Canada's sons and Great Britain in the world war; a complete and authentic history of the commanding part played by Canada and the British empire in the world's greatest war

Front matter

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Photo from Western Newspaper Union

GENERAL SIR ARTHUR CURRIE

Contents

Introduction by General Sir Arthur W. Currie . . ^

CHAPTER

I. The Great World War

Preface

The main purpose of writing this book is to give Canadians, in particular, a fair idea of the part that they and the people of the British Empire have played in the great world war recently ended, and to give it its proper relationship to the war as a whole.

The Canadians won the war; so did Britain, France, the United States and the other Allies: no one of them singly, all of them jointly.

The work of each nation was of vital consequence at certain stages of the war, and many times ‘The war was saved.” In that sense the Belgians, by delaying the German army in the first days of the struggle and thereby enabling the French and British armies to mobilize, saved the situation. At the Marne the French, assisted by the British, definitely wrecked the German plan of winning an early victory. The Russians in the east, by their offensive, kept the Allies on the western front from being crushed by sheer weight of numbers. The assistance of Japan in supplying the Russians with munitions and equipment helped that nation to keep its armies in the field when its own supplies were inadequate.

The British at the first Battle of Ypres and the Canadians at the second Battle of Ypres prevented the enemy from winning the Channel ports and bringing about a possibly fatal situation. The Italians broke the Austrian army and put Austria-Hungary out of business. In the last great crisis the Americans undoubtedly turned the tide with their moral and material resources.

And away and above all, the British fleet from the day war was declared made the seas safe, thereby making it possible for land operations to be carried on.

Yet though Canada, like any other country, did not of herself win the war it was generally acknowledged even by the highest British authorities that the Canadian Corps was the most effective fighting machine on the western front. Whenever there was a hard nut to crack the Canadian Corps was almost certain to be called upon to be the hammer. The Canadian Corps took Passchendaele when all other troops had failed to take it. The Canadian

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Preface

XX

Corps seized the powerful bastion of Vimy Ridge which had cost the lives of thousands of French and British soldiers in futile efforts to capture it. In the great Somme offensive Canadian divisions were given some of the hardest positions to win, and Regina trench, Moquet farm, Zollern redoubt, Hessian trench and Courcelette stand to their credit.

During the great German offensive the Canadian Corps, according to Field Marshal Haig’s official report, was kept behind the most vital sector of the British front ready to be thrown into line if a break should occur. During that period the Canadian Corps was humorously called “The Salvation Army.”

In the first great offensive of the Allies in July, 1918, the Canadian Corps, in company with the Australian Corps, tore through the German lines in front of Amiens to a depth of 14,000 yards, — the greatest advance ever made in a single day during the war. The Canadian Corps was selected to break the Drocourt- Queant switch line, considered by the Germans to be impregnable, and in an hour the Canadian boys had swept through that tangled jungle of wire and trenches. The Canadians were given the formidable Hindenburg line to smash and they did it, bursting through it at Cambrai in perhaps the hardest fought battle of the war.

Such was the record which resulted in the Canadian Corps being called “the spear-head of the British army.”

With the exception of two sacrifice guns placed in the front trenches at Mt. Sorrel, the Canadians never lost a gun. They never permanently lost a position. During the last two years they were never driven out of a captured position once consolidated and consequently never went backward. These are facts.

The glorious deeds of Canadians in the war need no fulsome praise — “Good wine needs no bush.” The plain narrative is sufficient to make one estimate them at their true value, and they should be known and appreciated by every Canadian. With that object in view it has been my pleasant endeavor, during many months of what would have otherwise been a long and tedious convalescence, to set down, in as simple and direct form as pos¬ sible, the plain story of the deeds of Canada’s sons and the British Empire.

