A double review with At The Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1914–1918
by Tim Cook
It is more than ninety years since the Great War ended on November 11, 1918, and only one Canadian who fought in that war is (as this is written) still alive. The war still resonates, however, for its huge casualties, its destruction of great empires, and for the way it established Canada as a fighting power and, as a direct result of that battlefield skill, as a recognized nation. The Great War mattered, and in these two splendid volumes historian Tim Cook explains how Canadians fought the war.
Cook’s books are welcome representatives of the new military history. There is much on fighting and weapons and much on generals, but also much more on the ordinary soldiers than the “old” history ever gave us. We also learn about tactics and training, about the ways in which technology was harnessed to war, and how mustard gas lingered in the mud and rose silently at dawn to maim and kill. We get enough on the home front and politics to make sense of how Canada’s leaders planned — or, more accurately, didn’t plan — the raising of the armies, and Cook presents a very close look at “the butcher’s bill,” the cost of the war.
The numbers are staggering in their horror. Canada enlisted 619,636 men and nurses; 51,748 were killed in action or died of wounds, while 7,796 succumbed to disease or injury. Another 1,388 Canadians died in action or in accidents in the British flying services, and 1,305 Newfoundlanders, their dominion not yet part of Canada, died while serving with British forces. Add to this 172,950 members of the Canadian forces who suffered wounds, and you have a total of 234,741 casualties, or fifty-five percent of all servicemen.
However, since only 425,000 Canadians went overseas, and only 345,000 made it to France, the casualty toll thus rises, as Cook notes, to almost seventy percent of those who crossed the Channel. He then refines the numbers even further, observing that only 242,000 served in the infantry, which took some eighty percent of the casualties. In other words, to be an infantryman was to be all but guaranteed death or wounding. No wonder the Great War affected Canada as profoundly as it did.
The Canadian soldiers were in many ways an untrained mob when the First Contingent left Valcartier, Quebec, to go to England in the autumn of 1914. These men, almost two-thirds of them British-born, proved themselves at Ypres in April 1915, withstanding the German gas attack. Then, as more battalions came to England, and eventually to France and Flanders, the Canadian Corps began to learn how to operate in the ghastly conditions of the Western Front.
The key figure was the corps’ second commander, the British General Julian Byng. His personality won him devotees among the troops, and he picked out the good commanders among the Canadians while resisting Sam Hughes, the mad minister of militia, in his efforts to put cronies and relatives in positions of responsibility.
It was also Byng who selected Arthur Currie as his successor in the summer of 1917. A Victoria, B.C., property speculator who had literally stolen $10,000 intended for his militia regiment’s uniforms when he ran into financial difficulty, General Currie nonetheless proved himself a man of integrity and principle and a superb battlefield commander.
Cook’s second volume traces Currie’s role as the Canadians captured Lens, fought through the horror of Passchendaele, and then played a decisive role in the Hundred Days, the period from August 8, 1918, to the Armistice. Cook’s account of this last period is quite wonderful, a detailed examination of the great battles that saw the Canadians smash the Germans at Amiens on August 8, cross the Canal du Nord and breach the Hindenburg Line, and then advance to Mons where they ended the war.
The Germans had been battered in their great offensives in 1918, but they were no pushovers as they used their machine guns to inflict maximum casualties on the attackers. The shock troops of the Canadian Corps had some 45,000 casualties in the Hundred Days, almost twenty percent of the war’s total, and over forty percent of the Corps’ strength on August 8. Such numbers are almost unthinkable today, and soldiers at the time grumbled and complained about Currie sacrificing them to advance his own career.
That was a gross calumny, and Tim Cook is at pains to make sure his readers realize this. Currie tried desperately to use his artillery and his units’ ability to manoeuvre to save his men’s lives, and he resisted the most foolish efforts of Field Marshal Douglas Haig and his more stupid army commanders to waste Canadian lives. But in the Great War, the machine gun and artillery ruled, and high casualties were inevitable.
These are superb books, brilliantly researched, well illustrated, and adequately written. They make clear just how well the greatest generation of Canadians behaved in what many thought of as the Great War for Civilization.
— J.L. Granatstein (Read bio)
Is a historian, former director and CEO of the Canadian War Museum.