The British Columbia Bantams

The B.C. Bantams

by Sidney Allinson.

The little men in khaki seemed impossibly short to be Canadian soldiers. Barely over five feet in height, they marched proudly, four abreast, to tunes of their brass band, smiling at the cheering crowds that lined Humboldt Street, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, that bright morning of February 10, 1917.

These tiny soldiers of the 143rd Overseas Battalion (B.C. Bantams), were being given a civic send-off by fellow townspeople with mixed emotions. After three years of what was known as the Great War, the notably patriotic city of Victoria had previously bade 'adieu' to seven other army units. -- including splendid soldiers of the Canadian Scottish Regiment, strapping Naval reservists, and picked men of the Victoria Rifles. But never had they expressed such a fond farewell or sent off a more improbable unit than these almost Lilliputian warriors.

Boots polished to a black sheen, buttons bright and puttees tight, soft peaked caps square on heads, bearing heavy back-packs, the men were like miniature Guardsmen in their smart military turnout, singing lustily:.

"Good-bye-ee,

Don't cry-ee,

Wipe that tear from your eye,

Good-bye-eeee..."

The British Columbia Bantams were volunteers all, and keen to be getting a chance to fight at last. Almost half of them would never see Canada again.

More thoughtful observers that morning might have wondered about the departing soldiers for other reasons than their novelty. Here were perhaps living symbols of the extreme scarcity of British Empire manpower reserves, that now such undersized recruits were needed to make up for the carnage of trench warfare on the bloody Western Front.

Slaughtered, ignored, their survivors even dismissed as failures, the Bantams formed one of the most unusual and little-known chapters in the annals of military history. Theirs is a neglected story, which involved over 50,000 British and Canadian soldiers who never quite made it into the war books. They volunteered to serve when they could have stayed safely at home, suffered physical hardship often beyond their capacities, and sometimes endured with good humor the ridicule of less-courageous men, all for the privilege of fighting for their country in some of the fiercest battles of the First World War. Among them were almost a 1,000 men who served in a little-known unit dubbed proudly, "The B.C. Bantams".

It was modelled on 20 other Bantam battalions raised by the British Army, to mobilize the many volunteers who were below the regulation minimum height. Revised medical standards to allow for bantam-size troops specified acceptable heights between 4ft.l0ins, and 5ft.3ins. "with a proportionately good chest expansion."

Mobilization was authorized for the 143rd Overseas Battalion (B.C. Bantams) and recruiting begin in Victoria on February 20, 1916. Driving force behind this unique formation was Lieutenant Colonel A. Bruce Powley, a front-line veteran, who had been wounded twice in battle before being invalided home to Victoria. Eager to get back into the fray, he managed to gain command of the 143rd, and engaged a talented group of local officers to assist with recruiting.

There was steady stream of volunteers towards the hoped-­for total of 1,000 men, but LCol. Powley soon found it difficult to find accouunodation for the thousand men he hoped to sign up. The situation was solved by a grant of $9,000 by the city of Victoria, to secure building materials for a new camp at Beacon Hill Park parade-ground. The recruits themselves built wooden structures for sleeping barracks, cook-house, and headquarters, far more comfortable than the usual canvas tents.

At this stage of the war, Canada had 200,000 men under arms, all volunteers. The nation had been quick to supply fighting-men after the outbreak of war, and many Victorians were among the First Contingent that sailed in October, 1914. By early 1916, Canada had sent three divisions to the Western Front, forming the Canadian Corps. They had fought in many major battles, always in the thick of things, and suffered heavy casualties. (The 1914-1918 war cost Canada a total of 65,000 war dead.)

Sparsely-settled British Columbia had responded whole­heartedly early in the war. Intensely loyal, with a high proportion of British immigrant stock quick to volunteer, BC had virtually shot its bolt by early 1916 in its capacity to supply manpower.

With recruits at a premium, the coal-mining communities up-Island promised the likeliest source of strongly-built bantam-sized men. One of them was Benjamin Barnes, a red­headed Cornishman who volunteered from his well-paid job as fire-boss of Coal Creek Mine. Another was Peter Campbell, an office worker from Sidney, who joined "B" Company in camp just down the road from his home. Allan Bell came over from Vancouver on the same ferry that brought Humbert Campbell back from his job on an Alberta ranch.

"It seemed the greatest adventure in the world", said Bell. "The sun shone on the water and the mountains stood out against the sky as we sailed across that day, and I felt my chest swell as if we were all setting out on a great crusade. My comrades proved to be such happy chaps, forever telling jokes, with never a cross word, and I never felt so happy in all my eighteen years."

Despite such enthusiastic recruits, LCol. Powley could not enlist enough suitable men at the pace needed. He regretfully reported to Ottawa on Oct. 15, 1916. "We were finally forced to take in some larger men as well, with a view to exchanging them later for smaller men from other units. But exchanges are not easy, and the result is I have a battalion of over half bantam, and the balance of larger men, though the average height is still below 5ft. 4ins."

When the unit returned from a summer of hard training at Sidney Camp, its members were so outspokenly impatient to be sent to France, they were known as "The Fire-eaters". Their attitude was all the more remarkable, considering the high proportion of family men in the ranks. Oldest of whom was Joseph Daniel, a 43-year-old Sidney resident who managed to wangle his way to combat in France.

Among those chafing to get overseas, was Ben Barnes, who as an accomplished cornet-player, found himself in the battalion band. In January, 1917, he wrote to his brother in immaculate penmanship from the Dominion Hotel. "We are all classed as soldiers, and though bandsmen do not put in as much time now with a rifle, we are all well prepared for the firing-line. Each of us in the band has learned machine-gun drill, signalling, first-aid, and stretcher-bearing."

He wrote again, soon after, excited by news of embarkation, but depressed by feelings of foreboding. "I get a little down-hearted when I dwell too much on my home, but shake it off as best I can, and will be content when I get a little more excitement at the front. If I get a bullet to put me to sleep, I will only be among my comrades, so I should not worry."

With men so keen, there was some disappointment when Ottawa announced the 143rd would be sent to France as a Railway Construction battalion, instead of as infantry. However, they were mollified by learning that trench railway duty was as vital as it was dangerous, a prime target of German artillery.

News of their departure brought out a tremendous wave of affection from Victoria residents, who cheered the little men all along their march from Beacon Hill, past flag-draped balconies of St. Joseph's Hospital where patients and nurses gave rousing cheers. Banners proclaiming "Good Luck - God Speed" hung from buildings at the mouth of Courtney Street, and people leaned through open windows, adding their applause to those packing the sidewalks.

By the time the soldiers reached the wharf on Bellville Street, they had to break ranks and march in single file through the press of dense crowds. It gave opportunity for many emotional scenes; last-minute kisses from families, friends and sweethearts, Quickly, the 32 officers and 667 other ranks boarded two CPR ferries, ‘Princess Victoria’ and ‘Princess Mary.’ where many climbed the rigging for better views as the vessels pulled away. Cheers, cries, and shouted well-wishes mingled with a cacophony of horn-blowing from other ships in the harbor, while the Bantams' band played a last refrain of "Old Lang Syne" as they sailed off to war.

Three weeks later, the British Columbians were in England, at the Canadian Holding Depot, Shorncliff. "We felt like cattle, the way they treated us there," said Allan Bell. The Canadian Corps needed more men in France in a hurry, and made no secret that we were viewed as cannon-fodder. One could not help but notice that while ordinary soldiers were getting this treatment, there were over five hundred lieutenants lounging around camp, many of whom had stayed there in safety since the previous summer."

"But that was the least of our irritations, because it didn't take long to figure out that the BC Bantams as a unit were about to be broken up forthwith!"