CANADA’S SONS AND GREAT BRITAIN IN THE WORLD WAR

Chapter I

On November 11, 1918, Germany, on the verge of a crushing defeat, threw up her hands and agreed to an armistice, the terms of which were the most humiliating ever imposed upon a first-class nation. In another ten days Marshal Foch, commander-in-chief of the allied forces, would have been in the position which the Germans had struggled for during four long years — the position of being able to destroy the enemy army. This alone, perhaps, could have taught the battle-loving Prussian the real meaning of war. Everywhere from July, 1918, onward, the allied armies had been successful. In turn the French, the British, the Belgians, the Italians, the Serbs and the Americans had smashed through the German and Austrian lines and beaten down the resistance of German troops, protected by the most elaborate fortifications and ingenious devices that science could devise.

From March till July with her armies re-enforced by tremen¬ dous numbers of men and guns, transferred from the disintegrated Russian front, Germany, on the Western front, had driven great wedges into the allied lines. She failed to break through. When it dawned upon the German people that their supreme military effort had failed, German morale also failed.

It was the last great effort of that arrogant people, who had already seen glimpses of the writing in the heavens; who realized that defeated Russia could not be organized as a source of raw material and food, and who saw millions of fresh and eager Amer¬ ican troops pouring across the Atlantic to the aid of the Allies. The Germany allies were weakening daily and required that increased support which became more and more difficult to supply. Germany fully realized that this was to be her last opportunity of obtaining a military decision. She struck and failed, and at the moment she failed the initiative passed from her hands into those of the Allies. Under the leadership of the great French strategist, Foch, our armies struck and struck again until, reeling under the force of repeated blows, Germany’s army fell back broken all along the line, and to save itself from utter destruction retired sullenly towards its own border.

DEFYING THE WORLD

When Germany defied the world she summoned to her aid the three autocracies, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey. Against these four autocracies twenty-four nations gradually arrayed themselves. At the beginning five nations only, France, Great Britain, Belgium, Russia and Serbia, were united against the Ger¬ man policy. Then as the full meaning of the struggle dawned upon the world, nineteen other nations, one by one, threw in their lot with the Allies so that there were finally twenty-eight nations, representing one and a half billions of people, directly engaged in the gigantic struggle.

Fighting for the Allies were men of every colour, black, white, red and brown. Every religion under the sun was represented, from the ancient Confucianism of the Chinese to the latest develop¬ ment of New Thought. Chinese coolies, Sikhs and Gurkhas from India, Senegalese from Africa, Maories from New Zealand, North American Indians and representatives of almost every climate under the sun rubbed shoulders in Northern France with British guardsmen, Alpine Chasseurs, Highlanders, Australians, Cana¬ dians, Portuguese and Americans. Never before in the world’s history had so many races come together to fight in a common cause. Never before had a war resolved itself into so many separate campaigns. In China, in Southeast Africa, in Mesopotamia, in Palestine, in Macedonia, in Egypt, in Gallipoli, in Serbia, in Rumania, in Italy, in Russia, in Poland, in East Prussia, in Galicia, in Belgium and in France the war was waged.

Never before had it been possible to carry on war in the air or under the sea. New types of warfare had seriously modified the older methods and both reduced and amplified the reach and striking power of the belligerent nations.

Germany, with her magnificent machine-like army and her civilian population organized on the basis of a “nation in arms” ready to co-operate to the full with the army in event of war; with her tremendous stores of equipment and vast quantities of guns and munitions made at first an admirable showing and for four years won a series of victories. Yet on looking back we see that her very failures to break the allied lines, such as occurred at the Marne and during the first battle of Ypres, were equivalent to great German defeats. For four years she won much territory and yet she was unable to destroy any of the armies of the first-class powers except that of Russia, which melted away through German propaganda and treachery and not from defeat in the field.

