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Chapter One
The Big Men of the War: Premier McBride and General Currie
Two leaders, more than all the others, personified British Columbia’s wartime spirit. Richard McBride was the province’s most successful politician. Arthur Currie has been hailed as Canada’s greatest battlefield general. (In fact, Britain’s wartime prime minister, David Lloyd George, believed Currie was the best general in the British Empire.)
Both men were living in Victoria when the war broke out. McBride was premier of the province, at the pinnacle of his power. Currie was a struggling real estate agent, laid low by the recession. Both were big men, over six feet tall. Both displayed an instinctive talent for leadership. But it was Currie who would soon shine the brightest. McBride, though no one realized it at the time, was on his way out.
Contents
Our Dick
Currie's Early Struggles
Embattled Immigrants, Labour Strife
1914 and War
The Generals—Lions or Donkeys?
McBride's Sad End
Currie's Rise
Sidebar: From Our Listeners
Our Dick
It was said that no man was as wise as Dick McBride looked. That was a bit of a backhanded compliment, but McBride’s looks were political gold through four elections. His image was even featured on cigar boxes. He was “Our Dick” and he was amazingly popular as long as the economy boomed. And boom it did between 1903 and 1912. BC went from one railroad— the venerable CPR—to three, or was it four? It was hard to keep count as McBride shuffled investors in and out of his office in Victoria.
While he promoted railroads at home, McBride preached imperialism abroad. He made annual trips to London to make his case for a strong naval presence on the West Coast. In 1912, he provided reporters in London with his perspective:
This is a matter which closely affects British Columbia. Since the withdrawal of the Pacific squadron, we have been left practically defenceless on the Pacific Coast. We have been greatly impressed with the vigour and strength of Hon. Winston Churchill’s naval policy and we have hope and confidence that any naval scheme in which he and the Canadian Government concur will restore to British Columbia a full and fair measure of naval protection.
McBride and Churchill were cronies and on the same page on naval matters. In Canada, McBride advanced Churchill’s dreadnought plans. In Britain, Churchill returned the favour, including McBride in his influential social circle (which included the royal family) and helping him get a knighthood in 1912.
McBride loved to play on the imperial stage. But by 1913, things were going wrong at home. The recession was taking its toll. The British investment that had fuelled the good times dried up. The railways that once seemed to be the symbol of progress started to falter. McBride’s era of prosperity was coming to an end.
Currie’s Early Struggles
Arthur Currie had come west from Ontario in 1894 to seek his fortune. He was trained as a schoolteacher and taught for a time in Sidney. But he switched to real estate when he saw the McBride economic boom was making people around him rich. He too did very well for a while, and then the bottom fell out and he was in deep trouble.
He came from Irish stock like McBride and both men listed their religion as Anglican. But Currie was a Liberal politically, which put him at odds with the predominantly Conservative establishment led by McBride. This streak of independence would also mark his approach to military affairs. He had the courage to defy superiors who could break him in order to press for his own views. And the military was his passion. He was president of the BC Rifle Association and served with the 5th Regiment Canadian Garrison Artillery for more than a dozen years before the war broke out.
Who’s Who and Why
Both McBride and Currie appeared in the 1913 edition of Who’s Who and Why. The thick red volume captured all the big men of Western Canada. Some paid for their entries: aspiring lawyers, businessmen and real estate agents. But a few prominent men in public life were given a full page. BC’s premier made good copy and his larger than life reputation inspired Governor General Earl Grey to call McBride “a picturesque buffalo.”
On the other hand, readers of Who’s Who could be forgiven for missing the 1913 entry for real estate agent Arthur Currie. He submitted a photo of himself in uniform hoping an appeal to military service might turn his struggling business around. The outbreak of war was the best thing that ever happened to him.