Peter Campbell recalled how it was for the crestfallen Victoria battalion. "After a brief landing-leave in London, we were called before a medical board at Shorncliff. The 143rd was broken up so suddenly that Local. Powley and his officers were not even given time to say farewell to us."

About a third of the unit became railway troops, while the rest were sent to the trenches as infantry after all. Ben Barnes was among a draft of 667 men from the B.C. Bantams who went to the 24th Canadian Reserve Battalion in France on May 11, 1917. They joined the new formations thrown immediately into the hideous meat-grinder known as the Battle of Lens.

This affair was yet another brain-wave of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, British commander in chief. He decided to increase pressure on the Flanders front, and as part of some grand strategy, flung the Canadian Corps against Lens as the first objective.

The Canadians surveyed the black slag-heaps, the shell­churned graveyard of so many troops before them, and were not inspired. "If we have to fight there at all", said General Sir Arthur Currie, the one-time Victoria school-teacher who was now corps commander, "Let us fight for something worth having.". Why not try to sidestep Lens, he asked, and burst out into open mobile warfare? But Haig was adamant. Lens was to be taken by direct assault.

On August 15th, the Canadians took Hill 70; little more than a low mound, really, but riddled with concrete pill­boxes, machine-gun nests, and concealed artillery. In a single morning, they captured the hill which had repulsed the British Guards Division in 1915, and pushed on through smoke and poison gas and shrapnel into the mining hamlets on the outskirts of lens itself. The ruined suburbs -- St. Emilie, St. Pierre, Calonne -- were made up of clumps of miners' cottages and pithead workings, and had been fortified in an interlocking maze of strong German defences over the past two years.

All Lens was like that; street after street of rubbled buildings hiding blockhouses and m.g. posts inter-connected by miles of passage-ways knocked through cellar walls. Alex Batchelor recalled an officer telling him, "Fix your bayonet, soldier. We have to winkle the Huns out."

Batchelor and other Bantams found their small size to be an advantage during the next ten endless days and nights, though it singled them out them for very hazardous duty. "We could pop through those tunnels as easy as could be. We left our packs off, stripped down to undershirts and went crawling around with a bagful of bombs and a revolver. Find a Heinie­hole, bung a grenade through, then nip in after it before the dust settled." Batchelor explained, still matter-of-fact in his old age. "After a while, I could tell if no bomb was needed in the next cellar. My nose would tell me when the Heinies in there had been dead for a long time."

Allan Bell fought there, too, attaching himself to some Nova Scotian machine-gunners to keep them supplied with ammunition. He would make repeated trips back through the hellish streets, casually employing his Lee-Enfield to snipe stray Prussians who tried to stop him. On one such journey, he stopped to aid the wounded Humbert Campbell, the clergyman's son he'd first met on a British Columbia ferry.

Street by street, the 4th Prussian Guards were forced back, dying hard for every cellar and crossroad. On the third day, reinforcements came in: two more Guards Divisions, the 11th Reserve, and the Saxon Brigade, until there were 46 German battalions battling to keep the Canadians from capturing the battered compost-heap that used to be the town of Lens.

Ben Barnes told a little of this to the folks at home. "Had a busy time of it," he pencilled in flawless copperplate on YMCA stationery. "But we all went forward and accomplished our objective. It was mostly street fighting, and we worked hard for protection from gunfire. When we got settled in our new ground, Fritz did not give us much rest as he had our range down pretty fair."

The indomitable attitude of Barnes and his comrades comes out in his final paragraph. "The Bantams certainly made a name for themselves this time. We are all of British stock here and fight with British spirit, and the Canadian Bantams are not going back without a name worthy of being set down in history for future generations to take notice."

He was never to know the eventual irony of those words he wrote on the battlefield. There have been so many other cataclysms throughout this century, that there is scant public memory now of distant heroism. Yet the belief sustained this modest soldier, whose letters were filled with loving memories for nephews and nieces he had met for only a few precious days. Though he had already seen so many friends cut down six thousand miles from homes they left in beautiful British Columbia, he retained his generation's simple faith in posterity's appreciation. It was a faith that sustained so many men through the misery of the First World War..

Then the Canadians went north to Flanders again, summoned to help break the deadlock on a vile, mad place called Passchendaele. This dread region in the Ypres Salient had already become the graveyard of hundreds of thousands of dead, and for four months previously British, Australian, and New Zealand regiments had lost entire battalions in a matter of days. On October 26, 1917, it became the Canadians turn, and they went forward through torrential rain mingled with the sleet of lead and steel from German guns. After a week of some of the war's most desperate fighting, four Canadian divisions managed to capture the previously­impregnable Passchendaele at last, on November 6, 1917.

The day after the battle ended, Sir Launcelot Kiggel, Haig's chief of staff, arrived to take his first look at the battlefield. When his Daimler limousine began to lurch through the mud, the general stared out unbelievingly at the endless quagmire, then burst into tears. "My God!", he moaned. "Did we send men to fight in this ?"

One of the men who had, was Benjamin Barnes. On October 29, during a lull, he wrote home in despair. "Had a very busy time of it for eight straight days and nights. I am sorry to say my pal Alf Patterson got napooed [killed] yesterday. I had many narrow escapes myself. One shell burst outside the dug-out, buried three of us. One blinded, one wounded, and all I got was shock. When I heard about A1f, it brought tears to my eyes, and I had the painful duty of writing to his aunt in Cumberland. Kindly excuse scribble, as I am quite upset. Au-re-voir."

As there was no conscription in Canada, fresh volunteer replacements were getting scarcer every month for the embattled Canadian Army. Veteran troops were kept in the line until death, or a lucky "Blighty" wound released them to hospital. Barnes managed to get letters home past the indulgent censorship of his officers. "Not many of the originals left now," he wrote on January 22, 1918. "If we did not get our rum ration, we would be laid up more often, as we are subject to wet feet and chills through our system. Disappointed at no leave, anxiously awaiting a square deal, and we cannot see why we have not had it yet."

There were only a few more letters from Barnes that year, in which he made no further mention of warfare, other than his address, "In the trenches." He sent a stream of suggestions about how to make his nieces and nephew happy, and often sent them what money he could afford.

His last letter was devoted to them. "Whenever you feel like making up a parcel for me, fix things fine, then let the children have a party of their own instead, to enjoy the contents ... Not much time to write. Continually on the alert. We Bantams are in a battle platoon, so we are not here as ornaments."

A week later, he heard his C.O. read out a commendation for his gallantry in rescuing a wounded comrade. The same day, August 11, 1918, Ben Barnes' luck finally ran out. He was killed in an obscure skirmish near Amiens -- one of the last of the B.C. Bantams to die in the Great War.

-end­

Victoria writer Sidney Allinson is author of "The Bantams: the untold story of World War One", Pen & Sword Books, UK, 2009.

THE BANTAMS march again!

NEW REVISED EDITION OF MY MILITARY HISTORY BOOK, "THE BANTAMS", TO BE PUBLISHED BY PEN & SWORD BOOKS IN BRITAIN IN 2009.

