“I differ,” said another. “A nice little bit of shrap right there”-pointing to his arm-“and I’ll pat myself on the back.”
And so, joking uneasily, they moved forward through the Grange Subway. The pipe band of the Princess Pats moved with them, ready to play the battalion over the top. Another battalion had nine footballs to place on the parapet, ready to be kicked across to the German trenches when they went over the top-another bit of morale-building bravado. Ahead, silhouetted against the moonlight, Breckenridge could see the line of troops moving into the jumping-off positions.
By this time, the entire Canadian Corps was in position, twenty-three battalions in the forward line, thirteen more waiting directly behind, and another nine along with three British battalions in reserve, waiting to leap-frog through – more than thirty thousand men stretched out over nearly four miles of front, the leading troops already half-way across No Man’s Land, lying flat in shell holes or shallow ditches. Clouds began to obscure the bright moon, and as the minutes ticked by, a light, cold drizzle started to fall.
Tensions rose as the officers checked and re-checked their watches. “You’re three seconds out, Cooper,” Arthur Currie had told one of the Princess Pats’ company commanders. “Now I don’t want that to occur again.”
Whizbang Johnston, commander of the 2nd CMRs – the same man who had tinkered with the grenade launcher-found these last hours terribly trying. Did the Germans suspect anything? Would an enemy barrage come down suddenly on the masses of men waiting so quietly and so patiently in the cold? The wind had sprung up. The drizzle turned slowly into rain mixed with snow. Johnston stood at the parapet, watching, waiting, praying.
At 7th Brigade headquarters Archibald Cameron Macdonell grew increasingly restive. Time after time he sent his twenty-eight-year-old intelligence officer, Hal Wallis, forward to make sure everything was all right with the troops crouched in the front line. Macdonell was known as a front line soldier; indeed, Wallis was to say he spent as much time at the front with his brigadier as he had in his days as a private. Not for nothing did the men of the 7th call Macdonell “Fighting Mac” and sometimes “Batty Mac” because of his eccentricities under fire. Everybody knew the story of how he’d gone so far into No Man’s Land that a sniper put a bullet in his arm. Instead of ducking, Batty Mac had stood up swearing, shaking his unwounded arm angrily at the sniper, who immediately put another bullet in his good arm. And everybody also knew that Macdonell, at the Somme, had insisted on walking among the wounded after the attack on the Regina Trench, unmindful of the enemy shells, to salute the corpses of the Black Watch. A sentimental Scot who sometimes swore in Gaelic in moments of great pressure, Macdonell stopped at every corpse and said: “I salute you, my brave Highlander,” until Wallis managed to pull him to safety.
He was a seasoned spit-and-polish veteran, a professional soldier who had served with the Mounted Police in the North West and the Canadians in South Africa. He had endured moments like this before many battles, knowing from long experience that it was the waiting, not the action, that tried men’s nerves. He had a sad, Celtic face, but he knew how to hide his emotions, never allowing himself to appear downcast even when things were going badly. When one of his battalion commanders gave him a gloomy response in a corpse-filled dugout during the heat of a Somme battle, Fighting Mac took him around a traverse in the trench and gave him a tongue-lashing: “Smile, man! Smile!” he said. “If you don’t I’ll do something to you that will make you.” After Vimy, Macdonell would replace Arthur Currie as commander of the 1st Division.
But now, with dawn approaching, he could no longer contain himself. Wallis had come back to report everything in good shape, but the Brigadier-General had to see for himself. “We must go up!” he said suddenly. He gathered a party together and set out overland, peering ahead trying to make out shapes in the gloom. Suddenly a German shell exploded a few yards away. Even Fighting Mac was shaken. “Til go down now,” he said to Wallis, rather like a small boy whose mother had caught him outside the yard. But he refused to climb back until the others had made their way to shelter.
By this time a sharp frost had set in, hardening the mud and covering the subway floors with ice that cracked under foot like broken glass. Some men had been standing in the jumping-off trenches for twelve hours in full battle kit, up to their knees in freezing water.
