“THE MAPLE LEAF FOLK”
Frederick Palmer
THESE were home folks to the American. You might know all by their maple leaf symbol; but even before you saw that, with its bronze none too prominent against the khaki, you knew those who were not recent emigrants from England to Canada by their accent and by certain slang phrases which pay no customs duty at the border.
When, on a dark February night cruising in a slough of a road, I heard out of a wall of blackness back of the trenches, “Gee! Get onto the bus!” which referred to our car, and also, ” Cut out the noise I ” I was certain that I might dispense with an interpreter. After I had remarked that I came from New York, which is only across the street from Montreal as distances go in our countries, the American batting about the front at midnight was welcomed with a ” glad hand ” across that imaginary line which has and ever shall have no fortresses.
What a strange place to find Canadians-at the front in Europe! I could never quite accommodate myself to the wonder of a man from Winnipeg, and perhaps a ” neutral ” from Wyoming in his company, fighting Germans in Flanders. A man used to a downy couch and an easy-chair by the fire and steam-heated rooms, who had ten thousand a year in Toronto, when you found him in a chill, damp cellar of a peasant’s cottage in range of the enemy’s shells was getting something more novel, if not more picturesque, than dog-mushing and prospecting on the Yukon; for that contrast we are quite used to.
All I asked of the Canadians was to allow a little of the glory they had won-they had won such a lot-to rub off on their neighbours. If there must be war, and no Canadian believed in it as an institution, why, to my mind, the Canadians did a fine thing for civilisation’s sake. It hurt sometimes to think that we also could not be in the fight for the good cause, too, particularly after the Lusitania was sunk, when my own feelings had lost all semblance to neutrality.
The Canadians enlivened life at the front; for they have a little more zip to them than the thorough-going British. Their climate spells ” hustle,” and we are all the product of climate to a large degree, whether in England, on the Mississippi flatlands, or in Manitoba. Eager and highstrung the Canadian born, quick to see and act. Very restless they were when held up on Salisbury Plain, after they had come three-four-five-six thousand miles to fight and there was nothing but mud in an English winter to fight.
One from the American continent knew what ailed them; they wanted action. They may have seemed undisciplined to a drill sergeant; but the kind of discipline they needed was a sight of the real thing. They wanted to know, What for? And Lord Kitchener was kinder to them, though many were beginners, than to his own new army; he could be, as they had their guns and equipment ready. So he sent them over to France before it was too late in the spring to get frozen feet from standing in icy water looking over a parapet at a German parapet. They liked Flanders mud better than Salisbury Plain mud, because it meant that there was ” something doing.”
It was in their first trenches that I first saw them, and they were ” on the job, all right,” in face of scattered shell-fire and the sweep of the searchlights and the flares. They had become the most ardent of pupils, for here was that real thing which steadied them and proved their metal. They refashioned their trenches and drained them with the fastidious-ness of good housekeepers, who had a frontiersman’s experience for an inheritance. In a week they appeared to be old hands at the business.
” Their discipline is different from ours,” said a British general, ” but it works out. They are splendid. I ask for no better troops.”
They may have lacked the etiquette of discipline of British regulars, but they had the natural discipline of self-reliance and of ” go to it ” when a crisis came. This trench was only an introduction, a preparation for a thing which was about as real as ever fell to the lot of any soldiers. It is not for me to tell here the story of their part in the second battle of Ypres when the gas fumes rolled in upon them. I should like to tell it and also the story of the deeds of many British regiments, from the time of Mons to Festubert. All Canada knows it in detail from their own correspondents and their record officer. England will one day know about her regiments; her stubborn regiments of the line, her county regiments, who have won the admiration of all the crack regiments, whether English or Scots.
” When that gas came along,” said one Canadian, who expressed the Canadian spirit, “we knew the Boches were springing a new one on us. You know how it is if a man is hit in the face by a cloud of smoke when he is going into a burning building to get somebody out. He draws back-and then he goes in. We went in. We charged-well, it was the way we felt about it. We wanted to get at them and we were boiling mad over such a dastardly kind of attack.”
Higher authorities than any civilian have testified to how that charge helped, if it did not save the situation. And then at Givenchy straight work into the enemy’s trenches under the guns. Canada is a part of the British Empire and a precious part; but the Canadians, all imperial politics aside, fought their way into the affections of the British army, if they did not already possess it. They made the Rocky Mountains seem more majestic and the Thousand Islands more lovely.
If there are some people in the United States busy with their own affairs who look on the Canadians as living up north somewhere toward the Arctic Circle and not very numerous, that old criterion of merit which discovers in the glare of battle’s publicity merit which already existed has given to the name Canadian a glory which can be appreciated only with the perspective of time. The Civil War left us a martial tradition; they have won theirs. Some day a few of their neutral neighbours, who fought by their side will be joining in their army reunions and remarking, ” Wasn’t that mud in Flanders-” etc.
My thanks to the Canadians for being at the front. They brought me back to the plains and the North-west, and they showed the Germans on some occasions what a blizzard is like when expressed in bullets instead of in snowflakes, by men who know how to shoot. I had continental pride in them. They had the dry, pungent philosophy and the indomitable optimism which the air of the plains and the St. Lawrence Valley seems to develop. They were not afraid to be a little emotional and sentimental. There is room for that sort of thing between Vancouver and Halifax. They’ve been in some ” tough scraps ” which they saw clear-eyed, as they would see a boxing-match or a spill from a canoe into a Canadian rapids.
From: Frederick Palmer, My Year of the Great War (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1916), pp350-54.