LEFT: Members of the Chinese Labour Corps manage to smile while on board a crowded vessel during the First World War. (PHOTO CREDIT: DAVID LIVINGSTONE CLC COLLECTION)
By Dan Black
Earlier in the day, many of the Chinese had managed to escape long hours of boredom by doing what many Canadian servicemen did on the troop trains. If they could write, they composed letters or maintained diaries. Others sketched, told stories, daydreamed or played games. Gambling was prohibited, but policing it was another matter. Besides, the men were quite inventive when it came to finding ways to amuse themselves.
One game involved a group of men taking turns striking each other on the head or palm with increasing force until one man gave in. Boredom was boredom and such tests of endurance and masculinity were not unique to the young men of the CLC. It is also more than likely some of the games kept the guards entertained.
In some cars, singing and the welcoming sound of Chinese folk music rose above the monotonous clacking of the carriage wheels. More than a few labourers had brought along the fourstringed sihu or two-stringed erhu. Depending, of course, on the player’s skill, the wooden, bowed instruments could lull a listener to sleep or send him into a world of irritability.
Several CLC members take a break from work detail at Camp Petawawa in the summer of 1917. The man in the middle enjoys a smoke while resting a sledgehammer or axe on his shoulder. (CREDIT: LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA, C-068867)
The erhu’s light weight and lack of bulk made it easy to carry long distances and play in confined spaces. Losing the bow usually meant losing the entire instrument because the bow was attached, placed between the two strings. For the men occupying the uncomfortable seats, the music helped free their minds. Few, if any, had a sense of where they were going or what the war in Europe would look like. But the sound of a well-played folk song took away much of the worry and made these non-combatants think of home or paint their imaginations with stories of honour and adventure.
While they slept or tried to sleep through the night between Fort William and Chalk River in eastern Ontario, the Canadian military guards were under orders to maintain their twenty-four hour watch.
The work of the Railway Service Guard (RSG) began the moment they and the Chinese boarded the trains at Vancouver. At any one time throughout the journey, there were two uniformed guards posted in each Colonist car, one at each end. Armed with rifles, but no ammunition, most of the men took their job very seriously and their vigilance extended to station stops during which they peered under carriages while patrolling both sides of the train.
No one wanted to be the man who allowed a labourer, employed under the massive British scheme, to escape.
This fear among the guards and those higher up on the chain of command was probably over-exaggerated. The Chinese very likely had no idea where they were or how they could live in such a strange land. Even if they did want to shirk their filial responsibility and slip away, the risk to health and safety was high.
Many of the men from Shantung (Shandong) province had grown up in heavily populated villages next to other crowded villages. On the trains, when they could peer through the windows, they saw mostly unpopulated wilderness. The prospect of disappearing into a dense, bug-infested forest or some other seemingly hostile landscape, especially in winter, was not appealing. Station stops in towns and cities were more appealing to would-be runaways, but in addition to the RSG, an escapee would have to get past the CPR’s railway police.
A language barrier may have also contributed to keeping the men on the trains. At the time, there was no standard Chinese, only a common written language, and regional dialects. The Chinese community in Canada was composed of many people from Guangdong and Hong Kong, and most spoke Cantonese. Few would have been able to understand the Shantung people from northeastern China.
While conducting an eye exam at Weihaiwei, Captain Harry Livingstone looks for signs of trachoma, the highly infections eye disease common in China and on the Western Front. (CREDIT: DAVID LIVINGSTONE CLC COLLECTION)
That same summer—three months into the transcontinental train movements of the CLC—Canadian immigration, military and railway authorities were under a lot of pressure. The war, which now involved the Americans, continued to make a very high demand on shipping. With so many labourers arriving on Canada’s west coast, a temporary holding or transit camp was erected at Camp Petawawa. The first two CLC specials rolled into the camp in August and they were the same two trains that passed Livingstone’s westbound train.
In the weeks leading up to that, there was much debate behind closed doors on whether Petawawa was the best location. And when it was agreed to house the men there, ongoing secrecy remained part of the equation. By then, keeping news of the CLC scheme out of the press was—for the press censor—less like keeping all of one’s fingers in a dike and more like a game of whack-a-mole. Newspaper editors across the country cooperated with the censorship rules, but stories popped up, including one in a Pembroke weekly that told of the CLC movements and use of Camp Petawawa.
After de-training from a CLC special, hundreds of Chinese labourers make their way to the holding camp at Petawawa, Ontario. Note that some of the men are still wearing the slippers they had on their feet when they left China. (CREDIT: LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA, C-068863)
With all the efforts to keep it quiet, it must have been strange for eastern Ontario food suppliers to receive government orders for large amounts of product. Issued with great haste on August 2, 1917, the government tenders went to several commercial establishments at Ottawa’s Byward Market Square. The initial order from the Department of Militia and Defence called for fifteen thousand tins of sardines, six hundred pints of peanut oil and “Chinese” sauce, plus six hundred pounds each of garlic and brown sugar. All of it destined for Camp Petawawa.
