Vimy

by Pierre Berton

  The battalion’s history was a curious one. It had been raised in 1916 as part of a Highland brigade to be attached to the Canadian 5th Division. But the idea of another division was soon abandoned. Casualties had been heavier than expected, and the Canadians preferred to have four divisions at full strength rather than five weak ones. All but two battalions – the 85th was one-were broken up to reinforce existing units.

  On the day of the battle, the Nova Scotians had been given the lowly task of digging a new communication trench from the rear lines and across the ridge, directly over Hill 145. Now they would have to exchange picks and shovels for rifles, machine guns, and grenades.

  Two companies were assigned to the task: Captain Harvey Crowell’s “C” company from Halifax and Captain Percy Anderson’s “D” company from Cape Breton. When the two officers met with Odlum, shortly before four that afternoon, Crowell thought he’d never seen a more worried officer. Odlum was determined that as soon as dusk fell, the hill would be stormed and the flanking fire harassing the 3rd Division stopped. Zero Hour was set for 6:45 that evening. There would be a twelve-minute barrage behind which the Nova Scotians would attack.

  Anderson and Crowell got their groups out of the Tottenham Subway, wading all the way to the jumping-off trenches, which, with the melting snow, were now more like brooks. The men were soaked to the skin before they reached them. Now, still standing waist deep in water, loaded down with bombs, ammunition, tools, reserve rations, and drinking water, they waited for the barrage to explode. The battalion’s adjutant, Major J.L. Ralston (a future Canadian defence minister), stood by encouraging the men.

  “Well, Anderson,” he chaffed, “they had to send you to take Vimy Ridge.”

  “Well,” said Anderson, “we’ll take it or never come back.”

  Just as the last man waded out of the tunnel and into the soggy trench, a message arrived from Odlum cancelling the barrage on the recommendation of the commanding officer of the Nova Scotians, Lieutenant-Colonel A.H. Borden, who was afraid it might obliterate the scattered Ottawa troops crouching in the shell holes up ahead. The news came too late to reach the company commanders on the far flanks of their units at the end of the wriggling ditch of a trench. And there simply wasn’t enough time to let every man know what was or what was not happening.

  Would the two companies jump off without waiting for the non-existent barrage? Tensely, Borden waited to see.

  The snow had ended. Now, as the men waited in the water, the sun came out. Harvey Crowell on the far left turned to see the setting rays aflame over the broken spires of the old church at Mont St. Eloi. The same sun, he realized, would be blazing in the eyes of the Germans. That could save a lot of lives.

  Zero Hour came; no barrage! Bewildered, Crowell checked his watch. Thirty seconds ticked by. Forty-five. At one minute, Crowell decided he must move. Lieutenant Manning of No. 9 platoon stood up in the trench so Crowell could see him; he, too, was worrying about the absence of the barrage. Crowell decided to go, guns or no guns. He waved his hand forward and the company climbed out of the trench. The instant Crowell stood up, the German machine guns began to stammer. Crowell’s runner went down immediately. German signal flares shot into the sky to bring down shellfire on the Nova Scotians. The first shell exploded in the line before it had moved twenty-five yards.

  To Crowell’s dismay, Anderson’s company was not advancing. It flashed through Crowell’s mind that he’d made a terrible mistake. But the truth was that Anderson, too, had been waiting for the barrage. Finally, when he saw Crowell’s men crossing the old German line well ahead on the left, he started forward.

  Crowell’s company was already forcing its way over the wreckage of that line-barbed wire, sandbags, bits of board, human limbs, all churned up into a muddy soup. One hundred yards ahead, five German machine gunners emerged from an undemolished dugout and opened up. Lieutenant Manning had already fallen, mortally wounded.

  As the Nova Scotians plunged on, the hail of bullets increased. This is the moment that every commander fears. There was no cover; the troops had been ordered not to stop and fire back but to keep moving; but that was almost more than the human psyche could bear. The instinct was to slow down, to stop, to grovel deep into the mud-anything to escape that deadly fusillade. It would take only one man to falter; the rest would seize the opportunity to follow. Once down, the company would never rise again, and the attack would fail.