William Pecover, his day of relaxation at an end, crowded into a shallow, muddy ditch, suddenly found himself aware of a strange and ominous silence hanging like a blanket over the trenches after a week of thunder. The guns had ceased, for they had to be rested like spirited animals, tested, and cleaned while new stocks of ammunition were brought to the batteries.
To Canon Scott, who had climbed a hill behind the lines, a tin of bully beef in his pocket, it seemed as if the war had gone to sleep, so heavy was the silence. Zero Hour was approaching, and to him “the thrill of such a moment [was] worth years of peacetime existence,” a curious thought for a votary of the Prince of Peace. The luminous hands of his watch crept forward as the sky grew lighter and objects began to appear in the fields below. To the padre it was as if nature herself was holding her breath. It was five minutes to Zero.
The snow was increasing to blizzard intensity – a bitter contrast to Easter’s glorious weather. In the distance a German starshell shattered the twilight before it sizzled out in a shell crater. In the assault trenches men were already dying. Harold Barker, the scout with the RCRs, noticed a man from Toronto making holes in the parapet to help his footing when going over the top. Alas, he reached too high. Struck by a sniper’s bullet, he tumbled dead at Barker’s feet. “No noise,” said Barker’s officer. “Roll him back.” Thus, the first man to go over the top was a corpse.
Three minutes to go. A barrage of gas shells landed in the German rear, killing hundreds of horses. In the 1st CMRs’ jumping-off trench, narrow and only thirty inches deep, Private George Johnston sat with his back to the enemy, his knees scraping his chin. Suddenly a dud shell killed the man next to him, spattering Johnston with his blood. Nobody budged.
Two minutes. Now came the whispered order to fix bayonets. The sound of the loose locking rings, rippling all along the miles of trenches, was like the humming of a thousand quivering bees.
Silence. Thirty thousand men held their breath, tensing their cramped muscles for the moment that some had been awaiting since November.
One more minute ticked by, and then a single gun fired. One second elapsed, and then the world exploded as the greatest artillery barrage in the history of warfare burst upon the unsuspecting Germans and the Battle of Vimy Ridge began.
BOOK THREE
The Battle
Moving forward in the full light of that clouded April morning, we learned full well the nature of the great modern battlefield. This was war.… The wounded, friend and foe alike, lay everywhere about in the cold, wet mud, silent and helpless in their agony or crying out for help to the stretcher-bearers who fanned out behind the attacking waves. And just ahead of us roared the barrage and all the fury of the fight-the death rattle of the machine guns, bursting overhead, shrapnel and counter fire from the enemy guns-all of the fiendish implements of death that man had devised. In contrast, the conquered area through which we passed seemed strangely quiet. Here death reigned, and the agony of pain.
From the unpublished memoirs of
Private William Pecover, 27th Battalion.
CHAPTER TEN
The 1st Division
1
In the apparent chaos of the Vimy battleground there was order of a sort – more order, in fact, than in most battles. Each division had its objective, and within the brigades, each battalion, each company, each platoon-indeed, each man-knew exactly where to head, when they should reach each objective point (marked on their maps by coloured lines), exactly how many minutes to stop before moving forward again, and at what point to dig in and allow reserve troops to leap-frog through.
For each of the
four divisions the style and method of attack differed, depending on the frontage, the distance to be covered, and the state of the German defences. There were four simultaneous mini-battles on the Canadian front that morning, all interconnected.
Arthur Currie’s veteran 1st Division held the extreme right of the line and had the longest advance of all-four thousand yards to its final objective of Farbus Wood, the small forest just below the eastern slope of the ridge, where so many of the big German guns were hidden. On Currie’s right was a British unit-the 51st Highland Division. Its commander, Major-General G.M. Harper, a venerable British regular, was Currie’s antithesis. A hidebound commander of the old school whose men nicknamed him “Uncle Harper,” he had opposed the use of machine guns by infantry soldiers and had little use for the newfangled tanks. Slavishly devoted to his own division, he was often blind to its flaws.
