Vimy Read online

  Duncan Macintyre once spent a day guiding Byng around the Ypres salient. Byng wanted to see everything, so they both crawled out to observation posts and snipers’ nests and through tunnels. At noon, Byng squatted on a firestep in the front line, pulled a sandwich from his pocket, chewed on it, then lit a pipe and enjoyed a short chat with the men at the point where fighting was heaviest.

  The physical descriptions of Byng by those who knew him are fascinating because no two are quite the same. Some call him big, some tall; some say he wasn’t tall but lithe, others that he was bulky. All say he was strong, with a strong jaw, strong hands, and a strong walk. The picture that emerges is one of a powerful and commanding presence, fit and muscular. He was fifty-four and looked younger, a handsome man with knowing blue eyes framed by a lean face, brown as shoe leather, and a large military moustache. In his photographs he looks a little terrifying, and he could be terrifying. But he also had the common touch.

  He did not stand on ceremony, did not even take his hand out of his tunic to return a salute, merely raising it courteously inside the pocket. At a corps inspection, where a general and his staff customarily trotted down the road on sleek chargers, the new commander came into the horse lines through a hedge, jumping the ditches, as Andrew Macphail put it, “as unaffectedly as a farmer would come into a neighbour’s place to look at his crops.”

  Byng’s inspections, unlike so many others, were starkly thorough, never perfunctory. He never kept the troops waiting but arrived promptly to the second. Once, it was said, he turned up seven minutes early and hid behind a hedge with his staff until the exact moment. Shiny buttons did not impress him; well-scrubbed mess tins did. He was an expert on the equipment of the ordinary soldier, from rifles to small packs. Nor did he indulge in the pleasantries that so often accompanied these rituals. As one officer in the 44th (Winnipeg) Battalion put it, “afterwards officers go around wringing their hands while hard-boiled sergeants burst into tears.” Major-General David Watson’s diary entry for December 15, 1916, at Vimy, speaks for itself. The 4th Division’s commander wrote a little ruefully that Byng had inspected the 54th Battalion from the Kootenay district of British Columbia and found it “in a most unsatisfactory state, dirty, and unorganized, and told Colonel Kemball so very plainly.”

  But he cared about his men. In India, years before, his first action had been to alter the high collars of the men’s jackets so they could wear them open in the sweltering heat. To Byng, a soldier was never a cipher, never a statistic on the casualty lists. There was a strong religious streak in Byng. Macintyre once heard him say that he never ordered so much as a patrol to go over the top without getting down on his knees and praying for their safe return.

  It was said of Byng that he could converse on subjects as far apart as Confucius and Canadian ducks. He had forgotten more than most of his junior officers had learned, for he had been a professional soldier and a keen student of military tactics for thirty-three years.

  He had commanded the South African Light Horse during the Boer War, and in that free-wheeling atmosphere he made his reputation as a daring and often unorthodox commander. It was there that his character was moulded. Byng, the tireless young colonel, followed a different drummer from his colleagues’. In London on leave, while others were playing polo or dancing at fashionable clubs, Byng was down at the Smithfield Market learning about meat, trying to outwit the contractors who were supplying an inferior product to his troops.

  When war broke out in 1914, he was a major-general in the Egyptian command. He distinguished himself at Ypres, was knighted, promoted to lieutenant-general, and sent to Gallipoli, where he drew up a successful plan to evacuate the embattled troops with a minimum loss of life. For that he received the blue ribbon of the Bath and, after a spell in Egypt, command of the Canadian Corps.

  Now he was determined that every man under him would know his task when Zero Hour dawned. “Explain it to him again and again,” he told his officers. “Encourage him to ask you questions. Remember also, that no matter what sort of a fix you get into, you mustn’t just sit down and hope that things will work themselves out. You must do something in a crisis. The man who does nothing is always wrong.”

  This kind of attitude fitted the Canadian character and helped to win the battle that followed. It was surely Byng’s greatest moment, as he himself acknowledged when he was elevated to the peerage. Four years after the battle he would be Viscount Byng of Vimy, Governor General of Canada. It is one of the ironies of history that future generations would remember him more for the constitutional battle with Mackenzie King that he lost than for the bloody battle he won on the muddy slopes of a battered ridge in France.

