Selkirk. At every camp they passed on their upstream voyage, they were greeted with cheers, and the recruits repeatedly sang, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” Whether they used the original lyrics or those penned by John Dines is not known. When they reached Fort Selkirk, their singing was loud enough to scare the huskies into the woods. Finally, early in the morning on Friday, October 16, they arrived in Whitehorse, a week after leaving Dawson City. They had lunch on board, with Captain P. Martin, a Whitehorse businessman, and E.J. White, the editor of the Whitehorse Star, as special guests. Jim MacKinnon, known as “Skotay” by his fellow volunteers, made a speech, and they presented Captain Cowley with a gold watch chain and fob in appreciation of the hospitality extended to them during their upriver voyage. As the Lightning vanished downriver later, they stood on the wharf, again singing “Tipperary.”
The Boyle battery in uniform in Vancouver. Dawson City Museum 1984.55.1
Since the Canadian Pacific ship was not to arrive in Skagway for a few days, they remained in Whitehorse for a week; while they were there, they owned the town. A committee of Whitehorse citizens arranged some social activities for the Boyle boys. A dance was arranged for the Monday and a smoker for Tuesday. The five-piece orchestra donated their services for the dance. Across one end of the hall was hung a banner that read “Dawson to Berlin 7460 Miles.” The Boyle men, all dressed in their uniforms, had earlier posed for a photograph with the banner supported on the building behind them. A splendid supper was served after midnight, catered by Henry Kamayama, a local baker.76 The dancing continued until two in the morning. The smokers outnumbered the dancers the following night in a program filled with movies, speeches, dancing, recitations, songs, banjo duets and boxing matches, which also lasted until two in the morning. The guests stated that they were well entertained during their stay in Whitehorse.77 They then rode the train to Skagway and took passage on the Princess May to Victoria, where, after a three-day delay, they were transferred to Hastings Park camp in Vancouver, where hundreds of recruits were temporarily stationed.
Life took on some semblance of order at Hastings Park. Charles Jennings, a Whitehorse man, was appointed the colour sergeant, and James MacKinnon quartermaster. Harold Strong and Jesse Tolley became sergeants, and Robert Morton, Edward Fitzgerald, Frank McAlpine and William Black (Commissioner Black’s brother, who joined them in Vancouver) became corporals. But if they thought that they would soon see action, they were sadly mistaken.
A New Kind of War
The months rolled by and the Boyle unit remained in Vancouver, and the men became restless with the delays. Finally, on May 19, 1915, an impatient Joe Boyle sent a telegram asking when the Boyle contingent was to be shipped overseas. Minister Hughes responded by issuing orders that they be shipped overseas immediately, without horses. Within a week, the men, and Jack the husky, were on their way to Montreal by train. They boarded the SS Megantic on June 11 and arrived in England a week later.
Six months after arriving in England, the Boyle detachment was still posted to Shorncliffe camp in Kent, still unequipped and yet to see action. The discontent of the Yukon men grew. For patriotic Canadians, there was nothing nobler than to serve and to see action “on the front.” Many homesick enlistees wrote about their eagerness to go up on the line. “Yukoners are very much dissatisfied at being kept here so long,” wrote Felix Boutin to his brother back in Dawson,
In fact, a number of the boys have transferred and gone to the front with other units. There are only thirty three left and most of us would give anything to get across to France, as we are ashamed to remain here. Last week a call came into this depot for twelve men to reinforce the Sifton battery and nearly all the Yukoners jumped at it. Twelve of them were picked out, including Forrest, Peppard, Black and Burgess. They got all ready to go, and at the last minute orders came from headquarters that Yukoners could not be taken on a draft as they were to remain as a unit. There seems to be no reason why we should be kept here so long as lots of men are being sent over that are less trained than we are.78
“As a matter of fact,” wrote one of the volunteers, “we are all rather ashamed to be here so long in England, but there seems to be no way of getting machine guns with which to equip us.”79
The year passed, and still the men had not seen action. Meanwhile, back home, the IODE and the civil servants of the Yukon each raised $1,000, and two cheques in that amount were sent to Ottawa for the purchase of two machine guns. Over the winter, the Boyle men remained at Shorncliffe and were formed into a battery that was later attached to the 4th Canadian Division.80 In late February, they were moved from their comfortable billets into tents, which they found very disagreeable in the damp, cold winter.
The training for machine gun units was rigorous and physically demanding. Many volunteers found themselves transferred to other units if they didn’t meet the standard. Leading commanders in the British forces did not grasp the tactical significance of the machine gun during the early years of the war. The generals did not see the need for them or to revise their tactical thinking. Machine guns were viewed as contrary to all accepted military practice. Tight formations by foot soldiers with bayonets fixed were the order of the day, and as a consequence, tens of thousands of soldiers, many of them Canadians, were sent to deaths that could have been avoided.81 The machine gun took the nobility out of warfare. It was industrial-scale slaughter.
The hidebound structure of the British chain of command was not inclined toward subtlety and manoeuvre but rather believed that only the greatest display of moral fibre would win the day. By this structured thinking, soldiers who hesitated to advance under machine gun fire were not showing the stern qualities of a good soldier. A bold charge of infantry would cause the enemy lines to break and run, and the waiting cavalry would ride through the gap on their horses and take the line. As one observer noted:
In Britain, class was everything. The command and fabric of the British Army has been described by one critic as having “stiffened into a sort of Byzantine formalism.” The other ranks, who belonged to the lower class, were expected to obey orders without question and without any real knowledge of the military situation, which was considered too deep and complicated for them to grasp. Such was the gap between officers and men that any private soldier who did try to ask a question of his seniors was considered by his own fellows a traitor to his own class.82
The combatants dug into opposing defensive lines zigzagging across northern France, for hundreds of kilometres from the North Sea coast to Switzerland. They were occupied by hundreds of thousands of soldiers—German and Austrian on one side, French, English, Australian, New Zealander and Canadian on the other. They called it the Western Front. The Allies’ combat strategy quickly resulted in a stalemate in which the Germans had dug trenches and established defensive positions using machine guns with overlapping fields of fire, hidden behind rows of barbed wire. Such positions were virtually impregnable and could only be broken at terrible cost. “Three men with a machine gun can stop a battalion of heroes,” noted one observer.83 Then there were snipers hidden in nooks and crannies, their sharpshooting rifles trained upon the opposite line. If anyone dared to lift their head above the top of the trench, they risked getting it blown off. Between these lines lay No Man’s Land. Varying in width from one hundred to several hundred metres, it was a zone in which nothing lived, and any man foolish enough to enter it quickly died. The men on the front lines figured this out almost immediately. The high command, securely positioned kilometres away from the action, and aloof from the enlisted men, denied this reality for far too long.
Between 1914 and 1918, the machine gun became the defining instrument of death for hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides of the conflict. By the time the Boyle detachment had made its way into the theatre of war, the Vickers machine gun was the weapon of choice. These guns had withering firepower, capable of firing up to five hundred rounds per minute. They required a team of five men to