Although they weren’t political bedfellows, McBride and Currie knew each other and there is every indication they liked each other. McBride even put in a good word when Currie was up for promotion to command the Canadian Corps in 1917. Both men were ardent imperialists at a time when it was a great thing to be an imperialist. And they were happy warriors. Ready for the fight.
Still, that recession was hitting the little guy pretty hard. Unemployment was high. With jobs in short supply and wages under pressure, men were looking for better prospects wherever they could be found. Immigrants who might drive wages even further down or take scarce jobs were not welcome.
Some young men headed for the States looking for work. Theo Dickson, the son of a struggling real estate agent from Vernon, headed for Montana but found he was even worse off than back home in the Okanagan. He wrote to his younger brother, Ted, to warn him the bad times were everywhere:
I would not come to the States because it’s a hard world over here. I am working on a ranch at present earning $1.25 a day and have only earned $5.60 so far. In a few days I lose my job but will soon land something else. I had a pretty hard time of it for a while without any money or a thing to eat.
Embattled Immigrants, Labour Strife
In Vancouver, the bleak job picture turned ugly when news spread that a ship carrying South Asian immigrants was on the way. When the Komagata Maru tried to land its passengers in Vancouver on May 23, 1914, the ship’s captain met stiff resistance. The passengers were British subjects and felt they had a right to disembark. But the authorities called in HMCS Rainbow and would not let any passengers come ashore. The standoff lasted for two months. On July 23, the Komagata Maru was forced to leave Vancouver Harbour under naval escort. Only a few passengers were allowed to disembark.
McBride no doubt supported the outcome. He was a firm believer in a white Canada. “Another facet of McBride’s imperialism was his fear of Asiatic immigration,” said former BC Attorney General Brian Smith, who wrote a highly respected study of McBride.
In peacetime, both the navy and the militia could be depended on to serve their political masters. As a militia officer in Victoria, Arthur Currie too got the call in 1913—in his case to police a Vancouver Island coal strike.
The Nanaimo strike of 1913–14 was a bitter, class-riven dispute that dragged on and on. In August 1913, fearing violence, the BC attorney general called out the militia. The headline in the August 15 edition of the Victoria Daily Colonist read, “Military Forces to Bring Order Out of Anarchy at Vancouver Island Coal Mines.”
Members of the Victoria militia sailed for Nanaimo with two Maxim guns. “The mission of the soldiery is not to kill,” warned one of the officers, “but as you can see we have guns with us.”
Colonel Currie was in charge of the 5th Regiment and he was in a difficult place. He hadn’t signed on to shoot civilians. But he came out of this police action with his self-respect intact. The militia was able to move in and defuse the situation. Currie got some of the credit for working with the strikers. He must have been buoyed by an editorial in the Victoria Daily Colonist:
The militia at Nanaimo today represents each one of us, whether we sympathize with the miners or not. It is asserting the supremacy of what we have declared to be the law; of the law that protects both the rich man with his hoarded wealth and the penniless agitator for new social conditions... The militia is not a tool in the hands of capital as some profess to believe. It is the guardian of the liberty of the people.
Currie made more headlines just a year later when the British government declared war. He might be a failed real estate agent to his neighbours, but in the military community he was already recognized as one of its most promising militia officers.
1914 and War
“Despite struggling daily with his financial woes,” wrote Currie biographer Tim Cook, author of The Madman and the Butcher, “Currie, a towering figure at over 6'2 and 250 pounds, was recognized as one of the best militia commanders in the country.”
It should be remembered that Canada went to war with what was essentially a civilian army. About six hundred thousand enlisted from across the country. But they were not professional soldiers. Some had served in local militias but many had no previous military experience. Over four hundred thousand went overseas and almost all were civilian soldiers: bank clerks, loggers, miners, farmers and real estate agents like Currie.
