As British as the King: Lunenburg County During the First World War
As British as the King: Lunenburg County During the First World War
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| ISBN-13: | 9781771087742 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nimbus |
| Publication date: | 03/30/2020 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 21 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
"THE GREAT BROIL ACROSS THE SEA"
"The Peace of the World Disturbed," proclaimed the headline in the Progress-Enterprise of Lunenburg on August 5, 1914.
According to the editorial, Germany was massing men to strike at neutral countries. The Niobe, one of the ships of the newly created Naval Service of Canada, was being prepared for active service, and Halifax had "its war face on." Reports were conflicting; it was next to impossible to learn the true state of affairs. If the headline was an understatement, the editor's final comment was perceptive: "Fears for a long European war are very great and the consequence will be so disastrous to the world at large that it will pass all human understanding." When Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife in the faraway Bosnian city of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, most Nova Scotians likely paid little attention. Within weeks, however, Europe had descended into madness. The Great Powers — Austria-Hungary and Germany, Russia, and France — were at war. As Sir Edward Grey, Britain's foreign secretary, famously remarked, "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." Closer to home, Halifax's Morning Chronicle on August 3 concluded, "The German Emperor has made war. ... In the shadow of these fateful happenings and tragic possibilities, all is doubt and uncertainty. But all the omens spell War on a mighty scale." Bound to honour a long-standing treaty to protect Belgian neutrality, Britain declared war on Germany on August 4. Canada, as a member of the British Empire, was at war.
A week later, on August 11, the town of Lunenburg, greatly excited, was said to be "filled with the military spirit that seems to be almost in the air." People thronged the street in front of Kinley's drugstore, where the latest bulletins were displayed. That evening a crowd enthusiastically applauded the band of the 75th Lunenburg Regiment, which performed patriotic airs on the bandstand, opening with "Rule Britannia." When the old favourite "Soldiers of the King" was played, the clapping began even before the last bar had closed.
The next day, August 12, the Progress-Enterprise observed there was no doubt that war was on in earnest:
You can see it in your neighbor's face. You can gather it from the tense, drawn appearance of small groups on the streets. Every corner has its small contingent discussing the news with an animation that approaches hysteria. The uncertainty of it all just catches your breath.... Here in Lunenburg we are thousands of miles from the actual zone of battle yet the atmosphere is charged as though a terrific conflict were being waged within eye distance.... You wonder how long it is going to last and where you can get your food for the approaching winter. Out of your window you see team after team laden with flour slowly wending homewards. The cautious ones are preparing for a siege. The cowards who joined the militia to have a lark at Aldershot are quaking and trembling in their shoes. Occasionally one more knowing than his neighbors stoutly asserts it makes no difference to Canada, that we won't be affected. But the average man is placing his reliance and his trust in God and the British navy and calmly awaits the full development of the crisis.... Yes, war is on and we know and feel it.
A fairly typical reaction to the outbreak of the war, not just in Lunenburg but across the country, was expressed by G. E. Romkey of West Dublin, a small community in Lunenburg County on the west side of the LaHave River. Romkey was owner of a general store that specialized in buying and selling fish and lumber; later he would become the owner of the G. E. Romkey & Company fish plant in West Dublin. In his memoirs, published in the Progress-Enterprise in the mid-1970s, he wrote:
1914 will always be remembered as the start of the first Great War. No one seemed to take it seriously at first and somehow we expected the British Navy and the great French Army to clean up the German forces in a few weeks. We were very much shocked and disappointed when the Germans rushed through Belgium, and France not able to stop them. Canada began to wake up and start enlisting men and many who signed up expected the war would be all over before they were trained and would not see England. Events were to show how badly all were wrong and Canada had to pay the price that all our Allies shared.
On August 14, only ten days after Britain declared war, three young men from the town of Lunenburg volunteered to serve the Empire overseas. Two of them were natives of the town: Ned Coldwell, son of A. B. Coldwell, collector of customs, who was of English descent; and Charlie Cossmann, whose grandfather had come to the town as a Lutheran missionary in 1835. The third man was a Norwegian, Emil Olsen, who had lived in Lunenburg for almost ten years. These men enlisted at the military camp at Valcartier, near Quebec City, in September 1914, and after some training there in October they embarked on the ss Ruthenia bound for England.
As Lieutenant Colonel Charles A. Andrews of Mahone Bay insisted on August 20, just before the Maritime Express pulled out for Valcartier with the first Nova Scotia volunteers on board: "If you want to find a staunch and solid son of the Empire, look down Lunenburg way. We know the value of British liberty. We are prepared to fight for it and that is the best test." The LaHave Chapter of the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE), organized in Bridgewater that September, sent thirty "housewives" (portable sewing kits) to the Lunenburg contingent at Valcartier, and Colonel Andrews had sent a telegram saying they were deeply grateful for the kind gift.
