Thomas S. Axworthy
Executive Director of The Historica Foundation of Canada

According to the distinguished historian John Keegan, ¿the written history of the world is largely a history of warfare, because the states within which we live came into existence largely through conquest, civil strife or struggles for independence.¿¹ World War I certainly proves Keegan¿s thesis for it was one of the tipping events of world history: 20 million people died, the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires disintegrated, new states like Iraq and Yugoslavia were born, newly powerful states like Japan emerged, the League of Nations was invented and the European age which had dominated the world since the 16th century gave way to the ascendance of the United Sates. Millions of husbands, sons, fathers and brothers responded to the call of arms in 1914 and after burying their dead, when they returned to their homes in 1918, the world they had set out to defend had been changed almost beyond recognition.

Canada was far from immune to this transformation by war. In 1914 Canada was still a colony of Great Britain: when Great Britain went to war so did Canada. In 1901 about 60% of Canada¿s population still lived in rural areas and manufacturing played a little part in Canadian exports compared to wheat, lumber or minerals. Canada was still a Victorian nation in morals and culture. Women did not have the vote and their accepted place was at home raising a family, not in the workforce. There was no income tax, and few government regulations: the Victorian tradition of laissez-faire, or little government, still prevailed.

George Woodcock calls the 19th century, ¿the century that made us.¿ ² Two popular novels describe well the Victorian Canada of 1914: Sara Jeanette Duncan¿s The Imperialist (1904) rhapsodized about the mission of the British Empire and Canada¿s role within it. Meanwhile, Louis Hémon¿s famous novel, Maria Chapdelaine (1913) equally extolled Quebec agriculture and the virtues of the Church.³ But the imperial certainties of English Canada and the agricultural Roman Catholic mission of French Canada, were both about to be shattered on the anvil of war. Nellie McClung, at her cottage north of Winnipeg in 1914, wrote with foreboding, as her son Jack clamoured to enlist; ¿instinctively we felt that we had to come to the end of a very pleasant chapter in our life as a family; something had disturbed the peaceful quiet of our lives; somewhere a drum was beating and a fife was calling.¿⁴

Canada¿s contributions to the war effort were immense. With a total population of 8 million there were about 3 million Canadians of working age, one million and a half of whom were men or potential soldiers. Prime Minister Robert Borden pledged a force structure of 500,000, hoping that a third of all eligible Canadian men would volunteer! In comparison, today in peace time, we have a population four times greater with a military just 10% of the size of our World War I predecessors. What is even more amazing, as Desmond Morton writes in Canada¿s contributions to the war effort were immense. With a total population of 8 million there were about 3 million Canadians of working age, one million and a half of whom were men or potential soldiers. Prime Minister Robert Borden pledged a force structure of 500,000, hoping that a third of all eligible Canadian men would volunteer! In comparison, today in peace time, we have a population four times greater with a military just 10% of the size of our World War I predecessors. What is even more amazing, as Desmond Morton writes in A Military History of Canada, is that combining the 232,968 men who volunteered for the infantry, the thousands more who volunteered for the Royal Navy or Royal Flying Corps, the reservists, etc, ¿by 1917, though no one realized it, Borden¿s target was close to being reached.¿ ⁵

This army fought well, especially at Vimy Ridge. The Canadians were the first to feel the onslaught of what today we call ¿weapons of mass destruction,¿ when in April, 1915, soldiers of the First Canadian Division were chemically gassed at Ypres. On Easter Monday, April 9, 1917, at Vimy Ridge the Canadian Army made history. For the first time the four Canadian divisions were on the same battlefield, led by a Canadian Commander, Sir Arthur Currie, rather than a British officer. After four days of fighting the Ridge was captured and Canadians had taken more land, cannons and prisoners than all previous British offensives. But the cost was high. Over 3,000 Canadians died at Vimy Ridge and 7,000 were wounded. In all, 60,000 Canadians died in the mud of France, a sacrifice immortalized in 1915 by John McCrae¿s poem ¿In Flanders Fields.¿

