The career of the late Sam Hughes is a tragic reminder that no man in
public life can afford to regard himself as bigger than his suitable
job. When a nation has to retire a genius for the sake of enthroning
what remains of common democracy the nation's loss is nobody's gain.
In the jungle book of our aristocracy Sam Hughes should have been Lord
Valcartier. Not that a democratic country cares at all to be given any
more lords, even if Parliament had not asked the King to abolish the
custom. But while peerages and baronetcies were being handed about for
honour, Hughes was the kind of man that should have got his--except
that he made it impossible.
However, it is more interesting to record the shortcomings of Hughes
than to report the success of mediocrities. Canada had in Hughes a
name with which for a year or so to poster almost any part of the
Empire, especially England. We are in danger of forgetting at this
distance--five years now since he resigned office--just what were the
conditions that made him such a tremendous figure.
Sam Hughes, M.P., born in County Durham, Orangeman from the town of
Lindsay, editor, soldier, adventurer, school teacher who once taught
English and who never could make a speech, though he talked in
public--what was there about him up till 1914 to make any nation
wonder? The first time I saw Hughes, in 1910, a man whose office he
had just left said, as though imparting a State secret:
"There goes the next Minister of Militia."
Up till that moment if anybody had asked me, "Do you know Hughes?" I
should have said, "Oh, yes, everybody knows Jim Hughes, the School
Inspector."
The story of Canada's Army is immortal. It is yet to be truly told.
When it is told by the right man--whether historian or poet--the name
Hughes, as we know it at its best and biggest, will shine out like a
great fixed star that tried to play being a comet. On April 22nd, from
the sick bed that even he probably knew he never would leave of his own
will, in memory of St. Julien, he sent the army boys a brief message,
that he still believed in them as he always had.
Simple little message, it meant much. It would have meant a million
times more if the "boys" could have flashed back a helio to the wan old
General who used to be such a noise in the world--"Same to you,
General." The boys somehow liked him. The defects of Sam Hughes were
of the sort that soldiers love. He was a man's man.
"Tipperary" was just becoming popular to whistle when a camera man
authorized by the Government of Canada took one of the most striking
pictures in our part of the war outside the zone of the shell areas.
Gen. Sam Hughes, jack boots and oilskin cape flung back by the gale to
show his belt and the flap of his khaki, wide-legged on a rope ladder,
coming down forward from a troopship in the Gulf, almost baring his
teeth to the October wind; bidding farewell to the First Contingent
33,000 strong, that steamed out of the Gulf into the convoy.
You recognize in such a picture a man who perhaps understood the
sensations of Alexander. Sam Hughes had finished his first job for the
war. Among all the war achievements that thrilled nations when big men
suddenly took hold of them in after years, this one holds its own.
Hughes never could match it again. Here was the greatest army that had
ever put out to sea at one time; an army forty per cent bigger in three
months than the total force that Gen. Ian Hamilton estimated Canada
could send as her whole contribution to a great war. This was Hughes'
answer to Hamilton. Not only were the men Canadian--if not many of
them Canadians--but their uniforms, boots, kits, rifles, horses, tents,
artillery, machine gun batteries, army waggons, cook waggons,
engineering outfits and munitions, were as far as possible produced in
Canada. Troop trains and transport steamers were Canadian. The money
that paid for the army was Canadian. The pay of officers and men was
Canadian. And we know what Hughes was.
But the moment Hughes let go the rope ladder that should have made him
Lord Valcartier, he began to undo his own career.
In a misguided speech afterwards Sam reminded Lord Shaughnessy that to
raise, equip and dispatch the First Contingent from Canada was a
heavier contract than building the C.P.R. The comparison was foolish,
but very human. Shaughnessy had provoked it by announcing to the
Government that he intended to make a speech in condemnation of Hughes'
methods of recruiting.
The author of Canada in Flanders describes exactly what the work of
organizing that Contingent was. A few extracts will do:
"In less than a month the Government, which had asked for 20,000 men,
found almost 40,000 at its disposal. . . General Hughes devised and
ordered the establishment of the largest camp that had ever been seen
on Canadian soil. The site at Valcartier was well chosen. . . ."
"The transformation effected within a fortnight by an army of engineers
and workers was a remarkable triumph of applied science. Roads were
made, drains laid down, a water supply with miles of pipes installed,
electric lighting furnished from Quebec and incinerators built for the
destruction of dry refuse. A sanitary system second to none that any
camp has seen was instituted. Every company had its own bathing place
and shower baths: every cook-house its own supply of water. Troughs of
water for horses filled automatically so that there was neither
shortage nor waste. The standing crops were garnered; trees cut down
and the roots torn up. A line of targets 3 1/2 miles long--the largest
rifle range in the world--was constructed. . . . . Camp and army
leaped to life in the same hour. Within four days of the opening of
the camp nearly 6,000 men had arrived in it. The cloth mills of
Montreal began to hum with the manufacture of khaki, which the needles
of a great army of tailors converted into uniforms, greatcoats and
cloaks. The Ordnance Department equipped the host with the Ross Rifle.