Currie had proved himself to be good at commanding a few hundred men. Canada’s minister of militia and defence, the erratic and egotistical Sam Hughes, decided Currie was capable of greater things. From obscurity, he picked him to be one of just a few brigadiers to command the first infantry brigades taking shape at the new training camp at Valcartier, Quebec. Currie was thirty-eight years old and was now in charge of four thousand men. Within just a few years, he would command the entire Canadian Corps on the Western Front.
The Generals—Lions or Donkeys?
After the war, it was said of our soldiers that they were “lions led by donkeys,” the suggestion being that British generals in particular were throwbacks to a different era, arrogant old men in jodhpurs who thought of the men as nothing more than cannon fodder. That view has been coming under reconsideration as historians look back a hundred years and learn more about what actually happened.
“It’s a myth that the generals on both sides were heartless effete aristocrats who sipped champagne behind the lines while they pondered, unsuccessfully, the challenges of modern industrial war,” historian Margaret MacMillan wrote recently in the Guardian newspaper. “Nor were they all from the upper classes. General Erich Ludendorff, one of the most successful of the German generals, was middle class, while General Arthur Currie, arguably the most competent of the British Empire’s generals, was (in civilian life) an unsuccessful salesman.”
MacMillan and other historians think the generals deserve more credit. Certainly Currie stands apart, a citizen soldier who learned on the job and kept improving his understanding of trench warfare and tactics. In an interview with Canada’s History magazine, biographer Tim Cook said that is what makes Currie a truly outstanding Canadian:
He never claimed to be brilliant. He never claimed to have all the answers. And how could he?How do you defeat barbed wire, and trenches and machine gun positions and artillery and poison gas and everything else? But he was willing to learn, he was willing to apply himself to try to understand how to break through the terrible stalemate on the Western Front. And he always did so with the soldiers’ lives in mind.
McBride’s Sad End
For a man who succeeded so well and at such a young age, it was a terrible shock for McBride when it all started to unravel. The first shock was the recession. And then the public started to question how a man who had seemed to be so brilliant could be left holding the bag when the bill came due for all the over-extended railroads and other projects. He promoted all these railroads and guaranteed them, but they were unsustainable when recession hit. The editor of the Grand Forks Sun (a Liberal newspaper) put it bluntly:
We give him credit for being a shrewd and successful politician but maintain that he lacked the essential sagacity of a statesman. He rode on a wave of marvellous prosperity while in power and acted as if those days of inflated values were endless. Had he been gifted with a deeper foresight,he would have foreseen that the conditions which produced the prosperity were transitory, and would have governed the province less recklessly than he did.
Politics aside, the recession and war years were hard for the newspaper business as well. Many closed as advertising dried up. McBride too knew when the game was up. In late 1915, sensing that he could not win another election, he gave up the reins to Attorney General William Bowser and left for his beloved London to take up the post of Agent General. Bowser was left to clean up the mess and suffer defeat when an election was finally held in September 1916.
In London, McBride’s star recovered some of its lustre. His friendship with Churchill gave him an influence beyond his modest status. Historian Margaret Ormsby wrote in British Columbia: A History:
Once arrived in the British capital, Sir Richard found companionship in the stimulating little group of Canadians who had already established themselves there in positions of influence...At just the right moment, McBride was able to put in a word on behalf of General Sir Arthur Currie, a fellow Irish-Canadian, whom he had known in Victoria...His influence helped to win for Currie the command of the Canadian Corps in June 1917, in succession to Sir Julian Byng.
For McBride, the year ahead was not good. He had become ill with Bright’s disease and it proved fatal. When he realized the end was near, McBride appealed to the new Liberal government back in British Columbia for financial aid to come home. They provided funds but McBride died before he could sail on August 6, 1917.
Under the banner headline “Richard McBride Is Dead,” the Vancouver Province reminisced:
Sir Richard...during the boom days of the province in the past decade was an unbeatable leader. He was a man of broad vision and imperial views. In going to England, he felt he would be able to do British Columbia a valuable service in an imperialistic way...Sir Richard McBride was once described by Premier Borden as a brilliant young Canadian whose name in British Columbia means to the people of that province much, if not all, that the name of Sir John A. Macdonald meant, and still means to Eastern Canada. And Hon. Winston Churchill...spoke of him at the dinner given in his honor in London as having “high destinies” written in his face.
