Part 22

"As soon as one lets the cheeky beggars, Canadians from America, have a bit of quiet, they get uppish," was the illuminating sentence in a letter found in a German trench near St. Eloi. Currie knew those "cheeky beggars". In his own elephantine way he loved them, when few of them could figure it out. He knew how hard those "beggars" could hit: how grimly they could stick: how madly they could raid and rush: how infernally they could scheme to "put one over on Heine"; how desperately they could abuse earth and heaven when they had time in the rest billets to smoke fags and write letters home. They were no army to go whacking on the shoulder.

It had been all right for Byng the Briton to go among those men with three buttons loose. Men like a touch of insurgency in a commander who has come up among the martinets. Byng was a professional soldier. Currie was not yet even a mild insurgent, or was not known as such to the ranks. He was almost a man of prayer. He moved in a large arc somewhat like his great resolute body; an engine of might that never seemed weary; who at "Molly-be-Damned" studied battle reports at two a.m., and was in the field at six. As he had almost come up from the ranks, the men knew him. Here and there in a British Columbia battalion may have been a man who had bought a corner lot from Currie in Victoria. If so, he liked to talk about the hard-up days of the Corps Commander when he was in real estate.

Currie knew that above all things he must keep the confidence of those men and that he could never do it by familiarity. Success was the only way. Not, anyhow, speeches. The C.C. was rather fond of talking aloud at first; sometimes too religiously. It was a habit that he never quite abandoned, though he changed his style as he grew in experience.

There was work to do. No army had more; few armies as much. Currie's was a mobile army; needed as shock troops in rough places--a very good reputation if not too much of it. There was danger of the army losing its Canadianism by being shunted about. One of Currie's first objectives that he wanted above all things to achieve as a Canadian commander of initiative, was the capture of Lens. He had a plan for this. He was never allowed to carry it out. Says the author of "Canada's Hundred Days":

"Thus when he is ordered to abandon his planned offensive at Lens and take the corps up the Salient, he refuses point blank to serve under the Commander of the Fifth Army. He is placed under his old Chief of the First Army, looks over the ground before Passchendaele and then protests against the whole operation as being useless in itself and likely to cost the Corps 15,000 men."

It was said by some who believed they knew, that the Lens preparation was nothing but a huge feint put up to mislead Heine for an attack in force elsewhere. This was one of the bewildering events of that baffling year when the French army was in a state of mutiny, the nation behind the army in a state of nerves, and the politicians, clamouring for victories--or at least a cessation of defeat. Something had to be done, not only by France but by Britain, whose Premier insisted that unless the Germans could be broken in the north he could not hold his country united at home. There was a Council of War--so, a few weeks before the writing of this, said a Canadian General in New York--at which Currie was present. Sir Douglas Haig unexpectedly arrived and was soon into an argument with the Canadian Corps Commander demanding that he abandon Lens and strike at Passchendaele. The two commanders were in violent disagreement. Currie refused to yield. The British Premier went to France and met Currie, who gave way to the Premier--as people usually did--and, against his own convictions, abandoned Lens.

The precise military significance is of less value here than the remark credited to Lloyd George, who is reported to have said in England after a subsequent War Cabinet meeting--that in the Canadian Corps Commander he had met "the biggest thing physically and mentally on that front."

What Currie was at the head of the Corps no civilian then in Canada has any means of knowing, except by what men say who were under him or about him. A brawny veteran infantryman, whom I met with his chum, said:

"Currie--oh, yes, he was a good general. But few of the men where I was in the trenches or the billets ever liked him."

"But did you see much of him?"

"Too much, begad." His chum nodded agreement. "Too awful much, sometimes. Why, he used to come into a rest billet almost every day after we'd come there all shot to bits with only a corporal's guard o' the whole battalion, muddy and tired and sleepy; yes, and what's the first thing we hear, but begad, we've all to shine up and get spic and span for parade because the O.C. says the C.C. orders it. Out we go, like a ragbag remnant and he looks us over, says he knows we're tired and makes a speech----"

"Oh, boy, them speeches!" sighs the chum.

"Tells us how well we've done and all like o' that, and at the end says there's such a devil of a job yonder that he's compelled against his will----"

"Oh, yes, dead aginst his will," pipes the chum.

