Chapter VI: Part 6

Hughes was the embodiment of force without power. He began to mobilize a nation, not merely as battalions on parade, but as an army equipped by Canadian science, industry, transportation, intelligence, and citizenship. So far as he carried that out, the editor of the _Lindsay Warder_ and M.P. for Haliburton and Victoria had no superior in organizing force in this country. Up till 1916 he was a patriotic cannon-cracker exploding without any particular objective, except that he wanted a Canadian Army in Canada, not an overseas Contingent, or an Imperial Army. between 1914 and 1916 he was a great organizing soldier, at his best comparable to any men who were doing wonders at the front. As Nationalist as Quebec, he thought of Canada as a unit in the Empire, most of which he had seen for military reasons. Canada could not declare war; but in the mind of Hughes the force that held Canada and other overseas dominions within the Empire was not in trade and tariffs, but in ships, armies and victories.

Sam Hughes failed to translate his force into power because he failed to estimate the elements which carried him to success, and therefore could not measure the energies that would defeat him. He never understood what Bismarck called the "imponderables". Nature gave him the energy; Fate the ambition: Destiny denied him the vision.

The electric energy of this nation in response to the call of war made a flash that blinded Hughes. He seemed to think that he was the man who was running the cataract. He had a wholesome contempt for Kaiserism in Germany. He tried to express it by an imitation of Kaiserism in Canada. He had a sense of relative omnipotence. He put editors in jail, went over the heads of District commanders, inexcusably humiliated General Lessard in command of the most important military district in Canada, openly browbeat officers in front of their men, played Napoleon on a white charger at the crest of a mound in Valcartier, and trod on the official corns of his colleagues.

Such things are now somewhat blurred by perspective. At the time they were glaringly in the spotlight as the pranks of a Jack the Giant Killer. In December, 1914, Premier Borden made a tactical visit to the headquarters of Military District No. 2, nominally commanded by General Lessard.

A military writer had this to say about the Premier's speech:

". . . . He thought the accomplishment of this task (Valcartier) was a tribute to the spirit of the people. He claimed no special credit for his Government; inferentially it was a high compliment to the organizing ability of the Minister of Militia, but Sir Robert deftly left that to the imagination of his audience. . . . A curious feature was his avoidance of any mention of the 'Minister of Militia.' When he desired to speak of the military programme, he stated that he had decided, after consultation with the 'Chief of Staff'. This was done repeatedly and apparently with definite purpose. Once he mentioned the name of Major Lessard, and a shout went up from the audience."

Further quotation is not needed. In less than two months after the glorification of Valcartier, the Premier found himself challenged by the man who had already begun to act as though national headquarters were in the Militia Department. Sam Hughes was never unpopular in Toronto. The incident referred to might almost have taken place in Montreal.

Canada was beginning to understand, to heroize and to censure Sam Hughes. His measure was being taken here. But the censure was unheeded. Hughes worked while critics talked. He was mobilizing, if not organizing, a nation. He still believed that he (ipse) could do it. The mobilization included everything needed by the army as well as the army itself. He wanted to get the nation behind the army: and himself behind the nation. He started everything--even to shells, high explosives and aeroplanes. Hughes knew what the army needed. He refused to admit that other men also knew how to get some of these things better than he did.

Cabinet colleagues were adjuncts. The motto punctuated by the smashing fist was, "I want to tell you!" No major on parade ever felt so overwhelming. Hughes was more than a martinet. He was a dilemma. The phenomenal was always about him. War was not even hell to Sam Hughes. It was more often a chance to show a civilian minister that he was a mere conventional ornament. Hughes may have hated the necessity, but he loved the spirit and the fire, of war.

Sam Hughes was probably wiser on what modern war demanded than many of the British command. Even Kitchener argued for shrapnel when Lloyd George wanted high explosives. There was no civilian in Canada to argue against Hughes, who aimed to do in Canada what the Minister of Munitions, Director-General, Headquarters Staff, and the Minister of Transports did in England. He was able from the first to get a realizing measure of the kind of mechanical hell known as modern war.

Start a force like that and you may expect abnormalities in the wake of it. We had "Sham Shoes". Hughes had nothing to do with those. He stated in Winnipeg that Wellington had once said that a contractor who made bad boots for an army should be shot. We had shell contracts--and the "friend" Joseph Wesley Allison; the Kyte charges, which brought the Minister home from England to answer them in the House. Neither the answer nor the friend was characteristic of the kind of man we had supposed Sam Hughes to be. We had the Ross Rifle. Hughes knew that in actual warfare the Ross was the finest sniper's rifle in the world, but that in quick action it jammed so badly that often the Canadians furtively swapped them for Lee-Enfields whenever the chance came. There was no excuse for the Ross rifle, and Hughes ought to have admitted it. There never should have been a chance for any detractor of his to insinuate that the Minister had stock in the Ross Rifle Company. We had cellulose nitrate and Grant Morden, who has never had an equal over here for making sudden wealth out of next to nothing and getting popular credit for doing it. What the ex-Minister of Militia made out of that promotion was never stated. It never should have been necessary for him to have made a copper in any such way. On his retirement from the Cabinet Hughes should have had a big honourable endowment from the nation sufficient as an income for the rest of his life. The whole idea of such a character being even good-humouredly mixed up with any deal not absolutely foursquare is a paradox. The Sam Hughes that we knew best was as straight as a chalk line.

