Canada in Flanders, Volume II

by Baron Max Aitken Beaverbrook

The landing in France possessed one feature both of racial and historic importance. The 1st Division had included one company of the 14th Battalion, which was entirely composed of French Canadians, and many others of the same race were scattered among the various units. The 22nd Battalion of the 2nd Division was entirely recruited, as has been recorded, from the French of the old province, and its appearance on the sacred soil of France serves to awaken a host of memories.

There is no parallel in history that matches the picture of the descendants of the men who founded Port Royal and Quebec under Champlain in the first decade of the seventeenth century returning, after three hundred years of absence and a hundred and fifty years under a different flag, to fight once more for the soil whence their ancestors sprang. The German menace has welded the two great nations of the West on the two sea-boards of the Atlantic and linked the centuries together beyond imagination and almost beyond belief. In the firing line at Ypres were found side by side not only the successors of the British who had stayed in their island home and of the French who had remained in France and dealt with the British since on many a hard-fought field in Europe, but the sons of those who had struggled together before the entrenchments of Ticonderoga or on the fateful Plains of Abraham. When after the Seven Years' War in 1763 the Empire of the West passed finally to Great Britain under the pressure of British sea-power and the military inspiration of Chatham, France must have mourned what seemed the irrevocable loss of her sons. Yet in France and Flanders to-day they are risen again for her service, returned across the Atlantic by that same sea-power that once claimed them, and are now warring on the very fields their fathers held, with the same courage and fortitude their race displayed in the eighteenth century against Great Britain.

The French are of all people the most susceptible to an appeal to the imagination. One can imagine their feelings when they learnt that a whole regiment of French Canadians had landed with the 2nd Division. Very strange must have been the meeting between these two branches of a race separated so long by the Seas of Time!

Gradually it dawned on these people that among the strange soldiers from across the ocean were men speaking their mother tongue—not the French, perhaps, of modern Brittany and Normandy, but French none the less. One must picture the joyous effort to find the common idiom and accent, the older country casting back in memory across the years to the point where the two streams of speech had divided, the younger nation of the older speech casting forward to catch the new French which had sprung up since the division. The scene is one for the painter or the novelist, and this wonderful journey's end in lovers meeting must leave an ineffaceable imprint on the memories of both England and France. Dramatic moments are few in modern war, but this was one of them—a fitting pendant to that other scene when the joint memorial to Wolfe and Montcalm was unveiled on the heights of Quebec.

[[1]] The Divisional Artillery consisted of the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th Brigades of the Canadian Field Artillery, and the 97th, 98th, and 107th Siege Batteries. The 4th Brigade was recruited in Toronto, and commanded by Lieut.-Col. W. J. Brown, the 5th (Lieut.-Col. Dodds) came from Winnipeg, the 6th (Lieut.-Col. King) was raised from various quarters, and the 7th (Lieut.-Col. Stewart) from Montreal, Toronto, and New Brunswick. The Divisional Ammunition Column was under the command of Lieut.-Col. Harrison. The entire artillery of the 2nd Division was commanded by Lieut.-Col. Thacker, until June 25th, 1915, when that officer took command of the 1st Divisional Artillery and was succeeded by Brig.-General E. W. B. Morrison. Mention must also be made of the other units of the Division. The Divisional Engineers were under Lieut.-Col. J. Houleston until September, 1915, when Lieut.-Col. H. T. Hughes took over command; the Divisional train was under Lieut.-Col. A. E. Massey, the Cyclist Company under Lieut.-Col. Denison, and Nos. 4, 5, and 6 Field Ambulances under Lieut.-Cols. Webster, Farmer, and Campbell respectively, with Col. J. T. Fotheringham, C.M.G., as A.D.M.S.

[[2]] Major-General Steele's career in the army reads more like a romance than reality. Having distinguished himself as a mere boy in all his examinations while attached to the British Regulars then stationed in Canada, he left the Service, only to rejoin as a ranker in the Red River Expedition of 1870. Here he spent a year in Fort Garry, which was then "the farthest West." After a short time in the Royal Canadian Artillery he went West again, became a Major in the Alberta Field Force during the rebellion of 1885, having raised his own corps of "Steele's Scouts." He was through all the fighting of that summer, and finally broke up Big Bear's band at Loon Lake, a place in the Great Northern Forest where no white man had ever before set foot. In 1898, as soon as the Klondyke gold rush began, he was dispatched at once to secure the frontier, erect customs posts, and prevent American miners establishing claims on the wrong side of a vast and ill-defined frontier. In 1899 he was promoted Lieut.-Colonel, and became the military representative of the Government in the Yukon. The South African War brought him immediately into the field. Within the space of five days he recruited "Strathcona's Horse" from the Western provinces; within a month he had them ready to move from Ottawa—truly a miraculous performance. In South Africa he saw a good deal of fighting in Natal and the Lydenberg district east of Pretoria, notably at Belfast. On August 26th, 1900, he was mentioned in despatches, obtained the Queen's medal with four clasps, and finally took command of a division of the new South African Constabulary. At this stage he was for six months under the direct orders of Lord Kitchener, with whom he became intimately acquainted. In 1906, after a period of mixed civil and military administration in South Africa, he returned to the Dominion to take over the command of the Western Canada military district, a post he occupied until December, 1914. Seven thousand six hundred men went from his command in the West to the First Canadian Contingent, and before he left to take command of the 2nd Division no fewer than 24,000 men in his district had joined the Colours.

[[3]] The Special Message from the King to the 2nd Canadian Division was published after the inspection:—

"Officers, Non-commissioned Officers and Men of the 2nd Canadian Division,—Six months ago I inspected the 1st Canadian Division before their departure for the Front. The heroism they have since shown on the field of battle has won for them undying tame. You are now leaving to join them, and I am glad to have the opportunity of seeing you to-day, for it has convinced me that the same spirit which animated them inspires you also. The past weeks at Shorncliffe have been for you a period of severe and rigorous training; and your appearance at this inspection testifies to the thoroughness and devotion to duty with which your work has been performed. You are going to meet hardships and dangers, but the steadiness and discipline which have marked your bearing on parade to-day will carry you through all difficulties. History will never forget your loyalty and the readiness with which you rallied to the aid of your Mother Country in the hour of danger. My thoughts will always be with you. May God bless you and bring you victory!"

[[4]] The 6th Brigade was formed by reorganising the 8th Howitzer Brigade from the Reserve Brigade at Shorncliffe.