As they rose from the shallow assembly trenches the Saskatchewan troops on the right of the line could see Harper’s Highlanders on their own right. It was important to keep in touch. All battles are confusing enough, but on this particular spine of mud with few identifiable features it would be easy for groups of men to wander out of their sector and find themselves tangled with the wrong units, leaving a gap in the line for the Germans to exploit. At Vimy members of each platoon kept their eyes on the men on each flank who carried signs of coloured metal to let their neighbours know who they were. But all attempts by Currie’s men to get any information on the intentions of Uncle Harper had been frustrated. This stand-offishness would have serious consequences within a few hours.
Currie’s orders were to reach the outskirts of Farbus and Farbus Wood by early afternoon. The division would do this in two stages, each stage consisting of two bounds, although “bounds” is scarcely the right word, for the men were loaded down with at least forty pounds of equipment. The ordinary private carried his rifle, 120 rounds of ammunition, two Mills bombs, five sandbags, forty-eight hours’ rations, a waterproof sheet, gas mask, smoke helmet, a ground flare, a filled waterbottle, and a pick or a shovel. Sweating in their heavy greatcoats, stumbling and falling into shell holes, some drowned in mine craters while their comrades struggled to keep up with the barrage as it blasted its way forward.
And some carried considerably more. Norman Evans, the strongest man in the division, found himself burdened with a 225-pound box of Lewis gun ammunition, which he was persuaded to carry on his back, using a tumpline. Evans had actually joined the army to escape hard work, but the members of the 48th Highlanders soon learned that no one else could lift such a load. He had demonstrated his incredible strength on more than one occasion. As a youth working on the railway in Saskatchewan he had shown he could lift six hundred pounds. On the boat going over he had encountered some husky Scots trying to hoist a four-hundred-pound anvil. They sneered at Evans when he offered to help: “What’s a little bugger like you think you’re going to do?” one asked. Evans hoisted it easily and since that time had been given all the heavy jobs.
Now he stuck close to his friend Joe Lafontaine because Lafontaine never seemed to attract a bullet. It didn’t help. Evans was scarcely out of the trench before he felt a hard thump in the groin that knocked the breath out of him. A shrapnel ball the size of a ten-cent piece had entered his groin and emerged just above his hip. Evans went down, throwing off the box of ammunition as he fell, and then waited patiently until the stretcher-bearers dragged him to shelter. By this time his clothes had frozen to his body and had to be cut off. Later his friend Lafontaine turned up, still unscratched.
“How come you got hit and I didn’t?” Lafontaine asked.
“I stopped it before it hit you,” said Evans wryly.
The first bound would take the division right through the German front line system of forward, support, and reserve trenches. The forward line was as little as seventy-five yards away, and much of it had been pulverized beyond recognition. But farther on the going was harder. By the time the troops had penetrated the entire seven-hundred-yard labyrinth of crumbling ditches and dugouts, some battalions had lost almost half their men.
On the division’s left flank, Cy Peck’s Canadian Scottish had trouble fighting their way around the clusters of old French mine craters that blocked their advance. The craters were twenty feet deep with slippery sides that led down to six feet or more of slime and water. As the Scottish squeezed through the gaps between the hollows, German machine guns on the far lips fired on the leading companies. The troops paused, then put Currie’s platoon tactics into practice, attacking the machine guns from the flanks. The cost was heavy, but the battalion managed to get through the craters into the German forward positions. It was here that Gordon Tupper, leading his company in the running fight that followed, fell dead.
When the attackers reached the second of the three German trench lines, resistance stiffened. Men rushed from shell hole to shell hole, attacking strong points with grenades and bayonets. It wasn’t hard to spot them: a mound of corpses indicated their position. Officers were hit; NCOS were hit; but the advance never slackened as juniors took over. Here, a young Scot from Moose Jaw, Private William Johnstone Milne, won the Victoria Cross by acting on his own initiative as he’d been taught. A machine gun on the left was doing fearful damage. Its crew fought off all attempts to capture it. A fan-shaped heap of corpses was piling up in front of the gun when Milne leaped from a nearby shell hole, crawled on his hands and knees through the mud, and managed to destroy the Germans with a grenade.