"The untold story of World War One" is the sub-title of "The Bantams", a recently revised military history book by Canadian author, Sidney Allinson.
"The Bantams" provides fascinating additional details to the factual but nigh incredible story of how the British and Canadian armies recruited over 50,000 tiny men who volunteered to serve as front-line soldiers. Such Bantam battalions eventually numbered over twenty units in Britain, plus two battalions from Canada. The movement spread all over Britain, particularly the coal mining regions of Wales and Northern England, then to Canada, particularly among British immigrants there.
Originally published by Howard Baker Press, London, in 1981, this revised 2008 version includes new material, and reveals disturbing new information about battlefield executions by firing squads that was only recently released from British official records long held secret from the public. It adds even more poignancy to the story of how thousands of patriotic ‘bantams’ -- not much taller than a rifle themselves -- well below the army’s 5ft. 3ins. minimum regulation height, flocked to the colours.
Canadian military historian Sidney Allinson's researches took him off on a three-year quest for information, journeying across Britain, Canada, the U.S., and the old battlefields of Flanders. He contacted over 300 survivors of the Bantams, to gather the many first-hand accounts of battle told in his book.
It also recreates the social conditions in Britain and Canada during the First World War. Patriotic fervour enabled many famed British regiments to recruit eager volunteers for bantam-designated battalions. English and Scottish Bantams fought along the Somme front, while Welsh Bantams helped win the Battle of Bourlon despite hideously large casualties. In Canada, the 216th Bantam (Toronto) Battalion was recruited within a few weeks, and the 143rd B.C. Bantams was quickly raised on Vancouver Island. Soldiers from both these now-forgotten Canadian units served at Vimy Ridge and in other later battles.
"The Bantams" has been recognized as an important new volume of original military research into the Great War of 1914-1918. Allinson served overseas in the Royal Air Force, and is a past director of the Royal Canadian Military Institute, Toronto. He now lives in Victoria, British Columbia, where he is Chairman of the Pacific Coast Branch of the Western Front Association. Contact him at: allsid@shaw.ca

For a free sample chapter, go here:
https://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=22708

"The Onion Files."

[Victoria Times Colonist, May 25, 2008.]

Ex-Intelligence Chief Val Pattee Now

A Successful Author of Spy Novels.

By Sidney Allinson.

Val Pattee is fit-looking and courteous, with a wry humour and shrewd observations about the current perilous state of international affairs – a retired military general perfectly suited to his new career as writer of espionage novels. Still tanned from spending three months in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with his artist wife Joan, he says, “Our annual winter vacation works very well for us both creatively; Joan busy at her easel, painting local scenes, and me at the keyboard almost non-stop, writing a sequel to “The Onion Files.”

That title of his first book, which came out last fall, refers to a multi-layered plot of international intrigue that reflects a good deal of his own first-hand involvement with the grim world of espionage. Starting as a young Canadian Air Force jet-fighter pilot, Maj.-Gen. Pattee eventually became Chief of Intelligence & Security at headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO] in Mons, Belgium, during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

He recalls, “Every morning, my desk would be flooded with new secret information from space satellites, signal intercepts, allied counter-intelligence services, and our espionage agents in potentially hostile countries. My job was to quickly assess all this detail and boil it down into a concise daily situation report for military and political leaders of NATO’s sixteen European member nations, including Canada, the United States, and Britain.”

Pattee also worked in Paris to help combat Action Direct terrorism, and in Germany when the Red Army Faction was creating havoc across Europe. On leaving the Canadian Forces, he moved to British Columbia to become Assistant Deputy Minister of Police Services, then the Director of BC Ambulance Services, and finally “retired” for good in Victoria five years ago.

All this front-line knowledge of dangerous international intrigue uniquely equips him to become a successful author of spy thrillers. He says, “Considering what I do these days, it’s almost funny that most of my professional life required me to compress masses of information into a very tight digest form for strategic briefings. Now, as a novelist, the situation is reversed, and I’m faced instead with the need to expand material to make entertaining novels. Usually I aim for about 96,000 words.” He did not just stumble onto that particular number, his study of the trade having found most publishers ideally prefer book-lengths to total just below 100,000 words.

Pattee obviously tackles writing novel-writing with great enjoyment. “I find the process of writing comes easy to me. I just capture related thoughts, character traits, and incidents, and flesh them out. My approach is not the usual first-draft, second-draft, and so on. I continually rewrite or rearrange the manuscript daily, as the story unfolds. That’s where my laptop word-processor is so marvellous. You can go back to revise a paragraph to suit a time-line, or move an entire chapter from here to there. The technology makes the physical act of writing so easy, I can’t imagine how authors did it in the old typewriter-and-paper days. I’ve got the second book pretty much all down already. I just have to refine it, add some details, and it should be ready for publication in a couple of months. Unlike a lot of techno-thrillers, I don’t add a lot of fluff; those clumps of extraneous details that can bore readers and don’t move the story along at all.”

There is no danger of that, judging by his first book. “The Onion Files” flings us into a fast-paced chillingly-possible scenario that never lets up. It is that rarity, a believable spy yarn, whose heroes and villains alike seem credible human beings, unlike the comic-strip characters who populate some thrillers. The lifelike opponents include a pair of intrepid agents from the Central (Defense) Intelligence Agency, abetted by a sympathetic Soviet spy, who battle evil master-mind Osama bin Laden and his fanatical cohorts across the world. They are portrayed in such an authentic atmosphere, that many so-called fictional incidents portrayed in it could have actually occurred. He confirms that by saying, “Many of the anecdotes in my book are the real stuff, encounters during my own experience, altered just enough for security’s sake.”

Not to give away the story, but his book focuses on countering a devilishly clever terrorist scheme to cause a catastrophic disaster aimed at killing millions of civilians across the United States. Drawing on his insider knowledge, Val Pattee expertly describes the technicalities of how to cause this mass atrocity so well, one hopes his novel does not fall into the wrong hands and give them another nasty idea to use against us. Moreover, “The Onion Files” could make a useful defensive primer for governmental security agencies on both sides of our border.

His strategic skills obviously helped make careful analysis of the publishing process and the modern author’s prospects for getting into print. “I find that the entire publishing trade is in a state of turmoil,” he says. “Large conventional publishing houses are overwhelmed by changes in public reading tastes, and by computer innovations that affect printing, marketing, and distribution. New print-on-demand technology that can instantly publish one or a thousand copies at push of a button is doing away with the need for bricks-and-mortar warehouses. Authors too are suffering, from the squeeze for shelf-space in bookstores, a huge increase in the number of people writing books, and most seriously by the difficulty of getting into print the old-fashioned way.”

“Prospects for most writers to get their work accepted are pretty limited today. Few if any publishing houses will accept manuscripts if they are not submitted by a literary agent. That goes to the near impossibility of getting an agent to take on new unknown authors. Time and again, agents sent back my own writing, saying, ’Good story, but you have to understand we get hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts every month, so we simply cannot handle most of them.’”

“Had I been writing twenty years ago, I might have had it much easier. This style of book was very popular then – and Clancy, Forsythe, McCarry, Ludlum, and company were very big sellers. But by the time I jumped in, I found myself way behind the power-curve in terms of readership, and that’s mainly a question of time. Societal change, too. Now, there’s what can be best described as general disinterest in espionage, military subjects, and so on. Notwithstanding people are aware of Afghanistan and Iraq, there simply are so many other diversions that people find it hard to be as interested in those conflicts the way they did back in the Sixties and Seventies when the threat of nuclear war was very real to everyone. So the market for my kind of book has shrunk somewhat.”

All of which is why Val Pattee decided to self-publish his book, and turned to Agio Publishing House, of Victoria to produce it. He seems very happy with the result. “Now here I am, an old Cold War warrior who even had to learn how to type, with a published-on-demand book in hard cover and paperback, plus a web site and a podcast. Even though the podcast doesn’t directly give me any return financially yet, the idea is to start some buzz on the Internet and spread worldwide awareness of my book’s availability. And that it’s done in spades, as my book is already the sixth most popular title on Podiobooks. Sales are definitely starting to look up, and better still, I am having a lot of fun writing -- which is the main thing after all!”

