After the Final Whistle

by Stephen Cooper

  Ripe for any adventure, sturdy, loyal and game

  Quick to the call of the Mother, the young Canadians came

  Eager to show their mettle, ready to shed their blood

  They bowed their neck to the collar and trained in Wiltshire mud.

  Even King George, who inspected the Contingent on 4 February, sent an apologetic ‘gracious message to be read to all units on board ship after embarkation for France’:

  I am well aware of the discomforts that you have experienced from the inclement weather and abnormal rain. I am confident that you will emulate the example of your fellow-countrymen in the South African War and thus help to secure the triumph of our arms.

  The cannier of the ‘sturdy, loyal and game’ realised that exhibitions of rugby to assist recruitment might release them from the sodden Plain. When the First Canadian Contingent challenged Sid Smart and his 5th Gloucestershire Regiment to a game, Colonel Collett of the Gloucesters secured the prestigious Queen’s Club ground. The Canadians were the first colonial troops to arrive in Britain (the ANZACs being delayed by the small matter of Gallipoli) and curiosity made them a major attraction around the sports fields of Britain, even if their rugby prowess was in its adolescence. On 12 December, ‘In spite of depressing weather [again] and a somewhat one-sided game, for the Canadians had no opportunities of playing together, it was an exhilarating afternoon … there was some really fine football and the atmosphere, as of a rollicking military festival, permeated the crowd.’10

  Discipline was good. Civil offences committed by the troops were few; more than half of military offences were for absence without leave, which usually meant overstaying a pass, a crime classified as minor, ‘for determination was needed to forsake the bright lights of London or the kindly warmth of home and friends, when the alternative was a tent on a wind-swept waste where darkness lasted fourteen hours a day and all was wetness, mud, and misery’.11 Inevitably, not every red-blooded Canadian soldier used his London leisure time profitably. Two from the Royal Montreal Regiment, incarcerated at Christmas in the Tower of London for disorderly conduct, broke their window bars, escaped and returned to camp. These first escapes in a century from the Tower were saluted by the newspapers: ‘Stone Walls do not a Prison make for Canadians’.

  At Richmond, the contingent next played the Public Schools & Universities (UPS) Brigade, to benefit two Belgian charities. Recruiters were present, adorned with badges of red, white and blue, ‘ready to enrol any that offered themselves’ for the Regular or Territorial Armies, or the grandly titled ‘Central Association Volunteer Training Corps for Home Defence (Veteran Athletes Battalion)’. The programme warned that ‘men of enlistable age will not be accepted for this Battalion, unless they can show good and sufficient cause’. The Canadians took the field in light blue and brown. Support was one-sided: ‘in the matter of noise the Englishmen had certainly an unfair advantage, for those who might have been shouting for the Canadians were on Salisbury Plain’.

  The ring seats along the touchlines presented the appearance of being almost solidly military – rows of khaki caps and of khaki figures leaning forward with hands on knees, rows of canes waving in time to the tunes or war cries that rose and fell. There was one splendidly fierce hoarse voice that rang out every now and then with ‘Come on Canada’, and was unquenchable.12

  The UPS team featured former Wales winger Hopkin Maddock,13 whose 170 tries for London Welsh still stand as a club record, and G.G. Ziegler of Cambridge, Barbarians and Richmond. The game was ‘very fast and very hard fought-out in the friendliest spirit’ and the home side ran out narrow victors 13–11. On New Year’s Day 1915, a crowd of 20,000 watched the Canadians at Leicester’s Welford Road.

  Five days later the first troops from Canada went into the front line, although they were the least ‘Canadian’: Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, or the ‘Pats’ – named for the glamorous daughter of the Duke of Connaught, the king’s uncle and Canada’s Governor-General – were mainly British-born, often Boer War veterans, but also included students. Montreal industrialist Hamilton Gault put up $100,000 to raise the ‘Pats’ privately, but insisted he fight with the regiment his money had bought. They were led by British officers and their CO was an ex-Guards colonel called Farquhar (probably not to his face). They kept their distance from Hughes’s CEF, refused to train at Valcartier, sailed earlier and were integrated with the British 27th Division. Not until Christmas 1915 did they join the 3rd Canadian Division.

