Vimy (27 page)

Peck was accompanied by his artillery officer, his adjutant, S.G. Johnston, and three runners. The Bentanta Subway was so crowded they, too, decided to chance an overland journey. The C.O. wasn’t well. Shaking with fever, plagued by a splitting headache, he should have been in hospital, but nothing was going to keep him from the coming battle.

All his life Cy Peck had trained for moments like this one. He had taken every militia course available and had even gone overseas before the war, intending to enlist in the British Army, a decision he found easy to abandon on closer inspection. For Peck was the quintessential Canadian, born in the Maritimes of United Empire Loyalist stock, schooled in Toronto, lured to the Klondike during the gold rush and later to Prince Rupert. Now a proud, if ersatz, Scot who wore the glengarry cocked over one bushy eyebrow, he insisted that no fewer than five pipers accompany him into battle – one for each of his companies and one for himself. He was nothing if not resourceful in his adopted Highland calling. Asked to speak Gaelic at a Hogmanay dinner, Peck extolled the haggis with a five-minute speech in Chinook, the West Coast traders’ pidgin. Few present knew the difference.

The Colonel’s chills were not helped by the mud. It grew so bad that one of the party had to unlace his boots, climb up the bank of a sunken road in his stocking feet, and pull his footwear after him. The continual shelling was less of an aggravation to Peck, who was used to it. Badly wounded at Festubert, he had insisted on returning to his battalion weeks before his doctors felt it was safe. But now tragedy struck. The little group had been out for only a féw minutes when a shell exploded among them. The adjutant, Johnston, was tossed high in the air. The artillery officer and two of the runners were killed outright, the third was seriously wounded. Bleeding heavily, Johnston tried to carry on but was soon a stretcher case. Peck, unscathed, kept on going alone and finished his inspection.

As the evening hours ticked by and the moon went down and the shells continued to fall, the men who would face death the following day slept, talked in whispers, or went on with small, necessary tasks. Major D.J. Corrigall of the 20th arranged for 150 scaling ladders to be placed along his assault trench during the night to enable the troops to scramble out quickly when the barrage began. Lieutenant-Colonel Jack Clark of the Seaforths crawled on his hands and knees along his own assault trenches to speak to every one of his men waiting for Zero Hour. Frank Ormiston of the 44th, sent back to bring up the officers’ rations, stole a gallon of their rum and proceeded to drink most of it. Private Lester Giffin of the 85th, carrying bags full of bread and bully beef to the assault troops, emerged from the Tottenham Subway into No Man’s Land and came face to face with a new corpse draped over the wire. He would see many more in the hours that followed.

In the Cobourg Subway, on the 4th Division front, Lieutenant J.E. Tait told himself that it was surely no weakness at that time to think of home-of canoes and guns, of trails threading through the woods, of the camp on the river and the smell of woodsmoke in the twilight and the sunset on the lake. In the chill of those last hours, Tait conjured up memories of another kind of cold – of the snowclad trails of winter, the yelps of the huskies, the howl of the Indian dogs. How far away it all seemed! How different, that fragrant world of his boyhood, from this world of mud and starshells, of continual thunder, of endless days and restless nights, of the crump of mortar and rum jar, of devastation, unspeakable misery, and death!

On the 2nd Division front, Lieutenant William George Mclntyre, battalion machine-gun officer for the 29th Battalion (Vancouver) – better known as Tobin’s Tigers – was writing a long letter to his mother.

“I hope not, but this may be a note of farewell,” he wrote, “for we attack tomorrow morning. If this must be goodbye I must try to acknowledge the unrepayable debt I owe you for love and tenderness, encouragement and sympathy, and high ideals all through my life-you have been the best of mothers to us – and to ask forgiveness-I know it has been granted already-for the pain and trouble I have sometimes cost you. God bless you for all your goodness!”

Mclntyre was typical of the very best the country had to offer. His family had homesteaded in Manitoba; he had studied under George Munro Grant at Queen’s. A good rugby player, he’d been president of his Alma Mater Society, had two seasons’ experience as a teacher in Saskatchewan, was working on his M.A. when the call came. When the war ended, he intended to become a minister.

“… I feel very cheery,” he wrote, “and if my feelings are an index I should get through this alive, but one never knows. I trust humbly in God, whichever way the issue goes and ask success for our arms, forgiveness for our sins and rest after much toiling.”

For William Mclntyre that rest came too soon. The following day he was felled by a burst of German shrapnel. He lingered on during the hours of the battle. By ten that evening, he was dead.

3

Midnight passed. It was now Easter Monday. Lewis Buck, the stretcher-bearer, lay beside his brother Billy waiting for the dawn, looking periodically at his watch. He came from a family of twelve who had emigrated from Birmingham to the Ottawa Valley. The watch was a cheap timepiece, long since thrown out of kilter by the reverberations of the guns. But Buck kept looking at it anyway. He couldn’t sleep and it was something to do.

