Vimy Read online

  The crater line constantly changed shape as new cavities were formed and older ones refashioned. Each crater had a name and even a personality. The older ones had been named by the French and the British (Duffield, Durand, Crassiers); the new ones bore Canadian names. Earlier that season, George Hambley had watched the Montreal Crater blown: “The whole earth shook and heaved and erupted, blowing up at least 50 yards of trenches.” Unfortunately the sappers blew up more than they intended, burying a number of Canadians. Hambley, who helped dig some of them out, almost lost his own life in the shower of earth and stones thrown up by the explosion. A hand-to-hand fight followed for possession of the crater. When the Royal Highlanders of Montreal seized it and drove off the Germans, the crater was named in their honour.

  The tunnelling companies had tried to make the craters easier to defend by consolidating and reshaping the old ones. The resulting explosions were Brobdingnagian. They had used eleven thousand pounds of the high explosive ammonal to create the Longfellow Crater out of four earlier depressions on the 3rd Division front. It was well named, being two hundred feet long and twenty feet deep.

  The neighbouring Patricia Crater was named for the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, the unit that had seized and held it after it was blasted out of the mud. Two parties of the battalion, each consisting of thirty men, dashed through lanes previously cut in the wire, ran across several smaller shell holes spanned by duckboards, and seized the lip of the new crater. The first man to reach it, Private Walter Scott, was actually under arrest for drinking too much rum. But all was forgiven when the seventeen-year-old Scott returned with three blood-spattered German helmets. A few days later, 1st Army headquarters honoured the unit by giving its name to the crater.

  Battalion commanders had mixed feelings about the craters. They could be an impediment to the assault; they could harbour German machine gunners and snipers; and wounded men could (and would) drown in the water that collected in their depths. On the other hand, the craters could provide shelter for the advancing troops, who zigzagged forward from one depression to the next, and they could even harbour elements of the assaulting force before Zero Hour and – if a safe entry could be found – signal crews and telephone lines as well.

  The ingenious Captain Duncan Macintyre, who had been promoted to Brigade Major of the 4th Brigade, discovered such a safe entry by simple deduction. As he pored over a series of aerial photographs, his trained eye prompted an inspired hunch. Directly in front of the Zivy Subway he noticed the presence of the Phillips Crater, the product of a French mine explosion months before. It occurred to Macintyre that the French couldn’t have blown that mine under the German lines unless they’d first dug a sap out from their front line in which to carry and place the explosive. The end would have been blown up when the ammonal was touched off, but the rest should still be intact.

  Macintyre got the old records from the French, located the sap, and set his men to digging down to find it. Sure enough, the little tunnel was there, three feet wide, three feet high, still timbered. It ran for two hundred feet out into No Man’s Land, its forward end still blocked by the debris of the explosion.

  Working in absolute silence (for no one knew whether the Germans had a listening post above it), the tunnellers grubbed their way through the rubble, shaving off the chalk with their bayonets, scooping it up silently with their hands, and dragging it away in gunny sacks until, with a rattle of falling earth and timber, they saw a tell-tale glimmer of light at the tunnel’s end. That night they returned to find that they had indeed broken through to the Phillips Crater, on whose far lip a German sentry was posted. This meant that the signals party, which followed the attacking troops, unrolling spools of telephone wire, could reach the crater from the reserve lines without being exposed to enemy fire.

  Macintyre was typical of the young breed of civilian officers who were breaking new ground at Vimy. He came from pioneer Canadian stock. His grandfather was a Hudson’s Bay trader and his uncle, the famous Walter Moberly,* had helped survey the original Pacific railway line through the Rockies. Resourceful and independent-minded, Macintyre was unfettered by the barrack-room mentality. He had been on his own since the age of seventeen on survey gangs in the Quebec bush and on the rail line north of Lake Superior. As a storekeeper in Moose Jaw and later a real estate salesman,* he’d watched the West develop from empty prairie to boom country. He’d had little military experience when he joined the army, but as Brigade Major he acted, in effect, as the general manager of a military corporation that employed several thousand men.

