Vimy Read online

  4

  Arthur Currie’s record confirms the old adage that in certain men the furnace of battle causes hidden qualities to bubble to the surface. For there was little in Currie’s background to suggest his later military prominence. He was a big but sickly Ontario farm boy, suffering from stomach complaints, which, when they returned in early adulthood and later in the war, hinted at psychosomatic roots. He had moved to Victoria at the age of seventeen and taught school on Vancouver Island until he was twenty-two. Then his life reached a crisis point. He’d been in the non-permanent militia for two years and had achieved the rank of corporal. At that point he was offered a commission, which he desperately wanted to accept. But he could scarcely afford it on his teacher’s salary of sixty-two dollars a month. It was then that his stomach trouble returned.

  Victoria had by far the most highly stratified society of any city in Western Canada, and there is little doubt that Currie coveted the status that a militia commission would bring in a community dominated by Imperial officers, not to mention the upper caste of the British Navy stationed at the Esquimalt base. Currie’s social aspirations may be gauged by his change of name. His immigrant grandfather’s “Corrigan” had already been transformed to “Curry.” Now the grandson adopted an even more acceptable spelling. And he rejected the more plebeian Methodist Church of his mother for the more fashionable Church of England.

  A militia commission cost money. An officer had to pay for his own expensive kit and was expected to give his pay to the mess. And Currie also wanted to get married: his English-born fiancée had a double-barrelled name, which made her more than socially acceptable in Victoria. There was nothing for it but to quit the classroom and go into the insurance business and later into real estate. In those yeasty days of Western expansion these were much more attractive vocations.

  He joined the Masons and became president of the Young Liberals but spent most of his free time in the local armouries. He was an ardent and energetic citizen soldier, out on the rifle range every Saturday, up at 6 A.M. to shoot during the summer months. By the time the great land boom swept Western Canada, Arthur Currie was colonel of his regiment and senior partner in a real estate firm.

  Those were heady days. With a population of thirty thousand, Victoria boasted 111 real estate agents like Currie, most of whom plunged wildly in the belief the boom would never end. Currie was a victim of his own unbridled optimism. The bubble burst, and by 1913, almost broke and due for militia retirement, the future general was about to fade into obscurity.

  At this point he was suddenly pressed to take over command of a new militia unit, and a Highland unit at that-the 50th Battalion, known as the Gay Gordons, after the mother regiment in Britain. He could scarcely afford the splendid but expensive (and for a man of Currie’s physique slightly ludicrous) Highland kit, let alone the mess bills and his expected contributions to the regiment. But he could not resist. And when he was offered an overseas brigade the following autumn of 1914, he could not resist that either.

  What was not known to the officers who served under him, and to only a handful who served over him, was a truly dreadful secret. Currie kept it locked within himself for all those years at Ypres, Festubert, Givenchy, the Somme, and Vimy: a secret that must have caused his stomach to turn and his dreams to become nightmares. For nearly three years, as he later admitted, it was the last thing he thought of at night and the first thing when he awoke each morning.

  To be blunt, Currie was an embezzler. He had diverted eleven thousand dollars of the regiment’s funds, intended to pay for uniforms, to cover his own personal debts. There were extenuating circumstances involving the Gordon Highlanders’ honorary colonel, William Coy, a newly rich New Brunswick entrepreneur who bought himself social status in Victoria by promising to underwrite the regiment to the tune of thirty-five thousand dollars. Coy not only welched on the deal but also bought up Currie’s note at a fat discount. Bankruptcy would have meant the end of Currie’s career as an officer and the collapse of his social position, and so he appropriated the government’s cheque intended for the regimental contractors.

