Great War commander gets his due
Edward Morrison’s grave restored, with memoir pending
Thanks to a military historian, a simple granite cross was erected on the grave of Maj.-Gen. Sir Edward Morrison at Beechwood Cemetery on Sunday and his longunpublished memoir, safely protected for nearly a century by his Ottawa family, has been compiled into a book.
Morrison: The Long-Lost Memoir of Canada’s Artillery Commander in the Great War will be published later this month.
As Megan Gillis reports, Morrison was a former Citizen editor-inchief who took part in every major battle fought by Canadians in the First World War and commanded the Canadian Artillery from 1916 until his men were home again in 1918.
During a rain-soaked Sunday afternoon ceremony, Chaplain General Guy Chapdelaine gave thanks for the perseverance of Morrison and his men in the face of mud, vermin, disease and “the inescapable stench of death” while enduring the constant barrage of artillery fire and ever-present threat of gas attacks.
A moment of silence began and ended with the bone-thrumming thunder of a 105-millimetre C3 Howitzer.
“But — oh! What a tale for the generations to come,” Maj.-Gen. Sir Edward Morrison wrote of the First World War. “Never in civilian life are men called upon to labour as those men laboured — with all the might of their bodies, to lift, and carry, and pull for the sake of their comrades and their cause.”
And “for every inch of ground gained,” they paid “a price more terrible than human tongue can tell.”
But just as Morrison’s grave marker vanished from Beechwood Cemetery, so did the tale he left for generations to come. A former Ottawa Citizen editor-in-chief, Morrison took part in every major battle fought by Canadians in the First World War and commanded the Canadian Artillery from 1916 until his men were home again in 1918.
Thanks to military historian Susan Raby-Dunne, a simple granite cross was erected on Morrison’s grave Sunday and his long-unpublished memoir, safely protected for nearly a century by his Ottawa family, has been compiled into a book coming out this month.
In the driving rain at his graveside, Chaplain General Guy Chapdelaine gave thanks for the perseverance of Morrison and his men in the face of mud, vermin, disease and “the inescapable stench of death” while enduring the constant barrage of artillery fire and ever-present threat of gas attacks.
A moment of silence began and ended with the bone-thrumming thunder of a 105-mm C3 Howitzer.
Raby-Dunne discovered Morrison while researching two books about John McCrae, the Canadian surgeon and poet who penned In Flanders Fields. McCrae wrote those immortal lines after the funeral of a young soldier at Ypres in 1915 as Morrison, his close friend, made a sketch. They’d formed a lifelong friendship as artillery lieutenants in the Boer War, a conflict in which Morrison, on leave from the Citizen, still sent “from the front” dispatches to the newspaper.
“The more I learned about Morrison and the Great War, the more astonished I became that he was relatively unknown by anyone other than some artillery personnel, a few war historians, and the most avid military buffs,” Raby-Dunne said Sunday. She hopes the book and the restoration of the gravesite done by Beechwood will set the record straight “in this small, yet significant way.”
“Morrison needs to be recognized as one of the great military leaders of World War One,” she said.
A “modest, very humble” man who stood only five-foot-six and was nicknamed “Dinky,” Morrison came from a working-class family of Scottish immigrants in London, Ont., rose to become an editor with the Hamilton Spectator and then was hired in 1898 to helm the Citizen newsroom, where he stayed until the cusp of war in 1913.
A Citizen colleague once wrote that Morrison was “a pungent writer, with an uncompromising style, a bonnie fighter in the journalistic field as afterwards he proved himself to be on the field of battle.”
Morrison went to France with the first contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary force and records in his memoir being with McCrae at Neuve Chapelle, when the newly arrived officers decided to go see the front and ended up taking cover between furrows of a farmer’s field as the Germans rained “pipsqueaks” — small shells — down on their heads.
The pair talked of how annoyed military brass would be if they got themselves killed, and Morrison wryly noted it was a mistake they wouldn’t repeat.
He would take part in battles including the Second Battle of Ypres, Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele. McCrae, who hailed his friend’s character, leadership and bravery at Ypres in the spring of 1915, believed Morrison should have been decorated, but there wasn’t anyone of sufficiently high rank nearby to make the recommendation.
“Just as the Canadian Corps was the hammer of the allied armies, so the artillery was the hammer of the Canadian Corps,” said Maj. (Ret’d) Marc George, former curator of the Canadian Artillery Museum.
“The guns caused 60 per cent of the casualties during the Great War. Major-General Sir Edward Morrison commanded the Canadian Corps Artillery from December of 1916 until the Armistice. During that time, the Canadian Corps never failed to take an objective that had been set for it and carved out a record of achievement which is truly unequaled in military history.”
By the war’s end in 1918, Morrison had more combat experience as a corps commander of artillery than 80 per cent of his peers in the British Army.
“Under his expert leadership, the guns had contributed mightily to the destruction and final defeat of the German army on the Western Front,” George said. “He is without question one of the most important and most successful artillery commanders in any army in the Great War.”
Yet after the war, he “disappeared into obscurity.” He returned to 21 McLeod St. — the old brick house still stands today — and died in 1925. Born the year of Confederation, he was not yet 60, but Raby-Dunne believes “the war took everything out of him.”
When she visited his grave at Beechwood, she found his marker gone and no monument to match his stature.
In trying to reach his family to have it restored — a task since completed by Beechwood Cemetery — she discovered the Fripp family of Ottawa and a “unique” artifact: a commander’s detailed account of war, from training at Valcartier to demobilization. It was full of appreciation for the infantry and the men who built the corduroy roads through the mud.
Shaun Fripp said it had been passed down from Morrison, his step-grandfather, through his late father. The 81-year-old had long wondered what to do with the 300page manuscript.
“I’m very proud,” Fripp said. “He’s never gotten the recognition. That war was such a terrible war, as all are, and he played a very, very important role in it.”
Morrison: The Long-Lost Memoir of Canada’s Artillery Commander in the Great War will be published by Heritage House later this month.
Exactly 100 years ago, Canadians were fighting the savage Battle of Passchendaele.
“It’s 100 years ago today (that) Morrison was commanding all of Canada’s artillery in the Battle of Passchendaele,” Raby-Dunne said. “Five days from now, 100 years ago, the Canadian Corps captured Passchendaele Ridge.”
The big guns that Morrison commanded were the weapon that won that “horrific war,” she said.
“My mission is to educate Canadians about what has been sacrificed in their name.”