Читать книгу Ordeal by Fire - Ralph Allen - Страница 17

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IT was now well into June of 1914. Parliament was prorogued on the twelfth. On the twenty-eighth the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated at Sarajevo. On the twenty-ninth Borden’s memoirs record: “I left for Nova Scotia, arriving at Halifax late the following evening. Here I received various delegations, chiefly respecting patronage.” This now seemingly incredible serenity reflected not irresponsibility but sheer innocence. Borden had concluded at least two years earlier that war—sometime, somewhere—was inevitable, but he still had no suspicion that it was imminent. Nor was this surprising. For his knowledge of what was about to happen in Europe, he remained dependent on the press, on his intuition, and on the vague and irregular dispatches relayed to him at the pleasure of the British government through the Governor General.

As late as July 23—barely two weeks before war was to begin—the only Canadian military units in an attitude of belligerency were poised to repel, not an armed invasion from Europe, but a shipload of 376 would-be East Indian immigrants. The unfortunate party had sailed from Hong Kong on a Japanese vessel in the full but unwarranted expectation of being allowed to enter Canada at Vancouver. Ever since coolie labor finished the C.P.R. and filled the country with leftover laundrymen and café owners, Canada’s immigration policy had been distinctly hostile to Orientals and there was no change now. On Borden’s orders the H.M.C.S. Rainbow, the dubious pride of the hapless Canadian navy, had rushed to the Vancouver dock area, as had a detachment of militiamen. Ultimately the unhappy Indians sailed back home after the equally unhappy Canadian government had restocked their ship with food. On the same day Winston Churchill cabled that Admiral Jellicoe would soon arrive to reopen discussions about Canadian naval aid. The admiral could be expected either in August or October.

Borden thereupon took off for what he expected to be a month’s golfing and swimming in Muskoka. In the meantime the Governor General was relaxing at Banff, half the width of the country away. The Prime Minister did not return to Ottawa until the last week of peace; the Governor General, not until the first day of war.

Borden had officially volunteered military help to the British government two days before the war began. On August 6, two days after it had begun, he was informed: “His Majesty’s Government gratefully accept your offer to send expeditionary force to this country and would be glad if it could be dispatched as soon as possible.”

No such force was ready or in sight. But if Canada as a nation was not well prepared for the onrush of history, there was one Canadian who was more than ready. This was Borden’s Minister of Militia and National Defence, Colonel Sam Hughes. Hughes was soon to become—next to Borden himself and not infrequently above Borden himself—the best known and most influential of all Canadians. In the first days of August 1914, the role had already begun to fit him as snugly as the red-tabbed khaki twill for which he happily discarded his mufti.

Hughes had been at his desk in Ottawa throughout the mysterious, ill-comprehended days before the mysterious, ill-comprehended decision that there must be a war. If there was going to be a war he, at least, was set for it, spiritually and psychologically. Indeed, as late as August 3, the martial spirit of Grey and Asquith was far too tame for his liking.

On the morning of that fateful day, Hughes’s military secretary, who was later to become his biographer, found Colonel Sam pondering his morning paper with growing distaste. Although Germany and Austria were already at war with France, Russia, and Serbia, Britain’s course still lay before Parliament. Suddenly, according to his secretary, “Colonel Hughes rose from his desk, banged the paper with his fist and said: ‘They are going to skunk it. England is going to skunk it; Morley and Burns have resigned from the cabinet as a protest against participation in the war, and they seem to be looking for an excuse to get out of helping France. Oh! What a shameful state of things! By God, I don’t want to be a Britisher under such conditions; to think that they would want to go back on France!’ ”

Then Hughes, by now thoroughly worked up, ordered the flag lowered from its masthead above his headquarters. And down it came and remained down for fully an hour before the Minister of Militia was persuaded by cooler heads that the honor of the Empire was not, in truth, in jeopardy. A day later Hughes’s fears were fully at rest and he was fully embarked on the job of raising, equipping, and sending into battle one of the finest groups of fighting men of its size in modern history.

On the surface he had not much to build on. In his three years of office, Colonel Sam had been able to enlarge the military budget only from seven million dollars to eleven million. His regular army stood at three thousand men and it had no reserves. The militia had a paper strength of seventy-five thousand, but by no means all of these took part in the brief annual course of training, which consisted mainly of two weeks of foot and rifle drill, field skirmishes, physical training, and community singing. (The teetotaling Hughes had imposed an absolute ban on wet canteens in the militia camps.)

