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FIRE of unsolved origin on February 3, 1916, reduced the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa to a shell of grey stone. While they were being rebuilt to a grander scale with a magnificent Peace Tower as a war memorial the Victoria Museum, a barn-like structure in a residential district, was cleared of its curios and fossils and given to the law makers. My news apprenticeship included parts of the 1917 and 1919 sessions there as a member of the Press Gallery of the House of Commons, with forays into the Senate when its elder statesmen edged into current history.

This gave a sustained course in speech tasting and an intimate glimpse of the Dominion being run in wartime and afterwards.

The view was necessarily close for the Museum, while no doubt admirable as a makeshift legislature, was a clubby place as compared with the present House of Parliament with its cathedral dimensions and austere halls. The Commons met in a large auditorium across from the front entrance which had galleries suitable for press and public. It was arranged in the traditional manner and lacked nothing of mace or Speaker’s throne to give customary form.

From the Press Gallery it seemed that almost one sat on top of the Members below, so near were they. By stretching it might have been possible to reach down and scratch the head of that most urbane of Speakers, Hon. Eric N. Rhodes, which would have surprised though it would not have upset him.

Each of the wings, to right and left of the entrance, had been converted by partitions into a double series of stalls which made offices for Commoners and Senators, leaving an aisle between. Along this ran a strip of cocoanut matting. This had the effect of genteel stabling—but no more impressive sight may be imagined than that of the lean, athletic Speaker, wearing his tricorne hat, black uniform and gown and buckled shoes, sweeping along one of these corridors on his way to or from the chamber, the gowned clerks with their books and the Sergeant-at-Arms carrying the mace in dignified attendance.

But with its passage the corridors lost all pretence of historic charm or high and courtly mystery and became a kind of political market-place. Commoners, Senators, correspondents, Ministers’ secretaries, Hansard reporters, girl stenographers and lobbyists found them a common rallying ground. This robbed this Parliament pro tem of that aloof atmosphere which doth cloak legislators and made most of them most ordinary human fellows, with the exception of the greater men, Borden, Laurier, White, Meighen, Lapointe, Fielding, who were not to be found leaning against a partition in mood for chat.

This to me was Ottawa, for I kept a beaten track between my lodging and the National Museum, saw little of the city and learned little of its life, if any, outside Parliament, except such as went on in the Chateau Laurier and the Russell House, the two hotels which were hives of political swarmers. My first lodging was modest enough but during the 1919 session I inherited the lease of a small, chaste suite in the Roxborough Apartments from a Gallery predecessor of expansive tastes. This noble housing gave amusement to some of my colleagues who had little pretentiousness, and the veteran Tom King of The Toronto World dubbed me “the bird in a gilded cage”.

The Roxborough had select lodgers and a very imposing doorman in uniform who saluted gravely, and I had a conviction of guilt every time I slipped past him with a bundle of soiled clothes for the Chinese laundryman. He would, I know, have died of shame if he had suspected a guest of such low habits. However, Tom King and other Gallery spirits were delighted at the dilemmas of etiquette which I brought them to solve. My white room and tiled bathroom were charming. An older colleague frequently came there to sleep off the effect of too much hospitality elsewhere. Nothing, he said, sobered him like a short stay in my room at the Roxborough.

The Gallery held a number of personalities, men without affectation who were kind to a neophyte: the white-haired, wise Tom King with skin soft as a girl’s and eyes so nearly blind that he could not see the Members below or take notes but carried every tone and twist of the debate in his mind, to dictate his despatch afterwards; Arthur Ford of The London Free Press, modest and courteous; the late J. K. Munro, of The Toronto Telegram, caustic, cynical, warm-hearted; the late Tom Blacklock of The Montreal Gazette, untidy, gruff of manner, keeper of a thousand confidences; Charlie Bishop of The Ottawa Citizen, bland, imperturbable; Grattan O’Leary of The Ottawa Journal, quick, clever, sharp; H. E. M. Chisholm of The Manitoba Free Press, excitable, lovable Highlander; Vernon Knowles of The Winnipeg Telegram, cool, quiet, wise; Bill Marchington of The Toronto Globe, unhurrying, helpful; and the French-Canadian group who kept largely to themselves and do not come so easily to mind except Savard the elegant and Brousseau the boulevardier, delightful fellows. The Gallery men were more real than the Parliamentarians, more clever than most of them, as they quipped and scribbled.

