Vimy

by Pierre Berton

  The gunners lived more comfortably than the infantry, but they also lived in fear of premature bursts. A bad batch of 18-pounder ammunition had arrived in these last days before the battle. Ernest Black, a law student from Toronto, and his fellow field gunners feared it more than they feared the enemy cannon. Many of the time fuses were defective, the shells exploding as they left the muzzle. Black and his comrades, testing their ammunition, found two prematures in six rounds fired; one fell short and killed an officer and a sergeant on the Arras-Souchez Road.

  By this time there were so many guns firing that Black found himself in a perilous position. His battery was in the front row of seven rows of guns, each of them firing a percentage of prematures. When such a defective shell burst it flung a pint of steel marbles directly in front of it, all travelling at top speed in a narrow cone twenty-five feet wide and one hundred feet deep. In this hail of small projectiles were two whirling chunks of brass, both lethal-the fuse that hadn’t worked and the shell case that had blown off. All night and all day Black and the others were treated to the nerve-racking whine of these shrapnel bullets and the accompanying howl of the fuses and shell cases hurtling at them. Only a thick wall of sandbags at their backs provided any protection.

  In those final days, the tempo of activity at Vimy quickened with the intensity of sound as events moved toward a final crescendo. The Canadians raided the enemy trenches every night, probing for scraps of information. It was a costly business. The raids and the German guns took their toll. In the fortnight before the battle, 327 Canadians died; another 1,316 were wounded or lost.

  And some went sick. Will Bird was suffering from the early stages of mumps and didn’t know it when, on the night of March 28, he was transferred to the sniping section and sent out with a veteran marksman named Harry Pearce, who had eighteen kills to his credit. As the bombardment thundered overhead, the two lay out on dry strips of brick and blocks, above the mud, concealed behind a slitted steel plate that had been camouflaged on the enemy’s side with wire and rubbish. Two days went by during which each man took turns peering through the slit with binoculars, examining the enemy lines. Then, on the third morning, Bird saw a German rise waist high in his trench and look around. Bird got him in the cross-hairs at a hundred yards and shot him dead. Even as Pearce was recording the kill in his record book, a second German rose. Bird shot him, too. A third stood up, so sharply defined in the sights that Bird could count the buttons on his tunic. He shot him in the left breast. Two more of the enemy appeared, one of them carrying binoculars; when Bird shot him, the binoculars were flung in a high loop above his head. His comrade raised his rifle and pointed it in the direction of the snipers. Pearce gripped Bird’s shoulder. “Shoot!” he said. “You won’t get a chance like this all day.”

  But Bird couldn’t continue. A wave of nausea swept over him. “Go ahead yourself,” he said, “I’ve had enough.” Pearce took quick aim and Bird saw the dark flush that spread over the German’s face as he went down. Pearce shot two more Germans in quick succession, but for Will Bird the future novelist, his sniping days were over. Back in the trenches he told his sergeant he’d had enough of butcher’s work. The following day, half delirious from his case of mumps, he was shipped by ambulance to Mont St. Eloi.

  Tossing on his hospital cot, unable to sleep because the sniping still preyed on his mind, he would miss the Battle of Vimy Ridge. But he would never forget that cold morning when he, William Richard Bird, aged twenty-five, late of Amherst, Nova Scotia, stared not only into the faces of the men he was about to kill but also into the deepest recesses of his own soul.

  2

  By April 2, every infantryman knew every detail of the attack except the date and the time. Every division had a thick, typewritten volume, carefully guarded, each copy numbered, that covered every conceivable operation from the use of tram lines to the burial of the dead.

  Now, the second phase of the artillery plan went into effect as the guns that had been concealed from the enemy came into action. For the next seven days, the Canadian and British artillery pounded the enemy positions until one million rounds had been fired. The Germans called it the Week of Suffering.

  There had never been anything like it in history : fifty thousand tons of high explosives raining down on the demoralized and disoriented Prussian and Bavarian troops. For all of that time, the men in the German front lines had to stand to, unable to wash or shave, their rations heavily curtailed because supplies could not be brought forward under the intense bombardment. Ration trips that had once taken fifteen minutes now took several hours. Even the deep dugouts were not entirely secure, for the new armour-piercing shells with the delayed-action fuses could penetrate for twenty feet or more.

