The Great Halifax Explosion Read online

  “We students felt that since our brothers, cousins, and classmates were fighting and dying in the trenches in France,” she wrote, “this was no time for dances or other fun. Most spare time was given to Red Cross work, making and folding dressings and bandages and preparing and sending socks, food, and chocolate to the boys overseas.”

  When Halifax needed her, Florence J. Murray would contribute more than chocolates.

  Most Haligonians thought less about the trenches overseas than the daily bustle of their resurgent town. Halifax’s renaissance had started a few years before the Great War with more funding for public works, progress on women’s suffrage and workman’s compensation, and a general move toward modernization. But once Great Britain declared war, Halifax roared liked the old days.

  The city’s population surged by a third, to an estimated 60,000—and even that figure was probably low, because thousands of workers, soldiers, sailors, and spouses came into the city every day without being recorded. On Barrington Street in Richmond, just above the busy piers and the Acadia Sugar Refinery, young wives with young children from across Canada moved into newly built low-rent row houses, waiting for their husbands to return.

  Halifax was not only Canada’s war base but also one of the busiest ports in the world. It served as the conduit for meat and grain from the prairies, lumber from the mountains, and men from the West Indies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, eventually, the United States. Halifax was the British Empire’s lifeline for virtually all the supplies it needed to win, and that included explosives, which arrived from plants across New England in unmarked ships and trains.

  Haligonians could watch all these resources run through their railyards to the ports and out to sea from Fort Needham, which had been converted to a park atop the slope of Richmond; from the Richmond’s neighborhood homes, which often featured bay windows overlooking the Narrows; or from Citadel Hill, which lorded over the entire harbor. From those vantage points, locals could watch food, clothing, munitions, and thousands of men come in by train and leave by ship every day, while casualties were quietly brought into the city at night so as not to alarm the locals with the horrible toll the war was actually taking.

  Although Halifax had always profited from war, the Great War was particularly good for business. In 1913, Halifax shipped a total of 2 million tons of goods. By 1917 that figure had multiplied more than eight times, to a stunning 17 million tons. From 1915 to 1916 alone, exports quadrupled, and they almost doubled again the next year. This was all the more impressive because during the Great War, Halifax Harbour opened every morning and closed early every evening, when the two large metal gates were drawn across the harbor, limiting shipping activity to about ten hours a day.

  Halifax was more than a spigot for goods going overseas. As the area grew, so did its farming and manufacturing sectors, with local merchants fielding orders for a thousand dozen eggs, locally made flamethrowers, and the iconic “Doughboy” helmet, which looked something like a lampshade. There was a reason for that: Halifax’s Willis & Bates specialized in stamping metal to make lamps, one of which looked just like the helmet they mass-produced for the Allies. The economy’s sudden acceleration brought everything to life, even smaller, quieter Dartmouth across the harbor, whose businesses produced rope, iron, steel, sugar, oil, and, of course, beer in unprecedented quantities that still barely kept up with the spike in demand, both from the ships and the city.

  Add it all up, and the area’s exports skyrocketed from $19 million in 1916 to $142 million in 1917. Life was good in Halifax.

  Before the war, Halifax already had neighborhoods of Irish Catholics in Richmond, blacks just a few blocks north in Africville, and the Mi’kmaw people across the Narrows in Turtle Grove, but the harbor was still a largely white, English-speaking area. By 1917, however, Halifax teemed with European and North American soldiers and workers of virtually every stripe. Those who couldn’t be readily identified by their uniforms could be distinguished by their accents, if they could speak English at all.

  Neighborhoods of Italians, Galicians from northwestern Spain, Russians hired by railway contractors, Greek fruit sellers, and everyone else who thought they could do better in Halifax during the war quickly formed. The town’s small Jewish community experienced a sudden influx, while Chinese laundries and restaurants gave rise to Halifax’s Chinese Quarter on Granville Street.

  The war might have been fought thousands of miles away, but its impact on Halifax was obvious to everyone who lived there. The wartime prosperity created a dramatic increase in automobiles on the streets, naturally led by the military. In 1914, local troops were transported entirely by horse. Four years later, the stables had been completely replaced by “motors,” as people called them. Likewise, civilian cars were a rarity in 1914, but by 1918 they had begun crowding the town’s narrow streets. The potentially dangerous mix of horses and motors on a grid laid out for horse and buggy traffic more than a century ago required the creation of a new position: the traffic cop.

  If you weren’t heading to the trenches or worried about someone who was, it was a golden time to live and work in Halifax. When workers arrived from all over the world, they often spent a bit of their income on the town before sending the rest back home. In the pubs and speakeasies, women’s skirts rose higher by the year, and “the lavish use of powder, rouge, and lip paint,” wrote historian Thomas H. Raddall, who grew up in Halifax during the Great War, “hitherto confined to ladies of the demimonde, actresses, and society girls in search of publicity, became the preoccupation of every typist and shop girl in the city.”

