Vimy Read online

  As the battalion settled down, Breckenridge decided to wait and form his own opinion. Soon he had become an old hand, standing from dusk to dawn in his soaking boots, never changing his clothes or taking off his equipment for the six or eight days spent in the line, climbing up on the firing step when his turn came, clambering over the parapet at night to join a wiring party, learning to freeze at the burst of a flare in No Man’s Land, and waiting his turn on that last nervous night for the new relief to arrive-a long, uneasy vigil, when the minutes seemed like hours and the guides, with their welcome group of followers, seemed to take forever to arrive.

  2

  By the time Bill Breckenridge joined the Black Watch in March the tempo of work and planning had reached a new pitch of intensity. The troops did not know the exact date of the attack-it had, indeed, been postponed for several days – but they knew it was coming soon. Those who were not shivering in the front lines toiled and sweated in the rear. For this was a drudge’s war, and that had not occurred to those who rushed to the colours in the early days. Many had been raised on tales of derring-do in The Boy’s Own Paper and in the novels of G.A. Henty: nothing there about hacking away in tunnels and gloomy caves, laying rails, toiling on road gangs, hauling back-breaking loads for miles over rough terrain, or swinging a pick or shovel for hours on end.

  The Canadians hated pick-and-shovel work: many had joined the army to get away from it. They had come to fight, not to scrabble in the dirt. Once at the Somme, after they’d been ordered to dig in, aerial photographs revealed a line of ineffectual scratches rather than the well-sited and deeply dug trenches that were called for. Julian Byng examined one photograph, then turned wryly to a group of Canadian officers.

  “You Canadians are a very brave people,” said the general. “You would, I know, fight and die if necessary to the last ditch. But,” and he raised his voice, “I’m damned if I can get you to dig that ditch.”

  They hadn’t bargained on ditch-digging, nor had they contemplated burrowing underground like so many moles, squeezing through narrow, airless passageways, clawing away at the dripping chalk walls.

  But if the ridge was to be taken the work had to be done. The army, which scorned euphemisms, called it “fatigue.” It was especially fatiguing for those who had joined those branches of the service that seemed to be the least irksome and possibly the safest: the medical corps, the cyclist corps, and the regimental band. Most of these ended up with a shovel in their hands or a burden on their shoulders.

  There was a great deal of this fetching and carrying in spite of the fifty thousand horses and the narrow-gauge railways. It irked a young staff captain in the 11th Brigade named F.R. Phelan to think of the hours used up in lugging ammunition from the wagons and railheads. Here were hundreds of soldiers, slogging along in pairs, each pair carrying two boxes of ammunition between them in a sling made with their rifles. Here were others, toiling through the mud, bowed down with heavy packloads of supplies biting into their shoulders. Surely there was a better way!

  And of course there was. Like Whizbang Johnston, Phelan decided to build a better mousetrap. On camping trips in Quebec he had seen Indians loping through the bush with their backs straight, the weight of their packs distributed evenly by means of a broad strap supported by the forehead. After Captain Phelan demonstrated this Canadian tumpline, the method was adopted, special tumpline companies were formed, and thousands of man-hours were saved.

  And every man-hour was needed if the Corps was to be ready by Zero Day. Like any other small city, Vimy required a network of supporting services. Unlike other cities it needed them in a hurry- and all at once. Water-mains had to be constructed, reservoirs dug, pumping stations installed. There were roads to be built, ties to be tamped, rails to be laid, tramways to be put into operation. Sweating troops buried twenty-one miles of electrical cable in trenches seven feet deep and strung eleven hundred miles of telephone wire, some of it carried on aerial supports, which also had to be erected. And all this work had to be carried out at night in the cold by men constantly slopping about in water or muddy gruel and under constant fire.

  Water alone was a major problem. Every man needed five gallons a day, every horse ten gallons. That meant a total of one million gallons daily, but the planners, with grisly realism, cut it to six hundred thousand, knowing there would be daily casualties among both men and animals. The horses, tied in unprotected lines, were especially vulnerable and died by the hundreds.

