Читать книгу England, Canada and the Great War - Louis Georges Desjardins - Страница 6

No stronger evidence could be given of the determination of the country as a whole, and over all its component parts, to support Great Britain and her Allies to final success, than the truly wonderful record of the voluntary enlistment of more than four hundred thousand men, of all walks in life, to rush to the front.

Recruiting in the Province of Quebec indeed started very well. Several thousands of French Canadian youth rallied to the colors. I hope and trust that, sooner or later, it will be possible to make a more satisfactory statistical record of the number of French Canadians who enlisted. I am fully convinced that the total is somewhat much larger than the figures usually quoted. It would surely be conducive to a better understanding of the case, if such statistical information was carefully prepared and made public. It is easily conceivable that the pressure of the work of maintaining the splendid Canadian army renders it perhaps difficult to attend actually to the details of that compilation. So we can afford to wait for the redress of figures which may constitute a wrong to the race second in numbers but equal to any in patriotism in Canada.

Pending my remarks upon certain causes which have contributed to check recruiting amongst the French element in the Province of Quebec, I consider it important to mention those which were easy to ascertain and comprehend.

It is a well known fact that early marriages are a rule in the Province of Quebec much more than in the other Provinces of the Dominion. As a natural consequence, the available number of young unmarried men for recruiting purposes was proportionately less. I myself have known parishes in our Province where half a dozen of unmarried young men from twenty years of age and upwards could not be found.

It was easily to foresee that a comparison would be made between the number of Canadian-born volunteers in the English-speaking Provinces and that from the Province of Quebec. The degree of enthusiasm for enlistment in the other Provinces between the foreign born and the Canadian born has also been noticed. It has generally been admitted that most naturally the young men recently arrived in Canada were more strongly appealed to by all the sacred ties still binding them to their mother land. When generations have, for more than a century, enjoyed all the blessings of peace and lived far away from the turmoil of warlike preparations and military conflicts, is it to be much wondered at that the entire population is not at once permeated with the feeling of the dangers ahead, and do not rise rapidly to the full sense of the duty she is suddenly called upon to perform.

My daily personal intercourse with hundreds of my French Canadian compatriots allowed me to realize that many of them, even amongst the leading classes, were over-confident that the Allies representing at the beginning the united effort of England, France and Russia, soon to be reinforced by Italy, breaking away from the Central Powers, would certainly be equal to the task of being victorious over German militarism. Repeatedly, before public meetings and in very numerous private conversations, I urgently implored my hearers not to be so deluded, doing my best to convince them that it would be a fatal error to shut our eyes from the truth, that the military power of Central Europe, comprising the two great Empires of Germany and Austria, Bulgaria, with the help of Asiatic Turkey, and the undisguised support of baneful teutonic influences and intrigues at the courts of Petrograd and Athens, was gigantic, and that the terrible conflict would surely develop into a struggle for life and death between human freedom and barbarism.

This feeling of over-confidence was passing away, when it became evident that to triumph over the modern huns and their associates was no easy task; that the goal of freeing humanity from the threatening universal domination would require the most determined effort of the nations who had heroically undertaken to reach it.