  He set to work to wire the new tunnel, making sure that a heavy cable line should run all the way from brigade headquarters in the Zivy Cave to the new Phillips gallery, two hundred feet beyond the forward line. Here switchboards could be set up and surface lines run forward to follow right behind the attacking units on the day of the battle. Macintyre had hundreds of feet of cable and several telephones ready for the moment when the brigade punched through the German front defences. In that way, he hoped to avoid the snarl of surface wire that had frustrated communications in earlier battles.

  Macintyre had written a booklet on communications with the help of an old school friend, Captain Talbot Papineau of the PPCLI, a grandson of the leader of the 1837 rebellion in Lower Canada. The Corps used the booklet, but its keenest student was Macintyre’s own communications officer, Ken McKinnon, a young subaltern from Nova Scotia.

  McKinnon was obsessed by the need to get back word from the front, both to brigade headquarters and to the artillery. In the confusion of battle this would not be easy. Because no single system could be considered foolproof, McKinnon came up with no fewer than seven ways to get word back: by runner, by semaphore, by pigeon, by aircraft signals, by telephone, by wireless, and by Morse buzzer. It was, Macintyre always insisted, a record in ingenuity, and it would be no more than enough. On the day of the battle, when the barrage deafened the ears, drowned out all speech, and inhibited communication, these seven options could help make the difference between success and failure. Useful though it would prove, Macintyre’s plan held one hazard neither he nor anyone else foresaw: when the signalmen emerged from their haven far out in No Man’s Land, the advancing Canadians might mistake them for the enemy.

  * See The National Dream, pp. 156-64.

  * See The Promised Land, p. 323.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Things Worth Remembering

  1

  In one of his handwritten memos to himself entitled “Things Worth Remembering” the methodical Arthur Currie had included as Item 3: “Thorough preparations must lead to success. Neglect nothing” and as Item 19: “Training, Discipline, Preparation and Determination to conquer is everything.”

  He could not accept the excuse given at the Somme, where entire brigades had advanced blindly in neat waves to vague spots on the map with no clear idea of the tactics or strategy of battle: the men, it was said, were not sufficiently trained for anything more sophisticated. To this alibi Currie had a blunt response: “Take time to train them.”

  As a result, the thoroughness and scope of the training that took place on the broad slopes in the back areas of Vimy that March were entirely new to the Western Front and, indeed, the British Army. Troops had rehearsed battles before, using tapes to represent enemy trenches, but never with such detailed, split-second timing.

  Miles of white and coloured tapes and thousands of flags were used to mark out full-scale replicas of the German trench system. Suspected mine positions, buildings, topographical features were all pinpointed, thanks to the information received from the trench raiders and from the photographs taken by the Royal Flying Corps. Enemy forward, support, reserve and communication trenches were outlined with tape. Every stronghold, every pillbox, every redoubt, every barbed-wire entanglement known to the Canadians was marked and labelled. Big signboards named the German trenches; coloured pennants outlined the enemy positions – red for trenches, blue for roads, black for du
gouts, yellow for machine guns.

  By the end of March entire divisions were going through manoeuvres. The advance behind the creeping barrage had to be choreographed to the split second; men’s lives depended on it. Officers on horseback carried flags to represent the advancing screen of bursting shrapnel. Behind them the troops walked slowly-not in line but in groups (“lumps,” to use Gregory Clark’s descriptive phrase) – carrying their rifles at the high port, bayonets fixed, ready to shoot or lunge when the red tapes were reached. Over and over again they practised the “Vimy glide,” walking at the rate of one hundred yards every three minutes, while the instructors checked their watches, halting the troops to allow the barrage to lift, then ordering the advance again. Beside them other officers with megaphones pointed out strong points and suggested methods of dealing with them.

  Perfect timing was essential. If the troops moved too quickly they would be killed by their own artillery. If they moved too slowly they wouldn’t be able to pounce on the German dugouts before the enemy recovered. As Julian Byng put it, “Chaps, you shall go over exactly like a railroad train, on the exact time, or you shall be annihilated.”