The exploits of Canada's army never surprised Hughes. He had always said they could do it. He boasted about the generals he had taken from desks and offices. But the generals were fighting. There was a cubist picture in the War Memorials at Ottawa thus described by a Canadian editor who went over the battlefields which it depicted:

"The canvas shrieking with its high hues was filled with Turcos in panic flight crowding one another in their terror, while over them billowed the yellow poison pall of death; but in the midst of the maelstrom the roaring Canadian guns stood immovable and unyielding, served by gunners who rose superior alike to the physical terrors of battle and the moral contagion of fear."

That picture of St. Julien must have thrilled Hughes, whose son was soon to be Brigadier-General. It was on the crest of the St. Julien wave that Hughes got his title and was given the freedom of London; when some delirious writer in a London daily predicted that some day Sir Sam would ride through London at the head of his victorious troops. One writer called him the Commander-in-Chief of Canada's Army. None of these things moved Sam Hughes to humility. As well as any man he knew how small the greatest man was in the fury of that war.

Other Cabinet Ministers had to wait till the Peace Conference before getting such press notices. Even the Premier took nearly two years to convince London that he was much more than the civilian colleague of Gen. Hughes. Sir Sam was idolized from the beginning; at times when generals at the front were baffled, discouraged and beaten, and when patient old Kitchener was enduring red tape and making perfunctory reports to the Lords, knowing that the war was bigger than his knowledge of it.

Hughes may not have been wise enough to estimate the real value of this idolatry; but he was probably shrewd enough to know that it would soon be over. He knew that much as had been done to make Canada a war nation, the first two years had done less than half the work. 87,000 troops went overseas in 1915. That was natural. The majority of the men were in camp. In 1916 the number was almost doubled, from the enlistments of 1915. In 1917 the number sent overseas dropped to 63,536, proving that the enlistments of 1916 had been about half those of 1915.

Hughes knew this better than anybody. He knew that the voluntary system, in which he believed, was going to break down. We had no national register. A country as big as twenty Englands, with a population about one-fourth as big, had also Quebec--and the farmer. The Canadian census was five years old and useless for anything like a national register of resources of war. Camp Borden in 1916 helped to stimulate recruiting and to give Hughes something resembling in a feeble way the sensations of 1914. But Camp Borden was not Valcartier. General Lessard, whom he had ignored in 1914, was sent down to Quebec to encourage enlistments. He went too late. Wrong men had gone earlier. Hughes had never tried to placate Quebec. But in 1916 he himself went down to see Cardinal Begin. For an Orangeman like Hughes that was a desperate measure. He got what he expected--cynicism. Begin afterwards issued a letter to the press in which he tried to set the clergy above the law of conscription. No doubt the Cardinal came at Hughes with the twaddle invented by the Nationalists and later adopted by Laurier, about enforcing the Militia Act which provided for nothing but defence.

Canada had now four divisions in the field. The problem was how to keep them up, and how to send a fifth. The fifth never went. But it stands to the immortal credit of Sam Hughes that the four did, and that he had sent them.

The affair about the Chairman of Munitions was to Hughes a sore blow. He had started munitions as an arm of war. He did not want a civilian to take it over as a mere industry. Even that was a sign that the volunteer system was about done. Ottawa was full of experts now, each man taking over as a big business something started by Hughes. The one-man epoch was over. But Hughes refused to admit it. The man who had started everything was in no humour to admit anything. Yet in the darkest days Hughes never lost faith in the men who had gone. No man continued to say more heartening things about ultimate victory. And he played blind optimist against the cold, comfortless fact that the Canadian Army was wasting and the reserves were not marching up to mend it.

Hughes knew that conscription had to come. But he was the very last man in authority to admit it. Only a few days before Ottawa announced that compulsory service must be applied, and when Sir Sam knew it was coming, he said publicly to soldiers in Toronto that Canada, the freeman's country, would never need conscription. It was most pitiful to hear him. Sir Sam never seemed to pity himself. His egoism was game enough for anything. Bigger men than he had gone down. A big man here or there was nothing now. But what of little men that stayed up? Hughes probably asked that in silent contempt as he saw the coming of Coalition. But he knew he would not be there when it came.

By this time the egotism that was so splendid in 1914 had begun to breed in Gen. Hughes rancours and envies and enmities. Some of the men he had sent overseas were now more potent figures than himself.

There was still a person at the head of the Militia Department known as Lieut.-General Sam Hughes, K.C.B. But there was no longer in Canada any such man as old Sam Hughes. The Fate chickens hatched in 1914 were coming home to roost. For two years the Government had carried on two wars, one with the Kaiser Wilhelm, the other with Kaiser Sam. It had to be determined that whatever defects government may have because it is a democracy--even such democracy as was left in 1916--it is bigger than any one man. It had to be conceded that the nation was bigger than any one political party, and war bigger than all the world's volunteer armies.

