We have strawed our best to the world’s unrest,
To the shark and the sheering gull.”
By following the log of some of the Canadian Pacific vessels we get at least some of the bare facts.
The Empress of France had barely reached the dock at Liverpool, two days after war was declared, when she was requisitioned for special service by royal proclamation. Within a few days after her cargo was unloaded, all passenger accommodation and other wood work was removed. Armed with eight six-inch guns, she was sent out, manned by a naval crew, to patrol in the North Sea between Shetland and Iceland, and became, a few months later, the flagship of the patrol squadron, in which service she intercepted 15,000 ships. Later, she was transferred to convoy service in the North Atlantic route. In that service she escorted nine convoys of twenty vessels each, carrying per convoy about 30,000 troops, mostly Americans on their way to the front. Some indication of the extent of the war service of the Empress of France may be gathered from the fact that while in commission she steamed 267,000 knots and consumed 170,000 tons of coal. These figures as to only one vessel out of many, tell little of the services and the hardships of a gallant crew, but they shed some light on the frightful monetary cost of war.
The Empress of Britain, one of the new and large vessels, was fitted out as a transport, carrying troops to the Dardanelles, Egypt and India; also from Canada to the Western Front. Besides her own crew she accommodated 5,000 officers and men. During one of her trips across the Atlantic with a full complement of crew and soldiers, a German submarine launched two torpedoes, one of which missed the bow by three feet and the other passed some ten feet astern. It was all in the day’s work; but that was a close shave “between the devil and the deep sea!”
The splendid new steamer, the Calgarian, of the Atlantic service, was one of the many Canadian ships sunk by the enemy during the War, but not before doing some notable work. Along with the famous Vindictive, the Calgarian blocked Lisbon to prevent German ships sheltering there from coming out on raids into the Atlantic; and later, for nearly a year of continuous service, was stationed outside New York to prevent the escape of German ships interned there. Then, when she was convoying thirty vessels across the Atlantic, she was torpedoed and sunk with the loss of forty-nine men.
Our old Pacific Coast friend, the Empress of Russia, had a thrilling experience as an Admiralty cruiser. She left Vancouver for Hong-Kong on her usual run in August, 1914, but she was already designated for war service. At Hong-Kong her interior fittings were taken out and replaced by coal bunkers, and eight guns were mounted fore and aft. British Naval Reservists and French gun crews were put aboard in place of the Chinese hands, and the Empress started out to work. Shortly afterwards she met the pride of Australia, the cruiser Sydney, after that gallant ship had smashed the wicked German rover, the Emden. The Russia took off the prisoner members of the Emden crew, including the Captain, Von Muller, and put them out of commission by landing them at Ceylon. With the help of some Indian troops, she captured the Turkish fort of Kamaran on the Red Sea. Then, for twenty-three days, she and her sister Canadian Pacific vessel, the Empress of Asia, guarded the British port of Aden until the arrival of British warships. After some more dangerous experiences, the Empress of Russia, the Empress of Asia, the Empress of Japan, the cruiser Himalaya, and the destroyer Ribble, kept in blockade the Port of Manilla, where fifteen German ships were hiding in the hope of getting out with supplies to their war vessels. Finally the Russia spent a year cruising in the East, and then, when the War was over, slipped back quietly on to her old peaceful run out of Vancouver to the Orient.
One can only sum up in a wondering way the enormous service done for the Empire by this great railway company, by saying that during the War, Canadian Pacific ships carried over a million troops and passengers on war business. They carried over four millions of tons of cargo and munitions of war, and many thousands of horses and mules for transport service on the field. And perhaps one of the most amazing and least-known feats of the Canadian Pacific was the carrying to and from Flanders and France, through Vancouver, of what seemed a numberless army of Chinese from the North of China, who went out to do the unskilled labour on the field and thus released thousands of the allied soldiers for the fighting line, who otherwise would have had to do this highly necessary non-combatant work.
Letters from Mr. David Lloyd George, the dynamic war-time Premier of Britain, and others, to the Company and to officials, conveyed the appreciation of the Old Land to the Canadian Pacific for its unique assistance in a crisis hour. Many decorations worn by Canadian Pacific men who served on land and sea, and the scars of battle on many of her ships, attest the unique way in which President Shaughnessy (one of whose sons fell in action) and his wide-reaching organization came to the assistance of the Motherland when vital things were in danger. Let this great service not be lost sight of when petty matters and little controversies in commercial life have their innings.
A peculiarly striking sidelight is thrown on the general subject of war by the changing attitude to the subject of Sir William Van Horne, who lived only a year into the war period, but who studied it all with the thoroughness so characteristic of the man. Some years before the Great War he had written to Mr. S. S. McClure, in New York, almost in praise of war as a creator of heroisms and an inspiration to valiant endeavour. But as he studied the Great War, with its horrible engines of destruction, high explosives and silent, stealthy weapons of death on land and sea and in the air, he began to see the monstrous side of such a method for settling international differences. He saw the frightful annihilation of some of the brightest young men whose record he knew in his own organization, and whose services to the country, had they been spared, would have been beyond price. One would like to have had his changed attitude put into words by himself in his own vivid and vigorous way. Perhaps he would have left us an expression of assured hope that the day would come