“Good to see both of you,” Lieutenant Norman said. “I know it’s been a long day, but orders could come at any time for the attack. Now that you are back we need you to memorize your portion of the map.”
This was not a surprise to Jake. It was common knowledge among all the soldiers that each division leader had a thick binder with complete plans of the attack. This had been broken into many small pieces, so that every section of six to nine soldiers had their own detailed map. The maps were marked with exactly what the small group needed to accomplish.
It made Jake feel like he was trusted by the commanding officers and that they felt he was smart enough to do what needed to be done.
He remembered what Major McNaughton had passed along from General Byng just before giving them medals of honor. I want soldiers with the discipline of a well-trained pack of hounds. Soldiers who will find their own holes through the hedges. I’m not going to tell them where those holes are or how to get through them. I want soldiers who can find those holes themselves and get through those holes their own way. Soldiers who will never lose sight of the objective as they do it.
Down in the trench, they were safe from the wind. They studied the maps by candlelight.
“We’re going to be able to do this,” Thomas said. “I can feel it in my bones. All four of our Canadian divisions together for the first time? We’re going to do what everyone else thinks can’t be done.”
Jake felt that pride too. The British had failed to take Vimy Ridge. The French had failed to take Vimy Ridge. But he and the rest of the platoon had spent weeks and weeks training for this. They would fight for Canada. More importantly, they would fight for each other. Jake was glad to be back, even though he knew it would be dangerous.
Lieutenant Norman stopped by again.
Colonel Scruffington stood with his shoulder pressed to Thomas’s knee as if he was afraid Thomas might go away again. That made Jake sad. Thomas was about to go away: into battle.
“Are you both good with what you need to do when we go? You have the instructions and map memorized?”
Jake and Thomas nodded.
“Good,” Lieutenant Norman said. “When we get the call to go, I won’t have time to say much except do your best. So now is when I have to remind you of the most critical part of the attack. And this comes directly from General Byng, so I need you to listen as if your lives depend on it. Because your lives do depend on this. Ready?”
Jake and Thomas nodded again.
Lieutenant Norman said, “The barrage of shells is going to be like a moving curtain in front of you. This curtain is going to be your protection from the enemy. It means when you go over the trenches, you have to be like a railroad train. Exactly to the second. If you move too quickly, you’ll run into that curtain of explosives, and you’ll be dead. If you move too slowly, the enemy will recover before you can pounce on them in the trenches. That’s why we taught you the Vimy Glide. Tell me you both understand.”
Jake and Thomas nodded for the third time.
“Not good enough,” Lieutenant Norman said. “You need to tell me you understand. Each of you.”
“I understand,” Thomas said.
“I understand,” Jake echoed.
“Good then,” Lieutenant Norman said. “You need to do one last thing before sleep. Write your letters to your loved ones and hand them to me. I’ll pass them down the line for safekeeping.”
Jake knew exactly what that meant. He leaned over and scratched Colonel Scruffington’s head. Some of them might not make it home.
He was far less afraid of dying than he was of letting down his fellow soldiers. He wanted to be there for Thomas and Charlie and the others. Jake belonged to the platoon.
—
Louise belonged to the herd. Not just a herd of other creatures like herself. In the herd were the two-legged creatures that made soothing sounds as they patted her side and rubbed her nose.
Louise felt safe in the herd, even in the dark. Even when she was awake at a time that she normally slept.
There was wind and sleet as she plodded through mud. She felt the itch of her hide and it hurt to walk. Her belly was tight and she wished she could drop her head and find thick grass. She felt the tremendous weight on her back of the load that had just been placed by those two-legged creatures. But her pain mattered less than loyalty to the herd.
There had been one two-legged creature in particular who led her by the halter, and the soothing sounds that came from this creature were a particular rhythm that she enjoyed, but he was not with her anymore.
Someone else held her halter. Someone else guided her. Something about the smell of this creature’s skin said that tonight there was an urgency to making sure the herd moved forward.
Louise could hear the sounds of hundreds of others in the herd, plodding forward in the dark in the mud.
She knew where they going. They had gone there many, many times before. They were going to the smell of the big iron and the smell of bitterness from loud sounds, where the load would be taken off her back. Then the creature beside her would lead her back to where they had started, and another load would go on her back.
It was strange to do this at night, but Louise was part of the herd. Louise felt safe in the herd. Louise felt loyalty to the herd.
Louise moved forward in the night.
—
The wind had picked up in the night, and the sleet had thickened. Jake and Thomas and Charlie stood in the trenches with the rest of the platoon, waiting for time to tick down to precisely 5:30 a.m.
An hour earlier, Lieutenant Norman had tapped on their shoulders, telling them it was the morning for the attack. Every Canadian soldier able to fight was ready. Every single soldier! Jake knew he would never forget the date: April 9, 1917.
Dawn for them did not come gradually.
To the second, at 5:30 a.m., the pitch-black night sky blossomed into a brightness so intense that Jake could have read a newspaper. A split second later came the sound that shook his entire body.
