The Great Halifax Explosion Page 5

  By the second week of October 1914, in the Flemish region of Belgium commonly called Flanders near the ancient walled city of Ypres, the gap between the trenches of the two sides had been reduced to a narrow corridor. It is one of the dreariest landscapes in Western Europe, a vast, sodden, gray pasture with few signs of life. The water table is so high that a hole dug just a few feet down rapidly fills with water, followed quickly by water rats, making the already ghastly business of trench warfare that much more miserable.

  The First Battle of Ypres cost the Allied forces some 150,000 dead and wounded in exchange for a grand total of 500 yards of worthless land. The Second Battle of Ypres, in April 1915, turned even worse after the Germans introduced gas warfare. By mid-April 1915, the Germans had delivered 6,000 cylinders containing 160 tons of chlorine, which, when inhaled, stimulates overproduction of fluid in the lungs and leads to drowning, even while its victim is standing on dry land.

  April 22, 1915, was a sunny day with a light breeze running from east to west—perfect conditions for the Germans to test their new weapon. They selected as their first guinea pigs a few French and Algerian divisions, who were dug in near the Canadian Expeditionary Force, which included the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI), the first Imperial division to reach the Western Front. The Germans roused the Allies with a barrage of traditional artillery fire at 5:00 p.m. When the Allies peered over the tops of their trenches, they saw grayish-green clouds of chlorine drifting from the middle of the battlefield toward their lines. Having no idea what this strangely colored air was, or how to protect themselves from its devastating effects, they inhaled deeply. Within seconds, thousands of Allied soldiers were stumbling about, coughing, clutching their throats, and turning blue in the face before falling in the muddy fields and trenches, dead.

  The Canadians, just far enough away to avoid the brunt of the gas attack, took over the French and Algerian positions to mount a dogged defense. Their efforts kept the Germans from advancing, but modern warfare had changed forever that day.

  The results were perhaps best described two years later by a twenty-five-year-old British soldier named Wilfred Owen in his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” (“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”), a line that comes from the great Roman poet Horace. In his poem, Owen invites the reader to walk behind the wagon into which they flung the gas victims “And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, / His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,” and “hear at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs”; the reader then might not so eagerly tell the young, “Dulce et decorum est.”

  As historian John Keegan writes, the second battle at Ypres “must have been as near to hell as this earth can show.”

  Soldiers quickly learned that if they couldn’t get to their gas masks in time, they could urinate onto handkerchiefs and cover their noses with them. This worked surprisingly well, and was certainly preferable to inhaling the deadly gas.

  Despite the Germans’ great success with their new weapon, more than two weeks after its introduction, the Canadian line still held—but even that was a mixed blessing. Major John McCrae, a forty-one-year-old physician, artist, and poet from Guelph, Ontario, wrote to his mother, “For seventeen days and seventeen nights none of us have had our clothes off, nor our boots even, except occasionally. In all that time while I was awake, gunfire and rifle fire never ceased for sixty seconds. . . . And behind it all was the constant background of the sights of the dead, the wounded, the maimed, and a terrible anxiety lest the line should give way.”

  On May 2, 1915, ten days after the Germans fired the first gas shells, they killed McCrae’s good friend Alexis Helmer. When McCrae buried Helmer, he noticed how quickly the poppies came up around Helmer’s grave, and those of others of his countrymen. While sitting in the back of an ambulance the next day, McCrae composed one of the world’s best-known war poems, “In Flanders Fields.”

  In Flanders fields the poppies blow

  Between the crosses, row on row

  . . .

  We are the Dead; short days ago

  We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

  Loved and were loved, and now we lie

  In Flanders fields.

  But where Wilfred Owen wrote his poem to deter the next wave of recruits, McCrae wrote his final stanza to rally them.

  Take up our quarrel with the foe!

  To you from failing hands we throw

  The torch; be yours to hold it high!

  If ye break faith with us who die

  We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

  In Flanders fields.

