Brave Battalion (3 page)

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 almost 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.”
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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 91
^st
Canadian Highlanders left Hamilton with the 50
^th
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 91
^st
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 48
^th
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 48
^th
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 91
^st
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 70
^th
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 1
^st
Canadian Infantry Division delivered orders that, when the 70
^th
Gordon Highlanders arrived the next day, all four contingents would be amalgamated into a single battalion numbered the 16
^th
and would serve in the newly minted 3
^rd
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 16
^th
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 1
^st
Division traced their lineage back to Britain. Only 1,245 of them were French-Canadian.
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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 16
^th
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, 2
^nd
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 16
^th
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 91
^st
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 16
^th
Battalion was noticeably distinct from other units in 1
^st
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?”
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