  When fresh recruits got to Halifax, they frequently made a beeline for any place that sold alcohol, where they met soldiers who had been recently discharged, were on leave, or were about to head back to the trenches. They told the recruits stories so horrifying that they might have been tempted to think they were exaggerating. The experienced soldiers knew the average infantryman lasted only three months before getting wounded or killed, so they were determined to make the most of their time on the safe side of the Atlantic. Their hard-earned fatalism fostered a devil-may-care disposition and all the elements that came with it, including scores of prostitutes from across Canada and bootleggers so fearless that they set up shop in the downtown YMCA—which was probably not what the YMCA’s benefactor, Titanic victim George Wright, had had in mind when he wrote his will. During the war years, Halifax experienced a spike in venereal disease and out-of-wedlock births. Local orphanages had to expand.

  Despite the daily dread that the ships bringing back the wounded and the dead would include a loved one, Halifax remained a fiercely patriotic town, riding a wartime economy and convinced that its best years were still ahead. The Haligonians were also largely unaware of what was really happening in the trenches of Europe.

  So, too, was Ernest Barss. But that was about to change.

  Chapter 7

  Life and Death on the Western Front

  1915–1916

  On September 16, 1915, Ernest Barss wrote his first letter to his parents from France, though we’re not certain where he was at the time because censors redacted it. He scratched it out underneath a tree behind an old chateau where they had been billeted, and he had not seen combat yet, but he suspected he would soon. After finishing a 15-mile march the day before, his tone started to shift subtly from the unbridled enthusiasm of the fresh recruit training in England.

  “I tell you it was no joke either,” he wrote them. “I didn’t know whether I should be able to stick it out or not. However, I did and brought my entire section in with me.”

  They were still well behind the front lines, hearing only the “occasional boom from one of the big guns. We haven’t the slightest idea where we are going from here.”

  After wishing “Lots and lots of love to you both,” he added this postscript: “Don’t forget to send me a couple of pairs of socks. Also some cigarettes as they are very hard to obtain out here. Oh yes, also some foot pow
der as well.”

  Nine days later, on September 25, 1915, Barss wrote his parents again, but this note was rushed and sloppy. He told them his unit was about to make its first trip to the trenches, taking over a section from the French troops on the far right of the long line. After a 5-mile march and an overnight trip on a train with no seats, they settled in for their first breakfast of “bully beef”—tinned meat—tea, and hardtack, the same sort of industrial-strength crackers his privateering great-grandfather had to choke down while serving a few months in the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, prison, 104 years earlier. After marching for 15 more miles, Barss’s unit had set up camp in the middle of nowhere, where supplies of just about everything were running low.

  He also mentions, rather casually, that his unit suffered its first casualties when a German shell “blew up their kitchen spilling all their dinner, killing four men, and their major who was standing nearby, and wounding twelve.”

  And this is where his tone changes. “I will simply say this about the situation here. It is far more serious than anyone can imagine or almost conceive, and we need every able bodied man we can get out here.”

  When his fellow soldiers from Canada’s western provinces bragged about how many men their hometowns had sent to the Western Front, Barss felt “absolutely ashamed” of Wolfville, “where I know there are so many husky fellows hanging around content to let someone else go and do the work which they ought to feel it their duty and privilege to do. They are all needed now not later. It may be too late then. And I can tell you that if they keep on hanging back and anything big is started I fear greatly for the outcome. —Ernest

  “P.S. Please write Eileen often & keep in touch with her. I know she is anxious to do so but feels a little shy.”

  Eileen Clarke was one of three women Barss had mentioned in an earlier letter, and she appears in a photo with his family in Montreal taken before Barss shipped overseas. Exactly what their relationship was isn’t clear, but Barss clearly valued her correspondence, and sent $15 of his $33 a month to her. He never says why, and it could simply be that he wanted her to deposit it in his Montreal account. But it could also be that they were trying to save for their future, or that he wanted her to have the money if he didn’t make it back.

  On the lighter side, one day the Prince of Wales, who would become King Edward VIII before abdicating the throne to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson, made one of his frequent trips to visit the troops. He picked the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, one of his favorites, and drove himself there in his own Rolls-Royce. While the senior officers met behind the lines to discuss strategy, the Prince remained with the men at the front, which was his preference. When it was Barss’s turn to patrol the area by “walking the boards” that they’d placed around the shell holes created by German bombs, the Prince of Wales decided to join him.

  Barss was flattered, but felt compelled to warn him that “It is very dangerous and slippery,” but the prince insisted. Not long after they started their tour, Barss heard a big splash behind him and turned back to see the Prince of Wales standing in a shell hole up to his waist in muddy water. Barss pulled him out and took him back to get dry clothes, putting a uniform together from whatever scraps his colleagues could spare.

  When the senior officers returned to see the Prince wearing a wildly mismatched uniform, they were aghast. The captain asked Barss why he had allowed the Prince to walk among the shell holes when it was obviously a dangerous area.

  “What is all this?” his officer snapped. “Do you not know this is the next King of England?”

  “Yes sir,” Barss replied. “But he outranked me.”

  Barss wrote his next letter right after he’d returned from four days in the trenches, his first tour. He gave his letter to a friend going on leave, so the censors never got their markers on it. His handwriting appears even more hurried and cramped than in his previous letter, with uncharacteristic grammatical and spelling errors.

