s not needed. In less than two months after the
glorification of Valcartier, the Premier found himself challenged by
the man who had already begun to act as though national headquarters
were in the Militia Department. Sam Hughes was never unpopular in
Toronto. The incident referred to might almost have taken place in
Montreal.

Canada was beginning to understand, to heroize and to censure Sam
Hughes. His measure was being taken here. But the censure was
unheeded. Hughes worked while critics talked. He was mobilizing, if
not organizing, a nation. He still believed that he (ipse) could do
it. The mobilization included everything needed by the army as well as
the army itself. He wanted to get the nation behind the army: and
himself behind the nation. He started everything--even to shells, high
explosives and aeroplanes. Hughes knew what the army needed. He
refused to admit that other men also knew how to get some of these
things better than he did.

Cabinet colleagues were adjuncts. The motto punctuated by the smashing
fist was, "I want to tell you!" No major on parade ever felt so
overwhelming. Hughes was more than a martinet. He was a dilemma. The
phenomenal was always about him. War was not even hell to Sam Hughes.
It was more often a chance to show a civilian minister that he was a
mere conventional ornament. Hughes may have hated the necessity, but
he loved the spirit and the fire, of war.

Sam Hughes was probably wiser on what modern war demanded than many of
the British command. Even Kitchener argued for shrapnel when Lloyd
George wanted high explosives. There was no civilian in Canada to
argue against Hughes, who aimed to do in Canada what the Minister of
Munitions, Director-General, Headquarters Staff, and the Minister of
Transports did in England. He was able from the first to get a
realizing measure of the kind of mechanical hell known as modern war.

Start a force like that and you may expect abnormalities in the wake of
it. We had "Sham Shoes". Hughes had nothing to do with those. He
stated in Winnipeg that Wellington had once said that a contractor who
made bad boots for an army should be shot. We had shell contracts--and
the "friend" Joseph Wesley Allison; the Kyte charges, which brought the
Minister home from England to answer them in the House. Neither the
answer nor the friend was characteristic of the kind of man we had
supposed Sam Hughes to be. We had the Ross Rifle. H