Читать книгу Ordeal by Fire - Ralph Allen - Страница 10

Table of Contents

BORDEN heard the news of his victory in Halifax. For a dozen years he had scarcely dared turn his back on his impatient and frustrated followers. And now it must have given him a certain gentle satisfaction—and it would have been a gentle kind, for he was not a malicious man—to disappear alone and unavailable to his old home at Grand Pré beside the Bay of Fundy. Eight hundred miles away in Ottawa there grew and swelled to the edge of bursting a cloudhead of public rumor and speculation and private hope and anxiety that had hardly seen an equal since Confederation.

When Borden returned to the capital five days after the returns had been counted, it was not only the minor lobbyists and office seekers who were crowded in the corridors and anterooms leading to the country’s new inner sanctum. The Prime Minister-designate heard directly from or soon heard urgently on behalf of scores of men who believed themselves deserving of cabinet or other high rank in the public service. Letters and telegrams, not all of selfless congratulation, were coming in at the rate of three or four hundred a day.

The Cabinet, of course, was the first order of business, and here there were many nice points to consider. Priority of numbers would go automatically to the true-blue Tories, but the Quebec Tories, even though everyone knew them to be anti-Laurier and Nationalist rather than pro-Borden and Conservative, had to be well represented in common equity and sense. And the rebel Grit bankers and manufacturers whose flight to the protectionist banner had so clearly contributed to Laurier’s demise in Ontario must have their spokesman in the Cabinet too. Then there were wheels within the wheels. At least a token caning was required for the most persistently difficult of the older Tories. The usual individual rivalries and jealousies had to be considered.

Mercifully Borden was limited in the time for soul searching. Less than three weeks hence a new Governor General, the Duke of Connaught, would arrive at Quebec. It was imperative that the new Cabinet be sworn in before the Prime Minister left to meet him at the dockside. Within a few days Borden appointed seventeen ministers. His long-time chief lieutenant in the Tory councils, George E. Foster, reluctantly took the Ministry of Trade and Commerce. Finance, the post that Foster really wanted, went to the Liberal apostate Thomas White. Monk became Minister of Public Works and was joined in the Cabinet by two other Nationalists.

But none of the decisions Borden made in that October 1911 and perhaps no decision of his lifetime had anything like the bravura, the splendid derring-do, of his choice for the apparently secondary Ministry of Militia and National Defence. For that portfolio Borden selected Colonel Sam Hughes. In Hughes he chose and prepared for fulfillment one of the most bizarre and unlikely figures in all of Canadian history.

Sam Hughes was born in 1853 in the pastoral Ontario county of Durham. A Huguenot great-grandfather on his mother’s side had died at Waterloo fighting for Napoleon. On the same field blood from the other side of the family had been shed for Wellington. The mixed and storm-tossed tribe put out its Canadian roots during one of the Irish potato famines and soon took on the very bloom and texture of Ontario: in blood, mainly Irish and Scots; in religion, Methodist by way of Presbyterianism.

Sam grew up a non-smoker and a non-drinker. He had the solid build of a lacrosse player and the square jaw and unswerving, humorless blue eyes of a man destined to live and die without a single doubt. At seventeen he had taken up arms in the Fenian raids. Soon after that he was teaching school in eastern Ontario. From there he went to Toronto as a high school instructor in English, and shortly after his thirtieth birthday he had saved enough money to buy a weekly newspaper, the Lindsay Warder.

Lindsay nestled at the very heart of what was then a kind of subprovince of Ontario—the Loyal Orange Lodge—and as an Orangeman, an Irishman, an editor, and a teetotaler, Hughes soon became one of its leading figures. Within a few years he was Conservative member of Parliament for Victoria North and—a source of almost equal satisfaction—officer commanding the 45th Victoria Regiment of the Canadian militia.