THE ODDS WITH GERMANY

All the odds were with Germany; her plan to destroy France, then settle with Russia and finally deal with Great Britain at her leisure was sound in theory but just failed of accomplishment. The unexpected delay caused by the Belgian resistance, the dogged fighting of the British in their retreat from Mons, the lightning strategy of the French at the battle of the Marne and their won¬ derful recuperative powers were just sufficient, at vital moments, to snatch victory from the Germans when it was almost within their grasp. Above all, the British Grand Fleet steaming silently through the mists of the North Sea, or waiting patiently in our northern harbours, steadily wove the web that was, slowly but surely, to strangle the Central Powers. With the German fleet bottled up, with her merchant ships rotting in German harbours, with the wharves of her great ports overgrown with grass and streets silent, with her exports shut in and her imports shut out, with increasing lack of food, metals, rubber and other necessities, Germany slowly but surely languished.

The last great attempt to achieve a military victory in 1918 was an attempt to break the web which the navy had so steadily woven and which was now choking the very life out of her. With that despairing effort and the refusal of the German navy to meet the British fleet the end was inevitable and possibly would have occurred within a few months without a military decision.

At the opening of the war the superiority of Germany and

Austria in numbers of effectives and material was overwhelming. A year after war had begun she was manufacturing one hundred times as many high explosives as England. From the moment war was decided upon, the Civil Government of Germany virtually ceased to exist; the country was under martial law; every man, woman, child, mine, factory, railroad or store was at the practical disposition of the military authorities.. There was no need for the Government to consider the opinions of the people as was the case in democracies. Germany had no further worries about a great many things. Her mercantile marine for example had gone out of business, the result of the “inactivity” of the British Grand Fleet. The German navy was in the same condition.

The Fatherland was relieved of all responsibilities regarding her colonies and the attendant problems of supplying them with troops and munitions. Her foreign commerce was off her hands. She had not allowed any previous engagements, understandings, conventions or moral scruples to interfere at any time with her freedom of action.

Perhaps most important of all, Germany was seated in the centre of the sphere of action with her appliances of war all about her and a network of strategic railways reaching out in all direc¬ tions to her enemies’ borders. She was able with an incalculable saving, as compared with her opponents, of time, labour, risk and expense to concentrate troops at this point, withdraw them from that, and send with despatch artillery, ammunition, troops and supplies as conditions demanded them from any one section of front to any other. The Allies working around the circumference of that circle, in countries devoid of strategic railway systems, were at a tremendous disadvantage from the very beginning. Only the skill and inventions of the Allies were able to overcome these initial handicaps at a tremendous cost of labour, material, men and money.

BEHIND THE LINES

The war was not decided upon the battlefield alone. Every patriotic civilian in the allied countries of Europe as well as America who endeavoured to produce more food and do without unnecessary luxuries helped to win the war. During one phase it was the food which we grew and the food which we saved in America which carried the allied people through a period of threatened starvation.

The German submarines came very close to their objective of starving Great Britain, France and Italy by sinking food-laden ships from America. The U-boats were conquered by a margin that was very narrow.

THE COST OF WAR

The heaviest cost in proportion to population and losses sustained in national wealth through devastation by war was undoubtedly borne by the nations that were first invaded and bore the heaviest shock and destruction of battle. These were Poland, Serbia, France and Belgium. The losses of Poland are unknown, but must have been enormous, for that ancient battle¬ ground was harried and laid waste during successive German retreats. France, with a population of 40,000,000, suffered 4,500,000 casualties and lost 1,400,000 in killed. It was estimated that 250,000 houses in France were destroyed and that destruction of property amounted to $13,000,000,000. Belgium, with a pop¬ ulation of 8,000,000, had a casualty list of 100,000, with 30,000 killed. Her monetary losses due to German military occupation amounted to $1,400,000,000. Russia had a casualty list of 9,150,000, with a loss of 1,700,000 in killed and 2,500,000 prisoners. The British Isles, with a population of 60,000,000 including the population of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Newfoundland, had a casualty list of 3,089,757, of which almost 1,000,000 were killed and missing. Of the British colonies Canada, with a population of 8,000,000, sustained 254,000 casualties, of which 54,000 were killed or missing. These are included in the total of British losses. The United States, with a population of 100,000,000, sustained 236,117 casualties, of which 50,000 were killed or missing. Germany sustained 6,066,769 casualties. Austria had some 5,000,000 casualties.

