The Book of War Letters

The Canada of 1899 was a callow country of seven provinces, thinly populated by five million people of mostly Anglo-Saxon stock. A mere thirty-two years old as a nation, it was a colonial outpost firmly clasped to the bosom of Britain. Yet Canada's character was changing. The Klondike gold rush was bringing fortune-seekers from around the world, and peasant immigrants were flooding in from central and eastern Europe 7,500 Doukhobors from Russia that year alone to settle the prairies. Elsewhere, two world powers were flexing their imperialist muscles. The United States, fresh from winning Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines in the jingoistic Spanish-American War of 1898, began a bloody 3-year conflict to quash Filipino insurgents. And Britain, a year after machine-gunning thousands of tribespeople to dominate the North African territory of Sudan, was about to embark on another war, this time in South Africa. The Boers (Dutch for "farmers") declared war on Britain on October 11, 1899, and Britain called on its overseas colonies to gird for battle. There were intriguing parallels to the global state of affairs a century later: public opinion in Germany and France (along with the Netherlands, ancestral home of many Boers) was strongly opposed to an invasion based on questionable motives in this case, Britain's expansionist ambitions in South Africa. As Canadian historian Robert Page points out, "Unlike the world wars of 1914 or 1939, Mother Britain was not in danger, for the Boer Republics' total available manpower was not much more than that of the city of Toronto." And Canada, then as in 2003, was led by a Quebecois Liberal who was reluctant to commit his countrymen to fight on foreign soil. The only major external conflict Canadians had engaged in was the British-led, North American War of 1812, which ended in a draw although the Canadas had ultimately repelled the invaders. Yet, in a land where less than a third of the population was French-speaking, loyalty to the British crown was still intense in 1899, only two years after Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. The Canadian Constitution rested in London, not Ottawa, and couldn't be amended without British consent. Although Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier had been knighted during the Jubilee celebrations, he tried to keep Canada out of the war reflecting the anti-British feeling of French Canadians. He was soon swayed by the hope that aiding the Imperial forces might boost the young nation's political status and leave it stronger and more independent of the Mother Country. Paradoxically, he also hoped that sending troops overseas would cement ties with Britain at a time when American protectionism was increasingly closing the U.S. border to Canadian goods. Three days after war broke out, the Dominion of Canada, urged on by British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain, issued a recruiting order to organize the First Canadian Contingent for South African service Canada's first expeditionary force. Among English Canadians, this decision was popular, supported by the press and politicians across the country, except in Quebec (which in 2003 registered the most opposition of any province to an invasion of Iraq). The government at first decided to dispatch only a thousand troops, half Australia's contribution and even smaller than New Zealand's. Sending them off on October 31, Laurier parroted English-speaking sentiment: ". . . the cause for which you men are going to fight is the cause of justice, of humanity, of civil rights and religious liberty. This is not a war of conqueAudrey Grescoe is the author of 'The Book of War Letters', published 2003 under ISBN 9781551991054 and ISBN 1551991055.