Eight months after the Military Service Act was passed,
it had added only twenty thousand men to the nearly five hundred
thousand volunteers; but steps were then taken to cancel
exemptions and to simplify the machinery of administration. Some
eighty thousand men were raised under conscription, but the war,
so far as Canada was concerned, was fought and won by volunteers.
"The self-governing British colonies," wrote Bernhardi before the
war, "have at their disposal a militia, which is sometimes only
in process of formation. They can be completely ignored so far as
concerns any European theater of war." This contemptuous forecast
might have been justified had German expectations of a short war
been fulfilled. Though large and increasing sums had in recent
years been spent on the Canadian militia and on a small permanent
force, the work of building up an army on the scale the war
demanded had virtually to be begun from the foundation. It was
pushed ahead with vigor, under the direction, for the first three
years, of the Minister of Militia, General Sir Sam Hughes. Many
mistakes were made. Complaints of waste in supply departments and
of slackness of discipline among the troops were rife in the
early months. But the work went on; and when the testing time
came, Canada's civilian soldiers held their own with any veterans
on either side the long line of trenches.
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