McBride was just forty-seven. His body was brought back to BC and his public funeral in Victoria was a major event. But he died financially insolvent, putting a lie to suggestions that he had personally benefitted from all the railway expansion that he promoted. According to Patricia Roy in Boundless Optimism: Richard McBride’s British Columbia, McBride wrote an epitaph of sorts shortly before resigning as premier:
For my own part, I have tried to do my little best and to serve the Province first and the party next. Possibly I may have attempted too much in the end, however, all of the policies I have espoused are bound to reflect creditably on the country.
Currie’s Rise
While he was not in command of the Canadian Corps at Vimy Ridge, General Currie was certainly instrumental in the planning that led to a victory there in April 1917. Victoria bombardier Thomas Baxter of the 10th Battery at Vimy remembers Currie’s audacity. His interview was put online as part of the project “A City Goes to War” from the University of Victoria Special Collections:
General Currie from Victoria was in charge of the Canadian troops. I said to him, “Will the Canadians capture Vimy Ridge?” He said, “I’ll try if you’ll give me 700 field guns.” And they [military headquarters] said, “Where are we going to get 700 field guns?” He says, “I don’t know. If you can’t do it, I’m not going to do it.” Well, he was very clever, because usually they just had one row of field guns. Well, when you advance, you’ve got to stop firing and go ahead. When you do that, you let the enemy dig in. His idea was that they have two rows of guns. I was in charge of a gun in the back row. And they fired. And when they were told to stop and go ahead, the other row started firing. So there were shells dropping on the German front lines all the time. We made bridges to get our guns over the German front lines but when we got there, it was so badly blown up, they weren’t long enough and we had to detour the long way around. And I only saw one dead Canadian soldier and that amazed me.
That “creeping barrage” made all the difference at Vimy. It pulverized the enemy and prevented machine gunners from setting up again to cut down the Canadian troops. Currie was putting what he was learning into practice, and he was getting noticed. In June 1917, McBride was still alive and his endorsement helped Currie to get full command of the Canadian Corps.
In August, Canadians fought at Hill 70 and in October they went through the horror of Passchendaele. Conscription passed into law that year and Currie had more manpower but he no longer had a strictly volunteer army. In December the federal election brought a Unionist government to power, saving Prime Minister Robert Borden from defeat but not the condemnation that would result from conscription.
In the meantime, Currie carried on. Biographer Tim Cook, in an interview with Canada’s History magazine, said that Currie was a workaholic:
I don’t think anyone would have predicted in 1914 that he would become Canada’s greatest battlefield general. He fought under extremely difficult conditions. He was a man who pushed himself relentlessly. He put in 16 and 17 hour days. He barely slept. He was killed by the war ultimately. It shortened his life.
In March 1918, the Germans launched one last major offensive and overran many of the battlefields where Canadians had fought hard to gain ground. Currie wrote to his troops on March 27:
Looking back with pride on the unbroken record of your glorious achievements, asking you to realize that to-day the fate of the British Empire hangs in the balance, I place my trust in the Canadian Corps, knowing that where Canadians are engaged, there can be no giving way. Under the orders of your devoted officers in the coming battle, you will advance, or fall where you stand, facing the enemy.
To those who fall, I say: “you will not die, but step into immortality. Your mothers will not lament your fate, but will be proud to have borne such sons. Your names will be revered forever by your grateful country, and God will take you unto Himself.”
Canadians, in this fateful hour, I command you and I trust you to fight as you have ever fought, with all your strength, with all your determination, with all your tranquil courage. On many a hard-fought field of battle, you have overcome this enemy, and with God’s help, you will achieve victory once more.