Sam Hughes belonged to the eternal Volunteers. The days of his glory were the days when Canada of her own accord went to war or stayed at home. The Force called Hughes dreamed that it was bigger than a machine called War. But the machine won. Hughes went down. He went down as he had come up--alone. His going down seemed more swift than his rising. And yet he began to go down when he stood on the rope ladder down the Gulf and watched the troopships drift out. If in that moment he had not dreamed that General Sam Hughes was above government, he might have continued his great work long enough to become Lord Valcartier. He might have helped in a second Capture of Quebec, made conscription less difficult when it came, and put the Fifth Division into the field. And in that case Canada's part in the war would have been even more magnificent than it now is.

The latter days of the General were characteristic of a man who never knew he was beaten. Musical geniuses have written tremendous scores to depict a man's struggle with death. None of them could have transcended the long battle which Sam Hughes put up to stay here. For months we had intermittent bulletins from his bedside when any morning we expected to read that he was gone. He was a hard man to conquer. And only his intimate friends are likely ever to know whether or not it was his own ultimate biting failure, after his almost super-human success, that turned this man of the shadow into a phantom before he let go.

And before he went the hard, bluff soldier, who has as much iron in his composition as any man of his time sprang one of those human surprises that even war fails to emulate--when he listened time after time to the record that he loved better than most music, "I know that my Redeemer liveth", from Handel's "Messiah".

THE STEREOPTICON AND THE SLIDE

LIEUTENANT-GENERAL SIR ARTHUR CURRIE

The war was a great cosmic artist of infinite satire, making of humanity little stereopticon slides which he slipped in front of his calcium and flashed upon the clouds for a screen. When the war was done the stereopticon was smashed. The slides remain. What shall we do with them?

One of the most world-interesting characters in the magic lantern of war was Lieut.-General Sir Arthur Currie, who in 1914 locked his real estate desk in Victoria, B.C., and in 1919 came back to Canada admittedly one of the ablest commanders in a war which made the exploits of Wellington seem like comic opera in simplicity.

Whatever partial, prejudiced or private opinions some Canadians may have about Sir Arthur Currie, it must be generally admitted that he was perhaps the most remarkable of all the slides slipped into the stereopticon of the war artist. To quote from "Canada's Hundred Days", by J. F. B. Livesay, concerning the secret strategy of Sir Arthur Currie for the great Amiens show in August, 1918:

"That afternoon the Corps Commander had a talk with the two Canadian correspondents. Before him was a large scale map and the barrage map. It was all very clear and lucid. We take up our line here; and our first objective is there; 'zero' hour was named; our final objective for the day over there--constituting a world record for a first day's advance. . . .

"So at last all is ready. The story goes that the Corps Commander was asked how soon he could deliver the Corps in fighting trim at the appointed place. 'By the tenth,' he had said. 'Too long; do it by the eighth.' And he did it. . . .

"And it was all done secretly and by night. For an entire week the men of Canada were passing south from their old front, taking circuitous and puzzling routes. None knew where they went. They sang as they marched--a thing they had not done for two years.

"Foremost that night of nights was one's sense of wonder at how it had been done; how of many tangled threads of railway and lorry and march, all that great and intricate machine--more complex far than Wellington had gathered on the field of Waterloo--had been assembled in perfect order to the minute. . . .

"Up the winding hill go all the impedimenta of war--marching battalions, traction-engines towing great guns, ammunition trains, long lines of Red Cross lorries; everywhere the pungent odour of petrol. From every little wood belch forth men. They march silently. They might be phantoms, dim hordes of Valhalla, were it not for the spark of a cigarette, a smothered laugh. There is no talking. All is tense excitement. For miles and miles in a wide concentric sweep every road and lane and bypath is crowded with these slow-moving masses. Over the bare hillsides lumber the heavy tanks, just keeping pace with the marching men.

". . . . Berlin thinks we are in Flanders; London that we are in the south. All is well. . . .

". . . . The watch hand is creeping round--half-past three--four--ten past four--an interminable laggard. It is to be the greatest barrage of the war.

". . . . 'Zero' is set for four-twenty, and the pointer has barely reached that figure when behind us there goes up a mighty flare, and simultaneously all along the line ten miles to north and south of us, other flares light up the countryside. At the same instant there breaks out the boom of our heavy guns, the sharp staccato of sixty-pounders, the dull roar of howitzers, and the ear-splitting clamour of whizz-bangs--a bedlam of noise. Shells whistle and whine overhead; they cannot be distinguished one from another, but merge into a cataract of sound.

". . . . The heavens are lighted up across their broad expanse by a continuous sheet of lightning, playing relentlessly over the doomed lines. Now a faint light of dawn shimmers in the east and soon blots out the fireworks. A lark rises high, carolling. . . .

"The fog lifts. It is eight o'clock. The cavalry, a wonderful sight, appear on the scene. They have come up from Hangest-sur-Somme and have lain overnight in the great park of Amiens. Like a jack-in-the-box they have sprung from nowhere--miles on miles of gay and serried ranks, led by the Canadian Cavalry Brigade."

