My grandfather got flu in January 1915 and was hospitalized for it. "Mild attack" says the note. But there may be more to this than the obvious.
It seems that the strain of flu that hit the world like a sledgehammer in 1918 might have been appearing in a lesser form in 1915. (Link)
At present, no virologist can demonstrate that the ancestor of the causative H1N1 virus was the product of wartime conditions, though recent viral archaeology and reconstruction have suggested that it emerged between 1915 and 1917, i.e. during World War I.
If so, this might have helped Alec in 1918 when he was very weak after 3 years in France and had been gassed. He might have gained some immunity back in 1915.
The war records are quite skimpy really but they offer all sorts of hints. I looked up Lavington Manor, that had been used as the hospital for the Canadians on Salisbury Plain - to discover that not only does it still exist but is the boarding house for a school, Dauntseys, that looks rather special.
The man pointing on the left is Dr Fritz Haber, a Nobel winning scientist, who - as well as discovering how to make artificial nitrates and so fertilizer - was the primary advocate of using poison gas.
The use of gas was to change the very nature of war in 1915. Until then, war was seen by all as being about personal courage and honour. The infantry all believed that dash and courage was the key. The British Artillery saw its role as to be fully exposed in the front in the field and firing directly at the enemy who would be in sight.
Honour required that men fought each other face to face.
The use of gas in the upcoming second battle of Ypres ended this idea of personal honour. War became "total" and industrial. The human element was removed. Flame throwers and mass indirect bombardment became the new norms.
There were to be no limits.
The Canadians were going to be amongst the very first troops to live through this change. For them, Ypres in 1915 was going to be what the Somme was to the Kitchener divisions in 1916.
But for now, in January 1915, the plan was for the Canadians to begin the war in a quiet sector. They would arrive in early February.
But as the staff was organizing to add the Canadians into this now quiet sector, Haber was working to change all of this. We have already seen how important Ypres was. If Ypres was taken, Germany could win the war in 1915.
Haber was convinced that the use of gas was going to give his country the edge and enable them to break the deadlock and take Ypres. In January, he was using the full power as his position as Germany's greatest living practical scientist to get the Army to agree.
At first the high command pushed back.
Here is how Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria saw it
When Dr. Haber and General von Falkenhayn stayed with me before the gas trials were carried out in Flanders for the first time I didn't conceal my feelings from them. I consider this new weapon is not only distasteful, but envisage the potential danger from it for our own troops; if the gas is successful in the attack then the enemy will doubtless start to use the same method against us, and with even greater success. In Flanders, as in northern France, the wind seldom blows from the south-east. Predominantly the wind blows west-east, thereby giving ten times more opportunity for the enemy to blow gas towards our positions instead of us blowing it towards him.
In response to my concern I was told by Dr. Haber that our enemy's chemical industry was not capable of producing gas on that large a scale. I replied that this may well be the case at present, but that I doubted it would remain so.”
It was decided to go ahead though. Haber won.
The map above shows us how the final plan was devised.
It was a stroke of fate that, days before the planned attack, the Canadians replaced units in this key position on the right of the main attack.
This was the last time in the Great War where courage made the difference and it was the Canadians, with over 6,000 casualties out of the 18,000, who held the line.
There is massive irony to add.
Haber represents a paradox for science. A patriot, he could only see that the use of gas might be a war winner. Is this not the trap that confronts many scientists? Just because you can does not mean that you should.
As the Crown Prince feared, the British did respond only months later at Loos. Gas became the new normal for everyone. The playing field was levelled but at a more terrible level.
Haber paid a terrible price.
His wife, Clara, deeply ashamed and troubled by this decision and her own part in the research, killed herself in the fall of 1915.
Many scientists in 1919, when Haber received his Nobel, shunned him.
After the rise of Hitler, no credit was given to Haber for his work and his conversion to Christianity was no protection. Many of his family died in the holocaust. Haber's lab had also created Zyklon B, the gas used at Auschwitz. All his patriotism was for nothing.
And the final irony was that his second wife and children were given asylum in England the home of his enemies in 1915.
Haber remains for me a truly tragic figure.
And finally, Haber inadvertently might have saved my grandfather's life. On September 7th 1918, Alec and his entire battery were gassed. He survived and missed the last 2 months of the war when the Canadians had very high casualties.
This first group of 100 horses were as well known to the men as the men were to each other. They were as unsued to war as the men.
This classic painting shows the grief of the loss at this early stage in the war. Each death of a man or a horse had the power then of shocking people.
