Lindsay, editor, soldier, adventurer, school teacher who once taught
English and who never could make a speech, though he talked in
public--what was there about him up till 1914 to make any nation
wonder? The first time I saw Hughes, in 1910, a man whose office he
had just left said, as though imparting a State secret:

"There goes the next Minister of Militia."

Up till that moment if anybody had asked me, "Do you know Hughes?" I
should have said, "Oh, yes, everybody knows Jim Hughes, the School
Inspector."

The story of Canada's Army is immortal. It is yet to be truly told.
When it is told by the right man--whether historian or poet--the name
Hughes, as we know it at its best and biggest, will shine out like a
great fixed star that tried to play being a comet. On April 22nd, from
the sick bed that even he probably knew he never would leave of his own
will, in memory of St. Julien, he sent the army boys a brief message,
that he still believed in them as he always had.

Simple little message, it meant much. It would have meant a million
times more if the "boys" could have flashed back a helio to the wan old
General who used to be such a noise in the world--"Same to you,
General." The boys somehow liked him. The defects of Sam Hughes were
of the sort that soldiers love. He was a man's man.

"Tipperary" was just becoming popular to whistle when a camera man
authorized by the Government of Canada took one of the most striking
pictures in our part of the war outside the zone of the shell areas.
Gen. Sam Hughes, jack boots and oilskin cape flung back by the gale to
show his belt and the flap of his khaki, wide-legged on a rope ladder,
coming down forward from a troopship in the Gulf, almost baring his
teeth to the October wind; bidding farewell to the First Contingent
33,000 strong, that steamed out of the Gulf into the convoy.

You recognize in such a picture a man who perhaps understood the
sensations of Alexander. Sam Hughes had finished his first job for the
war. Among all the war achievements that thrilled nations when big men
suddenly took hold of them in after years, this one holds its own.
Hughes never could match it again. Here was the greatest army that had
ever put out to sea at one time; an army forty per cent bigger in three
months than the total force that Gen. Ian Hamilton estimated Canada
could send as her whole contribution to a great war. This was Hughes'
answer to Hamilton. Not only wer