The hundreds of thousands of Canadians who enlisted fought to preserve the Victorian Canada that they loved, but in fighting to preserve it they contributed to a process that changed it utterly. Canada entered the war as a colony and emerged as a nation. When the League of Nations was founded in 1919, Canada was a member in its own right. In 1926, a Canadian Embassy was established in Washington, and the Balfour Declaration proclaimed that Britain and the dominions were equal in stature. In 1931 the Statute of Westminster legally ended the colonial status of Canada. When Canada again went to war in 1939, it did so as an independent, sovereign country.

Wars release passions, both good and bad. The incredible patriotism of Canadians who enlisted for the war effort contributed to the development of a Canadian nationality which was eventually expressed internatio-nally, but it also led to great stress at home. Suspicion of non-Anglo-Saxons was strong and 80,000 ¿enemy aliens,¿ a majority of them Ukrainians, were forced to register. Those who failed to register were interned in camps, and more than 8,000 Canadians suffered this injustice.

Even more bitter was the dispute over conscription. Canadians volunteered in droves but the 500,000 force objective was a tremendous undertaking, and the infantry need to be replenished after the losses in France. In 1917, Prime Minister Borden decided to conscript or draft 100,000 Canadians who had been exempt from military service or chose not to volunteer. Canadians were bitterly divided everywhere over the draft, but in Quebec especially, there were demonstrations and riots. In January 1918, Joseph-Napoleon Francoeur, a Liberal member, tabled the first separatist motion in the history of the Quebec Assembly. Borden persevered: 100,000 men were eventually called up, 50,000 crossed the Atlantic, and 25,000 saw service in France. But for 25,000 men, Canada endured a deep divide.

If war unleashed the evil spirits of ethnic and racial division, it also unshackled social and economic conventions. With hundreds of thousands of men at the front, women entered the workforce: 30,000 women, for example, worked in munitions factories. With women making such a large contribution to the war effort, it was hard to deny them the vote. Activist Nellie McClung persuaded the Manitoba Legislature in 1916 to be the first province to grant women the vote, and the Federal government followed suit in 1918. The war also contributed to industrialization with the Imperial Munitions Board becoming Canada¿s biggest business. By 1918, for example, Canada was exporting $18 million worth of cars and trucks to add to its traditional wheat and lumber shipments, and Sam McLaughlin of Oshawa became a founder of General Motors. Along with industrialization, cities grew, with 50% of Canada¿s population urban based by the 1920¿s. The Canada of Maria Chapdelaine was no more.

Growing cities and an industrial economy called, in turn, for a more active government, and during the war years Canada left laissez-faire behind. The Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk railways were nationalized to eventually become the CNR. If the Borden government was conscripting war, there was a persistent demand that it also conscript wealth. In 1917, Sir Thomas White introduced the Income War Tax Act, and we have had personal income taxes ever since. Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook have summarized the economic impact of the war years thusly, ¿By 1918 the free-wheeling economic activity and business practices of pre-war years had been replaced by government regulations and in a vital sector of the economy, a heavy dose of government ownership.¿⁶

George Woodcock may be right that it was the 19th century that made us: most assuredly, it was the Great War of 1914-1918 that transformed us.

Notes

¹ John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 386.

²George Woodcock, The Century that Made Us: Canada 1814-1914 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989).

³ This point is well-made by Ramsay Cook¿s chapter, ¿The Triumph and Trials of Materialism (1900-1945)¿ in The Illustrated History of Canada edited by Craig Brown, (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Denys, 1987), p. 375.

⁴Quoted in Don Gillmor, Achille Michaud and Pierre Turgeon, Canada: A People¿s History, Volume Two (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001), p.91.

⁵ Desmond Morton, A Military History of Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1999), p.136.

⁶ Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook, Canada 1896-1921: A Nation Transformed (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974) p.247.