Regiments were shuffled and reshuffled into battalions; battalions into
brigades. The whole force was inoculated against typhoid. There were
stores to accumulate; a fleet of transports to assemble; a thousand
small cogs in the machine to be nicely adjusted."
Sir Max Aitken did not mention the message to "My Soldiers" in every
man's knapsack, an imitation of Kitchener's knapsack message to the
"Old Contemptibles"; or that he himself had applied to Sam Hughes for a
"job" in Canada's army.
Hughes was Minister of War, not a Minister of Defence. In the tramp of
battalions down the street he felt Canada to be a young nation, not an
overseas Dominion only. Yet the First Contingent was the work of one
of the most scientifically unprepared-for-war peoples in the world.
Valcartier was the glorification of Hughes, who was always personally
prepared for war; what or where he was not always sure, except that it
would involve the Empire, that when it came, the sand-bags of Canada's
front line would not be in Canada, and the Canada Militia Act would be
as useful in the case as a page from Pickwick Papers.
Allow for the British-born majority in the First Contingent, the
patriotic enthusiasm of Militia officers, the commandeering of national
resources and the great work of subordinates; the fact remains that had
he not been as much his own enemy as he was a soldier born and bred,
Sam Hughes should have been Lord Valcartier.
The sad fact about Hughes is that he did not estimate what Canada did
and did not in her first impact upon the war. He could not see Canada
except as the shadow of Sam Hughes. In the light of the war as he
stood in front of it, that shadow of Hughes seemed to him to cover the
country. For two years, it seemed to grow. Then it flickered. In
1916 it went out. And there never was in Canada a going out like it.
Hughes was the embodiment of force without power. He began to mobilize
a nation, not merely as battalions on parade, but as an army equipped
by Canadian science, industry, transportation, intelligence, and
citizenship. So far as he carried that out, the editor of the _Lindsay
Warder_ and M.P. for Haliburton and Victoria had no superior in
organizing force in this country. Up till 1916 he was a patriotic
cannon-cracker exploding without any particular objective, except that
he wanted a Canadian Army in Canada, not an overseas Contingent, or an
Imperial Army. between 1914 and 1916 he was a great organizing
soldier, at his best comparable to any men who were doing wonders at
the front. As Nationalist as Quebec, he thought of Canada as a unit in
the Empire, most of which he had seen for military reasons. Canada
could not declare war; but in the mind of Hughes the force that held
Canada and other overseas dominions within the Empire was not in trade
and tariffs, but in ships, armies and victories.
Sam Hughes failed to translate his force into power because he failed
to estimate the elements which carried him to success, and therefore
could not measure the energies that would defeat him. He never
understood what Bismarck called the "imponderables". Nature gave him
the energy; Fate the ambition: Destiny denied him the vision.
The electric energy of this nation in response to the call of war made
a flash that blinded Hughes. He seemed to think that he was the man
who was running the cataract. He had a wholesome contempt for
Kaiserism in Germany. He tried to express it by an imitation of
Kaiserism in Canada. He had a sense of relative omnipotence. He put
editors in jail, went over the heads of District commanders,
inexcusably humiliated General Lessard in command of the most important
military district in Canada, openly browbeat officers in front of their
men, played Napoleon on a white charger at the crest of a mound in
Valcartier, and trod on the official corns of his colleagues.
Such things are now somewhat blurred by perspective. At the time they
were glaringly in the spotlight as the pranks of a Jack the Giant
Killer. In December, 1914, Premier Borden made a tactical visit to the
headquarters of Military District No. 2, nominally commanded by General
Lessard.
A military writer had this to say about the Premier's speech:
". . . . He thought the accomplishment of this task (Valcartier) was a
tribute to the spirit of the people. He claimed no special credit for
his Government; inferentially it was a high compliment to the
organizing ability of the Minister of Militia, but Sir Robert deftly
left that to the imagination of his audience. . . . A curious feature
was his avoidance of any mention of the 'Minister of Militia.' When he
desired to speak of the military programme, he stated that he had
decided, after consultation with the 'Chief of Staff'. This was done
repeatedly and apparently with definite purpose. Once he mentioned the
name of Major Lessard, and a shout went up from the audience."
Further quotation is not needed. In less than two months after the
glorification of Valcartier, the Premier found himself challenged by
the man who had already begun to act as though national headquarters
were in the Militia Department. Sam Hughes was never unpopular in
Toronto. The incident referred to might almost have taken place in
Montreal.
