August arrived across a sweltering British Columbia in 1914 and even the air seemed heavy with portent.
None, in hindsight, came close to anticipating the cataclysm that in the coming 4 1/2 years would kill, maim or injure more than one of every 10 men in the province between the ages of 15 and 50, leaving ghosts, ghost towns and deeply traumatized communities in its wake.
The deepening shadow all seemed so distant, oceans and continents away from the garden parties, regattas and champagne soirees of Vancouver’s upper crust and the church or union ice-cream socials, beach outings, hotdogs and baseball tournaments of its working class.
Yet omens of doom there were.
Lightning struck a church spire at Enderby. It burned to the ground. On Vancouver Island, sparks from a coal mine blew in through a window at South Wellington’s Alexandra Hotel, set curtains afire and turned more than 80 buildings to ash, leaving 350 homeless. In the Crowsnest Pass, forest fires raged along a 40-kilometre front. The inferno claimed three lives and threatened the entire city of Fernie, newly rebuilt after being razed in 1908.
Pillars of smoke from burning forests marched the skylines everywhere. Along the coast the acrid haze mingling with dense fogs created a serious shipping hazard.
A few weeks later, confused in the 6:30 a.m. murk obscuring Puget Sound, the steamer Princess Victoria would ram the passenger liner Admiral Stanhope, outbound from Seattle to Alaska with 121 passengers and crew. The American vessel would sink in four minutes. Desperate passengers leaped from the sinking ship’s deck to the Canadian steamer while the ships were locked together. Somehow, only 17 lives were lost.
Normally, editors would have played the story big. Now the maritime disaster, like the dramatic holdup on the Dease Lake trail in which bandits made off with $5,000 in gold bricks, was relegated to secondary news. War in Europe now eclipsed everything.
Since late June, reports of frantic shuttle diplomacy and troop movements as generals jockeyed for advantage should the worst occur had ruled front pages, bumping even the sensational murder trial of Henriette Caillaux, the beautiful second wife of France’s finance minister. She had shot to death the muckraking editor of the newspaper Le Figaro after he obtained intimate and explicit letters from her passionate adulterous affair with the minister.
Even in remote outposts like Quesnel, where the Cariboo Observer still warned that if J.D. McLean didn’t soon claim the saddle horse he’d left at a Fort Alexandria ranch, his steed was going to auction, the threat of war had dominated late July’s news.
“All Europe is in turmoil and a general war is predicted,” the Alberni Advocate warned.
Any war would be quick, thought the Winnipeg Free Press: “The democracies of the world would not tolerate a large-scale war for 20 years, or, for that matter, 20 months.”
But in Quesnel, where Fraser’s Store had become the mecca for those anxious for news, posting reports from a bulletin service in the window, the Observer disagreed.
“The war is likely to prove a long one,” it cautioned, “as there is much bitterness of long standing between European nations.”
Vancouver Sun writer Alan Morley observed in his 1961 history of the city that as old wars are supplanted by more recent ones, it becomes increasingly difficult for succeeding generations to comprehend what is, for them, impersonal history rather than living memory.
So for us, the Second World War of still-living fathers and grandfathers dominates – there are no longer any known living veterans of the earlier conflict – and the full emotional impact of the First World War is difficult to convey.
“There had been no conflict of such magnitude and menace for century, since the wars of Napoleon; even the American Civil War, bitter and destructive as it was, could not be compared with it,” Morley wrote in trying to put the Great War’s effect into context. Total casualties in the Civil War, for example, amounted to fewer than the butcher’s bill from single battles in the First World War.
As it loomed, even in 1914, few grasped that what was about to occur would smash the old world order, reconfigure the ruins and transform B.C. as permanently and profoundly as the gold rushes of 50 years earlier.
On a personal scale, there was the returning army of the blind, the legless, the gassed and the shell-shocked, typified, perhaps, by the Skeena River fisherman who returned from the war. His hair had gone snow white and he was unable to speak. He never uttered another word to his family and then one night he just stepped off the back of his boat. He was a war casualty, but not one officially counted.
