While many of the CLC on board this train appear happy and content, the Colonist cars were very crowded with no time allowed for exercise during station stops. (PHOTO: DAVID LIVINGSTONE CLC COLLECTION)
By Dan Black
Captain Harry Livingstone had dozens of birds’ eggs, tucked under glass in three wooden display cabinets at his home in Listowel, Ontario: each specimen carefully labelled and placed in its own cubicle, on a bed of cotton batting. But while this fragile collection was safely stored, the small-town family doctor, grand-nephew to the world famous African explorer Dr. David Livingstone, was putting himself at tremendous risk. It was August 10, 1917, and the recently commissioned officer of the Canadian Army Medical Corps was moments away from boarding a train at London, Ontario. The twenty-nine-year- old bachelor was on a top-secret, wartime mission aimed at delivering himself to a dusty recruitment depot in northeastern China, then back across Canada to the Western Front. More than once, the five-foot-ten, 145-pound physician was warned not to breathe a word about the assignment, at least not in public. Especially sensitive was the part about Canada’s role in transporting tens of thousands of unarmed Chinese labourers across Canada in sealed, guarded railway cars.
Starting in early 1917, special trains of the Canadian Pacific Railway raced day and night across the Dominion, working to keep pace with a highly complex British scheme that became the world’s largest international mass movement of Chinese from the Far East to Western Europe. The trains rumbled past farms and through towns and cities, and the public had no idea what they were transporting or who was on board because the press was barred from reporting on the highly classified operation. Overall, nearly 81,000 members of the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC) were transported across Canada en route to Britain and France where they were assigned a variety of heavy work behind the lines. Another 3,600 boarded the Empress of Asia and sailed from Canada’s West Coast to the United Kingdom via the Panama Canal. Then, well after the Armistice was signed in November 1918, Canada again facilitated the movement of the CLC, only this time the operation was in reverse, sending more than 48,000 of the men home to China.
Both balance and brute strength are captured in this photo of a CLC labourer at Weihaiwei, 1917.
(PHOTO: DAVID LIVINGSTONE CLC COLLECTION)
The land and sea logistics were enormous and involved multiple nations. But it was here — in Canada — where many of the Chinese formed their earliest impressions of Western civilization. Indeed, for those who had not travelled far from their villages, the enormity of Canada’s varied geography and the time it took to cross the country was truly surprising.
The fact that most Canadians have never heard about the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC), let alone Canada’s historic role in the larger British effort to utilize such labour on the Western Front, is understandable. Our military history rarely, if ever, touches on the subject. Yet it is a wartime story that goes well beyond the timely provision of a transportation network. Many individuals, including other doctors and Canadian missionaries, were called upon to officer CLC companies in France and Belgium. Several were employed at the large CLC hospital at Noyelles-sur-Mer in northern France. But even before these highly educated men reached the Western Front, many assisted with recruitment in China and, like the Chinese workers, endured dangerous journeys, particularly across the stormy North Pacific to Canada and then across the U-boat-patrolled waters of the North Atlantic to Britain and France. But even the journey by rail across Canada was dangerous as well as tedious. Labourers died en route, some even before they entrained at Vancouver.
Those who crossed Canada made up more than 86 per cent of the nearly 95,000 Chinese recruited by the British between the fall of 1916 and early 1918. The French, who launched their own drive to recruit 50,000 Chinese in 1916, had, by 1917, approximately 37,000 Chinese navvies under their command, thousands employed in industry. Meanwhile, tsarist Russia recruited between 160,000 and 200,000 Chinese to work at a number of places throughout Russia. Altogether, at least 300,000 Chinese men joined various labour schemes during the First World War. This book, however, is about Canada’s largely unrecognized role in the British effort, which also coincided with the age of steam, not to mention the global mobilization of mil- lions of armed combatants that began in the summer of 1914.
Captain Harry Livingstone (left) and Captain Lou Sebert study maps at No. 1 Depot, London, Ontario, during the summer of 1917, shortly before deploying to China.(PHOTO: DAVID LIVINGSTONE CLC COLLECTION)
Throughout the war and later — during demobilization — massive steam ships and trains logged millions of kilometres while trying to adhere to schedules that relied on international co- operation and secrecy. The demands on ships and ports, locomotives and rolling stock, railway infrastructure and telegraph facilities were unprecedented. However, the movements themselves were largely dependent on people, from ships’ masters, deckhands and dockworkers to the firemen on the trains, and those who issued the orders.
