Vimy

by Pierre Berton

  Victor Wentworth Odlum was a curious specimen. The men in his brigade were infuriated by his teetotalism. They called him “Peasoup” Odlum because, when neighbouring brigades were warming their bellies and stiffening their resolves with the daily tot of rum, they had to be content with mugs of broth. That finally ended in February 1917, when tensions began to rise over the coming battle; Odlum himself later regretted the puritan strain inherited from his Methodist father.

  A missionary’s son, born in Cobourg, Ontario, schooled in Tokyo and Vancouver, and shuffled around the world, he had been brought up to believe that strong drink, card games, and the theatre were all devices of the devil. Since these were among the chief diversions of the soldier, it is possible to believe that Odlum fought a personal war within himself, especially in the mess where he was always a little apart from his fellow officers, never quite one of the gang. They called him “Old Lime Juice” and, more affectionately, “Victor of Vancouver.”

  Like his staff officers – a lawyer, a politician, a miller, a mayor – Odlum was a militiaman, a civilian in uniform, whose interests were far broader than those of the regulars who confined themselves to polo, pigsticking, or ragging in the mess. Odlum had studied political science at the University of Toronto before becoming a reporter on a Vancouver newspaper. Such were his abilities that he rose in three years to become its editor. By the time war broke out, he was owner and editor of the Vancouver Star, but that did not consume all his energies. On the side he sold bonds and insurance.

  He was also a bookworm who would later boast that he managed to get through a volume every day of his life, a passion he could scarcely indulge in the hurly-burly of Vimy. But he came from a military family-various of his ancestors had served with William of Orange and Wellington and fought in the Upper Canadian rebellion of 1837 and the Fenian raids. Warfare fascinated him. It was said that he had taken to peacetime soldiering because it presented an interesting problem, that he had set himself the task of mastering the psychology of war. It is more than probable that this preoccupation led to the idea of the trench raids, which were really miniature battles, fought in minutes instead of hours, but combining all the characteristics of the more ambitious set pieces.

  By the time he reached Vimy – an austere, thirty-seven-year-old brigadier-general with a lean, hawk’s face, piercing blue eyes, and a hard, scarred body-Victor Odlum had seen a good deal of battle in South Africa and France. He had been wounded five times, had seen his own brother blown to bits by his side, had won the Distinguished Service Order, the army’s second-highest decoration, and been mentioned in dispatches half a dozen times. He never ordered his men to do what he himself was not prepared to do. He refused to wear a steel helmet because he believed his men should be able to recognize him at all times and know where their orders were coming from. Like Lipsett, Odlum preferred to stay up front. He himself led some of the night raids for which he was famous and that were his chief contributions to the Vimy victory.

  In the four months before the assault the Corps launched at least fifty-five raids on the German positions. The earlier ones were carried out by a handful of men; the later ones involved as many as seventeen hundred. The smallest took place on New Year’s Eve, 1916. Two brash Canadians crept out into No Man’s Land, wriggled under the enemy wire, jumped quietly into one of the forward German trenches, seized two sentries, and somehow managed to drag them back to their own lines for questioning.

  The Canadians felt, with good reason, that they owned No Man’s Land. The scouts of the 2nd Division grew so confident that they treated it as their private playground, standing up and taunting the Germans, daring them to come out, and tossing bully beef tins into their trenches wrapped with notes urging them to come over and enjoy some good food. The game was played all along the Vimy front: on one raid by the 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles two officers actually nailed up a sign in one of the enemy trenches: “COME ON OVER AND WE WILL TREAT YOU RIGHT.”

  The 46th Battalion, a particularly aggressive unit made up of Westerners from Moose Jaw and Regina, raided the Germans every time they moved into the line; but the Germans rarely raided and when they did, the raids were small – sometimes very small. There is a comic opera flavour to the image of one German patrol, consisting of a lone and bewildered Bavarian seen stumbling about No Man’s Land by three amused Canadian scouts, into whose waiting arms he eventually blundered.

