Vimy (26 page)

While Evans was struggling to reach the Quarry Line by way of La Targette, Bill Breckenridge and a dozen signallers were trying to reach the big reserve water tanks not far away on the same Arras-Souchez road. There seemed to be no rest for Breckenridge. He had managed a few hours’ sleep after one carrying job; now the medical officer had sent him back on another, this time for water. War is a thirsty business.

Like Evans, the signallers had opted again for an overland journey, since the trenches were almost impassable. But with the Germans only half a mile away it had been a nerve-racking trip. When at last they reached the tanks they came upon a chilling spectacle. There lay the mangled corpses of three men like themselves who had also been sent for water and were killed by German shells – grisly evidence that the enemy had the range of the tanks and was doing his best to frustrate any attempt to use them. The party scrambled to fill the buckets; but the tanks were in poor condition, and the water dribbled slowly from the taps. Just as the job was done, a whizbang burst fifty yards away. Breckenridge and his friends dived into a ditch, hugging the cobblestones. A second shell exploded. Off they all scurried for the safety of the Pont Street trench, heedless of the M.O.’s precious water supply splashing out of the swinging buckets.

Meanwhile, in the forward lines of the 10th Battalion, the adjutant, Major Daniel Ormond, was a worried man. Seven huge craters lay between the battalion’s position and the enemy lines. The Germans had wired the intervening gaps heavily, and Ormond couldn’t be certain that the wire had been destroyed. The artillery’s ground observers assured him that it had; the air observers differed. What to do?

Arthur Currie had no doubts at all. Take no chances, he advised: get out there and find out. And so the battalion launched one final raid on the Germans and discovered that the wire still stood, hidden from the ground by masses of earth thrown up by the explosions that produced the craters. Currie ordered the trenches cleared for one thousand yards, moved the troops back a quarter of a mile, turned the guns on the wire and pulverized it. Thus was the 10th Battalion from Calgary saved from almost certain destruction.

Billy Bishop had crossed the lines that morning at nine, about the time that Bill Breckenridge and his fellow signallers were trying to fill their water buckets. He came out of a running fight at eight hundred feet above the German support lines to see the hundreds of grey-clad reserves moving forward, preparing for the coming battle. Separated from his squadron, Bishop that morning took on in succession no fewer than eight German aircraft, damaging several and shooting down two. At one point he fought off five planes single-handed and was down to his last round of ammunition when they dispersed. One bullet had grazed his helmet, another had cracked his windscreen. No wonder his commanding officer told him to take the rest of the day off when he returned to base! In just three-quarters of an hour on a sunny Easter morning, Billy Bishop had done the work of an entire squadron.

For most of that day, Private William Pecover, the Manitoba school teacher, had lain stretched out enjoying the warmth of the sun in the St. Eloi woods, well behind the lines. His battalion, the 27th (City of Winnipeg) was the reserve battalion in the reserve brigade-the Iron 6th as it was called. It would not go into action with the first wave at dawn. For Pecover it was a real day of rest. The men sat around under the trees in small groups, laughing and singing together, although, as Pecover noted, there was an undercurrent of anxiety, almost of sadness, as each man asked himself what the next day would bring.

All that afternoon, in the rear areas, as the troops got ready to move forward, the regimental bands played lively tunes designed to banish unspoken questions from everybody’s minds. They played “Mademoiselle from Armentières,” “Pack Up Your Troubles,” and “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty,” and they played ragtime and jazz as the troops sang and adjusted their equipment and drew their Mills bombs and extra rations, packed away their bully and biscuits, and wrote letters home, carefully avoiding any suggestion of the possibilities the dawn might bring. But in his little khaki memo book, Pecover wrote down the unspoken question: “I wonder?”

As Pecover and his friends were taking their ease, Andrew McCrindle was sitting outside the Zivy Cave, taking a breather from his work party and chatting with his corporal, a former McGill theological student named Jarvis, better known by his nickname, “The Reverend.” The Reverend felt it might be a good idea in view of the approaching battle if the entire party all went down into an old dugout, read aloud from the Bible, and indulged in a short prayer. Everybody agreed to go, but when Jarvis reached the dugout he found that only four had actually turned up. “What the hell,” he said. “It’s no use of us having a meeting. I’ll just read a couple of verses and say a short prayer and then we’ll bugger off back to the cave.”