  McCrae was not satisfied with it, but a friend convinced him to send it out to the Spectator, which turned it down, and then Punch, which picked it up. The last stanza was quickly employed in Allied campaigns for war bonds, recruiting posters, and pro-war political candidates, right up to Canada’s crucial election of 1917.

  The Germans’ use of lethal gas in the Second Battle of Ypres so outraged Winston Churchill, then Britain’s secretary of war, that he countered by authorizing the production of British gas shells. When the Red Cross protested that the strategy was inhumane, Churchill coolly replied, “So is the rest of war.”

  Gas warfare was a horrible business, but the people back in Halifax didn’t have much sense of it. The German U-boats, however, put fear into their hearts, because even civilians were fair game. This fear peaked on May 7, 1915, just two weeks after the first Allied troops had been gassed, when a German U-boat sank the Lusitania. The Great War seemed to be creeping closer to home each month.

  Joseph Ernest Barss, the great-grandson of Nova Scotia’s greatest privateer, Joseph Barss Jr., didn’t have to wait for a clever recruitment poster to enlist.

  Barss was born in India in 1892 to Baptist missionaries. His mother, Libby, almost died in childbirth, and would have no more children. Libby and her husband, John Howard Barss, who went by Howard, named their son Joseph after the famed privateer, and Ernest in honor of his uncle, Ernest DeWitt Burton, who had mentored Howard at Newton Theological Institution near Boston and would become the third president of the University of Chicago.

  When Libby was healthy enough to travel after giving birth, the family returned to Wolfville, Nova Scotia, a picturesque town about 60 miles across the province from Halifax and just 16 miles from Windsor, the birthplace of hockey. In Wolfville, the Barss name went a long way. After Howard’s father, the son of the privateer, had made his fortune as a shipbuilder and banker, he built a big house for his growing family and served as superintendent for both the town’s Baptist church and Acadia University, which was quickly becoming one of Canada’s top undergraduate colleges. Most remarkable for a family living in rural Nova Scotia in the mid-1800s, when only a small percentage of North Americans graduated from high school, Barss’s sons all earned college degrees, including Howard, who ministered to Wolfville’s Baptist congregation while running a grocery store and fish market on Main Street.

  Howard called his son by his middle name, Ernest, and taught him how to read newspaper headlines when he was just four years old. The precocious Ernest soon became the store’s best salesman, going door-to-door to take orders. Because Howard was no sportsman, Ernest learned to play hockey, football, and baseball and how to box from others, including a former Canadian champion boxer. Ernest starred in all four sports at Acadia University, despite standing only five foot eight.

  “He was sort of a stocky fella, big thighs, who carried himself very straight,” recalled his son, Dr. Joseph Andrew Barss, in a 1999 interview. “A tough guy. His ankles were so strong, he didn’t have to lace up his skates.”

  Ernest graduated cum laude in 1912 at the ripe age of nineteen, and accepted a position in Montreal with the Canadian Railroad supplying dining cars. It paid a handsome $45 a month, with free transportation and a week’s vacation for his twenty-first birthday—practically unheard of back then—but he soon jumped at an offer f
rom the Imperial Oil Company for $65 a month. When the Great War broke out in 1914, the district manager transferred, so the twenty-two-year-old Barss took his position at $1,500 a year, a great salary for someone so young, with the promise of more promotions and raises ahead.

  In Montreal, Barss led quite an active social life, squiring a few women around town each week, with a knack for dating women who would help him learn foreign languages, music, and other subjects. After several dates with his French tutor, Marie, a petite French-Canadian girl “of good family,” her father answered the door the next time Barss called and directed him to sit down in his library for a private conversation.

  “I notice you have been here several times,” her father said. “What are your intentions concerning my daughter?”

  “Strictly honorable,” Ernest replied, “but not matrimonial.”

  “Then I’ll thank you not to call again. You are wasting my daughter’s time.”