Currie’s division captured the entire German forward defence system-all three sets of trenches marked on the maps as the Black Line – in just over half an hour, knocking the Germans off balance. To the north, the 2nd and 3rd Divisions were enjoying equal success. All three arrived on their objectives almost to the second, just as they had on the training fields. They would continue to do so; it was one of those occasions in which a battle has gone almost exactly as the planners wanted it to, without the confusion and disarray that has accompanied most set-piece attacks, from Cannae to the Somme. Only the embattled 4th Division, more than three miles away on the extreme left, was in trouble.
The enemy trenches were so badly obliterated that some troops didn’t recognize them: the standing barrage had reduced them to a muddy pudding. Yet it was so brief that, as Byng had planned, those of the enemy who survived underground couldn’t believe it signalled an attack; they had been used to much longer periods of softening up. When they stumbled from their dugouts, stunned by the fury of the bombardment, they weren’t prepared to find thousands of Canadians rolling over them.
2
As the forward platoons of the 1st Division reached their objectives, they searched the sky for the RFC reporting aircraft, identified by black bands and streamers attached to the struts. Right on time, a plane buzzed low over the battlefield, its klaxon blaring over the noise of the barrage. The troops waved flags carrying the divisional symbol-the famous red patch–to show they’d reached the Black Line. Back at divisional headquarters, Arthur Currie got the word that his division was precisely on schedule.
Now, as the division dug in, the barrage moved forward by two hundred yards to hammer the Germans’ second defence system half-way up the slopes of the ridge. All along the Canadian front, the troops enjoyed a breathing spell. The leading wave, which had borne the brunt of the 1st Division’s attack, moved back to allow the rear wave to come forward and lead the next phase of the assault to the Red reporting line. Behind them, on the ground just captured, the mopping-up platoons attacked small pockets of resistance and, in the army’s coldly euphemistic phrase, “neutralized” them. The canopy of steel arced over the heads of the assault teams for thirty-eight minutes. Then, at exactly 6:55 A.M., the barrage began to creep forward once more, and the division advanced, right in its wake, as it had been trained to do.
The troops had almost half a mile of torn ground to traverse before reaching the next objective – the great transverse trench the Germans called the
Zwischen Stellung. On the reporting maps this was the Red Line. The ground here was a honeycomb of shell holes in which could be discerned dugout entrances about one foot square. Apart from these and some ruined emplacements there were no observable features; the terrain had been wiped clean of any other signs of human habitation.
The advance to the Red Line was punctuated by small tragedies, blunders, triumphs, and the occasional surprise. As the 7th Battalion approached the shattered copse known as the Nine Elms (the Red objective), a British Columbia officer, Arthur Pollard, was astonished to see two rabbits hopping across the exploding battlefield and equally astonished to see two of his platoon taking pot shots at them instead of at the enemy. True to their training, they didn’t stop but banged away on the move. The rabbits got away.
George Alliston, a young bugler with the same battalion – the 7th – also followed the rules even though it cost him many a heartsick night. His closest friend and fellow bugler, Georgie Brown, who had lived next door in Glasgow before the two emigrated to the Canadian West, keeled over and fell into a mine crater. Alliston ran to the crater to pull his friend out, but before he could do so an officer pointed his revolver directly at him and then skyward. The meaning was clear: don’t stop for casualties. Alliston trudged forward, leaving his friend dying in the muck.
Resistance was crumbling, yet some of the German machine guns were still firing from the Red Line. Here the indomitable Bill Milne of the Canadian Scottish clinched his hold on the Victoria Cross with a second feat of daring. Vicious fire was holding up the battalion’s advance. It seemed to be coming from a haystack directly in front of him. What was a haystack doing in No Man’s Land, where every other object had been ground into the mud? Milne crawled forward and discovered, with no surprise, that the haystack was a cover for a concrete machine-gun emplacement. His throwing arm didn’t fail him. The first Mills bomb put the gun out of action and terrified the crew, who looked up to see Milne charging directly upon them. They surrendered in a body and the advance continued. The V.C. was posthumous. Milne was killed later that day.
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