F.C. Bagshaw, paymaster of the 5th Battalion from Saskatchewan, lay quietly, trying to sleep, when he heard the voice of his friend Dave McCabe boom out: “Bag, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I’ll recite Robbie Burns and you recite Shakespeare.” For the next three hours they did just that while the entire battalion listened.

At about the same time – 2:30
A.M
. – a company of the 262nd German Reserve Regiment, facing the 3rd Division front, reported that the Canadian assembly trenches were filling up. The news came too late. The Canadian artillery had already destroyed the German telephone cables. By the time a runner made his slow way back to the German artillery batteries, the battle was on.

Meanwhile, David Moir and his machine gunners, roused from their sleep in the chalk pits, had left the corpse of the dead sergeant behind and were making their way forward through the Grange Subway. It was not an easy passage, for they were loaded down with guns, tripods, spare parts, and ammunition boxes, and the tunnel was full of sleeping members of the PPCLI. Moir tried to avoid stepping on the sleeping men but couldn’t avoid one, who awoke with a grunt. The oath died on his lips when the two recognized each other. He was an old friend from Winnipeg named Anderson, whom Moir hadn’t seen for years. Led by guides, the machine gunners crept out into craters half-way between their own lines and the Germans. There they took cover until dawn. Just before daylight a bold sergeant named Catherwood crawled out to bring them a bottle of rum. A German machine-gun crew spotted him creeping back and opened fire, but he managed to roll into his forward trench unharmed.

Not far away in the Bentanta Subway, Gordon Tupper of the Canadian Scottish, a scion of one of Canada’s most notable families, had finally convinced his C.O., the indomitable Cy Peck, that he should be allowed to fight that day. With his headquarters staff gravely decimated, Peck had sent word back to battalion headquarters that Tupper should take over as second-in-command. Since Peck meant to lead his men in battle, that meant that Tupper would have to stay behind. “Sir, if you order me to do so I will,” said Tupper, “but otherwise I want to stay with my boys.” Peck relented, and now Captain Tupper was writing home to his father, Sir Charles Hibbert Tupper, the son of one of the original Fathers of Confederation, Canada’s seventh prime minister.

“If I am going to die,” young Tupper wrote, “this is worth it a thousand times. I have ‘been over’ two or three times before but never with a company of my own. Think of it-150 officers and men will follow you to hell if need be!.… I have seen this game for two years and I still like it and feel my place is here.… The war has done wonders to me and makes me realize a lot of things I would not have done otherwise.…”

He was an attractive young officer, barely old enough to vote but already mature beyond his years, strong and supple, erect of carriage, a company commander of poise and judgement, “as proud as Punch on the most glorious day of [my] life.” It was the third time that he had written what he called “one of those ‘in case’ letters.” Unhappily, it would also be the last.

The dark hours of the morning moved leadenly toward their climax. At three o’clock, Andrew McCrindle moved out of the Zivy Cave with his battalion and entered the front line trenches. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, came cartons of chocolate bars and chewing gum. As he munched gratefully on a Lowney’s bar, thinking how odd it was to be enjoying a Canadian confection under these tense conditions, a vagrant thought popped into McCrindle’s head: if only somebody had thought to bring a camera, what an advertisement
that
would make for the Toronto chocolate firm!

McCrindle’s unit was to be in the second wave of the assault, which meant that he and his friends had to move back to allow the first wave room to get a footing and climb over the parapet. McCrindle stripped off his overcoat to give himself more freedom of action. Like so many others he would spend the hours before dawn standing in a sea of mud.

At 3:40
A.M
., “C” Company of the RCRs reached the jumping-off trenches. Lieutenant Robert England’s immediate task was to lead a work party out into No Man’s Land to cut the Canadian wire. His best wire cutter was a tough Russian-born private, too impatient to use gloves, who simply rolled the wire aside with his bare hands and uprooted the steel stakes. Suddenly a sniper’s bullet struck one of the party, and to everybody’s consternation the wounded man let out a shrill cry. Had the enemy been alerted? Flares went up from the German trenches as England and a fellow officer carried the man back. There a stretcher-bearer did his best for him. It was no use. The man was dead before dawn, but fortunately the German line was silent.

At about the same time, Bill Breckenridge and his fellow signallers in the dressing station on the Quarry Line were awakened to the corporal’s shout: “Stand to! Get up soldiers and prepare for breakfast in the Zwischen Stellung!”

The men threw off their blankets, crawling with lice, and began to talk about their prospects in the coming battle.

“I’m going over this morning and I’m not looking for a blighty,” the corporal declared. “If I’m with the boys after the battle, I’ll be satisfied.”

“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.