On a global scale, ancient empires would be erased, monarchs would be dethroned, the stage would be set for the even greater carnage and genocidal lunacy unleashed by fascist and Communist tyrants, the United States would emerge as the world’s greatest power, social norms would be overthrown, women would enter the workforce and win the vote, and Canada would become a truly independent country.
For B.C., the war and its vast appetites meant rapid industrialization. In 1910, there were 40 registered forest companies. By 1918, there were 140. Where the province had a single pulp mill before the war, by its end there were six. Copper, used in shell casings, became B.C.’s most valuable mineral commodity with exports tripling to $18 million a year. Zinc production, another strategic military metal, grew sevenfold.
In 1914, industrial output for B.C. was less than $150 million a year. By the war’s end it was $400 million, with dramatic increases in both resource extraction and manufacturing. The development accelerated a process of urbanization as populations concentrated in the Fraser Valley around Vancouver and on southern Vancouver Island near Victoria.
Before the war, only 20 per cent of the population was urban. After the war, the ratio had begun to reverse and more than half lived in cities.Women, who made up only 36 per cent of B.C.’s total population in 1911, flooded into the workforce to replace absent soldiers, won the franchise in 1917 and, in the next election, Mary Ellen Smith became the first woman to sit in the provincial legislature – in 1921 she was elevated to cabinet, the first woman to hold such high elected office in the British Empire.
Men who had gone to war in a flush of patriotism and returned disillusioned and embittered added to the growing strength of muscular trade and industrial unions whose battles to secure worker’s rights from employers who hadn’t yet metabolized the changed social order still reverberate today.
And yet, on the eve of these momentous changes, the coming war was perceived as a kind of glorified schoolboy adventure of the kind romanticized by Victorian writers like G.A. Henty and H. Rider Haggard.
“To Britons, war had become a gallant, gay and only occasionally fatal game, directed by professionals in an atmosphere of pageantry and hero-worship,” Morley noted. And B.C. was heavily British – about 80 per cent of Vancouver’s population had British origins.
The second largest ethnic group, ironically, was German, having begun to arrive in large numbers during the Cariboo gold rush.
Few anticipated the grisly consequences for massed troop formations of industrialized warfare with the machine gun, rapid-firing long-range artillery, high explosives, chemical weapons, tanks, submarines and aircraft, all of which would be used on an unprecedented scale.
Yearning for ‘great experience’
Perhaps this inability to foresee how science and engineering would increase the magnitude and efficiency of slaughter explains the sense of pent-up anticipation mingled with excitement that swelled across empires as the grim news from Europe deepened.
In European capitals, the declaration of war was greeted with frenzies of patriotism.
Ernst Junger, a lieutenant with the 73rd Hanover Fusiliers, once a key regiment in the defence of Gibraltar for the British and in the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, said the news of Britain’s declaration of war “entered into us like wine.”
“In each of us there was the yearning for great experience, such as we had never known,” he wrote in his 1929 memoir The Storm of Steel. “We had set out in a rain of flowers to seek the death of heroes. The war was our dream of greatness, power and glory.”
In St. Petersburg, an astonished 21-year-old Russian cavalry officer, Sergei Kurnakov, watched the hysteria as a mob sacked the German embassy, its rosewood piano exploding like a bomb when it hit the pavement.
“A woman tore her dress at the collar, fell on her knees with a shriek, and pressed her naked breasts against the dusty boots of a young officer in campaign uniform. Take me! Right here, before these people! Poor boy … you will give your life … for God … for the Tsar … for Russia! Another shriek and she fainted,” he wrote, memory still vivid, 20 years later.
In London, U.S. Ambassador Walter Page reported “indescribable crowds” blocking the streets. Frightened German nationals besieged the German embassy – “several of them have committed suicide. Yesterday one poor American woman yielded to the excitement and cut her throat” – and the German ambassador was still in his pyjamas at 3 p.m.
“He is of the antiwar party and he had done his best and utterly failed. The interview was one of the most pathetic experiences of my life. The poor man had not slept for several nights,” Page wrote.
