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

Catholic politician who had prospered mightily by trimming his sails to catch the prevailing wind from Britain (he had a standing order in London for the latest guide to the British peerage), but who knew how to play the local game. And the war looked a lot like salvation to Morris: if he played along with Governor Davidson, he might be able to use the war as a stepping-stone to better things than Newfoundland politics.
    So the Newfoundland Patriotic Association duly raised a contingent for overseas service, and the “First Five Hundred,” recruited mainly from St. John’s—baymen tended to be more doubtful about the whole enterprise—sailed for England in the steamship
Florizel
in October 1914. They then spent ten months training in England—and they had only volunteered for a year. In August 1915, as they were being reviewed by the king and by Lord Kitchener, the British war minister, they were given the option of returning home or enlisting for the period of the war. Most of them, unable to face the social disgrace of quitting, chose to stay, whereupon Kitchener announced that they were just the people he needed in Turkey. A week later they were sent to the Gallipoli peninsula, where imperial forces had landed earlier in the year in an attempt to break through the straits at the Dardanelles and capture Istanbul.
    By now, the legendary early battles between the Turks and the Anzacs (Australians and New Zealanders) were largely over. What the Newfoundlanders had to face was four months of grinding, stalemated trench warfare where more men died from disease and exposure than from enemy action.
    All over the Peninsula disease had become epidemic, until the clearing stations and the beaches were choked with sick …
    By sickness and snipers’ bullets we were losing thirty men a day. Nobody in the front line trenches or on the shell-swept area behind ever expected to leave the Peninsula alive.
    John Gallishaw, Royal Newfoundland Regiment,
Trenching at Gallipoli
    Those who survived Gallipoli and were unlucky enough still to be fit for war were then sent to the Western Front, where the Royal Newfoundland Regiment was virtually wiped out at the battles of Beaumont Hamel and Gueudecourt in 1916. But Morris survived: aware that public opinion was turning against the war and that he had no chance of winning the 1917 election, he postponed the election on the grounds that he would be absent attending the Imperial War Cabinet in London. But his real reason for being in England was rather different. Sir Basil Davidson had written a letter for him.
    Sir Edward Morris … now feels weary of the burden of leadership … and he has expressed to me his hopes that he may shortly retire from public life and reside in England.
    [By 1914, in Newfoundland], the proud tradition of attachment to the King and the Royal House had become almost lip service, not involving the conception that loyalty might involve sacrifice. Despite these discouraging conditions Sir Edward never hesitated, but offered his people to the Army and Navy and pledged the Colony’s credit for their maintenance.
    [I wish] to press for your advocacy before the King in granting to Sir Edward Morris the unprecedented Honour of a Peerage, as a fitting reward for a man who has so well served the Cause of the British Empire. Sir Edward has sufficient means to maintain the Dignity of a hereditary title and a seat in the House of Lords.
    Governor Davidson to the colonial secretary, September 1917
    Morris was already in London by September of 1917. On Christmas Eve he finally wrote to two of his former colleagues to announce his resignation as prime minister of Newfoundland. A few days later he received his peerage, and a grateful imperial government arranged for him to be appointed to the boards of a British insurance company and an aircraft-building firm. His heir still sits in the House of Lords today.
    “I’d like to know,” said one chap, “why we all