Vimy: The Battle and the Legend by Tim Cook

Author:Tim Cook [Cook, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780735233164
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2017-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

A wartime image of Sir Arthur Currie, the final commander of the Canadian Corps.

In March 1919, Sir Sam Hughes, the misguided and angry old warhorse who had been cast from Borden’s cabinet for his unstable behaviour, stood in the House of Commons and accused Currie of being a murderer of his men during the Hundred Days campaign—especially in his ordering of the capture of Mons on November 11, 1918. It was a shocking charge. And while many stepped up to Currie’s defence, the government did not, fearful of becoming embroiled in the controversy and unsure about the merits of Hughes’s attack. Currie was exhausted from the war, suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder, and he offered a poor defence of his war record.56 The charges lay heavily, and once made, they were hard to refute. How many casualties were too many in industrial warfare? For those Canadians who wanted answers for the deaths of loved ones, or to blame someone for their loss, Currie was an easy target. The government of the day accorded him no special honours, even as other nations fêted their senior generals with titles and cash gifts. Soon thereafter, Currie exited the military to become principal of McGill University in 1920. He was a resounding success as principal and became one of the country’s most distinguished figures. Yet for some Canadians, the “butcher” had slunk from his carnage to take up a cozy university appointment.

On June 13, 1927, a small-town Conservative paper, the Evening Guide of Port Hope, Ontario, published a scathing editorial repeating the substance of Hughes’s charges in 1919. Currie was portrayed as a callous killer for ordering the attack on Mons on the last day of the war, which was “a shocking useless waste of human life.”57 Currie had lived with these ghosts and the unanswered charges for nearly a decade, and he struck back against the paper, hoping to put an end to the rumours. He sued for libel of character, and the court trial in Cobourg lasted sixteen days, from mid-April 1928 to early May.

The trial was among the most controversial cases ever held in a Canadian court, and Currie’s reputation hinged on a victory. If he lost, he would be destroyed. Moreover, the memory of the Great War would forever be cast as a blight on Canadian history—a conflagration in which young boys had been murdered by their general. The newspaper’s defence team tried to marshal evidence to show Currie’s guilt, but the records did not reveal what they had hoped—callous orders or even significant losses on November 11. The war was refought in the courtroom, and when Currie took the stand he was lashed by the defence, who questioned his every decision. Though Currie suffered under the onslaught, he was backed by almost all of the surviving officer corps, hundreds of whom offered to testify on his behalf. Currie’s health was compromised during the trial, but the verdict came down in his favour—awarding $500 in damages, although not the $50,000 he asked for.

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