Brave Battalion Read online

  His confidence was well placed. Across the country the planned celebrations of the Bank Holiday had been overshadowed by impromptu parades of thousands of flag-waving citizens. Even in Montreal the crowds demonstrated their patriotism by repetitiously singing first “La Marseillaise” and then “Rule Britannia.” Throughout the country, militia headquarters had quietly opened, and the regiments’ officers had taken to their desks to receive a steady stream of men reporting for duty.

  The Duke of Connaught was, however, not entirely beguiled by this outpouring of patriotism. The third son of Queen Victoria, he was a man with a long soldiering career behind him and well knew that the strong emotions of the day would weaken as the complexity of mustering and financing an army for service abroad became apparent. To keep enthusiasm running high, he counselled his British superiors to ensure Canadian troops were sent to the front, wherever that might eventually be, as soon as they were trained to even the most minimal standards of proficiency. Having men fighting and bleeding on European soil for the Empire would ensure the commitment of Canadians to the cause.3

  On August 10, the Canadian government issued an Order-in-Council for the immediate raising of a contingent 25,000 strong. Mobilization had already begun in some parts of Canada, but it was the day after the Order-in-Council that the 72nd Seaforth Highlanders of Canada assembled at the Arena Rink in Vancouver. At the same time, the 50th Gordon Highlanders of Canada gathered on the Exhibition Ground in Victoria. Two days later, Hamilton’s 91st Canadian Highlanders (informally known as the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders but not yet formally possessing this designation) mobilized at their James Street Armoury, while, in Winnipeg, the 79th Cameron Highlanders of Canada reported to Minto Armoury.4 In four separate cities men mustered, as yet unaware that soon they would be training side by side as members of a single infantry battalion—the 16th Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force (C.E.F.). Nor did they know that this battalion would come to be known as the legendary Canadian Scottish. This is the story of that battalion’s epic odyssey through the grim crucible of the Great War.

  chapter one

  “Ready, Aye, Ready!”

  - AUGUST 1914-FEBRUARY 1915 -

  As Canada’s Parliament had been prorogued on June 12 it took until August 18 for the nation’s parliamentarians to journey from their constituencies to assemble in the House of Commons. Their mood was sober, faces set with grim resolve. In years to come a myth would arise that Canada went to war with no sense of the horrors ahead and a belief victory could be had by Christmas. But Sir Robert Borden’s speech, although typically ponderous, was coldly prescient. “In the awful dawn of the greatest war the world has ever known,” he began, “in the hour when peril confronts us such as this Empire has not faced for a hundred years, every vain or unnecessary word seems a discord. As to our duty, we are all agreed; we stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and the other Dominions in this quarrel, and that duty we shall not fail to fulfil as the honour of Canada demands. Not for love of battle, not for lust of conquest, not for greed of possessions, but for the cause of honour, to maintain solemn pledges, to uphold the principles of liberty, to withstand forces that would convert the world into an armed camp; yes, in the very name of the peace that we sought at any cost save that of dishonour, we have entered into this war; and while gravely conscious of the tremendous issues involved and of all the sacrifices that they may entail, we do not shrink from them but with firm hearts we abide the event.”1

  A more skillful orator than the prime minister, opposition leader Sir Wilfrid Laurier, kept his remarks brief and to the point. In 1910, Laurier declared, he had stated that if “Britain is at war, Canada is at war, there is no distinction.” Nothing had changed since then. “When the call comes, our answer goes at once, and it goes in the classical language of the British answer to the call of duty, ‘Ready, aye, ready!’” Thereafter, the enlistment order for a 25,000-man contingent was readily confirmed without a single dissenting vote. To finance the effort a $50-million war appropriation was approved and the Canadian Patriotic Fund created to raise money to support the families of men sent overseas.

  Despite habitual parsimonious military funding, Canada was relatively prepared for mobilization because in recent years the army had developed a plan for fielding an overseas expeditionary force by quickly assembling composite units from existing militia units at the large Petawawa military camp north of Ottawa. This approach would enable local militia commanders to select men for immediate service from a pool of militiamen, trained to various degrees, whose strengths and weaknesses were known to those commanders.