  The Pats earned battle honours at Frezenberg, Mount Sorrel, Vimy and Passchendaele and, through losses and replacements, became more Canadian – if not completely so. Hugh Huckett, a British missionary’s son born in Madagascar and games master at St George’s, Harpenden, had moved to Canada in 1912, swapping a rugby ball for the American pigskin. He joined the Pats from his university company to replace the gas casualties of Ypres. He was wounded at Mount Sorrel, his right hand ‘terribly lacerated by gun shot during an attack which his regiment was ordered to hold at all costs’, and was ‘Struck off Strength’ (SOS) nine days later. This ended his rugby career, but meant he survived the war and lived to be 99. Both his less fortunate brothers were killed: Arnold14 at Gallipoli and Oliver at the second Battle of the Somme in 1918. Inspecting her regiment in London in February 1919, Princess Patricia saw only forty-four ‘Originals’ from the thousand militiamen she had first reviewed in 1914 when presenting their Colours in Ottawa. One was Gault, his leg amputated and left behind at Mount Sorrel in June 1916.

  The time came for the CEF to join the fight; they marched to Amesbury in February to entrain for Bristol and the crossing to St-Nazaire. As proof that they had absorbed both Britain’s moisture and its sardonic sense of humour, they sang: ‘Are we downhearted? NO. Are we wet? YES.’ An officer observed: ‘The men are so light-hearted and cheerful – full of life and ginger. Somebody is going to be badly hurt when these boys are let loose.’ These boys first saw action at Neuve-Chapelle in March, but were unable to let loose as their Canadian Ross rifles jammed as easily as Sam Hughes’s shoddy boots fell apart. Many seized the more effective Lee-Enfields from dead British troops.

  On 22 April 1915, the Germans used chlorine gas at Ypres for the first time in the history of warfare. It was a terrible baptism for the Canadians, who were targeted where their line joined the French Algerians – the Germans considered both as ‘unreliable colonials’. It was, wrote an officer,

  a low-down trick, most extraordinary stuff, a sort of bluish-green mist was blown over the trenches; it felt cold to breathe, and one felt it in one’s lungs and began to cough and gasp for breath. It knocked the men out like ninepins and several have died of it.15

  One was Private Owen Sawers, aged 31, a Miller Cup winner with ‘Rowers’, ever present with brother Norman in team photographs from 1908 to 1914, and old enough to have played the All Blacks in 1906. An insurance agent, he had volunteered exactly seven months before, joining the 10th Battalion. After the Algerians fled the choking gas, the 10th’s counter-attack at Langemarck stopped the enemy advance but at terrible cost. Owen was never found; his name is commemorated on the Menin Gate. Both his brothers were wounded but survived; inaugural club skipper Captain Norman Sawers, MC, returned to coach rugby at VRC.

  The Canadians suffered 5,975 casualties at Ypres, 3,058 on 24 April alone; in forty-eight hours, one in three was lost from Canada’s small force. It was a grim introduction to mechanised and chemical slaughter. Another Canadian, Field Artillery Major John McCrae, a field doctor and Scots Presbyterian from Ontario in his second war, wrote from Ypres to his mother after ‘seventeen days of Hades’ spent in his aid post dug into the bank of the Yser Canal:

  The general impression in my mind is of a nightmare. We have been in the most bitter of fights. For seventeen days and seventeen nights none of us have had our clothes off, nor our boots even, except occasionally. In all that time while I was awake, gunfire and rifle fire never ceased for sixty seconds. And behind it all was
the constant background of the sights of the dead, the wounded, the maimed, and a terrible anxiety lest the line should give way.16

  His poem, written the day after he had read the funeral service of a close friend, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, buried in a makeshift grave with a simple wooden cross,17 gave the dead a voice:

  We are the Dead. Short days ago

  We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

  Loved, and were loved, and now we lie

  In Flanders Fields.

  Spring poppies were blooming in the disturbed earth. The poem that began ‘In Flanders Fields, the poppies grow Between the crosses row on row’ was published in Punch in December and widely reprinted. Not only was it popular in the trenches, but it was used to advertise the sale of the first Victory Loan Bonds in Canada in 1917; the campaign ‘to take up our quarrel with the foe’ raised $400 million, almost three times its target. It was influential too in the United States, where a ‘response’ by R.W. Lillard (‘Fear not that you have died for naught The torch ye threw to us we caught’) added heft to arguments in favour of joining the war. A disillusioned McCrae would not survive, dying of pneumonia brought on by exhaustion in January 1918. More enduringly the poppy remains today a vivid and abiding symbol of Remembrance.

