Читать книгу Ordeal by Fire - Ralph Allen - Страница 20
ОглавлениеPacifism and isolationism—The battles
of Loos and the Mound
WHILE these enterprises were being carried out in distant places, Canada was adjusting its bearings closer to home. It was already apparent that the task of preserving friendship with the United States of America might become more difficult than anyone would have thought. More than one resident of the United States out of every ten was of German extraction. Their total number was nearly as great as the number of Americans of British ancestry.
And, leaving these loyalties aside, there was always the point about war itself. William Jennings Bryan, the U.S. Secretary of State, spoke with maddening logic for millions of isolationists: “If the dogs of war have got to fight it out in Europe, let us avoid hydrophobia at home.”
From Los Angeles to Cape Cod good and earnest American women were singing a good and earnest song:
I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy,
Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder
To kill some other mother’s darling boy?
The nations ought to arbitrate their quarrels,
It’s time to put the sword and gun away,
There’d be no war today, if mothers all would say
“I didn’t raise my son to be a soldier.”
Woodrow Wilson and Henry Ford were against the war. So was William Howard Taft, who accepted the presidency of a League to Enforce Peace and came to Toronto to deliver a lecture on the blessings of the Monroe Doctrine. Henri Bourassa, ironically, had been almost trapped during a walking tour of Europe when war broke out, but he returned to take over his role as the leading Canadian isolationist. He was as yet, for him, in a subdued and tentative mood, but he soon deplored “the grotesque and stupid intolerance manifested in Canada against everyone who dares think and say that there are many aspects to the struggle in Europe.”
Long before the Canadian contingent’s arrival in France, Bourassa was being called at home a pro-German. The respected journal of opinion Saturday Night said: “Every day in Europe men who have done no more harm are hung as traitors.” Some of the most widely circulated French-language papers hastened to disown him. La Patrie declared the government would be justified in trying him for high treason. Le Soleil asserted angrily that he had “done more harm to the French-Canadian people than its worst enemies have ever been able to do.”
Even some of Bourassa’s most ardent disciples began to question his judgment. One of them, Olivar Asselin, complained lugubriously that his leader had “once more fallen into his customary air of being erudite when it would have sufficed to entrench himself in plain common sense.” But Bourassa’s wrath and resentment only mounted. When Sir Wilfrid Laurier spoke in favor of recruiting he denounced the speech as “an explosion of empty and sterile chauvinism.” And leaving abstract principles aside, he got down to cases. The war effort was surmounted by “boodlers, vampires, the furnishers of bribes and electoral funds.” The soldiers being sent abroad were “badly clad, badly shod, and undisciplined.”
The Montreal Star began calling him “von Bourassa.” Bourassa stubbornly demanded that war contracts be investigated, and when funds were asked for the suffering of Belgium he countered by demanding charity for “the wounded of Ontario”—by whom he meant the Catholics who had been denied their separate schools.
The military forces in France heard nothing of these domestic quarrels. In their part of the world other matters were under way. With the Channel flank secured by the bloody stalemate at Ypres, the Allied generals persuaded themselves that they were in a position to attack. They debated where to begin. It was decided that Sir Douglas Haig’s First British Army should strike into the plain around Loos and Lens, a little south of Ypres.
Haig did not want the assignment. He protested that he had neither enough guns nor enough ammunition. But after a long wrangle that ultimately involved Joffre, Sir John French, and Foch as well as Kitchener and Poincaré at the political level, he was ordered to go ahead.
He made up his mind to use gas. The chlorine that had given the Germans so great a temporary advantage at Ypres appeared to be a useful weapon and now it needed no apologizing for.
Haig brought up a hundred and fifty tons of gas in five thousand cylinders, but his attempt to use it turned into a fiasco. There was almost no wind. At dawn just before the attack he left his headquarters to test the wind in person. He told an aide to light a cigarette. The smoke sat still in the stagnant air.
The British commander nevertheless had been waiting a week and he gave the order that the attack must go ahead. The gas was released. Instead of drifting toward the German defenders according to the week-old battle plan, it behaved according to the laws of nature. It hung above the British attackers and hundreds of them stumbled through it, half blind and half paralyzed, to be mowed down helplessly when they emerged at the brink of the German trenches. The offensive halted with a quarter of a million Allied casualties and half that number to the enemy.
The Canadians took no part in the offensive at Loos. After Ypres they spent most of 1915 in a holding action on the left flank, building up their casualty lists in a deadlock of attrition and also building up their total strength as fresh contingents poured across from Canada.
As even Ypres had not done, the nature of the fighting almost perfectly demonstrated one great fact, now half forgotten in an age of atoms and missiles. No matter with what majesty of design and purpose wars begin, they nearly always end with multitudes of half-drugged people scrambling for goals of insignificance and squalor.