"To intimate that he'd like us to trail back to the show and do it some more for the sake of the victory and the good long billet we'll get presently. Yes, Currie was a good General. He did the work, he got results. But never tell me he was easy on his men--becuz four years I was wan o' them."

One allows in this man's opinion for the tendency to "grouch" that always appears in veterans who know best how to fight. Men like this were "fed up" on the war, of which they never saw anything but the glimpse of their own sector. The war was over now, and between the armistice and getting home many such men had a chance to talk, as they wearily waited for a ship.

"Yes, and that capture of Mons," says the chum, as he sips a little drink. "Altogether useless and against orders. The war was over."

"No," says the veteran; "that was a mere trifle, as I see it. Not one, two, three with the march into Germany. Begad! if ever I was a rebel it was then on that 150 miles, says you. But--'twas so ordered by the C.C. and we went."

It was not likely that Gen. Currie believed his army to be rebellious against that march. He was too much of an insurgent to fear insubordination. He had packed many a pipe-clay parade officer home for inefficiency.

A machine gun officer, who had got a Blighty at Passchendaele and was asked by the writer what he thought about Currie, admitted that he knew very little about him because all he saw at the time was his own little corner of the show. He casually referred the question to two others, one of whom was a H.Q. staff officer, and saw Currie at first hand for months at a time. The answer was:

"I'll say that Currie always inspired me with absolute confidence in his genius for modern war. It was a pleasure just to see him revise a Divisional plan of action. He had a hawk eye for any weak spots and he pointed them out. No doubt some of the stuff that got through to the boys in some of the shows shortly after Currie took command was Byng stuff, and Byng sure handed over a fine army to Currie. But believe me, Currie had his own programme and picked his own men and developed his own machine shortly after. And I don't believe there was a commander in any of the Corps on that Front that had anything on him for what makes an army win."

The General's return to Canada was preheralded by a barrage of criticism that seeped through from men coming home. Some day we shall know how much or how little of this was politics inspired by Currie's enemies in Canada and by men who, jealous of his success and his eminence, had no scruples about fomenting the criticism. But Currie must be judged by what he did with his army. In that last hundred days all the armies but the American army were remnants of what they were in 1915. The wonderful thing about the Canadian army is that in the three months before victory it was an even more terrible arm of war than it had been at Vimy Ridge. After a year and a half of Commander Currie it was still the superb fighting machine described in the extracts already quoted from the battle of Amiens. For a few of the reasons why it was so we quote again that same book the writer's estimate of Currie:

"But according to the letter of the law he is not a good subordinate. He cannot be popular with the powers that be: he is always complaining about something; getting his own way or making it unpleasant for people if he doesn't.

"In the panic of the following March (1918 after Passchendaele) he finds the Corps is being torn to pieces, its divisions hurried here, there and everywhere; orders given and countermanded and then issued again. He protests strongly; the Canadian corps whose value is tested, must be kept together; and he wins out." . . .

"Is all this insubordination? If so, it is a quality that makes for victory. The average Canadian is always willing to "take a chance" because he has confidence in himself. And the Corps Commander is very much of a Canadian."

The author does not criticize Currie, though he had so good an opportunity. In telling so well the wonderful story of that last hundred days and so explicitly glorifying the Commander whose best work of the war was done during that period, he gives us no perspective. Is it not just to admit that though the four reduced Canadian divisions--with certain attachments--had defeated forty-seven German divisions, they had conquered divisions terribly more reduced than their own and absolutely without reserves in either men or materials and devoid of the last vestige of morale? The great bluff was about to break. It was due to have broken sooner.

When the armistice came all the armies but the Canadians laid down their arms. Currie had not finished his work. He had planned the whole hundred days, beginning with Cambrai, and the apex of that achievement after the breaking of the infallible Hindenburg line, was the recapture of Mons. He was once more "insubordinate". He did not seem to pay respect to the armistice. His men had often said that they wanted to fight Heine on German soil. Denied that, at least they wanted a chance to be part of the army of occupation, as far east as Cologne. Currie could never have ordered an unwilling army--not that army unwilling--to march 150 miles into Germany. He had an army of conquest, not of armistice. But the stereopticon and the slides:

What was to be done with this soldier at home? How could he be re-established in civil life? Thanks to the Administration's predicament in trying to please both the General and his enemies, here was the worst D.S.C.R. problem of the lot. Thanks to McGill University, the predicament was removed.