True Patriot Love (9 page)

By the summer of 1910, Grant had been lured home to Canada by an offer of an endowed chair in colonial and Canadian history at Queen’s. He had been away six years. If he remained in England, he knew that he would never be accepted as one of the tribe. Parkin had done well passing as an Englishman, but Grant lacked his graces and political finesse. If Grant went home to Queen’s, he reckoned, life might be more provincial, but he knew he belonged there.

It was not until early August 1910, with departure for Canada only a month away, that he screwed up his courage and wrote “Miss Maude” a letter in which he declared his true feelings. He admitted that he had always seen himself as a confirmed bachelor, but their last few months together had changed his plans for life. He confessed that he was old, pushing forty, but hoped there was still the play of life in him yet. He burst out finally: “I have come to love you very deeply. There! It is said now, and nothing else makes much difference.”

He told her that with her at his side “we can do ten times as much for Canada” as he could do alone, and then, realizing she might think he wanted her just for what she could bring to his work, he blurted out: “My dear, whenever I think of you, when I speak your name, the pulses in my neck quiver and tighten, and all my blood seems to be in my throat.”

It was a touching letter and it did the trick. Within a week, they met in London, Maude accepted him, Mr. and Mrs. Parkin gave their approval and the engagement was announced.

It is worth pausing over the phrase in William Grant’s declaration about working together for Canada. Commit to help each other, commit to stay with each other in sickness and in health, certainly, but commit to Canada? Yet it was not just a fine phrase, but central to Grant’s sense of what his life—and hers—were for.

By mid-September 1910, he was on his way across the Atlantic, back to Kingston, and she back to Manchester. Letters, sometimes two a day, would pass back and forth between them. He confessed, “I am not a great man. I have read their biographies and they all write to their lady loves as if they were addressing a large and highly cultivated Public Meeting … whereas I write to you about You and Me.”

Sometimes, as the days passed and a letter would not come, he would break into a kind of half-comic despair:

Will you always love me? Always? In the commonplace days? If my hair falls out? If the maid gives warning and we have to cook our own dinner? If I make a bad speech? And my class despise my lectures? If all goes wrong? When you are overworked, and we have to take a second best
holiday because we can’t afford the one we want? Will you always love me?

As 1910 turned into 1911, she wanted to know what position he took on the issue of trade reciprocity, the great question dividing the country. Laurier went into the elections with a proposal to lower tariffs on all American goods. The Conservatives opposed, believing that reciprocity would jeopardize Canadian manufacturers, weaken the British connection and threaten the identity of the country. Maude’s father was almost certainly with the Conservatives on this issue. Grant sided with Laurier and the Liberals but added, pointedly, that “we prate of our Canadian nationalism … yet we have so little real confidence in our nationality that a large part of us think it likely to founder if the US take off their tariff on a few of our natural products. A somewhat precarious nationalism, surely!”

In the election of 1911, Robert Borden became prime minister, and Laurier was swept from office on fears in English Canada that continental integration with the Americans would weaken Canada and on suspicions in Quebec that Laurier had wanted to tie the country too closely to the British Empire.

Over the seven months that Maude and William were apart, from September 1910 to April 1911, they slowly revealed their secrets to each other. She wrote to him a
solemn letter about her ideals and about the “need for grace and refinement and restraint as well as strength,” and he agreed but told her that these were very hard ideals to realize in Canada, where “the tendency is all slap-dash hustle.” He jokingly called her “my little Puritan,” but he knew he was one too. They were both faithful churchgoers, yet something was changing inside him, taking him away from the faith of his father. He confessed to her, “I rarely, terribly rarely now feel the need of Divine Aid or Communion. I want to work for my fellows, to be in communion with them, but God comes terribly little into my thoughts and I fear Christ even less.”

The simple truth may have been that he was discovering, in those solitary months alone, grading student papers, eating a lonely meal at the local Chinese restaurant in Kingston, waiting for her letters to come, pouring out his heart to her, that love and desire mattered more to him than faith.

