Читать книгу Ordeal by Fire - Ralph Allen - Страница 22

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VERY little information came back from the front and most of that was half hidden behind censorship and communiqués. One unfailing, fully visible source of news was Sam Hughes.

In the early months of the war Hughes had created a munitions buying and manufacturing complex called the Shell Committee. Characteristically he put it under the direction of a handful of honorary colonels.

Hughes’s most favored honorary colonel was not a member of the Shell Committee but a sort of free-lance commission agent. J. Wesley Allison had come to Canada from Ohio as a contractor. He had done well in many things, but in none so well as in making a friend of the editor from Lindsay, Ontario. With Sam’s sponsorship behind him, Allison went into the buying of arms with a status resembling that of a Chosen Instrument.

The Shell Committee’s chief job was to obtain munitions, mostly from Britain, in Canada and the United States. On some, if not all, of the half billion dollars’ worth of orders he placed, Allison collected commissions. Everything he did was within the law, and was made much simpler by the prevailing air of confusion and subterranean haste.

Finally, in the second year of the war, the Liberal opposition got wind of Allison’s activities and launched a massive assault against him.

The ground was well prepared by a former Laurier cabinet minister, William Pugsley, and two fellow M.P.s, Frank B. Carvell and G. W. Kyte. They had not only found out where the body was buried; they had seen it. Carvell accomplished this by going to New York and hiring a lawyer and a private detective. The detective, in the best cloak-and-dagger tradition, broke into the offices of the New York commission broker through whom Colonel Allison and the Shell Committee placed some of their largest American orders. Reinforced by the resulting evidence, William Pugsley read the main indictment to the House of Commons. Carvell and Kyte spelled him in reciting the particulars. The indictment was this: Members of the Shell Committee had made money from munitions contracts; on many contracts there was no competitive bidding; huge orders were placed in the United States when they could have been filled more cheaply and quickly in Canada; finally, and most flagrantly, Sam Hughes’s friend and protégé, J. Wesley Allison, was turning these practices to his own excessive profit.

Assertions as harsh as these would have embarrassed any government, at any time. At this juncture the administration found them especially painful. During much of the previous year—the first full year of the war—it had been explaining and correcting a whole mare’s-nest of lesser scandals. The first contingents were equipped with shoddy, substandard boots and it had taken a special committee of the House of Commons to get to the root of the matter and start setting it right. Of the first 8500 horses bought by the Army, nearly one out of four had been proved unfit for use. There had been public charges of profiteering in drugs, in binoculars, in trucks, in field dressings, in bicycles, and even in jam. Two Conservative M.P.s were among those caught simultaneously robbing the public purse and endangering the war effort, and the outraged Borden had forced them to resign their seats.

For the most part, the public was ready to attribute these early derelictions to a combination of rush and human nature. So far there was no widespread inclination to blame the government. But the accusations against Colonel Allison and the colonels of the Shell Committee were a different matter. If there was the slightest doubt that the colonels were a government responsibility, Sam Hughes put it right. He had been associated with Colonel Allison, he told the House of Commons staunchly and definitely, for twenty-five or thirty years. Among other things he described his lifelong friend as “an absolutely disinterested and straightforward businessman, the soul of honor and kindness.” Moreover, Sam told the House indignantly, Allison constantly refused to take his legitimate commission on arms he bought for Canada. On purchases for the Allies he had refused to accept “more than 50 per cent of what was offered him for his services by those countries.” Through his wisdom and integrity, the much abused Allison had “saved upwards of fifty millions to Great Britain and Canada.”

How much of this was Hughes’s instinctive bluster in the face of criticism, how much loyalty to a friend under duress, how much the flame of full and honest belief, even Borden could not be sure. But the Prime Minister wanted desperately to think the best or a sufficient portion of the best to refuse the full parliamentary inquiry the Liberals were asking for. For the time being he took refuge in the reminder that the Shell Committee had done all its buying for Great Britain and therefore if anyone was robbed it wasn’t Canada.

“If any investigation is sanctioned or approved by the British government,” Borden assured the House, “we shall not have the slightest objection, and we will assist and co-operate in every way. So far as our own affairs are concerned, so far as the actions of the government are concerned, these stand upon a different basis.”

Any relief that this evasion might have given the government was dissipated by another act of evasion on the part of Hughes. Having declared his confidence in Allison, the Minister of Militia almost immediately took another ship for England. Borden pleaded with him to stay in Canada at least until the end of the defense debate (but inexplicably did not order him to do so). Hughes in turn pleaded that he needed a rest, needed a change of scene, that his health was failing, that he couldn’t sleep. Finally he wrung Borden’s reluctant consent to the journey after telling the Prime Minister he had been secretly in touch with the Opposition and won their promise not to insist on an inquiry. No such pledge, as Hughes well knew and as Borden had a ready means of finding out, had been given. The Liberal onslaught continued as Hughes sped across the Atlantic to attend to what he insisted were more pressing duties.

In the early stages of the debate the nation, while fascinated, had found it difficult to follow all the details. But on March 28, G. W. Kyte produced a case history that had all the lucid symmetry of a short story by O. Henry.