As dusk fell and the Easter afternoon darkened into night, the setting sun, a glowing fireball, reddened the khaki world of Vimy. The last airplanes droned homeward. The balloons, caught in the dying light, swayed languidly, like ungainly monsters. Blue smoke curled from the chimneys of the cookhouses near the gun positions. The sun went down and a chill, wet wind sprang up-an omen of things to come. In the shadowed woods, Private Pecover and his chums shivered in small groups and wished they were through with the bloody business they’d come to carry out for Canada.

2

As darkness began to cloak the trenches from the enemy and the long lines of men prepared to move off, the sound of martial music again filled the twilight hours in the rest areas at Bois des Alleux and Château de la Haie. Brass bands, bugle bands, pipe bands, fife and drum bands played their units forward and into history.

Thousands of men were moving through the gloom, wading through the long communication trenches, the reserves heading for the subways, the assault troops for the jumping-off trenches and shell holes well out in No Man’s Land. As they passed they called greetings to each other: “There go the 13th! Good old 13th!” and the answering greeting: “Good luck, Toronto!” For the first and the last time all four Canadian divisions would be attacking in line, British Columbia side by side with Calgary, Ottawa next to Vancouver, the Van Doos of Quebec shoulder to shoulder with the Highlanders of Nova Scotia. Off they went, slopping through the mud and water, their paths marked out by luminous stakes, until, cramped and cold, they reached the assault positions scraped out for them in the mud and the chalk of No Man’s Land.

For many battalions, especially those trudging through Death Valley on the far left of the line, the move forward was fraught with hazard. The 44th Battalion from Winnipeg found itself exposed to heavy German shellfire, which blew more than one man off the duckboards and into the mud. Fortunately the mud was so deep that the shells exploded well beneath the surface, smothering the troops with filth but not with shrapnel. Private Jack Spears, who had never been under shellfire before, was one who tumbled off the duckboards into mud to his waist. Another man pulled him out by grasping his rifle. Ahead, in the dark, Spears could dimly see a hole in the side of the ridge-the Cobourg Subway. He breathed a sigh of relief at the sight and, with the others, was soon scrambling about looking for a place to sleep. There was none. The floor of the subway was so wet no one could lie down. Spears, who was just twenty – another English immigrant from the West – philosophically turned his steel helmet upside down and sat on it with his feet in the water. He had a long wait ahead of him, since the 44th would not do battle until the following night. For twenty-four hours, Spears and the others sat or stood ankle deep in the muddy gruel of the subway.

The mud was so bad that some men couldn’t be extricated by simply grasping their rifles and pulling. It took several men to save the orderly-room sergeant of the 20th. He was so firmly stuck that he couldn’t be hauled out by hand. In the end, the party stretched a pole across the top of the trench, made slings of their belts, and finally tugged him to safety, minus his hip rubber boots.

Most trenches were in ghastly shape. The 48th Highlanders moved up Douai Avenue, which had once been a narrow communication trench leading to the front. Now under constant battering by the German 5.9s, it had been mashed into a gaping, dish-shaped quagmire, fifteen feet wide. To get past the support trenches, known as the Music Hall Line, attacking troops of the 4th Division had to wade through waist-deep water and then stand all through the cold night in the jumping-off trenches – soaking wet, crammed so tightly together in their full battle kit that for most sleep became impossible.

Conditions were the same all along the front. While Jack Spears of the 44th was treading warily along the duckboards crossing Death Valley, Lewis Buck, a former Ottawa lumberjack, almost four miles to the south was also moving forward with the 4th Battalion from Western Ontario, trying his best not to look scared. Like Spears, Buók and his brother Billy, both stretcher-bearers, spent an uncomfortable night in a filthy dugout with water pouring in from the main trench, a foot of mud on the floor, and so many rats crawling over their heads that they too were unable to sleep.

The troops of the 13th, shivering in their cramped positions, waited for hot soup to be brought up from the field kitchens in the rear. Many waited in vain: the cooks bringing it forward were killed by shellfire.

