"The self-governing British colonies," wrote Bernhardi before the war, "have at their disposal a militia, which is sometimes only in process of formation.They can be completely ignored so far as concerns any European theater of war." This contemptuous forecast might have been justified had German expectations of a short war been fulfilled.Though large and increasing sums had in recent years been spent on the Canadian militia and on a small permanent force, the work of building up an army on the scale the war demanded had virtually to be begun from the foundation.It was pushed ahead with vigor, under the direction, for the first three years, of the Minister of Militia, General Sir Sam Hughes.Many mistakes were made.Complaints of waste in supply departments and of slackness of discipline among the troops were rife in the early months.But the work went on; and when the testing time came, Canada's civilian soldiers held their own with any veterans on either side the long line of trenches.
It was in April, 1915, at the second battle of Ypres--or, as it is more often termed in Canada, St.Julien or Langemarck--that the quality of the men of the first contingent was blazoned forth.The Germans had launched a determined attack on the junction of the French and Canadian forces, seeking to drive through to Calais.The use, for the first time, of asphyxiating gases drove back in confusion the French colonial troops on the left of the Canadians.Attacked and outflanked by a German army of 150,000 men, four Canadian brigades, immensely inferior in heavy artillery and tortured by the poisonous fumes, filled the gap, hanging on doggedly day and night until reenforcements came and Calais was saved.In sober retrospection it was almost incredible that the thin khaki line had held against the overwhelming odds which faced it.A few weeks later, at Givenchy and Festubert, in the same bloody salient of Ypres, the Canadian division displayed equal courage with hardly equal success.In the spring of 1916, when the Canadian forces grew first to three and then to four divisions, heavy toll was taken at St.Eloi and Sanctuary Wood.
When they were shifted from the Ypres sector to the Somme, the dashing success at Courcelette showed them as efficient in offense as in defense.In 1917 a Canadian general, Sir Arthur Currie, three years before only a business man of Vancouver, took command of the Canadian troops.The capture of Vimy Ridge, key to the whole Arras position, after months of careful preparation, the hard-fought struggle for Lens, and toward the close of the year the winning of the Passchendaele Ridge, at heavy cost, were instances of the increasing scale and importance of the operations entrusted to Currie's men.
In the closing year of the war the Canadian corps played a still more distinctive and essential part.During the early months of 1918, when the Germans were making their desperate thrusts for Paris and the Channel, the Canadians held little of the line that was attacked.Their divisions had been withdrawn in turn for special training in open warfare movements, in close cooperation with tanks and air forces.When the time came to launch the Allied offensive, they were ready.It was Canadian troops who broke the hitherto unbreakable Wotan line, or Drocourt-Queant switch; it was Canadians who served as the spearhead in the decisive thrust against Cambrai; and it was Canadians who captured Mons, the last German stronghold taken before the armistice was signed, and thus ended the war at the very spot where the British "Old Contemptibles" had begun their dogged fight four years before.
Through all the years of war the Canadian forces never lost a gun nor retired from a position they had consolidated.Canadians were the first to practice trench raiding; and Canadian cadets thronged that branch of the service, the Royal Flying Corps, where steady nerves and individual initiative were at a premium.
In countless actions they proved their fitness to stand shoulder to shoulder with the best that Britain and France and the United States could send: they asked no more than that.The casualty list of 220,000 men, of whom 60,000 sleep forever in the fields of France and Flanders and in the plains of England, witnesses the price this people of eight millions paid as its share in the task of freeing the world from tyranny.
The realization that in a world war not merely the men in the trenches but the whole nation could and must be counted as part of the fighting force was slow in coming in Canada as in other democratic and unwarlike lands.Slowly the industry of the country was adjusted to a war basis.When the conflict broke out, the country was pulling itself together after the sudden collapse of the speculative boom of the preceding decade.For a time men were content to hold their organization together and to avert the slackening of trade and the spread of unemployment which they feared.Then, as the industrial needs and opportunities of the war became clear, they rallied.Field and factory vied in expansion, and the Canadian contribution of food and munitions provided a very substantial share of the Allies' needs.Exports increased threefold, and the total trade was more than doubled as compared with the largest year before the war.
The financing of the war and of the industrial expansion which accompanied it was a heavy task.For years Canada had looked to Great Britain for a large share alike of public and of private borrowings.Now it became necessary not merely to find at home all the capital required for ordinary development but to meet the burden of war expenditure, and later to advance to Great Britain the funds she required for her purchase of supplies in Canada.