Field Marshal Sir John French had inspected the Canadian militia a few years earlier and reported that it was “only a large collection of troops without any organization.” A German general had said it could be completely ignored insofar as any effect it might have on any war in Europe. A Canadian officer, Colonel Hamilton Merritt, credited his country with “perhaps the most expensive and ineffective military system of any civilized community in the world.”

Hughes set out to correct these conditions with the erratic energy that he soon made his trademark and finally left as his monument. The country had about two million men of military age to draw upon. The terms of service in the Army were compatible with the general standards of the time. Pay ranged from a dollar a day for privates to twenty dollars a day for major generals. A private who came back from the war totally disabled could expect a pension of twelve dollars and fifty cents a month. One who left a widow would leave her thirty cents a day, plus a dime for each of the first two children only. If, after his enlistment, his father or mother or his wife wanted him discharged and could give a good reason, any soldier could be bought back into civilian life for fifteen dollars or less.

Sam Hughes, seeing in the profile of his country a strong trace of his own granite, true-blue cast of jaw, rightly estimated that the immediate problem was not how to raise recruits but what to do with them. He wired his two hundred militia units instructing them to recruit to war strength. But, he said emphatically again and again, only volunteers would be accepted now, and only volunteers would be accepted in the future.

Borden had asked for a first contingent of twenty thousand. As a place in which to assemble, house, partly train, and sort out so considerable and—for Canada—so unprecedented a community Hughes selected the valley of the Jacques Cartier River near Quebec City. There, amid Plantagenet swirlings and clankings, oceans of dust, mud, oaths of humans, groans of horses, and the creaking of wagon wheels and harness, he built a great tented camp almost overnight. Valcartier was one of Sam Hughes’s authentic triumphs. Out of its pastoral slopes and fields he created, in the late August and early September of 1914, four miles of bell tents, a maze of rope corrals and canvas mangers, and an artillery range the size of the townsite of Montreal. As its first settlers began converging on it in response to the first calls for volunteers, he treated the growing settlement as a personal empire.

Its management, he shortly told Borden in a memorandum, compelled him to deal with “thousands upon thousands of cranks, contractors, grafters, self-seekers and interlopers, as well as with thousands of decent men.” But neither then nor in the more complex future awaiting him did Hughes’s willingness to cope with these problems waver in the least degree. On more than one occasion he hinted that he personally would lead the first contingent overseas and command it in battle, as there was no one so well qualified. He made frequent tours of inspection at Valcartier, sometimes augmenting his weekday colonel’s uniform with a sword and a feathered hat. Occasionally he appeared on horseback.

He took a special delight in handing out promotions on the spot. “A fine unit you have here, major,” he would say. “Pardon me, sir,” an embarrassed officer would say, “I’m only a captain.” “You’re a major now,” Hughes would say, moving grandly down the parade lines or tent rows.

Although it was of undoubted advantage to the country and to the government to have so vigorous and forthright a man in command of the war effort, there were also some serious disadvantages. On the relatively small stage of the Boer War and during its long but narrow epilogue, Hughes had aroused the choler of none but men of eminence—two Governors General, a British War Minister, three or four British generals. But now he began to antagonize people of no greater stature than his own, and this, in time, proved more serious.

The Anglican bishop of Montreal came to see him, complaining that there weren’t enough Anglican chaplains to serve the first overseas contingent. Hughes used so many swear words in rebuttal that the bishop was moved to complain to Borden. The secretary of the Toronto Humane Society visited Hughes to complain about the mistreatment of military horses. Hughes at first called him a liar, then amended it to a damned liar, and according to the official objection of the distraught friend of animals, “finally pushed me out of the room.”