It was as if twenty locomotives had collided directly in front of him. He’d thought the previous seven days of shelling were loud, but this was as if the very earth had been struck by a meteor. Jake had a quick vision of the lines upon lines of packhorses that had served to move all those explosives from the trains to the artillery and realized that the shell-shocked soldier had been right. Without the packhorses, there would have been no attack.
At the first of the explosions, the Canadian trenches erupted with thousands upon thousands of soldiers and Jake scrambled forward with them.
There was no time to give in to any kind of terror. It was too loud to be afraid. It was too bright to be afraid. It was nearly impossible to even think.
But because of the weeks of training, Jake found that it was almost as if his body took control, and he found himself gliding forward with the exact rhythm of all those times under the stopwatch. One step every two seconds. No more. No less. One hundred yards every three minutes.
It was almost as bright as daylight. Just in front of him, a sheet of explosives came down, like someone behind him was shooting a stream of water over his head and he could almost reach out and touch the spray as the water landed.
Except this spray consisted of the largest artillery bursts ever fired in the history of all mankind. He glanced left and glanced right. There were clumps of soldiers as far as he could see, all marching with determination behind that protective sheet of explosives.
Few men were falling. The driving sleet was at their backs, making it even more difficult for the enemy to see what was happening behind the approaching barrage of explosions.
This barrage was overwhelming to the point of being supernatural. Despite the advantage of fighting from a trenched position, no army in the world would have been able to deal with the barrage. Their enemy could not shoot, not when it had to cope with the shaking of the earth, the thunder that vibrated their bodies and the massive explosions that c
rept closer and closer at the exact pace of one hundred yards every three minutes.
Jake concentrated on his pace. One step every two seconds. One step every two seconds. One step every two seconds.
The map that Lieutenant Norman had given him was etched in his mind. Jake knew where to go and what to do when he got there. Thomas and Charlie and the rest of the platoon were by his side. Today was the day.
One step every two seconds. Follow the curtain of explosives. One step every two seconds. The Vimy Glide.
They reached the enemy trench, and right at that moment, the barrage that had ripped apart those trenches stopped.
To his left and to his right, up and down a ridge that was nearly ten kilometers (6 mi.) long, soldiers like Jake and Thomas and Charlie cut their way past the barbed wire, swarmed machine gun posts, dropped into the trenches and chased down the enemy.
Vimy Ridge belonged to them.
One of the most crucial elements to taking Vimy Ridge was moving thousands of tons of armament.
For this reason, the packhorses were almost as important as the soldiers. Patiently and under horrible conditions, the animals steadily brought 42,500 kilograms (93,700 lb.) of ammunition to the front lines—every single day! During the buildup to the battle and the battle itself, the eventual total reached 38 million kilograms (84 million lb.).
For the entire Vimy Ridge operation, then, it took the equivalent of a line of dump trucks seventy kilometers (43 mi.) long to deliver what was needed. While the trucks of that era were capable of moving ammunition, the mud and the poor condition of the roads were too much of an obstacle. The packhorses were so vital that, without them, attacking Vimy Ridge would have been as much a disaster for the Canadians as it had been during the previous failed attempts by the French and British. Since a healthy packhorse can carry about 20 percent of its body weight, a line of all the horses it would take to carry this load would stretch 1,340 kilometers (833 mi.), nearly the distance from Ottawa to the coast of Newfoundland.
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SHELL SHOCK
Imagine the physical toll war would take: sleepless nights, fatigue, injuries. Now imagine the mental toll: intense and constant bombardment, noise, danger and the knowledge that you or your comrades could die at any moment—or be responsible for the death of a similar solider on the opposite side.
During World War One, some soldiers began to report symptoms typical of physical head injuries, including amnesia, headaches, dizziness, tremors and a high sensitivity to noise. Many of these soliders were unable to reason or sleep or walk or talk. This was puzzling at first, because the men had no physical wounds to the brain.
Eventually these symptoms were recognized as a mental illness brought on by the stress of combat. Called shell shock then, and later, in World War Two, combat stress reaction, the brains of the affected soldiers would do strange things to try and make sense of the horrors of war.
Soldiers showing symptoms were taken away from the front line as soon as possible. For short-term shell shock, a few days of rest were often considered enough of a cure and soldiers were sent back to the front. Other soldiers, however, never overcame the illness. Ten years after the war, 65,000 veterans were still in treatment for it, and nineteen British military hospitals were totally devoted to treating those cases. Although not all soldiers were diagnosed with shell shock, all soldiers left the war changed—the brutality of what they experienced and witnessed meant that no soldier escaped unscathed.
THE WEEK OF SUFFERING AND THE ROLLING BARRAGE
5:30 came and a great light lit the place, a light made up of innumerable flickering tongues, which appeared from the void and extended as far to the south as the eye could see, a light which rippled and lit the clouds in that moment of silence before the crash and thunder of the battle smote the senses. Then the Ridge in front was wreathed in flame as the shells burst, confining the Germans to their dugouts while our men advanced to the assault.
