Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 Read Online Free

veldt hummed like a telephone office. (When a soldier loots a house the first thing he grabs is the clock.)” Nevertheless, most of the Canadians felt a certain sympathy for the people they were fighting, and often their rural instinct to help out people in distress mingled strangely with the ruthless nature of modern counterinsurgency warfare. One of the most vivid accounts of the confused behaviour that often resulted was a long letter published in the Ottawa
Citizen
by its editor, Lieutenant E.W.B. Morrison, who was serving in South Africa with the Canadian Artillery. He described an attack on the village of Dullstroom in the northern Transvaal by Canadian troops.
    The main street was full of smoke and fiery cinders and as the flames belched out in huge sheets from one side or the other our horses shied and plunged from side to side. The place was very quiet except for the roaring and the crackle of the flames.
    On the steps of the church were huddled a group of women and children. The children didn’t seem to know whether to cry or to be diverted by the spectacle. The women were white but some of them had spots of red on either cheek and their eyes blazed. Not many were crying. The troops were systematically looking the place over and as they got through with each house they burned it. Our Canadian boys helped to get their furniture out, much as they would do at a fire in a village at home. If they saw anything they fancied they would take it … but they had not the callous nerve to take the people’s stuff in front of their faces. Of course in the case of shops it was different.…
    I went into a very pretty little cottage standing in a rose garden on a side street. The C.M.R.’s [Canadian Mounted Rifles] and R.C.D.’s [Royal Canadian Dragoons] were looting it, but really helping the woman out with her stuff more than sacking theplace. The woman was quite a good-looking lady-like person and the house was almost luxuriously furnished. She was breathlessly bustling about saving her valuables and superintending the salvage operations. A big dragoon would come up to her and say in a sheepish sort of way: “What you want next, lady?” and she would tell them and they would carry it out. As I stood looking on she turned to me and said: “Oh, how can you be so cruel?” I sympathised with her and explained it was an order and had to be obeyed. She was a good-looking female in distress and had quite the dramatic style of an ill-used heroine.
    I certainly was sorry for her—we all were—until the house began to burn and a lot of concealed ammunition to explode and nearly killed some of our men. But all the same it was a sad sight to see the little homes burning and the rose bushes withering up in the pretty gardens and the pathetic groups of homeless women and children crying among the ruins as we rode away.
    Lieutenant E.W.B. Morrison,
The Citizen
, Ottawa, January 2, 1901
    In all, over seven thousand Canadians enlisted for the South African war, of whom about five thousand arrived in time to see active service there. For most English Canadians at home the war began as an exciting distraction and ended at least as a successful demonstration of Canada’s military prowess and its unbounded loyalty to the empire. But there were a few nagging details that detracted from this cheery view of the war: of the eight companies of the Royal Canadian Regiment that had enlisted in the first rush of enthusiasm, for example, six flatly refused to extend their service when their year’s contract expired in September 1900.
    Even in English Canada the war was not without its critics (although the criticism tended to be limited to farmers’ weeklies and radical labour journals). Journalist and historian Goldwin Smith wasappalled by the brutalization of Canadian society. He particularly disliked the war toys being given to children: “puppets made by their distortions and squeaking to resemble the agonies of dying Boers.” But the