  In France, Currie was bombarded with letters demanding explanations or payment. To these he did not reply – could not reply. In Victoria, his friends tried to raise money to cover the missing sum; but Victoria was floundering in depression, and the debt remained outstanding. Borden was brought into the matter-he had received, in 1915, an anonymous letter calling Currie a thief- and so was Sir George Perley in London. Currie’s delinquency was a court-martial offence; but how could you court-martial Canada’s best soldier? That would shatter both army and civilian morale. And so for three years the government, the army, and the contractors themselves conspired in a cover-up that would end only in the fall of 1917, when David Watson of the 4th Division and Brigadier Victor Odlum, both wealthy men, lent Currie the necessary funds.

  Of Currie’s inner turmoil the officers and men rehearsing day after day the careful plans for the attack on the ridge knew nothing. The big, fleshy face remained impassive, the pale eyes clear and unblinking. No lines of worry creased that smooth brow, no hunch of the shoulders betrayed the shadow of the Damoclean sword that, during those final days before Zero Hour, hung suspended over the senior divisional commander of the Canadian Corps.

  5

  Byng and his staff knew very well that all the training in the world would not save the Canadian Corps if the German wire remained intact. The British High Command had been sobered by the tragedy of the Somme, where twenty thousand British soldiers, on the first day of the offensive, had been blown to bits. The guns had not been able to cut the enemy wire, which formed an impregnable barrier, eighty feet thick in places. The rolls of heavy, tempered steel were as high as a house, with five-inch barbs, stronger and thicker than anything seen on a rancher’s fence. To get caught on that wire was to suffer a fearful fate.

  In the Second World War, the Canadian troops, marching on manoeuvres, used to sing a silly song:

  Has anyone seen the sergeant?

  I know where he is

  I know where he is

  I know where he is.

  Has anyone seen the sergeant?

  I know where he is,

  Hanging on the old barbed wire.

  The implications of that piece of gallows humour, revived from an older conflict, were lost on most of the young men studying the more adventurous tactics of fire and movement. It dawned on only a few that the sergeant, hanging on the old barbed wire, was enmeshed like a fly in a web, unable to advance or retreat, impaled on the barbs, blood pouring from a dozen gashes, a sitting target for the German machine gunners.

  The nocturnal moaning of such men, dying slowly in No Man’s Land without hope of succour, haunted many a veteran of the Somme, as it must have haunted Byng. That is why he and his brilliant chief gunner, Brigadier-General Edward “Dinky” Morrison, the former newspaperman, pressed hard through every available channel for supplies of the new No. 106 fuse, which allowed shells to explode on contact with the wire rather than above it.

  What was good enough for Henry Shrapnel in the eighteenth century wasn’t good enough for the siege warfare of the twentieth, but it took the Allied commanders two years to realize that. Shrapnel was designed to kill men, and it was horribly effective: when the shell burst it released hundreds of steel balls, which whirred through the air, scything down everyone in their path. But it could scarcely make a dent in the wire. Thousands of soldiers, deceived into believing that a pathway had been cleared in front of the enemy trenches, found themselves trapped in a tangle of barbs. Immobilized, they could only wait for the machine guns to tear them to pieces.

  The solution to this catastrophe was the development of the new fuse and the abandonment of shrapnel as a wire cutting device. The fuse caused each high-explosive shell to burst on contact, driving deep into the heart of the wire, tearing it to shreds and ripping great gaps through which the attacking troops could pour. When the new fuses began to reac
h the Vimy sector in mid-January, Byng and Morrison could breathe more easily.

  Like the cavalry, the artillery was one of the most conservative arms of the service. The senior British gunners, with one or two admirable exceptions, were still fighting the Boer War. At the start of the war they treated the machine gun as a toy. The Germans had fifty to a division, the British only two. Kitchener, under pressure from Lloyd George, then Minister of Munitions, thought four would be a luxury. The scrappy little Welshman went behind his back and ordered a speed-up in production. By November 1916, with Kitchener dead, the British war office was asking for sixteen machine guns per battalion. By the end of the war, the number had risen to eighty. But in that first year the Allies had stubbornly refused to understand the new style of battle that the invention of the machine gun had brought to France.

