a wholesome contempt for Kaiserism in Germany. He tried to express it by an imitation of Kaiserism in Canada. He had a sense of relative omnipotence. He put editors in jail, went over the heads of District commanders, inexcusably humiliated General Lessard in command of the most important military district in Canada, openly browbeat officers in front of their men, played Napoleon on a white charger at the crest of a mound in Valcartier, and trod on the official corns of his colleagues.
Such things are now somewhat blurred by perspective. At the time they were glaringly in the spotlight as the pranks of a Jack the Giant Killer. In December, 1914, Premier Borden made a tactical visit to the headquarters of Military District No. 2, nominally commanded by General Lessard.
A military writer had this to say about the Premier's speech:
". . . . He thought the accomplishment of this task (Valcartier) was a tribute to the spirit of the people. He claimed no special credit for his Government; inferentially it was a high compliment to the organizing ability of the Minister of Militia, but Sir Robert deftly left that to the imagination of his audience. . . . A curious feature was his avoidance of any mention of the 'Minister of Militia.' When he desired to speak of the military programme, he stated that he had decided, after consultation with the 'Chief of Staff'. This was done repeatedly and apparently with definite purpose. Once he mentioned the name of Major Lessard, and a shout went up from the audience."
Further quotation is not needed. In less than two months after the glorification of Valcartier, the Premier found himself challenged by the man who had already begun to act as though national headquarters were in the Militia Department. Sam Hughes was never unpopular in Toronto. The incident referred to might almost have taken place in Montreal.
Canada was beginning to understand, to heroize and to censure Sam Hughes. His measure was being taken here. But the censure was unheeded. Hughes worked while critics talked. He was mobilizing, if not organizing, a nation. He still believed that he (ipse) could do it. The mobilization included everything needed by the army as well as the army itself. He wanted to get the nation behind the army: and himself behind the nation. He started everything—even to shells, high explosives and aeroplanes. Hughes knew what the army needed. He refused to admit that other men also knew how to get some of these things better than he did.
Cabinet colleagues were adjuncts. The motto punctuated by the smashing fist was, "I want to tell you!" No major on parade ever felt so overwhelming. Hughes was more than a martinet. He was a dilemma. The phenomenal was always about him. War was not even hell to Sam Hughes. It was more often a chance to show a civilian minister that he was a mere conventional ornament. Hughes may have hated the necessity, but he loved the spirit and the fire, of war.
Sam Hughes was probably wiser on what modern war demanded than many of the British command. Even Kitchener argued for shrapnel when Lloyd George wanted high explosives. There was no civilian in Canada to argue against Hughes, who aimed to do in Canada what the Minister of Munitions, Director-General, Headquarters Staff, and the Minister of Transports did in England. He was able from the first to get a realizing measure of the kind of mechanical hell known as modern war.
Start a force like that and you may expect abnormalities in the wake of it. We had "Sham Shoes". Hughes had nothing to do with those. He stated in Winnipeg that Wellington had once said that a contractor who made bad boots for an army should be shot. We had shell contracts—and the "friend" Joseph Wesley Allison; the Kyte charges, which brought the Minister home from England to answer them in the House. Neither the answer nor the friend was characteristic of the kind of man we had supposed Sam Hughes to be. We had the Ross Rifle. Hughes knew that in actual warfare the Ross was the finest sniper's rifle in the world, but that in quick action it jammed so badly that often the Canadians furtively swapped them for Lee-Enfields whenever the chance came. There was no excuse for the Ross rifle, and Hughes ought to have admitted it. There never should have been a chance for any detractor of his to insinuate that the Minister had stock in the Ross Rifle Company. We had cellulose nitrate and Grant Morden, who has never had an equal over here for making sudden wealth out of next to nothing and getting popular credit for doing it. What the ex-Minister of Militia made out of that promotion was never stated. It never should have been necessary for him to have made a copper in any such way. On his retirement from the Cabinet Hughes should have had a big honourable endowment from the nation sufficient as an income for the rest of his life. The whole idea of such a character being even good-humouredly mixed up with any deal not absolutely foursquare is a paradox. The Sam Hughes that we knew best was as straight as a chalk line.
The exploits of Canada's army never surprised Hughes. He had always said they could do it. He boasted about the generals he had taken from desks and offices. But the generals were fighting. There was a cubist picture in the War Memorials at Ottawa thus described by a Canadian editor who went over the battlefields which it depicted:
"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 battle and the moral contagion of fear."
