Canada has yet to come to terms with the legacy of the First World War. While our soldiers won lasting international renown at Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele, such victories exacted a mind-numbing price: more than 60,000 dead by war’s end, and many more broken in mind and body. In The Madman and the Butcher, award-winning historian Tim Cook takes just measure of both the glory and the cost of Canada’s most important war by telling the intertwined stories of two leading figures, Sam Hughes and Arthur Currie.
Both were Ontario farm boys who rose through the ranks of the pre-war militia and found themselves elevated to the international stage. As minister of the militia, Hughes was a bombastic and successful recruiter whose cheerleading built up the national morale. But he was also an inept, unstable manager who filled the ranks with unqualified patronage appointments, and equipped his troops with faulty gear, notably the Ross rifle. The diffident, thoughtful Currie was a methodical, level-headed administrator who became one of the war’s greatest generals, not through displays of strategic brilliance, but rather by keeping his cool and learning from earlier mistakes.
By 1916, even the patient Prime Minister Borden concluded that Hughes was “unbalanced.” Ousted from power, the bitter Hughes went on a rampage against those he regarded as his betrayers. In an infamous 1919 tirade, he accused Currie of building up his own military fame by “needlessly sacrificing the lives of Canadian soldiers.” Hughes’s rant confirmed his reputation as a “madman” even as it tarred Currie with the label of “butcher.” By carefully reconstructing their lives and war experiences, Cook tries to rehabilitate both men, arguing that “the madman was no madman, the butcher no butcher.”
His attempt to paint both men in a favourable light is only partially convincing. Currie emerges as a genuinely heroic and tragic commander, a man who stifled his natural compassion to do a dirty job. But, working against his own argument, Cook provides a great deal of evidence to support earlier historians who described the minister of the militia as a madman. He refers to Hughes’s “unstable emotions,” “unhinged quality,” “manic behavior,” and “almost pathological [refusal] to delegate authority,” and suggests he was “either a liar or delusional or both,” “out of touch with reality at the front,” “irrational and unpredictable,” and prone to “ego-driven interferences, racist rhetoric, and manic actions.”
Cook complains that other historians have caricatured Hughes as “an unstable megalomaniac.” But based on Cook’s own evidence, Hughes was, if not a full-fledged lunatic, at the very least someone so unhinged he should never have held a position higher than that of potato peeler in a military canteen.
Despite its unpersuasive defence of Hughes, this book is a triumph of the historian’s craft, rich fare for both scholars and general readers. Confidently written and based on an impressive mastery of archival and secondary sources, it confirms Cook’s stature as our leading military historian.
