Vimy

by Pierre Berton

  Jack Quinnell had no intention of following his example. At eighteen he was an old soldier who’d enlisted at sixteen young enough to be called “baby face” by his comrades. Now a veteran, he carried the more adult nickname of Quinnie. Wounded at the Somme, he knew enough to keep a low profile and so removed his steel helmet and crawled on his belly, nose in the mud, until he saw the sign marking the gap through which his battalion was supposed to advance.

  This was one of the markers that had alerted the Germans, who had trained machine guns on the gaps. The closer Quinnell got to his battalion sign, the more corpses he encountered. He caught his breath: there, on a pile of dead, lay the body of one of his closest friends, George Meade; and there, too, was the corpse of his C.O., Sam Beckett, who’d been killed trying to collect his scattered troops. One of Beckett’s men was trying to cut his way through the wire to reach his colonel’s body, but the German machine-gun fire frustrated the attempt.

  Meanwhile, Victor Wheeler, hearing the cry “Stand to!” had strapped his Lucas lamp to his belt, fingered his telegraph key, stuffed four grenades into his pocket, and prepared for the attack. The first wave of phosgene had been let off in the face of a terrible German barrage and now the second wave of the less deadly chlorine was ready to go. But the wind had risen and changed, and the phosgene was already blowing back in the faces of the Canadians. It made no sense to release any more. The Calgarians tried desperately to climb over the parapet; it was not possible in the face of the German barrage. The first six men to reach the top were killed instantly. Others were collapsing in the green clouds of phosgene blowing back upon them. But Wheeler and his comrades were luckier than most; they lived, those who were not gassed, to fight another day.

  Jack Quinnell found himself in an apparently hopeless situation. Looking back he could see fresh troops being hurried into the division’s empty front lines-a precaution against a German counterattack. Somehow he managed to crawl back under the wire, coughing and choking, his buttons and brass insignia green from the gas, his eyes in dreadful shape. It was daylight when he fell into the forward trench. Somebody handed him a large insulated jug of tea. He swallowed a mugful and immediately vomited over the man who gave it to him. He continued to vomit, and that probably saved his life. But for all of his years, his lungs would bear the scars they sustained before dawn on the first of March, 1917.

  Others weren’t so lucky. The dying and the wounded lay out in No Man’s Land, waiting for help that never came. Phosgene is an insidious gas, eighteen times as powerful as chlorine. Its effects build slowly: breathing becomes shallow, the victim begins to retch, the pulse rises to 120, the features turn ashen grey; over the next forty-eight hours the victim drowns slowly as the lungs discharge pints of yellow fluid. As the day wore on, the suffering of those who had been gassed increased as the phosgene ate into their lungs.

  Such scenes of adversity in battle are always illuminated by small epics of courage and endurance. Six hundred yards behind the German front, two privates of the Seaforths, Black and Debouchier, found themselves stranded, cramped and muddy, in a shell hole with a wounded comrade. They would not leave him and so lay out all through that long, hideous day. When dusk fell they drew lots to see which would go for help. Black won and somehow managed the extraordinary feat of crawling for six hundred yards right through the enemy trenches, dodging between groups of Germans, guided only by the stars. At one point, the sleeping enemy soldiers were so tightly packed that Black had to crawl up and down the back wall of the trench seeking a place to slip through. He made it at last to his own barbed wire, convinced the sentry that he was friendly, and then, in spite of the fact that he was grey with fatigue, insisted that he lead a party back to save his friends. His pleas were denied: any attempt that night would have failed. Black’s comrade, Debouchier, was captured. The wounded man died. Black survived to be killed in the mud of Passchendaele.

  Two days later, at ten o’clock on the morning of March 3, when the gas had dissipated and No Man’s Land was a silent, corpse-littered waste, the Germans offered a truce to allow the Canadians to bury their dead. Representatives of both sides met under a Red Cross flag at a spot equidistant from both lines. The Germans-all picked men in smart new uniforms-carried the Canadian dead and wounded half-way across and handed them over to their enemies, who picked them up and carried them to their own trenches. The body of Lieutenant-Colonel Kemball was treated with great respect by his adversaries; one of the Germans who spoke English mentioned the commander of the Kootenay battalion by name, an indication of the laxness of security that had preceded the attack.

