Allen Lane Canada, Toronto, 2010
472 pp., illus., $36 hardcover
On a June evening in 1920, the citizens of Uxbridge, northeast of Toronto, gathered in the local Methodist Church to unveil a monument in honour of a deceased favourite son. The tablet and the community heralded the commander of the 116th Ontario Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Sam Sharpe, “a brave soldier,” for helping save civilization in the recently ended Great War.
Nowhere during the memorial was it mentioned that of the 1,100 men whom Sharpe had personally recruited across the county only 160 had returned alive. Some said Sharpe had committed suicide because he couldn’t face his hometown for losing nine of every ten men he recruited.
Similarly, as Tim Cook points out in The Madman and the Butcher, Sir Arthur Currie’s funeral in 1933 attracted 150,000 mourners to the streets of Montreal, closed McGill University for a week, and prompted “a memorial service … in London’s Westminster Abbey to mark the passing of one of the Empire’s most prominent generals.”
Cook writes repeatedly that Currie never received the acclaim he deserved as divisional commander for Canada’s victories at Vimy, Passchendaele, and the war-ending Hundred Days campaign. However, the Great War historian at the Canadian War Museum makes it clear that Currie had blood on his hands too; the 1914–1918 war had cost Canada “60,000 dead and another 173,000 wounded in body, mind, and spirit.”
Hence Currie’s moniker “the butcher.” Of particular interest to First World War history buffs is Cook’s account of the final forty-eight hours of the war — November 10 and 11, 1918 — at the Belgian city of Mons.
Out of one side of Currie’s mouth comes the later claim, “we could have taken Mons on Sunday, November 10, but it would have cost too much,” and from the other side he reveals his obsession to command the Canadian Corps to capture Mons, “a symbolic victory, and one heeded throughout the Empire.” Two hundred and eighty Canadians died during the advance on Mons. In all, the Hundred Days campaign would mean fame for Currie and misfortune for nearly 46,000 Canadians killed or maimed in the final three months of the war.
This is where the other half of the title, the madman, enters Cook’s book. We learn that Sir Sam Hughes, the minister of militia and defence and the orchestrator of Canada’s Great War effort in 1914, had scores to settle after his dismissal in November 1916. Among them was one with Currie, whom Hughes accused of “needlessly sacrificing the lives of Canadian soldiers.” Any general ordering the last push on Mons in November 1918, Hughes continued, should be “tried summarily by court martial and punished so far as the law would allow.”
And so Cook sets the stage for a clash of titans. Although Sam Hughes had died in 1921, Arthur Currie chose to challenge a 1927 editorial published in the Port Hope Evening Guide, espousing Hughes’ view that Currie “had conceived the mad idea that it would be a fine thing to say that the Canadians had fired the last shot in the Great War and had captured the last German entrenchment before the bugles sounded [the] eleven o’clock … armistice.” Currie would sue the paper and publicly salvage his reputation.
Cook’s manuscript, rich with detail about two warhorses and political combatants with the will and the skill to survive, reveals a unique war of words and personalities. Though they never faced each other across the floor of the House of Commons, nor in the Cobourg, Ontario, courtroom where the suit was contested, Cook brings Hughes back from the dead and Currie to the brink in a reconstruction of the trial.
And who wins? In this case, Tim Cook’s growing army of loyal readers.
— Ted Barris (Read bio)
Ted Barris teaches journalism at Centennial College in Toronto. His book, Deadlock in Korea: Canadians at War 1950–1953 was originally published in 1999, and is now available in paperback from Thomas Allen Publishers.