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.
In short, nobody is left to remark—
"I say, what a pity Geddes left us in the lurch!"