Review: The Madman and the Butcher The Sensational Wars of Sam Hughes and General Arthur Currie

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THE MADMAN AND THE BUTCHER The Sensational Wars of Sam Hughes and General Arthur Cuirie Tim Cook Toronto: Alien Lane Canada, 2010. 4oopp, $22.00 paper. ISBN: 978-0143173571In other countries successful generals rise to high political office. Not so in Canada, where there remains a persistent suspicion of successful military leaders. This book may explain why. For Tim Cook, the story of Canada in the First World War is intertwined with the clashes between Sam Hughes, Canada's minister of militia and defence from 1914 to 1916, and General Arthur Currie, who became the commander of the Canadian Corps. Few are better qualified to tell this story than Tim Cook. Having served for the past decade as the Great War Historian at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, Cook combines a vast knowledge of the primary sources with a real talent for storytelling.Recent historians have had little good to say about Sam Hughes. They admit that this profane and egotistical son of Victorian Ontario managed to mobilize and ship off to England some 36,000 troops in the fall of 1914. But did Hughes march into the office of Lord Kitchener and threaten him in order to keep the Canadians together? Certainly not, Cook admits. Did he interfere with the granting of munitions contracts in Canada? Absolutely. Did he insist that Canadians use a Canadian rifle, even as evidence mounted that it was a bad choice for the trenches? Indeed. Did anti-Catholic ravings incur the wrath of French Canada and weaken recruiting? Of course. But Cook still retains a certain grim admiration for the man. His rhetoric was fierce, methods wild, but Sam Hughes held a deep paternal concern for his boys.Among Hughes's better decisions was choosing Arthur Currie to help lead Canada's first contingent to the trenches. Currie was a struggling real estate developer and part time artillery officer then living in Victoria, British Columbia. By the fall of 1916, he was honing reputation as an innovative, thoughtful commander of one of Canada's four overseas divisions. The following spring Currie knelt on a champagne case before King George V, who knighted him in the field just before the Canadian took command of the entire Canadian Corps. By then Hughes was a spent force. Weakened by bitter political attacks over often questionable wartime conduct, he was kicked out of cabinet by Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden in November 1916. Hughes believed that downfall was the result not of own incompetence but of disloyalty. Arthur Currie was high on list of enemies.Currie's reputation as a careful, though somewhat distant, commander rose with that of the Canadian Corps, which he led to war's end. Both reputations were built upon 60,000 Canadian dead from a population in 1911 that had stood just over seven million. Hughes waited until March 1919 to take revenge. From seat in the house of commons, where he was protected by parliamentary privilege, Hughes accused Currie of wasting Canadian lives, especially when Currie launched an attack on the Belgian city of Mons just hours before the armistice on n November 1918. …