  For the Germans, sleep, when it was possible at all, became fitful. The artillery carried out feints – creeping barrages, which seemed to signal an attack, or sudden intensifications in certain areas to throw the enemy off guard. These contributed to the Germans’ confusion. Lulled by false alarms, wearied by constant orders to stand to, they grew complacent. In vain, Ludendorff urged that more batteries be brought forward; his artillery was being outgunned three to one. But by the end of the Week of Suffering his extra batteries still weren’t in position.

  As the shelling intensified, so did the work behind the Canadian lines. The regimental tailors and their assistants were hard at it, sewing up canvas buckets for the bomb carriers. The pioneer companies were making wooden signs, each bearing a regimental shoulder patch to mark for the runners the quickest route back to battalion headquarters. Battalion scouts began to familiarize themselves with overland routes to avoid the clogged trenches and tunnels. Tools of every kind, from wire cutters to picks, were cached in underground storage areas. In one sap alone, the RCRs stored 46,000 rounds of rifle ammunition, 200 shovels, 150 picks, and great rolls of barbed wire.

  On the night of April 3, the Corps faced an unexpected crisis: the RFC reported that the Germans were evacuating the Vimy front. If that were true, then all plans for the capture of the ridge would have to be abandoned. Front-line officers reported the situation normal along the line, but when the RFC reports persisted, the 29th Battalion (Vancouver) – known as Tobin’s Tigers, after their original commander-was ordered to find out what was going on.

  The Tigers were about to be relieved by the Royal 22nd of Montreal – the famous “Van Doos.” Nevertheless, Captain Harry Clyne, who knew of a gap in the enemy wire, organized a patrol, crawled across No Man’s Land, peered cautiously over the enemy parapet and, to his amazement, found the German trench empty. Water oozing from footsteps in the mud indicated it had been occupied only a few minutes earlier.

  Clyne sent out scouts to the right and left: nothing! He and his men moved cautiously forward to the support line only to discover, to their astonishment, that it, too, was empty. They crept along the deserted trench and, as a flare shot up, huddled in a corner of the traverse. In the light they spotted a few German stragglers, unshaven, exhausted, their greatcoats caked with mud. All were high-tailing it to the rear.

  What was going on? Had the Germans decided upon a ruse – to evacuate the forward areas and set up a new and stronger defensive line farther back, perhaps on the reverse slopes where they would be protected by the great bulk of the ridge? If so, all the planning and training, all the bombardment and split-second timing for the assault would be worthless.

  Clyne, pondering the problem, made plans to seize at least one prisoner to confirm his suspicions. Then, suddenly, it seemed as if the entire German army was descending on his small patrol on the double. These were fresh clean troops in unsoiled greatcoats, leaping into the support trench on his right and dashing past his concealed patrol to occupy the forward line.

  Clyne knew he had to get the message back as fast as possible. That wouldn’t be easy. He gave each man the same message: “No retirement on the Vimy front-corps relief only.” But how to get back with the fresh troops surrounding them? Clyne’s only advic
e to his sergeant was to “go where the mud is thickest.”

  Through the mud they crawled, over the parapet of the trench to the very edge of a vast crater, fifty feet deep, two hundred feet wide. Their own troops held the far side, but two German sentries loomed up ahead, on the near lip, barring their way. Clyne sent his men in pairs, creeping around the enemy post with orders to race for their own lines even at the risk of being shot at by their own men.

  Miraculously, they all made it. The Van Doos, who had already relieved the Tigers, had given the patrol up for lost. Now they couldn’t believe their eyes: how could such a group get through the wire and the German trenches, remain for two hours behind the enemy lines, and return without a scratch? It was fortunate they did. The word went back to Corps headquarters that the enemy trenches were manned and there was no need to abandon the plan. The Germans, aroused now, shelled the Canadian front and had their revenge. Two members of Harry Clyne’s bold little patrol were killed by shrapnel.

