Michael Alderton (essarem) notes that: This group photograph, taken in Western Canada during 1915, shows Cohen as a 26-year-old drill instructor seated front and centre of a company of 55 rather earnest looking Chinese Canadian infantrymen.
The entire company is smartly turned out in regulation issue British army uniforms, but ones devoid of any insignia. Some of the men in this group photograph hold military-type rifles, while Warrant Officer Cohen and the Chinese Commanding Officer sport swagger sticks.
These hopeful Great War volunteers are members of Dr Sun Yat-sen’s representative organization in Canada, and the drilling and musketry that they received from Cohen in Canada had been much the same as the basic military training that Cohen had himself received as a member of the Jewish Lads’ Brigade, some ten years earlier, from his drill master at the Hayes School for Jewish Boys near London.
This 1915 group photograph under discussion was taken relatively early in Cohen’s long, varied, and distinguished military career, and the next military group photograph I have seen him in was taken a year later in 1916. Here he is seated, still with swagger stick at hand, but now in the midst of a group of severe looking Canadian army senior sergeants who had been charged with the task of training volunteer soldiers for active service on the Western Front during the Great War of 1914–1918.
Late in 1922, and following active service in France during the Great War with both the Canadian Railway Troops and the Chinese Labour Corps, Cohen’s somewhat unorthodox military career took an interesting turn when he left Canada for Canton to serve under Dr Sun Yat-sen as Adjutant-General at the General Headquarters of the Generalissimo of the Republic of China. For most of 1923 and 1924, Cohen served in the field and took part in battles that at times seriously threatened to overrun Dr Sun’s Canton headquarters.
Following Dr Sun’s death in 1925, Cohen continued to serve in the Chinese military as a brigadier-general in the Chinese 19th Route Army and its precursors, before then being further promoted to the rank of major-general, for defence procurement duties, in April 1935.
In a December 1943 Montreal interview, Dr Yui Ming, the Chinese Minister of Information in Canada, revealed that Cohen had, for many years past, served as a gazetted general in the Chinese army, having been awarded the rank of General by the present as well as previous Chinese governments. In describing Cohen’s somewhat unconventional Chinese military career, it was further suggested that: General Cohen is, from the military point of view, a self-made man, having learned his lessons on tactics first hand on the fields of battle.
During the 40-odd years between 1923 and 1967, General Two Gun Cohen was a frequent visitor to Hong Kong and sometimes took up extended periods of residence in one of the large, fashionable hotels of the Colony; normally at the Hongkong Hotel on the Island or at the Peninsula Hotel on the Kowloon side of the harbour.
(The group photograph above came from the collection of Canadian military historian and contract researcher, Allan E. Levine of Ottawa.)
The above extracts of text have been taken from: Alderton, Michael, In Chinese Company – Warrant Officer Morris A. Cohen trains Dr Sun's Chinese Canadian military cadets.
See also: 1916 - photo studio portrait of Chinese Warrant Officer Morris Two Gun Cohen | Gwulo