  Life was good for Barss in just about every way we typically measure for a young man: career, finances, and fun. Someone who could read headlines at four, become a skilled salesman by twelve, graduate cum laude from college with a handful of varsity letters in multiple sports at nineteen, and then leave his small town to embark on a rising career in the country’s biggest city is not a person who lacks ambition, talent, or charisma. But Barss’s letters give the unmistakable sense that his current lifestyle, appealing as it was, did not leave him fulfilled. He came from a line of people who had something else in spades: a profound sense of purpose. His direct ancestors attacked enemy ships on the high seas, built fortunes in business, started universities, and went on missionary trips to India. And that essential piece was something the good life Ernest Barss was living in Montreal did not provide.

  Every Saturday in warm weather, Barss and three friends met at their Montreal rowing club on the St. Lawrence River to pull a four-man shell, then retired to the boathouse for a smoke, a few beers, a card game, and some casual conversation. But on one spring Saturday in 1915, a crewmate opened the paper to see a story about the Second Battle of Ypres, including an account of the Germans’ gas attack on the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. When he read out loud some of the PPCLI’s 461 names on the casualty list—out of an original company of 1,068—including many friends of theirs from Montreal, the group was “filled with indignation.” The four young men decided to enlist right then and there.

  When Barss blithely wrote his parents about his spontaneous decision, they immediately made plans to travel to Montreal to talk him out of it. He was their only child, after all, for whom they had sacrificed much; but they could not get to Montreal in time. On April 28, 1915, two days before Ernest was officially inducted, he wrote:

  “Dear Father and Mother:

  “Well, this is probably the last letter you will receive from here. It is all settled and I am to report Friday morning for duty.”

  Barss would start two weeks of training at Niagara-on-the-Lake, getting paid $1.10 a day, a fraction of what he had been making in Montreal. He mentioned a series of dates with women named Bertha, Eileen, and Marie (suggesting that he hadn’t listened to her father’s admonition) and visits with various buddies. “I didn’t know how many friends I had till I said I was going away,” he wrote. “It certainly feels good to know it though.”

  He asked his parents to send him some nice underwear and undershirts with long sleeves to make his wool uniform more comfortable to wear, then closed by saying, “I think of you a great deal. . . . So long. Much love to you both. —Ernest.”

  On Friday, April 30, just eight days after the Germans hit the PPCLI with gas, Ernest Barss officially joined the famed Canadian unit himself, which had earned a reputation for valiant fighting and heavy losses. In Ernest’s next letter to his parents, dated Monday night, May 13, 1915, he brags about this fact, clearly unaware of how it would be received by two aging parents terrified that their only child was marching toward his death.

  The reason the PPCLI was in such need of reinforcements, he explained, was because “there are only 53 left out of 1500. So we have some reputation to keep up. I suppose you have read of the fine work done by the Canadians at St. Julien & Ypres. I tell you we can certainly make good when called upon. Of course, as you have probably noted, I am full of this thing. So are the other fellows.”

  He later added, “I suppose you have read by this time that the 13th & 14th battalions, both from Montreal, have been wiped out. The result is that the 1st McGill [University] company, which I was just too late to join, is going across on the 17th. I almost wish I was going with them for all my friends are in that unit.”

  He finished by describing their days, which started with reveille at 6:00 a.m. and could go as late as 11:30 p.m. with night maneuvers. “I passed my physical exam in fine shape,” he told them. “The doctor said I was in perfect physical condition. I will let you know at once if we get sudden orders for a move. Much love to both of you. —Ernest.”

  Between that letter and his next, written three months later, Ernest’s parents visited him in Montreal, then went home to Wolfville to worry that they’d never see their only child again. Nova Scotians knew more about war than most. They listened to the sailors and soldiers tell their stories in the taverns, cheered their ships going off to fight Britain’s far-flung battles, and saw thousands of them come back maimed, traumatized, or dead. But their knowledge was still secondhand, their view from a distance. Aside from the occasional neighbor’s son who was serving, they got most of their information from the newspapers like everyone else in North America, including dispatches Barss would send back to the Wolfville paper, but these naturally left most of the worst news out.