  By April 6, Good Friday, senior officers knew the date of the attack but not the time; it had been postponed for a variety of reasons from April 8 to April 9. The weather that Friday was bracing, “the bluest of spring mornings, cold enough to be exhilarating, too cold to be delicious,” in Andrew Macphail’s notation. The news from across the Atlantic was equally exhilarating: the United States had declared war on Germany. Few had time to give that much thought: everyone’s mind was concentrated on the coming battle. The sacred had to give way to the profane. When Canon Frederick George Scott, the senior chaplain of the 1st Division, tried to organize a Good Friday service, he was told everybody was too busy to attend.

  It was a day of hard work and sober reflection. Over on the 2nd Division front, Major James DeLancey, the second in command of the 25th Battalion (Nova Scotia Rifles) – the man who would take them over the top – told a meeting of officers that if only one man was left alive their objective must be taken, and unless their plight was drastic they must not call for help from any other unit.

  On the enemy side, the jitters were growing. At the far left of the sector, sentries of the 38th Battalion from Ottawa looked out across No Man’s Land and, to their astonishment, spotted a lone German soldier, carrying his pack and rifle and walking directly toward them. He was a young private of the 11th Bavarians, short and blond and in good condition, apart from the mud caking his grey uniform, but the bombardment had been too much for him. The sentries shook their heads in amazement: something must be wrong if one of the enemy was allowed to walk into their trench in broad daylight.

  That afternoon, the artillery obliterated the already badly shattered village of Thélus on the forward slope of the ridge, just below the crest. Its underground shelters were strongly defended by German machine guns. Now two hundred artillery pieces were turned on the ravaged community. Farther to the left the village of Farbus and Farbus Wood, on the far side of the ridge, received a similar battering.

  The weather was so clear that Bill Breckenridge, detailed for an advance party of the Black Watch, could see the smears of white chalk thrown up by the Germans in their trenches along the ridge. The rest of Breckenridge’s battalion was again bivouacked in the Dumbbell camp, six miles behind the lines; the advance party’s job was to prepare the jumping-off trenches for the coming battle. As they trudged past the old French cemetery, Breckenridge looked soberly at the long lines of crosses and asked himself: “Can the Canadians drive Fritzie from the Vimy Ridge after the French and the British failed?” It seemed to him an almost impossible task.

  On the plank road that ran from Mont St. Eloi to the Arras-Souchez highway, the party stopped to rest. Breckenridge cast his eyes back to the village and the shattered twin towers of the old abbey perched on the hilltop. All around him the great guns lay in wait, guns of every calibre-row upon row-lined up on an old sunken Roman road that had once known the tramp of Caesar’s legions. As the sun began to sink, the sky took on a deeper hue; Breckenridge had been here before, but now it seemed to him more beautiful than he’d ever known it. A phrase popped into his head: “Even in the jaws of death, life is sweet.” He thought of his home in Sherbrooke and the turmoil that lay ahead. Who could survive? Who would fall? It occurred to Bill Breckenridge that everybody expected to survive, including himself.

  By now, in the gathering dusk, the towers of the abbey had blended into a single spire. On that Good Friday evening, it seemed to Breckenridge that it had taken on the shape of a great monument, overshadowing the battlefield.

  On this journey to the front line, everything would stand out sharply in Breckenridge’s memory: the sight, for instance, of an artillery post disguised so well as a shattered tree trunk that it was hard to tell it from a row of real trees that lined the Arras road; or the scenes in Pont Street, flooded by April showers, where men continually slipped off the bathmats into the mud to the merriment of the others; or the sight of troops sloshing through the water of another sunken road known as the Quarry Line – as unconcernedly as if they were walking down the main street of their home village.

  In the Grange Subway, labour battalions were still clawing away at the chalk, creating dugouts off the main subway to be used for the headquarters of various battalions. Here, Breckenridge vainly tried to find a place to sleep; the tunnel was so tightly packed with snoring troops that there wasn’t a square inch of space to be had. He and the others moved up into the forward trench system only to be driven back by a rain of mortar shells. Finally, they returned to the Quarry Line to join a group from the field ambulance cooking a midnight dinner over a charcoal brazier. “I can’t give you a bunk but I can give you a stretcher and a blanket,” one of them offered. Breckenridge and his party accepted gratefully, flung themselves onto the ground, and dropped off to sleep.