The cost of the war to Great Britain was $52,000,000,000; the total allied claims for indemnities amounted to $120,000,000,000.

THE SILENCE OF THE BATTLEFIELD

But no account of cost either in deaths, wounds or gold can convey any adequate idea of what war is or what German brutality has accomplished. The battlefield, even when the living have gone, is in itself terrible and terrifying. Even its silence can con¬ vey to the spectator some real idea of the horror of war.

From Ypres to Noyon, a distance of one hundred miles, there exists the most appalling desert, fifteen to fifty miles in width. In a land where before the war nearly 3,000,000 Belgian and French people lived there is nothing: villages, forests, shade and fruit trees, shrubs, hedges and buildings are all gone. Of a town or village there remain a few mounds of broken masonry and formless heaps of brick and debris sometimes blackened with charred ashes.

Standing upon any slight elevation you will see a land so torn with shell fire that it resembles a skeleton. Endless rows of rusty barbed wire, great shell holes, crumbling dug-outs and thousands of crosses which themselves are beginning to tumble over, cover the landscape as far as the eye can see. It is a mon¬ strous waste without a survivor, without a single habitation, without a tree. Where there had been fertile fields, happy people and smiling villages nothing remains but desolation, tragic beyond expression.

In the shell-torn flats of the Ypres salient alone nearly half a million men lie, — men who had blocked the road to Calais. Between Ypres and the Somme in the land which holds no living thing one and a half million dead lie sleeping. This desert was not caused by battle, it was the deliberate cold-blooded purpose of Hindenburg and the German army to create that desert. With the thoroughness with which Hindenburg laid waste Poland in his retreat before the Grand Duke the thing was done in France. Villages were destroyed, everything living was cut down and every inanimate thing blown up, while the civilian population was driven away to die or be sustained by the bread of neutrals. Thus did the Germans deliberately create a desert in France, a desert sown with unexploded shells and the debris of battles, and planted with innumerable unexploded mines and booby traps.

The Lens coal mining region, which annually produced 15,- 000,000 tons of coal, the greater part of the French supply, is an area of razed houses and splintered beams. Machinery which could not be moved was smashed and the mines flooded. Every house was dynamited, and utter ruin prevails in that region which is a key to the industry of France.

Looms, of which there were hundreds of thousands in the little villages and hamlets of the invaded regions of France and Belgium, were carried away or deliberately destroyed, so that when the war was over the French and Belgian people would be unable to work and Germany would obtain a great lead in the industrial war to come. Such were the results of war in a country invaded by Ger¬ many. Such were the results produced by the deliberate destruction of a brutalized people whose degraded minds had adopted the belief that force alone must win.

The war cost the world altogether some 33,000,000 casualties, of which approximately 7,500,000 are dead.

For four years the Germans had successfully withstood the whole civilized world arraigned against them. In spite of inferi¬ ority in numbers and resources they were able to add victory after victory to their astonishing record. At the beginning they were superior to the Allies in the number of men and their perfect organization. After the first year, realizing that they had reached their climax in numbers and must steadily decrease while the allied forces must increase, they concentrated upon their resources of science and industry. They produced a tremendous preponderance of artillery, machine guns and shells designed to keep the man¬ power of the Allies at bay and destroy it while they conserved their own decreasing man-power. They had implicit faith in their superiority and in the belief of their invincibility. In arms and leadership their morale was sustained.

LEADERSHIP PASSES TO ALLIES

In July, 1918, Foch was able to demonstrate to the German masses that the superiority of leadership had passed definitely and permanently to allied arms. They knew that the advantage which they had enjoyed for four years had been snatched from them and their cause had become hopeless. That was the beginning of the end and the decline was swift.

The complete breakdown of the morale of Germany is a dra¬ matic episode in the history of modern times and bordered on the sensational. Only four months before the end the allied cause was in the greatest danger and it required all the fortitude and faith of the allied peoples to carry on. The critics predicted that by midsummer of 1919 with the coming of 4,000,000 Americans the tide would turn and the war would end within at least two years. The mathematical exactitude of the critics in the estimation of bayonets, guns and available reserves was impressive.