  It was at Ypres that the Canadians’ reputation as a formidable fighting force was forged. An officer wrote home on the day after the gas attack, as the desperate attempt to stabilise the line continued. His letter reminds us that this was indeed a first global war, with Canada now performing with distinction on a world stage:

  There were English, Canadians, Algerians, French, Senegalese, Arabs, Belgians and Indian troops … The sun has risen on many a dead Canadian this morning. It is very unlikely that braver troops can be found; they have behaved splendidly. Canada can expect a startler on the casualties, but she can be sure she has good fighting material.18

  Historian (and rugby fanatic) Basil Liddell Hart, himself wounded and gassed at the Somme, would later call them ‘matchless attacking troops’.

  Allied offensives followed at Festubert and Givenchy: frontal assaults against enemy positions defended by machine guns. The Canadians achieved their objectives, but gains were negligible, and the cost in lives extremely high. One life lost was that of Ralph Farrar Markham, originally from New Brunswick on Canada’s Atlantic coast and an advertising agent whose father was a noted newspaperman. A military college graduate and Boer War cavalry veteran, he made a fresh start in Vancouver in 1910, joining the rugby club, and was a Miller Cup-winning forward. He volunteered with the Seaforths, but was made a signals captain in the Manitoba Regiment; he was killed at Ypres in August 1915 at the age of 38.

  Despite the losses, patriotic enthusiasm prevailed at home and a Second Canadian Contingent sailed for Europe in the spring of 1915. By the end of the year, the 2nd Canadian Division and some units of the 3rd had reached the front to form a Canadian Corps of 38,000, kept together to build morale and unity, rather than scattered amongst British units. 1916 saw more local offensives in the southern Ypres Salient. In their first engagement, the 2nd Division suffered 1,373 casualties in twelve days of confused attacks and counter-attacks on a battlefield of water-filled craters and shell-holes at St-Eloi.

  Amongst the rugby ‘Rowers’ to die here was Scottish internationalist forward Andrew Ross. Originally from Edinburgh, and educated at its Royal High School, he played his first InterCity match in 1899 (helping to break a ten-year Glasgow winning streak). His second in 1904 led to his Scotland debut against Wales in 1905; he won four more caps. Against England that year, he played on with one rib broken and two cracked. The Scots’ 8–0 victory sent the English home from Richmond ‘tae think again’ before Ross caught the night mail train of pain to Edinburgh, arriving home white-faced and in agony. An adventurous seafaring career had already sent him to sea at 16, sailing to Iquique and Tokyo; he nearly died of yellow fever in Rio, and played the bagpipes to an awed assembly of sugar plantation workers in Cuba. His move to Vancouver in 1909 had much to do with VRC’s Miller Cup success the following season. In November 1914 he had rushed south from his work in the Arctic Circle to start military training, joining the 29th (Vancouver) Battalion, known as ‘Tobin’s Tigers’. He noted:

  Most of the men are splendid shots … the work in camp is hard, but we all like it, as we have to get into good condition for the British Army. A man feels that it’s worth giving up his life to save millions of homes, such as ours, from the fate of poor old Belgium. We don’t want to stay too long in England drilling, so it is with a jolly good will we go into our drills here.19

  At 34, his ardent enthusiasm was hardly youthful, and his ideals were widely shared.

  In England, he represented his new country of Canada in the regimental sports at Stamford Bridge in August 1915, before sailing for France. Barely a year after enlisting, his appetite for the fight sharpened, he wrote gleefully from Ypres to team-mate Nelles Stacey:

  We lit a fire in the trench and put plenty wet wood on it. That made a big smoke. Then two men made all the row they could, shouting at each other and hitting an empty biscuit tin with sticks. Fritz easily located the row by the column of smoke, and all the Fritzes within hearing peeped round their sandbags to have a look … it was the last look for most of them.20

  Sewell refrains from quoting another letter describing Ross’s first bayonet charge, presumably in bloodthirsty detail. He was first wounded, then killed, aged 36, on 6 April 1916, while bandaging a wounded comrade under heavy artillery fire. ‘Quite reckless as regarding his own life, he exposed it and gave it to save, as his quick attention undoubtedly did, the lives of a great number of our men.’ His Miller Cup rugby cap is still displayed in the clubhouse at Stanley Park, Vancouver.