Victoria-based novelist Sidney Allinson

is a past-Director of the Royal Canadian

Military Institute.

Military history

VIMY RIDGE: A Canadian Reassessment.

VIMY RIDGE: A Canadian Reassessment, Edited by Geoffrey Hayes, Andrew Iarocci, & Mike Bechtold, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, 353 pages, photographs, maps, bibliography, index.

The three military historians who compiled this study are acknowledged experts on Canadian participation in World War One, particularly well-equipped to select these commentaries on one of our country’s most epic battles. The result is a compendium of twenty cogently written opinions and reports about the final bloody struggle for possession of Vimy Ridge, now considered not only an important military victory but also a defining moment for Canadian nationhood.

They tell how (unusually for those days) the Canadian troops at all levels of rank were given detailed briefings on the planned strategy before the attack was launched, which enabled even private soldiers to surge forward confidently to fight a “corporal’s battle,” often independent of direction by officers.

The book puts the struggle in context; the hill’s strategic significance, the seldom-mentioned British participation, and the German point-of-view. It also provides insights about the personalities and military styles of various senior officers – including General Julian Byng, Canadian Corps commander, and Major. Gen Arthur Currie, who insisted on meticulous preparations before the attack by his First Canadian Division.

Excellent photographs movingly show Canadian warriors of all ranks who fought so valiantly that day, and good clear maps help readers follow various tactical moves during the battle. This retrospective provides a thorough explanation of exactly why those monumental concrete towers now stand atop Vimy Ridge.

-- Sidney Allinson

Military history

"In Flanders Fields."

My own late father, Private Thomas Allinson, served in the First World War as a soldier with The Green Howards, a famous regiment of the British Army. To my eternal regret, I seldom made enough of the opportunity to break through his modest silence about the horrors he faced in the trenches. However, one casual mention by him that our family had a connection with the author of the most famous war poem of all time: “In Flanders Fields.” did not dawn on me as significant until many years later, when I finally set about learning the details.

The incident is described in "Welcome to Flanders Fields - The Great Canadian Battle of the Great War: Ypres, 1915", by Daniel G. Dancocks. It recounts:

"On May 3, Maj. McCrae had spent 17 weary days performing surgery on hundreds of wounded soldiers, and took a brief respite on the back of an ambulance near his dressing station beside the Canal de l'Yser. McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem. In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches there, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook."

"A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two year old sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant-major stood there quietly. 'His face was very tired but calm as he wrote,' Allinson recalled. 'He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Lt. Helmer's grave.' When McCrae finished five minutes later, he took his mail from Allinson and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the young NCO."

"Sgt. Maj. Allinson was moved by what he read, saying later, 'The poem was an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word 'blow' in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene.'"

I now feel a quiet pride that an Allinson relative -- Canadian cousin of my father -- was the first person to read the immortal words of "In Flanders Field" moments after it was penned by Major John McCrae.

Sidney Allinson.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED WHEN BREAKER MORANT WAS SHOT BY FIRING-SQUAD

"Breaker Morant" is one of the best motion pictures set during the Anglo-Boer War ever filmed. However, it took a lot of liberties with the actual historical events concerning the execution of Lt. Harry "Breaker" Morant. It did not mention that Morant was not Australian -- being in fact an Englishman -- or that on the night before his execution he met with the Reverend Canon Scott and signed a note in which he confessed his guilt of shooting Boer prisoners -- contrary to the movie's premise that he was an innocent scapegoat. One particular dramatic scene in the film depicts Morant shouting defiantly at the firing-squad: "Shoot straight, you bastards!" In reality, he said nothing of the kind. Here is an eye-witness account of his real last words and the calm manner of his dying, published soon afterwards in an Australian newspaper.

THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD - 3 April 1902

LETTER FROM A PRETORIA PRISON WARDER: AN ACCOUNT OF THE EXECUTION of LT. MORANT.

Mr. G. Aldridge, who was a member of the Second South Australian Contingent, has received a sad letter from Mr. J. H. Morrow, warder of the Pretoria Gaol, with reference to the shooting of Lieutenants Morant and Handcock. Aldridge was a friend of Morant's. The letter was dated March 1, 1902, and is as follows :-

"Dear George, I write these few lines to you on behalf of Lieutenant H. H. Morant, who was shot here on February 27, two days ago, by order of court-martial. His last word was that I should write and tell you that there were four officers- one South Australian, one Victorian, one New South Welshman, and one New Zealander, all Australians - concerned. The South Australian and the New South Welshman were shot, and the others were transported. It is quite a mystery here regarding the deed. All I know is that they shot 38 Boers, and there are rumours circulating that these Boers surrendered to them. Morant told me that he was guilty of shooting the Boers because they shot his captain.

I was the warder who was in charge of the officers the last week they had on earth, and they faced their doom as brave as men could do. Everyone said it was a pity to shoot two such brave men. Morant came out here with the South Australian Mounted Rifles with which you and I enlisted. Morant got a commission with the Bushveldt Carbineers, and I went on the railway duty here, and I was only transferred to this prison about six weeks ago. I was not here when they came here. They had been in prison at Pietersburg for four months, and then they were transferred to Pretoria, where sentence was passed upon them.

They were shot next morning at 6 o'clock, and were buried at 5 o'clock in the evening. There were a large number of Australians at the funeral; no less than 30 of them were Australian officers. I felt it very much. The only reply given by the two men when asked if they were ready was, 'Yes, where is your shooting party?' and the men marched out hand in hand.

The firing party went to blindfold the men, but Morant said, ‘Take this thing off,’ and pulled the handkerchief off. As the two sat in the chair awaiting death Morant remarked, ‘Be sure and make a good job of it.’ Morant folded his arms across his chest and looked them straight in the face. The firing-party fired, and Morant got all in the left side, and died at once. With his arms folded and his eyes open, you would have thought he was alive."

Military history

JEREMY KANE: a Canadian historical novel of the 1837 Mackenzie Rebellion.

JEREMY KANE: a Canadian historical novel of the 1837 Mackenzie Rebellion and its brutal aftermath in the penal colonies of Australia.

This is a BIG book. Big in its geographical scope and its extraordinary capacity to bring alive the Canada and Australia of the 1830s, and the author's ability to spin his compelling story through the words and deeds and thoughts of his main character. Yes, Kane is the hero, yet so completely is he submerged in the actual events that overtake him that we accept the man as every bit as real as the true life governors, colonels, rebel leaders and jailors with whom he mingles.

This is the art of historical fiction, and Sidney Allinson has it in spades. Without once distorting or overstating the often terrifying events and conditions that confront Kane and his fellows, the author breathes life into a fascinating period of history about which all too little is understood. We meet Jeremy Kane during the heady days that led up to the Mackenzie Rebellion in colonial Upper Canada - today's Ontario. Reformist and populist, the rebellion was led by the crabby old Scot whose name commemorates it.

The trusting and rather unworldly young Kane supports Mackenzie as an act of patriotism. Canada is being misgoverned by the 'Family Compact' of local shysters, and the lackadaisical British do nothing about it. The insurrection comes and goes, the rebels are scattered, captured, or killed, and Kane is saved from the gallows only to be deported with one hundred others to a penal colony on Tasmania, off the coast of Australia.It is hard to credit that conditions such as Kane encounters in this book existed only 160 years ago: the plague-ridden convict ships, sadistic torture camps approved by the authorities, a veritable Gulag flying the Union Flag.

This is not light reading, but you'll keep the pages turning, believe me. Still there is hope. Hope that transcends rational calculation and imbues the convicts with the will to survive. This can take one form only: escape. And when the terrors of the sea have been vanquished, there are the horrors of cannibalism in a land so vast and forbidding that the chances of survival shrink daily until, after all manner of adventures, Jeremy Kane, alone, proves that hope reinforced by straight thinking and determination pays off.