In 1917 I reached Ottawa as relief man in time to cover the passage through the Senate of the Conscription Act and afterwards in that and the 1919 sessions I reported Commons debates on the acquiring of the capital stock of the Canadian Northern Railroad, the War Times Elections Act, the formation of the Canadian National Railways, the abolition of titles in Canada and the rights of the provinces to create their own divorce courts.

Public interest in these measures was great. War and the imminence of Union Government and an election made the 1917 session a contentious and strenuous one and I frequently put from eight to twelve thousand words a night on the telegraph wires for the next day’s paper, every word by hand since typewriters were not then in as common newspaper use as they are to-day. The bulk was running copy, ground out while listening to a debate, catching up, if necessary, afterwards and writing the introduction when the House arose.

During both sessions there was considerable steam-rollering, in 1917 by the Conservative Government, in 1919 by the Union Government which had succeeded it to carry through the War, and many nights saw the closure rule in effect—twenty minute speeches, with debate automatically ending at 2 a.m. when the vote was taken. Such nights were crowded with talk. I often found myself writing until 4 or 5 o’clock and turning into bed after sunrise, facing the necessity, usually, of being back at the House at 11 a.m. to report a committee or a morning sitting, for in 1919 morning sittings were the vogue towards the end of a heavy session. I became an automaton spinning out copy in an unending weave from this marathon talk factory. Thumb and wrist muscles grew at times so weary that the hand could scarcely guide the pencil. At least, it engendered stamina.

That historic period remains in the memory largely for its work. Parliament ceased to be a place of romance or wonder and became just a chamber in which figures, grown familiar as the whirling riders of a six-day bicycle race seen each day, uttered ceaseless speech that had to be listened to endlessly. Not that it did not have its drama and its emotion, and that work of importance was not accomplished in parliamentary fashion. But, while feeling was sincere enough, there was an effect of sham fighting for purely party advantage, of wordy and inferior oratory except by the leaders, of waste of time and energy. That is, as viewed in retrospect. Perhaps one should have a taste for debate to appreciate continued sittings of a legislature just as one must have an ardour for wrestling to be a fan.

One afternoon, during an exchange on some forgotten subject, an Ontario Conservative of cabinet rank and a Quebec Liberal who had been a Laurier minister joined issue and abused each other lustily. Both are now dead; they were no worse than many of their fellows; their names do not matter.

The Gallery went into action to garner the hot periods of attack and retort while the Hansard reporters’ pencils raced to put their words imperishably on record. Shortly they ceased and sat down; the House resumed its dead level of debate by back benchers; the Gallery relaxed. I strolled out to the front hall for a smoke, in time to see the two opponents issue from opposing doors and rush at one another.

To start fisticuffs! Good gracious, no. To shake hands and almost kiss in the Gallic manner.

“Ah, mon vieux,” cried the French-Canadian, “your speech, it was grand. The Orange lodges will love it.”

“Hope they do,” said the other, “but say, Quebec will gobble yours up. Hot stuff for the habitant, eh!”

“You think so? Good! Come, let’s have a drink.”

And the pair of them, lively likeable men, went chuckling down the corridor.

The War was still on in 1917. Tens of thousands of young Canadians were being shipped overseas to squat in trenches, to be shot at, wounded and gassed, to die. Tens of thousands of loyal fathers, mothers, wives, daughters and sons had their eyes turned towards the distant, invisible, soundless guns. But in Parliament went on this endless talk and the often petty, frequently spiteful party warfare. Yet what would you? There had to be discussion. This was Democracy, in war as in peace. In 1917 there was a general election in the offing with loyalty as the keynote. The great game of the Conservatives was rubbing it into Laurier and those Liberals, mostly French-Canadian, who were opposed to conscription. The Liberals, bitter, uncertain, divided by the threat of Union Government which many were ultimately to join, feeling Laurier going shortly from among them as leader, fought back as best they might.

