War Service
The Canadian Pacific Railway was and is a triumph of constructive
endeavour in the days of peace. We have spoken of the army of men at
work, from the turning of the first sod, all through the grading, the
tracklaying and the operation of the road, as a peaceful mobile army
which moved with tireless tread in the march of civilization. It was the
business of these men to build and not to destroy, to gather together
and not to scatter abroad, to conserve and not to dissipate the natural
assets of Canada. In doing this work the Railway would be performing a
great task in relation to the stability of human society and would send
coursing through the arteries of commerce that national and
international trade which has so much to do with the calm health of the
world. But, alas! there are times when the peace of the earth is rudely
interrupted by some megalomaniac who kicks the anthill of the world’s
population and sends the inhabitants into wild confusion. In such times
it becomes necessary to resist and subdue the disturber, if need be, by
force. Pacifism is a high ideal if all would seek to work it out
together; but, changing to another figure of speech, we all know that it
is useless to reason with a mad dog running amuck on the world’s
thoroughfare. Hence there are occasions, unhappily, when the peaceful
have not only to stand on the defensive but to carry war into the
enemy’s country, so as to compel the inciter to war to remember that
other people have a right to life and liberty and happiness on this
round globe. On such occasions the machinery of traffic has to be
temporarily diverted, in some degree, from its accustomed employment and
swung into the conflict for ultimate peace.
In this regard the great railway of which we are writing has done its
startlingly large share at home and abroad. It will be remembered that
the road was not finished over the North Shore of Lake Superior when Mr.
Van Horne, who had, months before, offered help in such a possible
emergency case, transported troops to the scene of the Riel outbreak on
the North and South Saskatchewan. We spoke specially of the North Shore
in relation to bringing troops from the Eastern Provinces, but we must
also bear in mind that troops were rushed from Winnipeg westward with
pronounced effect. Those were my student days in Winnipeg, but it was my
privilege to be one of the Winnipeg Light Infantry which was specially
raised and rushed on the new road by troop train to Calgary. This was an
exceedingly important movement, because the massacre at Frog Lake, down
the North Saskatchewan from Edmonton, had taken place and the Indian
tribes were very restless all over the vast area from the boundary line
away to the north. We left some companies at points in what is now
Southern Alberta where the war-like tribes of the Blackfeet, Piegans,
Bloods and others had their habitat. Their great chief, Crowfoot,
befriended in the early days by the Mounted Police, was loyal, but young
braves under the prevailing excitement might break away and were none
the worse of seeing a few red-coats in the locality. From Calgary the
rest of our regiment, along with the 65th of Montreal, and a few
splendid Mounted Police and Scouts, marched north to Edmonton. We passed
through some tribes that were very much agitated by Riel’s runners, and
on to Edmonton, which, but for the timely arrival of our column, would
have shared the fate of Forts Pitt and Victoria, not far away, which had
already been looted and burned by the Frog Lake and other Indians under
Big Bear and Wandering Spirit. Similarly, were troops rushed westward
from Winnipeg to Swift Current, whence they marched for the relief of
Battleford, which was beleaguered by Indians, and farther east others
went on the railway till they came to the point nearest Batoche, where
Riel and Gabriel Dumont were at the centre of revolt. Riel had sent his
runners out in all directions, saying to the Indians that there were
only a few Mounted Police in the country and that the Queen’s soldiers
could not reach the Far West. My own recollection is that the Indians
amongst whom we came were positively amazed at the suddenness of our
appearance in their remote districts. Prevention is better than cure,
and there is no doubt at all but that the effect of the inflammatory
appeal of Riel was headed off by the swift arrival of soldiers. But for
this the whole prairie might have been overrun by maddened Indians, who
would have made many massacres like that of the nine unfortunate white
men whose mangled bodies we buried on the Frog Lake Indian Reserve.
After the rebellion was crushed, the Government at Ottawa took many
Indian Chiefs to the Eastern Provinces in order that these Indians might
see the strength of “the Queen’s people.” This trip was an effective
deterrent on any more uprisings and not the least of the influences for
peace were the “fire wagons” that drew trains along steel trails with
such swiftness that the Indian ponies were left hopelessly behind. The
Riel outbreak was not a great war, but it might have led to massacre,
pillage and ruin only for the demonstration of power made possible by
the railway transport before the flame of revolt got fairly started. For
that service, of enormous value to Canada and the Empire, we who knew
the situation will always be grateful for the work of the Canadian
Pacific in a critical hour. The swift suppression of the Riel revolt put
the all-Canadian railway conspicuously on the map of the Empire as a new
element of power in her far-flung battle-line.
