Vimy (8 page)

His next letter, from the trenches before Vimy, was positively peevish. He berated his family for making light of his condition. “I don’t see anything amusing about writing by candlelight, that is all we have here, you can’t even get a coal oil lamp of any kind, nothing but candles.… It is pitch black without them.”

At this point Williams was plastered with a thick layer of mud from his head to his boots. It had poured rain all night. The trench was a quagmire. Parts of the walls had caved in, burying half the ammunition. The roof and stairway of his dugout were threatening to collapse, and the men had been roused to stand by with picks and shovels. Water tumbled down the steps like a miniature Niagara, and Williams and his batman found themselves struggling frantically to dig themselves out before the whole thing gave way. The mud was so deep that one of the platoon runners had been stuck waist deep and forced to leave his boots in the glue before he could be extricated. This, of course, was standard stuff, but Williams made it clear that it wasn’t a matter for family jocularity.

Yet Williams soon got over his pique and, like almost every other man in the trenches, continued to reassure his family in his letters home. “It is the greatest fun, slop, slopping for miles without a dry spot anywhere,” he wrote to his mother in November after a dreadful day spent with a working party in the rain. To his father, in January, he apologized because “on reading over this letter the tenor sounds far from cheerful.” Low spirits, Williams emphasized, “have no place in the trenches,” adding “I don’t think you should show it to mother.”

By that time, the entire corps was dug in below the slopes of Vimy Ridge, and every Canadian in Europe was, like Williams, learning to endure the unendurable. They had looked out into the night and seen, glowing like embers in No Man’s Land, the red eyes of the foraging rats-the same rats that ran across their faces as they slept and whose bites scarred their legs to the kneecaps. They had turned their shirts inside out, night after night, running a cigarette lighter along the seams to kill the lice that crawled by the hundreds through their clothing. They had seen mud so bad that the horses died of exhaustion trying to pull loads through the gumbo. They had seen men in shock cry and shiver if a shell dropped a hundred yards away, and they had seen others shoot themselves in the foot or chew a thread of cordite from a rifle cartridge to turn themselves into hospital cases-anything to escape, if only for a few days. Hideous death had become a familiarity; men learned to use human shinbones as coat hangers and corpses as benches to keep their backsides out of the mud.

For two years, from Neuve Chapelle to the Somme, Canadians had been fighting and dying in Flanders. They made their reputation in April 1915 at the Second Battle of Ypres. The French Zouaves, surprised and terrified by the first gas attack of the war, fled the salient, leaving a four-mile gap in the line. But the Canadian 1st Division-those who had joined up in those first enthusiastic days-held fast, filled the gap and, choking and gasping in the yellow cloud of poison, pressed urine-soaked handkerchiefs to their noses and prevented a German breakthrough. The cost was terrible: more than six thousand casualties out of a divisional fighting strength of ten thousand … But by standing fast the Canadians prevented a rout that could have changed the course of the war.

The Ypres catastrophe bred in the Canadians a suspicion of British and French rigidity. The system didn’t allow for any real feedback of ideas up or down the chain of command. The brass hats didn’t believe the lower classes in the lower ranks were bright enough to think for themselves. Junior officers were given little leeway in responding to orders. You did what you were told, and you didn’t question the word from on high. That did not sit well with men like Arthur Currie, a brigade commander at Ypres, whose tactical handling of his own troops brought him a promotion shortly afterward.

The Canadians were infuriated by the staff work at Ypres. Their British superiors had repeatedly ignored warnings of an impending gas attack. By the end of March, 1915, German prisoners were telling their interrogators specific details about gas cylinders stored in the enemy trenches. One captured German told of batteries of such cylinders placed every forty metres along the front. A few reconnaissance patrols were sent out to confirm these reports, but nobody took the findings seriously. When one French general warned of possible use of gas his superior ignored him as a credulous fool. The feeling at the top was that the Germans would never be so ungentlemanly as to use gas against their enemies.