In the Goodman Subway on the 3rd Division front, there was a near disaster. Private Alfred Thomson, working by candlelight, was trying to clean mortar grease off his hands with gasoline. His hands caught fire from the candle, and in his excitement he knocked over the entire can of gas. To his horror, young Thomson saw the flaming fluid racing toward a pile of ammunition. In a few seconds the entire tunnel would have been blown. Fortunately, the man closest to the flames had the presence of mind to seize a blanket and beat them out, saving the battalion for the dawn assault.

There were other, grislier accidents. In an underground fort, twenty-five feet below the chalk pits behind the 3rd Division lines, David Moir of the 7th Machine Gun Company heard a sudden retort from a neighbouring gun crew and saw a man fall dead. The accident was the result of a breach of discipline. The orders were that all guns be half cocked so that they could be fired by a single pressure on the trigger. Since a mistake could lead to trouble, performing this ritual was reserved for the No. 1 man in the crew, and for him only. But here the No. 2 man had taken it upon himself to cock the gun in the belief that his superior hadn’t done it. The gun fired, and a sergeant who happened to pass by the muzzle was instantly killed. It was too late to bury him, and so the corpse was put in the storage dugout. The gun crew lay down to sleep beside it.

Not far away at the neighbouring Grange Subway, Sergeant Evans, his day of rest now totally ruined, had finally reached his destination, loaded down with the signal equipment and carrying the precious bottle of Scotch. The subway at this point was like a scene from Dante – hundreds of men from the 7th Brigade, stumbling about in the dim, smoky light, some trying to sleep, others attempting to scribble a last letter home, or, like Evans, trying to squeeze through the narrow passageway to find a resting place or deliver messages or equipment. At this moment, the gas alarm sounded and the entire, squirming mass began to vibrate as men struggled with their respirators. Evans’s own eyepieces misted so badly that he couldn’t find his way and ripped off the mask in disgust. He found he had gone too far and retraced his steps once again, squeezing between protesting men until he reached the Brigade Signals room. “Did you bring the Scotch?” he was asked. Evans nodded wearily, handed it over, and, being too exhausted to return to his lines, finally found a place to rest. To cap it all, Evans learned the Germans had already put up a large sign reading “WE HOPE THE CAPTAIN GOT HIS WHISKY.” The water-soaked chalk was an easy conduit for clandestine listeners.

The Grange Subway was the connecting link between the front line and the dressing stations and ration dumps set up along the sunken road known as the Quarry Line, some five hundred yards to the rear. At eight that evening, as Evans moved up the Quarry Line to deliver his Scotch, Bill Breckenridge was squatting on the floor of one of the dressing stations playing poker, thankful that his long work day was at an end. Alas for him, it wasn’t; once again, the M.O. was calling for three men to fetch more water.

The nine card players separated into groups of three to flip a coin, the losing man from each group to join the work party. Breckenridge tossed a franc into the air, looked at it, sighed and mumbled: “It looks like me for it.” He had mistaken a head for a tail on the unfamiliar coin, and no one was about to point out his error. So off he went with two others heading for the wells at Neuville St. Vaast.

The shattered village was in turmoil. German shells were falling without let-up. In the moonlight, Breckenridge could see black clods of earth mixed with the debris of broken buildings hurled high into the air. He and the others stayed in the trench until the shelling stopped, then made a dash for the well. By a miracle it was still operating. Unfortunately, twenty men had reached it ahead of them; it would be hours before they could hope to fill their pails.

They knew there was another well some distance away, near the YMCA hut. For the next half hour they waded along the trench, waist deep in water, then struck out overland only to find a longer queue ahead of them and the well almost dry. It was growing late. The battle was only a few hours away now. All felt the need of sleep. They trailed back to report defeat, then, plastered in cocoons of mud, rolled onto the dugout floor and slept.

While Breckenridge was moving to the rear in search of water, Lieutenant-Colonel Cy Peck, the popular commander of the Canadian Scottish, was setting out, at 9:30
P.M.
, in the other direction to inspect his forward battle headquarters on the 1st Division front. Peck was known as one of the most belligerent battalion commanders in the Corps-a bulky, black-browed British Columbian with an enormous walrus moustache who believed that senior officers should not hang back in battle; indeed, it was his custom to move forward with the assaulting troops. “She’s a bear, boys!” Peck would shout over the noise of battle. “She’s a bear!”