“I shall never forget Sir Edward Grey’s telling me of the ultimatum – while he wept; nor the poor German ambassador who has lost in his high game – almost a demented man; nor the King as he declaimed to me for half an hour and threw up his hands and said, ‘My God, Mr. Page, what else could we do?’ Nor the Austrian ambassador’s wringing his hands and weeping and crying out, ‘My dear colleague, my dear colleague.”
‘Life was easy and pleasant’
In far off Canada, suffragette Nellie McClung, then in Manitoba and taking a languid family holiday at Lake Winnipeg, “with our sport suits, our silk sweaters, our long, lovely, lazy afternoons in hammocks,” captured the sense of unreality tempered by unease that prevailed.
As Europe unravelled, “Life was easy and pleasant, as we told ourselves life ought to be in July and August, when people work hard all year and then come away to the quiet greenness of the big woods, to forget the noise and dust of the big city,” she remembered in 1917.
Then the morning train arrived from Winnipeg. On Aug. 4, Britain had declared war on Germany. That meant Canada was at war, too.
“Every night when the train came in, the crowds waited in tense anxiety to get the papers,” McClung wrote, “and when they were handed out, read them in silence, a silence which was ominous.
“A shadow had fallen on us, a shadow that darkened the children’s play,” she recalled. “Now they made forts of sand and bored holes in the ends of stovewood to represent the gaping cannon’s mouth … every boat that was built was now a battleship, and every kite was an aeroplane and loaded with bombs!”
In Toronto, immense crowds thronged the streets. Bands playing the national anthem led impromptu parades all night long. In Quebec City and Montreal, cheering French, Irish and English marched together. In Ottawa, multitudes sang God Save the King, the Maple Leaf Forever and O Canada. In Edmonton, the patriotic frenzy spawned riots.
George Herbert Rae Gibson, writing in 1916, described the arrival of the news in Vancouver 18 months earlier as “a murmur in the air, and the east wind, as it came to us from across the mountains, carried with it a faint whisper, the subdued rattle of the European millions arming. Were we to be in it, too?”
Managers of Vancouver vaudeville theatres lowered the curtains in mid-performance to make hushed announcements that war had come. A Canadian Club smoker was interrupted; the audience rose unbidden and spontaneously sang God Save the King.
“The newspapers seized the opportunity and gleaned a golden harvest,” Gibson wrote. “Special editions appeared by the half-hour and were as rapidly bought up. Militia officers, not yet in the glory of their war paint, paraded the sidewalks in twos and threes.
“They were authorities, pretending a knowledge which they probably did not possess, while the mere civilians hung breathless on their remarks. The clubs were crowded with anxious businessmen, too excited to talk business, and the bars conducted a feverish trade.”
In Nanaimo, where the 88th Victoria Fusiliers were keeping the peace in a bitter labour dispute, 70 men, many of them striking coal miners who had been staring down the militia, enlisted overnight. Lt.-Col. Arthur Currie of the 50th Gordon Highlanders reported 50 enlistments with hundreds waiting in Victoria. In Vancouver, volunteers overwhelmed recruiting stations.
All through the Boundary Country, down the Crowsnest Pass, across the grasslands of the Chilcotin, in Cariboo mining camps and Shaughnessy salons, men young and old clamoured to join regiments with Kiplingesque names like the Rocky Mountain Rangers, Tuxford’s Dandies and Tobin’s Tigers, the latter mustering in Hastings Park.
“Day by day the recruits swarmed in. Such recruits were surely never seen before,” Gibson wrote of the volunteers storming Vancouver. “The woods disgorged them, the mountains shook them clear; they deserted from the ships and the harbour, they hit the ties from across the great divide, the mines, the camps, the canneries and the orchard, all sent their share.”
Walhachin was a small fruit-growing settlement near Ashcroft, planned as a progressive scientific model of the most advanced agricultural science. Historian Elsie Turnbull wrote that 97 of its 107 men enlisted. One was Gordon Flowerdew, the storekeeper. His sister, Eleanor, ran the Walhachin Hotel. He was a horseman of skill and dash.