Other reverses followed – at Givenchy, where the maps turned out to be grossly inaccurate; at Festubert, where the preparation was hasty and inadequate; and at the St. Eloi craters, where the advice of Canadian leaders was overridden by that of the British commander. But it was at the Somme in the summer of 1916 that the Canadians learned, at dreadful cost, how not to conduct a war.

The Battle of the Somme began on July 1, 1916. Its purpose was twofold: to achieve a breakthrough in the line and to relieve pressure on the French, who were defending Verdun to the south. By the time it petered out the following winter, gaining nothing but the possession of a few acres of ground, all four Canadian divisions had been blooded. The first three divisions fought from September 3 to mid-October when they went north to the Vimy front. The newly created 4th Division stayed on the Somme from October 10 to the end of November when they joined their comrades at Vimy.

What is loosely described as the Battle of the Somme was actually a series of battles, a mosaic of ghastly setbacks and minor victories in which the obstinate British commander, Sir Douglas Haig, who seemed to learn very little from adversity, threw away tens of thousands of lives by repeating tactics that had proved ineffectual on the first day of the struggle.

Indeed, the early tactics at the Somme were reminiscent of those nineteenth-century wars when men armed with muskets marched solidly forward in line, shoulder to shoulder, spraying lead at their enemies. The rifle and the machine gun had long since replaced the musket, but the British troops still attacked the German positions in closely packed waves. The men, lined up like ten pins, each wave from fifty to one hundred yards behind the next, depended on an artillery barrage to soften the German positions, but in every case the barrage was too little and too late.

The idea was that the Germans would be pinned down in their dugouts by the barrage, sitting ducks when the British reached them. But the advancing troops were too far behind the barrage. When it lifted and moved on, the Germans simply leaped out of the trenches and, with their machine guns, mowed down the rows of British, many of whom were still far from their objective, held up by the heavy wire entanglements that masked the German positions.

In the first day of the Somme battle – the day that was supposed to blast a gap in the German line that would start the troops forward on a dash to Berlin – almost sixty thousand men were killed or wounded. The blood-letting continued all that summer. The Newfoundland Regiment, in one single tragic day, lost 710 of its 801 officers and men. Incredibly, the same tactics continued, and the lessons of the Somme only began to sink in when the Canadians attacked Courcelette in mid-September.

Here, for the first time, a new expression entered the military lexicon:
creeping barrage
. Now the wall of shells crept forward just ahead of the advancing troops in hundred-yard lifts at three-minute intervals. Thus the Canadians were able to reach the enemy before he had a chance to rise out of the protecting trenches. And they moved forward not in a blind and steady advance but in a series of bounds, each to a specific, predetermined objective, and each one covered by artillery fire. It was this innovation, refined to the split second and drilled into every man on the Vimy front, that helped the Canadian Corps seize the ridge from the Germans.

At Courcelette, the Canadians showed an initiative that was rare among the Allied troops in the Great War. Having captured their objective, a sugar factory and a farm on the outskirts, they kept on straight through the village, taking a thousand prisoners and holding their ground against the inevitable counterattacks, a bold stroke praised by the High Command as “without parallel in the present campaign.” It was this action that confirmed them as shock troops. As David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, was to put it in his memoirs, “Whenever the Germans found the Canadian Corps coming into the line, they prepared for the worst.”

The Somme was the training ground for Vimy-but at the cost of twenty-four thousand Canadian casualties. The worst experience came in October with the Canadian assault on the Regina Trench, a strongly fortified line that was the Germans’ second position in the battle for possession of the Thiepval Ridge. The trench held out. The British artillery failed to cut the German protective wire, and so the German machine gunners could not be dislodged. Although there were plenty of shells available by this time, the British gunners were still husbanding their supplies, out of habit. Thus the trench remained intact.

It would be up to the 4th Division to try to take the trench, for the other three, sadly depleted by the events of that bloody summer, had already been taken out of the line. They were a subdued company, moving north through the rolling farmland of Picardy toward the Vimy sector. Duncan Macintyre, the one-time prairie storekeeper, now a staff captain with the 2nd Division, rode back along the line of march to meet his brigade, the 6th, on its way out. These were all Westerners from Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, and the Territories. To Macintyre, astride his horse on a little rise, they seemed a surprisingly small group, winding along the valley road out of La Vivogne so slowly that they scarcely seemed to be moving.