That picture of St. Julien must have thrilled Hughes, whose son was soon to be Brigadier-General. It was on the crest of the St. Julien wave that Hughes got his title and was given the freedom of London; when some delirious writer in a London daily predicted that some day Sir Sam would ride through London at the head of his victorious troops. One writer called him the Commander-in-Chief of Canada's Army. None of these things moved Sam Hughes to humility. As well as any man he knew how small the greatest man was in the fury of that war.
Other Cabinet Ministers had to wait till the Peace Conference before getting such press notices. Even the Premier took nearly two years to convince London that he was much more than the civilian colleague of Gen. Hughes. Sir Sam was idolized from the beginning; at times when generals at the front were baffled, discouraged and beaten, and when patient old Kitchener was enduring red tape and making perfunctory reports to the Lords, knowing that the war was bigger than his knowledge of it.
Hughes may not have been wise enough to estimate the real value of this idolatry; but he was probably shrewd enough to know that it would soon be over. He knew that much as had been done to make Canada a war nation, the first two years had done less than half the work. 87,000 troops went overseas in 1915. That was natural. The majority of the men were in camp. In 1916 the number was almost doubled, from the enlistments of 1915. In 1917 the number sent overseas dropped to 63,536, proving that the enlistments of 1916 had been about half those of 1915.
Hughes knew this better than anybody. He knew that the voluntary system, in which he believed, was going to break down. We had no national register. A country as big as twenty Englands, with a population about one-fourth as big, had also Quebec—and the farmer. The Canadian census was five years old and useless for anything like a national register of resources of war. Camp Borden in 1916 helped to stimulate recruiting and to give Hughes something resembling in a feeble way the sensations of 1914. But Camp Borden was not Valcartier. General Lessard, whom he had ignored in 1914, was sent down to Quebec to encourage enlistments. He went too late. Wrong men had gone earlier. Hughes had never tried to placate Quebec. But in 1916 he himself went down to see Cardinal Begin. For an Orangeman like Hughes that was a desperate measure. He got what he expected—cynicism. Begin afterwards issued a letter to the press in which he tried to set the clergy above the law of conscription. No doubt the Cardinal came at Hughes with the twaddle invented by the Nationalists and later adopted by Laurier, about enforcing the Militia Act which provided for nothing but defence.
Canada had now four divisions in the field. The problem was how to keep them up, and how to send a fifth. The fifth never went. But it stands to the immortal credit of Sam Hughes that the four did, and that he had sent them.
The affair about the Chairman of Munitions was to Hughes a sore blow. He had started munitions as an arm of war. He did not want a civilian to take it over as a mere industry. Even that was a sign that the volunteer system was about done. Ottawa was full of experts now, each man taking over as a big business something started by Hughes. The one-man epoch was over. But Hughes refused to admit it. The man who had started everything was in no humour to admit anything. Yet in the darkest days Hughes never lost faith in the men who had gone. No man continued to say more heartening things about ultimate victory. And he played blind optimist against the cold, comfortless fact that the Canadian Army was wasting and the reserves were not marching up to mend it.
Hughes knew that conscription had to come. But he was the very last man in authority to admit it. Only a few days before Ottawa announced that compulsory service must be applied, and when Sir Sam knew it was coming, he said publicly to soldiers in Toronto that Canada, the freeman's country, would never need conscription. It was most pitiful to hear him. Sir Sam never seemed to pity himself. His egoism was game enough for anything. Bigger men than he had gone down. A big man here or there was nothing now. But what of little men that stayed up? Hughes probably asked that in silent contempt as he saw the coming of Coalition. But he knew he would not be there when it came.
By this time the egotism that was so splendid in 1914 had begun to breed in Gen. Hughes rancours and envies and enmities. Some of the men he had sent overseas were now more potent figures than himself.
There was still a person at the head of the Militia Department known as Lieut.-General Sam Hughes, K.C.B. But there was no longer in Canada any such man as old Sam Hughes. The Fate chickens hatched in 1914 were coming home to roost. For two years the Government had carried on two wars, one with the Kaiser Wilhelm, the other with Kaiser Sam. It had to be determined that whatever defects government may have because it is a democracy—even such democracy as was left in 1916—it is bigger than any one man. It had to be conceded that the nation was bigger than any one political party, and war bigger than all the world's volunteer armies.