A large contingent of Chinese labourers pose in front of one of the accommodation sheds or barracks behind the wire at the Weihaiwei recruitment depot in northeastern China. (PHOTO: DAVID LIVINGSTONE CLC COLLECTION)
The recruitment of Chinese labour may not have changed the duration or outcome of the war, but it was an important measure. It came at a crucial time, owing to the desperate need for more men and equipment in war-torn Europe. And while the Chinese workers were non-combatants, they represented the largest and longest-serving non-European contingent in the war. What is also interesting is that the Chinese employed by the British were subject to military law and discipline, and not just in France and Belgium. One old photograph taken on Vancouver Island shows a labourer being caned in front of his peers. On the Western Front, at least ten Chinese labourers were executed during and after the war. Chinese labourers also earned medals for acts of courage, but most simply carried on with the hard and often dangerous work assigned to them. Some of the riskier and certainly more gruesome work came after the Armistice when the men cleared the battlefields and recovered the remains of soldiers for proper burial. One of the CLC’s final acts, which the Chinese Embassy in London expressed a strong desire for, involved carving names and inscriptions on headstones for fellow labourers who did not survive. Sixty Chinese stonecutters, along with tens of thousands of other Chinese labourers and many of their Canadian officers, were the last to be repatriated in 1919 and 1920.
The reason the British and French went looking for labour is well told. Skilled, but mostly unskilled, men capable of hard work were recruited from every part of the globe, including South Africa, Egypt, the Seychelles and even as far as Fiji. However, the CLC was, without doubt, the largest workforce to go to France. Such men were needed the moment war was declared, but no specific plan was developed until much later. For the British War Committee, pressure began to mount through 1915 and into the first half of 1916 with the alarming loss of frontline soldiers. The Ypres Salient, St. Julien, Festubert, Givenchy, St. Eloi and Mount Sorrel — all familiar places to Canadians — were among the battles that introduced stark efficiencies to mass killing, including the first use of chlorine gas.
Chinese labourer proudly exhibits his bowed instrument while leaning through the window of a CPR Colonist car in Western Canada. Note how the glass portion of the window is covered with a screen. (PHOTO: DAVID LIVINGSTONE CLC COLLECTION)
The battles between early 1915 and mid-1916 produced horrendous casualty figures, yet the numbers were far less than those exacted on the Somme in 1916.
Recruiting labourers from China and elsewhere allowed the British and French armies to release more of their able-bodied labourers behind the lines for frontline duty. Thousands could join the ranks of the fighting men, while the crucial supply lines — from the wharfs to the ammunition depots — were maintained by foreign as well as British and Canadian labour units. “The danger then was not so much of direct defeat in France through shortage of soldiers as an indirect defeat through failure to supply those who were there,” wrote British historian Michael Summerskill in his 1982 book, China on the Western Front. The British knew this before the first shots were fired in the Battle of the Somme, but it took them longer than it did the French to realize they, too, had to look further afield for manpower.
Travelling from Vancouver’s waterfront — and leaving only an hour apart — the CLC trains followed the transcontinental line across a seemingly endless landscape. The trains, some twenty cars long, followed the same route carved and blasted out of the landscape by that earlier Chinese workforce. They moved through tunnels into the clear, sudden brilliance of steep mountain valleys, across the Prairies and into the seemingly revolving vistas of the Canadian Shield. They came down the Ottawa Valley, past Chalk River and Smiths Falls, and on toward the St. Lawrence River and Montreal. In the summer of 1917, a special holding camp, enclosed with barbed wire and patrolled by guards, was erected at Petawawa, northwest Ottawa. Buried there in 1917 was a young Chinese labourer, Chou Ming Shan (Zhou Mingshan, No. 39038), who died on one of the trains. The CLC specials that bypassed the docks at Montreal continued to Lac-Megantic in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. After a thirty-minute stop, they headed south, crossed into the United States and steamed over the hills and through the dense forest and swamps of remote northern Maine. From there, they continued over the Saint Croix–Vanceboro Bridge to Saint John, New Brunswick, and Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Canadians and other Allied military personnel travelling with the CLC formed both good and bad impressions. Livingstone was intent on learning from the Chinese while being mindful of the men’s health. During his time at the CLC recruiting depot at Weihaiwei, and on the long journey to France, he remained open to the language, and patient around cultural differences that were often ridiculed by other officers. When the doctor nearly missed his train in late 1917, a number of labourers became anxious and began to hang out the windows. When they spotted him running along the railway platform, they cried out: “Dai fu lai la!” or “Here comes the doctor!” Most of the Chinese who did not survive the war and its dangerous cleanup are overseas. Approximately two thousand are buried in some forty cemeteries throughout France and Belgium under the care of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) — their lives cut short by accidents, bomb- ings and, mostly, by disease. The largest of those cemeteries, at Noyelles-sur-Mer, has 838 identified and four unidentified casual- ties. Of those, more than 50 per cent died after the Armistice. Nearly forty others with no known grave are listed on the cem- etery’s memorial panel.
The Chinese also lie in cemeteries in the United Kingdom, from Shorncliffe to Liverpool to Plymouth. Here in Canada, their graves exist across the country, from William Head to Regina, to Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Petawawa, Montreal, Quebec City and Halifax. At last count, more than fifty lie here, some of them without a headstone or defined location, a difficult situation that the Canadian Agency of the CWGC has made great headway with as part of its ongoing commemoration and in co-operation with research for this book. It is believed through this research that the body of one man, found by Livingstone on the troopship Olympic at Halifax, Liu Chih (Liu Zhi) of Tongshan, China, simply vanished after being taken ashore before the transport sailed to Liverpool. That was five days before the Halifax Explosion.