For this reader, it was the story with its myriad characters, their encounters with danger, and the impact of events on character development that held me. In the aftermath, however, I found myself contemplating the significance of the historical lesson concealed within the story. Did Canada miss an unique opportunity when the mishandled Mackenzie rebellion failed: Has Canada yet risen above a modern version of the Family Compact? Since Canada had inherited from Britain a top-down form of government, and the Americans had established a bottom-up form, to what extent was opposition to Mackenzie's reforms based on fear that any move towards true democracy would undercut the political rationale for a separate North American nation?

As for Australia, the author dares to defy political correctness by describing aboriginal life, warts and all, an important corrective to the myth that such societies enjoyed some kind of Golden Age until this was overturned by newcomers. Whatever your interests, read Jeremy Kane and enjoy.

– Brig. (Rtd.) Maurice Tugwell, Founding Director, Centre for Conflict Studies, University of New Brunswick, Canada.

PALESTINE: The roots of conflict.

The Palestine Mandate:

"Lucky Tommy: in the middle again."

by Sidney Allinson.

America's current experience of bloody resentment by many of the Iraqi people they liberated from Saddam Hussein's dictatorship has a close resemblance to Britain's problems in Palestine over half a century ago. Recalling those historical events may help to better understand the origins of present-day strife in the Middle East.

Until December 1917, Palestine had long been part of the Turk­ish Ottoman Empire, an ally of Germany in World War One. This rule was finally broken by the conquest of Jerusalem by British and Australian troops under the command of General Allenby.

In 1922, the League of Nations presented Britain with the Palestine Mandate to administer the region. Terms of the Mandate included founding a new Jewish state in the territory, set out in the Bal­four Declaration of 1917. This was sent in a letter from Arthur Balfour, Britain's Secretary of State, addressed to Baron Lionel Rothschild, stating:

'His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achieve­ment of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing will be done which may prej­udice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.'

If more attention had been paid to the old boy's stricture, the Levant could have become a more peaceful region than it is today. As things turned out, the number of Jews immigrating rapidly increased their population from 60,000 to 600,000 during the next two decades. Those 26 years were turbulent, to say the least, with increasing violence between Arabs and Jews, fighting over land occupation and political influence.

Though there was a small garrison of Imperial troops, the bulk of peacekeeping duties was the job of the Pales­tine Police. Mainly British, these civilian police also included a large number of Arabs and Jews, who managed to carry out their duties with remarkable impartiality. Their unbiased fairness only drew violent enmity from both opposing sides, and today the only monuments to the 'Pal Police' are 320 long-forgotten graves.

During the early 1930s, guerrilla warfare became so prevalent that units of the British Army were brought in to combat both camps of extremists. It was an all-too-familiar role for "Tommy Atkins," the affectionate nickname for British soldiers. Used to handling peace-keeper jobs in foreign lands, they resignedly accepted being once more, "Lucky Tommy - in the middle again". Their thankless position then in Palestine is strikingly similar to the Coalition Forces’ present entanglement in the Persian Gulf region now.

The Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 flared because of Palestinian Arabs' resentment against the growth of Jewish immigration, but the violence soon turned against the British as well, because of their firmness in combating the uprising. During the three years it took to finally put down `The Arab Troubles', there were 236 Jews killed by Arabs, 435 Arabs killed by Jews, plus 1,200 rebels killed by police and military action. The British cost came high, too; nearly 200 dead policemen and soldiers.

In World War Two, Britain's Eighth Army defended the Middle East from Germany's Afrika Korps, and Gen. Montgomery's victory at El Alamein saved Palestine's Jew­ish population from becoming victims of the Nazi's Final Solution. But after WWII's end in 1945, the hideous ordeal of the Holocaust made world Jewry unwilling to settle for anything less than the establishment of an independent State of Israel within Palestine, and demanded that Britain relinquish control there. The deadly earnestness of Zionist extremists was first signalled by their assassination of Lord Moyne, British Minister of State, in Cairo, November 6, 1944.

The Arabs, who then still formed most of the local population, were just as adamant that Palestine must be entirely controlled by them. Britain's newly-elected Labour government led by Prime Minister Clement Atlee strongly sympathized with Zionism's goal, yet hoped to remain friendly with the Arabs also.

Parliament cited the Balfour Declaration's original terms to support concerns that too rapid an increase in new­comers could further alienate the local Arab population and destabilize the entire Middle East. Britain's prediction of serious consequences from unlimited immigration was viewed by America and other members of the United Nations Organization as mere colonialism – or even disguised racial discrimination.

Opponents of British concerns could not see the nigh-inevitable tragic results of a destabilized Middle East for generations to come. So the UK government was pressured into the nigh-hopeless role of trying to arrange a compromise political solution agreeable to Jews and Arabs alike.

Meanwhile, in what became a public relations nightmare, Britain imposed a sea blockade to limit the numbers of Jewish immigrants to Palestine. It caused a devastating impression of a callous Britain, shown world­wide in cinema newsreels of Royal Navy vessels turning back ships crammed with refugees. Repeated images of burly Tommies flailing pick-­handles at emaciated concentration camp survivors to prevent them from landing in the Promised Land had a ruinous effect on the UK's reputation. Those scenes made most of the world unsympathetic to Britain at the same time Zionist partisans began a wide campaign of violence to support demands for a separate Jewish state. It was carried out by two insurgent groups: LEHI known as the 'Stern Gang,' under operations chief Yitzk Shamir, and the Irgun Zwei Leumi led by Menachem Begin -- both of whom later became prime ministers of Israel.

Though Winston Churchill had been a staunch supporter of the Zionist cause throughout his political life, the events in Palestine brought this comment from him, "A race that has suffered the virtual extermination of its national existence cannot be expected to be entirely reasonable. But the activities of terrorists, who tried to gain their ends by the assassination of British officials and soldiers, were an odious act of ingratitude that left a profound impression."

Facing international hostility at the UN, and hotly debated in Parliament, the government still continued to send military reinforcements to the Holy Land. These included many peacetime draftees, 19-year-old British males conscripted for their period of compulsory National Service, who formed a large part of the 100,000 troops stationed in Palestine. These units were kept under orders to behave with restraint despite being targeted by increasingly ruthless Jewish guerrillas.

Individual British Army soldiers and Royal Air Force personnel began to be picked off from ambush, often while unarmed and off-duty, easy targets for assassins who ran scant risk of being caught. Troop trains were machine-gunned, mined and derailed; tented camps, airfields, and police stations were attacked, with steadily mounting casualties. One example was the deliberate murder of seven soldiers of the Royal Artillery, shot whilst sleeping in their tents. In perhaps the most infamous incident, two British sergeants, Clifford Martin and Mervin Paice, were kidnapped in Tel Aviv and hanged from orange trees, their bodies booby-trapped with explosives.

Civilians were not exempt as victims, either, often from car-bombs left in Arab marketplaces. On 22 July, 1946, Irgun saboteurs blew up Jerusalem's King David Hotel, with great loss of life; 91 British, Arab, and Jewish men and women being killed, none of whom were soldiers. The heads of the Jewish Agency hastened to denounce the explosion by expressing "our feelings of horror at the base and unparalleled act perpetrated today by a gang of criminals." The death toll among British servicemen and civilian bystanders from increasingly ruthless terrorist attacks continued. Letter bombs were sent to army officers' families in the UK, causing deaths and injuries to civilian relatives.