Desmond Morton
Professor of History at McGill University

During 52 months, the Great War, 1914-18, hastened the death of over 20 million people, demolished all but one of Europe's six empires and created enough yearning for vengeance to bring on a world war barely twenty years later that killed three times as many people. To argue that this terrible event also helped determine the future shape of Canada seems impertinently trivial.

The fact remains that the Great War persuaded most Canadians to support their own autonomy. In 1914, the pan-Canadian nationalism of Henri Bourassa or John Skirving Ewart was easily ignored. As prime minister, Sir Robert Borden's vision of Canada was as a leader of a world-girdling British imperial federation controlled by His Majesty's white subjects. War in 1914 was a splendid excuse to show that Canada's loyalty knew no limits.

Within three years, a million Canadian men had volunteered for the war, at least one in every two men of military age. By the war's end in 1919, Canada had torn itself apart and bankrupted itself to sustain its war effort; 60,000 of its men were dead and many more would suffer mental or physical mutilation for the rest of their lives. In an Imperial War Cabinet, Canada's prime minister had helped decide imperial strategy, including an invasion of revolutionary Russia to restore Czarist authority and to restore the alliance of 1914.

In retrospect and even at the time, other decisions were far more important. At Versailles in June 1919, Canadians signed the ill-fated peace treaty under their own name, indented like the other Dominions, it was true, under the United Kingdom. In September 1916, Canada asserted its own direct authority over its soldiers overseas and created a new Ministry of Overseas Force to exercise control. The reform was needed to clean up the mess Canadians themselves had helped create when they entrusted their war effort to a partially insane Sir Sam Hughes, but the decision asserted Canada's extra-territorial sovereignty long before the Statute of Westminster in 1931.

By 1918, Sir Arthur Currie, Canadian-born commander of the Canadian Corps in France, exercised authority in keeping his four divisions together that no British commander would have dared assert. "...we must look upon them in the light in which they wish to be looked upon," confessed the Earl of Derby to a resentful Field Marshal Haig, "rather than the light in which we would wish to do so."¹ Borden had made the point a month earlier when he arrived in London, furious at the waste of 13,000 Canadian soldiers in the hopeless Passchendaele offensive. After he heard the Canadian leader, British prime minister David Lloyd George summoned the generals and forced them to listen. "Let the past bury its dead," thundered the usually taciturn Borden, "but for God's sake let us get down to earnest endeavour." If there were more Passchendaeles, he warned, not a single Canadian would sail for Europe.
²

There had been no such questions or reservations in 1914. Colonel Sam Hughes had thrown away the official mobilization plans and commanded militia colonels to bring their men to Valcartier, a sandy plain outside Quebec City. Within a month 33,000 volunteers covered the plain with their tents. In September they were formally attested under the British Army Act as "Imperials," soldiers raised in a British colony and subject to British military law. How else could they serve abroad? Seventy per cent of them were British born.

In April 1915, the raw Canadians faced their first trial in badly built trenches in front of the Belgian city of Ypres. It was a disaster. In a few days, the Canadians lost over half their fighting strength in dead, wounded and those taken prisoner. The men fell back to their reserve trenches, leaving their useless Canadian-made rifles behind. One brigadier stayed in his dugout with Sam Hughes's son as companion. Another wandered back, looking for help. A Canadian colonel turned up drunk in Boulogne while his men headed to German salt mines as prisoners.

Was it a national humiliation? No. The Germans had cheated by using poison gas. Official figures showed only three Canadian dead from gas but that was a detail. Hughes's Canadian-born pal, Max Aitken, owner of London's Daily Express, had gained access to France as "Canadian Eyewitness." He returned the favour with a quick book, Canada in Flanders, giving a vivid, if fictional, portrayal of Canadians as rugged, sharp-shooting farmers, cowboys and frontiersmen overcoming impossible odds. Conscious of Canadian sensitivity, the British commander, Sir John French, wisely claimed that the Canadians "had saved the situation." To Canadians at home, St. Julien, Kitchener's Wood, Gravenstafel Ridge and Ypres entered their language as triumphs of courage and sacrifice for a new nation, much as Paardeberg in the Boer War had ended as a Canadian victory. Canada may have been British but Canadian soldiers had become the team to cheer for.