The recruitment officer in Lunenburg was Lieutenant Colonel Titus A. Mulock of the 75th Regiment, called "the War Lord of Lunenburg County" by the Progress-Enterprise on September 9. Through him and his officers the connection of the county with the battlegrounds of the Empire would be honourably maintained. Already a noble little band had gone forward, observed the paper. Not all the men were connected with the militia, but they had gone nevertheless. The 75th used to play an important part at camp drill when there was only mimic warfare; now that the real thing had come, "surely there would be no shirking."
Sam Hughes, minister of defence in Sir Robert Borden's Conservative government at Ottawa, had set up the camp at Valcartier in August 1914, having scrapped all prewar mobilization plans. Preferring citizen volunteers to professional soldiers, he encouraged militia from all over the country, including members of Lunenburg's 75th Regiment, to assemble there. Volunteers crowded in, many fearing they might not get overseas before the war was over. The Bridgewater Bulletin, the newspaper in Lunenburg County's largest town, on September 26, 1916, would have some kind words for "fighting Sir Sam," calling him "Canada's War Lord": his "wonderful success in enlistment will entitle him to the designation of 'the Kitchener of Canada.'" In his early sixties, the paper remarked, he had closely cropped white hair, but "the vigor of perfect manhood is manifest in every action ... of striking appearance and personality he is every inch a soldier; especially is this noticeable on the occasion of a review, when he sits his charger like a centaur." Not everyone was so enthusiastic about Sir Sam, who was ultimately removed from his post in December 1916 because of his erratic behaviour.
The First Contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), Canada's wartime army overseas, sailed from Quebec to Plymouth in October in a great armada of transport vessels, with more than thirty thousand men and about seven thousand horses. The majority of the men on board had been born in the United Kingdom. After many miserable months in southern England, in the rain and mud on Salisbury Plain, the troops crossed to Belgium in February 1915. There, they would face their baptism of fire in the Second Battle of Ypres, in which the Germans first used poison gas against the Allied lines.
Shortly after the First Contingent left for England, the Canadian government authorized the recruiting of a second division. Unlike the gathering at Valcartier, this time the men were trained at various locations across the country. They sailed to England in the spring of 1915 and completed their training at Shorncliffe on the coast of Kent. In September they joined the First Division in France to form the Canadian Corps.
The 25th Battalion, Nova Scotia Rifles, in the Second Division, was the first of the battalions to be raised entirely in Nova Scotia during the war. Mobilized at Halifax in the final months of 1914 and housed in the armoury and in tents on the Common, the battalion sailed to Plymouth on the Saxonia in May 1915 and crossed the channel to Boulogne in September. The necessary thousand men had come forward readily, and among them were volunteers from Lunenburg County. The Bulletin reported in its Lunenburg column on November 17, 1914, that the new soldiers had been conveyed to the station, behind the 75th Regiment band, in automobiles draped with flags. On their arrival there, Mayor J. Frank Hall and Rev. F. C. Ward-Whate of St. John's Anglican Church addressed them. The "feminine portion of the assemblage wept unrestrainedly, realizing the horrors of war and the fear that harm might befall the bright faces which on that occasion were smiling so unconcernedly." As a young soldier put it in Frances Itani's novel Tell, "We went off to war like children who'd been blindfolded for the occasion."
Pressure to enlist continued in the following months and it came from all sides and in many forms. In the Bridgewater Bulletin of May 18, 1915, a poem appeared, written for the paper by "a Bridgewater young lady":
Come, take a stand for your native land,
Come, with determined will;
Join with a genial sturdy band,
And drill, my boys, and drill.
O take a stand for your country now,
'Tis the time she needs you most,
Although you work with pen or plough Come, join the patriot host.
One of many patriotic evenings "in aid of the soldiers and sailors" had been held at the small community of Rose Bay in February 1915, according to the Progress-Enterprise on the seventeenth. The dramatic talent of nearby Riverport put on a farcical comedy in five acts called "Punkin Ridge." The Welsh singer Madame Lily Hambly-Hobbs, resident in Riverport at the time, sang the stirring war song "Land of Hope and Glory" in a way "to touch each British heart." Kenneth Creaser gave a splendid rendition of "King and Country" and everyone welcomed Hector MacGregor in "The Call of the Motherland." The "quiet unassuming postmaster" of Riverport, Daniel Myra, startled his fellow townsmen by his remarkable ability as a comedian. The concert was so successful that it played for three evenings to crowded houses. Indeed, patriotic concerts took place all over the county, including one in March at the Foresters Hall in Petite Riviere featuring talent from Dublin Shore; the star piece of the evening, six-year-old Lois Bell's rendering of the verses of "Tipperary," assisted by the full chorus in the refrain, "literally brought the house down."
