Free Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 by Gwynne Dyer Page A

while going for soup. His mother and sister, who had gone over to Britain to be with him, brought his body home to Paris, Ontario, for burial.

    On the 9th. January [1916] the final evacuation took place off Cape Helles. Thirty-two of the Newfoundland Regiment were honoured as rear-guard to remain in the trenches, and rifles and flares continued to go off at intervals. But it was recognised that the element of surprise would not serve and the rear-guard was thought doomed. The Turks would be apt to take toll for their former napping. But they proved sportsmen.
    Our men said they stood four ranks deep on a narrow strip of beach which could have been enfiladed from the heights with great slaughter. Not a shot was fired, however. The Turks had called across the hill the previous day: “Goodbye. We know you’re going. So are we. Good luck!” … They were a decent foe. They cared for British graves and there were no atrocities. Of the 32 [Newfoundlanders] who had been dedicated to an almost certain fate, all escaped.
    Nursing Sister Mabel B. Clint, No. 1 Canadian Field Hospital, Lemnos (near Gallipoli), 1916. (
Our Bit
)
    The traditional role of Newfoundland politics has been to make Canadian politics look good by comparison, and it positively shone in that role in the First World War. Not all of Sam Hughes’s pals profited directly from their work in recruiting and equipping the Canadian Expeditionary Force, although one of the honorary colonels, J. Wesley Allison (whose shady business activities were partly responsible for Hughes’s ultimate downfall), boasted publicly of the wonderful profits he had made in his dealings with the British government. In most cases, Canadian businessmen and politicians who exhorted other men to join up for the war (and sometimes spent their own money to help found new regiments) were not so much out for profit, but just aware that their efforts might be rewarded with British knighthoods, honours and distinctions, which still played a large part in social advancement in Canada at the time. Not one of them, however, could match the social-climbing ambitions and skills of Sir Edward Morris, the prime minister of Newfoundland.
    Newfoundland was an independent country then, of course, but it had not had any military forces for almost a century. Nevertheless, on 7 August 1914 Prime Minister Morris sent a telegram to London offering an entire regiment for service overseas. Two days later London accepted Newfoundland’s offer. Morris and the British governor, Sir Basil Davidson, then created the Newfoundland Patriotic Association to raise, equip, and finance the contingents dispatched from Newfoundland. The governor made himself chairman of the association and controlled committee appointments: in effect, he directed Newfoundland’s war effort. It was a highly unusual arrangement for a self-governing dominion, but Morris needed the Governor’s support to stay in power, and Davidson needed an eminent Newfoundlander who was willing to trade colonial soldiers for imperial honours. As he explained in a dispatch to London in 1914:
    The bulk of His Majesty’s subjects in Newfoundland had then been steeped in ease for hundreds of years and imbued with an instinctive aversion to war, albeit the bravest of people in theirown seafaring conditions. Neither did they understand the causes which compelled His Majesty’s Government to declare war, nor did they consider themselves directly interested in the issue.
    The larger part … were on the whole inclined—living in the misty atmosphere of past centuries—to side with the King of Prussia, as the champion of Protestantism, and they remembered France only as the traditional enemy. The old memories of the press-gang still lived in the outports, and the recollection of soldiering was that the wastrels of the hamlets enlisted for life and never returned home.
    Sir Edward Morris, it seemed to the governor, was the man who could get past all that: an Irish