  Hundreds of thousands of men were slaughtered because the generals were still thinking in terms of bayonet and pikestaff. In one tragic incident, 6,000 French soldiers, massed in a sector only 2,400 feet wide, were ordered to advance with fixed bayonets, forbidden even to pull the triggers of their rifles. Half died in the attempt, but that did not stop their leaders from ordering a second identical suicide bayonet attack into the spray of German machine-gun bullets!

  Byng had no intention of repeating this folly. The new commander was good at picking men; Winston Churchill had once served under him in South Africa. Three of his staff officers would later rise to become Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff. Most of the staff was British; Canadians were only beginning to gain the experience to achieve staff rank. But now, with the help of his colleagues, Byng reached down and plucked out the youngest brigade commander in France to take charge of counter-battery work.

  On January 27, Andrew George Latta McNaughton, aged twenty-nine, was named Counter-Battery Staff Officer and given carte blanche to focus his scientifically trained mind on the twin problems of pinpoint intelligence and pinpoint accuracy. The post was a new one. McNaughton would have to develop the techniques of counter-battery work from scratch. But before the war was over he would be acknowledged by both the Allies and the Germans as the best artillery officer in the British Empire. And when, a generation later, Canada raised a new army for a new war, McNaughton would be its first commander.

  Like so many of the unconventional leaders in that conventional first war, McNaughton was a Westerner, the son of Scottish pioneers. He grew up in Moosomin, then a tiny hamlet in the old North West Territories. There he learned to ride, shoot, hunt, and fish, activities that nurture self-reliance. At brigade headquarters he slept on the floor, spurning a mattress, perfectly content to open a tin of bully beef for his supper.

  A crack shot, he also brought to the artillery an intimate knowledge of horses – invaluable in those pre-mechanized days – and a questioning mind. As a boy he had been fascinated by explosives: he was always blowing up things, building small cannons out of lengths of pipe stuffed with black powder. But it was at McGill that his mind was trained under such physicists as Ernest Rutherford, the future Nobel prize winner. Electrical engineering was in its infancy. A new device known as an oscillograph had just been developed, and McNaughton was later to put that to good use at Vimy. He would, in fact, bring a scientist’s mind to every aspect of counter-battery work, from gun barrel wear and the effect of wind on shell velocity to the technique of spotting the precise position of an enemy weapon by observing its muzzle flashes.

  He had already made a considerable reputation. Currie had spotted him as a comer and so had Morrison, the chief gunner. He was known as a hard worker: when he first arrived at his battery he had put reveille back one hour. And he was well liked: his men called him Andy. Now Byng sent him south, too, to see what the French had learned at Verdun and the British at the Somme.

  Off went Andy McNaughton in a spanking Napier motor car all to himself, feeling that he was now Somebody-a sinewy black Scot, somewhat dishevelled and shaggy, with deep-set, burning eyes. In later years when he commanded the Canadian Army of the Second World War, he was photographed by Karsh with a vast greatcoat draped across his shoulders, those dark eyes glowering into the distance, as if with some suppressed fire. It made him seem larger than life and more than a little terrifying; in reality he was a slight, mild man who rarely raised his voice and was more scientist than soldier. But he was firm and he was stubborn. His staff saw him sack a senior officer once – or rather didn’t see it. The man walked into McNaughton’s office to emerge, after a short period of silence, white and shaking-ordered to take the first boat home. But it had all been done without the CO. raising his voice.

  McNaughton learned little from the French. Their high command told him one thing about counter-battery work, the middle command another, the men in the trenches something else again. Clearly the brass was woefully out of touch with the front line. At British 5th Corps, however, he encountered an unconventional gunner, Lieutenant-Colonel A.G. Haig, who happened to be a cousin of the British Commanderin-Chief. Haig, who had fought in the mountains of Burma where unorthodox methods were essential and the High Command a long way off, told McNaughton something of his experiences and experiments with flash spotting and sound ranging. In the weeks that followed, McNaughton was to develop and fine-tune these techniques, right to the moment of the Vimy attack.

