bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1993) — Summer 1993 // Été 1993, pp. 16–17
by W. (Bill) A. Dymond
On a still, early August evening seventy-five years ago, a solitary Canadian soldier stood on a steep hill overlooking the valleys east of Amiens in Northern France. As it grew darker, trucks, horse-drawn artillery, tanks, and thousands of Canadian soldiers appeared on the roads below. From a nearby wood, bands played Canadian marches. Something was in the air. The men were singing; they believed that this was it. As he watched his divisions march to the battle line, the Canadian commander, Sir Arthur Currie, remarked: “God help the Bosche.”
The night of Thursday, August 8, 1918 was fine and moonless. The infantry took up position in fields of ripening corn. Many slept. At 4:00 AM, a ration of rum was issued to stiffen the men and burn off the evening chill. A dense ground mist began to form. At 4:20 AM, a single cannon barked. Some troops heard it; most did not. Immediately, more than 900 cannon opened fire and the Canadian infantry pressed forward. It was the first day of the 96-day battle which ended the Great War.
Few realized that victory was at hand. Trench warfare had reigned since 1914. Offensives dissolved in the French and Flemish mud. Men died by hundreds of thousands for slight gain. The great push of Passenchedaele in Flanders, finally captured by the Canadians in November 1918 left the Allies in a “slough of despond,” exhausted, understrength and despairing of victory. In the spring of 1918, the German army fortified by more than 1 million soldiers transferred from the Eastern front after the Russian collapse, launched three massive attacks in March, April and May. At tremendous cost and considerable loss in territory, the allied lines held. After nearly four years of war, the German army lacked the strength for the final push. The Allies were poised for the offensive which would bring victory in the Great War.
On August 8 and 9, the Canadians, 100,000 strong, flanked by Australians and British on their right and French on their left, advanced 13 miles. The Germans were totally surprised to find the Canadians suddenly upon them. One officer complained bitterly that the Canadians were supposed to be 70 kilometres north and had no business capturing his unit. Through four hard years of war, the Germans had learned that the arrival of Canadian soldiers in allied trenches meant an imminent attack. They were the shock troops of the Allied armies. But this time, there had been no warning. The Germans were victims of an elaborate deception scheme. The Canadians marched south towards Amiens only by night and concealed themselves by day. Two battalions, complete with signals detachments, maintaining a lively and fraudulent chatter, were sent north into Flanders. On the final days prior to the offensive, airplanes droned overhead to drown the noise of trucks, artillery, tanks, and marching
Canadians were Resistance had stiffened by August 10. The Germans had reinforced. The battle had reached the old, torn up battlefields of 1916. Only the Australians had been able to keep up with the Canadians; the British and French lagged far behind. Further progress could only be made at the cost of heavy casualties. Still, the achievement was enormous. Four Canadian divisions had defeated 4 times their number capturing over 10,000 exhausted, demoralized enemy troops. Ludendorff, the German commander, called August 8 “the black day of the German army.” The Kaiser told Ludendorff that “the war could no longer be won.”
The Canadians moved back north to spearhead the next Allied offensive. On August 26, they attacked the Hindenburg line, the most strongly fortified parts of the German defensive system. Again, surprise was achieved and by September 2, the Canadians were through, prompting a German withdrawal along virtually the whole of their lines facing the British and French further south. In this battle, Major Georges Vanier of the 22nd battalion (the famous Van-doos) lost his leg. In late September, the Canadians liberated Cambrai, then Valenciennes and finally Mons on November 9. At 10:58 on November 11, two minutes before peace, Private George Price became the last Canadian killed in the Great War.
While the capture of Vimy Ridge in 1917, is celebrated as the summit of Canada’s military achievement of the Great War, it was the performance of the Canadian army as the strike force of the Allied forces in 1918 which confirmed Canada’s right to a place in the sun. With 100,000 soldiers compared to 600,000 Americans, the Canadians advanced twice as far, captured twice as many prisoners, met and defeated the same number of enemy divisions and suffered less than half as many casualties. The fighting was hard. In one battle, German machine gunners surrendered but then shot a Canadian officer. The officer’s platoon charged the post and killed all the defenders. Later a group of defenders tried to surrender and they too were killed by the enraged Canadians. The butcher’s bill was high, 45,000 Canadian soldiers were killed and wounded, more than one-fifth of all casualties suffered by Canada in the Great War. Yet, morale remained high until the end. Currie said of his men, “they do not whimper and they do not quit.”
