uffled into battalions; battalions into
brigades. The whole force was inoculated against typhoid. There were
stores to accumulate; a fleet of transports to assemble; a thousand
small cogs in the machine to be nicely adjusted."

Sir Max Aitken did not mention the message to "My Soldiers" in every
man's knapsack, an imitation of Kitchener's knapsack message to the
"Old Contemptibles"; or that he himself had applied to Sam Hughes for a
"job" in Canada's army.

Hughes was Minister of War, not a Minister of Defence. In the tramp of
battalions down the street he felt Canada to be a young nation, not an
overseas Dominion only. Yet the First Contingent was the work of one
of the most scientifically unprepared-for-war peoples in the world.
Valcartier was the glorification of Hughes, who was always personally
prepared for war; what or where he was not always sure, except that it
would involve the Empire, that when it came, the sand-bags of Canada's
front line would not be in Canada, and the Canada Militia Act would be
as useful in the case as a page from Pickwick Papers.

Allow for the British-born majority in the First Contingent, the
patriotic enthusiasm of Militia officers, the commandeering of national
resources and the great work of subordinates; the fact remains that had
he not been as much his own enemy as he was a soldier born and bred,
Sam Hughes should have been Lord Valcartier.

The sad fact about Hughes is that he did not estimate what Canada did
and did not in her first impact upon the war. He could not see Canada
except as the shadow of Sam Hughes. In the light of the war as he
stood in front of it, that shadow of Hughes seemed to him to cover the
country. For two years, it seemed to grow. Then it flickered. In
1916 it went out. And there never was in Canada a going out like it.

Hughes was the embodiment of force without power. He began to mobilize
a nation, not merely as battalions on parade, but as an army equipped
by Canadian science, industry, transportation, intelligence, and
citizenship. So far as he carried that out, the editor of the _Lindsay
Warder_ and M.P. for Haliburton and Victoria had no superior in
organizing force in this country. Up till 1916 he was a patriotic
cannon-cracker exploding without any particular objective, except that
he wanted a Canadian Army in Canada, not an overseas Contingent, or an
Imperial Army. between 1914 and 1916 he was a great organizing
soldier, at his