From the News

Dated: November 23, 1918

Those Missing War Trophies

The officers of the 102nd Canadian Infantry Battalion have sent word that they will present to the city of Toronto one light and one heavy machine gun captured from the enemy, as a "tribute and lasting memorial to those citizen soldiers who have so gallantly sacrificed all for the cause of liberty."

The idea is an excellent one, but there is, unfortunately, no certainty that the city of Toronto will ever receive these guns unless the 102nd Battalion keeps them in hand and brings them home.

After the battle of Vimy Ridge, early last year, the 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles of Toronto gathered their more important trophies, eight pieces in all, we believe, some of them large, and sent them home to the Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario for safe-keeping.  Sir John Hendrie stated in a speech at the Armouries that these trophies never arrived, nor has he been able to find trace of them.  They may still be in France, or they may have been detained in England, although it was reported that some of these trophies had been seen at Quebec.  As to that, however, it is necessary to remember that it is difficult to distinguish one gun from another unless careful evidence of identification has been made.  Sir John Hendrie has asked the military authorities to investigate the matter and locate these missing war trophies.

Last year we protested against an arrangement - tamely agreed to, we believe, by the Canadian authorities - by which the agents of an Imperial Museum in London were to have the pick of all the war trophies captured, and from what was left, after the demands of that central museum were satisfied, there would be "assigned" to Canada and Australia, etc., fine collections.  It was quite natural that the agents of the museum in London should favour this arrangement, but one wonders how the Canadian authorities were ever induced to assent to it, and it is pretty certain that the fighting Canadian corps at the front, which was so sensationally wresting trophies of war from Germany, was not consulted nor its rights and desires fairly considered.

It is not a collection of old iron and brass, disused guns, and rusty implements of war, without identity and history and meaningless in themselves, that Canadian desire to see in a national museum at Ottawa.  If cannon captured from the enemy at Vimy Ridge, Amiens, Monchy, Cambrai, are to stand in front of the City Hall in Toronto, people will want these cannon to be guns captured by Canadians, by Toronto's own troops, in their battles.  In a London museum a howitzer may be only a howitzer, but in a local part of the Empire like this, people desire to see the howitzer and no other.  We are a young people, not age-long collectors of samples of the improving implements used in warfare.  It is this gun, captured by these men in that battle, that we have an interest in, and nothing else, just as good or even better, will answer instead of it.

The military authorities should seek, find, and deliver to the Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario the war trophies captured by Ontario troops and forwarded to him a year and a half ago.