Understandably, this pressure began to affect the morale of troops. They could see no point to doing their peacekeeping job among people who resented them, or worse. Many Tommies felt their hands were tied by political priorities and regulations that forbade them from combating the attackers more aggressively. Back home in a Britain already weary from WWII, young soldiers' mothers began to question a government that was sending their sons to die in an unappreciated cause. During the Jewish Insur­gency from August 1945 to August 1947, British casualties totalled 141 killed and 475 wounded.

Faced with these mounting casualties and the political and financial costs of maintaining order in Palestine, Britain turned over responsibility to the UN for establishment of a bi-national Jewish-Arab state under United Nations trusteeship. On 14 May 1948, the last British soldier sailed from Haifa, and the Palestine Mandate ended. On that same date, the new State of Israel was born, and continues its battle for survival to this day.

Army Quarterly & Defence Journal.

Copyright Sidney Allinson (revised) 2007.

Historical Ignorance.

"D-Day, 1899, and President Denzel Washington is leading the liberation of New Zealand from the Nazis."

By Chris Hasting and Julie Henry, Daily Telegraph, UK.

It is 1899 and Denzel Washington, the American president, orders Anne Frank and her troops to storm the beaches of Nazi-occupied New Zealand ...

This may not be how you remember D-Day, but for a worrying number of Britain's children this is the confused scenario they associate with the events of June 6, 1944.

A survey of 1,309 British pupils aged between 10 and 14, from 24 different schools, found alarming levels of ignorance about the invasion of Normandy 60 years ago.

Only 28 per cent of primary and secondary pupils who sat the quiz last week were able to say that D-Day, involving the largest invasion force ever mounted, was the start of the Allied liberation of occupied western Europe.

Many of them could only say that it was something to do with the Second World War - though 26 per cent were flummoxed by even that fact. Some thought it took place in the First World War, or was the day war broke out, or the Blitz, and even Remembrance Sunday.

"It's a day when everyone remembers the dead who fought," said a 14-year-old girl at a north Devon secondary school. Only 16 per cent of 918 participating primary school children had the answer right.

One 10-year-old thought it was the day the "Americans came to rescue the English". Another thought D-Day involved "the invasion of Portsmouth". Various dates for the assault were 1066, 1776, 1899, and 1948.

Children also had great difficulty in naming Britain's war-time prime minister. Less than half of the overall sample and only 39 per cent of primary school children correctly identified him as Winston Churchill; a significant number opted for Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair.

Seventeen per cent of the sample and only 38 per cent of secondary school children identified Franklin D Roosevelt as the then President of the United States. Other candidates offered by both age groups were Denzel Washington (the actor), George Washington, John F Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and George W Bush. Some said simply: "George Bush's dad."

Ignorance about the Allied leaders, however, contrasted sharply with knowledge about Adolf Hitler. Overall, 71 per cent of the sample and 64 per cent of primary school children were able correctly to name the Nazi leader. Only one in three could identify the broad location of D-Day, with a number saying that it happened in New Zealand, Skegness, or Germany.

Thirteen per cent could name two of the beaches involved, and only 10 per cent of the sample knew that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander. Others thought that the invasion was led by Anne Frank, or Private Ryan (the hero of the Steven Spielberg D-Day fictional epic), or Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, Eisenhower's deputy.

The disclosure that school children know so little about D-Day comes a week before the country prepares to celebrate the anniversary and will again focus attention on what sort of history is being taught in schools.

Even in those schools where the Second World War is taught, the emphasis is not on military events or even wartime leaders. One primary school teacher said: "We do study the Second World War, but we do not tend to concentrate on particular military events or leaders. We look at issues that are relevant to children themselves. They learn about civilian evacuation for instance, or the issuing of gas masks."

Dr David Starkey, the historian and television broadcaster, said yesterday that the survey had uncovered what he called a climate of "unfortunately reduced horizons and expectations".

It was "absurd", he said, that children were spending so much time discussing Hitler and Stalin to the detriment of everything else connected with the war.

"There is nothing difficult about the concepts being discussed and no reason why a child of primary school age should not be able to understand."

He said that he did not want to go back to a situation where history teaching was nothing but dates and battles, but he said he feared that the pendulum had swung too far in the other direction.

"I think that trying to begin any subject by relating to a child's own experience is a useful tool. But education is about teaching children things they do not know."

Chris Grayling, the shadow education minister, said: "These are really very recent events that have shaped the lives of all of us.

"It is a real worry that so few children seem to know the basics of what happened during the Second World War. We must not allow this to continue."

Interview With Wilbur Smith

BEST-SELLING AUTHOR WILBUR SMITH TELLS ME HOW HE WRITES SUPERB AFRICAN ADVENTURE NOVELS.

By Sidney Allinson.

“Victoria’s delightful,” says best-selling author Wilbur Smith, sitting at a window in the Empress Hotel, admiring the Inner Harbour of Victoria, British Columbia. “You have everything here, perfect scenery, beautiful mountains, and salt water, which I love.” Appreciative praise indeed from the much-travelled Smith, who was visiting here for the first time, during a cross-Canada promotional tour. The effort seems almost superfluous, considering his books now top 100 million copies in total sales.

Smith is tall, tanned, and fit-looking for his 73 years, a friendly raconteur with a hearty laugh. Considering he is one of the highest-paid authors in the world, he is open, cordial, and not in the least full of himself.

The death of his third wife of many years devastated him for a sad period, until he married again in 2003. He introduces his gracious, gorgeous young wife, Mokhiniso Rahkimova, who is 38 years younger than him. A Muslim from the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan, Niso was a law student when Smith first met her, appropriately in a London bookshop. Proudly uxorious, he says, “Thanks to her, this is the best period of my life.”

They are in town to plug his latest opus, “The Quest,” fourth in the wildly popular River God series about Taita, Egyptian master of the supernatural. Not to give away the plot, but this time the River Nile dries up, a catastrophe caused by mysterious happenings far away. In desperation for a solution, the Pharaoh sends for the long-lived Warlock, Taita (pronounced “Ty-ee-tah”.)

He sets off on an epic journey, during which his strange powers equip him to win through to the source of the Nile and combat the cause of the disasters. To triumph, Taita must overcome dangerous challenges that are as much psychic as physical, and is awarded an astonishing regeneration that foreshadows modern stem-cell growth.

Smith’s stories set in ancient Egypt are a sharp turn away from his previous action-packed novels about battle, murder, and sudden death -- portraying muscular white hunters, fearless explorers, and lusty female characters in bygone eras. His historically accurate portrayal of how they actually behaved at the time, without inserting any fashionable authorial disapproval, has drawn some flak from liberal-minded critics.

Smith laughs uproariously, “So what? I revel in being politically incorrect! Hah, they’ve even called me sexist, too. I love women! Gutsy women, fiery women. I believe that women are superior in many ways, their resilience and courage. Furthermore, most of my readers are female.”

Whatever his unfashionable views, they reflect his own origins. Smith was born in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1933, the son of English settlers. His earliest childhood memories are of his artist mother reading adventure stories to him. He grew up to be a voracious reader, between rifle-toting forays into the bush, where at age thirteen he shot his first lion. His father, an implacable big-game hunter who claimed to have never read a book in his life, sternly discouraged young Wilbur’s ambition to become a journalist. “You’d starve doing that -- get a real job!”

So he reluctantly became a government tax accountant, married twice, both ending in divorce, and then turned to writing novels. In 1963, he scored enormous first success with “When The Lion Feeds,” and never stopped from then on, having since written 31 international best-sellers.

He explains matter-of-factly how he produces them in such volume. “After a lot of research, I just go to my writing place every second February and start writing. I keep doing that seven hours a day, five days a week, and at the end of eight months or so I have another manuscript ready.”