In spite of the Irish strain Hughes was a devoted—though by no means an inflexible or uncritical—Imperialist. He saw in the South African War at the turn of the century a clear call to duty. Canada then had no regular army. Its few permanent garrisons were manned by British redcoats, and the senior staff officer of the Canadian militia was a British regular army officer.

Partly because it had no army to send and partly because there was no popular enthusiasm for the British excursion to the far-off veld, the Liberal government of the day showed no tendency to rush to the mother country’s aid. Colonel Sam chafed briefly under what he considered his country’s humiliating inertia and then acted unilaterally. To the then Canadian Militia Minister, Sir Frederick Borden (a cousin of Sir Robert), he dispatched an offer to raise and personally command a Canadian battalion to aid the British Expeditionary Force. Without waiting for his own government’s reply he sent the same offer to Joseph Chamberlain, then Secretary of State for the Colonies.

Chamberlain interpreted this message from the Canadian member of Parliament and officer as an earnest of Canada’s intentions and indicated his and the Empire’s gratitude. The Canadian government, which very probably would have matched or bettered Colonel Sam’s private and unsanctioned offer in its own good time, was only moderately embarrassed. But Major General Hutton, the British army officer in command of the Canadian forces, could not contain his rage or even bring himself to the attempt. Hutton had been in the habit of going over the Canadian Cabinet’s head to communicate directly with the War Office and with the Governor General, Lord Minto, in matters of defense. He now found the idea of a civilian colonel going over his, Hutton’s, head quite insupportable. There ensued between the two men a duel that would have enriched the pages of Cervantes, although on occasion it became difficult to tell which was Quixote and which was the windmill.

Hutton vowed that the upstart militia colonel from Lindsay not only would get no command in South Africa but would not get to South Africa at all. In one of the many exchanges of view and ukase about military affairs which he conducted with Lord Minto and the War Office without troubling to inform the Canadian government, the general wired London in cipher: “I regret that I must decline to recommend Colonel S. Hughes for employment with our troops proceeding Transvaal in any capacity whatever. This officer’s want of judgment and insubordinate self-assertion would seriously compromise success of Canadians when acting with Imperial troops. His insubordinate and improper correspondence, official and unofficial, renders his appointment moreover impossible on military grounds.”

And that, the general was happy to suppose as he reported the message to his sympathetic confidant the Governor General, was that.

But Colonel Sam still intended to march against the Boers whatever Hutton said. As an M.P., of course, he had ready access to the ears of members of the Cabinet, and as an Opposition M.P., he had a special nuisance value. No doubt, too, there was a certain grudging sympathy in the highest circles for the well-meaning Canadian civilian in collision with the autocratic British officer.

At any rate, when Hutton’s opposition to Hughes became public and apparent, the Cabinet insisted on Hutton’s appearing three different times to explain why Hughes should not be allowed to go to South Africa at least as a captain. Hutton remained unyielding and within ten days he was able to report to his ally Lord Minto, the Governor General: “Have carried all my points.” He added: “Poor Hughes is almost heartbroken and has been to see me twice full of tears and contrition. The struggle is over. No one but Your Excellency and I will ever realize the magnitude of what has been achieved by the overthrow of Hughes, the Conservative Insurgent.”

Hughes compounded his humiliation by writing two extremely docile letters to Hutton and as a reward he was now given permission to accompany the first Canadian contingent to South Africa as a civilian. But he was specifically forbidden to wear a uniform.

This posed no serious problem for the indomitable Hughes. When he disembarked at Cape Town he took a good room in the Grand Hotel and began looking around. Soon he discovered a number of high-ranking British staff officers he had met at the Diamond Jubilee celebrations in London two years before. Soon he was in uniform as a transport officer. And soon he was writing letters home to his paper in Lindsay recounting his military exploits in vivid detail. Actually, as nearly as can be ascertained through the fragmentary official accounts and the purple fog of Sam’s own narratives, he did conduct himself well as a supply officer and as a combat officer in a small handful of minor skirmishes. Certainly in his activities as a belligerent against the Boers there was nothing that was not to his credit. On the other hand, there was nothing so spectacularly heroic as to protect him from the consequences of his bombast. In newspaper dispatches in praise of himself and his ever faithful batman, a soldier named Turley, Hughes had directly or indirectly made comparisons to his and Turley’s credit with a number of other soldiers, including a few of considerably higher rank than his own. After some eight months in the field he was quietly ordered to return to Canada. Hughes received no reprimand and was indeed made officer commanding troops on the ship that bore him to England on the way back home.