  His Edinburgh classmate, Theo ‘TED’ Byrne, skipper of the all-conquering 1910 ‘Rowers’, wrote from Salonika, where he was a lieutenant with 5th Royal Irish Rifles, having picked up some useful Irish phrases from the ‘Fighting Fifth’:

  Every time that I hear of further prowess of some VRC man the more proud (if possible) I become, when I remember I once had the honour to captain the championship team. How often have I tried to imagine that forward line with me in a go and the backs coming up like lightning in extended order ready to pass the bayonet through some *****. I want you to prepare a list of that football team … the unit to which the man belongs and any honours. Then I’ll bet no football fifteen in the world can equal it.21

  As for his own situation, after sixteen months’ continual service at Gallipoli and in Macedonia, with ‘only a few left of the original corps, only three officers now surviving’, he shrugged off a recent commendation for a medal as ‘what any one of our Vancouver chaps would have done’. But there was clearly more to it, and the streetfighter spoke with understated relish of close-quarter combat:

  The climate is hellish and as these Bulgars rather fancy themselves with the knife we are endeavouring to show them there are competitors at the game, and this makes a very untidy state of affairs after each engagement. So far my clothes are the only spoiled portion of me.22

  In late August 1916, the Canadian divisions moved to the Somme front line facing Courcelette; on 15 September, they assaulted and captured the village. In the weeks that followed, repeated attacks gained only a few hundred metres over shell-pocked, corpse-strewn land. The Somme slaughter weighed heavily: the Allies suffered more than 620,000 casualties, 24,029 of whom were Canadian. More than 235,000 German soldiers were killed in what they called Das Blutbat. Canadian official historian Colonel Nicholson adjudged: ‘we cannot close our eyes to the horror of the mass butchery’.

  Four Canadians won the Victoria Cross on the Somme. Piper James Cleland Richardson of the 16th Battalion, another Vancouver Scot, earned a posthumous VC for piping his comrades ‘over the top’ at Regina Trench. His company, struggling through barbed wire, took heavy casualties; under intense fire, the 20-year-old strode about, playing his bagpipes, urging them on. The objective wa
s taken. Having left his pipes behind, Richardson went back to find them and was not seen again. An army chaplain found the pipes in 1917, and took them back to Ardvreck School in Scotland. They stayed there for seventy years – a broken, muddied and bloodied remnant of an unidentified piper from the Great War – until a chance discovery saw them returned to British Columbia in 2006.

  The Canadians had come to be valued as crack offensive troops. Their apotheosis was at Vimy Ridge in April 1917: superb planning and preparation, executed with bravery and flair by four divisions united for the first time in a Canadian Corps, supported by British infantry, engineers and artillery, achieved a victory with casualty levels far below the norm for this war of attrition. Intended as one element of the British Arras diversion for French General Nivelle’s spring offensive (which failed), it was the only success of 1917 and quickly became a symbol of national unity and achievement for Canada.

  From the west, open ground slopes gradually up to the Vimy escarpment that overlooks, then drops suddenly to the Douai plain, with its coal mines and industries then pressed into German service. Three defensive lines faced the Canadians, fortified since 1914 with a maze of trenches, concreted machine-gun emplacements hedged by barbed wire, and an underground network of deep dugouts and tunnels. Some vast chambers could shelter an entire battalion from Allied bombardment.

  Canadian commanders had learned cruel lessons from past frontal assaults. They took time to train their troops, down to the smallest unit and individual soldier. Aerial reconnaissance identified German gun positions, as did new sound-ranging and flash-spotting techniques. Five kilometres of deep tunnels were dug through soft but stable chalk; troops and supplies could move safely to jumping-off points, wounded could be brought back under cover. Telephone cables were laid two metres deep to avoid shells cutting communications. To the rear, a full-scale replica of the battlefield enabled repeated rehearsals. Lieutenant General Julian Byng had picked up the pieces of the Gallipoli fiasco and now deployed his theatre learning; maps were issued to all units, and troops were fully briefed on their objectives and routes.