But as the war went on, death lost its ability to shock and became commonplace.
Men lived, slept and faught next to other dead men. The trenches that the Canadians first used were like this. They were full of dead Frenchmen and Germans who had not been moved for months. Agar Adamson's diary (PPCLI) tells of having to dig a new trench through a wall of dead bodies.
So it did not take men long to pass by dead horses without a second glance.
But the bond was still there with individuals.
This was especially true in the artillery where life with the horses was everything.
As the war went on horses also became more valuable than men.
The value of horses was known to all. In 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele, men at the front understood that "at this stage to lose a horse was worse than losing a man because after all, men were replaceable while horses weren't." For Britain, horses were considered so valuable that if a soldier's horse was killed or died he was required to cut off a hoof and bring it back to his commanding officer to prove that the two had not simply become separated.
My uncle tells me that his father, Alec, had a large collection of hooves. All from horses that he had lost.
Only a handful of the horses that came from Canada ever returned home. It is not even clear that Bonfire ever made it back.
I know of only one horse who did - Morning Glory. She died in Canada and is buried near where I live now.
There are few graves for any of the millions of horses and mules that perished.
This is the Cloth Hall in Ypres at the end of 1914. Ypres was where the Canadians lost their innocence. It was where the war took a new turn in horror.
Here it is at the end of the war. Still in allied hands but without one building standing.
Why was Ypres so important? Why did the Canadians play such a role here early in 1915 in the 2nd battle of Ypres and later at the 3rd battle of Ypres?
This map shows why Ypres was so important. In the closing months of 1914. The Germans had almost reached Paris but had been turned back on the Marne. Each side tried to outflank the other from the North. This process lead to the establishment of trenches that ran from the Channel in the North to the Swiss border in the south.
This image using Google Earth gives us a sense of how close it is to the sea.
If the British lost Ypres, the whole trench system could be rolled up and the BEF could be blocked from thre ports.
The "Race for the Sea" ended in November 1914 at Ypres. Here it was finally revealed to the Germans that courage was not enough. That faced with rapid fire from trained men with rifles, machine guns and artillery firing high explosive flesh and blood had no chance.
By January 1915, both armies were now spent. (Source for quote)
The losses were staggering. From October 12 to November 12, 1914 the British sustained 56,000 casualties, including 8,000 killed, 30,000 wounded, and 18,000 missing (of whom perhaps a third or more were also killed). While it’s harder to find precise numbers for the other combatants, the Germans suffered around 135,000 casualties across all categories, the French 85,000, and the Belgians 22,000. Assuming that one fourth of the casualties were fatal, as in the case of the British, it seems safe to assume that around 75,000 soldiers lost their lives at the First Battle of Ypres.
One soldier, Private Donald Fraser, explained it this way: "one [a man] was not a soldier unless he had served on the Ypres front." Less than half of the 160,000 men the BEF sent to France came out of the encounter unscathed. After November 1914, the British would come to call these trenches 'the Salient" and would remain as Ypres' guardians for the rest of the war.
The BEF had to be reinforced. The First Division of the Canadians would be amongst the first reinforcements. They will arrive in February 1915. At the same time the Territorials and reservists from the British army also arrived. It would take until the summer of 1916 for the new Kitchener army to arrive. By which time the Canadians would be a Corps.
In spite of the losses, hopes on the allied side were still high.
It looked in January that the Allies had nearly won the war. They had pushed the Germans back a long way. They had held the Ypres salient. To many it needed just one more push. .
But these hopes were misplaced. The Germans held all the best defensive ground. At at Ypres they held 3 sides of a box.
The Germans were on high ground and could fire into the shallow trenches of the new front. They could see everything and everyone. The Salient was a death trap.
This is the infamous Hellfire Corner. The road feeding the front from Ypres town. Defenders were exposed all the time. The screens on the left were an attempt to shield people on the road. You can see that the gunners are going at a gallop here.
The British Army had settled into shallow and makeshift trenches. The thinking was that they were not going to be here for long. Here is what life looked like then.
Or this:
Strewn in front of the trenches were the dead of the battles in the autumn. It was too dangerous to move them.
This dead Frenchman lay exposed for a year.
So this was the place where the Canadians would find themselves in 6 weeks time. This what what any oberserver could see.
But things were going on that no one could see.
Back in Germany, a world renowned scientist who had invented nitrogen fertilizer, was working on a secret plan to give the Germans the edge and enable them to break through here at Ypres.
