The war was a great cosmic artist of infinite satire, making of
humanity little stereopticon slides which he slipped in front of his
calcium and flashed upon the clouds for a screen. When the war was
done the stereopticon was smashed. The slides remain. What shall we
do with them?
One of the most world-interesting characters in the magic lantern of
war was Lieut.-General Sir Arthur Currie, who in 1914 locked his real
estate desk in Victoria, B.C., and in 1919 came back to Canada
admittedly one of the ablest commanders in a war which made the
exploits of Wellington seem like comic opera in simplicity.
Whatever partial, prejudiced or private opinions some Canadians may
have about Sir Arthur Currie, it must be generally admitted that he was
perhaps the most remarkable of all the slides slipped into the
stereopticon of the war artist. To quote from "Canada's Hundred Days",
by J. F. B. Livesay, concerning the secret strategy of Sir Arthur
Currie for the great Amiens show in August, 1918:
"That afternoon the Corps Commander had a talk with the two Canadian
correspondents. Before him was a large scale map and the barrage map.
It was all very clear and lucid. We take up our line here; and our
first objective is there; 'zero' hour was named; our final objective
for the day over there--constituting a world record for a first day's
advance. . . .
"So at last all is ready. The story goes that the Corps Commander was
asked how soon he could deliver the Corps in fighting trim at the
appointed place. 'By the tenth,' he had said. 'Too long; do it by the
eighth.' And he did it. . . .
"And it was all done secretly and by night. For an entire week the men
of Canada were passing south from their old front, taking circuitous
and puzzling routes. None knew where they went. They sang as they
marched--a thing they had not done for two years.
"Foremost that night of nights was one's sense of wonder at how it had
been done; how of many tangled threads of railway and lorry and march,
all that great and intricate machine--more complex far than Wellington
had gathered on the field of Waterloo--had been assembled in perfect
order to the minute. . . .
"Up the winding hill go all the impedimenta of war--marching
battalions, traction-engines towing great guns, ammunition trains, long
lines of Red Cross lorries; everywhere the pungent odour of petrol.
From every little wood belch forth men. They march silently. They
might be phantoms, dim hordes of Valhalla, were it not for the spark of
a cigarette, a smothered laugh. There is no talking. All is tense
excitement. For miles and miles in a wide concentric sweep every road
and lane and bypath is crowded with these slow-moving masses. Over the
bare hillsides lumber the heavy tanks, just keeping pace with the
marching men.
". . . . Berlin thinks we are in Flanders; London that we are in the
south. All is well. . . .
". . . . The watch hand is creeping round--half-past three--four--ten
past four--an interminable laggard. It is to be the greatest barrage
of the war.
". . . . 'Zero' is set for four-twenty, and the pointer has barely
reached that figure when behind us there goes up a mighty flare, and
simultaneously all along the line ten miles to north and south of us,
other flares light up the countryside. At the same instant there
breaks out the boom of our heavy guns, the sharp staccato of
sixty-pounders, the dull roar of howitzers, and the ear-splitting
clamour of whizz-bangs--a bedlam of noise. Shells whistle and whine
overhead; they cannot be distinguished one from another, but merge into
a cataract of sound.
". . . . The heavens are lighted up across their broad expanse by a
continuous sheet of lightning, playing relentlessly over the doomed
lines. Now a faint light of dawn shimmers in the east and soon blots
out the fireworks. A lark rises high, carolling. . . .
"The fog lifts. It is eight o'clock. The cavalry, a wonderful sight,
appear on the scene. They have come up from Hangest-sur-Somme and have
lain overnight in the great park of Amiens. Like a jack-in-the-box
they have sprung from nowhere--miles on miles of gay and serried ranks,
led by the Canadian Cavalry Brigade."
* * * * * *
On the 1913 side of this Wagnerian stage setting take a look at a real
estate office in Victoria, B.C. The junior member of the firm is a
pink-faced giant who had taught school and made no money, and having no
other qualification for getting ahead in the world, went into buying
and selling houses and corner lots. Victoria was booming then or he
never would have done it. He had maps of the city on his walls and
could solemnly point out to some timid newcomer in 1913 what little
house there or nice wooded lot yonder might suit her; and the
price--oh, yes, the price; seems high, but the location is excellent,
the neighbourhood fine, the scenery superb, and the city--well, it had
been going ahead until the slump and then----
"Oh, yes, Victoria's all right," he insists heavily. "Got sleeping
sickness, that's all."