Sam Hughes belonged to the eternal Volunteers. The days of his glory were the days when Canada of her own accord went to war or stayed at home. The Force called Hughes dreamed that it was bigger than a machine called War. But the machine won. Hughes went down. He went down as he had come up—alone. His going down seemed more swift than his rising. And yet he began to go down when he stood on the rope ladder down the Gulf and watched the troopships drift out. If in that moment he had not dreamed that General Sam Hughes was above government, he might have continued his great work long enough to become Lord Valcartier. He might have helped in a second Capture of Quebec, made conscription less difficult when it came, and put the Fifth Division into the field. And in that case Canada's part in the war would have been even more magnificent than it now is.
The latter days of the General were characteristic of a man who never knew he was beaten. Musical geniuses have written tremendous scores to depict a man's struggle with death. None of them could have transcended the long battle which Sam Hughes put up to stay here. For months we had intermittent bulletins from his bedside when any morning we expected to read that he was gone. He was a hard man to conquer. And only his intimate friends are likely ever to know whether or not it was his own ultimate biting failure, after his almost super-human success, that turned this man of the shadow into a phantom before he let go.
And before he went the hard, bluff soldier, who has as much iron in his composition as any man of his time sprang one of those human surprises that even war fails to emulate—when he listened time after time to the record that he loved better than most music, "I know that my Redeemer liveth", from Handel's "Messiah".
The war was a great cosmic artist of infinite satire, making of humanity little stereopticon slides which he slipped in front of his calcium and flashed upon the clouds for a screen. When the war was done the stereopticon was smashed. The slides remain. What shall we do with them?
One of the most world-interesting characters in the magic lantern of war was Lieut.-General Sir Arthur Currie, who in 1914 locked his real estate desk in Victoria, B.C., and in 1919 came back to Canada admittedly one of the ablest commanders in a war which made the exploits of Wellington seem like comic opera in simplicity.
Whatever partial, prejudiced or private opinions some Canadians may have about Sir Arthur Currie, it must be generally admitted that he was perhaps the most remarkable of all the slides slipped into the stereopticon of the war artist. To quote from "Canada's Hundred Days", by J. F. B. Livesay, concerning the secret strategy of Sir Arthur Currie for the great Amiens show in August, 1918:
"That afternoon the Corps Commander had a talk with the two Canadian correspondents. Before him was a large scale map and the barrage map. It was all very clear and lucid. We take up our line here; and our first objective is there; 'zero' hour was named; our final objective for the day over there—constituting a world record for a first day's advance. . . .
"So at last all is ready. The story goes that the Corps Commander was asked how soon he could deliver the Corps in fighting trim at the appointed place. 'By the tenth,' he had said. 'Too long; do it by the eighth.' And he did it. . . .
"And it was all done secretly and by night. For an entire week the men of Canada were passing south from their old front, taking circuitous and puzzling routes. None knew where they went. They sang as they marched—a thing they had not done for two years.
"Foremost that night of nights was one's sense of wonder at how it had been done; how of many tangled threads of railway and lorry and march, all that great and intricate machine—more complex far than Wellington had gathered on the field of Waterloo—had been assembled in perfect order to the minute. . . .
"Up the winding hill go all the impedimenta of war—marching battalions, traction-engines towing great guns, ammunition trains, long lines of Red Cross lorries; everywhere the pungent odour of petrol. From every little wood belch forth men. They march silently. They might be phantoms, dim hordes of Valhalla, were it not for the spark of a cigarette, a smothered laugh. There is no talking. All is tense excitement. For miles and miles in a wide concentric sweep every road and lane and bypath is crowded with these slow-moving masses. Over the bare hillsides lumber the heavy tanks, just keeping pace with the marching men.
". . . . Berlin thinks we are in Flanders; London that we are in the south. All is well. . . .
". . . . The watch hand is creeping round—half-past three—four—ten past four—an interminable laggard. It is to be the greatest barrage of the war.
". . . . 'Zero' is set for four-twenty, and the pointer has barely reached that figure when behind us there goes up a mighty flare, and simultaneously all along the line ten miles to north and south of us, other flares light up the countryside. At the same instant there breaks out the boom of our heavy guns, the sharp staccato of sixty-pounders, the dull roar of howitzers, and the ear-splitting clamour of whizz-bangs—a bedlam of noise. Shells whistle and whine overhead; they cannot be distinguished one from another, but merge into a cataract of sound.