  Officers were under orders to grill their men to be sure they knew exactly what to do and where they were at every stage of the advance. Duncan Macintyre, during his brigade’s turn at the tapes, picked one man at random during the practice advance and asked him where he was supposed to be. “On the Red Line, sir,” came the reply, indicating the second objective of the division.

  “Right,” said Macintyre. “And what are you going to do?”

  “Stay right here and hang on like hell.”

  The troops grew weary of the repetition. Harold Barker, the RCR scout who had joined the army from homesickness, pronounced himself heartily fed up with it; he was to change his mind on the day of the battle. A.E. Wright, a private with the 18th Battalion from Western Ontario, asked himself, “What are we doing?” and agreed with his friends that they were just playing games. Harry Wilford and his fellow soldiers in the 28th Battalion, all from the Canadian North West, treated the whole thing as a joke. Leslie Hudd found his boots wearing thin because his unit was an hour’s march from the training area. The constant rehearsals added to the drudgery. Although Currie had insisted that troops in training be relieved of heavy fatigues and given as much rest as possible, there were still sandbags to be filled, dugouts to be propped up, and parapets to be repaired.

  Nonetheless, as the training progressed, the men began to gain a sense of confidence. “We are going to give them a tremendous licking right here,” one stretcher-bearer wrote on March 29. “[I] am absolutely sure of it; every tiniest detail is perfect … confidence is absolutely the limit – everyone is laughing and cheering like a bunch of kids.” His enthusiasm is striking, for the weather that day was dreadful. In the training areas, only ground sheets rigged up as makeshift tents sheltered the infantry from a howling wind.

  One reason for their high morale was Currie’s insistence on a return to the pre-war tactics of fire and movement at the platoon level. The basic technique is easily described: while part of the platoon keeps the enemy occupied with heavy fire, the others sneak around his flank and rear to bomb him into submission. In the stationary war of 1914, these tactics had been discarded or forgotten, but Currie saw how useful they could be in dealing with isolated machine-gun nests or other pockets of resistance that might hold out during the advance. An old maxim was dusted off: reinforce success, not failure. If a brigade or a division was held up during the attack, the units on its flanks would not stop, as they had been ordered to do at the Somme. Instead they would defend their own flanks with machine guns but continue to push on, encircle and mow down the resistance.

  For the first time, junior officers, NCOs, and ordinary soldiers would all be given specific responsibilities. On Currie’s advice each platoon was reorganized into a self-contained fighting unit made up of a lieutenant, three sergeants, fifteen riflemen, eleven bombers, eleven rifle grenadiers, six Lewis machine gunners, two scouts, and a stretcher-bearer, all of whom could be interchangeable in the event of casualties. By the end of March, every platoon and every section had developed into a tightly knit group of cronies who knew each other well and knew exactly what their job was to be in the battle that followed.

  There was more to this than a mere increase in efficiency, and no doubt Currie sensed it. For he had stumbled, perhaps unwittingly, on a principle that was only partially understood even in the wars that followed: the reason why men fight-why, in the face of all human logic, they continued, in that war as in other wars, to stumble forward into the whirlwind. They did not do it for patriotism or love of country. They did not do it for mothers, fathers, sweethearts, or wives. They did not do it for the colonel, the lieutenant, the sergeant, or even the corporal. They did it for their closest friends-the half-dozen private soldiers with whom they slept, ate, laughed, worked, and caroused, the men in their own section – grenade throwers or riflemen or Lewis gunners-whom they could not and would not let down because in moments of desperation and terror their virtual existence was woven together as tightly as whipcord.

  Two generations would pass before the psychologists came to understand what Currie had sensed. Had they listened to the survivors of the Great War, who talked so wistfully, even longingly, about the comradeship of the trenches – a comradeship so intense they were unable to duplicate it in civilian life-they might have reached their conclusions far earlier.

  The platoon system adopted at Vimy had broader implications. Claude Williams, writing home as early as January, had quoted Byng as saying that “war in the future more than ever will be won or lost by platoon commanders.” It was a prescient remark. In the peacetime army, the veterans who stayed in uniform taught the platoon tactics adopted at Vimy. In the next war they were the basis for what came to be known as “battle drill.”