When the Great War broke over the world so suddenly in 1914, the
Canadian Pacific had, in the interval since Riel’s outbreak and the
primitive line of that day, grown into the world’s greatest
transportation system by land and sea. It is remembered now of course
that the War took most people unawares, so that they acted in the
emergency according to the attitude their manner of thinking had
developed. It is a striking comment on the thinking of President
Shaughnessy, of the Canadian Pacific Railway, that while others in
various places hesitated he at once put the resources of the Company,
with its world-wide system on land and sea, at the disposal of the
Empire. This was all the more remarkable when we recall that he was
foreign born and had only come to Canada when he had grown to man’s
estate. The fact was that he had become intensely Canadian. It seems a
law of human life that people come to love the cause for which they make
sacrifices. Shaughnessy had sacrificed much for Canada and its progress.
He had left his own country and his home at an age when these mean much
and when for him certain promotion on well-established roads was within
reach. He had come to a new enterprise in a comparatively new country
with an uncertain future and he had passed through circumstances that
imposed upon him, for some years, a mental strain which amounted to
positive suffering. I do not suppose that either he or Van Horne ever
became less attached to their native land to the south of the line, but
the stupendous undertaking of Canada’s pioneer transcontinental railway
so absorbed the intense devotion of all their energies that they became
profoundly Canadian. They did not love the United States less, but the
immense enterprise to which they gave the best years of their lives in
Canada bound them with unmistakable loyalty to their adopted country.
When the War broke out, Mr. Van Horne had retired from active service in
the Canadian Pacific and was in poor health, but his heart was in
sympathy with Canada and he exerted himself to do what he could.
Shaughnessy, as we have said, wheeled the whole system into line to help
win the War. The transcontinental trains had to be kept moving with
precision, to transport troops and to rush to the front stores of food
from the granary of the Empire on the Western plains. But the huge
workshops were turned into shell factories and became hives of industry
for the manufacture of the destructive enginery of war. Shaughnessy, at
the request of the Home Government, loaned to the work of war
transportation some of the ablest officials of the Company in that
department. In an effort to reorganize the broken-down transportation of
Russia, Shaughnessy sent to that strange land one of the keenest minded
officials of the Canadian Pacific in the person of George Bury, who was
knighted for the efforts he made there in a period seething with
discontent and revolution.
Although it would not do to cripple the system at the home base, every
facility was given to employees to enlist for military service abroad. I
have seen with Mr. F. W. Peters, the popular and efficient General
Superintendent of the Railway in British Columbia, a copy of the
instructions issued by Shaughnessy and sent out to leading officials all
over the system. It was intimated therein that to all employees who
enlisted, their full pay would be continued for six months (many thought
the war would be brief) and that places equivalent to those they had
occupied when they enlisted would be given to those who returned. There
were over eleven thousand enlistments and of these about eleven hundred
were killed in action. So well was the promise as to re-employment kept
that former employees to the number of nearly eight thousand were taken
on again, and in addition some fourteen thousand other returned soldiers
were given situations—a most remarkable showing. It is quite well known
that the Company also did all it could for the dependants of those who
did not return.
In tribute to the unreturning brave the Canadian Pacific erected
permanent memorials in bronze and tablets all over the system in order
that succeeding generations might not forget. Upon each bronze monument
and each tablet are these fine words:
“To commemorate those in the service of the Canadian Pacific
Railway Company, who, at the call of king and country, left all
that was dear to them, endured hardship, faced danger and
finally passed out of sight of men by the path of duty and
self-sacrifice, giving up their own lives that others might live
in freedom. Let those who come after see to it that their names
be not forgotten. 1914-1918.”
We have been thus far studying the war service of the Canadian Pacific
with our minds principally upon the forces drawn from the land portion
of the system. But there is in some respects a more wonderful record on
the sea. Not that the men on the sea were more valorous than those on
the land; but the men on the sea, being located in ships, were more
easily followed than the men who in the land or the air forces were
scattered in various localities on many battle fronts.
Almost every ship of the Canadian Pacific fleet went on war duty, and
fifteen of these were lost by torpedoes or mines or other similar causes
on the high seas. These lost vessels represented over a third of the
tonnage engaged. Behind this simple statement are many tales of heroism
of which there is no permanent record, and there are achievements of
thrilling importance done in practically all parts of the world. It is
possible for us to give only an outline which can be filled in with
deeds of gallantry and valour by the imagination of any reader who knows
the traditions of our British men on the high seas of the world.
“If blood be the price of Admiralty,
Lord God, we have paid it full:
We have strawed our best to the world’s unrest,
To the shark and the sheering gull.”