". . . . The heavens are lighted up across their broad expanse by a continuous sheet of lightning, playing relentlessly over the doomed lines. Now a faint light of dawn shimmers in the east and soon blots out the fireworks. A lark rises high, carolling. . . .
"The fog lifts. It is eight o'clock. The cavalry, a wonderful sight, appear on the scene. They have come up from Hangest-sur-Somme and have lain overnight in the great park of Amiens. Like a jack-in-the-box they have sprung from nowhere—miles on miles of gay and serried ranks, led by the Canadian Cavalry Brigade."
* * * * * *
On the 1913 side of this Wagnerian stage setting take a look at a real estate office in Victoria, B.C. The junior member of the firm is a pink-faced giant who had taught school and made no money, and having no other qualification for getting ahead in the world, went into buying and selling houses and corner lots. Victoria was booming then or he never would have done it. He had maps of the city on his walls and could solemnly point out to some timid newcomer in 1913 what little house there or nice wooded lot yonder might suit her; and the price—oh, yes, the price; seems high, but the location is excellent, the neighbourhood fine, the scenery superb, and the city—well, it had been going ahead until the slump and then——
"Oh, yes, Victoria's all right," he insists heavily. "Got sleeping sickness, that's all."
Then he yawns, which is a relief to the lady client, who thinks that his face is less ugly that way. Such a huge, long, solemn face! She glances at the office, wondering—if the agent is hard up? If so, no wonder; for he seems a sad salesman.
He closes his desk and locks up. Off to the rifle ranges, where he stays as late as the eye can see because—well, it's a joy to help the men get bull's eyes.
Sunday—marches in full Highland regalia at the head of the 50th Gordon Highlanders on garrison parade. On the curb a twinkling little Jap watches him.
"Nothin' like him in Japan, John," says a boy scout. "Wow!"
"Big—so big!" admires the Jap.
"Yah. Makes them big Macs. in the ranks look shrunk. Knows artillery, too. Rifle—kick! got a great eye. Look at 'im right wheel!"
* * * * * *
Then on the 1920 side of the Wagnerian stage picture observe this same giant, less baby pink, thinner in the face, clad in evening dress; Inverness cape, crush hat, in the rotunda of the Ritz in Montreal, beside an average athletic citizen similarly dressed; the superb civilian—and his marionette.
"Er—I think the car's waiting, General."
"Oh, no. We'll walk. Only a block or two," booms the giant.
He crosses the rotunda in seven swift, great strides, while the marionette trots to keep up. They are off to a function at McGill University. The new President—to whom professors bow with frigid politeness and ladies ogle in admiring awe, and university governors stand about like a bodyguard as though to intimate,—
"Ridiculous? Not a bit of it. There's no other university President like him. And what else could we do with him? The Government had nothing to suit him; for politics he's never meant; for business never. Geddes left us. We picked a greater man. Yes, it seems awkward, but never mind. A year from now you will say—here was the man that made McGill as famous in 1921 as Sir William Dawson, the world geologist, made it in 1890."
Montreal that made a citizen of prodigious Van Horne had here a character in a setting far more unusual. The eminent soldier as head of a university. One of the last surprises of the war; almost as it seemed then a joker in the pack; when men had to remember how this man leaped from an almost bankrupt real estate office in Victoria to what he was in Canada's Hundred Days.
Of all men who seemed to have been absolutely created by the war Currie was the first. He enlisted for active service in 1914, and Hughes made him brigade-commander at Valcartier. He was in the First Contingent that swung out of the Gulf the day that Hughes stood on the rope ladder, almost forgetting that he had shaken hands with Currie. He went to France as Commander of the 2nd Infantry Brigade. Within two months came St. Julien and the green gas when Currie held his part of the stricken line from Thursday till Sunday.
"And on Sunday," said Max Aitken, eye-witness, "he had not abandoned his trenches. There were none left. They had been obliterated by the artillery. He withdrew his undefeated troops from the fragments of the field fortifications, and the hearts of his men were as completely unbroken as the parapets of his trenches were completely broken." Much more was said in official despatches about the fine spectacular heroism of other officers of lower rank. Currie, the most picturesque physique on the West front, was no man for mere gallantry. Poor dashing Mercer, beloved of the ranks, later paid the penalty for the sort of bravery that inspires troops but does not win battles. Currie was no coward. But he was cautious. The Scot in him preordained that he might be a necessity higher up. He just flung his left flank around south and hung on. We read on in the official record:
"Monday morning broke bright and clear and found the Canadians behind the firing line. But this day too was to bring its anxieties. The attack was still pressed, and it became necessary to ask Brigadier General Currie whether he could not once more call on his shrunken Brigade. 'The men are tired,' this indomitable soldier replied, 'but they are ready and glad to go again to the trenches.' And so, once more a hero leading heroes, the general marched back the men of the 2nd Brigade, reduced to a quarter of its strength, to the very apex of the line as it existed at that moment."