  Unfortunately the army’s planners were unable to account for the actions of an erratic and eccentric boss—Minister of Militia and Defence Sam Hughes. On August 6, Hughes swept aside their plan in favour of his own. In a lettergram to all 226 Canadian Militia unit commanders, he ordered development of a roll of volunteers drawn from men aged between eighteen and forty-five who met prescribed physical requirements and were skilled in musketry and general soldiering proficiency. These rolls were to be submitted to Hughes’s office in Ottawa no later than August 12 for examination—presumably personally by Hughes and his staff. The unit commanders would be informed as to which men listed on their specific rolls would be accepted. With typical pomposity, Hughes described his plan as “really a call to arms, like the fiery cross passing through the Highlands of Scotland or the mountains of Ireland in former days.”2

  The scheme’s cumbersomeness was quickly recognized in Ottawa and modified to allow allotments to be determined locally based on the number of immediate volunteers. Yet Hughes refused to be sidelined. Daily he issued more instructions that often contradicted those of the day previous. Most damnable of all for the militia commanders, Hughes—who distrusted professional soldiers and the traditional military system—ordered each infantry militia regiment to immediately provide either a two-company-strong contingent of 250 men or one company numbering 125 men. While this hastened the assembly of the expeditionary force, it shredded the traditional fabric of the army whereby battalions comprised men drawn from a specific geographical area and its local militia regiment who knew each other. Years spent inculcating a sense of regimental spirit and affiliation were swept aside by Hughes’s scribbling pen.3

  Hughes further disassembled the army’s mobilization plan by ordering that the expeditionary force be concentrated at Valcartier rather than Petawawa. Whereas the latter was an established military base, the former consisted of 12,428 acres of mixed woodland broken by farms, patches of swamp, and sandy stream flats that bordered the east bank of Jacques Cartier River 16 miles northwest of Quebec City. Given control of the land only ten days before the first recruits were scheduled to arrive on August 18, the military began a mad scramble to have a camp readied for the recruits’ arrival.

  They could not do so, of course, without Hughes’s personal intervention. This time, however, the defence minister’s boundless energy came usefully to the fore and his constant haranguing helped bring about the rapid transformation of rural countryside into a sprawling military camp. Hordes of lumberjacks descended to fell trees while contractors deployed bulldozers and hundreds of workers to cut roads and erect buildings. When the first recruits arrived they were assigned to barracks in a functional military base. In a report to the government, Hughes trumpeted the results of just ten days of intensive construction: three and a half miles of firing ranges completed with 1,500 targets positioned on them, 12 miles of water mains laid, 15 miles of drains, Army Service Corps and Ordnance buildings constructed, railway sidings laid, “fences removed, crops harvested, ground cleared, streets made, upwards of 200 baths for the men put in, water chlorinated, electric light and telephones installed…and 35,000 men got under canvas.” Hughes credited himself for making this achievement possible.4

  Neither Hughes nor the militia commanders professed surprise that the initial mobilization far surpassed the 25,000 volunteers the government had mandated. At alm
ost every militia armoury the numbers of volunteer recruits had greatly exceeded the one- or two-company strengths Hughes had sought. In Winnipeg, a recruitment parade on the afternoon of August 6 through the downtown streets and into St. Boniface netted almost 1,400 volunteers. Most of those reporting to the armouries were city dwellers, townsmen, or farmers working land close to population centres. This was simply a result of proximity to the only local source of information—newspapers. As the news filtered out into the hinterland by telegraph or local mail, men there packed bags and headed for the nearest regimental headquarters. In British Columbia, for example, word reached the Okanagan Valley through a ham radio operator named George Dunn in Kelowna. He told a British remittance man lolling in front of a nearby hotel. Jumping astride his horse, the man galloped off to spread the word to his colleagues living in shacks scattered through the nearby hills. Soon several hundred volunteers rode to Vancouver to enlist.

  Farther afield, a surveyor working in the province’s Cascade Range more than 150 miles from the nearest telegraph office only learned in late September that a war had broken out somewhere. Trying to get more details was a challenge, for the man who told him could only communicate via the Chinook trade language. “Who was fighting?” the surveyor asked.