(Sgd.) A.W. Currie, Lieut. Gen., Commanding Canadian Corps
It was cold comfort for Canadian soldiers, and there were reports that copies of the order were thrown aside in disgust. But the Canadians did overcome. The Germans overextended themselves, and with the entry of more Americans into the war effort that summer, the tide gradually turned.
In August, when the picture was a little brighter, Currie delivered his assessment of the work ahead to an audience in London. The speech reflects the feelings of hatred and revenge that reached their zenith in 1918:
Personally, I think that the factor that can be turned in our favour is this: If we stop and fight the Boche, we will kill a sufficient number to make him silly, while America develops enough strength to turn the man power in our favour...Our men do not regard the Boche as a superman; and, remembering the crimes they have committed, we shall never take such delight in killing them as when we next meet them. Germany is simply a mad dog that must be killed, a cancerous growth that must be removed.
After four years of war, the image of Canadians as amateur soldiers was gone and Currie spoke about that to his London audience:
When we came to England first, we were not regarded as the finest fighting soldiers. We had many things said about us unjustly; and suggestions were put about that it was improbable we should ever become good soldiers. Everywhere today, at General Headquarters and all other places, it is recognized that Canadian soldiers are fit to take their place beside the veteran soldiers of the British Army, with whom we are proud to serve.
The same could be said of Currie. It was rumoured that Prime Minister Lloyd George was preparing to put him in charge of all British forces. The war would end before that could happen. But there was still plenty of fighting left in 1918.
Currie led the Canadians through the last hundred days, first at Amiens, then at Canal du Nord, Cambrai, and on the eve of the Armistice, at Mons, retaking the city where British forces first faced the Germans in 1914. After Armistice, Currie exhorted his troops to take no personal vengeance against the civilian population as they marched into Germany:
Some of you have already commenced, while others are about to march on the Rhine, liberating Belgium in your advance. In a few days, you will enter Germany and hold certain parts, in order to secure the fulfilment of the terms of armistice preliminary to the peace treaty. The rulers of Germany, humiliated and demoralized have fled...It is not necessary to say that the population and private property will be respected. You will always remember that you fought for justice, right, and decency, and that you cannot afford to fall short of these essentials, even in the country against which you have every right to feel bitter. Rest assured that the crimes of Germany will receive adequate punishment.
Historian J.L. Granatstein wrote in the Globe and Mail that while Canadians should be appalled by the death toll, they should also recognize that those victories shortened the war:
The Hundred Days, that short period running from Aug. 8, 1918, to the armistice on Nov. 11, saw the Canadian Corps score victory after victory against the toughest German defences on the Western Front. The Hundred Days was unquestionably the most decisive campaign ever fought by Canadian troops in battle.
As others have pointed out before us, the sacrifice in blood and treasure was shocking. Sixty thousand Canadians, over six thousand British Columbians among them, killed out of a national population of eight million. Tim Cook did the math and estimated the equivalent death toll today would be 250,000 Canadians killed over a four-year period. That is a staggering figure.
Currie came out of the war on top. But the death toll would come back to haunt him. And so would his clumsy attempts to salvage his real estate business before the war by “borrowing” money that should have paid for militia uniforms. More on that in our concluding chapter.
From Our Listeners
My Grandfather Tom Anderson: As with most men of accomplishment he wasn’t forthcoming about his experience in war or in his career as Vancouver’s longest-serving city fireman. As a child I didn’t know the right questions to ask... [Read more]
Constance Philip, A Heroic Nursing Sister: She was born in Scotland, came to Canada and enlisted on February 24, 1915. She was awarded three medals for her contributions in France, including at Abbeville Hospital... [Read more]
Major G.D. (Paddy) Cameron, Military Cross: Two of his friends had joined a highland regiment but changed their minds and came with him to the Straths. He recalled how they had done their riding tests in kilts! [Read more]