* * * * * *

On the 1913 side of this Wagnerian stage setting take a look at a real estate office in Victoria, B.C. The junior member of the firm is a pink-faced giant who had taught school and made no money, and having no other qualification for getting ahead in the world, went into buying and selling houses and corner lots. Victoria was booming then or he never would have done it. He had maps of the city on his walls and could solemnly point out to some timid newcomer in 1913 what little house there or nice wooded lot yonder might suit her; and the price--oh, yes, the price; seems high, but the location is excellent, the neighbourhood fine, the scenery superb, and the city--well, it had been going ahead until the slump and then----

"Oh, yes, Victoria's all right," he insists heavily. "Got sleeping sickness, that's all."

Then he yawns, which is a relief to the lady client, who thinks that his face is less ugly that way. Such a huge, long, solemn face! She glances at the office, wondering--if the agent is hard up? If so, no wonder; for he seems a sad salesman.

He closes his desk and locks up. Off to the rifle ranges, where he stays as late as the eye can see because--well, it's a joy to help the men get bull's eyes.

Sunday--marches in full Highland regalia at the head of the 50th Gordon Highlanders on garrison parade. On the curb a twinkling little Jap watches him.

"Nothin' like him in Japan, John," says a boy scout. "Wow!"

"Big--so big!" admires the Jap.

"Yah. Makes them big Macs. in the ranks look shrunk. Knows artillery, too. Rifle--kick! got a great eye. Look at 'im right wheel!"

* * * * * *

Then on the 1920 side of the Wagnerian stage picture observe this same giant, less baby pink, thinner in the face, clad in evening dress; Inverness cape, crush hat, in the rotunda of the Ritz in Montreal, beside an average athletic citizen similarly dressed; the superb civilian--and his marionette.

"Er--I think the car's waiting, General."

"Oh, no. We'll walk. Only a block or two," booms the giant.

He crosses the rotunda in seven swift, great strides, while the marionette trots to keep up. They are off to a function at McGill University. The new President--to whom professors bow with frigid politeness and ladies ogle in admiring awe, and university governors stand about like a bodyguard as though to intimate,--

"Ridiculous? Not a bit of it. There's no other university President like him. And what else could we do with him? The Government had nothing to suit him; for politics he's never meant; for business never. Geddes left us. We picked a greater man. Yes, it seems awkward, but never mind. A year from now you will say--here was the man that made McGill as famous in 1921 as Sir William Dawson, the world geologist, made it in 1890."

Montreal that made a citizen of prodigious Van Horne had here a character in a setting far more unusual. The eminent soldier as head of a university. One of the last surprises of the war; almost as it seemed then a joker in the pack; when men had to remember how this man leaped from an almost bankrupt real estate office in Victoria to what he was in Canada's Hundred Days.

Of all men who seemed to have been absolutely created by the war Currie was the first. He enlisted for active service in 1914, and Hughes made him brigade-commander at Valcartier. He was in the First Contingent that swung out of the Gulf the day that Hughes stood on the rope ladder, almost forgetting that he had shaken hands with Currie. He went to France as Commander of the 2nd Infantry Brigade. Within two months came St. Julien and the green gas when Currie held his part of the stricken line from Thursday till Sunday.

"And on Sunday," said Max Aitken, eye-witness, "he had not abandoned his trenches. There were none left. They had been obliterated by the artillery. He withdrew his undefeated troops from the fragments of the field fortifications, and the hearts of his men were as completely unbroken as the parapets of his trenches were completely broken." Much more was said in official despatches about the fine spectacular heroism of other officers of lower rank. Currie, the most picturesque physique on the West front, was no man for mere gallantry. Poor dashing Mercer, beloved of the ranks, later paid the penalty for the sort of bravery that inspires troops but does not win battles. Currie was no coward. But he was cautious. The Scot in him preordained that he might be a necessity higher up. He just flung his left flank around south and hung on. We read on in the official record:

"Monday morning broke bright and clear and found the Canadians behind the firing line. But this day too was to bring its anxieties. The attack was still pressed, and it became necessary to ask Brigadier General Currie whether he could not once more call on his shrunken Brigade. 'The men are tired,' this indomitable soldier replied, 'but they are ready and glad to go again to the trenches.' And so, once more a hero leading heroes, the general marched back the men of the 2nd Brigade, reduced to a quarter of its strength, to the very apex of the line as it existed at that moment."

Five months later a party of Canadian newspapermen visited the Canadian front when one of them wrote concerning Major-General Currie:

"English officers spoke of him with a curious mixture of enthusiasm and reserve as though he were some new sort of being. It was everybody's secret that this big, husky Canadian with the baby pink face and the blue eyes and the slow, smooth, bellowing voice was to be in command of the Second Canadian Division just then being organized. . . . No place except Canada produces such voices as Currie's, or such tremendous easy-moving bodies. He met the newspapermen with a smile and a great outstretched hand. The gesture was something like that of a popular preacher shaking hands with the children on their way out of church. But the voice was the great thing. It seemed to come from illimitable depths. It suggested at once poise and unlimited balance. Cool judgment that could never be upset. Officers who saw Brigade Headquarters being strafed and who saw the roof blown in over Currie's head whispered among themselves that would be the last of Currie. But he emerged as calm and smooth and pink as ever. . . . The day the newspapermen saw him a very junior officer who has since distinguished himself came to report breathlessly, 'That last one, sir, got my tent!' He was excited and just a trifle hysterical; but two words from the General seemed to calm him at once. 'That so?' he said, with the same quiet interest that a farmer might have received news that a certain hen had at last laid an egg. 'I thought that last one sounded a bit close.'"