In 1911, riding his horse Dixie, he won most of the honours in races held for King George V’s coronation. In 1914, he joined a cavalry regiment. He never returned, leading a heroic but doomed cavalry charge against German machine guns in 1918 for which he would win the Victoria Cross, having denied the enemy a crucial height of land.
Nor did the other men come home to what was supposed to be an Eden in the desert. The women there struggled a while, then they, too, left. All that remained of Walhachin was a decaying irrigation flume on a hillside. The dream of progress had perished along with other illusions.
In Prince Rupert, there was Cy Peck, who had stampeded to the Klondike only to find there was more gold to be had selling cases of salmon. He founded the Cassiar Cannery and had married only months before.
A sergeant in the militia, Peck was commissioned overnight, raised a contingent of 255 volunteers and left his newly pregnant bride to lead them to war as a major with the 16th Battalion Canadian Scottish, winning the Victoria Cross in 1918 “for prodigies of valour and leadership under intense enemy fire.”
Volunteers turn out in force
In Carcross, Yukon, Const. George Pearkes of the Royal North West Mounted Police immediately applied for discharge so that he could re-enlist with the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles in the Okanagan, although he wound up afoot, an expert at trench raiding across No Man’s Land at night.
Pearkes won the Victoria Cross at Passchendaele in 1917. He became a major-general and eventually was a much-loved lieutenant-governor of B.C.
In Vancouver, Gibson wrote, the patriotic enthusiasm that led to these enlistments was mind-boggling.
“Pete Sornson from Fort Charles was deficient of a hand, and kept the stump carefully hidden behind his back, until told to spread his fingers out. That ditched him! Andie Mack from Squamish, with a wooden leg, the result of a badly primed dynamite cartridge, kept the fact concealed until told to take his trousers down. Private Purdy, late of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, insisted on seeing 10 spots where there were only five. Fresh air and exercise were his portion, until such time as he was sober enough to see his way through the eyesight test.
“There were lumbermen and railwaymen, prospectors, surveyors, bankers, brokers, stokers, teamsters, carpenters and schoolmasters. Many had not seen a city for months, and they were frequently drunk; but the material!”
In Penticton, the first 38 volunteers, still in civilian clothes, paraded at the corner of Martin and Nanaimo streets. Lieut. P.E. Coleman was presented with a silk Red Ensign. Now on display at the Penticton Museum, the flag would be present at every major Canadian battle and Coleman, promoted to lieutenant-colonel and leading the first allied unit to enter German territory in 1918, carried with him the Battle Flag of the Orchards.
Militia units went on active duty Aug. 8 and the first contingents were bound for Valcartier, Que., and on to France by Aug. 19. Others followed in short order.
Volunteer Herbert Sandham Graves, later a Victoria newspaper editor, wrote about the unforgettable day when he marched out of the capital to embark for Flanders.
“Victoria had turned out to the last man, woman and child,” he recalled. “Even the dogs were there, marching. The cheers swelled into one constant roar, echoing and reverberating along the canyon walls of the business district. The crowd flooded in behind, a great, surging wave.”
Bound for Vancouver aboard the Princess Sophia, soldiers swarmed into the rigging for a last glimpse of home and families, “watched the sea of handkerchiefs, fluttering and waving faster and faster as the distance lengthened; watched until unaccountable films came over the eyes, and lumps that had never been there before rose in their throats.
“Then they found voice, and cheered and cheered and sang, and cheered again until the lumps rose and choked them into a self-conscious silence.”
As troop trains chugged through the Interior, they stopped to pick up more volunteers. One train, jammed with men from the Kootenay Battalion, arrived at Penticton after a long, hot journey delayed twice by washouts on the just-completed Kettle Valley Railway. It was greeted by the lake city’s girls and women, glowing in their long dresses and summer hats, who presented the troops with 250 kilograms of freshly picked cherries, the Penticton Herald reported.
The laughing, khaki-clad men transferred to a sternwheeler to travel down Okanagan Lake to connect with the Canadian Pacific Railway spur at Vernon. As it travelled the glassy lake, the men ate the fruit and spit the pits over the side. Cherry juice left crimson stains on the gleaming white paint.