  On the other hand, it would take only one man’s example to turn the tide. As so often happened that day, such a man emerged. Corporal M.H. Curll, a rifle bomber from Mahone Bay, was worried that he’d shortly be facing a court martial. The previous night, drunk on too much rum ration, he’d been insubordinate to Captain Crowell. Now he leaped out of a shell hole firing a borrowed grenade rifle from the hip. Thus heartened, the others in the company followed directly behind. The German machine gunners turned and tried to flee. Curll and two of his platoon shot them down. But Curll’s main concern was not the Germans. To set off the grenades the rifle bombers were supposed to use blank ammunition. His grenadier had forgotten to bring any, so Curll was forced to use live bullets. Now his rifle was useless and he was afraid he’d be charged with destroying government property.

  This bold action marked the turning point of the advance. The Germans were overcome by the same tendency to panic that had been about to engulf the Nova Scotians. When a few turned to flee, more and more followed, and the 85th, en-flamed now by blood lust, firing rifles and Lewis guns from the hip, swarmed up the hill, killing seventy of the enemy as they advanced.

  Harvey Crowell could see the German gunners trying to climb out of their slippery trench. Three started to slide back down the hill, all whacking into each other until they landed at his feet. Crowell began to laugh at the spectacle when he suddenly felt as if a mule had kicked him in the back. An explosive bullet had made mincemeat of his shoulder, and the shock knocked him speechless. He could see his men rushing on past their objective, but he couldn’t yell at them to stop. He feared his own guns would cut them down if they went too far. In the heat of their enthusiasm, they seemed to be prepared to chase the Germans all the way to the Fatherland. Pain or no pain, Crowell went over the crest to bring them back; it wasn’t an easy job.

  Percy Anderson’s company had also roared past its objective. Anderson himself rushed into an enemy stronghold, shot the first German he encountered, captured the next, and told him to remove his belt. When the man hesitated, Anderson ripped it off himself. His men killed or captured the rest. As they dug in, Anderson heard someone groaning out in No Man’s Land. The field was raked with fire, but the company commander went out himself, threw the man over his shoulder, and brought him back to the trench.

  Within one hour the Highlanders without kilts had captured Hill 145 and exceeded their orders by going beyond it, a breach of discipline that their commander, Borden, didn’t mention in the war diary. Now all of the crest, save for the Pimple, was safely in Canadian hands. But there would be two more days of fighting before the eastern slope and the northern tip were wrested from the enemy.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Mopping Up

  1

  All along the crest of Vimy Ridge, as darkness fell, men stood and gaped at the scene to the east. Captain H.S. Cooper of the Princess Patricias looked back at the khaki world he and his battalion had just vacated and asked himself: “How did the Germans let us do it?” Until this moment, he had not realized what a complete field of fire the enemy had had.

  For others, scrambling up the ridge like tourists to drink in the view, it was a bit like playing hookey. Here they were, perched on forbidden ground, walking over territory that not long ago had been raked with death, eating mulligan and watching the fleeing enemy. To Elmore Philpott, a gunner with the 25th Battery, it was an extraordinary experience. He had never actually seen a German. To him and his friends, working the big artillery pieces far behind the line, the enemy was a faceless stranger who killed his fell
ow Canadians in the night. Now it seemed as if the entire German army was in retreat. As Philpott stood with the others on the ridge, a Biblical phrase popped into his mind: “The children of Israel looking at the Promised Land.”

  Archie Brown of the Winnipeg Grenadiers, looking down and across the sodden Souchez Valley, had a different view. To that drab monochrome a bright new hue had been added. The potholes, the shell holes, the little stream itself seemed to be brimming with a scarlet dye. It looked to Brown as if somebody had soaked the entire valley with blood.