  The water came from springs behind the lines, but it wasn’t easy to move it forward. Twenty-two pumping stations were installed and forty-five miles of pipeline built, every inch of which had to be buried three feet below ground level. Two reservoirs, each holding fifty thousand gallons, had to be dug by hand. And every piece of equipment – every nut, every bolt, every foot of pipe, every bracket-had to be brought in by road, hauled by horses or on the backs of men.

  The engineers built, maintained, or improved thirty miles of road in the shadow of the ridge in full view of the enemy. Heavy guns dragged over a well-laid thoroughfare could pulverize it in a single night, destroying the work of weeks. Thus the roads were constantly in need of repair.

  War had obliterated the old drainage system of Artois. In the Zouave Valley and in the farmland beyond Neuville St. Vaast, the ground was so sodden that no amount of rubble or metalling could have kept the roads from sinking into the muck. Here, the double plank roadway so familiar to frontier Canadians saved the day. Men who had once worked in the forests of the Maritimes or the timberlands of Western Canada were enrolled in a forestry company, felling old trees in the Bois des Alleux. Portable sawmills set up in that forest turned out one hundred thousand feet of rough planking every week – enough to build three miles of plank road and to supply timber for tramline sleepers and tunnel supports.

  Without the main plank road, the problem of getting men, ammunition, and supplies forward before the battle would have been horrendous. Once twilight fell, the finished thoroughfare came alive with wagons and limbers threading their way between working parties and troops shifting positions at the front. No lights were allowed. If a driver dozed and his vehicle slipped off the planks and into the mud, the traffic jam lasted for hours.

  Another unit, the Canadian Corps Light Railway company, operated the tramway system that the engineers had extended to a length of twenty miles. Concealed in the forest known as the Bois de Bruay, not far from Ecurie, a mixed bag of Canadian businessmen, train dispatchers, and Western railroad hands now turned soldier operated a hidden terminus twenty-four hours a day. Just after dark, the engines puffed off, loaded with shells for the gun positions, on a circular route from Byng’s advanced headquarters north to the Zouave Valley and back. The tramway had another, grimmer task. Three hundred pushcarts were built to fit the rails so that wounded men could be trundled smoothly and efficiently to the casualty clearing stations when the attack began.

  3

  Long before the Canadians arrived, the opposing troops on both sides of the ridge had fought an underground war in the soft chalk that underlay the Vimy battlefield. The Canadians kept it up. By March the entire sector was a Swiss cheese of galleries, dugouts, subways, and narrow tunnels in which men toiled and scrabbled. The smaller tunnels that reached out from the front lines toward the enemy positions were known as “saps,” a derivation from old French meaning “an undermining.” The sappers’ task was to undermine the enemy- to tunnel beneath him, eavesdrop on his plans, or plant an explosive charge and blow him up-in short, to sap his strength.

  All along the front line in these claustrophobic passages, men were scratching away at the chalk, pushing farther and farther into No Man’s Land, listening for the sounds of their German counterparts, fearful that the enemy’s mines would explode first before their own were prepared or that they would unwittingly break through into a nest of armed Germans. It was heart-stopping work, as Will Bird discovered.

  He would never forget a night he spent with a work
party underground. For weeks afterward, whenever he thought of those moments his whole body would grow tense. For two years Bird had tried desperately to get into the war, after being turned down early in the game. Now, having finally made it, he found himself descending a dizzy ladder into the half-light of a fetid subterranean passage. The air was dank and close, and even before he flung off his greatcoat he was bathed in sweat. He and the others tied sacking over their boots to muffle all sound and then, crouching on their knees, began to spray the face of the chalk with vinegar. The sap was just four feet high and three feet wide, so tight that the men had to work in turns. One scraped away the softened chalk and passed large chunks of it back to his helper, who in turn passed it farther back. The last man in the crouching file laid it on a small trolley, which, when loaded, was hauled silently back on its rubber-tired wheels along a narrow track of two-by-fours to the hoist.

  All night long the men worked, cramped, sweating, and wordless. Silence was mandatory, for the Germans were also underground only a few feet distant, chipping away.