  Andrew Macphail had left the rear areas near Mont St. Eloi about the same time as Breckenridge to walk with his son, Jeffrey, to the Corps headquarters at Camblain l’Abbé. The road was good, but when he returned six hours later it reminded him of cream that had been churned into butter. Horses were fainting and falling, lorries spewing up stones, transport jammed for miles in both directions, a drizzle starting to fall-yet everybody was cheerful and punctiliously polite. As the guns gobbled the ammunition the traffic continued its snail-like pace, hour after hour. Workers at a YMCA coffee stand counted the three-ton trucks moving up the line, all loaded with shells, and figured that in a single twenty-four-hour period two thousand had passed that way.

  Everywhere, as night fell, the work went on. The Zivy Subway was being rushed to completion. Tramways were being pushed forward as close to the front line as practical. Bridges were being thrust across the parallel lines of trenches so that the supporting troops would not be held up. The Canadian wire had to be cut to allow the attackers to go over the top and into No Man’s Land unimpeded. Dumps were being assembled, dressing stations set up in the ruins of Neuville St. Vaast, and the great Zivy Cave made habitable for even more men. In the Vincent, Tottenham, and Cavalier subways, huge dressing stations were being completed. And out in No Man’s Land that night, whole companies of infantry were silently digging away ahead of the forward line, building the shallow jumping-off trenches-three feet deep and no wider than a man’s shoulders – that would give the first wave of attackers a head start at Zero Hour. But not all of those who dug trenches in No Man’s Land that night would ever experience that moment. Even as they worked, the enemy shells exploded among them, destroying the sweetness of their youth.

  Other men died that night and not all of them in No Man’s Land. That same afternoon, Corporal Eric Forbes of the 6th Field Company, Engineers, stood beside the Arras-Souchez road watching the traffic. Up came an officer with a company of men. “Corporal,” he asked, “do you know of any place around here my men could rest? We’re a tunnelling company and we’re going up to the ridge. We have to get some rest because we have to work all night.” Forbes found a billet in a building behind the armoury where others were also sleeping. The tunn
ellers entered, slipped out of their equipment, and settled down on bunks of wire and netting. Fifteen minutes later a shell with an instantaneous fuse struck the building, killing twelve, wounding thirty. Just a few inches higher and it would have passed over harmlessly.

  For Eric Forbes, this was a moment of horror. He was twenty-four, a Nova Scotian who had been studying engineering at Queen’s. He’d joined a militia company of engineers because that would count as a credit toward his degree. He’d been working as purser on a boat out of Boston the summer war was declared. A telegram had ordered him into active service. Now here he was, standing outside a ruined building, his gorge rising as an old friend, the company driver William Stalker, staggered toward him, trying to stuff his guts back into the jagged hole in his belly before collapsing at Forbes’s feet.

  3

  Saturday, April 7, dawned, another fine day, the kind of spring morning that makes a man feel good to be young and alive. With the battle only forty-eight hours away the attacking brigades began to organize their advance headquarters. As Brigade Major, it was Duncan Macintyre’s task to make arrangements in the Zivy Cave. By afternoon the job was complete and the headquarters personnel of the 4th Infantry Brigade were sloshing forward with their kits and office supplies through the deep mud of the communication trenches, only to be halted by a flurry of shelling. One man died, another was wounded.

  The cave itself was jammed with men, casting grotesque shadows in the candlelight as they played cards or brewed tea over small fires or carved their names on the chalk walls. A stream of humanity constantly shuffled in and out, splashed by water that dribbled from the roof above covering everything in an inch and more of grey slime. Stretcher-bearers staggered under wounded men whose cries punctuated the general buzz of voices. Carrying parties entered, dumped their loads, and went off for more. Mud-covered men stumbled in from the front to catch a few winks of sleep. To Macintyre, the stench of foul air, mud, cooking, sweat, urine, chloride of lime, and stale tobacco was nauseating. More than four hundred men had crowded into the cave, tracking in so much mud that a layer of wet ooze carpeted the chalk floor.