This involved three New York entrepreneurs, who took as their corporate name the American Ammunition Company. Beginning with a total capitalization of $3000, the neophyte concern—with Allison as the go-between and the Canadian Shell Committee as backer and ultimate buyer—was given about $10,000,000 in orders for artillery fuses. Since it had neither a factory nor the money to build a factory, Allison arranged for the Shell Committee to advance the company $1,500,000. Ultimately the orders were filled under this arrangement. The three primary partners, one of them the already legendary railway promoter Benjamin Yoakum, thereupon received a cash commission of $1,000,000. Of this sum $220,000 was kicked back to Colonel Allison.

These astonishing revelations could not be met by mere adroitness. Old Sir George Foster, Deputy Prime Minister to Borden, went home that night from the Commons to scribble a lament in his diary: “To this point of great danger the foolish tolerance of the Hughes-Allison alliance carried us. The Prime Minister knew the connection, was warned by all his Ministers of the probable results, but did nothing.” But Borden at last did three things: he appointed a Royal Commission; he asked Hughes to come home from London; and he cabled the apologetic suggestion: “Hope you will take into consideration desirability of placing your resignation in my hands while inquiry is pending.” George Foster was still uneasy: “The danger ahead is the premier’s lack of will when Sam sits opposite. What he will do no one can tell. What he will not do, we all fear.”

Hughes arrived in Ottawa in mid-April and proceeded to Borden’s office. The latter’s diary described the meeting thus: “Hughes came at four and was as eccentric as ever. Wept at one time and laughed at another. He is confident that he will come through inquiry with flying colors, which I doubt considerably. Discussed with him my proposal that during the inquiry I should administer his department. He objects, thinking it will humiliate him. I told him it would strengthen him and that in making his statement on Tuesday he should say that he had asked me to relieve him of administration during progress of inquiry. We finally left it open after I had impressed upon him its importance.”

Though he might show signs of weakness in the privacy of the Prime Minister’s office, the Minister of Militia still confronted his enemies with unwavering self-righteousness. On his first day back in Parliament he gave a lecture to the entire House of Commons. After painting a picture of the rigors of the war from which he had just returned, he thundered: “Yet, after an absence of four or five weeks I find, on my return to Canada, that two hundred of the ablest men in this country, members of the House of Commons, instead of being out helping in the cause, are sitting here listening to piffle.”

He returned to his championship of Allison: “A gentleman who today stands high in the estimation of the people of the country.” When, during the proceedings of the Royal Commission, the Auditor General asked some suggestive questions about Allison’s operations, Hughes rose to charge in Parliament that he “makes reflections on a gentleman who has more honor in his little finger than the Auditor General has in his whole carcass.” Although the new object of his wrath, the Auditor General, held an office nominally outside politics, Hughes promised darkly: “I will find means of reaching him.”

The length to which he was willing to go to reach an enemy or a fancied enemy was illustrated during the same month in a stormy contretemps with P. D. Ross, president of the Ottawa Journal. The Journal happened to be among the many papers that were now calling for Hughes’s resignation. The brother of the paper’s publisher happened to be the Canadian Paymaster-General in France. Hughes telephoned Ross, the publisher, one night and in effect ordered him to have the paper stop its criticism. Ross told Hughes—in exactly those words—to go to hell. Hughes thereupon telephoned a note to the press gallery at Parliament with the request that it be circulated to “all the boys.” The note read: “It is rumored that Colonel Ross of Montreal, Paymaster-General at the front, is being recalled. No reason is assigned. No confirmation can be got here.” The attempted plant and the insinuation behind it were treated by the press with the suspicion they deserved; one of the first men to see Hughes’s message was a Journal reporter, who passed it on to his employer, who passed it on to Borden.

The hearings of the Royal Commission did nothing to ease the government’s discomfort. Big Ben Yoakum came up from New York, eased his burly frame into the witness chair, and blandly corroborated every detail of the American Ammunition Company transaction, including the kickback of a quarter of a million dollars to Allison. Allison made the same admission during a wearing two-day appearance, but attempts to pin him down on his other ventures in the buying of arms ended in a blind alley of I-don’t-remember’s. Toward the end of his second afternoon on the stand Allison collapsed, and his lawyer demanded that he be excused on grounds of health.

The Commission’s ultimate findings, as the findings of Royal Commissions occasionally do, bore faint echoes of Lewis Carroll. Everyone was guilty, so in fairness to all everyone was acquitted. The Shell Committee had discriminated among manufacturers, notably in favor of Americans against Canadians. It had paid more than four dollars a fuse for twenty million dollars’ worth of fuses when even the most perfunctory investigation would have shown the going price to be three dollars a fuse.

Hughes had known nothing of his friend Allison’s rake-off on the American Ammunition Company contract and certainly had not partaken of it. Hughes had, however, successfully urged the Shell Committee to award contracts to certain of his own constituents, including his own son-in-law. As for Allison, he had practiced deception. From these premises the Commission proceeded to three main conclusions: (1) the members of the Shell Committee had been overworked and deserved the nation’s sympathy; (2) Hughes was exonerated of complicity with Allison and of using undue influence in the awarding of contracts; (3) Allison’s conduct in the American Ammunition purchase “could not be either justified or excused.”

The sole visible outcome was that Allison was stripped of his honorary colonelcy. Hughes tried to soften the blow by complaining privately to Borden that his friend deserved better in view of his “services to the Empire” and publicly that he was “the biggest and best man in Canada—and the cleanest too.”