Five months later a party of Canadian newspapermen visited the Canadian front when one of them wrote concerning Major-General Currie:
"English officers spoke of him with a curious mixture of enthusiasm and reserve as though he were some new sort of being. It was everybody's secret that this big, husky Canadian with the baby pink face and the blue eyes and the slow, smooth, bellowing voice was to be in command of the Second Canadian Division just then being organized. . . . No place except Canada produces such voices as Currie's, or such tremendous easy-moving bodies. He met the newspapermen with a smile and a great outstretched hand. The gesture was something like that of a popular preacher shaking hands with the children on their way out of church. But the voice was the great thing. It seemed to come from illimitable depths. It suggested at once poise and unlimited balance. Cool judgment that could never be upset. Officers who saw Brigade Headquarters being strafed and who saw the roof blown in over Currie's head whispered among themselves that would be the last of Currie. But he emerged as calm and smooth and pink as ever. . . . The day the newspapermen saw him a very junior officer who has since distinguished himself came to report breathlessly, 'That last one, sir, got my tent!' He was excited and just a trifle hysterical; but two words from the General seemed to calm him at once. 'That so?' he said, with the same quiet interest that a farmer might have received news that a certain hen had at last laid an egg. 'I thought that last one sounded a bit close.'"
Then there came to the head of the Canadian Corps a man named Byng, who could stroll casually into a billet or a training field to inspect "the muddy trench hounds" in canvas leggings and with three buttons loose. Until Byng came the Canadian Corps was a semi-disciplined and marvellous mob of men who could swear as hard as they could fight and fight like wildcats. Byng gave then the massive and complex mechanism of an army competent to conduct operations as a unit of modern war, dominated by the man of whom the boys sang to the tune of Three Blind Mice, "Byng Bangs Boche, See how they run!" Currie, commander of the 2nd Division, had seen this Corps Commander stroll into a billet and hurl machine gun questions at the men who jumped like eager school-boys to answer. He must have silently envied this genius, who cared far less than he knew about what was wrong in a kit inspection, but had a shrewd eye for manoeuvres. Not often in actual war does a man so personally popular organize a cross-section of a vast international country into a war machine called an army, and not seldom do men when they hear of such a commander being transferred look at one another in a sort of blank dismay and say, "Well, I'll be damned. Now who's it?"
Out of the army came slowly and ponderously the huge Highlander, with the "baby pink face" and the rumbling gong of a voice.
Sir Arthur Currie was much too honest to imagine that he or any other man could make the Canadian army. It was a heavy ordeal to follow Byng, just as it had been easy for Byng to succeed Alderson. But Currie knew the Canadians down at the root better than Byng knew them. He knew how that army had been made: that he was taking over a humanized machine that was to war in 1917 what the sword of Wallace had been in man-to-man combat seven hundred years earlier. He knew the weakness of men for idolizing a popular commander. They never would parody any nursery rhyme in his honour. Except the Anzacs, they were the most audacious army in Europe. They had become great in defiance of red tape, insisting on whatever is called Canadianism. They embodied all there was of Western independence on that Front. The Anzacs, great in fight and in ideas of personal liberty, had not been welded into such a machine as the Canadians, whose advertised national qualities Currie was expected to conserve.
"As soon as one lets the cheeky beggars, Canadians from America, have a bit of quiet, they get uppish," was the illuminating sentence in a letter found in a German trench near St. Eloi. Currie knew those "cheeky beggars". In his own elephantine way he loved them, when few of them could figure it out. He knew how hard those "beggars" could hit: how grimly they could stick: how madly they could raid and rush: how infernally they could scheme to "put one over on Heine"; how desperately they could abuse earth and heaven when they had time in the rest billets to smoke fags and write letters home. They were no army to go whacking on the shoulder.