Then he yawns, which is a relief to the lady client, who thinks that
his face is less ugly that way. Such a huge, long, solemn face! She
glances at the office, wondering--if the agent is hard up? If so, no
wonder; for he seems a sad salesman.
He closes his desk and locks up. Off to the rifle ranges, where he
stays as late as the eye can see because--well, it's a joy to help the
men get bull's eyes.
Sunday--marches in full Highland regalia at the head of the 50th Gordon
Highlanders on garrison parade. On the curb a twinkling little Jap
watches him.
"Nothin' like him in Japan, John," says a boy scout. "Wow!"
"Big--so big!" admires the Jap.
"Yah. Makes them big Macs. in the ranks look shrunk. Knows artillery,
too. Rifle--kick! got a great eye. Look at 'im right wheel!"
* * * * * *
Then on the 1920 side of the Wagnerian stage picture observe this same
giant, less baby pink, thinner in the face, clad in evening dress;
Inverness cape, crush hat, in the rotunda of the Ritz in Montreal,
beside an average athletic citizen similarly dressed; the superb
civilian--and his marionette.
"Er--I think the car's waiting, General."
"Oh, no. We'll walk. Only a block or two," booms the giant.
He crosses the rotunda in seven swift, great strides, while the
marionette trots to keep up. They are off to a function at McGill
University. The new President--to whom professors bow with frigid
politeness and ladies ogle in admiring awe, and university governors
stand about like a bodyguard as though to intimate,--
"Ridiculous? Not a bit of it. There's no other university President
like him. And what else could we do with him? The Government had
nothing to suit him; for politics he's never meant; for business never.
Geddes left us. We picked a greater man. Yes, it seems awkward, but
never mind. A year from now you will say--here was the man that made
McGill as famous in 1921 as Sir William Dawson, the world geologist,
made it in 1890."
Montreal that made a citizen of prodigious Van Horne had here a
character in a setting far more unusual. The eminent soldier as head
of a university. One of the last surprises of the war; almost as it
seemed then a joker in the pack; when men had to remember how this man
leaped from an almost bankrupt real estate office in Victoria to what
he was in Canada's Hundred Days.
Of all men who seemed to have been absolutely created by the war Currie
was the first. He enlisted for active service in 1914, and Hughes made
him brigade-commander at Valcartier. He was in the First Contingent
that swung out of the Gulf the day that Hughes stood on the rope
ladder, almost forgetting that he had shaken hands with Currie. He
went to France as Commander of the 2nd Infantry Brigade. Within two
months came St. Julien and the green gas when Currie held his part of
the stricken line from Thursday till Sunday.
"And on Sunday," said Max Aitken, eye-witness, "he had not abandoned
his trenches. There were none left. They had been obliterated by the
artillery. He withdrew his undefeated troops from the fragments of the
field fortifications, and the hearts of his men were as completely
unbroken as the parapets of his trenches were completely broken." Much
more was said in official despatches about the fine spectacular heroism
of other officers of lower rank. Currie, the most picturesque physique
on the West front, was no man for mere gallantry. Poor dashing Mercer,
beloved of the ranks, later paid the penalty for the sort of bravery
that inspires troops but does not win battles. Currie was no coward.
But he was cautious. The Scot in him preordained that he might be a
necessity higher up. He just flung his left flank around south and
hung on. We read on in the official record:
"Monday morning broke bright and clear and found the Canadians behind
the firing line. But this day too was to bring its anxieties. The
attack was still pressed, and it became necessary to ask Brigadier
General Currie whether he could not once more call on his shrunken
Brigade. 'The men are tired,' this indomitable soldier replied, 'but
they are ready and glad to go again to the trenches.' And so, once
more a hero leading heroes, the general marched back the men of the 2nd
Brigade, reduced to a quarter of its strength, to the very apex of the
line as it existed at that moment."
