By Holly DoanThere's a signed photo of Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden on my office wall because he's an inspiration to any Canadian who ever felt ordinary.Robert Laird Borden was a Halifax lawyer and an unlikely leader; a hypochondriac, indecisive and riddled with self-doubt. In 1901, he was drafted as leader by the Conservative caucus because there seemed to be nobody else.Borden was a nervous campaigner and in the House of Commons “never cracked a joke or told a story,” a reporter wrote.Borden was a dedicated golfer but rarely broke 100. He was on the links in Muskoka, Ont. when the First World War broke out in 1914, but said he didn't think it would amount to much. Cabinet nicknamed him “Robert the Unready”.The horror of WWI changed Canada and Robert Borden. Sixty thousand died, with ten thousand casualties at Vimy Ridge in a single day.  Borden toured the front three times and was moved to tears by the soldiers' suffering. “The war is horrible,” he said.The war tormented Borden, but the soldiers' sacrifice inspired his leadership. He became emotionally involved, smoked too much, obsessed over his diet and complained of illness, though doctors could find nothing wrong.When Canada suffered its worst loss at Passchendaele, 16,000 casualties, Borden went to London to meet British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Historian and biographer Robert Craig Brown described that meeting to me in a 2003 interview: “Borden gripped Lloyd George by the lapels and shook him and said, 'Prime Minister, if anything like that ever happens again, not a single soldier more will leave our shores.'”Sir Robert formed a solemn covenant with soldiers at the front and passed a divisive conscription bill that forced 100,000 into service.  A newly decisive prime minister called those who refused to fight “slackers”.The war eclipsed everything else about Canada because it was the first major test for a young nation. It turned a painfully ordinary person into a great statesman. It changed the way we see our leaders.When Borden died on June 10, 1937, the two-and-a-half-mile funeral procession route was thick with veterans. “These were HIS boys,' said historian Brown.It was war that almost finished the unlikely prime minister and it was the war that made him.The lesson is courage.[caption id="attachment_568859" align="aligncenter" width="440"] Holly Doan's signed photo of former PM Robert Borden[/caption]Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist.  He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney's best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen's Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy.  A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.