Chapter VII Compensations
I rode out to the Canadian battlefields from a city where for seven weeks there had been going on a determined, though partly hidden, tug-of-war between conflicting ambitions, some of them far from high-minded; and, after my pilgrimage over the grounds where men by the hundreds of thousands died for an idea, which many of them only vaguely realized though they felt its influence in their hearts, I returned to the same atmosphere of controversy where the keenest discussions turned upon the degree of the reward that should be allotted to this or that country for the services of the men who had made for themselves the utter and complete sacrifice. The contrast could not but suggest reflections upon the relative contributions to the future security of the world—which was supposed to be their common object—of the soldiers who won the war and the statesmen who were building a peace upon their achievements. There was some satisfaction in recalling that the Prime Minister of Canada was reported to have said, at a certain meeting, that not a single Canadian soldier had died in order that any country might add a mile of land to its territory.
In one of his addresses to the Plenary Conference President Wilson made a striking reference to the United States soldiers. “As I go about the streets here,” he said, “I see everywhere the American uniform. Those men came into the war after we had uttered our purpose. They came as crusaders, not merely to win a war but to win a cause.” This language applies still more aptly to the soldiers of Canada. No participant in the war has so clear a record of disinterestedness as Canada. The United States came in late after repeated and deliberate attacks upon its national honor really left no alternative to a proud nation; but Canada, in keeping with a deep and true instinct, drew her sword at the first blast of the war trumpet. There was no calculation about Canada’s entrance into the war; nor was there ambition for territory or trade or glory. There was an intuitive recognition that this was Armageddon; and that if the powers of hell were not to overturn the world there would be need of us.
There is much idle discussion as to who won the war. The answer is that it was won by the allies; and that the help of every one of them was essential to the final result. During the war we were told, by little Canadians and would-be-shirkers, that in a conflict of such range and violence the contribution of Canada, however great it might be in relation to the country’s resources, could not be a deciding factor; and that, therefore, our canny course was to turn the war to our advantage by supplying goods and war materials to the allies at war prices. That counsel of infamy was spurned by a generous people, and Canada made her sacrifice of life and treasure to the last ounce of her power. The war is over and won, and the cost is known—a huge debt that will long burden us, a great army of maimed men and sixty thousand Canadian graves in France and Flanders. Was the sacrifice worth while? Are there compensations for our grief and loss? There is an answer to these questions from the battlefields and it is one of consolation.
It would be ludicrous to say that Canada won the war; but the view that if Canada had kept out or had limited her contribution to a mere nominal participation the war would not have been won, can be held with a clear mind by every Canadian. The war was almost lost many times; it was saved on occasions by the narrowest of margins, both as to time and force. It was saved by the defence of Liege by the Belgians; by the miraculous rally of the allied forces at the Marne; by the holding of the line by the British in the first battle of Ypres; by the repeating of this achievement at the second battle of Ypres by the Canadians; by the glorious resistance by the French at Verdun; by the tenacity with which the bent line was held a year ago; and by that marvelous rally of all the allied powers, in which Canada joined, after the narrow escape from disaster last year, which supplied as though from inexhaustible reservoirs the resources in men and material that crushed the Germans in the summer offensive. Canada has the compensation of knowing that the first object of her war contribution—the infliction of complete and overwhelming defeat upon Kaiserism—was fully realized in part by her exertions. But the soldiers—not only of Canada but of all the democratic countries—were inspired by something more than a determination to defeat and punish the Germans. They all had in some measure the feeling that they were engaged in a crusade for the making of a better world in which wars of aggression should cease. They fought, many of them consciously, for a peace which should endure because it would rest upon justice and fraternity. It rests with the statesmen of Paris to keep faith with the aspiration which turned millions of peace-loving men into militant crusaders. If they succeed only in patching up the old order under a pretentious false front, it will be only too true that much of the sacrifice will have been in vain. But though the conditions in Paris are far from cheerful, it is still possible to hope for a peace that will achieve the immediate object of the war—the just punishment of Germany and her allies; and will have in it, as well, the healing qualities that will safeguard the world against the repetition of these horrors. The responsibility that rests upon the world’s elder statesmen, in session in Paris, is immeasurable; and pitiful will be their place in history if, in the judgment of posterity, they turn to base uses the high devotion that strewed the battlefields of Europe with the bones of the generous youth of their countries.