BY FAITH THE WAR WAS WON

The psychic element as a decisive factor did not make any appeal to them, for it was not believed that psychic element could stand against machine guns. Nevertheless the complete breakdown of the German home front before the military front was decisively crushed was the final factor. The German home front broke down because it was inferior psychically to the allied home front.

It was faith that won the great war for the Allies. As soon as the Germans believed that they were not going to win the war they went to pieces, and the Allies, who all along believed that victory must eventually be theirs, went over them like a steam¬ roller. The best critics believed that from a purely military stand¬ point the Allies were due to win the war in late 1919 or early 1920. The break in the German morale and the strengthening of our own through America coming into the arena shortened the war by at least one year. It was a fine demonstration of the fact that he who takes into account only material forces will never reach correct results.

The allied morale and the German morale are spoken of as though similar, yet they are so unlike that the difference between them has gone far to win the war.

There are two elements that constitute morale, the belief that one’s cause is just and that right cannot be defeated, and the knowledge that one has superiority of arms and cannot be defeated. The dominating factor in allied morale was faith in the righteousness of their cause; the belief in their military superiority being secondary.

In German morale the dominating factor was belief in their military superiority; faith in the justice of their cause was a sec¬ ondary consideration. In either case the crushing of the domi¬ nating element in the national morale would rapidly result in a crumbling of resistance. If the Allies were brought to believe that they were wrong morally they could not go on fighting, no matter how much they believed in their military superiority. If the Germans were convinced that they could not win the war

© Underwood and Underwood

MARSHAL FERDINAND FOCH

Generalissimo of the Allied Forces in the Great War from March, 1918.

Canadian Official Photograph Copyright Reserved.

ONE OF THE PROUDEST MOMENTS IN THE WAR FOR CANADA’S HEROIC TROOPS

General Sir Arthur Currie, Commander of the Canadian Corps, taking the salute of the troops at the solemn parade held in the main square of Mons on November 11, 1918, at the hour when, by the terms of the armistice, the “Cease Fire” put an end to hostilities on all fronts. On his left is the general commanding the division of Canadians that recaptured the town.

they could not go on, no matter how much they believed in the justice of their cause.

In defeat the allied morale was stubborn and inflexible because no amount of force could destroy faith in the justice of their cause. German morale gave way because it required but a slight pre¬ ponderance of force to destroy faith in their military superiority. That is precisely what happened to German morale in July, 1918.

THE PASSING OF GERMAN KULTUR

The question is often asked, “Was it worth while; was not the cost too great?” There can be no second answer to that. With the destruction of autocracy and the blight of militarism removed; with the passing of German Kultur and all that the German menace implied; with the spread of new ideas as to liberty throughout the earth, and with the increased opportunities that will be afforded to the people at large to become better educated, and obtain their just share of material comfort and happiness, the world has undoubt¬ edly made a gigantic step forward and entered upon a new era of progress.

Germany had woven a legend as to her invincibility which she almost succeeded in forcing the world to believe. She made her own people during many long years hate and despise France and England. Yet when she precipitated the war she knew that hate, even to a German, had not a strong enough appeal and invented the fable that she had been attacked and was waging the warfare in defence of The Fatherland.

Above all, believing in material more than in spiritual forces she laboriously and with infinite patience builded a war machine that could not fail. And this superb military machine did fail when it was confronted with those other forces, call them spiritual if you will, which the Allies possessed, — belief in the righteous¬ ness of their cause; that justice should not perish; that might was not necessarily right; that utter extinction was preferable to existence under the rule of a people whose every principle of national ethics, morality and justice was wrong.

Chapter II

The underlying causes responsible for the World War are even yet not perfectly understood. Years must elapse before these causes can be fully comprehended and the future historian with all the facts, data and memoirs yet to be written views the whole in perspective, and pieces together the scattered bits of evidence. Then only will the true be separated from the false and opinion sifted from fact.