  “Everybody,” the Indian replied. In Victoria and in Vancouver they fought, but not in Seattle.

  None of this made sense to the surveyor, whose questions only elicited more images of street battles in front of the Empress or Georgia hotels. Finally the Indian paused and shouted triumphantly, “King George, he fight.” Knowing that King George in Chinook meant Great Britain and that Englishmen were called King George’s Men, the surveyor suddenly understood. “I knew this meant that England and Germany were at it, and it took no time for me to decide as to what I should do.”5

  By the time the surveyor understood Canada was at war, the first contingent of volunteers from Victoria and Vancouver were well on the way to Valcartier. The Seaforth Highlanders boarded a troop train on August 22. In Winnipeg, the Camerons entrained the following day. The day thereafter the 91st Canadian Highlanders left Hamilton with the 50th Gordon Highlanders departing Victoria on August 28. The last of these four groups had disembarked at Valcartier by September 3.

  The commanders of each contingent had no idea how it would be incorporated into the expeditionary force, for Hughes had not yet announced how battalions were to be formed. Some officers had tried unsuccessfully to take matters into their own hands. While still in Vancouver, the Seaforth’s Lt.-Col. Robert S. Leckie had attempted to communicate directly with other Highland regiments across the nation in an attempt to amalgamate their respective forces under the banner of a single Highland battalion. But Hughes had quickly dismissed this notion.

  The first of the four contingents off the train at Valcartier had been five officers and 132 other ranks of the 91st under command of Major Henry Lucas Roberts. They arrived later the same day as they had departed from Hamilton. Already in place was a contingent of 48th Highlanders from Toronto who allowed the Hamiltonians to join their mess. Two days later, seven officers and 250 Camerons marched into the camp. Their commander, Captain John Geddes, rebuffed the 48th Highlander invitation to join their mess, which was under canvas. Instead he drew the Camerons off to a location on the northerly fringe of the camp facing the Jacques Cartier River. Here officers and men alike took their meals out of mess tins on a grassy football pitch. Active service conditions, Geddes declared, required living in the open with only such comforts as one could carry in a pack. Prematurely greying, the thirty-six-year-old Geddes was an unsparing man with a prickly and obsessive personality. Having turned to soldiering, he applied the same unwavering fullness of attention that he had previously accorded to his days as a student at Rugby, or as a Winnipeg businessman after that.6 As the Argylls of the 91st had situated their camp next to the Camerons and the two shared a common parade ground, the men from each were soon getting to know each other in an amicable fashion.7

  On August 27, the Seaforths arrived and paraded before the Camerons and Argylls on the football pitch. The Winnipeg and Hamilton troops were impressed by the newcomers’ parading skills, but noted disdainfully that instead of Scottish headgear those men wearing full military kit were equipped with “stove pipe” helmets. There was also a noticeable lack of Scottish brogue to be heard, the Vancouverites’ accents being distinctly English and noticeably upper class in tone. This generated a justified suspicion that despite the kilts few Seaforths had Scottish blood running in their veins. In fact, and this was also true of the 70th Gordon Highlanders from Victoria, most Seaforths were either English public school men or young cadets born and bred on the west coast who adhered to the prevailing English values of that region. For their part the Camerons and Argylls were of a rougher hue, labourers and farmers of Scottish descent.

  For the next five days, although the men of these three contingents marched and trained together, they had no idea whether they would be officially affiliated or not. Then, on September 2, the headquarters of 1st Canadian Infantry Division delivered orders that, when the 70th Gordon Highlanders arrived the next day, all four contingents would be amalgamated into a single battalion numbered the 16th and would serve in the newly minted 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade. Lt.-Col. Leckie, who had brought the Seaforths from Vancouver, was named the battalion commander while brigade command fell to Lt.-Col. Richard E. W. Turner. The senior battalion major and Leckie’s second-in-command was his younger brother, Major John E. (“Jack”) Leckie.