The national compensations to Canada for her participation in the war would not in themselves justify the sacrifices; but they are a substantial reinforcement to the considerations that supply the actual justifications. We have won a new status among the nations of the world; which is the outward sign of that strong national spirit, evoked by the war, which is to-day vitalizing our common life in all its manifestations—political, commercial, intellectual, spiritual. It is something, too, to have learned in the sternest of tests, that we have been building our nationhood on sound lines; that our conception of a democratic people, with equality of opportunity and status, endures while autocracy, based upon the subjection of man, has crumbled in the fierce fires of war. We know now that everything that makes the normal and happy citizen in peace—good schools in youth, just living conditions, opportunities for advancement to honest work, wise laws, the cultivation of the spiritual life—makes also the unconquerable soldier when he is called upon to defend his home. Canada derives from the war the profound satisfaction that she gave essential help in protecting the world from a political and spiritual reaction that would have set the clocks of human progress back a thousand years; the hope, still confident, that she has helped to usher in a new international order under which democratic institutions can have a peaceful and fruitful evolution to better things for all; and a knowledge of her own capacities and possibilities which gives her confidence to go forward to a great career amongst the nations of the world.
The financial burdens of the war, heavy though they be, need give us little concern. They can be borne—or better still, largely removed—if Canadians in grappling with this problem, show, in any degree, the qualities of patriotism, unity and sacrifice which gave so sharp an edge to their war effort. We all helped in the war but the actual fighting was done by the men who could fight. We shall all help to carry the war debt but most of the paying will have to be done by those who can pay. The war debt may be no calamity whatever if we are driven by necessity to juster methods of taxation, greater co-ordination of national energies and wise development of the country’s resources.
The hard question is where the recompense is for the men who will never come back—who rest in the countless cemeteries which dot the battlefields of France. The answer—if answer there be—must be given by fighting men themselves who counted in advance the cost and accepted the price with proud humility; let them speak! Julian Grenfell, before going into battle to his death, put the case of the young man to whom duty calls in two ever memorable lines:
“He is dead who will not fight,
And who dies fighting has increase.”
The passion of man for his country which makes death in her defence a high honor burns in Vernede’s “Petition”—a prayer that was granted:
“Grant thou one thing more;
That now when envious foes would spoil thy splendor,
Unversed in arms, a dreamer such as I
May in thy ranks be deemed not all unworthy
England, for thee to die.”
It must be a deep instinct, not to be judged by finite tests, that sent the young men to battle with joyous hearts and shining faces. “Now God be thanked that has matched us with His hour!” cried Rupert Brooke, now asleep in Scyros in the far Aegean seas. And the stoicism with which the young soldier foresaw death on the battlefield was never expressed in finer terms than by the British officer in the letter which he wrote to his parents the night before his death:
“It is impossible to fear death out here when one is no longer an individual but a member of a regiment and an army. I have been looking at the stars and thinking what an immense distance they are away. What an insignificant thing the loss of, say, 40 years of life is compared with them! It seems hardly worth talking about!”
Here are four voices, all now from the shades! Do they not, taken together, tell us something of the high exaltation with which the young hero makes his sacrifice. He welcomes the hour that makes his arms his country’s shield, scorning the recreant who shuns the test; and measuring time by eternity he renounces life as a garment to be laid aside. If the poet and the seer can speak for them, the lost do not ask us for pity or for hopeless grief:
“They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun in the morning
We will remember them.”
For those who mourn for the unreturning brave there are secret springs of consolation! The ending of the full-lived life is not tragic; the symbol of poignant grief is the broken column that bespeaks the day that ended in the morning. But for those who die for their country there is not this sense of irremediable loss, this feeling of the unlived life, the unfulfilled dream. There is an instinct deep-hidden in human life which tells the mourner that for the man who falls upon the field of honor his life has come full circle whatever the tale of his years; and that somewhere in the divine scheme of things there is compensation for the lost experiences and achievements.
If the dead gave their lives without bitterness and the living are consoled Canada, the common mother of both, is richer for all time for their sacrifice. In the life of the race a single generation passes like a heart-beat; but the chosen few from this generation, whose names are in the lists of the lost, are secure in their fame and in their power. They have set for all time for Canada the standards of service and of sacrifice; their example will, now and forever, sweeten our civic life and if the occasion calls will nerve the youth of Canada to emulate their deeds on the stricken field. A thousand years from now Canadian youths will read the story of their deeds with hearts uplifted and with kindling eyes. Safe in such an immortality what matters it that they sleep far from Canada upon the battlefields of France!