The image makes a striking metaphor for the horrors awaiting them that few could yet imagine.
Vancouver gave much
A First World War battalion consisted of 1,100 officers and men. Vancouver Island mustered 10 battalions, Vancouver 12. Of the province’s total 1914 population of about 400,000, more than 43,000 of the 251,000 men aged 15 to 50 enlisted and served overseas.
Vancouver sent a higher proportion of its men to France than any other city in North America and B.C. contributed more volunteers in proportion to its population than any other province. So many went that Vancouver’s population fell by 26,000 and didn’t recover until 1919.
In Victoria, wrote historian Harry Gregson, by fall of 1914 the city was almost devoid of able-bodied male civilians: “The knickerbockered remittance men and ramrod-backed Imperial Army officers who had succeeded the ranchers and bearded naval officers of the 1890s disappeared from the Union and Pacific clubs.”
Currie, the former school teacher whose financial difficulties in the collapsing real estate bubble had overwhelmed him, took the opportunity in the excitement to lift $10,833.34 from regimental funds intended for new uniforms. He used the misappropriated money to pay his debts before leaving for France.
Currie’s scruples and business acumen might have been wanting, yet he would prove such a brilliant commander that he would eventually become the first Canadian general of an all-Canadian army, a major step toward national independence. His fellow officers repaid the misappropriated funds on his behalf.
But by 1915, the dreams of schoolboy glory had become a nightmare of muck, giant corpse-fed rats, flooded craters that oozed poison gas, brutal night raids with clubs, axes and bayonets, snipers and incessant bombardments that addled brains and buried the dead, then churned up the putrefying body parts.
Battles in which territory gained or lost was measured in metres cost hundreds of thousands of casualties – half a million at the Marne in 1914, half a million at Gallipoli in 1915, 800,000 at Passchendaele, a million at Verdun, 1.2 million at The Somme, 1.5 million in the German 1918 offensive, 1.8 million in the Allies’ counteroffensive over the last 100 days of 1918.
“I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy war, and the orators who talk so much about going on no matter how long the war lasts and what it may mean, could see a case – to say nothing of 10 cases – of mustard gas in its early stages – could see the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great mustard-coloured suppurating blisters – all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke,” a shocked and embittered Vera Brittain wrote from her nursing post at a base hospital overwhelmed with casualties.
A battalion of a thousand men could be used up in two battles, Morley wrote. The famous 7th Battalion, the British Columbia Regiment, in which many Vancouver men found themselves serving, had 9,000 pass through its ranks in three years at the front. Of these, 1,400 were slain and 7,000 were wounded. In 1917, the 46th Battalion lost 70 per cent of its men in a single afternoon. A few days later the 49th Battalion lost 75 per cent.
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Rev. John Walker’s diary from a casualty station records the kind of unrelenting suffering.
“All day long cars of dying and wounded,” he noted. “They are literally piled up – beds gone, lucky to get space on floor of tent, hut or ward, and though the surgeons work like Trojans many must yet die for lack of operation. All the casualty clearing stations are overflowing.”
If the war changed B.C. economically, it also changed the province psychologically. Almost 14 per cent of the able bodied men in the province in 1914 were dead or wounded by 1918.
As newspaper jingoism gave way to endless columns of casualties, day after day, and, Morley wrote, “practically every name brought mourning or anxiety to a city home, and regret to scores of citizens for a man known personally to them,” a kind of psychic numbing occurred. An enormous grief entered the marrow of entire communities.
Essayist Guy Davenport argues persuasively that this was true for western civilization and, though memory dims with time, the consequence of the Great War continues to echo through our present.
The 20th century which began filled with such hope and promise, he surmises, was actually stillborn in the mud of Flanders and, although we can’t quite discern it, our own age limps on like a maimed survivor through a cacophonous interruption between cultural epochs, a castrated, shell-shocked remnant culture still incapable of self-realization because of what was done and what was lost in the Great War that was fought, they said, to end war.