  But in Barss’s letters we can see a surprisingly candid account of his journey, including his bravado. On Tuesday, August 18, 1915, Barss sent his first letter from the Shorncliffe Camp in England. He mentioned that he’d taken the examination to become a machine gunner, one of the most dangerous jobs the Great War offered. While the position provided a bit of distance behind the front lines, and the ability to mete out punishment instead of just absorbing it, for this reason the machine gunner was a very appealing target for the Germans, and plenty close enough for their skilled snipers to hit. This position earned Barss a patch on his shoulder emblazoned with “MG,” for machine gunner, which was also known as a “suicide patch,” because if the Germans saw it on a captured soldier, they were much more likely to shoot him than to imprison him.

  On Sunday night, August 23, 1915, Barss gave his parents an update, with his brio still in full bloom. His unit had just gotten word that they’d be leaving camp at 2:00 a.m. for France, joining a flotilla of 12,000 Allied troops. Having just heard the chaplain general of the British Forces deliver a sermon on the Kingdom of Heaven, Barss sounded both philosophical and fearless.

  “Strange to say,” he wrote, “I am perfectly content to take whatever fortune has in store for me with a brave heart and to do whatever lies before me in the way of duty as well as I can no matter the cost. . . . May God bless us all and find it in his mercy to bring us all together again safe & well is my earnest prayer. If he sees fit to do otherwise whatever he does is Right. With lots and lots of love to you both. —Ernest.”

  Barss’s bravery and equanimity would soon be tested when the prospect of being killed in the trenches shifted from a far-off hypothetical to a cold reality he would face every day. But no one could claim his new life lacked purpose.

  Chapter 6

  Halifax at War

  1914–1917

  Halifax sent 6,000 sons to the Great War, roughly a quarter of its male population. It seemed almost every home had sent a brother, a husband, a father, or a son. The Great War drained the town of its able-bodied young men and left behind women, boys, girls, and men too old or infirm to fight.

  Hospital ships brought wounded soldiers to Halifax weekly, where they were set up in the Pine Hill Military Convalescent Home, or in the newly fin
ished Camp Hill Hospital with 240 beds for war casualties, built right next to the Citadel. The locals had sent the soldiers off with bands blasting and crowds cheering, but they returned to silence. Halifax’s five daily newspapers printed lists titled “KILLED IN ACTION.” Black armbands and patches were common sights on the streets of Halifax, and black-edged writing paper, black-bordered handkerchiefs, and black clothing, all indicating their owners had lost a son overseas, sold well.

  Halifax’s citizens were eager to contribute to the cause just about any way they could. Schoolgirls knitted balaclava helmets and slipped notes of encouragement inside them. They signed up to become Junior Red Cross members, learned first aid, and rolled thousands of bandages for the medics overseas. Adults joined the Red Cross and the Imperial Order of Daughters of the Empire. People from the upper class, who had relied on hired help for most of their domestic needs, volunteered to serve tea and cook in the canteens.

  The medical school at Halifax’s Dalhousie University had been whittled down to ten doctors-in-training, including a pioneering woman named Florence J. Murray. Born in 1894 and raised in rural Nova Scotia, she recalled, “The only careers I knew of open to girls were teaching, nursing, and stenography, none of which appealed to me. I wanted to do something different.”

  When she decided to become a doctor, she had to overcome a few obstacles, including her rudimentary education in a one-room schoolhouse that served students in ten grades at once. Her father, a Presbyterian minister, supported a wife and four children on $750 a year, and the medical profession wasn’t eagerly welcoming women, with McGill University in Montreal, one of the nation’s best, openly refusing to admit women to its medical school. With hard work and her family’s support, however, Murray got into the medical school at Dalhousie University, which had been founded a few years after the War of 1812 as a progressive institution. She enrolled in 1914 only to watch her classmates and instructors, including Dr. John Stewart, Lister’s protege, join her two brothers in the European theater.