Similarly in 1919, the War over and Laurier dead, the Union Government, predominantly Conservative, kept up a barrage on the Liberal rump, while the latter maintained a constant sniping as they gave way before the forces opposed to them.

I was, no doubt, incompetent to measure the value of so many words or the meaning of so many speeches. It is perhaps sufficient to write down Parliament as a necessary institution of government under Democracy with no greater proportion of stupidity and no more waste energy than there is in business or society. But, as a meeting of the national directors chosen to run the country, much of it was hard to understand. Decisions as to policy were made in cabinet or caucus. In the House in open debate some of the speeches, of the ruling or more logical minds, might explain or criticize with effect but many of them only muddied or obscured an issue. At least, not a speech, good or bad, ever seemed to change a vote. Only too frequently men spoke to their constituents rather than to impress their colleagues, which may have its necessity, of course, in a democratic state. It may be, too, that the freedom of any Member to say what he pleased on a pro-party basis had its value in deciding the Government in regard to the legislation it might openly introduce.

Of course, it was impossible to tell when some rank and file Member might not say something that was pertinent and wise, even though anything in the nature of a really upsetting utterance was rare. Actually Members were voting machines, for or against. For the most part Government members supported a move or a measure and the Opposition attacked it, whatever its merits or demerits. There was no other plan. It was attack and defence, a game largely for goals or points like a hockey match. It was common to hear declarations of enthusiasm for Canada but most men showed themselves most careful of themselves and their party. It may be that party views were always for the good of Canada.

In the 1919 session the shifting times were indicated. For the first time Progressive Members from the West had seats to show that sections of the country felt that some change from the old parties was necessary. And the general strike in Winnipeg, with its local revolutionary threat, won heavy debate. It was the first sign of the ferment which Canada was to feel in common with the rest of the world though few men in the House or the Gallery realized that the Dominion they had known was slipping, as it emerged from the War, into a world whirlpool of swirling values.

Of course, the House of Commons held many able and convincing men and men of charm. Two gentlemen were outstanding, on opposite sides, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the white-plumed Liberal chieftain, and Sir Robert Borden, the sturdy, handsome, if somewhat ponderous, Prime Minister. The latter may have had to assume responsibility for some of the tactics of his party and for the measures like the War Times Elections Act, which loaded the dice by enfranchising the women relatives of soldiers and disfranchising alleged alien enemies for the sure return of Union Government to prosecute the war until the last available young man had been sent to the front, but in the House he was never anything but fair and courteous, even to opponents. He was somewhat laborious in manner, but no one could so lucidly straighten out a tangled debate. He may not have been a Lloyd George or a Woodrow Wilson or a Clemenceau as wartime leader of his country but he inspired by his character and calm. On one occasion, after returning from England and France where he learned all the secrets, he called the correspondents into his office and with no more than a word of caution that he was speaking confidentially he gave us, quietly and graphically, a résumé of the situation which was at the moment most grave for the Allies.

For the most part Laurier sat, a sad and tired wraith, seldom rising to speak, while around him lesser men wrangled. The spirit seemed to have gone out of him and I often wondered wherein had lain the magic of the great minister. One evening he revealed it, when, on a threat of closure with the Liberals vainly trying to block the move, he arose unexpectedly and for fifteen minutes showed himself a king. Hands hard on his hips, he straightened up his slight, bent form until it was erect as in his youth. And he flamed. How he flamed! He spoke of justice, freedom, right. He spoke not of war or of politics but of abstract, ethical principles—and his Conservative opponents cowered beneath the flail of his argument. For months, on the defence against the patriots opposite, the Liberals had had little to cheer for. But that night they jumped up to salute the last flare of spirit from their dying chief. I have always been grateful for that flash of him.