Canada was beginning to understand, to heroize and to censure Sam
Hughes. His measure was being taken here. But the censure was
unheeded. Hughes worked while critics talked. He was mobilizing, if
not organizing, a nation. He still believed that he (ipse) could do
it. The mobilization included everything needed by the army as well as
the army itself. He wanted to get the nation behind the army: and
himself behind the nation. He started everything--even to shells, high
explosives and aeroplanes. Hughes knew what the army needed. He
refused to admit that other men also knew how to get some of these
things better than he did.
Cabinet colleagues were adjuncts. The motto punctuated by the smashing
fist was, "I want to tell you!" No major on parade ever felt so
overwhelming. Hughes was more than a martinet. He was a dilemma. The
phenomenal was always about him. War was not even hell to Sam Hughes.
It was more often a chance to show a civilian minister that he was a
mere conventional ornament. Hughes may have hated the necessity, but
he loved the spirit and the fire, of war.
Sam Hughes was probably wiser on what modern war demanded than many of
the British command. Even Kitchener argued for shrapnel when Lloyd
George wanted high explosives. There was no civilian in Canada to
argue against Hughes, who aimed to do in Canada what the Minister of
Munitions, Director-General, Headquarters Staff, and the Minister of
Transports did in England. He was able from the first to get a
realizing measure of the kind of mechanical hell known as modern war.
Start a force like that and you may expect abnormalities in the wake of
it. We had "Sham Shoes". Hughes had nothing to do with those. He
stated in Winnipeg that Wellington had once said that a contractor who
made bad boots for an army should be shot. We had shell contracts--and
the "friend" Joseph Wesley Allison; the Kyte charges, which brought the
Minister home from England to answer them in the House. Neither the
answer nor the friend was characteristic of the kind of man we had
supposed Sam Hughes to be. We had the Ross Rifle. Hughes knew that in
actual warfare the Ross was the finest sniper's rifle in the world, but
that in quick action it jammed so badly that often the Canadians
furtively swapped them for Lee-Enfields whenever the chance came.
There was no excuse for the Ross rifle, and Hughes ought to have
admitted it. There never should have been a chance for any detractor
of his to insinuate that the Minister had stock in the Ross Rifle
Company. We had cellulose nitrate and Grant Morden, who has never had
an equal over here for making sudden wealth out of next to nothing and
getting popular credit for doing it. What the ex-Minister of Militia
made out of that promotion was never stated. It never should have been
necessary for him to have made a copper in any such way. On his
retirement from the Cabinet Hughes should have had a big honourable
endowment from the nation sufficient as an income for the rest of his
life. The whole idea of such a character being even good-humouredly
mixed up with any deal not absolutely foursquare is a paradox. The Sam
Hughes that we knew best was as straight as a chalk line.
The exploits of Canada's army never surprised Hughes. He had always
said they could do it. He boasted about the generals he had taken from
desks and offices. But the generals were fighting. There was a cubist
picture in the War Memorials at Ottawa thus described by a Canadian
editor who went over the battlefields which it depicted:
"The canvas shrieking with its high hues was filled with Turcos in
panic flight crowding one another in their terror, while over them
billowed the yellow poison pall of death; but in the midst of the
maelstrom the roaring Canadian guns stood immovable and unyielding,
served by gunners who rose superior alike to the physical terrors of
battle and the moral contagion of fear."
That picture of St. Julien must have thrilled Hughes, whose son was
soon to be Brigadier-General. It was on the crest of the St. Julien
wave that Hughes got his title and was given the freedom of London;
when some delirious writer in a London daily predicted that some day
Sir Sam would ride through London at the head of his victorious troops.
One writer called him the Commander-in-Chief of Canada's Army. None of
these things moved Sam Hughes to humility. As well as any man he knew
how small the greatest man was in the fury of that war.
Other Cabinet Ministers had to wait till the Peace Conference before
getting such press notices. Even the Premier took nearly two years to
convince London that he was much more than the civilian colleague of
Gen. Hughes. Sir Sam was idolized from the beginning; at times when
generals at the front were baffled, discouraged and beaten, and when
patient old Kitchener was enduring red tape and making perfunctory
reports to the Lords, knowing that the war was bigger than his
knowledge of it.
Hughes may not have been wise enough to estimate the real value of this
idolatry; but he was probably shrewd enough to know that it would soon
be over. He knew that much as had been done to make Canada a war
nation, the first two years had done less than half the work. 87,000
troops went overseas in 1915. That was natural. The majority of the
men were in camp. In 1916 the number was almost doubled, from the
enlistments of 1915. In 1917 the number sent overseas dropped to
63,536, proving that the enlistments of 1916 had been about half those
of 1915.