At first the only prizes visible to the soldiers fighting over them had been the same slopes and rises and clumps of wood that emperors, dukes, and princes had been fighting over since long before the days of gunpowder. Around these natural features there grew artificial features: the trenches, the sandbags, the wire, the craters. The shallowest of the craters were made by heavy shells, the deepest by sappers burrowing under No Man’s Land to blow up the trenches of their enemies.
In this churned-up but immovable battleground no commander, however small and local, had any choice but the choice of mistakes. Inaction repeatedly proved less dangerous than action; yet inaction was a military sin and, above all, it was no way to promotion. The need to do something—to do anything, however vain and futile—haunted every soldier in any kind of command, from sergeant to field marshal.
Under these barren and suicidal laws the front of the thickening Canadian Corps strained and struggled back and forth a few yards at a time for nearly a year. There was no discernible result except the mounting stream of casualties.
In early 1916 the monotony was relieved by several savage battles with enough shape and direction at least to earn their own identities.
Before the Canadian Corps there lay one of those gigantically puny, grotesquely treasured swellings in the ground. This one bore the name “the Mound.” Near by lay the battered village of St.-Eloi, and as the climax to a spectacular orgy of tunneling and mining, seven great craters were blown in the Mound and its flat approaches on March 27, 1916.
The British Third Division had been assigned to seize the craters and the Mound, but was cut to pieces before it got there and was relieved by the Second Canadian Division. St.-Eloi spilled over into other battles—Hooge, Sanctuary Wood, Mount Sorrel—and another ten thousand Canadian casualties. A minor by-product was the dismissal of General Alderson. Sam Hughes’s enemy was replaced as the commander of the Canadian Corps by Lieutenant General Sir Julian Byng.
The Canadians who stayed at home had expected to share, at least in some degree, the hardships of those who went overseas. In fact, they did not. In spite of the country’s heavy spending on the war, their economic condition was relatively good.
It could not, of course, be compared with the opulence of the United States which was described, accurately but with infuriating self-righteousness, by the president of the National City Bank:
“We have always known that nature had been lavish, that in a material way everything was ready at hand and it needed but industry, thrift and right-living to bring material success to the country and to all of its people. But on top of that comes what seems almost a conspiracy of events to test our moral fibre—a flood-tide of wealth, of opportunity, which, added to our resources, puts upon the people of this country a responsibility of trusteeship to the world. We are like the heir of an enormously wealthy father. None too well trained, none too experienced, with the pleasure-loving qualities of youth, we have suddenly, by a world tragedy, been made heir to the greatest estate of opportunity that imagination ever pictured.”
The United States was showing a favorable trade balance of nearly $3,000,000,000 a year. (Canada alone had increased its buying from the United States by $165,000,000.)
Bethlehem Steel declared profits in 1916 of nearly $50,000,000, and Du Pont sales of gunpowder and other explosives gave it a fantastic profit margin of 200 per cent. But for all its prosperity, the United States was not oblivious to the fact that, indistinct though they might appear, certain other issues were at stake in the far-off mud of Flanders and the United States might eventually be called on for hard decisions of its own.
Although neither Canada nor Britain had yet adopted conscription, more than nine Americans in ten, in an informal plebiscite, declared themselves in favor of it. Henry Ford had sailed his famous peace ship across the ocean and was asserting that America had three duties: to keep out of the war, no matter what the “Wall Street Tories and patriots tell us”; to strive for peace among the nations already at war; and to seek disarmament. President Wilson was firmly on the side of abstinence and peace. Norman Angell put the country’s orientation thus: “America is not interested in its foreign problems. It is far more interested in baseball.”
“This is a peace-loving nation,” Wilson said. “Everything we hold most dear depends upon peace.”
To the chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee the President wrote officially: “You are right in assuming that I shall do everything in my power to keep the United States out of war. I think the country will feel no uneasiness about my course in that respect.”
Applauding Wilson when he was renominated at the Democratic National Convention, Martin H. Glynn, temporary chairman of the convention, announced that as a result of Wilson’s policy “America stands serene and confident, mighty and proud, a temple of peace and liberty in a world of flame, a sanctuary where the lamp of civilization burns clear and strong, a living, breathing monument to the statesmanship of the great American who kept it free from menace of European war. Wealth has come to us, power has come to us, but better than wealth or power we have maintained for ourselves and for our children a nation dedicated to the ideals of peace rather than to the ideals of peace and slaughter.”
These lofty utterances and many others like them made a strong impact, but they could not change the fact that for better or for worse Canada was at war.
