Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (13 page)

Very early on April 9, Easter Monday (having spent Sunday at church services), the men of the four Canadian divisions were given a stiff tot of rum and began moving forward under cover of a heavy barrage. For once the weather was in their favour: the snowstorm in which the Canadians crept forward across no man’s land was unusual for April, but the snow was flying into the Germans’ faces, concealing the Canadian advance. The Canadian Official History says the attack “went like clockwork,” but nothing in battle goes like clockwork: some regiments in the 11th Brigade, which had suffered heavy losses in other recent fighting, had just “lost their confidence” (as the saying went):

Nevertheless, the bulk of the Canadian army swarmed up over the ridge and seized the German trenches. Although the Germans were very well dug in, a lot of the forward positions were taken by surprise, but the attackers were taking heavy losses.

After two days of futile counterattacks the German commander, Crown Prince Rupprecht, ordered the withdrawal of his troops onto the plain below. He had lost a dominating position, and 4,000 Germans had been taken prisoner. But the Canadians had suffered 10,602 casualties, including 3,600 dead.

It was partly in recognition of the Canadian Corps’ achievement at Vimy that it was finally given a Canadian commander in the early summer of 1917, and so became the first completely Canadian field army in the country’s history. But while Lieutenant General Sir Julian Byng, the British officer who had commanded the Corps since May 1916, was well liked by the troops, his Canadian successor, General Sir Arthur Currie
(who had been an insurance agent and part-time militia officer when the war broke out), was not. Leslie Hudd, by now a seasoned veteran, met Currie after he was recommended for a French Croix de Guerre and a British Military Medal for single-handedly taking a German machine-gun post.

Currie was a shy, ungainly man who had none of the actor’s skill at currying favour with the troops that is cultivated by so many successful generals. But although his later life was blighted by a campaign of slander directed by Sam Hughes and his cronies, who claimed that he wasted men’s lives needlessly, Currie actually worked very hard at keeping them alive. He was an excellent and conscientious commander who was once considered by Prime Minister David Lloyd George as a possible replacement for Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief in France.

However, despite Currie’s success in his unending struggle to keep the Canadian Corps together and prevent it from being frittered away in small packets by the British High Command to plug weaknesses in various sectors of the front, he could exercise little control over the way the Corps as a whole was actually used. Nor was there any senior Canadian military voice in Ottawa to give Prime Minister Borden strategic advice from the point of view of Canada’s own interests: during
the entire war the chief of staff of the Canadian army was a British officer, Major General Sir Willoughby Gwatkin. As in all Canada’s wars down to the present, the strategic thinking was being done elsewhere.

The victory at Vimy Ridge confirmed Borden’s belief that the Canadian army was the finest of the allied armies and made it even more difficult for him to contemplate reducing the Canadian commitment. However, no army could afford to go on taking such losses unless it received a steady flow of reinforcements, and voluntary enlistments were drying up. The prime minister had also been much affected by his visit to the front, where he was shocked by what he saw, and by the nerve-racking visits he insisted on paying to all the Canadian military hospitals. (He visited fifty-seven during his 1915 trip.)

As much as Borden’s solicitude for “his boys,” the deteriorating military situation of the Allies in general was now pushing him very strongly toward conscription. He spent from the middle of February to early May 1917 in England attending the first Imperial War Cabinet meetings. He was appalled by what he learned. The Allies’ situation was growing worse: they might even be losing the war.

The early optimism that the Russian Revolution would improve matters soon turned to fears that Russia would withdraw from the war. If that happened the whole weight of the German army could be concentrated on the Western Front, and things were bad enough there already. The French offensive that had begun at the same time as Vimy Ridge in the spring of 1917 had pushed their army past the breaking point. One French regiment went to the front making bleating noises like lambs being led to slaughter, and when the offensive collapsed, fifty-four divisions—almost half the French army—mutinied. It took 100,000 courts martial to restore discipline, and even after that the French army seemed to be finished as an offensive weapon, perhaps for years.

Meanwhile, German submarines were sinking a million tons of Allied shipping a month, and the first sea lord, Admiral John Jellicoe, had concluded: “It is impossible for us to go on with the war if losses continue like this.” Only one bright spot loomed on the horizon: the German campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare, by sinking neutral shipping, was pushing the United States into the war on the side of the Allies. (Washington declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917.) But it would take almost a year before American troops reached Europe in large numbers, and meanwhile France, Britain and the colonies had to hold out somehow on the Western Front. There was only one solution, and Lloyd George put it very bluntly to the Imperial War Cabinet on March 20, 1917:

Lloyd George’s “very sublime purpose,” of course, was to make sure that the British empire won the war—no matter what the cost to Britain or anybody else. By 1917 the first total war had brought a new breed of men to power in Britain, France and Germany: Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau and Erich Ludendorff owed their positions to promises that they would wage the war unrelentingly and uncompromisingly until total victory. In fact, there was probably no choice by 1917: it was not only in Russia that revolution was a danger. After so much sacrifice, any major European government that stopped the fighting short of victory now faced the risk of overthrow by an angry and disillusioned
populace: only victory could make them safe. Even in Britain the cabinet was seriously worried about domestic political stability.

In Canada there was no danger of revolution, but the English-speaking majority would not forgive any government that failed to prosecute the war to the utmost, while the French-speaking minority would not forgive any government that resorted to compulsion. Four days after he returned to Ottawa from the Imperial War Cabinet meeting, Borden made his decision: he announced that the government would impose conscription.

“L
UDENDORFF
”
WAS
G
ENERAL
E
RICH
L
UDENDORFF, EFFECTIVELY
the supreme commander of the German army in 1917–18. “Hoffmann” was General Max Hoffmann, who was an old associate of Ludendorff’s and chief of staff on the Russian front for much of the war. “Falkenhayn” was General Erich von Falkenhayn, the chief of the German General Staff for the first two years of the war. The conversation is quoted at the beginning of
The Donkeys
, a book published by British military historian Alan Clark in 1961 which ruthlessly dissected and analyzed the shortcomings and failures of the British army’s senior officers in the battles of 1915.

Clark’s book set the fashion for blaming the slaughter of the First World War on arrogant, stupid and callous commanders that has largely dominated popular accounts and dramatizations of the war ever since. Indeed,
The Donkeys
was the principal inspiration for the satirical
musical
Oh, What a Lovely War!
, which spread the fashion even more widely. (Clark, later a maverick Conservative Member of Parliament and cabinet member under Margaret Thatcher, even took the play’s authors to court in order to obtain proper credit and a share of the royalties.) So it’s a pity, really, that the whole conversation between the German generals that gave Clark his title never happened. Clark simply made it up.