He cantered forward and spotted a man he knew well, Major Alex Ross, leading his old battalion, the 28th, composed entirely of Northwesters.

“Where’s the rest of the battalion, sir?” Macintyre asked him.

“This is all of the battalion, Mac,” replied Ross in a choked voice, and Macintyre could see the tears glistening in his eyes.

There were more losses to come as the 4th Division prepared once again to attack the Regina Trench. On October 25, “the day of death” as it came to be called, the 44th, a Winnipeg unit, lost two hundred officers and men. Once again, the artillery barrage was insufficient to quiet the enemy fire. As the Canadians advanced across No Man’s Land, they could see the German machine gunners emerging untouched on the parapets. At last, on November 10, the barrage was perfected and the trench taken. The 4th Division vacated the charnel house of the Somme and moved north to join its fellow divisions holding the line at Vimy.

They had all suffered a costly lesson. When Greg Clark joined the 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles in the Vimy sector that month, he figured that there were 4,200 members of that regiment whom he had never seen and would never know. They had been there in France before him and now they were gone. At the Somme, the battalion had gone into action 1,200 strong. In six weeks it had suffered a thousand casualties. Some of the platoons, with a normal strength of thirty-eight, were down to ten men. Thus the Corps that fought at Vimy was a mixture of hardened veterans and raw newcomers.

There were other changes. Sam Hughes had finally been given his walking papers that month, fired after nine days of soul-searching by a vacillating prime minister who could not, in the end, stomach a grossly insulting letter. The Ross rifle, which Hughes had espoused with all the fanaticism of a dervish, had also been discarded in favour of the more rugged Lee Enfield. The snipers loved the all-Canadian Ross, which was a marksman’s delight, but the ordinary soldiers hated it because it jammed in the mud. Ignoring orders, they threw it away and picked up the British weapon from the nearest corpse. Alderson, the British commander who had had the temerity to attack the Ross, was also gone, a victim of Sam Hughes’s pique. His replacement, Lieutenant-General Sir Julian Byng, was a tougher nut for Hughes to crack.

Three months before, on August 17, the two had dined for the first time in France and discussed the matter of promotions and appointments within the Corps. In his usual bombastic manner, Hughes told Byng that he had never made a single mistake in his selections during the whole time he had held office and proposed to continue to make all appointments.

The Corps commander replied that he would always make recommendations to the Minister as a matter of courtesy. Nevertheless, the moment that Hughes attempted to override his suggestion, then he, Byng, would resign-a politically disastrous eventuality. That was that. Hughes had met his match in the deceptively casual general with the iron will.

Byng had had plenty of time to study the failures at the Somme during those autumn days when his troops were attacking Courcelette and later the Regina Trench. At Vimy he proposed to put these lessons into practice. More than anything else, the Somme had demonstrated the need for more careful training and meticulous preparation. New tactics were required; the creeping barrage would have to be perfected. Better intelligence was needed. The enemy guns would have to be pinpointed and destroyed before the men on the ground could move; that meant artillery men with more elastic minds and a scientific approach to the art of gunnery. And better fuses would be essential if the shells were to destroy the enemy wire.

A more flexible, less blinkered approach to static warfare was needed. There must be closer liaison with the air force, and better communication between the high command and the troops in the mud. Nothing could be taken for granted. It wasn’t good enough to assume that the German wire was cut or the trenches pulverized; somebody had to find that out. The lower ranks had to be given a better idea of what was planned and then trained to act on their own, instead of blindly following orders worked out by staff officers miles behind the lines.

All this would take time, for the morale and the strength of the four Canadian divisions were badly shattered. The old soldiers who sat in the trenches before Vimy were weary of battle while the newcomers, arriving by the thousands, were nervous, green, and unblooded. To weld the Canadian Corps into a cohesive fighting force would require initiative, understanding, and innovative leadership of the highest order. The Battle of Vimy Ridge was still five months away.