  “You can bet I was glad to get back,” he said, discarding his earlier bravado for a moment. “It rained continually & mud was over our boot tops and two nights I was out all night with working parties.”

  One of those nights he joined a group digging a secret tunnel about sixty yards long, which extended directly under the German trenches where they could hear the Germans talking above them “very plainly.” The next morning, the Germans bombarded the Canadian position with rifle grenades and trench mortars, which broke “quite a number” of holes in their front line, “killing five and wounding 14 others” of the King’s Royal Rifles. Barss’s group repaired the trenches damaged by German shells, rolled out barbed wire in front of them, and lengthened the tunnels. For four days, Barss got little sleep and couldn’t get a bath or change his soaked socks, all while working within 25 yards of the German trenches.

  “They can hear us and their snipers are always on the lookout for a head above the parapet,” he told his parents. “The bullets don’t bother us but the grenades and bombs make an awful commotion and get on our nerves after a while.”

  Barss then reported the tunnel they had spent many dangerous days digging beneath the German trenches was finally finished—and blown up by the Germans an hour later. He joked in passing about a German sniper’s bullet that whizzed “about an inch from my head,” but said it was not so bad in the trenches because they got plenty to eat—making a modern reader wonder if Barss was in denial about the danger he faced, and what effect being immersed in it day and night was having on his psyche.

  “I guess the hospitals are pretty full now as I hear that the British and Canadians had 40,000 casualties in the last 5 days,” he continued. “They will probably have some more after our attack. Here’s hoping I am not one of them. However I am here for better or worse and if anything does happen it won’t be anything to be ashamed of.”

  By this time Barss had already seen enough comrades die to contemplate his own death and the risk he had assumed by volunteering. He still fervently believed in the cause, and his religious faith never left him, but he was now openly hoping he would not be among the casualties, a noted switch from his early willingness—bordering on eagerness—to die for his country.

  Barss was always conscientious about giving thanks for the care packages sent by his parents, aunts, and others. But in this letter, for the first time, the gifts trigger a bit of homesickness, and some sense of the anguish his decision is causing them.

  “I just long & long for a sight of you again and I have lots of times [missed] you too, especially on such occasions as this. In fact I don’t think you are ever out of my thoughts. My how I look forward to getting home again and seeing you again. I just have a kind of ache inside sometimes when I think of you and wonder what you are doing just then. I tell you I fully appreciate what wonderful parents I have.” He adds that he’s now aware of “the terrible worry that I know I am causing you,” perhaps because he was becoming genuinely worried, too.

  Twelve days later, Barss’s unit crawled out of the trenches again. It was their custom that bagpipers escort the men into the trenches, and bagpipers lead them out, whether the soldiers were walking behind them, being carried on stretchers, or being hauled away atop a stack of dead men on hand wagons. The music stayed with the survivors long after they returned.

  Barss managed to lay his hands on a typewriter, which spared his parents his ever-worsening handwriting. He had also shed the swagger of his earlier letters, now freely expressing unvarnished weariness and gratitude for getting out alive. The letter, which he wrote from “Dug out, ‘Saint’s Rest’, The firing line,” was dated October 12, 1915.

  “Dearest Father and Mother:

  “I am writing tonight under rather trying circumstances,” after a three-day stint in the trenches. He had been on patrol, and because everyone expected “something to happen,” they all had to “ ‘stand to’ all night every night.” As a result, Barss got about three hours of sleep during his seventy-two-hour s
hift. On the night he got out, he had to lead a party to the front of their line to dig a new line of trenches right in front of their own line, about 80 yards from the Germans.

  “I tell you it was ticklish work. They could hear us but couldn’t tell just where we were. So they kept sending up flairs [sic] every few minutes and when they would go up we would have to drop flat in the grass. However we got out without a casualty which I consider extraordinary.” It was. The night before, the men of the King’s Royal Riflemen (KRRC) had lost twenty men.

  They were no longer just numbers to Barss. After the Germans finished dropping sixty-four-pound mortars filled with “a very high explosive” nearby, Barss’s group went up to inspect the damage and found nothing but piles of debris where the trench had been.

  “Poor Johnston was literally blown to pieces. Most of him was buried but his head and part of his shoulders were on top of the heap. . . . Oh it made me feel sick. He was a good boy and we all liked him so much. I have been upset all day from it. He is the first from our bunch to go. I wonder who will be the next?”

  Barss was learning something they didn’t teach in boot camp: modern warfare, efficient as it was, killed without warning and often without logic. Being brave, smart, or devoted didn’t seem to matter much. That being the case, daydreaming of home was as good a way to pass the time as any. After closing his letter with love, Barss added this postscript: “I thought of it being [Canadian] Thanksgiving Day yesterday & wondered what & who you would be having for dinner.”

  The next time Ernest Barss’s parents heard from him, on November 11, 1915, he sounded much better. His unit had marched a full day to a billet in a fairly large town so far back from the trenches that they couldn’t hear the big guns, and had enough free time to play some bridge. They even had heat, hot water, and baths, “so that it is the most like home that I have experienced since leaving Canada.”