  The Canadians had an advantage over their Allies. The social gap in the British army had led to a communication problem that affected the course of battle. On the first brutal day at the Somme, when officer after officer was mowed down, few rankers knew enough to assume leadership. At Vimy, Currie and Byng were determined that no one would be kept in the dark.

  Canadians were baffled by the haughtier members of the British officer class. Captain Andrew Macphail, McGill professor and medical officer at Vimy, wrote in his diary in March 1917 that a certain British quartermaster-general, Lieutenant-Colonel E.L. Hughes, “is as foreign to me as the Prussian is to the German.” According to Macphail, Hughes “fails to conceal the contempt he feels for all who were not born in his own parish and attended the same school; but he is quite sure that they will accept that contempt as being perfectly natural and proper, and so take no offence.”

  It did not pass unnoticed, either, that the British Guards officers insisted on being saluted in the trenches-something the easier-going Canadians dispensed with – and that those Imperial officers attached to the Corps sometimes ordered extra fatigues or other penalties for soldiers caught with mud on their greatcoats. Such officers did not last long in the Canadian lines: those who weren’t sent back to the British Army were shot in the back by their own men.

  There was an easiness between the Canadian officers and men that was foreign to both the French and British forces. At times the Canadian Corps seemed like one big family where everybody knew everybody else-like William Klyne, a sixteen-year-old stretcher-bearer with the Royal Regiment who got into action only because the C.O. was his sister’s boyfriend.

  Any graduate of Sandhurst would have been shocked right down to his polished boots by a scene that Gordon Beatty, a gunner with the 5th Field Battery at Vimy, witnessed in the battery’s orderly room. Beatty’s driver, Private Dan Surette, asked to be paraded before the commanding officer on “a personal matter.” Beatty marched him in, saluted smartly, and reported: “Driver Surette to see you, sir.”

  Whereupon Private Surette turned to the C.O., extended his hand, and
said, “Got a chew, Colonel?”

  “Sure,” said the Colonel, reaching into his hip pocket for a plug. “Just keep it, Dan,” he said as he handed it over. The two men were old friends who had both worked for the town of Moncton, the C.O. as a city clerk, the driver as a garbage collector.

  At 1st Army headquarters, Canadian sergeants and brigadiers rubbed shoulders as they clustered around a plasticine model of the Vimy sector, showing the German trench system and all the topographical features – every contour and fold in the ground-together with every strong point and pillbox. Byng himself often turned up to explain and to guide. “Make sure that every man knows his task,” he would say. “Explain it to him again and again. Encourage him to ask questions.”

  The Corps commander had devised a catechism, which he handed out in pamphlet form at officers’ training courses. The would-be subalterns were required to ask themselves a series of questions beginning: “No. 1: Do I know all the NCOs and men in my platoon? Do I know my snipers, bombers, Lewis gunners, scouts and rifle grenadiers? Have I practised with my platoon in getting out of their dugouts quickly to meet an attack, and does each man know where to go?”

  That a junior officer should know all the men under him seems elementary today, but in the British Army in the Great War, the platoon commander was more often than not a vague and distant upper-class figure who spoke with a different accent and dealt with the men only through his sergeant.

  “Are my men full of keenness and as happy as I can make them?” the eighth and final question in Byng’s catechism asked. “Can I say that my platoon is one of the smartest, most efficient and most aggressive in the corps?” As the training period drew to a close and Zero Day approached, this keenness was evident. The knowledge that nothing had been overlooked had seeped down to the newest private soldier and contributed to the high morale of the Corps. In no previous British offensive had so little been left to chance. Every possibility, it seemed, had been considered. The Canadian gunners had been taught how to dismantle and use captured German artillery pieces. In a nearby wood, platoons took a unique course in bush-fighting, stalking hidden machine guns through the trees and knocking down dummy snipers with live ammunition. Byng, who had booby-trapped the Turks at Gallipoli, gave lectures warning men to shun attractive souvenirs. And the gunners were cautioned not to increase their fire in the hours before the attack because that might alert the Germans.