  Lieutenant David Thompson, a bank clerk from Niagara Falls, was present at that truce. It gave him a queer feeling to be standing there in the broad daylight, not on his stomach but upright, without a shot being fired over that pock-marked field. It was almost as if he were in a dream. It was strange to see the Canadians exchanging cigarettes with the men they had tried to gas to death, but there they were, attempting to talk to any who spoke English. The German brigadier, who had been stationed at Esquimalt before the war, asked after old friends. He had words of praise for Travers Lucas, a Hamilton officer who had led his men gallantly to the wire-a practice uncommon in the German army. The officer, a Bavarian, spoke perfect English, having been educated at St. Paul’s, a famous British public school. He didn’t like the war, he said, hoped it would be over soon, and remarked how queer it would be to go back to the lines when the truce ended at noon, to, in his phrase, “pot at one another again.” The whole affair was rather like the atmosphere in a public house after a football game, when the players of both sides gather for a beer to discuss the contest. It lasted two hours and was hurriedly cancelled when the High Command got wind of it and ordered the immediate resumption of hostilities. But the guns were silent for the rest of the day; no one on either side had any stomach for further shooting.

  The losses in the raid were staggering-687 casualties out of a total of 1,700 attackers, including the very serious loss of two seasoned battalion commanders. The abortive attack had greatly weakened the 4th Division, a tragedy that had its effect on the battle that followed five weeks later.

  The press, of course, treated the raid as a victory, as the press always did. The Times reported that “the whole affair was carried out with great gallantry” and wrote of the heavy casualties inflicted and “valuable information gained.”

  Such reports incensed Captain Andrew Macphail, who confided his disgust to his diary. “Nothing could be more utterly false,” he wrote. “The dispatch is the grossest and lowest form of journalism.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Not What They Expected

  1

  The news of the failure of the March 1 gas raid swept through the lines like a sour wind. The men of the 4th Division, especially, were shaken. If an attempt of that size and complexity could fail so dismally, what hope was there for a larger venture? But the trench raids continued. More men died or were wounded or went missing – captured by the enemy, or ground into the mud of No Man’s Land to be lost forever, no more than a name on a post-war monument. By the end of March the total casualties would number the equivalent of two infantry brigades.

  The men in the trenches lived with death- and slept with it. Jim Curtis of Calgary was so cold and so tired one night that he crawled under the blankets with a group of strangers only to discover the following morning that they were all corpses awaiting burial. It did not faze him. Will Bird’s first task on arriving at the Vimy front had been to gather up in bags the legs and flesh of three men who had been shredded by the premature explosion of their own mortar bombs. A group of ten gunners digging a pit for a trench mortar in a French cemetery worked their way down through six layers of corpses and thought nothing of hanging their canteens on protruding shinbones: the dead were part of the landscape.

  Fresh troops poured in to fill the gaps left by the casualties. In Canada, those who had once been rejected as unfit found themselves wooed by
the army. Healthy-looking civilians were reviled as slackers. There was increasing talk of conscription.

  Out of Halifax the convoys steamed, loaded with reinforcements bound for England and, after a few days of training, for the French port of Le Havre. Here, in the first week of March, a draft of new recruits disembarked, destined for the signals section of the 42nd Battalion, Royal Highlanders of Canada, better known as the Black Watch. Among them was a twenty-one-year-old Scottish-born Canadian from Sherbrooke named William Breckenridge. A quiet, down-to-earth young man, Bill Breckenridge had arrived in Canada at the age of nine and had completed a course at the Ontario Business College in Belleville when the war broke out. He’d been in training ever since enlisting in 1915, and at Le Havre the training continued for another ten days before the reinforcement draft was ready to move to the front. By this time Breckenridge and his fellow signallers were sick of training and eager (if a little nervous) to encounter the real thing. But first they had to suffer the usual pompous send-off. As they stood fidgeting on the parade ground, the commanding officer appeared, hoisted himself onto a box, and made the kind of speech that commanding officers like to make and private soldiers don’t care to hear:

  “Now men, you are going to the front. You are going to get your heart’s desire – a crack at the Hun and a German helmet.…”

  It began to rain, the C.O. kept it up over a chorus of taunts and grumbles.