Then there came to the head of the Canadian Corps a man named Byng, who could stroll casually into a billet or a training field to inspect "the muddy trench hounds" in canvas leggings and with three buttons loose. Until Byng came the Canadian Corps was a semi-disciplined and marvellous mob of men who could swear as hard as they could fight and fight like wildcats. Byng gave then the massive and complex mechanism of an army competent to conduct operations as a unit of modern war, dominated by the man of whom the boys sang to the tune of Three Blind Mice, "Byng Bangs Boche, See how they run!" Currie, commander of the 2nd Division, had seen this Corps Commander stroll into a billet and hurl machine gun questions at the men who jumped like eager school-boys to answer. He must have silently envied this genius, who cared far less than he knew about what was wrong in a kit inspection, but had a shrewd eye for manoeuvres. Not often in actual war does a man so personally popular organize a cross-section of a vast international country into a war machine called an army, and not seldom do men when they hear of such a commander being transferred look at one another in a sort of blank dismay and say, "Well, I'll be damned. Now who's it?"

Out of the army came slowly and ponderously the huge Highlander, with the "baby pink face" and the rumbling gong of a voice.

Sir Arthur Currie was much too honest to imagine that he or any other man could make the Canadian army. It was a heavy ordeal to follow Byng, just as it had been easy for Byng to succeed Alderson. But Currie knew the Canadians down at the root better than Byng knew them. He knew how that army had been made: that he was taking over a humanized machine that was to war in 1917 what the sword of Wallace had been in man-to-man combat seven hundred years earlier. He knew the weakness of men for idolizing a popular commander. They never would parody any nursery rhyme in his honour. Except the Anzacs, they were the most audacious army in Europe. They had become great in defiance of red tape, insisting on whatever is called Canadianism. They embodied all there was of Western independence on that Front. The Anzacs, great in fight and in ideas of personal liberty, had not been welded into such a machine as the Canadians, whose advertised national qualities Currie was expected to conserve.

"As soon as one lets the cheeky beggars, Canadians from America, have a bit of quiet, they get uppish," was the illuminating sentence in a letter found in a German trench near St. Eloi. Currie knew those "cheeky beggars". In his own elephantine way he loved them, when few of them could figure it out. He knew how hard those "beggars" could hit: how grimly they could stick: how madly they could raid and rush: how infernally they could scheme to "put one over on Heine"; how desperately they could abuse earth and heaven when they had time in the rest billets to smoke fags and write letters home. They were no army to go whacking on the shoulder.

It had been all right for Byng the Briton to go among those men with three buttons loose. Men like a touch of insurgency in a commander who has come up among the martinets. Byng was a professional soldier. Currie was not yet even a mild insurgent, or was not known as such to the ranks. He was almost a man of prayer. He moved in a large arc somewhat like his great resolute body; an engine of might that never seemed weary; who at "Molly-be-Damned" studied battle reports at two a.m., and was in the field at six. As he had almost come up from the ranks, the men knew him. Here and there in a British Columbia battalion may have been a man who had bought a corner lot from Currie in Victoria. If so, he liked to talk about the hard-up days of the Corps Commander when he was in real estate.

Currie knew that above all things he must keep the confidence of those men and that he could never do it by familiarity. Success was the only way. Not, anyhow, speeches. The C.C. was rather fond of talking aloud at first; sometimes too religiously. It was a habit that he never quite abandoned, though he changed his style as he grew in experience.

There was work to do. No army had more; few armies as much. Currie's was a mobile army; needed as shock troops in rough places--a very good reputation if not too much of it. There was danger of the army losing its Canadianism by being shunted about. One of Currie's first objectives that he wanted above all things to achieve as a Canadian commander of initiative, was the capture of Lens. He had a plan for this. He was never allowed to carry it out. Says the author of "Canada's Hundred Days":

"Thus when he is ordered to abandon his planned offensive at Lens and take the corps up the Salient, he refuses point blank to serve under the Commander of the Fifth Army. He is placed under his old Chief of the First Army, looks over the ground before Passchendaele and then protests against the whole operation as being useless in itself and likely to cost the Corps 15,000 men."

It was said by some who believed they knew, that the Lens preparation was nothing but a huge feint put up to mislead Heine for an attack in force elsewhere. This was one of the bewildering events of that baffling year when the French army was in a state of mutiny, the nation behind the army in a state of nerves, and the politicians, clamouring for victories--or at least a cessation of defeat. Something had to be done, not only by France but by Britain, whose Premier insisted that unless the Germans could be broken in the north he could not hold his country united at home. There was a Council of War--so, a few weeks before the writing of this, said a Canadian General in New York--at which Currie was present. Sir Douglas Haig unexpectedly arrived and was soon into an argument with the Canadian Corps Commander demanding that he abandon Lens and strike at Passchendaele. The two commanders were in violent disagreement. Currie refused to yield. The British Premier went to France and met Currie, who gave way to the Premier--as people usually did--and, against his own convictions, abandoned Lens.