This workmanlike routine has earned him great wealth and the freedom to live life to the fullest -- posh homes in Cape Town, London, and Davos, leisure for skiing, hunting safaris, deep-sea fishing, and luxurious travel, with time out to write another novel every second year.

Asked why his last four books have veered away from his previous usual theme of two-fisted outdoor adventure into supernatural fantasy, he says, “I wanted to create an entirely different focus, and I was always fascinated by ancient Egyptian lore, whence the River God series. Now, with “The Quest” I like to think I have come up with something even newer again, both in story and narrative style. Writing it gave me a tremendous amount of pleasure, and favourable public response has been huge already, especially among young women, I might add.”

He says the story in his latest book owes a debt to many other authors, particularly Rider Haggard, whose Victorian novel ‘She’ was the first adult book Smith ever read. Fans of Smith's series set in early Egypt will be interested to know “The Quest” takes another leap forward from an historical basis to a mystical one, in which the continuing character Taita encounters a evil superhuman entity.

Summing up, the contented multi-millionaire author says, “My books are each offered as a finished piece, to enjoy or not. They have all been enormous fun. From my early thirties, I have called no man master. I have been able to choose exactly what I want to write about, free to shoot my mouth off on any subject. Quite a lot of people like me for it, and I have given pleasure to many and offence to few. So it’s been a good life.” Wilbur Smith beams happily towards Niso, “And it’s not over yet.”

-- Sidney Allinson is author of
"KRUGER'S GOLD: A novel of the Anglo-Boer War."
www.xlibris.com/krugersgold.html

"A Good Innings."

(Book Review)


I’ve Had A Good Innings, Paul A. Mayer, General Store, Renfrew, 2006, 219 pages, photos.

This admirable memoir recounts the experiences of a professional soldier and diplomat who epitomises the phrase “an officer and a gentleman.”

Colonel Paul Mayer served Canada for more than 50 years in war and peace; as a front-line infantry officer in the Second World War and the Korean War, then as a peacekeeper in such dangerous hot-spots as Vietnam, the Congo, and Dominican Republic, then finally as personnel director of international development banks.

He starts by telling how he emigrated to Canada as a teenager, proud that his family came from a long line of soldiers in the British army since 1689. He followed this tradition by becoming a career officer in the Canadian army the very week the Second World War began. The dangers he encountered from then on demanded every ounce of inherited steely resolve, ranging from German tanks and Korean human-wave attacks, to narrowly escaping from being staked out to die on an anthill by homicidal African rebels, and surviving an assassination attempt in Santo Domingo that was thwarted by his equally resolute wife.

His lucid style and clear recollections are all the more impressive, considering the book was written during his 90th year. Col. Mayer is poorly served by his publishers though, with badly reproduced photographs and type set ragged-right which gives an unfinished look to the book. However, even that cannot spoil this sprightly account of real-life adventures.

-- Sidney Allinson.

Revised new edition of THE BANTAMS

REVISED MILITARY HISTORY BOOK,"THE BANTAMS",
BY CANADIAN AUTHOR TELLS LITTLE-KNOWN SAGA
OF FIVE-FOOT WARRIORS

"The untold story of World War One" is the sub-title of "The Bantams", a recently revised military history book by Canadian author, Sidney Allinson.

"The Bantams" provides fascinating additional details to the factual but well-nigh incredible story of how the British and Canadian Army recruited over 50,000 tiny men to serve as front-line soldiers. Such Bantam battalions numbered over twenty units in Britain, plus two battalions from Canada. They had their origins in Merseyside, England, in 1915. The movement spread all over Britain, particularly the coal mining regions of Wales and Northern England, then to Canada, until there were Bantam battalions in a score of famed regiments.

Originally published in 1981, this revised version reveals disturbing new information about battlefield executions by firing squads that was only recently released from British official records long held secret from the public. It adds even more poignancy to the story of how thousands of patriots not much taller than a rifle themselves, well below the 5ft. 3ins. minimum height, flocked to the colours.

Canadian military historian Sidney Allinson's researches took him off on a three-year quest for information, journeying across Canada, the U.S., the old battlefields of Flanders, and all over Britain. He contacted over 300 survivors of the Bantams, to obtain the many first-hand accounts of battle told in his book.

It also recreates the social conditions in Canada during the First World War. Patriotic fervour here enabled Col. Frank Burton to raise the 216th Bantam (Toronto) Battalion within one week, and the Vancouver-based 143rd B.C. Bantams was raised despite constant poaching of recruits by other regiments. Soldiers from both these now-forgotten Canadian units served at Vimy Ridge and other later battles.

Published by Xlibris Corp., Philadelphia, PA, "The Bantams" has already been recognized as an important new volume of original military research into the Great War of 1914-1918. Sidney Allinson served in the Royal Air Force, is a past director of the Royal Canadian Military Institute, and now lives in Victoria, British Columbia, where he is Chairman, Pacific Coast Branch, The Western Front Association.

http://www.xlibris.com/thebantams.html

For more information, go to:
https://www1.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=22708

Contact the author at sidneya@shaw.ca

Where "this band of brothers" once stood.

"Agincourt," by Juliet Barker.

Reviewed by Frances Stonor Saunders.

Shortly after dawn on October 25, 1415, 6,000 Englishmen under the command of Henry V looked across a sodden field at the French enemy, and soiled themselves. Their bowels loosened by dysentery and fear, many of them cut off their breeches and undergarments in an attempt to let nature take its course. This option was not available to the men-at-arms who were encased in 70 lbs of steel plate armour. Their discomfort can only be imagined.

Harry's army also creaked, from joints stiff after weeks of exposure to incessant rain, and from armour that had rusted. Some men were barefoot, their shoes having disintegrated on a desultory march across 250 miles of hostile territory. Sick, half-starved, outnumbered by five to one - how did this pitifully reduced host transmute into the noble force that with "terrible aspect" humbled the pride of France at Agincourt 600 years ago?

The French army was vastly superior in number, but its bulk outweighed its intelligence. With no leader (both the king, Charles VI, and his dauphin, declined to make an appearance) or proper chain of command, it lacked the coherence and discipline of the English. During the lengthy period of deployment on that wretched field of the Somme, the French nobles and knights jostled to get their armorial banners into the leading ranks.

Distracted by this competitive gallantry, they failed to take advantage of Henry's highly risky redeployment of his archers, who actually had to turn their backs to the French as they adjusted their position. Free to commence their deadly work, the archers unloosed volleys "as thick as rain" (in England, meanwhile, geese shivered after the involuntary donation of their feathers). The French, as Henry had intended, attacked, sending mounted men-at-arms and infantry crashing towards the English lines.

What followed was carnage on a scale not seen in the Hundred Years' War since the battles of Crècy and Poitiers, half a century before. The French horses, stung by English arrows, reared and bucked and threw their riders, who now became a grisly front line of bodies wedged into the sticky ground. After them came the infantry, who had to clamber on top of their colleagues, pressing them ever deeper into the mud, in order to meet the English corps. Eventually, unable to move forward or back across the mound of jerking limbs, the flower of French chivalry was hacked and clubbed to death by the English.

The military facts of the battle of Agincourt, insofar as they can be accurately reconstructed, are briskly delivered by Juliet Barker. Too briskly, perhaps. We have to wait until page 287 for the fight to begin, and a mere 20 pages later, it's over (give or take: a subsequent chapter deals with the mopping-up exercise). There is little or nothing to distinguish her treatment from, say, John Keegan's commanding chapter in The Face of Battle. But Barker's account, as her subtitle suggests, seeks a much wider perspective on this cherished episode in English national myth than conventional military history can offer.