  “Tell it to Sweeney!” somebody shouted. “Let’s get going.” But they couldn’t get going until the C.O. had finished and the padre had spoken a necessary word of prayer.

  Breckenridge and thirty-nine others were herded into a boxcar marked 8 CHEVAUX OU 40 HOMMES-ARMEE ANGLAISE. For the next twenty-four hours, a rusty engine pulled its cargo at six miles an hour in a series of fits and starts to Doullens, where the guns of the Somme front could still be heard rumbling in the distance, and then on for another day, past shattered villages to Bruay in the heart of the mining district of northern France. This was the end of the line. As the Canadians tumbled off the boxcars, Breckenridge got his first glimpse of war-a German airplane directly above him dodging the black puffs of smoke sent up by the antiaircraft batteries.

  They slept that night in a barn, sheltered from a sudden blizzard. The following morning, as the sun cleared away the snow, they set off on foot, a twenty-mile march to the battalion rest area near the town of Mont St. Eloi, some six miles behind the Vimy front. Long before noon, Breckenridge could feel the straps of his eighty-pound pack biting into his shoulders, as, one by one, the weaker members of the group fell by the wayside, exhausted.

  As the others trudged on, the sights and sounds of war increased and the tension began to build. Observation balloons floated above the battle lines (“canteens for the aviators” one old-timer told a gullible rookie). Little trains rumbled by on narrow-gauge rails, loaded with shells. Long lines of battle-weary men began to appear, their faces grey with exhaustion, their uniforms spattered with mud, their puttees protected by ragged sacking. More planes buzzed overhead; lorries and limbers jammed the roadway. The new men threaded their way through the increasing traffic until they reached what was left of St. Eloi. There they enjoyed a bit of food and an hour’s rest before setting out again.

  Suddenly, just past the ruins of Villers-au-Bois, there came a dramatic change, as if a gigantic but invisible hand had rung down a heavy curtain. All sound ceased. All signs of life vanished. The road was empty of traffic, for it was still daylight and the German positions astride the famous ridge were only six miles away. The marching men had come within the reach of the enemy guns and had entered the ribbon of stealth.

  They had no choice but to continue. To keep casualties to a minimum, the draft was divided into parties of five, each marching at an interval of one hundred yards. In this fashion they reached the rest area, known as the Dumbbell Camp, unscathed. Here, in a swampy wood, the Black Watch was bivouacked – indeed, imprisoned. Because the entrance to the wood was in plain view of the German positions, no one could move out of the camp during the daylight hours.

  Breckenridge and the other rookies spent the night in bivvies no more than three feet high, built of sandbags and draped with tarpaulins. To his dismay, the camp was a swamp. The ground squished beneath a foot of water, and the troops waded through the resulting muck to their knees. Nevertheless, Breckenridge thought to himself, if the others can stick it here, then there’s no use of me complaining.

  That night the Canadian artillery opened a practice barrage to get the range of the German trenches. The noise was almost unbearable. Breckenridge felt as if he were in the middle of a blast furnace. In the distance, he could see the German flares go up, calling on their own guns to retaliate-a brilliant display of rainbow colours against the night sky.

  What would war be like? he asked himself. He tried to picture the scene, with shells falling all about him, wounded comrades being carried from the field. He had heard that men were sometimes buried in their own trenches during a strafe. Could those stories be true? Thirty minutes after it began, the barrage ended, and the troops slept.