Five months later a party of Canadian newspapermen visited the Canadian
front when one of them wrote concerning Major-General Currie:
"English officers spoke of him with a curious mixture of enthusiasm and
reserve as though he were some new sort of being. It was everybody's
secret that this big, husky Canadian with the baby pink face and the
blue eyes and the slow, smooth, bellowing voice was to be in command of
the Second Canadian Division just then being organized. . . . No place
except Canada produces such voices as Currie's, or such tremendous
easy-moving bodies. He met the newspapermen with a smile and a great
outstretched hand. The gesture was something like that of a popular
preacher shaking hands with the children on their way out of church.
But the voice was the great thing. It seemed to come from illimitable
depths. It suggested at once poise and unlimited balance. Cool
judgment that could never be upset. Officers who saw Brigade
Headquarters being strafed and who saw the roof blown in over Currie's
head whispered among themselves that would be the last of Currie. But
he emerged as calm and smooth and pink as ever. . . . The day the
newspapermen saw him a very junior officer who has since distinguished
himself came to report breathlessly, 'That last one, sir, got my tent!'
He was excited and just a trifle hysterical; but two words from the
General seemed to calm him at once. 'That so?' he said, with the same
quiet interest that a farmer might have received news that a certain
hen had at last laid an egg. 'I thought that last one sounded a bit
close.'"
Then there came to the head of the Canadian Corps a man named Byng, who
could stroll casually into a billet or a training field to inspect "the
muddy trench hounds" in canvas leggings and with three buttons loose.
Until Byng came the Canadian Corps was a semi-disciplined and
marvellous mob of men who could swear as hard as they could fight and
fight like wildcats. Byng gave then the massive and complex mechanism
of an army competent to conduct operations as a unit of modern war,
dominated by the man of whom the boys sang to the tune of Three Blind
Mice, "Byng Bangs Boche, See how they run!" Currie, commander of the
2nd Division, had seen this Corps Commander stroll into a billet and
hurl machine gun questions at the men who jumped like eager school-boys
to answer. He must have silently envied this genius, who cared far
less than he knew about what was wrong in a kit inspection, but had a
shrewd eye for manoeuvres. Not often in actual war does a man so
personally popular organize a cross-section of a vast international
country into a war machine called an army, and not seldom do men when
they hear of such a commander being transferred look at one another in
a sort of blank dismay and say, "Well, I'll be damned. Now who's it?"
Out of the army came slowly and ponderously the huge Highlander, with
the "baby pink face" and the rumbling gong of a voice.
Sir Arthur Currie was much too honest to imagine that he or any other
man could make the Canadian army. It was a heavy ordeal to follow
Byng, just as it had been easy for Byng to succeed Alderson. But
Currie knew the Canadians down at the root better than Byng knew them.
He knew how that army had been made: that he was taking over a
humanized machine that was to war in 1917 what the sword of Wallace had
been in man-to-man combat seven hundred years earlier. He knew the
weakness of men for idolizing a popular commander. They never would
parody any nursery rhyme in his honour. Except the Anzacs, they were
the most audacious army in Europe. They had become great in defiance
of red tape, insisting on whatever is called Canadianism. They
embodied all there was of Western independence on that Front. The
Anzacs, great in fight and in ideas of personal liberty, had not been
welded into such a machine as the Canadians, whose advertised national
qualities Currie was expected to conserve.
"As soon as one lets the cheeky beggars, Canadians from America, have a
bit of quiet, they get uppish," was the illuminating sentence in a
letter found in a German trench near St. Eloi. Currie knew those
"cheeky beggars". In his own elephantine way he loved them, when few
of them could figure it out. He knew how hard those "beggars" could
hit: how grimly they could stick: how madly they could raid and rush:
how infernally they could scheme to "put one over on Heine"; how
desperately they could abuse earth and heaven when they had time in the
rest billets to smoke fags and write letters home. They were no army
to go whacking on the shoulder.
It had been all right for Byng the Briton to go among those men with
three buttons loose. Men like a touch of insurgency in a commander who
has come up among the martinets. Byng was a professional soldier.
Currie was not yet even a mild insurgent, or was not known as such to
the ranks. He was almost a man of prayer. He moved in a large arc
somewhat like his great resolute body; an engine of might that never
seemed weary; who at "Molly-be-Damned" studied battle reports at two
a.m., and was in the field at six. As he had almost come up from the
ranks, the men knew him. Here and there in a British Columbia
battalion may have been a man who had bought a corner lot from Currie
in Victoria. If so, he liked to talk about the hard-up days of the
Corps Commander when he was in real estate.