By following the log of some of the Canadian Pacific vessels we get at
least some of the bare facts.
The _Empress of France_ had barely reached the dock at Liverpool, two
days after war was declared, when she was requisitioned for special
service by royal proclamation. Within a few days after her cargo was
unloaded, all passenger accommodation and other wood work was removed.
Armed with eight six-inch guns, she was sent out, manned by a naval
crew, to patrol in the North Sea between Shetland and Iceland, and
became, a few months later, the flagship of the patrol squadron, in
which service she intercepted 15,000 ships. Later, she was transferred
to convoy service in the North Atlantic route. In that service she
escorted nine convoys of twenty vessels each, carrying per convoy about
30,000 troops, mostly Americans on their way to the front. Some
indication of the extent of the war service of the _Empress of France_
may be gathered from the fact that while in commission she steamed
267,000 knots and consumed 170,000 tons of coal. These figures as to
only one vessel out of many, tell little of the services and the
hardships of a gallant crew, but they shed some light on the frightful
monetary cost of war.
The _Empress of Britain_, one of the new and large vessels, was fitted
out as a transport, carrying troops to the Dardanelles, Egypt and India;
also from Canada to the Western Front. Besides her own crew she
accommodated 5,000 officers and men. During one of her trips across the
Atlantic with a full complement of crew and soldiers, a German submarine
launched two torpedoes, one of which missed the bow by three feet and
the other passed some ten feet astern. It was all in the day’s work; but
that was a close shave “between the devil and the deep sea!”
The splendid new steamer, the _Calgarian_, of the Atlantic service, was
one of the many Canadian ships sunk by the enemy during the War, but not
before doing some notable work. Along with the famous _Vindictive_, the
_Calgarian_ blocked Lisbon to prevent German ships sheltering there from
coming out on raids into the Atlantic; and later, for nearly a year of
continuous service, was stationed outside New York to prevent the escape
of German ships interned there. Then, when she was convoying thirty
vessels across the Atlantic, she was torpedoed and sunk with the loss of
forty-nine men.
Our old Pacific Coast friend, the _Empress of Russia_, had a thrilling
experience as an Admiralty cruiser. She left Vancouver for Hong-Kong on
her usual run in August, 1914, but she was already designated for war
service. At Hong-Kong her interior fittings were taken out and replaced
by coal bunkers, and eight guns were mounted fore and aft. British Naval
Reservists and French gun crews were put aboard in place of the Chinese
hands, and the _Empress_ started out to work. Shortly afterwards she met
the pride of Australia, the cruiser _Sydney_, after that gallant ship
had smashed the wicked German rover, the _Emden_. The _Russia_ took off
the prisoner members of the _Emden_ crew, including the Captain, Von
Muller, and put them out of commission by landing them at Ceylon. With
the help of some Indian troops, she captured the Turkish fort of Kamaran
on the Red Sea. Then, for twenty-three days, she and her sister Canadian
Pacific vessel, the _Empress of Asia_, guarded the British port of Aden
until the arrival of British warships. After some more dangerous
experiences, the _Empress of Russia_, the _Empress of Asia_, the
_Empress of Japan_, the cruiser _Himalaya_, and the destroyer _Ribble_,
kept in blockade the Port of Manilla, where fifteen German ships were
hiding in the hope of getting out with supplies to their war vessels.
Finally the _Russia_ spent a year cruising in the East, and then, when
the War was over, slipped back quietly on to her old peaceful run out of
Vancouver to the Orient.
One can only sum up in a wondering way the enormous service done for the
Empire by this great railway company, by saying that during the War,
Canadian Pacific ships carried over a million troops and passengers on
war business. They carried over four millions of tons of cargo and
munitions of war, and many thousands of horses and mules for transport
service on the field. And perhaps one of the most amazing and
least-known feats of the Canadian Pacific was the carrying to and from
Flanders and France, through Vancouver, of what seemed a numberless army
of Chinese from the North of China, who went out to do the unskilled
labour on the field and thus released thousands of the allied soldiers
for the fighting line, who otherwise would have had to do this highly
necessary non-combatant work.
Letters from Mr. David Lloyd George, the dynamic war-time Premier of
Britain, and others, to the Company and to officials, conveyed the
appreciation of the Old Land to the Canadian Pacific for its unique
assistance in a crisis hour. Many decorations worn by Canadian Pacific
men who served on land and sea, and the scars of battle on many of her
ships, attest the unique way in which President Shaughnessy (one of
whose sons fell in action) and his wide-reaching organization came to
the assistance of the Motherland when vital things were in danger. Let
this great service not be lost sight of when petty matters and little
controversies in commercial life have their innings.