  The rest period was over; orders came to move into the front line. One night at dusk, the battalion marched off by companies in single file through roads clogged with traffic, until the long communication trench that the French had named Pont Street was reached, and the files moved into the labyrinth of the Vimy trench system.

  They had entered what might be thought of as the business section of a small city – a large city, in fact, by 1917 Canadian standards, as large as Vancouver and larger than any other Canadian community except Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg. In this eerie metropolis, silent by day, a-buzz and a-clatter by night, one hundred thousand khaki-clad citizens were hived.

  Here a confusing network of trenches and sunken roads, more than two miles thick, so complex that men could easily get lost in the maze without a guide, wriggled and squirmed through the mud along the four-mile front. This was the heart of the city that Breckenridge’s battalion now entered. Behind lay the suburbs from which they had just emerged, a land of billets, rest areas, and training centres, the haunt of heavy artillery and brass hats.

  The city came complete with streets and avenues, each with an identifiable name: Indian Trench, Border Lane, Stargate Street, Spadina Avenue, Tottenham Road, Gallows Gate. Most lay eight feet below the surface; some were not even open to the sky, for the city was underlain with tunnels and caves, some used from medieval times. Even as the Black Watch negotiated the trench system, thousands of men were slaving beneath their feet, chipping away at the soft chalk, probing closer to the enemy lines. The Germans, too, were hacking away underground, lengthening their own tunnels on the forward slopes of the ridge, seeking their enemy in a subterranean war of nerves that would last until the day of the offensive.

  It was a gloomy world that Breckenridge entered, devoid of any hue, a monotonous, mud-coloured monochrome. The trenches were mud coloured, the water in the shell holes was mud coloured, the dugouts were mud coloured; the men themselves in their muddy khaki with their mud-coloured helmets, mud-coloured packs, and mud-coloured webbing blended with their surroundings. Everything-trains, ration boxes, guns, even the sullen skies above-was the colour of mud, and so were the rats that scuttled through the mud-coloured garbage.

  The trench system was like a grid that had been squashed out of shape by a giant’s paw. Three more or less parallel lines of trenches – forward, support, and reserve – faced the Germans, all linked and criss-crossed by the long communication trenches, such as Pont Street, down which the Black Watch sloshed and stumbled.

  This cobwebby maze was never static. Many trenches were disused, others falling in, still others being obliterated by shelling. Lines that seemed firmly planted on the map scarcely existed on the ground. Dug and re-dug, battered and cratered, half filled in, they reverted to the mud and were abandoned or became part of another trench line.

  As the battalion drew nearer to the front there
came the faint rattle of machine guns and the whine of the occasional bullet directly overhead. All talking ceased as the troops in crouching position negotiated the wooden trench mats that lay in the slime beneath their feet. Occasionally a whisper was passed back from the company commander: “Step down, hole in mat,” or “Wire underfoot.” Sometimes the file would break and all would halt until it closed up. In the distance, Bill Breckenridge could see the sky light up as a star shell fell over No Man’s Land.

  As the company entered the forward lines, the only sound was the thud of heavy boots. The front lay just ahead. Beyond that were the great mine craters in which sentries were posted. Beyond that lay the dead world of No Man’s Land, and beyond that, invisible in the darkness, the great bulk of the ridge.

  The battalion that had been garrisoning the line was about to be relieved by the Black Watch. “Relieved” is the proper word, for relief was written on the faces of those who had survived a week of standing at the alert, eating cold food, sleeping in their clothes, twelve hours on and twelve off, never free of rats, lice, rain, snow, or mud and the constant hammering of the guns – the drumfire of their own artillery and, far worse, the roar, whine, crump, and moan of the German mortars, minnies, howitzers, and whizbangs plus the sharp stutter of the machine guns and the snap of the snipers’ bullets.

  Guided into the forward trench by old hands detailed for that purpose, Breckenridge could hear the nervous whispers around him: “Does he shell around here?” “What sort of place is this?” “Isn’t it quiet?” And the varying answers: “It’s a little hell at times,” or “He hasn’t made a direct hit yet,” or “It’s jake-a-loo around here.”