Currie knew that above all things he must keep the confidence of those
men and that he could never do it by familiarity. Success was the only
way. Not, anyhow, speeches. The C.C. was rather fond of talking aloud
at first; sometimes too religiously. It was a habit that he never
quite abandoned, though he changed his style as he grew in experience.
There was work to do. No army had more; few armies as much. Currie's
was a mobile army; needed as shock troops in rough places--a very good
reputation if not too much of it. There was danger of the army losing
its Canadianism by being shunted about. One of Currie's first
objectives that he wanted above all things to achieve as a Canadian
commander of initiative, was the capture of Lens. He had a plan for
this. He was never allowed to carry it out. Says the author of
"Canada's Hundred Days":
"Thus when he is ordered to abandon his planned offensive at Lens and
take the corps up the Salient, he refuses point blank to serve under
the Commander of the Fifth Army. He is placed under his old Chief of
the First Army, looks over the ground before Passchendaele and then
protests against the whole operation as being useless in itself and
likely to cost the Corps 15,000 men."
It was said by some who believed they knew, that the Lens preparation
was nothing but a huge feint put up to mislead Heine for an attack in
force elsewhere. This was one of the bewildering events of that
baffling year when the French army was in a state of mutiny, the nation
behind the army in a state of nerves, and the politicians, clamouring
for victories--or at least a cessation of defeat. Something had to be
done, not only by France but by Britain, whose Premier insisted that
unless the Germans could be broken in the north he could not hold his
country united at home. There was a Council of War--so, a few weeks
before the writing of this, said a Canadian General in New York--at
which Currie was present. Sir Douglas Haig unexpectedly arrived and
was soon into an argument with the Canadian Corps Commander demanding
that he abandon Lens and strike at Passchendaele. The two commanders
were in violent disagreement. Currie refused to yield. The British
Premier went to France and met Currie, who gave way to the Premier--as
people usually did--and, against his own convictions, abandoned Lens.
The precise military significance is of less value here than the remark
credited to Lloyd George, who is reported to have said in England after
a subsequent War Cabinet meeting--that in the Canadian Corps Commander
he had met "the biggest thing physically and mentally on that front."
What Currie was at the head of the Corps no civilian then in Canada has
any means of knowing, except by what men say who were under him or
about him. A brawny veteran infantryman, whom I met with his chum,
said:
"Currie--oh, yes, he was a good general. But few of the men where I
was in the trenches or the billets ever liked him."
"But did you see much of him?"
"Too much, begad." His chum nodded agreement. "Too awful much,
sometimes. Why, he used to come into a rest billet almost every day
after we'd come there all shot to bits with only a corporal's guard o'
the whole battalion, muddy and tired and sleepy; yes, and what's the
first thing we hear, but begad, we've all to shine up and get spic and
span for parade because the O.C. says the C.C. orders it. Out we go,
like a ragbag remnant and he looks us over, says he knows we're tired
and makes a speech----"
"Oh, boy, them speeches!" sighs the chum.
"Tells us how well we've done and all like o' that, and at the end says
there's such a devil of a job yonder that he's compelled against his
will----"
"Oh, yes, dead aginst his will," pipes the chum.
"To intimate that he'd like us to trail back to the show and do it some
more for the sake of the victory and the good long billet we'll get
presently. Yes, Currie was a good General. He did the work, he got
results. But never tell me he was easy on his men--becuz four years I
was wan o' them."
One allows in this man's opinion for the tendency to "grouch" that
always appears in veterans who know best how to fight. Men like this
were "fed up" on the war, of which they never saw anything but the
glimpse of their own sector. The war was over now, and between the
armistice and getting home many such men had a chance to talk, as they
wearily waited for a ship.
"Yes, and that capture of Mons," says the chum, as he sips a little
drink. "Altogether useless and against orders. The war was over."
"No," says the veteran; "that was a mere trifle, as I see it. Not one,
two, three with the march into Germany. Begad! if ever I was a rebel
it was then on that 150 miles, says you. But--'twas so ordered by the
C.C. and we went."
