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

mainstream English-language press was overwhelmingly jingoist, and its readers had no quarrel with its view of war as a morally positive and virtually cost-free spectator sport.
    In the late afternoon of January 12, 1901, two of the volunteers came home. To greet them, 2,000 citizens of Paris, Ontario, gathered at the Junction Station “to welcome” (in the words of the Paris
Star-Transcript
), “Our Boys who had Done so well—Gunners Arthur Flanagan and Alex Hume.”
    When the locomotive came puffing and clanking into the station, the band struck up “See the Conquering Heroes Come!” and the crowd raised a series of mighty cheers. Then, “as the Kaki clad heroes alighted, there arose upon the air that familiar refrain, ‘Home, Sweet Home’ ”.…
    After passing along streets of decorated and illuminated houses and through lines of cheering spectators, and after serenading the homes of the heroes and setting off a mass of brilliant fireworks, the procession wound its way to the town hall, [where] a number of long orations were delivered.… George Shepherd, John Vine, and John Jefferson, Paris boys who were still in South Africa … together with the two returned heroes, were praised for the part they had played in helping to defend “Truth, Justice and Christian Civilization.”
    Donald A. Smith,
At the Forks of the Grand
, vol. 2
    But five volunteers was actually not a very impressive total for a town of over four thousand people. In fact, the average native-born English Canadian man was not nearly so eager to go off and die forthe empire as his political leaders, his social betters and his newspapers assumed.
    Almost 30 percent of Canada’s volunteers for the Boer War were British immigrants, though they made up only 7 percent of the total population. Even more significantly, Canada’s total contribution lagged far behind that of the other white dominions: it had a larger population than the Australian and New Zealand colonies put together, but they raised over three times as many men for the war. As for French Canadians—the “fine French company” of the Royal Canadian Regiment had francophone officers, but two-thirds of its men were actually English speakers. Only 3 percent of those who served in South Africa were French Canadian, although francophones comprised 30 percent of the Canadian population.
    Individual French Canadians went to South Africa for the sorts of personal motives that will induce some men, at certain times in their lives, to go to a war almost regardless of what it is about, and once there they fought just as well as anybody else. But the war was almost universally unpopular in French Canada, where some of the young wore buttons bearing the name of Kruger, the Boer leader, to show where their sympathies lay. In March 1900 there were three days of rioting between English and French students in Montreal, and the militia had to be called out. Meanwhile, the more rabid sections of the English Canadian press called the French Canadians scoundrels and traitors and warned of civil war. Lord Minto, the governor general, reported that some eastern Ontario farmers went to bed at night with guns by their sides because they feared a French Canadian invasion.
    Nevertheless, Laurier’s compromise had succeeded. He won the 1900 election comfortably, and the country moved on to other concerns. In January 1903 the Alaskan boundary dispute was decided entirely in favour of the United States (because the British representative on the arbitration tribunal voted for the American case in order to avoid a clash with Washington). There was great fury in Ottawa andacross the country, and the two Canadian representatives on the tribunal refused to sign the decision in protest, but Laurier’s government survived. By then the South African War had been over for six months, and all the Canadian volunteers had come home except for the 224 who were buried there. It was a gentle enough introduction to the