  Because the trenches were as little as thirty-five yards apart, the Canadians were able to creep to the very rim of the enemy’s defences to report on the condition of his wire or the presence of new machine-gun posts. The Germans fired flares and star shells in a vain attempt to seek them out, but every man had been trained to freeze into immobility when the flare exploded. As long as they didn’t twitch, as long as they held their position-no matter how grotesque- and stayed that way until the flare faded, they were simply part of the moonscape.

  The raids were vicious because the weapons used – the Lewis gun and the Mills bomb-were vicious. The common image of the Great War soldier is that of a man in a steel helmet carrying a rifle and a bayonet. In reality the helmet gave little protection while the rifle and bayonet were all but obsolete. Few soldiers were well enough trained to fire the Lee Enfield with any accuracy. On the range, men lay on their bellies under perfect conditions and banged away at stationary targets. At Vimy, they blundered forward in the gloom, firing on the move at indistinct figures that popped up for a moment, then vanished. Too much oil in the barrel or a slight breeze could deflect the fire of the steadiest marksman. It’s safe to say that most of the enemy killed or wounded by rifle bullets were killed by snipers using the Ross or were hit at close quarters in the hand-to-hand fighting that took place in the trenches. But even here the rifle was an awkward weapon to handle in a narrow ditch full of struggling opponents.

  The bayonet only added to the problem: a man was just as likely to gash a friend as an enemy. There were few bayonet wounds among the men treated in the Regimental Aid Posts and Casualty Clearing Centres. As one British general put it, “No man in the Great War was ever killed by a bayonet unless he had his hands up first.” It was an excellent tool for opening bully beef tins, toasting bread, or prodding those who had already surrendered, but as an offensive weapon it was about as useful as a cutlass.

  All of this makes the long political battle over the rival qualities of the Ross and the Lee Enfield seem beside the point. The rifle was a psychological weapon, not a practical one – “the soldier’s friend,” whose presence certainly gave him a sense of security. In the monotony of trench life, the infantryman worked out his frustrations by banging away at an elusive enemy. But in the trench raids across No Man’s Land, it was the light machine gun and the hand grenade that did the job.

  The Lewis gun was light, easy to carry, and could be fired like a rifle from the shoulder. It weighed twenty-six pounds and was only four feet long. It could get off all of its forty-seven rounds in a single devastating five-second burp, though the gunners were trained to use shorter bursts of five rounds. It gobbled ammunition hungrily: in major battles half a dozen men in the Lewis gun section were detailed simply to carry the panniers of .303 cartridges to feed it. But, with the Mills bomb, it could clear a German trench in seconds.

  At close quarters, the Mills bomb was deadly. Shaped like an egg and about the size of a tennis ball, it had a shell constructed of cast-iron segments, which explains why Chicago gangsters later dubbed it a “pineapple.” As long as the spring lever was pressed down the grenade was safe. The bomb thrower removed the pin, kept the lever down with his hand, straightened his arm and lobbed the bomb or simply dropped it into a dugout or trench. Four seconds later it exploded. More often the grenades were fired from a cup-shaped launcher attached to the muzzle of the rifle and propelled by the gases released by the explosion of a blank cartridge (a real bullet, of course, would have mangled the launcher and destroyed the barrel).

  The Germans, whose equipment was supe
rior in almost every instance to that of the Allies, had developed grenade launchers that had twice the range of those of the British. This bothered Lieutenant-Colonel Chalmers Johnston. The ingenious commander of the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles, better known as “Whizbang” Johnston, believed that the problem lay with the barrel of the Lee Enfield; it was just too long for the task. If the escaping gases could be confined in a shorter space, the thrust would be greater. Johnston proceeded to break the rules by sawing eleven inches off a rifle barrel, thus committing the heinous army crime known as “destroying government property.” But the experiment worked; the shorter rifle hurled a grenade twice as far as the longer ones. Byng watched Johnston work with the new device and approved it, so that every rifle grenade section was equipped with sawed-off weapons.

