Vimy (35 page)

The Kootenay battalion was supposed to leap-frog through and seize Hill 145, but that proved impossible. Caught in the crossfire between the German machine guns on their undefended left and the nests hidden on the hill above, the Kootenay troops were pinned down. A few struggled toward their objective; none returned. The rest were thrown back into the arms of Warden’s Warriors, causing further confusion.

All that morning, while the other divisions triumphantly seized the ridge and drove the Germans back across the Douai Plain, the headquarters staffs in the subways along the 4th Division front received confusing and demoralizing reports. Runners sent out to get information were often killed before they could get back. Telephones were out of commission. At least one reporting aircraft was shot down before it could send a signal.

In the Cavalier Subway, at the battle headquarters of Warden’s Warriors, reports were so confused that the acting C.O., Major A.B. Carey, decided to go forward himself. He took his own runner and a scout sergeant; the latter was killed almost immediately, but Carey wandered about the battlefield for three hours, vainly attempting to find his men, and then returned, in the guarded words of the battalion’s war diary, “convinced that the battalion was securely dug in.”

Eedson Burns, a twenty-year-old engineer with the brigade communications group- and a Second World War general – had reported initially by phone to Odlum that the attack was going well. Warden’s Warriors had got past the German front line, and he himself had taken one prisoner, a diminutive Bavarian who hopped up and down in terror, in Burns’s words “like a small boy who had wet his trousers,” until he realized he wasn’t going to be slaughtered. Burns sent him back on his own. Then, with his signals team, he began to work his way up the slope of the ridge. His plan was to get a telephone operating on top of Hill 145 as observation for the Canadian gunners, and so his group moved right behind the forward troops.

Suddenly he noticed a change. The troops hadn’t been able to keep up with the barrage. As the shells passed them by, enemy machine gunners began to crawl out of their concrete shelters. Stragglers from several battalions began to join his party. Burns could see the German bullets smacking into the mud no more than a hundred yards ahead.

He leaped into a shell hole. As he did so a bullet creased his helmet. Burns looked up and saw one of the stragglers grinning at him in a peculiar apologetic way. “Get down, you damn fool!” Burns shouted. The grin faded, the man gently collapsed, his legs doubling under him, his eyes rolling upward until the whites showed. There was no blood, but he was stone dead.

Burns waited ten minutes, then headed back to round up the rest of the telephone section, crouching in a shell hole. Most were wounded; none could move; a German machine gun stuttered from a mine crater up ahead and to the left. Burns could see the machine gunners, exposed from the waist up, standing as if at target practice.

The effects of the March 1 gas raid were only too obvious. These were green replacements. Frustrated, Burns turned to a rifleman and told him to take a shot at the Germans. To his astonishment, the man gaped at him and confessed he’d never fired a rifle since arriving in France; that was the job of the snipers. Burns told him to loose off a few rounds anyway. None hit the target.

Burns now got on the phone to report the deteriorating state of affairs to brigade headquarters, explaining that his signals party couldn’t advance because the infantry had divided to the left and the right, leaving an enemy strong point directly in front. Odlum told him that was all poppycock. But nobody at brigade really knew what was going on. Up ahead, Burns spotted a scouting party, sent out by brigade to find out what was happening. It was blundering directly into the enemy. He couldn’t warn them-the noise of the barrage made anything but close conversation impossible-so he leaped from shell hole to shell hole and headed them off. He suggested they might get forward by moving over to the right; he’d seen some 3rd Division troops there, but nothing of his own brigade. They took his advice.

Burns made his way back to the old German front line and there found a group of men lounging about with a Lewis gun so covered with mud that it wouldn’t fire. He ordered them to clean it, gather up some Mills bombs, and wait for reinforcements. Fifteen minutes later, as he explored an old German dugout, a soldier ran down shouting: “Mr. Burns! Mr. Burns! Quick! Fritz is counterattacking!”

Up the stairs he went, doing his best to appear calm, only to find that the “counterattack” consisted of a dozen German prisoners being escorted back. At that very moment a German 5.9 shell landed in the midst of the group, blowing several into the air.