—Private Lewis Duncan to his aunt Sarah, April 17, 1917
In the last lead-up to the attack on Vimy Ridge, there were three important preparations taking place. First, General Byng made it his goal that every soldier knew the plan of attack. This way they would be able to continue to fight no matter what—even without the guidance of officers. They all knew the plans, just not when the attack would come.
The second major preparation was digging tunnels beneath the German lines. Soldiers set up explosives to be detonated when the attack first began, which took extensive mining operations and tunnel systems with tracks, piped water and lights.
With all this in place, there was still a final part to the strategy before the attack could begin: the armament brought in by packhorses.
Spread over the course of a week before the attack, the Canadians began a massive barrage of shelling on the German trenches. With the constant bombardment, the Germans could guess a major attack was coming, but they could not know for certain when. The shelling was also designed to keep the Germans from sleeping, and over the course of those seven days, more than one million shells bombarded Vimy Ridge. One million! This generated numerous false alarms on the Germans side, and the barrage ensured that the enemy soldiers were tired to the point of exhaustion even before the attack began.
It was such an effective ploy that the Germans have called this softening of their forces “The Week of Suffering.”
The Vimy Ridge attack itself began at 5:30 a.m. on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917. At that precise moment, another barrage began, and 20,000 Canadian soldiers, each carrying up to 36 kilograms (80 lb.) of combined equipment, jumped out of the trenches into snow, sleet and machine gun fire.
As the soldiers crossed No Man’s Land, they were protected by a rolling barrage, the reason that they had trained so long to perfect the Vimy Glide: directly in front of them, like a moving waterfall, the falling shells served as a screen and as protection.
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THE BATTLE OF VIMY RIDGE
In those few minutes, I witnessed the birth of a nation.
—Brigadier-General A.E. Ross, following the war
While most of the battle was won on the first day, from the opening barrage on April 9, 1917, the battle for Vimy Ridge lasted until April 12, 1917. It was the first time that all four Canadian divisions battled together. Trained to improvise in pursuit of a well-established goal and to understand what was ahead of them, some individual soldiers were able to force surrender of groups of Germans in their well-protected trenches, while others single-handedly charged machine gun nests.
Military historians all agree that the infantry used a combination of incredible discipline and bravery to advance under heavy fire and in confusing, hectic conditions, even when their officers fell and were no longer able to issue commands.
It was a victory that came with a cost that will never be forgotten: 3,598 Canadians were killed and another 7,000 wounded.
In 1922, the French government gave Vimy Ridge and the land around it to Canada forever.
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GEORGE GORDON RESERVE, SASKATCHEWAN
LATE SPRING, 1922
Dale Montague was the Indian agent on the reserve. He was a large man with a large voice and a bushy blond beard that he constantly scratched.
He sat behind his desk at the reserve office and said one word. “No.”
Thomas had expected it. He did not like to ask the agent for permissions because the agent always seemed to take extra pleasure in saying no to Thomas.
Thomas was there because of the third person in the office: his grandfather, William Northstar.
“There is no reason that you should deny a travel pass to my grandfather,” Thomas said. “His sister does not have long to live. My grandfather will return from Regina after the funeral.”
Actually, Thomas thought, there was no reason at all that his grandfather should even need a pass. Why did the Cree need permission to leave the reserve? How
could a basic freedom like travel be taken away from them?
Montague stood. This was how he liked to deal with people. Using his size and voice. As if the power of being Indian agent was not enough.
“No,” Montague repeated. He scratched his beard. “And I do not need to explain myself.”
Colonel Scruffington growled. The dog had refused to leave Thomas when the war was over, so Thomas had smuggled him onto the train and onto the boat to Canada and taken him home. Colonel Scruffington still limped and still slept beside Thomas every night.
“You may not like me,” Thomas said, “but that is no reason to punish my grandfather.”
William Northstar’s hair was fully gray. He stood as tall as Thomas but had begun to stoop just a little. They shared a house at the edge of the reserve on the farmland that Thomas used to raise cattle.
“I am judge and jury on this reserve,” Montague said. “I make the decisions around here, no matter how many letters you send to Ottawa. When will you give that up? Nobody believes your word over mine. Everybody knows that Indians are liars.”
Thomas reminded himself of the discipline he and the other soldiers had learned at Vimy Ridge. If he lost his temper, Montague could call in the police and have him arrested. He knew that was why Montague always tried to make him angry.
A shotgun was hanging from a rack on the wall. Montague walked to it and took it in both hands.
“Your dog growled at me,” Montague said. “It is a dangerous animal and I am tired of it.”
Montague pointed the shotgun at Colonel Scruffington.
Colonel Scruffington growled again.
Thomas stood directly over his dog, his legs on either side. Thomas said to the larger man. “Look in my eyes. Do you really want to pull the trigger? Because then you will have to shoot me too as the only way to stop me from breaking every finger on your hand.”
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