They were finally married in June 1911 in the parish church at Goring-on-Thames, she in a high-necked white lace dress with a train, he in a wing-necked collar and tail coat. In their wedding pictures, they look happy and a little frightened.

After a honeymoon in northern Italy, they returned to Kingston in the autumn of 1911. In the three years that followed, he shared the grumbling that Queen’s was not what it had been in his father’s day, but he was also proud
that Queen’s mattered mightily in the Dominion. With his colleagues O.D. Skelton and Adam Shortt, he set about training the men who created Canada’s first fully professional civil service in Ottawa. At home, he discovered in himself a love of family life he never expected. He shouted his happiness from the rooftops, telling one of his friends that “the desire of men for women is heaven born.”

As for Maude Grant, there is little doubt that she loved him and flowered in domestic intimacy, but Kingston was no match for Goring and her new life was more confining than the old. She had enjoyed professional respect at the University of Manchester. Now she was the dutiful wife of Principal Grant’s son, having to make conversation with every Kingston matron who remembered the grand old man and who had an opinion about the less spectacular son. Soon she was pregnant, and within three years, she had two infant daughters, Margaret and Charity, to care for. She was in her mid-thirties when the children were born, and, although the births went well, her life was swallowed up by domestic chores.

The summer of 1914 found the family in England, she with the children at her parents’ house at Goring, he in London, working at the Royal Colonial Institute on a biography of his father’s idol, Joseph Howe, colonial orator and the first man to achieve responsible government for a British colony.

When the European crisis broke out with the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo and the subsequent Austrian ultimatum to Serbia on July 28, 1914, Grant was putting the finishing touches on his biography of Howe. As the European powers rushed to war, Grant put away his books and went down to the House of Commons to listen to the speeches. In a letter to Maude at Goring, he confessed that the political situation “grips me, overwhelms me.” The prospect of war put him, he said, “in the same state that I was in when, in the hope of keeping my independence, I fought against telling you of my love and was at last swept away.” The war fever gripping the capital had seized hold of him, too.

He stopped going to the archives and joined the crowds in Trafalgar Square and Whitehall. He anxiously discussed the situation with a friend, Maurice Hankey, soon to become secretary to the War Cabinet. With his father-in-law, George Parkin, one August afternoon, he walked through the streets, noticing the broken windows at the German embassy and the frenetic excitement of the crowds. On Whitehall, they noticed that the National Union of Women’s Suffrage had set up a stand and was enlisting women for war work. Sentries were posted at Charing Cross Railway Station. He and Parkin bumped into Lord Sydenham, who told them that Parliament had adjourned. Parkin and Grant elbowed their way down Pall Mall to Buckingham Palace, until they were right in front
of the iron gates amid the clamouring crowd. As he reported to Maude that night,

Just then out came the King, Queen and Prince on the balcony. We cheered and waved and they waved and bowed standing for about 5 minutes. Pandemonium; some cheering, some singing God Save the King, others Rule Britannia!

His first thought was to enlist. He had already, while a master at Upper Canada, done service in a reserve regiment, so he was officer material, but his chief worry was that at forty-two years of age, he might be judged too old for active duty. At Canada House, he was told to get back to Canada and enlist there.

Few Canadians would have been as susceptible to the drum beat of martial patriotism as William Grant. He believed in the cause of empire; he thought of citizenship as service and sacrifice; and now at last the empire had sounded the call to arms. In a letter to Maude written in August 1914, William said that looking into his own heart was like peering through smoked glass into the white heat of a furnace. Inside him, he admitted, he could feel the “fierce, hellish spirit of this war.”

