". . . . 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.