Sam now thought he had scored at least a partial victory over Hutton, but its incompleteness and the lack of public acknowledgement of it was to rankle until his death. When the Boer War ended, Hughes received his service ribbons. But there were no decorations to show for what he clearly regarded as an exceptional combat record; he hadn’t even received his war gratuity.

He appealed for justice first to the Liberal government and finally, failing to find satisfaction there, directly to the Governor General. The Army Council of Britain notified the Governor General in 1904 that Hughes’s services in South Africa “were not such as to warrant the issue to him of the war gratuity.” But either through charity or prudence the Governor General did not pass this message on to Hughes, whose assessment of his exploits in Bechuanaland and the magnitude of whose slights thus grew year by year.

By 1908, eight years after his return from the wars, he wrote Prime Minister Laurier again demanding what he called recognition. By now he was convinced, and so intimated to Laurier, that he was entitled to at least one Victoria Cross and perhaps two. He said this estimate had been made to him by his divisional commander in South Africa, General Sir Charles Warren. Warren, he assured Laurier, had promised to recommend him for this highest of all British military decorations on two distinct occasions.

This much at least of Hughes’s background and temperament was well known to Borden when he took Hughes into his Cabinet. Perhaps the new Prime Minister had no certain way of knowing that Sam’s difficult streak was widening rather than narrowing. The fact was that it already bore symptoms of paranoia.

Six months before the election Hughes had begun to wonder seriously whether Borden himself was to be trusted. Throughout the party intrigues preceding the election victory Hughes had remained steadfastly a Borden man and he had confidently expected, after the abortive uprising of 1910, that he would be appointed either party whip or chief organizer. Instead the key posts went to George Perley and Herbert Ames. In a letter to a friend Sam poured out his misery and fury.

“Mr. Borden,” he began under taut control, “is a most lovely fellow; very capable but not a very good judge of men or of tactics.” But in a paragraph or two Hughes was claiming that he had almost singlehandedly saved Borden against a conspiracy led by the selfsame Perley and Ames. “You may imagine my horror this session to find Mr. Borden honoring and putting to the front, not the men who were loyal to him, but the men responsible for the agitation which caused and gave reason for the conspiracy.” “Ames,” he said reasonably, “has a nice mild appearance.” But he added, “He is absolutely vain and egotistical; a man of no depth or foresight. Indeed he would have made a marvellous main floorwalker for some large establishment such as Eaton’s but he has no political sagacity. The businessmen of Montreal will positively not have anything to do with him.... He is despised by the big men there.”

As for the other new favorite, “Perley is cold, tyrannical and very egotistic.” In a moment Hughes returned to the despised Ames, his orange banners flying. “He is from Quebec. He fought us on the autonomy bills; is under the control of the ecclesiastics of Rome.... The Orange Order, with its tens, aye, hundreds of thousands of friends will not put up with this sort of thing.”

Faced with such monstrous buffetings, Sam changed, almost between sentence and sentence, from stoic imperviousness to black despair. “As you know, my strength is that I am powerful where I am longest and best-known. I am loved by my friends, and feared but not despised by my opponents. These fellows are despised by both sides.... In my own case these d——d noodles, with one or two other nonentities, have for years whispered privately to suppress me. I have dozens of examples where these fellows over and over again prejudiced me by a word, a shrug of the shoulder, a grin or a direct condemnation.”