  Bird and the others had a second task: they had to get rid of the tell-tale chalk. If the German air observers spotted it- and it was easy to spot-they’d know the whereabouts of the sap. Some could be hauled forward and thrown on the trench parapets. Some could be carried to the rear and taken by rail to points beyond the lines. But the most ingenious method of concealment was no concealment at all. The spoil from the saps was dumped in the shell holes; from the air the white chalk in the pale light could not be distinguished from muddy water.

  Like Will Bird, Leslie Hudd, the cyclist, was scared stiff all of the time he worked in the saps. His job was to place a geophone (similar to a doctor’s stethoscope) against the chalk wall to find if the Germans were tunnelling near him. As long as he could hear the scraping of their knives or the gutteral whispers of their conversations he was content. But when the scratching stopped, the hair stood up on his nape and he sounded the alarm, for it meant that a mine was about to blow.

  The geophone picked up the tiniest noises, as another cyclist, Dick Warren, discovered. Warren was assigned to keep watch in a tunnel under the twin Crassiers craters on the 1st Division front. This tunnel was already mined but was not to be blown until the moment of the attack. Thus it was necessary to patrol it in case the Germans broke through. It was, as Warren discovered, a lonesome and eerie job. Carrying his candles, his flashlight, and his geophone equipment, he crawled up one branch of the tunnel only to find it was flooded. Suddenly his candle sputtered and died: Gas! He scurried back into a right-hand branch until more gas stopped him. He retreated again, cleared a space on the floor for the equipment, lit a cigarette, leaned against a pit prop, put the plugs in his ears, and listened to the enemy mumbling away on the other side of the wall. In the wavering candlelight he could see reflected the red eyes of his only companions, the scores of rats crouched just beyond his reach. Their squeaks, magnified by the geophones, sounded like high-pitched battle-cries.

  At this point nature called, and Warren answered without moving from his spot. Suddenly, in his ears, came the frightening rumble of rushing water. Panic! He remembered the flooded tunnel branch and knew he was doomed to drown with the rats in this subterranean trap. He tore the earphones from his head and abruptly the noise stopped. Only then did it dawn on him that the flood had been of his own making, magnified by the listening device.

  When Dick Warren’s tour was over and he reported back to the engineer officer on the surface, he was grateful for the tot of rum that was always proffered. It was strong stuff. Any man who could choke out a thank you after knocking back the rum was allowed a second tot-a “door prize” it was called. But try as he might, the shaken Dick Warren was never able to put away a second.

  These jobs were not quite what the young recruits had expected. George Henry Hambley, the pious young man from Swan Lake who had been shocked by the brothels in Neuville St. Vaast, had joined the cavalry, considered the most dashing branch of the service, yet he seemed to spend most of his time not on a spirited steed but deep in the bowels of the earth working ten-hour shifts until he turned ghastly white from lack of sun. And when his work party was sent out of the line for “rest” at Divion, he became a carpenter, rising at six and toiling until dusk, building horse troughs. After that there was cavalry drill. When Hambley forgot to remove the heel strap from one of the animals he was exercising, the sergeant gave him extra fatigues cleaning the messroom. When the “rest period” was over Hambley faced a five-mile march back to put in another ten days in the saps.

  To reach the sap, Hambley entered the vast Zivy Cave, half-way between Neuville St. Vaast and the front, and followed the Zivy Subway right to the edge of No Man’s Land, safe from German shell and sniper fire. This was one of a series of large subways being built or extended by the British tunnelling companies in the Canadian sector to connect the back trenches with the front line. The tunnellers were aided by Canadian work parties, many of whose members were familiar with the coal mines of Nova Scotia or the railway tunnels in the Rockies and the Selkirks.

  At first these great subways were seen merely as a safe method of moving troops into the forward positions. By January, however, the planners had become convinced of their tactical value. With the ends of the subways sealed off, the assaulting troops could be hived in the tunnels in the small hours before the attack. Then, at Zero Hour, the mouths of the tunnels would be blown out and the attackers would pour out into the heart of the battlefield.

