Brave Battalion (5 page)

The Canadians were soon setting up bell tents grouped into four separate camps that extended over a five-mile-wide area in the western corner of the military grounds. Lt.-Gen. E. A. H. “Edwin” Alderson, the division's first commander, had his headquarters in Ye Olde Bustard, a small country inn about three miles northwest of Stonehenge.

Alderson was a fifty-five-year-old British officer who, as a brigadier general, had commanded Canadian troops in South Africa. He had a long history of active service in various Empire hotspots and had recently commanded a division in India. Alderson quickly established a good rapport with the officers and men. If not charismatic, he exuded a reassuring air of confidence and competence. But his relation with Sam Hughes, who had hoped the division could be commanded by a Canadian, was accordingly strained.

Although Canadians at home often parroted Laurier's call that they were “Ready, Aye, Ready,” Alderson quickly realized that the division was anything but prepared for combat. Much essential equipment had still not been supplied and there were many shortages of what was in place.

Making matters worse and greatly hampering training schemes, the weather broke just after the division had arrived on Salisbury Plain. On October 21, a quarter-inch of rain bucketed down and, over the next five days, another inch fell. The Canadians would remain here for 123 days of which 89 brought rainfall that totalled 23.9 inches—double the 32-year average.

Living in tents that lacked flooring and around which no foot boards had been installed meant that it was impossible for the men to escape the eternal dampness. With each passing day the camp became, increasingly, a flooded quagmire of mud as it was discovered that a few inches below a layer of clay was an impermeable layer of chalk that prevented the water being soaked up. Abnormally low temperatures only added to the general misery. Strong winds buffeted the tents, ripping holes in the canvas that were reopened almost as fast as they could be repaired. Even those that remained intact were unheated and the fabric proved no barrier to the icy winds. During one three-week period, strong gales flattened almost all the tents.

In the 16
^th
Battalion's area the mud ebbed and flowed as if pushed by the rise and fall of a tide, now oozing into the tents, now sliming back out again. Boots were caked with clots of the muck and were quickly soaked through. Men desperately dug into their own pocketbooks to shell out for high-cut rubber boots hawked throughout the camp by private profiteers selling them at exorbitant prices. An attempt to use a snowplow to push the mud away and create paths only exposed the chalk, which proved treacherously slippery, and the mud inexorably reclaimed the paths soon after the plow passed through.

Things went from bad to worse when a gale that had abated during the night of December 3 returned with renewed fury late the next morning. One side of the battalion's large, seven-poled, mess tent was smashed in while the orderly room tent and many of the bell tents were overturned. As the entire battalion was on divisional duty the men were scattered throughout the camp performing one maintenance chore or another. Only a party of about fifty men and two officers was close enough to try to avert disaster. “They rushed,” the battalion historian wrote later, “through the slough of mud and held on to the ropes of the large mess tent hoping to save it from complete destruction, but in this effort the ropes came off the poles and the majority of the party were precipitated backward into the mud banks. The camp as a whole was in a sorry plight—smashed tables, broken crockery, sodden canvas flat on the ground, personal kit and orderly room papers flying in all directions and soaked, bedraggled men holding on to the tents left standing, or running around in an endeavour to salvage part of the wreckage.”
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Lord Kitchener had promised that the Canadians would be able to move to permanent barracks in huts by the end of November, but the contractors had fallen hopelessly behind schedule. Christmas found more than 11,000 men still living in tents.
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Fortunately for the 16
^th
, the disaster of the December 4 gale prompted its move to a new camp area called Larkhill, where they were able to occupy some recently finished huts. The battalion war diarist noted with satisfaction that these “are more comfortable than tents.”
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They were still, however, “draughty,” which did little for the men's health.
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But the cold only worsened, and on one particularly bitter night a 16
^th
Battalion sentry died from exposure. Sickness was rampant through the division's ranks with the war diarist reporting on December 22: “Many of the men have bad colds.” By January 15, an outbreak of spinal meningitis had infected about forty men, and killed several. With the entire divisional camp increasingly resembling a natural disaster zone, the men spent more days than not digging drainage ditches or in other ways trying to keep the mud at bay.
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This meant little time could be found for combat training. One 16
^th
Battalion soldier noted in his diary that only forty of the days spent on the plain entailed any training.
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Even when training days were allotted, all too often they were disrupted by weather. Two out of the four days the battalion mustered on the firing ranges they were met by a heavy snowstorm and dense mist that made it impossible to see any targets.

Adding to the difficulties throughout the last months of 1914 was an inability on the part of the War Office to decide how the division's battalions should be organized. At Valcartier each had been composed according to Colonial regulations of eight companies designated by the first letters of the alphabet. But the War Office now wondered if the division should conform to Imperial regulations with each battalion reduced to four companies numbered one to four, for this was the normal establishment adopted by the regular divisions of the British Expeditionary Force in Flanders. Unable to reach a decision, orders were issued that saw the battalions “see-sawing from single to double companies and the frequent transfer of officers from one command to another, instruction during the days entirely given over to it was subject to confusion, unnecessary repetition of effort in some directions and neglect in others.”
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While decisions such as this remained in the air, the War Office came down with a definitive verdict on the battalion's petition to call itself the Princess Mary's Canadian Highlanders by refusing it. On the evening of December 14, the officers gathered to discuss what title to seek next and decided to petition for designation as the 16
^th
Battalion Canadian Scottish. Two days later the War Office approved this request. Informally the battalion members were nicknamed Can Scots.