  * The offending article, which appeared in the Port Hope Evening Guide (owned by the Hughes family) in June 1927, was written by the most unsavoury of Liberal hacks, W.T.R. Preston. Currie won his suit for libel after a long and sensational trial, but the damaging effects on his health and reputation were lasting.

  * It was this attitude that led indirectly to the famous libel action. When Currie was promoted to corps commander after Vimy, Sam Hughes lobbied to have his son replace him as commander of the 1st Division. Currie, who had a low opinion of the younger Hughes’s military abilities, bluntly refused. “I will get you before I am finished with you!” Garnet Hughes threatened. And he did. The offending article was clearly inspired by father and son.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Raiders

  1

  On February 2, Julian Byng gathered his senior officers together at Camblain l’Abbé, a French chateau just beyond the far limit of the German guns. There he crisply outlined the dimensions of the task that faced the corps.

  From this moment on the rear areas began to buzz with activity. In addition to the the normal duties of army personnel-clerks and cooks, gunners and surgeons-a bewildering variety of other skills were needed. The preparations for the battle would require the combined talents of loggers, locomotive engineers, tunnellers, carpenters, track crews, tailors, telegraphers, train dispatchers, road builders, and, sadly, grave diggers, for the cemeteries must be ready to receive their tribute.

  But first, the divisions had to be reorganized. The corps front of ten miles was reduced to four. Currie’s veteran 1st Division came down from the north to take its place on the right of the line, as military tradition dictated. Henry Burstall’s 2nd Division, next in seniority, would move into the line to the left of Currie. The next two would follow, again in order of seniority and experience, right to left. They would hold their sectors without further shuffling until Zero Day, memorizing the ground on their immediate fronts. Every man was expected to be as familiar with the battlefield as he was with the streets of his home town. Every shell hole, every pitted decline, every battered tree and stump, every fold and hump, every trench, tunnel, and sap, every gun emplacement and sniper’s roost must be pinpointed on maps and registered in men’s minds so that, if necessary, they could walk blindfolded across No Man’s Land and still know where they stood.

  Some of this could be achieved through aerial observation, through the interrogation of prisoners, and through the wizardry of McNaughton’s team of scientists, who would shortly begin to locate the German guns through the new techniques of flash spotting and sound ranging. But there was no substitute for first-hand knowledge. To know the ground the troops had to cra
wl over it. That was one of the main purposes of the trench raids, which began as early as December and reached a crescendo in February and March.

  The trench raids were a Canadian invention. Until the Canadians came along nobody-not the British, not the French, not even the Germans – had considered the possibilities of raiding one another’s lines between major offensives.

  The first trench raid was staged in the Ypres salient on the last day of February 1915 by the Princess Rats, six months before the Canadian Corps was formed. One hundred men took part in a smash-and-grab attack that destroyed thirty yards of German trenches. Five Canadians were killed in the fight, eleven more wounded.

  But the credit for developing the trench raid into a sophisticated concomitant of battle is generally reserved for Victor Odlum, who in November 1915 commanded the 7th (British Columbia) Battalion. His was one of two units that carried out a successful double attack that month across the Douve River. It was the first in the Corps’s experience and it became a model for the scores of raids that followed.

  The front was quiet at the time. Odlum’s troops were bored and cold. It is said that somebody suggested a raid on the German trenches simply to relieve the monotony. Odlum seized upon the idea and made it his own. The raid was meticulously planned-the 170 volunteers rehearsed for ten days- and the results were overwhelmingly successful. The Canadians took the Germans by surprise and suffered only two casualties.

  The Canadians began regular trench raids and were soon recognized as experts in the technique, which became standard practice in all armies. The French, who had hitherto accepted a policy of live and let live with the enemy between major battles, now asked for Odlum; but he preferred to remain with his fellow Canadians. In February 1916, Joffre sent an officer to Currie’s headquarters to learn at first hand how the Canadians did it.