Canada in Flanders, Volume II

by Baron Max Aitken Beaverbrook

Deeply moved by a tribute made with so much feeling, tact, and sympathy, I ventured to ask,

"Do not these remarks of yours, General, apply with even more force to the troops of the great self-governing Dominions who from so far have come to sustain with their lives the fortunes of the Allies upon soil so remote?"

His reply stated so clearly and with such insight the view on which I desire to insist that I venture to reproduce it. "Nothing," he said, "in the history of the world has ever been known quite like it. My countrymen are fighting within fifty miles of Paris to push back and chastise the vile and leprous race which has violated the chastity of our beautiful France. But the Australians at the Dardanelles and the Canadians at Ypres fought with supreme and absolute devotion for what to many of them must have seemed simple abstractions, and that nation which will support for an abstraction the horror of this war of all wars, will ever hold the highest place in the records of human valour."

I recall this conversation because it illustrates my point.

In a sense it is true that the majority of Australian and Canadian soldiers understand generally that they are fighting for the existence of the Empire, and in particular for the independence of that part of the Empire to which each respectively belongs; but the conclusion can only be a general one, the outcome rather of intuition than of exact knowledge. Australia is far, far remote from European quarrels. Canada has no neighbour but the United States. The shearer from Australia and the lumberman from Canada have come to help the Empire; but they would, I suspect, rather fight for six months than spend six minutes in attempting a lucid exposition of the motives which proved decisive to each individual volunteer. And, indeed, how could they—simple men far away from the heart of the Empire—be expected to have grasped the nature of the German menace when the whole of a great historic party in England was blind to it six months before the war broke out? Was a bank clerk in Toronto, or a book-keeper in Sydney, or a squatter in Rhodesia, to appreciate the ultimate tendency of German policy when the Chairman of the National Union of Liberal Federations, himself a Privy Councillor, was declaring that as a business man he preferred the sanctions of International Law to the protection of the British Fleet; when members of Parliament were forming each year a powerful committee to fight the Naval Estimates; when official invitations to suspend shipbuilding programmes gave annual indulgence to the Teuton sense of humour; when German editors and professors in yearly deputations exploited the simplicity of their silly hosts; and when, finally, statesmen in high places paid periodic and public tribute to the sincerity and humanity of German Kultur?

To ask these questions is to answer them. The majority of those who stood to the Colours did so because they saw that at that moment the Empire was in peril. The circumstance that neither they nor their leaders were responsible for the policy which brought us, wholly unprepared on the military side, to the most gigantic struggle in history, seemed to them no sufficient reason for refusing to fight while the fight lasted. But it may be pointed out that many of their leaders had a very clear vision of the dangers in our path. They saw the European situation from a distance, and perhaps for that reason in truer perspective. Mr. Hughes, the Prime Minister of Australia, who unites with profound knowledge of affairs dauntless courage and the analytical power of a trained mind, has always believed this struggle must come. General Botha—in many ways the most romantic figure in the Empire to-day—adroit politician, skilful general, chivalrous soldier, faithful friend—returned from a visit to the German Army manoeuvres some years ago with the same apprehension branded upon his mind. Sir Robert Borden, only four years ago, in introducing his naval proposals in the Canadian Parliament, used these prophetic words:—

"But to-day while the clouds are heavy, and we hear the booming of the distant thunder, and see the lightning flash above the horizon, we cannot and we will not wait and deliberate until the impending storm has burst upon us in fury and with disaster."

The leaders, then, of political thought in the Dominions had arrived at sound conclusions by observation and inference from known facts. And having formed these conclusions, they decided, when war came, to throw their whole strength into the scale, though they were well aware of the errors of judgment that had paralysed preparation in England. The rank and file volunteered in hundreds of thousands, and then in more hundreds of thousands, because they saw that recrimination as to past responsibility was at that moment futile, and that there and then the Empire was in mortal peril. From thousands of miles the flower of the youth of the Empire have come and trained, and fought and died, or have drifted back broken after the war to the Dominions whence they set out. And the men who have done these things, uncompelled and uncompellable, have accepted our military and diplomatic direction of the war, even when they disagreed with it, without question and without complaint. Nothing nobler has been uttered in the war than the answer, made in the Australian Parliament, by the Prime Minister to a Member who gave expression to the bitter grief with which Australia learned of the definite abandonment of the Dardanelles adventure.

"Not upon us," said he, "have these great burdens and responsibilities been cast. Not by one word or even one doubt will I add to the anxieties of those from whom decisions have been required."

It is a commonplace that no such phenomenon as the great rally of the Dominions has ever been witnessed in history. None of the Great Empires of the world has ever conceded so much freedom to its constituent parts or been rewarded by so much devotion. And it is well known that the whole world—our friends and our enemies alike—have been amazed at the spectacle of Imperial solidarity which the war has exhibited. "For the purposes of a European war," wrote one of Germany's many military philosophers, "the British Colonies, even if they remain faithful, may be ignored." To-day this gallant theorist—the nursling of Treitschke—is, one may presume, somewhat better informed.