Burns could see the Germans still standing waist high in their trenches no more than fifty yards away. By now he was thoroughly frustrated and angry. He turned to one buck private and demanded to know what he thought his rifle was for. He seized it himself and got off several shots at the enemy gunners, who vanished below their parapet. Burns had no idea whether he’d scored a hit, but a moment later a bullet smashed into his own parapet, sending a shower of splinters into his face. At the same moment, a small, redheaded intelligence officer staggered into the trench, unable to speak, his throat emitting strangling, whistling sounds. He’d been shot through the jugular by the same bullet that had just missed Burns. As Burns tried to close the inch-long split in the officer’s neck, the man’s face turned scarlet, then purple, and he died.

Burns now tried to work his way around to the right to see where his brigade had got to. A bullet struck his gas respirator. That was enough. He made his way back to brigade signal headquarters and gave his report.

Over in the Cavalier Subway, the commander of the Kootenay Battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel V.V. Harvey, was also totally confused by the scattered reports coming in. Clearly his men had been unable to take Hill 145. Even now, at the headquarters of the neighbouring Black Watch, Bill Breckenridge was listening to his people demanding to know what had happened. Harvey couldn’t tell them.

He decided to send his newest subaltern, Alex Jack, forward to try to find out what was going on and to do his best to reorganize the battalion. Jack, a former company sergeantmajor, had been commissioned the week before and was assigned as a reserve officer at headquarters. Now he set off with a Lewis gunner and half a dozen middle-aged batmen carrying ammunition. As the heaviest fire came from the German salient on the left, they hugged the right flank. Harassed by sniper fire, they got too far over and found themselves in the 3rd Division sector. Just as they jumped into a captured trench, a sniper hit the Lewis gunner.

Jack left him and, using the trench as cover, headed to the left where he eventually came upon remnants of his own battalion and some of Warden’s Warriors. All the officers of both units were casualties and so Jack, the youngest and newest of all, aged twenty-five, found himself in command of two battalions.

But he knew what to do. He sorted out the men, placed three Lewis guns on the exposed left flank with the remaining ninety men of his own unit, then moved the men from the 102nd over to the right to link up with the Black Watch. That done he went forward to find out what was going on up front. He knew there must be scores of men pinned down in shell holes by snipers. One volunteer, Private Bob Hall from the Arrow Lakes district of British Columbia, came with him, and the two managed to crawl for six hundred yards to the far side of Vimy Ridge. There, looking down on the Douai Plain, they marvelled at the sight of peaceful farmers’ fields, unmarked by war.

They were now in the main German trench system. Jack posted Hall at one end of the German communication trench and then began to explore the lateral trench, noting that the machine-gun posts on both sides were still manned. Somehow the two Canadians had got right into the enemy position without being observed. It was time to beat a retreat.

A sniper perched in what was left of a tree spotted them. Both men tried to duck the bullets, but Hall was hit in the back. Jack, crawling on his stomach along the bottom of an empty trench, tried to pull the wounded man to shelter. Two bullets in quick succession chipped the chalk above his head. Hall was dead; Jack got back alive to report that the Kootenays were so badly shattered they could not move past the position held by Warden’s Warriors.

3

By early afternoon, Victor Odlum at 11th Brigade headquarters in the Tottenham Subway was haggard with worry. He had never felt so helpless. He had sent thirty scouts out to find out what was going on; only one had got back, and his report was confusing. But one thing was clear: Burns’s account had not been poppycock after all. The set-piece attack had disintegrated. If Hill 145 was to be taken that day, fresh troops would be needed. But where were they to come from? His brigade and the 12th were fully committed and badly cut up. The 10th, holding the line at its junction with the British corps, was tapped to attack the Pimple, once the rest of the ridge was in Canadian hands. There was only one source of fresh troops: the 85th Battalion, better known as the Nova Scotia Highlanders.

At this point the tangled narrative of the 4th Division’s assault on Vimy Ridge takes on a chimerical quality. The Nova Scotia Highlanders were an ugly duckling battalion. They belonged to no brigade. They had never fought a battle. Two hundred were still in England, laid up with mumps. The others had only recently arrived in France, and on the channel crossing they had all been seasick. Most were big, strapping fellows, but their tasks were menial: building and filling dumps, digging deep dugouts and assembly trenches, carrying and stringing wire, lugging forward loads of ammunition, escorting and guarding prisoners of war. They were, in short, a work battalion, not a fighting unit. The others sneered at the Maritimers as “the Highlanders without kilts.” Now these hewers of wood and drawers of water were assigned to do what the other battalions had been unable to do: attack and seize the stubborn defences in front of Hill 145.

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.