Chapter VI The Civilian as Warrior
Not the least astonishing of the many surprises of the war to the Germans was the, to them, incredible capacity for swift preparation for war which was shown by the democratic and unmartial British nations under the spur of deep national feeling plus driving necessity. In their careful preparation for sudden war and overwhelming victory they had believed with reason, judging by all that the past could teach, that their margin of advantage, because of their mighty armies and the vast numbers of their trained officers, could never be overcome by those nations which in time of peace had failed to educate their people into a psychological readiness for the mass war and to equip them to wage it. They remembered how vain had been the rally of the French levies under Gambetta’s leadership in 1871. For Kitchener’s army, when Great Britain set herself to create out of nothing but the valor and willingness of the people a buckler to stem the German flood, the German chiefs expressed a contemptuous and pitying scorn; while they did not give even this measure of regard to the Dominions’ contingents when they rushed overseas to take their part in the defence of civilization. These they regarded as mere mobs of untrained militia men, unkempt, undisciplined and without competent leaders, who would be scattered, like leaves before the tempest, by a mere handful of drilled and well-bullied German soldiers. At that time no German mind could have conceived the possibility of such an impossible fact as that within two years it would be a fixed rule of the German army that Canadian troops in the front line trenches must always be faced, across No Man’s Land, by Prussian Guards or Bavarian shock troops.
Nor was the low opinion of the military worth of these volunteer armies confined to arrogant Germans; there were doubters a-plenty at home. Thus a Canadian public man held forth despairingly to me at that time upon the hopelessness of opposing to the highly-trained German armies these hastily organized battalions of men summoned from civil occupations. For one thing was it not a fact, confirmed by all military experience and accepted as veritable holy writ, that an officer, capable of commanding men, could not be made in less than seven years? Unless the French, who were a military nation, had a sufficient surplusage of officers partly to equip the British armies it would be nothing but slaughter to pit these untrained hordes against the Prussian hordes. Nor was this Jeremiah alone in his gloom!
One can recall that there was a certain nervous trepidation among Canadians when, the early months of 1915, it became known that the Canadian troops were in the front line and likely at any moment to be put to the test of actual fighting. The men of this first division were separated from their civilian pursuits by barely half a year of time; they were, by all the standards of European war as to training, mere militia. The test came in April, 1915, when the Germans under a rolling barrage of poison gas—a new and terrifying weapon of war—sought to break through the allied front in the Ypres salient at a point where it was held partly by French African troops and partly by the new levies from Canada. The story need not be re-told to Canadians. The gas terror broke the nerve for the moment of the African troops, and they fled in panic; the Canadians plugged the line and held it against all odds until reinforcements came up and the danger was past. It was said at the time that the reason why the Canadians held on was that they did not know enough about the rules of the war game to realize that they would be justified under the conditions in falling back. Of all the myriad emotions that filled the hearts of the Canadians during those days of sheer stark horror fear was the most absent. An officer, now of high rank, who talked with me in France about the battle of Ypres said that the first solid fact that emerged from the confusion of the surprise attack was the instant resolution by Canadians of all ranks to stand their ground whatever might betide. Non-combatants hurried to their officers to ask what they could do to help. “From that moment,” said the officer, “I had no doubts whatever about the Canadian army; I knew that not potentially but actually they were troops of the first rank.”
In the War Memorials paintings shown in London in December—to be housed later in Ottawa in some fitting setting—there was a picture which, despite its cubist freakishness, put on canvas, for all men to see, the soul of Canada at war. Everything about the picture was wrong except its symbolism which was compelling in its truth. 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 the battle and the moral contagion of fear. The foundations of the world were rocking but the guns stood firm!