It had been all right for Byng the Briton to go among those men with three buttons loose. Men like a touch of insurgency in a commander who has come up among the martinets. Byng was a professional soldier. Currie was not yet even a mild insurgent, or was not known as such to the ranks. He was almost a man of prayer. He moved in a large arc somewhat like his great resolute body; an engine of might that never seemed weary; who at "Molly-be-Damned" studied battle reports at two a.m., and was in the field at six. As he had almost come up from the ranks, the men knew him. Here and there in a British Columbia battalion may have been a man who had bought a corner lot from Currie in Victoria. If so, he liked to talk about the hard-up days of the Corps Commander when he was in real estate.
Currie knew that above all things he must keep the confidence of those men and that he could never do it by familiarity. Success was the only way. Not, anyhow, speeches. The C.C. was rather fond of talking aloud at first; sometimes too religiously. It was a habit that he never quite abandoned, though he changed his style as he grew in experience.
There was work to do. No army had more; few armies as much. Currie's was a mobile army; needed as shock troops in rough places—a very good reputation if not too much of it. There was danger of the army losing its Canadianism by being shunted about. One of Currie's first objectives that he wanted above all things to achieve as a Canadian commander of initiative, was the capture of Lens. He had a plan for this. He was never allowed to carry it out. Says the author of "Canada's Hundred Days":
"Thus when he is ordered to abandon his planned offensive at Lens and take the corps up the Salient, he refuses point blank to serve under the Commander of the Fifth Army. He is placed under his old Chief of the First Army, looks over the ground before Passchendaele and then protests against the whole operation as being useless in itself and likely to cost the Corps 15,000 men."
It was said by some who believed they knew, that the Lens preparation was nothing but a huge feint put up to mislead Heine for an attack in force elsewhere. This was one of the bewildering events of that baffling year when the French army was in a state of mutiny, the nation behind the army in a state of nerves, and the politicians, clamouring for victories—or at least a cessation of defeat. Something had to be done, not only by France but by Britain, whose Premier insisted that unless the Germans could be broken in the north he could not hold his country united at home. There was a Council of War—so, a few weeks before the writing of this, said a Canadian General in New York—at which Currie was present. Sir Douglas Haig unexpectedly arrived and was soon into an argument with the Canadian Corps Commander demanding that he abandon Lens and strike at Passchendaele. The two commanders were in violent disagreement. Currie refused to yield. The British Premier went to France and met Currie, who gave way to the Premier—as people usually did—and, against his own convictions, abandoned Lens.
The precise military significance is of less value here than the remark credited to Lloyd George, who is reported to have said in England after a subsequent War Cabinet meeting—that in the Canadian Corps Commander he had met "the biggest thing physically and mentally on that front."
What Currie was at the head of the Corps no civilian then in Canada has any means of knowing, except by what men say who were under him or about him. A brawny veteran infantryman, whom I met with his chum, said:
"Currie—oh, yes, he was a good general. But few of the men where I was in the trenches or the billets ever liked him."
"But did you see much of him?"
"Too much, begad." His chum nodded agreement. "Too awful much, sometimes. Why, he used to come into a rest billet almost every day after we'd come there all shot to bits with only a corporal's guard o' the whole battalion, muddy and tired and sleepy; yes, and what's the first thing we hear, but begad, we've all to shine up and get spic and span for parade because the O.C. says the C.C. orders it. Out we go, like a ragbag remnant and he looks us over, says he knows we're tired and makes a speech——"
"Oh, boy, them speeches!" sighs the chum.
"Tells us how well we've done and all like o' that, and at the end says there's such a devil of a job yonder that he's compelled against his will——"
"Oh, yes, dead aginst his will," pipes the chum.
"To intimate that he'd like us to trail back to the show and do it some more for the sake of the victory and the good long billet we'll get presently. Yes, Currie was a good General. He did the work, he got results. But never tell me he was easy on his men—becuz four years I was wan o' them."
One allows in this man's opinion for the tendency to "grouch" that always appears in veterans who know best how to fight. Men like this were "fed up" on the war, of which they never saw anything but the glimpse of their own sector. The war was over now, and between the armistice and getting home many such men had a chance to talk, as they wearily waited for a ship.
"Yes, and that capture of Mons," says the chum, as he sips a little drink. "Altogether useless and against orders. The war was over."
"No," says the veteran; "that was a mere trifle, as I see it. Not one, two, three with the march into Germany. Begad! if ever I was a rebel it was then on that 150 miles, says you. But—'twas so ordered by the C.C. and we went."