Other men registered for some forthright quality of heart, mind or spirit: Sir Thomas White, N. W. Rowell, Thomas Crerar, James A. Robb, W. S. Fielding, Ernest Lapointe, Frank Oliver, F. B. Carvell, George P. Graham, Dr. Michael Clark, the orator; and individuals like Arthur Meighen, Solicitor-General and future Prime Minister, with his rapier brain and clinical coolness in debate, the sturdy Sir Sam Hughes and William Pugsley, suave and crafty, who won, if not warmth, at least respect. But for the most part the members were dull. The majority of the speeches were uninspiring, local in their outlook, more fitted to a county council than a national parliament. As a group the French-Canadians contained some lively minds and tongues, the vitriolic Lucien Cannon, the humorous Joseph Archambault, the solemn Thomas Vien, all young men, who more than matched most of their English-speaking colleagues.

W. L. Mackenzie King, now for the third time Prime Minister, was not then in the House but R. B. Bennett, recent Prime Minister, was in 1917 a back bencher from Calgary though a highly vocal one. Yet he was scarcely to be distinguished as a man of destiny despite his rather portentous bearing and his rapid-fire talk. One night in a debate under closure rules, limited to a speech of twenty minutes, on the Canadian Northern Railroad difficulties, he packed so much machine-gun oratory into his periods that the Hansard reporters failed to get him completely in shorthand. If anyone then in House or Gallery saw in him a future Prime Minister, he kept his opinion to himself.

Mackenzie King appeared in post-war politics for the first time at the National Liberal Convention in August, 1919, at Ottawa, as contender for the party leadership in succession to Sir Wilfrid Laurier. I witnessed its choice of him. The convention wound heavily through hot days and nights until the last hours when he won out on the final ballot over the late W. S. Fielding, the veteran Nova Scotian who had been Laurier’s Minister of Finance—the present Senator George P. Graham, former Minister of Railways, and the late D. D. McKenzie, House leader of the Liberals following Laurier’s death, having retired after the first two ballots.

It was worth waiting for the climax. Mackenzie King sat on the platform during the final vote-taking, his face agleam with perspiration, his collar wilted, his eyes tell-tale under the strain as he fingered his chin before the barrage of eyes. Across from him sat the elderly Fielding, a little grey slip of a man, slightly paralysed from a recent stroke. He might have been Fate, graven, inscrutable. Even when word was flashed that King had won and pandemonium broke loose, not a movement showed that he was hurt or disappointed.

Scarcely had the cheers died before he was at the front of the platform, a frail old man in a moment of severe defeat. He did not falter. Holding to the table, in accents that trembled a little, he moved that the meeting make the selection of his young opponent unanimous.

Mackenzie King proved historically splendid when his turn to speak came.

That virtually ended my recording of party politics. In December, 1917, between the two sessions aforesaid, I was taken off reporting and made Telegraph Editor of The Star. That meant sitting “on the Desk” and reading, editing and heading copy arriving by wire from points outside Toronto. The desk was small then; the City Editor in charge of the staff and of their copy, with an occasional assistant, the Cable Editor and the Telegraph Editor handled all matter, except financial and sports, for all editions.

It was great experience for a green but eager editor. I was scarcely a week on the desk when shortly after nine o’clock on the morning of December 6, the flash came that Halifax, Nova Scotia, had been destroyed by an explosion. Wiped out! That was the first report that initiated a strenuous day. A flash over the wires, half a dozen words!—the top was off the world, and the office jerked into hectic action.

How to get news? Wires were down; only meagre and conflicting scraps came trickling in. Then there was the censorship, since this was a war disaster. Everyone on the Desk went at the job. The City Editor put men to the task of checking on every local interest that had a Halifax connection. Telegrams were sent to every conceivable point which might have word. Staff reporters were started by train for the scene. My job was to help handle incoming telegraph copy, correlate it, head it, get it into the paper. The office was shortly besieged with telephone calls from relatives. The Managing Editor kept pressing, pressing, pressing for details, the measure of destruction, the actual damage, the cause, the number of dead, the number of injured, the lists of names. In turn we kept clamouring down east for news.

Nearly twelve hours passed, though we tried every source, before we had anything like an accurate toll.

We issued some ten extra editions. I worked in a feverish daze. It was the first time I had been caught in the hard, smashing charge of a big news story and gripped in the swing of The Star’s desk organization that was to go full-out for victory so many times in the years to come.