Even the advertisers of the day got caught up in the spirit of the times. The Hubley Company of Bridgewater, in the Progress-Enterprise on August 12, 1914, announced a "Great War on Prices" in a "Special White Wear Sale for Ladies": "These be war times, when prices need watching. Every opportunity to save a dollar is now more than ever necessary." "Don't Let the War Scare You," declared Bridgewater's P. G. Corbin store on September 9; because the Rayner International Fur Company owned their foxes, there would be no wartime shortage. "THE BATTLE of prices is still on," maintained H. S. Hall of Bridgewater the same day; they had "flour, feeds, hay, etc., and always coal." And the pharmacy in Lunenburg assured everyone: "The War will increase the cost of Drugs and Medicines, but kinley's Drug Stores are fully equipped with large stocks on hand, and prices will be kept down to the very lowest." "These Are Hard-War(e) Times," said the Bates-Freeman Hardware Company of Bridgewater. And William A. Banks, eyesight specialist, claimed that you would need good glasses to be able "to read the War News and keep posted. ... We are certainly lucky to have the British fleet to protect us, otherwise it would only be a question of time when we would be used like the Belgians have been used." Throughout the war there were ads and posters for various wartime fundraising purposes, but these commercial advertisements based on military themes generally disappeared once it became apparent how awful the war was going to be.
And so began what the Springfield columnist in the Progress-Enterprise of September 2, 1914, had referred to as "the great broil across the sea." Many men from Lunenburg County would perish in one of the deadliest conflicts in human history. Many others would return home wounded in body and spirit. Lives around the world would be changed forever.
* * *
"Our Soldiers Gone," lamented the Bridgewater Bulletin on May 18, 1915. The whole town had turned out to give "their soldier boys," members of the Bridgewater detachment of the 40th Battalion, a rousing send-off. The men had been drilling there for the past six weeks or so and had become familiar figures on the streets. The town was dull without them. On Sundays, they had attended as a body each church in turn. A tremendous crowd gathered at the station to see the detachment entrain for Halifax en route for the training camp at Aldershot, near Kentville. One special treat had been a ride in an automobile provided by some of the town's better-off citizens. The soldiers had gone to the theatre and afterwards had been served ice cream by the girls of the Baptist Sunday school. As they paraded to the station, mingled feelings of pride and sorrow took possession of the onlookers, "pride because of the courage of the lads and sorrow to think that such promising and physically fit young men should be exposed to the bullets of an unscrupulous enemy."
Lunenburg County, then, shared the national "jubilation," the sense of euphoria that swept the country in the early days of the war. And yet, there was also apparently a quiet resistance, a reluctance to participate fully in the war effort, or at least a hesitation to join the ranks. There was a suspicion, especially among the press, that some were not as loyal as they ought to be and that others were not doing their bit as they should.
The editor of the Bulletin, on August 11, 1914, maintained he had heard that certain persons about town had been indulging in pro-Ger- man talk, sympathizing with the Germans and against the British. He warned that such talk would not be tolerated, and, if persisted in, "summary steps would be taken to prevent a recurrence." On October 6, in its Lunenburg column, the Bulletin commented on strange rumours of treasonable remarks uttered by one of Lunenburg's fishing skippers. Unless he changed the tenor of his conversation, the customs officials could refuse to clear him, "as he has showered the most abusive remarks on the British flag, one which he would be the first to run up were danger to threaten him. ... A much needed lesson will be taught to this and other persons by those of the old town who are loyal to king and country." A "citizen" in Mahone Bay on October 28 was incensed because a man "though born in little Mahone" had the nerve to "fly the stars and stripes as well as the French flag without our Union Jack at the top of the pole."
On November 17, the Bulletin claimed to have heard that there were some school teachers in the county who were pronounced German sympathizers. Any teacher not thoroughly patriotic and not inculcating the principles of British patriotism and British loyalty in their students should be "weeded out of this British country." A disloyal teacher could do harm to the nation by sowing seeds of sedition in the rising generation. "German sympathizers must get it into their heads that the British Empire, of which we are a component part, is at war with Germany because Germany forced the war on us, by violating Belgian neutrality. We have the uttermost contempt for those who were born and live under the British flag and who air pro-German sentiments, slyly or otherwise."
(Continues…)
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