The incident at Sarajevo was only the match which kindled the great conflagration. The material for it had long been in course of preparation. When the time was opportune the murder in the Balkans served as the necessary excuse — the chance spark destined to set the whole world ablaze and snuff out the lives of 7,500,000 men.

The evidence at hand, nevertheless, is overwhelming in establishing the fact that Germany for at least thirty years had been deliberately preparing for war and was, at the end, directly responsible for it. Bismarck had by a series of master-strokes consolidated the numerous German principalities into the German Empire under the domination of Prussia. He had, by his final victorious campaign against France in 1870, proved to the satis¬ faction of the German people that war pays. This belief created by Bismarck, and carefully nurtured by the Prussian military caste, was bound sooner or later to prove itself.

The huge indemnity exacted from France in 1870 had been used to foster German industry and the German nation gradually emerged from a condition of poverty. Her people were both industrious and frugal and the national wealth of Germany in consequence grew rapidly. Gradually also she built up a gigantic merchant marine to carry her export goods to the four quarters of the globe. As her wealth grew she increased her military strength until it became the most powerful in Europe. Her universities also became famous for scientific research, and attracted thousands of students from civilized countries all over the world. Though Wagner and Kant were the last of their kind and no successors had arisen from a great mass of mediocrities to take their places, their traditions persisted, and no musician or philosopher in America thought his studies complete until he had spent at least one year in The Fatherland. The word “German” became a sort of fetish when applied to anything save cheap manufactured goods, for the German Government had learned the art of advertising and assidu¬ ously published the superior qualities of the German mind and German goods the world over.

German professors worked for ridiculously small pay; their work was more to them than money and it was honoured. A Herr Professor in a German university took second place only to a lieutenant in the Imperial army or navy. They were excellent plodding academicians, capable of painstaking, laborious work which sometimes resulted in a discovery such as that of Ehrlich, when, after six hundred and six chemical experiments, he lit upon a cure for a hitherto incurable disease — a cure which was immedi¬ ately patented and resulted in another great German industry. It was noteworthy that no German scientist gave his discoveries to the world to alleviate human suffering as had the immortal Pasteur of France. German scientific discoveries were always pat¬ ented and capitalized.

When the German Empire was born in the time of Bismarck most of the mental products that Germany had been famed for disappeared. Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven and many of the great masters of music, literature, philosophy and history had been the subjects of the smaller principalities which went to make up the new German Empire. After 1870, in art, literature and in the realms of pure thought, Germany steadily declined. She became content with mediocrities; she had turned her face towards material things and materialism invaded every phase of German life and character.

Bismarck in 1862 said: “The great questions are to be settled, not by speeches and ‘majority resolutions/ but by blood and iron.” In that speech Bismarck tried to establish the principle that force was more powerful than ideas, a lie that countless ages has disproved. The phrase “Might makes right” became the watchword of official modern Germany,

Nietzsche, a mystic poet and philosopher of Polish origin, who himself despised the Germans, taught that to be great the superman power is the only thing worth seeking, and that to attain this end all means are justifiable. He despised the morality of Christianity as something suitable for slaves only. The doctrine of Nietzsche that might may be right, combined with the material¬ istic thought of the teachers of modern German schools, resulted in a frame of mind suitable for the reception of teachings like those of Treitschke, the historian.

Treitschke taught that war was the great cleansing process for a nation, that true religion was the religion of valour, and that the absence of war would convert humanity into races of selfish nonentities. His teachings were not allied to religion and soon the new German school sank into a coarse materialism. The “magnificent blonde beast, avidly rampant for spoil and victory/’ became the national idea. Commercial success, militarism and a Kaiser who assumed himself to be the chosen instrument of God, and a philosophy divorced from ethics, united to foster in Germany a wonderful national self-satisfaction and an inordinate national ambition, with force as the accepted ideal, and the methods and ideals of the army saturating the whole national fife. The army came to be all-powerful in Germany and the Prussian military class became the real governing caste.