In the months following the Halifax disaster, on that desk, I learned a lot about news. For the news then was war news. I helped to handle copy, write heads, assess the value of the vivid drama that came marching across the round table at which we worked from the various fronts at home and abroad.

What newspaper values were like before the War I do not know, but the War certainly produced new ones. Death, suffering, sacrifice, sorrow, tragedy, courage, history, on a gigantic scale, offered themselves in relentlessly poignant panorama—to be gathered as an overwhelming harvest, to be written, edited, featured. They came clicking off the wires as words, words, words—little flashes of six words or ten words spelling action that might mean the death and wounding of ten thousand men, long columns of words that described that action in detail. Words marching by platoons, battalions, divisions before one’s eyes all day long as newspaper copy. And scarcely a word that did not concern the War. Such was the Desk in 1918.

In the old days a murdered man or woman might make a sensation of local interest, unless it was a Thaw shooting or a Crippen killing which excited the world. A couple of boys might drown; three, four or five people might burn; at odd intervals, a train wreck, a volcano or an earthquake might take sudden, shocking toll or a ship like the Titanic or the Empress of Ireland sink with startling pageantry and pathos. Such in pre-war times was death as the newspapers knew it.

Then came the War and death began to flaunt itself as daily, ceaseless, grotesque killing on a scale that made all the murders, fires, earthquakes and shipwrecks of recent history casual isolated episodes. Nations tore at each other’s throats. Men became savages living in trenches and holes underground, hurling death in wholesale fashion by mathematics, creeping across No Man’s Land like primitives to choke and disembowel. Civilization stripped off its veneer of a few centuries and stood forth as naked hate lusting to slay. Forgotten was Christianity, over and out went the teaching of the sages, as Europe was turned into a gigantic slaughter house. Canada sent a half million men to it. Everyone who stayed at home, even on a newspaper desk, was directly involved in this colossal affair of death.

Therefore, local as the Toronto newspapers may have been previously in their outlook, for four and a half years the War was news. Big news. Compelling news. News with a thousand faces, all terrible, every one tragic. Ships like the Lusitania were sunk by torpedo. Hospital ships with wounded men were scuttled. Dreadnoughts locked horns in titanic battles. Submarines were blown up by mines. War fronts were not little Waterloos or Spion Kops but stretched across continents, around the Seven Seas, back into the factories and the homes of Canada. Vast battles were fought for days, for weeks, for months, in which thousands of men died for a shattered hilltop like Vimy Ridge or a broken town like Ypres or a strip of wood on the Somme. Poison gas became a recognized weapon. Tanks were born as fearsome monsters. Aeroplanes and dirigibles showered death from the clouds. Lord Kitchener was blown up at sea. Russia weakened and staged a revolution. London was bombed. Paris was shelled. Jerusalem was captured. Germany crumpled. The Kaiser fled....

That was the panorama of news, with its accompaniment of Canadian action, war measures, orders-in-Council, conscription, meatless days, casualties, Victory loans, that flowed across the Desk.

Since there was war, what luck, in my early newspaper life, to have helped to handle the news of it! It not merely taught values, but speed, intensity, drive, the meaning of seconds in getting copy out to catch an edition.

I learned how to assess, slash, condense, rewrite, change a whole page at the last moment, working at such a pace, so hard, so concentrated, with every faculty and nerve on the task of flashing the cream of a startling fact in a heading of set size and shape, that for hours daily I was like a battling, punching boxer in a pinch. In peace time the rhythm of the news is much more smooth; only at sudden and irregular intervals do the fighting periods come when sharp, compelling breaks arise. But in the last year of the War, especially in the last months, every day was a rally, every hour a driving sprint. Seldom outside afterwards, gathering news, even when I was keyed to a high tempo to beat time or outwit rivals, have I known such a state of nervous and physical pressure as happened day after day in those War Desk days.

Work that is interesting, however fast and hard, never kills and I would have survived the War news period and gone with colours flying into the softer times of peace but that in October, 1918, just before the Armistice, I was struck by the ’flu, then in sweeping epidemic, and put out of action. When I won back to full work effort it was not on the Desk. I was sent back to get news at the source, reporting, which was well. It was to give me a lot more acquaintance with men and events than I could ever have gained inside.