  By late March, the tunnellers had completed twelve subways to the forward line and in some cases past it. Their total length was 10,901 yards or just over six miles. Working at top speed, stripped to the waist in the dank and often suffocating atmosphere, the tunnellers achieved miracles. In one subway they managed to hack through forty-six feet of chalk in a single twenty-four-hour period.

  The subways varied in length from the little 290-yard Gobron Subway in the northern sector to the vast Goodman and Grange Subways each with a mile of tunnelling. In most subways, with their six-foot-six-inch ceilings, the tallest man could stand erect. Most were three feet wide, some three and a half. Nine were lit by electricity from gasoline generators. All had telephone communication to the rear and many were equipped with narrow-gauge railways. The shallowest was twenty feet underground, so deep that the sounds of war vanished and only the trembling of the earth hinted at the shellfire above. At the northern end of the sector, where the ridge rose most steeply, some subways were fifty feet and more below the surface.

  The subways were so labyrinthine, with lateral galleries and dugouts running off the main stem, that signs had to be posted and guides stationed to prevent troops from losing their way. The famous Grange Subway, first to be completed, provides a good example. The main stem of the Grange was 750 yards long, but the galleries that ran laterally totalled another 600 yards. Off these galleries were vast chambers, 80 to 150 square feet in size, housing trench mortar emplacements, ammunition stores, officers’ dugouts, dressing stations, reserve ration dumps, even kitchens. In addition to the tramline and electric wiring, a four-inch water-main led to a 1,500-gallon tank beneath the floor of one of the rooms.

  As the subways nosed their way toward No Man’s Land, the tunnellers sometimes came upon existing caverns, some of which went back to the sixteenth century, when the Huguenots, fleeing from their Catholic persecutors, used them as hiding places. The old villages were underlain with a rabbit warren of caves and passages quarried from the soft chalk that had given Neuville St. Vaast the title of the White City. It was said that even in 1917 you could walk ten miles from the Grange Subway on the 3rd Division front to the Spanish caves near Arras without ever emerging into the sunlight.

  The caves were earmarked as assembly points to harbour troops in the second wave of the attack as well as various headquarters staffs. The largest was the vast quarry known as the Zivy Cave, so big it could hold five hundred or more men. When he first saw it, Duncan Macintyre of t
he 4th Brigade staff, which would have its headquarters in the cave during the battle, thought immediately of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. At night when the generator was shut off and hundreds of candles guttered from ledges in the walls, it more than lived up to the Arabian Nights comparison.

  More than ninety steps led down to the main chamber of the cave whose twenty-foot ceiling, supported on chalk pillars, was lost in the gloom. Hundreds of men working on the Zivy Subway that led from the cave to the front line or, like George Hambley, in the mine galleries that ran under No Man’s Land, slept in the cave between shifts. Macintyre, who first visited the cave in February, found a company of infantry sleeping, cooking, eating, playing cards, cleaning rifles, and carving their names and regimental numbers on the chalk walls. Here were bunks, tables, cook stoves, telephones, and running water, everything essential to the day when two brigades and five battalions would have their headquarters here and half a thousand men, held in reserve, would wait poised to reinforce their fellows trudging up the slopes of Vimy Ridge.

  4

  When the saps were blown, new depressions appeared in No Man’s Land, just beyond the forward line, to join the ragged succession of gigantic craters that ran the whole length of the Canadian sector. These water-filled hollows, some deep enough to swallow a four-storey house, seemed to have been carved out by meteorites or volcanic action. Many were legacies of the British, who had exploded earlier saps to nudge their front line a few yards closer to the Germans.

  For the soldiers of both sides who clung to the opposite lips of the craters, sentry duty was particularly trying. One never knew what was going on below the ground. Was it the enemy boring away beneath your feet or your own people? It was silent work, squatting on the crater’s edge, unable to cough or smoke. A sneeze could give you away. Wet, cold, and cramped after their tour, the sentries must then work their way cautiously back, crater by crater, to the comparative safety of their own front lines.