Before resuming their journey to the east coast, the CLC men worked at the camp. A September 26 memorandum from the camp’s engineer lists hammers and axes among tools purchased for the Chinese work details. “The Chinese men are distributed approximately as follows: Over 500 lowering water-mains in Central Camp below frost, Over 200 clearing up bush around Camp for prevention of fire, The balance are employed renewing beds of septic tank and filtering systems, gathering and breaking stone for roads, grading roads, spreading manure, and generally improving the Camp.”
On board one of the last trains to reach the camp in September was twenty-five-year-old Chou Ming Shan (Zhou Mingshan) who, as noted in Part 1 of this book excerpt, died of malaria on September 22 near Chapleau, Ontario. He had crossed the Pacific on the Empress of Russia, which landed her passengers at Vancouver at 5:30 p.m., September 17. The ship’s bill of health was “Good.” But the young man more than likely fell ill on the ship, not long before he arrived in Canada.
Chou Ming Shan’s body was carried from the train by fellow labourers to a grave dug by his compatriots. In the summer of 2019, in conjunction with research for this book, the Canadian Agency of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission arranged to have a headstone erected for Chou Ming Shan at Canadian Forces Base Petawawa. The author was honoured to attend the ceremony and say a few words.
The heavy work assigned to labourers involved in railway construction and repair on the Western Front included the hauling of timbers. A head ganger (right) looks on as the men walk away with another railway tie. (CREDIT: WJ HAWKINGS COLLECTION, COURTESY JOHN DE LUCY)
A group of CLC labourers manage a cart loaded with supplies at Noyelles-sur-Mer, France. (CREDIT: WJ HAWKINGS COLLECTION, COURTESY JOHN DE LUCY)
For the most part, the railway journeys across Canada, through Maine to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia went well. Equipment failures contributed to delays, and there were accidents. On January 15, dozens of CLC men nearly died in a train wreck in northeastern Ontario. It occurred at 6:13 a.m., four kilometres west of Eau Claire Station north of Algonquin Park.
British 2nd Lieutenant Ashley McCallum was in command of a 3,549-man contingent crossing Canada on separate trains. In addition to the locomotive, the train McCallum was on was composed of thirteen Colonist cars, two Tourist coaches, a commissary and a baggage car. There were 750 labourers on board when it left Vancouver for Halifax.
The sun was below the horizon when the big locomotive entered a series of curves some twenty kilometres west of Mattawa, Ontario. The CPR’s great steel ribbon cut through rolling landscape where plateaus and ridges of tree-covered granite dropped into narrow gorges or descended more gradually onto frozen, windswept lakes. Deep, fresh snow covered the open fields, and the temperature was hospitable for mid-January. Curled up in their upper and lower berths or sitting upright on wooden benches, the labourers were just waking up; many had not dressed, let alone put on their slippers.
Entering that stretch of track, the train was moving along at roughly forty kilometres per hour when four of its Colonist cars left the rails and careered into a field of snow. After rolling over and sliding to a stop in a cloud of white powder, the wrecked cars were lying more than nine metres from the track.
Tossed upside down and sideways, eighty-eight Chinese men were injured. “The depth of the snow was responsible for the marvelous escape of the coolies,” wrote McCallum in his report several days later. “Immediately after the accident…the train guard turned out and inside of one hour the coolies from all the damaged cars had been removed. The conduct and the discipline of the coolies was wonderful. Many of them had to leave the coaches practically naked, then wade through deep snow to the track and run about 50 yards to the nearest coach standing intact. Many coolies covered this space without socks or shoes.”
Anyone who has walked on snow in bare or socked feet, even for a few seconds in mild temperature, knows how it feels. The snow the men waded through while practically naked was likely waist high, so it took strength and perseverance to get off the field once they emerged from the cars. Looking around at the wilderness, many had to wonder where they were, but it appears, at least from McCallum’s report, they did it without complaint.
The Tourist car did not derail and there is no mention in the report of the RSG car derailing. In various states, the labourers boarded these surviving carriages where they received cigarettes and other canteen stores. Incredibly, the locomotive, with ten remaining cars loaded with CLC, reached Mattawa where three labourers were hospitalized. While no one died in the wreck, two labourers succumbed within days. Li Chin Hsiang (Li Jinxiang) was buried at Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery but his remains were repatriated to China after the war. Feng Chai Li’s (Feng Jiali) grave is in St. John’s Cemetery, Halifax, where a headstone was installed in 2017.
By mid-December 1917, Captain Harry Livingstone of the Canadian Army Medical Corps had completed his journey to China, spent weeks conducting medicals at the CLC recruitment depot, and returned to Canada with a CLC contingent. He had also reached France accompanied by the Chinese. Harry Livingstone’s Forgotten Men: Canadians and the Chinese Labour Corps in the First World War is available at major bookstores where it can also be ordered. It is also available through the publisher at www.lorimer.ca and Amazon.ca.