Ypres, indeed, revealed the basic quality upon which the achievements of the Canadians in the field rested—that fortitude, moral and physical, which in the day of battle and the hour of trial triumphed over every human weakness and made them the implacable and irresistible vindicators of divine justice. In the early summer of 1918 when there was imminent danger of the whole western front being crushed under the weight of the German advance, Sir Arthur Currie, the commander of the Canadian corps, in a speech at a Canadian dinner in London, made a remark which shocked and thrilled his hearers. He said he was the proudest man in the world because he commanded the Canadian corps; and the saddest because it was doomed to die. Thus he gave notice that, if the line were overwhelmed, the Canadians would die fighting. That was the darkest hour that comes before the dawn. No such glorious but tragic fate awaited the Canadians. The future held for them not the guerdon of inexpugnable heroism in disaster but the bright badge of victory. When they struck camp and unfurled their banners for the new campaign they marched not to Thermopylae but to Waterloo.
But much more than the capacity to conquer in the actual clash of the battlefield went to the making of the victorious Canadian army. These civilians, called from the bench, the office, the farm and the forest showed an aptitude for war—exemplified also in varying degrees by all the democratic armies—that must have seemed uncanny to the German High Command, hopelessly committed by training and inclination to the view that great and conquering armies could only be created in nations as the result of precedent and long-continuing conditions: among them the constant familiarizing of the popular mind with the idea of war as a weapon of national policy, the universal training of men of military age, the careful cultivation of an officer class, the maintenance of a general staff of highly equipped experts and strategists who devoted their lives to the art of war. Considering their environment and viewpoint it was inevitable that they should regard it as simply preposterous that a civilian army officered and commanded by men of their own type and class—farmers, artisans; clerks, bankers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, journalists, real estate agents—should be able to dispute the field with the disciplined legions of Germany. They could not realize what this war has established beyond all question, that the general principles upon which war is waged are simple and easily grasped.
War is a proposition to apply to a very definite and distinguishable object, all available power. It thus becomes in its essence a huge business problem, fundamentally one of engineering and organization. It was speedily demonstrated in the war that the qualities which make for success in civilian life in almost every field of endeavor are also the qualities which are necessary for successful leadership in war. The civilian mind with its initiative, its readiness to improvise means to an end, its disregard for precedent as such, its willingness to subordinate venerable sacred theories to modern hard facts, did not suffer in the clash with the stereotyped military mind despite its larger equipment of technical knowledge. All the democratic armies were fertile in inventions and expedients, which were gradually incorporated in the practice of the armies to their great good. A lengthy article—or a book—could be filled with a record of Canadian contributions to the art of war—many of them rapid improvisations when issues turned on minutes. One hears much about them as he goes about in France—and not always from Canadians either.
Thus I was much entertained at Arras by a British officer of artillery who told me how one of his fellow-officers, a young Canadian, had pitted his profound knowledge of artillery fire, which he brought from an insurance office in Winnipeg, against the inherited and assembled wisdom of the higher-ups to their ultimate conversion after an actual test had vindicated his theory. I shall not here recount how the Canadian soldiers at Ypres were supplied with ready-made gas masks upon the occasion of the first gas attack though it will doubtless be duly recorded in some grave history of the war. The trench raid, which came to be one of the constant factors of the war, was a Canadian invention. It was a Canadian doctor, transferred from civil practice to the front, who first showed the way to cope with trench feet, a war disease which at one time threatened to destroy the British army. The Canadian army led the way in the skilful application of machine-gun power to the necessities of attack and defence; and its system of massing the machine-guns in units instead of distributing them through companies, with their accompanying employment for barrages and indirect fire, would have been extended to the whole army if the war had continued. These are noted only as illustrations; the whole question of Canadian resourcefulness in the field, with its possibilities of infinite interest, cannot be dealt with here.
One lesson of this war is thus of vast significance to Canada and to all democracies. It is in brief that a country of free men, engaged and proficient in the countless occupations of civil life, is always potentially formidable in war. When we build our country for peace we build it for war, too, if the need arises. Our sure defence is not the soldier in his uniform but the patriot citizen in his plain civilian attire. The vindication of this profound truth has been upon a scale of such magnitude that it is difficult to think that ever again in the history of the human race any aspiring kaiser or Napoleon—white or yellow—will dream that he can, by enslaving his own people, provide himself with a weapon with which to conquer the world.