But Hughes had already made an assessment of Borden that was to stand him in good stead for some five years. Shortly after taking office he had written a friend: “Mr. Borden is a most lovely fellow; gentle-hearted as a girl.” After the war began, his attitude toward the Prime Minister ranged from obsequiousness to outright bullying. A journalist of the day summed up their relation like this: “The trouble between Sir Sam and the Prime Minister is that the Prime Minister has never been able to lassoo him and keep him lassooed. Sir Sam is a bronco of broncos and will ever be.” The gentle and gentlemanly Borden’s acquiescence in Hughes’s conduct is not easy to understand over the distance of the years. But the vast if somewhat awkward drive with which Sam had raised the first contingent, assembled it at Valcartier, and got it to the front had commanded the Prime Minister’s genuine respect. And there is also no doubt that Borden was afraid of him—not because Sam knew of any hidden bodies, but just because Borden had a quiet and peaceable nature and to avoid a public collision with the unquiet and unpeaceable Minister of Militia meant a good deal to him.

In Hughes’s two years as a wartime minister he picked on Borden outrageously and sometimes deceived him. Once Borden, who customarily detached himself from the troublesome business of procurement, ventured to question an order of Hughes’s to fit out a Canadian brigade with kilts. Hughes was on one of his numerous trips abroad and Borden cabled him timidly: “We decided last winter against large additional expense necessary for kilts.” Hughes sternly cabled him back: “You are entirely in error regarding kilts. They are less than half the cost of trousers. One kilt outwears four to six pair trousers.”

When Borden wondered whether an unsuccessful contractor mightn’t have been given more consideration Sam dismissed the man as “an ordinary, Yankee, boozing agitator.” Hughes, who quickly arranged his own promotions from colonel to major general to lieutenant general and also acquired a knighthood in the process—needed Borden’s acquiescence in these ventures. On his first trip to England he found it necessary to cable Borden nervously: “No report rank from you.” Borden cabled back timidly: “Are you specially desirous that your promotion should be made in meantime?” Hughes then replied firmly: “Re promotion my deputy or others announced long ago it seeming everyone wondering what wrong.” (To a Canadian wit, Hughes’s knighthood provided the opening for the war’s most ingenious pun: “Le roi Sam Hughes.”)

General Alderson, the commander of Sam’s First Division, was soon complaining behind the minister’s back to the Governor General. Guns, horses, and men had been loaded indiscriminately on the troop transports from Quebec and it took weeks to sort them out after the disembarkation in England. Moreover, Alderson complained, Hughes’s prejudices as a teetotaler were injuring morale. He had personally decreed that there would be no wet canteens, and so when they had a chance to leave the dismal Salisbury Plain encampment in England, the Canadian troops were under a strong compulsion to drink as much as they could as quickly as they could. In one of his rare retreats, Hughes authorized wet canteens, but to his growing list of enemies the name of the First Division commander had been added.

Alderson had further infuriated Sam by predicting that the Ross rifle, the Canadians’ basic infantry weapon, would not stand hard usage. The Ross rifle was not of Hughes’s devising. The first contract for it had been let by Frederick Borden, his predecessor in the Liberal government of Laurier. The manufacturer, the Scottish industrialist Sir Charles Ross, undertook to make twelve thousand rifles a year at twenty-five dollars each. Hughes had supported the contract himself even when he was a member of the parliamentary opposition. He tried it on the ranges and was impressed by its accuracy, and thus when he inherited it from Frederick Borden he also inherited his own blessing. From that point on his pathological inability to revise his first judgments held him a prisoner. By the time the first Canadian division went into the trenches at St.-Julien and Ypres, Canada had acquired 150,000 of the Ross rifles and Hughes was incapable of entertaining criticism of them.

Many of his other activities were, to put it mildly, provocative. He abused senior officers in front of junior officers and junior officers in front of their men, and he made no bones about it. He made many speeches holding the regular army up to ridicule and contempt; in one he lumped all the permanent officers together as barroom loafers. One junior commander, born and grown to a tradition in which such conduct was both unspeakable and unthinkable, was himself shocked into an unspeakable and unthinkable breach of discipline. He wrote the Prime Minister direct urging him to “get rid of this objectionable cad.” Sam Hughes, he said, insulted officers and men by the score, using the vilest language “whether ladies are present or not, indiscriminately cursing all and several.” When the city of Toronto conducted a mobilization test under the auspices of all the leading officials and local military officers, Sam described it publicly as “ridiculous nonsense.”

Within weeks Hughes was the most newsworthy and the most debated figure in the Dominion. Sir George Foster, Deputy Prime Minister and a senior to Hughes in the Borden Cabinet, scribbled in his diary: “There is only one feeling as to Sam, that he is crazy.” Even Sir William Mackenzie, the railway baron, whom Sam had befriended in the earlier debates about the Canadian Northern, began to wonder about him.