How Canadian was the team? Until June 1917, British generals commanded the Canadian division and, when it expanded in 1915 and 1916 to four divisions, the Canadian Corps. As historian W. B. Kerr remembered, the British accents of "Old Originals" dominated the non-commissioned ranks well into 1917. Carefully chosen British staff officers tried to keep their inexperienced Canadian generals from making fools of themselves. Lieutenant-General Sir Julian Byng -- "Bungo" to his British chums — re-shaped the Canadian Corps and transformed its tactics from the disastrous Somme offensives.³ Finally, after days of bombardment had shattered the German artillery and drove defenders insane, on Easter Sunday 1917, the four Canadian divisions rose from trenches and tunnels and walked forward under driving snow to capture Vimy Ridge. At a cost of 10,000 dead and wounded that seemed almost bearable by 1917, the Canadians delivered the first unequivocal Allied victory on the Western Front.

Nations are made by doing great things together, said the French historian Ernest Renan. Taking Vimy Ridge was a great thing a hundred thousand Canadians had done together. Colonel Thomas Tremblay's 22e bataillon canadien-francais had been there with 47 others. Of course the "Vandoos" did not include French Canadians who read Nations are made by doing great things together, said the French historian Ernest Renan. Taking Vimy Ridge was a great thing a hundred thousand Canadians had done together. Colonel Thomas Tremblay's 22e bataillon canadien-francais had been there with 47 others. Of course the "Vandoos" did not include French Canadians who read Le Devoir, cheered Henri Bourassa and denounced the war.⁴ Nor did it include the "enemy aliens" Canada interned in the thousands, nor many of the German-Canadian citizens of Berlin, Ontario, coerced to re-name their city for Lord Kitchener, Britain's War Secretary.⁵

Sir Robert Borden's response to Vimy was to recognize that the losses had to be replaced. Since volunteers had stopped coming, the initial pledge of a war fought solely by the willing could not be sustained. A complex, almost unworkable system of conscription would follow. If Canada was a country of two nations, one might slowly draw triumph from Vimy; the other would draw broken promises, betrayal and defeat.

Not even Vimy Ridge convinced Canadians to see themselves as a single nation. Nor could their prime minister, a colourless politician with little empathy for French Canada or the West. Sir Robert Borden was a deeply conscientious man, profoundly moved by the suffering he encountered when he devoted every spare minute overseas to visiting military hospitals. His imperial convictions cracked under the indolent defeatism he encountered in Whitehall in 1915, when he found most British ministers absent for the grouse-hunting season. Only the one minister he had been prepared to despise as a pacifist and radical, David Lloyd George, was utterly intent on his job as Minister of Munitions. When Lloyd George became prime minister, after a coup partly engineered by Max Aitken, he summoned the Dominion premiers to London. "We need their men," he explained, "We must consult them."

That winter, Borden had learned some grim facts. Americans had entered the war but had yet to create an army. Russia was collapsing; so might the French, with their army dissolving in mutinies. At sea, German U-boats had brought Britain close to starvation. Could Canada cut its Corps? Borden could not share his gloomy reasons, but he could only give one answer.

The struggle over conscription ended with victory for Borden's Unionists in December 1917. Confederation was a partnership more than a democracy; no partnership survives long if the larger partner coerces the smaller. In 1917, a minor political figure named William Lyon Mackenzie King learned that lesson. Defeated in 1911 as a Laurier minister and MP, King burned to resume his career. After cultivating his rebel grandfather's riding of York North, King even volunteered to run for Borden's Unionists in 1917. Borden turned him down. Instead, King ran as an anti-conscription Laurier Liberal and was badly beaten. In 1919, when Laurier was dead and the Liberals needed a new leader, Lady Laurier's testimonial to King's loyalty turned the convention and launched the most successful career in Canadian politics.