  All three were Boer War veterans. Indeed, the slight, bespectacled Turner, who tended to meet cameras with a crooked grin, had been awarded a Victoria Cross for bravery during the British withdrawal from Leliefontein on November 7, 1900. A Royal Canadian Dragoons lieutenant, Turner had led twelve men in a hasty ambush that broke an attack of more than two hundred Boers threatening to overrun an artillery train. Prior to returning to uniform, Turner had been a Quebec merchant with strong Conservative Party ties. Close political links to the government, particularly to Sam Hughes, largely determined which officers received senior divisional postings.

  While political affiliation was crucially important, so too was past military experience. A considerable number of the division’s officers had fought in South Africa. Indeed, a small percentage of the division’s other ranks—about three percent—had also either served in South Africa or India as a British regular. This quickly proved a blessing for an army being cobbled hastily together, for these (usually older) regulars provided a ready pool of experienced men to serve as the non-commissioned officers who, at the company, platoon, and section level, formed a battalion’s backbone.8

  Of the 36,267 men comprising the first contingent, sixty-three percent had been born in Britain or had immigrated to Canada from other parts of the Empire. In no other battalion was this more the case than in the 16th where fully half its officers and eighty percent of the other ranks were British-born. The majority of the 10,880 Canadian-born troops who formed 1st Division traced their lineage back to Britain. Only 1,245 of them were French-Canadian.9 Asians and Blacks were barred from enlisting at all, while First Nations were much encouraged because Hughes and most army officers believed they made particularly ferocious soldiers.

  Opting for subordinates familiar to him, Lt.-Col. Robert Leckie put a distinctly Seaforth stamp on 16th Battalion headquarters. In addition to his brother, the adjutant, signalling officer, transport officer, quartermaster, medical officer, machine-gun officer, pipe major, drum major, all wore the Seaforth tartan. Leckie’s command style defused any discontent that might have arisen among the officers of the other three regiments. Having commanded “A” Squadron, 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles in South Africa—a unit comprised not only entirely of westerners but largely ex-North West Mounted Police officers—Leckie had developed a deft hand for imposing discipline without stifling individual initiative. The forty-five-year-old battalion commander regularly reminded those under his command
that they were an integral part of a team and the four disparate contingents rallied to his example.

  But when the 1,162 men comprising the 16th Battalion paraded on the football pitch, it looked as if four Scottish clans had decided to gather together. Only the Camerons were equipped for the field with web equipment, sun helmets, and the like that had been dictated as active service uniform. Often they forsook this gear in favour of their kilts so as not to be outdone by the others. The Gordons were decked out in full uniforms identical to those worn by Britain’s Gordon Highlanders with whom they were affiliated, while the 91st Canadian Highlanders all sported the Argyll tartan. By comparison the Seaforths were a ragtag lot with only half wearing full Seaforth uniforms while the rest “wore civilian clothes of most known varieties, with Glengarries, cowboy hats or sun helmets.”10

  Robert Leckie and the battalion’s other officers puzzled over how to fuse together these four militia units, each fiercely proud of their particular Highland traditions. Adopting one of the tartans invited controversy, so they initially decided on another altogether—the MacKenzie. But Leckie feared that even this compromise would incite bad feelings. Instead, he decided regimental spirit would best be preserved if each regiment privately funded kitting its men out in their respective uniforms.

  In addition to its profusion of tartans, the 16th Battalion was noticeably distinct from other units in 1st Division due to the presence in its ranks of a greater number of men who had seen more than just regimental service. Fully 850 of its officers and men were found to have served in one of ninety-five different corps. While most had been British regiments, there were also men who had gained military experience in the “Australian Navy and Militia, the New Zealand Forces, various South African units, the Barbados Regiment, British Guiana Militia, Punjab Infantry, the American Navy, Holland Volunteers, Norwegian Corps, the Danish Army, the French Foreign Legion, the Belgian Cadets, Shanghai Volunteers, the Mexican Army, and the Chinese Imperial Army.” Gazing upon these men in their mismatched tartans and hearing of the diversity of past service, one senior officer turned to Leckie and barked: “Good God, Leckie, where does this battalion come from?”11