The Great War wrought a remarkable change in Canada’s status as a nation. In the early years of this century, Canada basked in the late afternoon, sunlit-glory of the British Empire. While global changes transformed the old verities of the 19th century, the concerns of the Canadian government and people were virtually exclusively domestic. Canada was nation-building.
20th century was the century of Canada; Sir Wilfred said so and so it seemed. Optimism reigned. New provinces were carved out of the Western prairies, immigrants were pouring into the newly opened lands, the transcontinental railway network was complete, foreign trade and investment reached record levels, Canada was becoming an urban nation. It was a time of unbounded confidence; the potential seemed unlimited.
Canada was a proud member of the Empire. Kipling observed that English Canadians, in particular, had “a certain crude faith in the Empire of which they naturally conceive themselves to be the belly button.” True, Laurier resisted initiatives for a closer Imperial federation; Canadians grumbled that the British judges had, for larger “imperial” reasons, sided with the Americans in the Alaska border arbitration. Still in 1910, Laurier had declared in ringing terms that “when Britain is at war, Canada is at war.” In the 1911 election, Borden converted the campaign fought over the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States into an Imperial loyalty test, persuading the voters that “Canada [could not] become fiscally and commercially a part of the United States and remain politically a part… of the British Empire,” and Laurier was defeated.
When Britain declared war on August 4, 1914, Borden declared: “We stand shoulder to shoulder with Great Britain.” Laurier answered, “ready, aye, ready.” Patriotic crowds filled the streets on the declaration of war. In Quebec, La Patrie announced that only “one race exists united by the closest bonds in a common cause.” Canada’s contribution to the war effort was immense; from a population of 7 million, over 600,000 served. Yet in the initial years of the war, the Canadian government had no voice in the conduct of the war or the use of Canadian troops. Indeed, Ministers got their war news from the censored press.
By 1917, however, Borden and the other Dominion Prime Ministers were members of the Imperial War Cabinet and were levying severe criticisms over the conduct of the war and the performance of British generals. In 1918, Borden informed Lloyd George that the arrangements for the Versailles Peace Conference which deprived Canada of a separate seat at the table were unsatisfactory. “I [have] not come to take part in any light comedy.”
In 1919, when Borden told Lloyd George to count Canada out of any guarantees to France against future German aggression, he had concluded that “perhaps sooner than later, Canada must assume full sovereignty.” Canada had arrived, no longer a child of the Empire but, an ally at best, and a difficult one at that. While it would be the Statute of Westminster which would confirm the full formal measure of independence of Canada and the other Dominions, by the end of the war, Canada had shed itself of Imperial control, indeed oversight over Canadian foreign policy for all intents and purposes.
If common purpose, national unity and patriotism dominated Canada in the war years, bickering, disunity, and bitterness soon arrived on the scene. The divisive conscription debate in 1917 accompanied by the shattering of Laurier’s Liberals and the desertion of Borden’s Quebec Conservatives foretold hard times ahead. Labour unions, farmers, and the returning wave of job-hungry soldiers agitated for change. Sir Arthur Currie did not escape the dismal treatment we reserve for our heroes. Recognized by the British as the most capable Corps commander in the British Army and considered by Lloyd George as a possible Supreme Commander of all British forces, Currie, alone among allied commanders, received no honour from his Government. When he was bitterly attacked in the House, and libelled in the press, no Minister stood to defend him.
But this war was over. On November 11, a soldier wrote home: “I can’t believe it… the end is come, no more horror, or death or fear. When I think of the friends who lie in battered fields and graveyards… thank Christ, we who are left did not let them die in vain … for the work is done.” General McNaughton, the commander of the heavy artillery was angry: “Bloody fools. We have them on the run. [The Armistice] means that we shall have to do it all over again in another twenty-five years.” When Canadians again went to war, McNaughton commanded
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1993) — Summer 1993 // Été 1993, pp. 16–17. Read the rest of this issue →