  Hollywood films have given the grenade awesome powers that it does not possess. It will not blow the tread off a tank, smash a building, or hurl a soldier into the air. What it does is quite gruesome enough. Dozens of bits of jagged pig iron whirling about and ricocheting can mangle everybody in a room, a dugout, or a section of trench. Seventy-five million Mills bombs were thrown at the Germans in the Great War. Like the trench raid, the grenade was not perfected until the war was two years old. It is hard to contemplate one without the other; they went together like bully beef and plum-and-apple jam.

  2

  Each raid was planned to the second. In some cases the raiders had to be back in their own trenches in as little as fifteen minutes from the moment they went over the top. This heart-stopping efficiency could produce dreadful tensions, as William Darknell discovered when he and twenty others were picked for a raid on the Prussian trenches below the Pimple early in 1917.

  Private Darknell, English born, Alberta bred, was given exactly forty-five minutes to harass the Germans with Mills bombs and dynamite and to bring back as much information about the enemy lines as he and his fellow raiders could gather in that brief span. Well after dark, they hoisted themselves over the parapet and began crawling across the dead and silent world of blasted stumps, rusted wire, and stinking ponds until they reached the enemy defences, thirty-five yards away.

  Darknell was flat on his belly, trying to squeeze under the massive rolls of wire that barred the way to the Germans’ forward trench. He couldn’t make it; entangled in the barbs he could move neither forward nor back. The clock was ticking. Darknell was painfully aware of his deadline. If a man didn’t get back within the allotted minutes, others would endanger themselves by returning to No Man’s Land to find him. But Darknell, at nineteen a veteran of almost two years and a survivor of the Somme, didn’t panic easily. He began to snip methodically at the wire with his cutters until finally he was free. He found the German line, pulled the dynamite sticks from his pocket, helped to blow up a machine gun, and was gone, almost before the enemy knew what had happened. With the others he scurried to safety and reported to his company commander on the dot of the deadline.

  Happily, on that night there were no casualties, but on most raids there were. When the same Calgary battalion (the 50th) sent one hundred men on another raid, only thirty-five came back.

  It wasn’t always easy to bring casualties back in the time allotted, especially when the wounded were as bulky as Lieutenant A.A. “Gonkie” McDougall of the Princess Pats. This massive officer, who weighed 230 pounds, was badly wounded on a ten-man raid in early December. When he rushed two German sentries on the lip of a crater, one managed to trigger with his foot a mechanism that dislodged a grenade from the parapet. The blast left McDougall terribly mangled and presented his comrades with a problem. They had only fifteen minutes for the entire raid. It would take at least four of them to drag him back. In spite of that encumbrance the raiding party made it home in the required time, having destroyed the post and killed the sentries. It was a point of honour for officers to scoff at adversity. “I shall be able yet to play nine holes of golf,” McDougall remarked gamely as he was hoisted to safety. A week later, the wounded man wrote to his C.O.: “… my left leg is off, my right leg is shattered below the knee, my left arm is broken, I have some shrapnel in my hip, but otherwise I am jake.”

  The strict timetable made the raiders ruthless. When 150 men of the 26th (New Brunswick) Battalion punched a hole in the enemy’s front line, thirty shell-shocked Germans fled to a dugout in the rear. The Maritimers had no time for niceties. When the Germans refused to come out, they sealed them in forever.

  But it was attacks like these that achieved another purpose of the raids: to keep the Germans off balance, nervous, and jumpy, never knowing what was coming. The troops in the line could sense these jitters. A single bomb thrown close to the enemy trenches would often touch off the warning blast of a sentry’s whistle; the Germans, their sleep disturbed, could be heard thumping along the bathmats to stand to in case of an attack that never came.

  The heaviest casualties of the trench raids were probably suffered by the Japanese Canadians from British Columbia, who were determined to prove they were as good as or better than their fellow Canadians. Victor Wheeler of Calgary noted that of twenty-five Nisei assigned to his company in the 50th Battalion, only two or three survived. They were, in the words of the company sergeant-major, “a bloodthirsty lot of chaps especially in hand to hand combat.” The trouble was they either ignored or forgot about the timetable and ended up casualties. One, a Sergeant Kaji, finally got permission to carry into battle the sword and special dagger used in ritual suicide that his father had carried in the Russo-Japanese war. Over the parapet Sergeant Kaji went, naked sword flashing in the moonlight, the dagger at his belt. He never came back.