A peculiarly striking sidelight is thrown on the general subject of war
by the changing attitude to the subject of Sir William Van Horne, who
lived only a year into the war period, but who studied it all with the
thoroughness so characteristic of the man. Some years before the Great
War he had written to Mr. S. S. McClure, in New York, almost in praise
of war as a creator of heroisms and an inspiration to valiant endeavour.
But as he studied the Great War, with its horrible engines of
destruction, high explosives and silent, stealthy weapons of death on
land and sea and in the air, he began to see the monstrous side of such
a method for settling international differences. He saw the frightful
annihilation of some of the brightest young men whose record he knew in
his own organization, and whose services to the country, had they been
spared, would have been beyond price. One would like to have had his
changed attitude put into words by himself in his own vivid and vigorous
way. Perhaps he would have left us an expression of assured hope that
the day would come
“When the war-drums throb no longer
And the battle-flags are furled
In the Parliament of man,
The Federation of the world.”
But, despite all its horrors, war has, for human society, some
compensation in the fact that it reveals suddenly certain elements of
good in the world whose existence we had only dimly realized before. I
remember how, as a boy, riding on horseback over the prairie in dark
nights, I used to conjecture in a vague way as to the character of the
trail ahead and as to what life of man or animal might be shrouded in
the blackness. And I recall how fascinating it was to have flashes of
lightning break recurrently now and then from the clouds, each flash
burning its way into the darkness, revealing the trail, showing cattle
and horses and the humble homesteads of pioneers who were beginning to
settle on the plain. It has sometimes seemed to me that war is a flash
of lightning which reveals much hitherto only dimly imagined as existing
in society. That it reveals many mean and disquieting features and
qualities in human life goes without saying. But that it also reveals
many noble characteristics, is amply demonstrated. The recent Great War,
for instance, revealed the greatness of the common man who, from some
unspectacular occupation, where these qualities were present but
unnoticed by the community, went out where the lightning flash of war
disclosed to the world marvels of heroism and self-sacrifice. Similarly,
we often discovered in the common business world and amidst business
organizations at home, a readiness to serve and sacrifice which before
had only been dimly understood as existing at all. The War revealed it.
The Canadian Pacific Railway, which had overcome early difficulties on
the road to success, was probably regarded by the average Canadian with
some patriotic pride as a prosperous organization, but possibly he
thought it was not much concerned about things beyond its own welfare.
Yet it is not too much to say that the War suddenly revealed in it vital
qualities of loyalty to the Empire and showed the Company personified as
a good citizen of Canada. As a citizen it threw itself into the business
of helping to defend the country and to assist in making conditions as
good as possible in war times.
The recent incident in the earthquake in Japan will illustrate my point
as being in keeping with the traditions of the Company. There at
Yokohama the Canadian Pacific steamship, the _Empress of Australia_, as
related elsewhere, was just casting off, when the earthquake took place.
Taking interest in the safety of themselves and their ship mainly as a
means of helping others, Captain Robinson and his gallant crew became a
band devoted to heroic rescue. We need not detail the story here, but,
the captain and men, knowing the traditions of the Company, did not
consider for a moment the immense expense and loss they were incurring
in cancelling a voyage and placing the ship and all their stores at the
disposal of the suffering and destitute.
The War gave the Canadian Pacific many opportunities of living up to
these traditions, and the Company did not fail. While its ships were
being sunk in service on the high seas and its general business on land
was being dislocated, the Company did its part as a citizen in the
enlistments, as already recorded. But, in addition, every good cause
which aimed at alleviating human suffering and administering to human
comfort found what to some must have seemed a surprisingly large support
from the Company. Hospitals at home and field hospitals abroad, Red
Cross movements, nurses’ homes, returned soldiers, disabled men and
their dependants, Y. M. C. A’s, Salvation Army efforts, and all such
persons or organizations were on the list for assistance in a big way.
The War brought this out more distinctly, but it was part of the
Company’s tradition. It is trustee for the funds of its shareholders,
and cannot throw these funds away to improvident people or undeserving
causes; but it uniformly seeks to help the community in the interests of
the general weal. The Canadian Pacific Railway, owning and maintaining
in Canada an enormous amount of property and employing over one hundred
thousand people, who receive eight millions monthly in salaries and
wages, is manifestly an extraordinary contributor to the upkeep of the
Dominion in the ordinary business way. When we add to this the fact of
the Railway’s support of all worthy causes, we are able to estimate in
some degree the value to Canada of its citizenship.