Hughes looked all critics and doubters squarely in the eye. To Mackenzie he wrote: “In short, Sir William, my character is unique, my ways are unique, and I purpose following the old road to the end.” When the Toronto Board of Trade passed a motion in censure of him he replied: “My critics will stop their yelping as a puppydog chasing an express train gives up its job as a useless task.”

To Borden he wrote: “It is my intention to stop all this backbiting, intriguing, whispering and all this premeditated plan of ‘suppression.’ They forget that half-a-dozen grasshoppers in a meadow make more noise than one thousand fat oxen grazing.”

As for the charge of abusing officers, his only answer to that was to recall wistfully that Wellington used to order unsatisfactory subordinates shot on the spot and that Edward VII once, “in the presence of tens of thousands of soldiers and spectators,” publicly dismissed a major general because he had forgotten to wear one of his decorations.

As the Valcartier encampment grew, Hughes’s sense of mastery grew with it. When one of his lady secretaries invented a spade with a hole in the middle which was supposed to serve as combination trenching tool and bulletproof shield for snipers, Hughes promptly ordered twenty-five thousand of them at $1.35 each. (When they received their brief baptism of fire many months later, they proved so useless that the government sold them all off as scrap for a total of fourteen hundred dollars.) He dispensed procurement contracts in wholesale lots with reference to no one but himself. He bestowed honorary colonelcies on his most trusted purchasing agents. Only in the choice of a commander for the Canadian contingent did his self-assertiveness desert him. It had been taken for granted that the British War Office would make the appointment, with or without consultation with the Canadian government. Hughes took this for granted too, but put forward three nominees of his own, all of them Imperial officers. All were rejected. Ultimately Lord Kitchener announced that the Canadians would be led into battle by Lieutenant General Edwin Alfred H. Alderson, whose thirty years of soldiering with the British Army had taken him to the Nile, Poona, and South Africa. Hughes cabled Kitchener accepting the appointment with grateful thanks.

But not to Alderson, to Kitchener, or to anyone else would Hughes entrust the embarkation and safe conduct of his first contingent. There were believed to have been at least a dozen armed German liners in or close to the neutral and nearby harbors of Boston and New York when war broke out. When the time came for the contingent to sail from Quebec City, Hughes personally took charge of the embarkation. It probably wasn’t his fault that some ships were overloaded and some underloaded—at least one so underloaded that it had to get the Quebec fire brigade to pump water ballast into its bilges before it could be considered stable enough to sail. Nor would it be fair to say it was Hughes’s fault that when the last ship of the convoy departed from Quebec City it left behind on the docks a handful of men, eight hundred horses, and nearly five thousand tons of wagons, ammunition, and other stores and supplies. Of the force that embarked, every man, every horse, and every pound of supplies arrived in England safely. Some weeks later in a speech at London, Ontario, Hughes declared that, but for him, the entire convoy of more than thirty ships might have been sunk by the German submarines. He said he had refused to accept Lord Kitchener’s advice that the transport ships were properly protected. “As a result of the continual hammering away,” he said somewhat cryptically, “the people of England came to know that German submarines were hovering in the English Channel.”

Once he had the first troops safely embarked, Hughes sped on ahead of them aboard a fast liner to prepare for their coming. He was in uniform when he called to see Lord Kitchener at the British War Office. According to the official history of the Canadian Army in the First World War, the following scene ensued: Colonel Sam marched up to Kitchener’s desk. When he arrived at the desk, Kitchener spoke up quickly and in a very stern voice said: “Hughes, I see you have brought over a number of men from Canada; they are of course without training and this would apply to their officers; I have decided to divide them up among the British regiments; they will be of very little use to us as they are.”

Hughes replied: “Sir, do I understand you to say that you are going to break up these Canadian regiments that came over? Why, it will kill recruiting in Canada.”

Kitchener answered: “You have your orders, carry them out.”

Hughes replied: “I’ll be damned if I will,” turned on his heel, and marched out.

As Kitchener and many other eminent persons had discovered and were still to discover, Sam Hughes might have been moderately crazy but he was also very tough. He saw Asquith, the British Prime Minister, and Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He exchanged cables with Borden. Kitchener’s plan to break up the Canadian contingent was dropped and Hughes went back to Ottawa.