Perhaps the Great War cured Sir Robert Borden of his dream of an imperial federation. Who can say what it did to his party? Once he was Liberal leader, William Lyon Mackenzie King needed no further demonstration. As Montreal's That winter, Borden had learned some grim facts. Americans had entered the war but had yet to create an army. Russia was collapsing; so might the French, with their army dissolving in mutinies. At sea, German U-boats had brought Britain close to starvation. Could Canada cut its Corps? Borden could not share his gloomy reasons, but he could only give one answer.

The struggle over conscription ended with victory for Borden's Unionists in December 1917. Confederation was a partnership more than a democracy; no partnership survives long if the larger partner coerces the smaller. In 1917, a minor political figure named William Lyon Mackenzie King learned that lesson. Defeated in 1911 as a Laurier minister and MP, King burned to resume his career. After cultivating his rebel grandfather's riding of York North, King even volunteered to run for Borden's Unionists in 1917. Borden turned him down. Instead, King ran as an anti-conscription Laurier Liberal and was badly beaten. In 1919, when Laurier was dead and the Liberals needed a new leader, Lady Laurier's testimonial to King's loyalty turned the convention and launched the most successful career in Canadian politics.

Perhaps the Great War cured Sir Robert Borden of his dream of an imperial federation. Who can say what it did to his party? Once he was Liberal leader, William Lyon Mackenzie King needed no further demonstration.As Montreal La Presse had once explained to its readers, French Canadians had only a single loyalty, to Canada. British Canadians seemed to need two loyalties. Charles Stacey discovered that Mackenzie King was more a closet anglophile than he could ever admit, but such emotions stayed in the closet. Never again, if King could help it, would Canada be drawn into a European war, to be torn apart by its own divided people. Under Borden, Canada changed from a colony to a junior but sovereign British ally.

The Great War gave King and the Liberals arguments and support enough to take Canada to full and unquestioned independence. Old loyalties proved too strong to keep Canada out of war in 1939, but, as King had pledged, "Parliament would decide." Until Adolf Hitler's triumphant summer of 1940, Canada did as little as it possibly could. As Mackenzie King insisted to shocked British delegates negotiating the Air Training Plan, "it is not our war."⁶

Notes
¹Derby to Haig, 2 November 1917, in Robert Blake (ed.) The Private Papers of Sir Douglas Haig (London, 1952), p. 266. See Borden Papers, Sir Edward Kemp to Borden, 24 February 1918; Preston, Canada and "Imperial Defense", pp. 487-9.

²Cited in Brown, Borden, vol. II, pp. 137-8; Stacey, Age of Conflict, vol. I, pp. 219-221.

³ On Byng, Jeffrey Williams, Byng of Vimy: General and Governor-General (London, 1983), pp. 127-9 and passim. On changes in tactics, see William Rawling, On tactics see Morton, When Your Number's Up, pp. xxx. and Bill Rawling, Surviving Trench Warfare: Technology and the Canadian Corps (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). On trench raids, Dennis Winter, Death's Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London, 1979), p. 92; John Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell: The Western Front, 1914-1918 (London, 1976), p. 76; Maurice Pope, Soldiers and Politicians (Toronto, 1964), p.34.

⁴ On French Canada and the war, see Elizabeth Armstrong, The Crisis of Quebec, 1914-1918 (New York, 1967; Toronto, 1974); Réal Bélanger, "Albert Sévigny et la participation des Canadiens français à la grande guerre (1919 1918) in W.A.B.Douglas and Desmond Morton, Canada as a Military Power (Ottawa, 1982); Jean-Pierre Gagnon, Le 22e bataillon (canadien-français), 1914-1919, Une étude socio-militaire (Québec, 1986); Desmond Morton, "French Canada and War: The Military Background to the Conscription Crisis of 1917" in J.L. Granatstein and R.D. Cuff, War and Society in North America (Toronto, 1971); Mason Wade, The French Canadians, 1760-1960 (Toronto, 1968), vol. II, pp. xxx.