  George Frederick Murray looked back over the battlefield they’d taken that day and inwardly remarked how deceptively gentle the slope up which they’d panted and struggled now appeared. Along the edge of the ridge he could see smoke rising from fires made by the troops cooking their supper. Below and beyond, the occasional Canadian shell still dropped, spurting mud into small volcanoes. Back on the old Canadian assembly line a few guns still flashed. But the general aspect was one of calm after a storm. There seemed to be no semblance of order around him as small groups of men wandered about, their heads bobbing up and down above the shell holes. On the German side the ground dropped off steeply, honeycombed by all manner of dugouts in some of which he would soon come upon hidden luxuries-baths, easy chairs, electric lights, even pianos. Beyond, in the distance, Murray could see the Canadian shells still exploding on the roads that led north to the German-held communities of Lens, Avion, and Méricourt.

  But the artillery could reach no farther, and for that reason the troops were frozen on the ridge. That morning, the Canadian Corps had been on the verge of a breakthrough – the one glorious moment that Haig, Nivelle, Joffre, and Foch had longed for in all those weary months of battering against the enemy’s diamond-hard defences. Driven from their front trenches early in the day, the Germans had been thrown off balance; the Allies had the momentum. If the guns could have been brought forward to continue the pounding barrage, who knows what might have been gained?

  The irony was that the very arm of the service that had made the capture of Vimy Ridge possible-the artillery-had rendered itself impotent. The guns had given the battlefield such a harrowing that they could not be hauled forward to hammer the fleeing enemy. The melting snow completed the work of the barrage. The heavier guns were bogged down. It took as many as one hundred horses and eight men to haul a single 60-pounder a quarter of a mile, and the horses were dying under the strain. It was almost as difficult to move the lighter field guns. By four o’clock on the dark morning of April 10, one battery of field artillery – the 3rd-had somehow managed to manhandle its guns three thousand yards farther than any other, but this was still not far enough. It was four days before the 5th Brigade of the 2nd Division could get its field guns through Neuville St. Vaast and into the ruins of Thélus. Most guns had to be withdrawn until new roads were built, old craters, trenches, and shell holes filled with rubble, piles of cut brush laid under the new thoroughfares, and a narrow-gauge rail line extended to the ridge top. Five thousand men were set to work to repair the famous plank road; it was so slippery that no gun could negotiate it. The only hope the artillery had of keeping up the pressure on the fleeing Germans was to use their own captured guns. By then, the enemy was consolidating near Lens and any hope of a breakthrough was lost.

  The critical moment in the battle had come about a little after 7 A.M. when the Germans’ triple line of forward trenches was overrun. This would have been the time to bring in the cavalry on the right of the line to exploit the breakthrough. Some of Byng’s staff had tried to plead with the commander to abandon the rigid artillery timetable and speed up the attack, once the Germans were on the run. Why give them time to breathe? But Byng had received explicit orders to capture Vimy Ridge and hold it as a bastion on the flank of the Arras offensive. He refused to throw off all restraint and interfere with the complex artillery plan that had to that point ensured the infantry’s success. You did that at your peril, as the 4th Division discovered.

  Masses of cavalry were stationed in the Arras area, and it’s possible that Byng might have committed them to a flanking attack-but they weren’t under his command or even under that of his superior, Henry Horne. Haig had taken them under his own wing, and Haig was difficult to reach. After the Brown Line was secured Byng sent two small troops of the Canadian Light Horse-ten mounted men each- to probe the German defences in Farbus Wood and Willerval on the Douai Plain. The move was disastrous. The troop that entered the wood, hampered by the trees, lost half its men, largely to German machine-gun fire from the unprotected flank of the 1st Division (for the British were still not in position). The other was cut to pieces; only two of its members got back safely.

  Von Hindenburg himself remarked on the British inability to exploit the success gained at Vimy – “a piece of luck for us.” The High Command and, indeed, the Canadians themselves had been so obsessed by the ridge that they had scarcely considered what lay beyond. All the ingenuity, all the planning, all the innovative training had zeroed in on one objective. No one had really set his mind to the possibility of a breakthrough or how to exploit one. Nivelle, the Allied generalissimo, had said flatly that the Canadians couldn’t take Vimy Ridge. Had Haig also believed that? Certainly he had made no plans to commit his cavalry in the event of any quick success. It was as if the capture of the ridge was an end in itself.