But what could a forty-two-year-old professor contribute to the war effort? While waiting to return to Canada, he persuaded the Royal Colonial Institute and
Heinemann Publishers to let him produce a short pamphlet on the causes of the war. In late August and early September, as German armies poured into Belgium and the French struggled to hold them at the Marne, Grant immersed himself in the works of the key ideologists of German expansion, von Treitschke and von Bernhardi, Kaiser Wilhelm and Prince von Bulow. Grant’s idea was to provide the general public, especially the enlisted soldier, with a pocket compendium of quotations that would illustrate the righteousness of the cause. Grant set out to convict German militarism, using only its own words. In the final pages of
Our Just Cause
, he argued that the Allies were at war because of the “swelled head” of the German militarist classes, because of “our plighted word to France and Belgium” and “in the cause of civilization and of liberty and of international law.” In the final paragraph, written as news of German atrocities in Belgium were filling the British and French press, he concluded that the empire must fight to the finish to avenge Belgium, to extirpate Prussian militarism and, finally, “to vindicate our character as a fighting race.”

A fighting race. Just two years before, Grant might have shrunk from such language. Now it came naturally.
Our Just Cause
was a stirring, if bellicose, performance from a scholar. It was successful enough to go through at least two editions.

The question that he and so many Canadians had debated in those years of peace—whether if Britain were at war, Canada would be at war as well—was now moot. The empire had called. Canada—proud member of the fighting race—could only answer yes. It never occurred to Grant to think otherwise.

Neither Maude nor William doubted that she should stay in England with her parents and that he should return as soon as he could to enlist in Canada. Raleigh, Maude’s teenage brother, immediately enlisted and the Cottage was busy with sending him off. Goring, it should be noted, was near the southeast coast of England and, by the autumn of 1914, it was not hard to imagine that one could hear the distant thunder of the guns on the battlefields of France across the Channel.

Finally, William returned to Canada. From late 1914 through the winter of 1916, he trained in Gananoque and other Canadian army camps, writing Maude sometimes twice and three times a day, letters that he used as a diary of the grinding routine of camp life: route marches, parade drills, weapons inspections, delousing details, censorship of recruits’ letters and court martial sessions for violations of discipline, mostly drunken escapades in the local towns. He missed Maude and the children, and sometimes a note of raw sexual longing enters the correspondence. He managed a leave early in the summer of 1915 and visited them all in Goring, and the encounter revived their physical passion
for each other. In February 1916, Maude proudly announced the arrival of Jessie Alison Grant, their third daughter. Maude was worried that William would have wanted a boy, and William admitted that he might have preferred it, hastening to add, “just for the variety, no feelings whatever about the superior sex.”

In the muddy, often frozen training camps at Gananoque, he discovered a capacity for leadership he had not suspected. He joked that army life was not supposed to suit an old professor, but he was used to motivating young men half his age. He told Maude, rather proudly, that they called him Daddy. When his contingents were ready to be shipped off to France, he was there waving at the platform at Gananoque station, choked up to see them heading off to battle and to God knew what prospects of survival.

And so they went, drunk and sober, rough necks and gentlemen—and how many of them shall I see again? One loves one’s men, the rougher they are, the simpler they are, the more one loves them. We started Auld Lang Syne but after about a line and a half, Daddy Grant had to stop and turn away.

By early 1916, the Canadian newspapers carried columns of the names of the dead. His classmates at Queen’s were dying. Balliol College sent him the lists of
the college men who had been lost and his heart tightened to see how many of them, the bright sparks of the 1890s, were no more. The boys he had taught at Upper Canada and at St. Andrew’s were also falling. He went on recruitment drives to the small towns of eastern Ontario and noticed, with fury and resignation, that the boys were no longer coming forward to serve. He wrote Maude,

We have almost reached the limits of the voluntary system even with the high pay and other inducements which we offer. The native-born Canadian especially in the small country village is very slack and when he does come forward, his woman kind do all they can to dissuade him.

The British born had come forward, but not the immigrants and the native-born Canadians. As the carnage continued, as the waste of young life carried on, month after month, the cause that was sacred to him ceased to be sacred for millions of Canadians. The spectre of conscription brought these divisions out into the open. Laurier and the Liberals supported the war but opposed conscription, knowing that while many French Canadians were fighting in France, Quebec as a whole would never accept forced participation in a war for king and country. Prime Minister Borden and his Cabinet believed conscription was necessary if Canada was to keep its pledge to the empire.