It was not likely that Gen. Currie believed his army to be rebellious
against that march. He was too much of an insurgent to fear
insubordination. He had packed many a pipe-clay parade officer home
for inefficiency.
A machine gun officer, who had got a Blighty at Passchendaele and was
asked by the writer what he thought about Currie, admitted that he knew
very little about him because all he saw at the time was his own little
corner of the show. He casually referred the question to two others,
one of whom was a H.Q. staff officer, and saw Currie at first hand for
months at a time. The answer was:
"I'll say that Currie always inspired me with absolute confidence in
his genius for modern war. It was a pleasure just to see him revise a
Divisional plan of action. He had a hawk eye for any weak spots and he
pointed them out. No doubt some of the stuff that got through to the
boys in some of the shows shortly after Currie took command was Byng
stuff, and Byng sure handed over a fine army to Currie. But believe
me, Currie had his own programme and picked his own men and developed
his own machine shortly after. And I don't believe there was a
commander in any of the Corps on that Front that had anything on him
for what makes an army win."
The General's return to Canada was preheralded by a barrage of
criticism that seeped through from men coming home. Some day we shall
know how much or how little of this was politics inspired by Currie's
enemies in Canada and by men who, jealous of his success and his
eminence, had no scruples about fomenting the criticism. But Currie
must be judged by what he did with his army. In that last hundred days
all the armies but the American army were remnants of what they were in
1915. The wonderful thing about the Canadian army is that in the three
months before victory it was an even more terrible arm of war than it
had been at Vimy Ridge. After a year and a half of Commander Currie it
was still the superb fighting machine described in the extracts already
quoted from the battle of Amiens. For a few of the reasons why it was
so we quote again that same book the writer's estimate of Currie:
"But according to the letter of the law he is not a good subordinate.
He cannot be popular with the powers that be: he is always complaining
about something; getting his own way or making it unpleasant for people
if he doesn't.
"In the panic of the following March (1918 after Passchendaele) he
finds the Corps is being torn to pieces, its divisions hurried here,
there and everywhere; orders given and countermanded and then issued
again. He protests strongly; the Canadian corps whose value is tested,
must be kept together; and he wins out." . . .
"Is all this insubordination? If so, it is a quality that makes for
victory. The average Canadian is always willing to "take a chance"
because he has confidence in himself. And the Corps Commander is very
much of a Canadian."
The author does not criticize Currie, though he had so good an
opportunity. In telling so well the wonderful story of that last
hundred days and so explicitly glorifying the Commander whose best work
of the war was done during that period, he gives us no perspective. Is
it not just to admit that though the four reduced Canadian
divisions--with certain attachments--had defeated forty-seven German
divisions, they had conquered divisions terribly more reduced than
their own and absolutely without reserves in either men or materials
and devoid of the last vestige of morale? The great bluff was about to
break. It was due to have broken sooner.
When the armistice came all the armies but the Canadians laid down
their arms. Currie had not finished his work. He had planned the
whole hundred days, beginning with Cambrai, and the apex of that
achievement after the breaking of the infallible Hindenburg line, was
the recapture of Mons. He was once more "insubordinate". He did not
seem to pay respect to the armistice. His men had often said that they
wanted to fight Heine on German soil. Denied that, at least they
wanted a chance to be part of the army of occupation, as far east as
Cologne. Currie could never have ordered an unwilling army--not that
army unwilling--to march 150 miles into Germany. He had an army of
conquest, not of armistice. But the stereopticon and the slides:
What was to be done with this soldier at home? How could he be
re-established in civil life? Thanks to the Administration's
predicament in trying to please both the General and his enemies, here
was the worst D.S.C.R. problem of the lot. Thanks to McGill
University, the predicament was removed.
A sagacious professor in McGill who knows by experience what it is to
get the ear of the public, said when Currie was appointed President
that almost the entire faculty were opposed to him because the idea was
so ridiculous. That professor now alleges proudly that faculty,
students and management are all convinced that Currie is a wonderful
President; that he has revolutionized all existing ideas about the
headship of a university, that he understands even the academic mind;
that the _esprit de corps_ of McGill is such as it never was.