  2

  In the dressing stations behind the old Canadian lines there was no sleep. Before the Battle of Vimy Ridge was over, the doctors, stretcher-bearers, and medical orderlies would treat 7,004 wounded men. Another 3,598 were past help. In short, one Canadian in ten was killed or wounded in the four-day battle for the ridge. That is not a high ratio by Great War standards, but to that number must be added another 9,553 casualties suffered at Vimy in the months before the battle. Sniper fire, artillery fire, and trench raids took their toll. Put bluntly, to take Vimy Ridge it cost Canada twenty thousand casualties, about a quarter of whom would never go home.

  The stretcher-bearers trying to clear the battlefield also worked without sleep. Enemy sharpshooters picked off even the walking wounded. One medic tried to lead five bleeding men back to the dressing station only to have three killed en route; the other two crawled back on their hands and knees.

  There were not enough bearers available to bring the wounded back immediately. Some were simply given hasty first aid in the field, then left in a shell hole for safety until stretchers were available. One man, Howard Learning, woke up in the dark of the night in pain and, feeling totally abandoned, pulled out a gun, determined to shoot himself. At the last moment, he paused and thought, “I didn’t join the army to be a coward.” He survived with a steel plate in his head for another fifty-two years.

  The men holding the ridge could hear the wounded moaning around them. Lewis Buck spent a sleepless night with badly injured men in a cold German dugout, trying to kill rats with a captured pistol. Scores of other men lay out all that night on the battlefield, groaning in pain and facing the German sniper fire. When they were brought in twenty-four hours later, their clothing was so stiff with filth it broke the medics’ scissors. For forty-eight hours the men of the medical corps worked continuously, dressing every kind of wound and setting every kind of fracture from skull to ankle. It was makeshift work. No doctor could follow his case through. In the forward stations each man got the same treatment whether his wound was slight or mortal: a bandage to hide the dirt, some bits of gauze to mask the protruding viscera.

  The scenes in the dressing stations were heart-rending, even to senior officers who had seen a good deal of war. Brigadier-General Macdonell’s voice broke when he saw the wounded from his brigade. “Poor boys,” he said, “poor boys.”

  The dead were often buried where they lay, in communal graves in mine craters and shell holes-as many as one hundred to a single grave. It was heart-breaking work for many who recognized familiar faces among the corpses lying in the mud. One young stretcher-bearer, William Klyne of the 3rd
Battalion, lost fourteen of his friends and buried three of them personally.

  The sick and the wounded were sometimes mixed together with the dead. Cy Peck, the pugnacious C.O. of the Canadian Scottish, suffered so dreadfiilly from stomach cramps that he was finally ordered off the field by his medical officer, but only after the battalion had seized its objective. Jack Quinnell, who had survived his battalion’s abortive attack, was taken back, unable to go on because of his trench mouth and trench feet – he hadn’t had his shoes off for days – and thrown into an ambulance full of corpses. “They’re all dead in here,” he heard someone remark.

  “No, they’re not!” Quinnell managed to cry out through his bruised gums.

  The corpse of David Moir’s fellow machine gunner Private Walker still lay out in No Man’s Land, to the sorrow and frustration of his best friend, another machine gunner named Pratt. Pratt couldn’t bear the idea of his dead buddy lying out in the open, exposed to the elements, and suggested to Moir that the two go out and bury him. Moir hesitated. That’s like putting your head in the lion’s mouth, he thought nervously. On the other hand, he was the only man in the section who knew where Walker’s body was. As Pratt kept urging him, a line from a Robert Service poem popped into Moir’s head: “A friend’s last need is a thing to heed.” He agreed to risk it.

  They waited for dark. But by then, after the continual shelling, the terrain had been transformed: every shell hole looked like every other shell hole. Every stump looked like a German; Moir could swear that some even moved. Surely, he thought, Fritz will be sending out patrols to probe our defences. In their haste the two gunners hadn’t even brought sidearms or grenades: they’d be sitting ducks! At last they found the body, got out their entrenching tools, scraped out a shallow grave, and buried it. But they were now completely lost, blundering about, stumbling into the lines of a strange unit. A Canadian sentry almost shot them, but fortunately they had the right password. The sentry thought they were both crazy.