Another issue that the battalion's officers had been wrestling with was whether they should march into combat wearing their respective tartan kilts or adopt something a little less colourful but likely more practical for field duty—khaki kilts. On the 21
^st
they settled on acquiring ones made of khaki.
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With the New Year, the War Office finally ruled that the Imperial battalion model would be adopted. The decision sent a shockwave through the battalions as each had to forfeit three officers from its headquarters and eight subalterns deemed superfluous due to the streamlining of command. Lt.-Gen. Alderson was not particularly happy with the decision as he was left with a hefty number of surplus officers. In mid-January a further shrinkage occurred as the entire 4
^th
Brigade was disbanded and its battalions—save the 4
^th
, which had been transferred to 2
^nd
Brigade when its 6
^th
Battalion (Fort Garry Horse) was transformed into a reserve cavalry regiment—were designated as reinforcing units that would remain in England to form the Canadian Training Depot.
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While all this reorganizing was going on, the unrelenting weather and mud had served to reveal many deficiencies in the Canadian-made equipment. In November a shipment of 48,000 overshoes arrived from Canada to great welcome, but within ten days most had come apart and the boots with which the men had been outfitted in Valcartier were proving equally worthless. Alderson ordered British regulation boots distributed and required every unit commander to return a certificate attesting “that every man is in possession of a service pair of Imperial pattern Army boots.”

Alderson would have liked to be rid of the unreliable, overly heavy, and unwieldy Ross rifle as well. Even without the bolt being exposed to mud or rain it jammed frequently and was difficult to properly clean in the field. But Hughes would hear none of it and the British had insufficient Lee-Enfields to entirely equip the Canadians. So there was no alternative but to take the rifle with them to France.

A lot of other Canadian equipment would not be going. Despite Hughes's efforts to prevent it, the MacAdam shovel was declared ineffective as a shield, ridiculously heavy to carry, and a poor implement for the most essential soldier's task of digging a slit trench. British shovels were secured and the MacAdam shovel would remain in Britain. Eventually, 2
^nd
Canadian Infantry Division conducted extensive field trials with it in France only to prove its unworthiness. Withdrawn from use, the shovels were sold for $1,400 as scrap metal.

Of 1st Division's battalions, seven—including the 16
^th
—had arrived mostly equipped with the obsolete Oliver pattern of webbing. Capable of carrying only 50 to 80 rounds rather than the regulation 150, it also lacked a pack or any means to lash an entrenching tool to it. The British War Office provided replacement webbing.
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Like most of the British Expeditionary Force (B.E.F.), the Canadians had been issued peaked caps for headgear—which provided no protection. (Steel helmets would not be introduced until just before the Battle of St. Eloi in the spring of 1916.
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)

Both motor and horse-drawn vehicles manufactured in Canada were plagued with parts shortages and the division had far too many different models of each. Two types of the motor trucks were proven to suffer from serious defects, and fifty-one British lorries were substituted. Most of the horse-drawn wagons were replaced by British wagons, and the Canadian harnesses were scrapped in favour of British designs.

As these substitutions were put into effect, Hughes railed against every decision. “Our transport, our rifles, our trucks, our harness, our saddles, our equipment, our shovels, our boots, our clothing, our wagons,” he declared, “were all set aside and in many cases … supplanted by inferior articles.”
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But the troops on the sodden Salisbury Plain applauded each change.

On February 6, the battalion sent all unnecessary kit to stores and everyone knew the deployment was imminent as an advance party commanded by Captain Fleming departed for France that evening. As the replacing of equipment was still underway, the pace of getting ready became frantic. When Lt.-Col. Leckie discovered that the stamping of particulars on each soldier's identity disc had not yet been done, shifts of men were required to work round the clock hurriedly carrying out this task.

Sickness and other calamities had also rendered the battalion under strength and efforts to draw reinforcements from the Canadian Training Depot based at Tidworth Barracks on Salisbury Plain came to naught. One officer sent to Tidworth to get reinforcements thought the depot's commander either suffered “from nervous shock or sunstroke.” He could make no headway with the man and came away empty-handed, but also painfully aware of the disappointment “and irritation everywhere amongst the battalions left behind or being broken up.”

Finally, a second visit yielded an allotment of men but, upon arriving at the battalion, they refused en masse to don kilts and so had to be sent back to Tidworth only to be turned away at the gates. After much back and forth negotiation the men were returned to the 16
^th
and told they had no choice but to wear kilts.

On February 10, with the battalion to sail for France the next day, an outbreak of measles among the Gordons, who made up No. 1 Company, was reported and the entire 16
^th
Battalion found itself facing the spectre of being quarantined. The relief was palpable when it was discovered that only the forty men of No. 1 Company's third platoon, all sharing two huts, had actually been exposed. This group was immediately isolated and would not rejoin the battalion until determined to be free of the disease.

Early on the morning of February 11, the rest of the battalion formed up and “a happy and proud bunch of boys bid farewell to our mud-hole.” Their last glimpse of the deserted camp where the men had endured such misery revealed a swarm of civilians descending on it “like vultures, making ready to cart away … everything they could lay their hands on.”
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