Hughes knew this better than anybody. He knew that the voluntary
system, in which he believed, was going to break down. We had no
national register. A country as big as twenty Englands, with a
population about one-fourth as big, had also Quebec--and the farmer.
The Canadian census was five years old and useless for anything like a
national register of resources of war. Camp Borden in 1916 helped to
stimulate recruiting and to give Hughes something resembling in a
feeble way the sensations of 1914. But Camp Borden was not Valcartier.
General Lessard, whom he had ignored in 1914, was sent down to Quebec
to encourage enlistments. He went too late. Wrong men had gone
earlier. Hughes had never tried to placate Quebec. But in 1916 he
himself went down to see Cardinal Begin. For an Orangeman like Hughes
that was a desperate measure. He got what he expected--cynicism.
Begin afterwards issued a letter to the press in which he tried to set
the clergy above the law of conscription. No doubt the Cardinal came
at Hughes with the twaddle invented by the Nationalists and later
adopted by Laurier, about enforcing the Militia Act which provided for
nothing but defence.
Canada had now four divisions in the field. The problem was how to
keep them up, and how to send a fifth. The fifth never went. But it
stands to the immortal credit of Sam Hughes that the four did, and that
he had sent them.
The affair about the Chairman of Munitions was to Hughes a sore blow.
He had started munitions as an arm of war. He did not want a civilian
to take it over as a mere industry. Even that was a sign that the
volunteer system was about done. Ottawa was full of experts now, each
man taking over as a big business something started by Hughes. The
one-man epoch was over. But Hughes refused to admit it. The man who
had started everything was in no humour to admit anything. Yet in the
darkest days Hughes never lost faith in the men who had gone. No man
continued to say more heartening things about ultimate victory. And he
played blind optimist against the cold, comfortless fact that the
Canadian Army was wasting and the reserves were not marching up to mend
it.
Hughes knew that conscription had to come. But he was the very last
man in authority to admit it. Only a few days before Ottawa announced
that compulsory service must be applied, and when Sir Sam knew it was
coming, he said publicly to soldiers in Toronto that Canada, the
freeman's country, would never need conscription. It was most pitiful
to hear him. Sir Sam never seemed to pity himself. His egoism was
game enough for anything. Bigger men than he had gone down. A big man
here or there was nothing now. But what of little men that stayed up?
Hughes probably asked that in silent contempt as he saw the coming of
Coalition. But he knew he would not be there when it came.
By this time the egotism that was so splendid in 1914 had begun to
breed in Gen. Hughes rancours and envies and enmities. Some of the men
he had sent overseas were now more potent figures than himself.
There was still a person at the head of the Militia Department known as
Lieut.-General Sam Hughes, K.C.B. But there was no longer in Canada
any such man as old Sam Hughes. The Fate chickens hatched in 1914 were
coming home to roost. For two years the Government had carried on two
wars, one with the Kaiser Wilhelm, the other with Kaiser Sam. It had
to be determined that whatever defects government may have because it
is a democracy--even such democracy as was left in 1916--it is bigger
than any one man. It had to be conceded that the nation was bigger
than any one political party, and war bigger than all the world's
volunteer armies.
Sam Hughes belonged to the eternal Volunteers. The days of his glory
were the days when Canada of her own accord went to war or stayed at
home. The Force called Hughes dreamed that it was bigger than a
machine called War. But the machine won. Hughes went down. He went
down as he had come up--alone. His going down seemed more swift than
his rising. And yet he began to go down when he stood on the rope
ladder down the Gulf and watched the troopships drift out. If in that
moment he had not dreamed that General Sam Hughes was above government,
he might have continued his great work long enough to become Lord
Valcartier. He might have helped in a second Capture of Quebec, made
conscription less difficult when it came, and put the Fifth Division
into the field. And in that case Canada's part in the war would have
been even more magnificent than it now is.
The latter days of the General were characteristic of a man who never
knew he was beaten. Musical geniuses have written tremendous scores to
depict a man's struggle with death. None of them could have
transcended the long battle which Sam Hughes put up to stay here. For
months we had intermittent bulletins from his bedside when any morning
we expected to read that he was gone. He was a hard man to conquer.
And only his intimate friends are likely ever to know whether or not it
was his own ultimate biting failure, after his almost super-human
success, that turned this man of the shadow into a phantom before he
let go.
And before he went the hard, bluff soldier, who has as much iron in his
composition as any man of his time sprang one of those human surprises
that even war fails to emulate--when he listened time after time to the
record that he loved better than most music, "I know that my Redeemer
liveth", from Handel's "Messiah".