The precise military significance is of less value here than the remark credited to Lloyd George, who is reported to have said in England after a subsequent War Cabinet meeting--that in the Canadian Corps Commander he had met "the biggest thing physically and mentally on that front."

What Currie was at the head of the Corps no civilian then in Canada has any means of knowing, except by what men say who were under him or about him. A brawny veteran infantryman, whom I met with his chum, said:

"Currie--oh, yes, he was a good general. But few of the men where I was in the trenches or the billets ever liked him."

"But did you see much of him?"

"Too much, begad." His chum nodded agreement. "Too awful much, sometimes. Why, he used to come into a rest billet almost every day after we'd come there all shot to bits with only a corporal's guard o' the whole battalion, muddy and tired and sleepy; yes, and what's the first thing we hear, but begad, we've all to shine up and get spic and span for parade because the O.C. says the C.C. orders it. Out we go, like a ragbag remnant and he looks us over, says he knows we're tired and makes a speech----"

"Oh, boy, them speeches!" sighs the chum.

"Tells us how well we've done and all like o' that, and at the end says there's such a devil of a job yonder that he's compelled against his will----"

"Oh, yes, dead aginst his will," pipes the chum.

"To intimate that he'd like us to trail back to the show and do it some more for the sake of the victory and the good long billet we'll get presently. Yes, Currie was a good General. He did the work, he got results. But never tell me he was easy on his men--becuz four years I was wan o' them."

One allows in this man's opinion for the tendency to "grouch" that always appears in veterans who know best how to fight. Men like this were "fed up" on the war, of which they never saw anything but the glimpse of their own sector. The war was over now, and between the armistice and getting home many such men had a chance to talk, as they wearily waited for a ship.

"Yes, and that capture of Mons," says the chum, as he sips a little drink. "Altogether useless and against orders. The war was over."

"No," says the veteran; "that was a mere trifle, as I see it. Not one, two, three with the march into Germany. Begad! if ever I was a rebel it was then on that 150 miles, says you. But--'twas so ordered by the C.C. and we went."

It was not likely that Gen. Currie believed his army to be rebellious against that march. He was too much of an insurgent to fear insubordination. He had packed many a pipe-clay parade officer home for inefficiency.

A machine gun officer, who had got a Blighty at Passchendaele and was asked by the writer what he thought about Currie, admitted that he knew very little about him because all he saw at the time was his own little corner of the show. He casually referred the question to two others, one of whom was a H.Q. staff officer, and saw Currie at first hand for months at a time. The answer was:

"I'll say that Currie always inspired me with absolute confidence in his genius for modern war. It was a pleasure just to see him revise a Divisional plan of action. He had a hawk eye for any weak spots and he pointed them out. No doubt some of the stuff that got through to the boys in some of the shows shortly after Currie took command was Byng stuff, and Byng sure handed over a fine army to Currie. But believe me, Currie had his own programme and picked his own men and developed his own machine shortly after. And I don't believe there was a commander in any of the Corps on that Front that had anything on him for what makes an army win."

The General's return to Canada was preheralded by a barrage of criticism that seeped through from men coming home. Some day we shall know how much or how little of this was politics inspired by Currie's enemies in Canada and by men who, jealous of his success and his eminence, had no scruples about fomenting the criticism. But Currie must be judged by what he did with his army. In that last hundred days all the armies but the American army were remnants of what they were in 1915. The wonderful thing about the Canadian army is that in the three months before victory it was an even more terrible arm of war than it had been at Vimy Ridge. After a year and a half of Commander Currie it was still the superb fighting machine described in the extracts already quoted from the battle of Amiens. For a few of the reasons why it was so we quote again that same book the writer's estimate of Currie:

"But according to the letter of the law he is not a good subordinate. He cannot be popular with the powers that be: he is always complaining about something; getting his own way or making it unpleasant for people if he doesn't.

"In the panic of the following March (1918 after Passchendaele) he finds the Corps is being torn to pieces, its divisions hurried here, there and everywhere; orders given and countermanded and then issued again. He protests strongly; the Canadian corps whose value is tested, must be kept together; and he wins out." . . .

"Is all this insubordination? If so, it is a quality that makes for victory. The average Canadian is always willing to "take a chance" because he has confidence in himself. And the Corps Commander is very much of a Canadian."

The author does not criticize Currie, though he had so good an opportunity. In telling so well the wonderful story of that last hundred days and so explicitly glorifying the Commander whose best work of the war was done during that period, he gives us no perspective. Is it not just to admit that though the four reduced Canadian divisions--with certain attachments--had defeated forty-seven German divisions, they had conquered divisions terribly more reduced than their own and absolutely without reserves in either men or materials and devoid of the last vestige of morale? The great bluff was about to break. It was due to have broken sooner.