This print by the Ilustrated Londom News shows British wounded early in the war. Nearly 90,000 of the BEF had been wounded or killed from August to December 1914. This kind of industrial war would demand an industrial approach to treating casualties.
Canada had already sent out a medical unit - see appendix - but it was not going to be enough. In Montreal a few key men were working on how to organize the best known of the new units, No. 3 Canadian General Hospital (McGill). This was to be the unit that John McCrae (A McGill man) was to spend the war.
Henry Birkett had retired from the CAMC in 1910. He rejoined the Medical Corps in 1914 as a Lieut Colonel and was in charge of the Montreal area. He canvassed his colleagues and friends in Montreal and learned that there was support to organize an expeditionary hospital to support the CEF in France. In December 1914, he got the green light from Principal Peterson. Uncle Montagu was on the board and his support was also key. The plan was sent to General Hughes, Minister of Militia and Defence the architect of the CEF, who passed it onto Sir Alfred Keogh, the DG of the British Army Medical Services. The plan was approved on December 15, 1914. (Source)
Birkett would command. Uncle Montagu's best friend, Lt Col Henry Brydges Yates would be 2nd in command. (Yates' son C Montagu Yates was Uncle Montagu's godson.) Lt Col John McCrae would be in charge of medicine. Both McCrae and Yates would die of pneumonia in this service. Mrs Alice Mary 'Bunting" Yates was the Regent of the IODE of Montreal and would later be involved with Aunt Marguerite in establishing the IODE hospital in London.
The staff were drawn from the Royal Victoria Hospital and the Montreal General and from McGill that had one of the finest medical schols in the world at that time.
The Royal Vic - to be closed in 2015 - was then the pre-eminent hospital in Canada and is adjacent to the McGill campus.
Uncle Montagu was Chairman of the board in 1914.
Uncle Montagu's house Ravenscrag is next door on the left hand side of the picture of the Royal Vic. It is now the Pyschiatric wing of the Vic. McGill would be just south of the hospital where the photographer would be standing.
The Montreal General hospital, that will also close in 2015, was then much smaller, 72 beds, and in a different location to the one today - Dorchester and St Dominique streets. Alec's father was on the board in 1914.
The orginal plan was to have a unit of 520 beds - much larger than the General. In January of 1915, Birkett was told that the unit would be doubled in size making this the largest Canadian hospital ever. His team rose to the challenge and recruited 35 officers, 73 nurses and 205 other ranks.
Meanwhile, Aunt Martha Allan, aged 20 the daughter of Uncle Montagu and Aunt Marguerite, was trying find her way to join this unit. It appears that she had a good try at joining the #3 for in the diary of Clare Gass - who was a senior nurse and who recorded the entire experience there is a note of sensation about Martha's appearance before sailing and allusions of a scandal.
But she was both too young and she was untrained. In spite of all his pull, only fully trained nurses would sail.
Foiled, Martha joined the VAD and hatched a plan with another old friend of the family, Dr John Lancelot Todd to get over to Europe. Her plan was to buy her own ambulance and get in the war that way. We will see that her plans changed after the sinking of the Lusitania.
Dr Todd was also to join Number 3. Later, he would go to London and work with Uncle Montagu Allan to set up the first ever Canadian war pensions scheme, the early version of Veterans Affairs.
Todd was also a friend of John McCrae and had given him Bonfire, his horse. Montreal was a very small world!
Aunt Marguerite was also planning to go back to England and work to help the men. She was initially going to work with her friend Julia, Lady Drummond, in the Red Cross. Later in the war she managed a convalescent hospital for Canadian Officers in Sidmouth, Moore Court. This was a Red Cross operation under the aegis of Julia, Lady Drummond and was started by Mrs Yates and was then run by Aunt Marguerite. Emily Yates and Martha Allan helped their mothers there. Both Alec and his brother Hartland would end the war there as patients before Alec was shipped home on the Aquitania. So the war ended with the survivors in the family holding on to each other.
It would take until the end of April to get everything ready. The Hospital would leave on May 6 from Montreal on a troopship. The Metagama. You can see some of the nurses on the rail top right in this picture taken as they set sail. (Picture Source)
Martha would leave earlier, April 21, on the Adriatic accompanied by Dr Todd and his wife, Alice. Aunt Marguerite would leave on May 1st on the Lusitania.
April and May 1915 were to be the months when everything changed for my family.
Next - The war so far for Britain - Setting the stage for the Canadians to enter the war proper. Then - More on the horses that went with them. Then - Gas an attempt to break the defence. In February, the First Contingent land in France and we shift gears as they get ready for their baptism in April.
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