Hughes’s remarkable outcry, much more remarkable because it was utterly uninhibited by any official or semi-official purpose, ended thus: “Personally I want no recognition. I fought almost singlehanded for Borden last year and completely overthrew the conspiracy; yet my reward was to be put under the very men primarily responsible for the trouble. They were promoted leaders. It will not do. I incurred more enmity over that than over anything I ever did, and yet see my reward. As you know, I was never surpassed in organization yet or in getting work out of the fellows whether they were orange or green, but I would not care to give my time any longer towards organizing the whole country. That day has gone by. But a man likes to be trusted.”

This letter was written in March 1911. It produced no result of course, but by the winter of the following year Hughes had a new avenue of appeal. The stately, soldierly, and stuffy Duke of Connaught—third son of Queen Victoria—was now installed as Governor General. Hughes, again overlooking the niceties of rank and procedure, wrote him personally. On this occasion he discussed himself in the third person. In the now ancient South African campaigns participated in by the third-person Hughes, the Governor General was told, “there were very many pretty ‘scraps’ and some pretty heavy fighting.” He went on to localize these engagements. “In each and every one,” he said, “it fell to the lot of Hughes to direct the British forces, and in each and every instance victory fell to their lot, although the numbers and positions were invariably in favor of the Boers.”

He told Connaught of his two missing Victoria Crosses. His decision to leave the South African front, he went on, had been entirely his own, made on the advice of his commander in chief, Lord Roberts, that the war was as good as ended and in the conviction that he would be needed back in Canada during a forthcoming election campaign.

“General Warren,” Hughes wrote the Duke of Connaught, “begged and implored Hughes to remain. He assured Hughes that he had no officer left on whom he could rely. On the night of the 25th June, sobbing like a child, General Warren went over the same story, and again begged Hughes to remain, but the return fever had seized him, so he insisted on going.” Hughes recollected his ancient feud with the now long vanished General Hutton, whom he called “a madman.” He demanded that Connaught, having been informed of all these matters, now arrange that he, Sam Hughes, receive the “recognition” still owing to him because of his record in South Africa.

Connaught was almost stunned, partly by the nature of Hughes’s communication and partly by its mere submission. He had, without doubt, been warned to look out for this strange, untrained, and ignorant member of Parliament and militia colonel, but he had not expected to hear from him with so little ceremony. If Hughes had been a genuine officer or a genuine gentleman, Connaught would have disposed of him as easily as he’d have stared down an erring footman. But Sam was only a part-time officer and he made no pretense to being a gentleman; when Connaught fired a whiff of regal grape across his granite prow, he not only failed to cower—he almost failed to notice. Connaught urged him sternly to remember that he had long ago promised to bury the hatchet over the Hutton affair. Hughes urged Connaught just as sternly to get him justice—“justice meaning full recognition by Imperial authorities of all my South African services, my many times being named in dispatches, the gratuity and any honors given to any Canadian.” Connaught’s ultimate reply was to scribble an angry note to Borden suggesting he get rid of Hughes at once and for good.

But the remarkable Colonel Hughes was already beyond the reach of viceroys and barely within the reach of premiers. Borden was scared stiff of him—and so remained for five years—and was also impressed by his performance.

Hughes threw himself into his job at the comatose Department of Militia with high heart and high energy. He went to work at once on new armories, on a master plan of military training under which all male citizens would be trained for combat by the age of twelve. It was his aim to have in five years “some hundreds of thousands of our youths trained to shoot and march.” As his plan took shape he was able to condense it to a sentence: “Give me one million men who can hit a target at five hundred yards and we would not have a foe who could invade our country.”

In most quarters he was heard attentively and politely. But the cynical Henri Bourassa still had no respect. Le Devoir interpreted Hughes’s military blueprint in a different way: “He has invited twenty-five thousand schoolboys to go and make exercises in the fields and learn to become debauchees and play the fool at the expense of the state. He has drawn a map of the country as a vast field for maneuvers where he proposes to enroll the nation and teach them, democratically, the art of shooting human game at a convenient distance.”