When the armistice came all the armies but the Canadians laid down their arms. Currie had not finished his work. He had planned the whole hundred days, beginning with Cambrai, and the apex of that achievement after the breaking of the infallible Hindenburg line, was the recapture of Mons. He was once more "insubordinate". He did not seem to pay respect to the armistice. His men had often said that they wanted to fight Heine on German soil. Denied that, at least they wanted a chance to be part of the army of occupation, as far east as Cologne. Currie could never have ordered an unwilling army--not that army unwilling--to march 150 miles into Germany. He had an army of conquest, not of armistice. But the stereopticon and the slides:

What was to be done with this soldier at home? How could he be re-established in civil life? Thanks to the Administration's predicament in trying to please both the General and his enemies, here was the worst D.S.C.R. problem of the lot. Thanks to McGill University, the predicament was removed.

A sagacious professor in McGill who knows by experience what it is to get the ear of the public, said when Currie was appointed President that almost the entire faculty were opposed to him because the idea was so ridiculous. That professor now alleges proudly that faculty, students and management are all convinced that Currie is a wonderful President; that he has revolutionized all existing ideas about the headship of a university, that he understands even the academic mind; that the _esprit de corps_ of McGill is such as it never was.

In short, nobody is left to remark--

"I say, what a pity Geddes left us in the lurch!"

They are making a new stereopticon for that slide.

A COAT OF MANY COLOURS

SIR JOHN WILSON

After a life of wearing Joseph's coat, Sir John Willison, ex-editor of the _Toronto Globe_ and of the _News_, finds himself President of the National Reconstruction Association. Programme--to reconstruct Canada, beginning in 1918, after fifty years of Confederation.

A supercilious editor once asked why on such an Association no farmer had been appointed. The answer was simple enough. Sir John was born a farmer. He used to wield a handspike at logging bees in Huron County, Ont. Why no Liberals? But Sir John used to be the leading Liberal of unelected Canada. Why no professor of political economy to represent the great universities who are always supposed to be reconstructing a nation? Simple again. Sir John himself once conducted a university of culture, economics and general information known as the _Toronto News_. In fact there was no need of an Association at all. Sir John Willison was sufficient unto the day.

One finds it tolerably easy to be sarcastic about Sir John Willison, because for many years he was to some of us the sort of man that compelled a sincere, almost idolatrous admiration. In this also he is more adept than the average man. He himself once idolized Sir Wilfrid Laurier in two volumes; but a few years before he turned all his political guns on the French-Canadian Premier to get him out of power for good.

In all Canada there has never been a more versatile character; never one who after a _volte face_ in politics could turn with such poise and dignity upon any critic cradled in the foundations of belief and ask, "Well, what's new?"

From his crisp manner of speaking and a certain austerity of manner, I used to think that Sir John was in a measure inscrutable. He had such a curt way of summoning a reporter, as once,--

"Never," he began when the culprit had got into the corridor facing the editor-in-chief, "never, when interviewing a man in his own home, say anything about the furniture."

Born a Conservative and a farmer, Willison became on the _Globe_ Canada's greatest unelected Liberal. He conserved Liberalism. On the _Globe_ he held the balance between the Free Traders who believed only in reciprocity and Brastus Wiman, who with Goldwin Smith made Taft a mere plagiarist when he said that Canada was an "adjunct" of the United States. It was Willison's attempt to consider commercial union on its merits that made the _Globe_ seem like a mark for the annexationists, at a time when the high priest of the movement in Canada had the effrontery to remain a citizen of the nation which he was openly trying to sell at a bargain counter. The man who kept the _Globe_ from becoming an annex to Goldwin Smith in 1891 had an experience that would fit any man to become a protection-tariff Chairman of Reconstruction, and to remember the sirens that tempted Ulysses.

Nobody could have predicted in those days that the great editor of the _Globe_ would live to become first an Independent, next a Tory, and at the last a Liberal-Unionist. And perhaps none of these transformations would have been necessary if Sir George Ross had not tried the trick of "32 years in the saddle" from the days of Mowat; to do which and to remain politically virtuous was an impossible feat, even though the Premier of Ontario was a director of the _Globe_. Ross remained director, and also Premier. But it seems that Mr. Willison saw in such a dual role a greater inconsistency than even he deemed to be worthy of so brilliant a man. As he could not remove the director, he took what seemed to be a providential opportunity to remove the Premier.

The reconstructed _Toronto News_ was the opportunity. The elimination of Ross was the first result. The removal of Laurier was the necessary sequel. The first was a pleasure. The second must have been a pang. Because of the first, in place of Sir George Ross, Willison had as frequent visitor to his sanctum James Pliny Whitney, the new Premier of Ontario, "honest enough to be bold and bold enough to be honest." From that to Toryism was merely opening a door. It took the new Tory editor eight years to remove his old idol Laurier, the result of which was a sort of intense and bigoted animosity to the Province of Quebec which Sir John is now learning to overcome. When the Tory _News_ became a Northcliffe Imperialist organ it was inevitable that Sir John should convert his common hostility to the western Laurier-Liberals into a polite suspicion of the Radicals who were becoming Agrarians.

When finally, weary of mere politics in which he was our greatest journalistic expert by instinct and experience Sir John left the _News_, he was free to engage in work of a more practical character than writing, and to become Chairman of the Government's most important branch of active agenda outside of professional politics.