⁵ On internment: Desmond Morton, "Sir William Otter and Internment Operations during the First World War", Canadian Historical Review, LV, 1, 1974; David Smith, "Emergency Government in Canada", ibid., L, 4, 1969; Lubomyr Luciuk, A time for Atonement (Ottawa, 1988); Wilson, Ontario and the Great War, pp. xxx.

⁶ See Pickersgill, J.W., The Mackenzie King Record, vol. I 1939-1944 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960, pp 43-44).

Sir Robert Laird Borden, lawyer, politician, prime minister of Canada, 1911-20 (b at Grand Pré, NS 26 June 1854; d at Ottawa 10 June 1937). The eighth prime minister of Canada, Borden was a Halifax lawyer, leader of the Liberal-Conservative Party 1901-20, architect of the Conservative victory in the "Reciprocity Election" of 1911, PM during WWI and a leading figure in the achievement of "Dominion Status" and the transition from the British Empire to the British Commonwealth of Nations.

Borden was a self-made man. After a brief formal education, he spent 5 years teaching at private academies in Nova Scotia and New Jersey. Returning to NS in 1874 to article in law, he was admitted to the bar in 1878 and by 1890 headed a prestigious Halifax law firm. He was elected to Parliament in 1896 and in 1901 was selected by the Conservative caucus to succeed Sir Charles Tupper as leader of the Liberal-Conservative Party. Over the next decade he worked to rebuild the Conservative Party and establish a reform policy (the Halifax Platform of 1907).

In 1911 he led the opposition to the Reciprocity Agreement negotiated by Sir Wilfrid Laurier's government with the US and forced a general election. By skilful political management Borden brought together a coalition of anti-Laurier groups (Liberal businessmen opposed to Reciprocity, French Canadian Nationalistes opposed to the Naval Service Act, Conservative provincial administrations and his own parliamentary party) which defeated the Liberal Party.

Borden's leadership during WWI was remarkable. At home, his wartime government was responsible for the Emergency War Measures Act (1914), the first measures of direct taxation by the Ottawa government (the Wartime Business Profits Tax, 1916, and the "temporary" Income Tax, 1917), the nationalization of the Canadian Northern Railway as the first step in the creation of the CNR and, after the collapse of the voluntary recruiting system, the Military Service Act, 1917. Conscription was accompanied by the creation of a union government of pro-conscriptionist Conservatives and Liberals which won the bitterly contested general election of 1917.

Overseas, the Canadian Expeditionary Force grew from one division to a full Canadian Corps commanded after 1917 by a Canadian, Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur William Currie. Borden believed that the distinguished record of the CEF at Ypres, Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele and in the final 100 days was the ultimate proof of the maturity of Canadian nationhood.

Principal author of Resolution IX of the Imperial War Conference of 1917, he argued that Canada and the other dominions deserved recognition "as autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth." As leader of the Canadian delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he was primarily responsible for international recognition of the autonomous status of the Dominions.

Borden retired as PM in 1920. In his last years he was recognized as an international statesman and firm advocate of the League of Nations. He pursued a successful career in business and served as chancellor of Queen's 1924-30.

Bibliography

Borden, Robert Laird, Sir. Canada in the Commonwealth: From Conflict to Co-operation. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1929.

---. Canadian Constitutional Studies: The Marfleet Lectures, University of Toronto, October, 1921. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1922.

---. Letters to Limbo. 2 v. Henry Borden, ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971.

---. Robert Laird Borden: His Memoirs. 2 v. Henry Borden, ed. Toronto: Macmillan, 1938.

Brown, Robert Craig. Robert Laird Borden: A Biography. 2 v. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1975-1980.

Author ROBERT CRAIG BROWN


Reproduced with permission from The Canadian Encyclopaedia, Historica Foundation of Canada