'Unwanted' officers sacrificed much in Great War - Opinion

JOHN McKendrick Hughes was an Alberta farmer when the Great War broke out in 1914.

Soldiers were recruited in the Vegreville area and he went to Europe as an officer and there became … a farmer.

His story is one of hundreds of thousands of Canadian stories during that conflict as a small colony nation sent an unprecedented number of troops to battle.

On Saturday, as they have for 87 years, Canadians will mark Remembrance Day and reflect on the sacrifices of war. The images mainly will be about troops in the trenches, on the front lines and in the line of fire.

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Hughes’ story reminds us that many others served in other roles in that terrible conflict. He was not needed at the front lines as an officer but became a key player in charge of producing food to feed the troops who were.

The tale is told in a 2005 book published by the University of Alberta Press, The Unwanted, Great War letters from the Field.

Hughes wanted to serve when he joined in 1915 at age 33 but so many officers were shipped from Canada that they were surplus once they arrived in England.

The prospect of being sent home without combat experience was intolerable for many of the men and these “unwanted” agreed to a demotion in rank in order to be eligible to go to France. Hughes was one of them.

But by 1917, it was dawning on the army bigwigs that supplying food to an enormous army was a challenge. The army created a class of “agricultural officers” charged with growing food in European lands held by the allies.

In August 1917, Hughes became one of them, charged with growing vegetables for one million soldiers on land often recently captured from the German army.

On Aug. 16, 1917, he broke the news to his wife back in Alberta.

“We had left the farm in western Canada to be a soldier,” he wrote. “Now within reach of shells and bombs and the steady roar of artillery, we were asked to leave off being a soldier and be a farmer. Well, so be it.”

By the end of the war, Hughes was in charge of thousands of soldiers harvesting crops, running the logistics for locating seeds and land to plant them in and generally having a far more responsible job than had he remained a mere army officer.

The work for Hughes and his soldiers, including some German prisoners-of-war, could be dangerous because the fields they cultivated were often within shooting distance of the front lines.

But there was little glory in being a war farmer and no monuments to those who fed the troops have been erected at the War Memorial in Ottawa where the valiants will be honoured on Saturday.

Yet Hughes’ story reminds us that the brave men and women at the front are supported by a very complex support machine and the people who make it run also make sacrifices.

When Hughes demobilized in 1919, he returned to his Alberta farm. He died in 1967, having survived the Great War, Spanish influenza, the Depression and Alberta farm politics.

In the 1950s, he even found time to send missives to be published in The Western Producer.

That was a war of a different kind.