From her introductory section on the background to Henry V's quarrel with France, through the massive logistical exercise of mounting an invasion, to the siege and fall of Harfleur and the increasingly desperate march towards Calais, this is narrative non-fiction in grand sweep mode. This allows Barker to gather up much rich material, but leaves her little room for analysis. We learn of the extraordinary sums raised to pay for Henry's campaign, and much about how it was disbursed, but there is no discussion of how this impacted the economy (we can guess: the survival of surnames like Bowyer, Arrowsmith, and Fletcher are a reminder of the medieval population's profitable invol-vement in war).

Barker dismisses stories of "Henry's wild, misspent youth and his dramatic conversion at his coronation into a sober, just and righteous king" as mischievous invention, but doesn't explain what animated this reverse hagiography. Nor does she explain why the chroniclers log Henry's every eyebrow movement up to and including on the eve of battle ("A little touch of Harry in the night"), only to leave us with such a pallid impression of his role on the battlefield itself.

Elsewhere, Barker is more vigilant in her reading of primary sources (not just for what they say, but for what they fail to say). She is right to warn of the "propaganda trap" that historians must dodge, "the one-sided, politically motivated or simply jingoistic" response to Agincourt that seasoned generations of prep-school history lessons and, most famously, provided Laurence Olivier with the excuse to prance and preen and speak in a ridiculous accent.

Barker is sometimes vulnerable to a bit of Old Vic nostalgia, but the weight of evidence she presents in this ambitious book speaks for itself: medieval war was a brutal business, and no amount of glamorous chivalric accessories can disguise that fact.

Memories of WWII air war.

A Walk In The Valley, by Robert C. Kensett, General Store Publishing, Burnstown, 120 pages, photographs.

Each time one reads a memoir by Allied veterans of the bomber war over Europe during World War Two, one is struck by their astonishingly matter-of-fact attitude about their bravery and what they accomplished. The title refers to the Biblical "valley of the shadow of death;" highly appropriate, considering that more than 10,000 Canadian airmen died during the British air offensive against Nazi Germany.

One of the lucky survivors was Robert Kensett, who volunteered to join the Royal Canadian Air Force and served three years as a navigator aboard Halifax bomber aircraft. Navigators were considered the "brainy" members of aircrew, with their requirement for mathematical and map-reading skills. They were responsible for directing the aircraft to target destinations and finding the way home again. Navigators did so despite their relatively primitive equipment and having to cope with foul weather, most often in darkness. Kensett was typical of the young volunteer flyers of his era, and recounts his dangerous experiences with modesty and humour.

Some of the impact of his book is lost early on though, by the way he starts with a sort of family history preamble. It gives the initial impression of a personal memoir aimed primarily for his relatives and friends. However, once he does get into his wartime service, interest quickens, and he is wise enough to include a good deal of minutiae about military aircraft routine.

The reproductions of pages from his actual flying operations and target charts convey rare details seldom available today. Though numerous other memoirs of Second World War experiences have been published, the specific details included in A Walk In The Valley will be of particular interest to air combat buffs.

-- Sidney Allinson.

Sic transit gloria ...

NELSON MUST BE TURNING IN HIS GRAVE.
By Tom Utley
21/10/2005)

At daybreak 200 years ago this morning, the people of Britain woke with the long-familiar threat of an invasion from France hanging over them. Napoleon had had his plan of attack ready for more than two years. He had built a vast fleet of barges to carry his Grande Armée of more than 100,000 battle-hardened troops over the Channel from Boulogne. All that stood in his way was that narrow strip of water and a couple of dozen ships of the Royal Navy.

By nightfall on October 21, 1805, the threat of invasion had been lifted for good - although it was not until November 4, a fortnight later, that news of what had happened reached England's shores aboard the schooner Pickle.

The crushing victory inflicted on Villeneuve's combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar had set history on a new course that would guarantee Britain's independence for as far ahead as men could see. It was Trafalgar that established Britannia as the undisputed ruler of the waves, Trafalgar that cleared the seas for the greatest trading empire that the world has ever known.

In not much more than five hours of battle, Nelson and Collingwood had made their country a superpower and ensured that Britons would continue to be ruled by governments of their own choosing for more than a century and a half to come.

A game that historians have always liked to play is What If…? It is usually a silly exercise, involving a great deal of guesswork. But we don't need to indulge in much fantasy to answer the question: "What would have happened if Nelson had lost Trafalgar, and Napoleon had been able to launch his invasion of England?" The question is fairly easy to answer, because we know how the French emperor treated the territories that he conquered, and there is no reason to believe that he would have treated us very differently.

It is safe to say, for a start, that the French invasion would have succeeded, with the Royal Navy out of the way. The Grande Armée was the most efficient fighting machine in the world at the time, and these islands were ill prepared to meet the threat that it posed. Within a matter of weeks, Napoleon would have established himself in power, perhaps crowning himself or one of his relations as King of England.

One of the new regime's first acts, apart from sending any organisers of resistance to the guillotine, would have been to sweep away the Common Law, and to establish in its place the Napoleonic Code. Like so many dictators - from the Roman emperors to Hitler, Stalin, Chairman Mao and Pol Pot - Napoleon was a tidy-minded rationalist who believed in universal laws, applicable to all mankind. From a dictator's point of view, the trouble with Britain's common law is that it is an organic growth, based not on first principles, but on human nature and accumulated experience.

We can be quite sure, too, that Napoleon would have imposed on Britain his uniform system of decimal weights and measures - his absurd metres and centimetres, based on mathematical calculations (which have since been shown to be wildly inaccurate) of the dimensions of the earth. Another safe bet is that, before long, he would have imposed a single currency on Britain and the rest of his European empire.

Unlike the earlier French revolutionaries, who thought that Italy should be governed by Italians and Spain by Spaniards, Napoleon was never a believer in nation states. He believed in centralised European government - one law and one authority for the whole of his empire. This was the fate from which Nelson and Collingwood saved the peoples of Britain, 200 years ago today.

Readers will already have seen the direction of my thoughts: on this bicentenary of Trafalgar, the similarities between Napoleon's vision of Europe and the regime now being imposed upon Britain from Brussels are simply too glaring to be allowed to pass without comment.

Like Napoleon, the champions of the European Union believe that one law, one currency, one system of weights and measures, one centralised authority should be imposed upon all the peoples of Europe, whether they like it or not. Like him, they see no place for the nation state in the modern world. They insist that European law should always take precedence over the laws of national parliaments - and to hell with the principle that people should be allowed to choose for themselves how they are governed.

One of the great triumphs of the Europhiles has been to plant the thought in so many people's minds that Europe is the future, and that anyone who suggests withdrawing from the European Union is seeking to "put the clock back". Somehow they have made it the received wisdom that pulling out now would be: (a) an extremely complicated matter; and (b) ruinous to the British economy.

In fact, nothing could be easier than withdrawal. Parliament could achieve it in a single afternoon's business, simply by repealing sections two and three of the European Communities Act, 1972. These are the pernicious clauses that provide for the supremacy of European law over British law. Nor is there any reason to believe that the British economy would suffer from withdrawal. On the contrary, as my occasional colleague, the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, points out in his brilliant pamphlet for Politeia, Voting on the Constitution, there is every reason to believe that our economy would prosper, freed from the daily increasing burden of European regulation. Europe is the only continent on earth, after all, with which Britain runs a trade deficit. The other nations of Europe need our markets more even than we need theirs.

If Nelson had lost at Trafalgar, Britain would have been locked into a centralised, protectionist Europe. Instead, his victory opened up the markets of the whole wide world to British enterprise. Two hundred years on, we could do with another Nelson.