In all these Protean changes of makeup, if not of character, Sir John Willison has never abandoned two early habits; lawn bowling and reading the _Globe_. He is an expert in both. Bowling vexes him least, because its rules never change. The _Globe_ gives him pangs because alas! it is now engaged in the unpardonable effort to merge the Liberals with the National Progressives as a greater Liberal Party.

Inconsistency may be the evolution of greatness. Inconstancy never. The _Globe_ of a certain date in June, 1921, contained a front page display of the Agrarian bye-election victory in Medicine Hat. On another date there was an editorial once again advising the Agrarians to make common cause with Liberals against the common enemy, Meighenism, or as it might be said, Willisonism.

Perusing the _Globe_ in his Reconstruction office, Sir John glances up--leisurely at a spot on the wall, next to the portrait of Sir John A. Macdonald. Like Macbeth's dagger, he sees a cold, organizing face smiling like Mona Lisa, fair at Sir John; the face of T. A. Crerar.

The Levite of Reconstruction shakes his fist.

"Down with you," he mutters. "Avaunt! I'll have none of you. There's nothing under Medicine Hat--except what Kipling said, 'all hell for a basement,' Natural gas, Crerar, not a test case at all. Oh, no. Too near the border."

Sir John yawns and peruses a proof of the 745th pamphlet issued from Reconstruction, total of nearly seven million copies paid for not by taxation of the people, but inferentially by tariffs. Probably a very patriotic minority read these Willison bulletins aiming to reconstruct the country by putting a crimp in the exportation of the Canadian dollar, looking after welfare work in factories, women and children, grappling with unemployment, helping to change over industry from war to peace, aiming to "stabilize" the nation, to curb that team of wild horses, Bolshevism and Agrarianism, and generally to keep Canada from going to perdition.

In spite of Sir John, in 1919 and 1920, people bought Canada almost bankrupt on the exchanges. Hence among the items in the cheapening list may be placed the Canadian dollar which is now worth about 89 cents in New York. That is what happens to the dollar when it goes away from home and plays prodigal son. What Sir John works to see is Canadian commodities crossing the border and the Yankee dollars coming back in exchange.

Here is one of the greatest moral issues of the age for this nation. Even the preachers, if they could see us put up the barriers against luxury imports from the United States--said to be such a wicked nation--would breathe more easily. People so often buy sin done up in dutiable packages. For the fiscal year ending March 31, 1921, Canadians went into debt to the United States over a million a day--adverse exchange. Nearly $400,000,000 in one year spent for Yankee goods more than Yankeedom spent buying goods from us.

And now comes the need for the rationalizing philosophy of Sir John Willison, truly our most versatile expert on tariffs from the _Globe_ reciprocity down to the Reconstruction. Beginning in 1917 with Foster's "economic unity" in North America, a friendly Democratic tariff had let Canada send certain natural products into the United States free of duty. Private interests found it profitable to handle Canadian trade, much of it in transit to Europe in a state of high demand. The democratic element in Sir John must have approved that. Grit as he used to be, Sir John must believe in letting the great United States practise free-trade if it be so disposed. Those good Democrats! Had they not enacted the Underwood tariff, what a mountainous load must have been imposed upon the Atlantean shoulders of Reconstruction!

Which brings us to the eve of Dominion Day, 1921. Sir John was not bowling; he was reading the _Round Table_ for June--at least if not he should have been--an article on the meeting of the "Imperial Cabinet".

"Mischievous title!" he mutters. "It's an Imperial Conference of Premiers. John S. Ewart will be sure to make a kingdom article out of that. Very ill-advised. Er--Come!"

"Evening paper, Sir John," says the boy.

Sir John takes up the paper and is at once confronted by an item which convinces him that if ever Canada needed protection from the United States, now is the time. The item is the repeal of the Underwood tariff. Accustomed for life to unpleasant sensations from printed pages, his face gives no sign of emotion. Swiftly he reads through, flings the paper down and looks up. At once he rises, glaring coldly at the Crerar palimpsest on the wall. Again that Mona Lisa exporting smile, as the lips seem to say:

"Well, Sir John--what will be the Republican Reconstruction price of the Canadian dollar now?"

"Bah!" Sir John snorts into a handkerchief, like a Tory squire. "That tariff, Sir, is not a menace, nor a prophecy of agrarian victory at the polls. It is a challenge to this nation. Canada will not let down the bars. We shall put them higher! Keep the Canadian dollar in Canada. Sell our natural products to Britain. Build up our towns and our industries. Utilize our great water powers, the cheapest power in the world. Use our raw material; our manufacturing experience gained in the war. Develop the home market. Sell more to ourselves and spend our incomes in countries that do not put up economic barriers against our products. Without some adequate protection, sir, we are economically as extinct as the Dodo. There's but one alternative--commercial autonomy from the United States or commercial annexation. Nobody but a lunatic or an Agrarian would ever doubt which of these we shall choose--eh, what's that you say?"

The portrait chuckles. An uplifted hand appears in the unframed picture.

"I said, Sir John--put the repeal of the Underwood tariff under your Medicine Hat."

In sudden fury Sir John flings the _Round Table_ at the place where the picture vanished.