  It was part of the Canadian tactics to stage a raid at a time when the Germans least expected it – in broad daylight, for instance, or on Christmas morning. While other battalions were planning to meet the Germans in No Man’s Land for a Yuletide truce, the 1st CMRs – more than half the battalion-were pouring out of hidden tunnels on the attack. The raiders fought hand to hand with the enemy (who hadn’t expected anything so diabolical), destroyed twenty-seven dugouts, a supply dump, and a machine-gun emplacement, and brought back fifty-eight prisoners, some of them lugging Christmas parcels. The whole affair lasted forty-five minutes. Six CMRs were killed, twenty-two wounded.

  Another unexpected raid was carried out by the 50th in January. The Calgarians had learned from a prisoner that the Prussians were about to enter the line. “They’ll show you what real soldiers are like,” the POW boasted. The 50th immediately organized a raid to catch the enemy just as the changeover took place. The disorganized Prussians were still moving into position when the Canadians struck, seizing more prisoners for the intelligence staff.

  The raids paid off. By March, Corps intelligence had accurate figures on the strength of the enemy as well as his intentions, the character of the reserves, times and places of relief, and the physical features of the German positions. Moreover, the men who would attack the ridge knew in advance every detail of the ground before them because they’d been over it time and again.

  By March, too, the reinforcements were becoming battle seasoned, thanks to three months of trench raiding. Every raid was, in a sense, a rehearsal for the big moment. The techniques that would be used to capture Vimy Ridge were honed and polished in the careful training that preceded the larger raids. As early as December, five officers and ninety men of the 3rd Battalion from Toronto had trained for a week using a replica of the enemy trench system located by aerial photography. These practice trenches were actually dug and the men trained to leap into them, first with dummy grenades and later with live ones. Scouts who had been over the ground guided the attacking parties to within fifteen yards of the enemy wire. The attackers flung bathmats over this obstacle and were in the German trenches in just eight minutes. In that time they killed or wounded one hundred Germans, cleared one hundred and thirty yards of trench, and suffered thirty-five casualties. These were not seasoned veterans. Two thirds of the party were new men who had arri
ved just in time to be trained for the job.

  3

  The British, who had adopted the techniques of the trench raid, began to compete with the Canadians as if trench raiding were a kind of Olympic contest. When one Canadian unit captured a record hundred prisoners in a single raid, the British, a few days later, sent news from the Ypres salient that they’d taken one hundred and twenty.

  Over the winter the raids grew more complicated. On January 17, Burstall’s 2nd Division mounted a massive two-pronged attack involving more than a thousand men. It was preceded by a ten-day bombardment and consisted of two raids, fifteen hours apart. It devastated two parallel lines of German trenches spread over a mile of front.

  In this way, the various elements that constitute an army corps learned the complicated art of working together. For the larger infantry raids involved all the elements of a set-piece battle: artillery support, creeping barrages, box barrages, indirect fire by machine guns, and all the supporting services, from the engineers who blew up mineshafts and emplacements to the stretcher-bearers and lorry drivers.

  By February entire brigades were involved in trench raids. On the morning of the thirteenth, 870 men of the 10th Brigade, their faces blackened with soot, jumped off before dawn behind a pounding barrage. They included 200 infantrymen from each battalion together with pioneer troops and engineers. The raid had been carefully rehearsed; each man knew his exact job. The raiding party smashed its way for almost seven hundred yards through the three parallel lines of the enemy’s forward trenches, killing or wounding 110 Germans and capturing 50 prisoners. The raid was counted a success: Haig himself came down to inspect and congratulate the survivors. But the cost was high: the Canadians lost 150 killed, wounded, or missing.