A Few Acers Of Wheat


      The fall out of Kitchener’s Mozambique campaign cannot be understated. It not only set off the fuse in the Balkans but, like ripples on a pond, it kept right on traveling further from it’s source. One chain of events only set off another and, it was never more harder felt than in London. Up till spring of 1900, the British war plan was monumental but, the goals were relatively simple. Britain only needed to defend it’s vital supply lines and, so far, they had managed. The Boers were on the defensive in South Africa meaning that Cape Colony remained in friendly hands, leaving the supply routes from India open. The Suez was out of harms reach and the French had proven an inability to close down the Mediterranean. Greenland and Iceland were now occupied and this gave the Royal Navy more success in running the American blockade of Canada. The sudden entrance of Italy into the war now began to change the picture in many little ways.
The convoys that passed through the Mediterranean would require more protection. More protection meant the same number of warships doing double duty and this ultimately meant fewer convoys. The British alternative was to reroute more traffic around the Cape of Good Hope and that meant more ships having to travel further thru seas that were far more dangerous. The end result was that the essential raw materials, coming from India, were going to be showing up in fewer quantities and that meant higher prices. The most important of these raw materials was food.
Even before the conflict, Britain had experienced a massive population explosion and feeding that population was critical in even the most peaceful of times. Sizable tracks of British land were becoming urban and domestic food production had not been so low in centuries. Now that Argentina was in the war this meant that another crucial source of wheat and beef was off the market. Of course, Britain now had access to Junkers wheat form Germany and Confederate beef from Texas but neither could provide the quantities that Britain required.
Great Britain had become very dependent on foodstuffs from Canada in the pre war era. This was so much the case that White Hall considered the breadbasket of Canada’s central plains to be strategically critical. The US blockade had managed to slow down traffic, primarily the export of wheat but, it had come nowhere near stopping it. What the US had managed more success at was stopping war materials from getting in. Again, the US had not brought things to a complete halt but, they did not have too. By 1900, the situation in Canada was becoming critical and the Balkan situation suddenly caused the Salisbury Cabinet to have to make a very hard choice.
So far, Britain had raised a sizable army at home but, unlike the other belligerents, she had not used this army. Most of the troops were still training in camps and waiting for shipment to Canada, where they had always been intended. The problem was the US blockade, something that no pre-war plans had taken into account since British plans had never anticipated having to fight a war of this scale. As a result, the large scale deployment of British troops to North America had only, so far, been a trickle. To move large sized formations would require large fleets to protect them and this ran two serious risks. The first was that it would weaken the defense of the home islands and quite possibly open the door for a French invasion. The second was that Britain might loose that fleet and, as a result, loose the entire war. The battle of the Yellow Sea had not been any great encouragement.
Now, the Salisbury government had to make a choice. If the Dardanelle straights fell to the Russians then Britain could also easily loose the war. The ownership of those straights was directly linked to how well the fighting in Serbia went and, it was a fight that the Austrians were ill prepared for. Most of their best troops were busy keeping the Russians from crossing the mountains of southern Poland and breaking out on the Hungarian plain. The Serbs did not represent a serious and immediate threat to Austria Hungary but, as Russian troops streamed into the region that would slowly start to change.
Germany had already promised to divert reserves to the region but, the only real reserve left to the allied cause, in Europe at any rate, was in Britain. Salisbury would have to commit the troops that had been promised to Canada and, by doing so, he was possibly writing Canada off as a loss. The British Army of North America and the Canadian Army were holding their own so far but, the weight of the never ending series of US offensives was taking it’s toll. The simple math was that British and Canadian losses were far exceeding their ability to replace those losses. The first cracks in the line were already starting to show.
Vancouver had been a sizable base for the Royal Navy before the war. It was considered strategic because, from that location, they could easily challenge US naval moves towards the far east and the all important China. As the war progressed, Vancouver also became an important secondary port for supplies that the British were shipping in from their base at Pearl Harbor. By the spring of 1900, Vancouver was a shadow of it’s former self. The US Navy had shown very little mercy in harassing the base and, by this point, the US Army had finally managed to isolate the city by land. The rail lines were cut, the mountain passes were occupied, and US artillery was routinely falling on the outskirts of the city. It was no secret to anyone, that soon, that same US artillery would be within range of the Royal Navy base and Vancouver would have little choice but surrender.
On the other side of the country, the war had not become that critical just yet but, it was widely believed that this was only a matter of time. Toronto was not yet cut off and her defenses were largely in tact but the US was steadily pushing Canadian and British forces past the city. The US advance was almost predictable and never measured in more than a few miles a day but, the allies had not managed to stop it in any way. It was only a matter of time before the city of Toronto would be cut off and under siege as well. The really bad part of this was that the US no longer really had to do this in order to neutralize the city. So many people had already fled town that Toronto’s industrial base was not even performing at a quarter of it’s prewar capacity.
The situation was even worse than that. Raw materials were also no longer getting into the city and, in effect, Toronto had almost reached a point of not being worth defending. The British army stated as much and were fully prepared to abandon the city. The Canadian government would hear nothing of such talk and absolutely demanded that the city be held to the last. This represented a serious turning point in the relations between Great Britain and it’s former colony.
Canada had officially become an independent nation over three decades before the war. This was largely in name only. While the Canadians were given a great deal of leeway in their internal affairs, foreign policy and strategic concerns were still being controlled in London. The US threat was considered that great and Canadians had a hard time denying it.
Of all the industrialized nations, at the time, Canada probably still had the most wilderness of any. Most Canadians were largely unconcerned with things like foreign policy since they seemed so far away and had very little to do with the lives of the average person. While the US and Great Britain might have been squaring off for war, right on the Canadian border (a border that the majority of the Canadian population lived by) the reality on the ground was that the average person on both sides largely ignored politics and pretended as if the border did not even exist.
The war had changed many such attitudes. The last real war that Canada had fought had been against the same enemy as now, the United States. That war was over eighty years old in 1900 and the only people who lived through it were too young to even remember. At the time of the first war, Canada was almost entirely wilderness and the majority of her population was Quebecois French. Much had changed in the past century and Canada had never experienced anything like the war they were now in. Their casualties were higher, per capita, than every other industrialized nation. Most of the North American campaign was being fought on her soil. It was forging a Canadian nationality like nothing else ever had.
This was why the heated protests, over abandoning Toronto, came as something of a shock in London. It also served as a wake up call for the Salisbury government. They suddenly realized that while they might not be able to follow through with their original plans for Canada, they would have to do something. Britain turned to her North American allies. It was the only card left to play.
The famous philosopher, Voltaire, had once told his French King, upon hearing of the loss of Canada, “do not worry your majesty, all you have lost is a few acres of snow.” Lord Salisbury could not be so optimistic. It was not the snow that concerned him but the golden fields of wheat that were now more important than ever. If Britain lost Canada then she might very well loose the war.