  2

  Six hundred thousand Allied soldiers had been killed or mutilated on the Somme, including twenty-four thousand young Canadians. Julian Byng was determined that there should be no repetition of that blood-bath, which had seen men with little training and less understanding of battle hurled in dense waves against the German machine guns. The Somme’s lessons must be studied and applied to the exercises that would take place behind the Canadian lines beyond reach of the enemy guns.

  The man chosen to report on the Somme experience was Arthur Currie, the senior divisional commander and Byng’s most trusted general – the man who took command of the Corps when Byng was absent and who would shortly replace Byng as its commander.

  In December Byng had given Currie two tasks: first, to analyse the Somme battle and report on the lessons learned; second, to advise how those lessons might be applied to the infantry tactics and training at Vimy. The methodical Currie took three weeks to prepare his first report on eleven foolscap pages. He had plunged into the second when he received a signal honour: he was the only Canadian chosen by the British to accompany a group of officers invited by the French to visit the Verdun battlefield in the first week of January. At Verdun the carnage had been even worse than on the Somme; there were lessons to be learned there, too.

  The French invited questions and Currie was ruthless in his curiosity. As one British officer put it, “he pumped everyone dry.” He was not prepared to accept the word of the French brass hats; he checked every statement against the experience of junior officers and often discovered that the seniors were wrong in their assessment. The result was another careful analysis of what could be learned from the Verdun experience. After Currie finished his second Somme report, he began, on January 20, to give lectures on tactics to the senior officers of the Corps. It was his findings that dictated the way in which the troops were trained for the Vimy battle.

  Here was a remarkable figure, plucked from obscurity by the onrush of history. A failed real estate operator in Victoria, close to bankruptcy, without professional military experience, Currie had risen to major-general in less than three years and would soon climb up another notch in the military hierarchy. With only a high school education and a third-class teacher’s certificate, he would be propelled after the war into the principalship of Canada’s most famous university, McGill.

  It is inconceivable that a man with Currie’s background could have risen past field rank in the British Army, where education and breeding counted for more than tactical skills. But Currie was not the only unschooled Canadian to wear a major-general’s red tabs. His colleague David Watson, commander of the 4th Division, had never got past Grade 8. Unlike Currie, Watson had enjoyed a spectacular business career. An orphan in Quebec City, he had gone to work as a youth on the commercial side of the Quebec Chronicle and ended up owning it. His rise in the ranks from militia private to lieutenant-colonel, and then to wartime major-general, was equally startling. Now he was a junior to Currie, a lean and supple man with an old, lined face, cadaverous and saturnine. The marks of Ypres, where he had personally carried out a wounded man under heavy fire, were on him. At forty-eight, he was the oldest of the divisional commanders and looked even older. It was said that Ypres had aged him ten years.

  In his own meteoric rise, Currie had l
eaped over two other officers, both his seniors in age and experience. Louis James Lipsett, commander of the 3rd Division, had actually taught Currie tactics in Victoria when the latter was a militia colonel. A firm-jawed Irishman, Lipsett was a professional soldier, lent to the Canadians during the war as commander of Winnipeg’s Little Black Devils. There the Imperial officer became a convert to the Canadian style.

  Lipsett was much loved, for he was tireless in the care he took of his men. His troops were well aware of his dictum that no officer should think of his own comfort until the ordinary soldiers were fed, warmed, and sheltered. His blunt declaration, as a battalion commander at Ypres, that he would “stick to the last in the trenches” was legendary, as was his fearlessness under fire. Any officer who showed the slightest fear, he warned, would be sacked. He himself liked to prowl the front lines in order to be close to his men.

  Will Bird ran into him one night in a crater post fifteen yards in front of the main trench. The strange officer seemed genuinely interested in Bird’s background, asking about his home in Nova Scotia and his years out West working for various eccentric ranchers. When he revealed who he was, Bird was stunned and tongue-tied, whereupon Lipsett pulled a snapshot from his pocket to identify himself, making Bird promise he wouldn’t tell his mates. Perhaps because of these nocturnal ramblings, Lipsett didn’t survive the war; a sniper’s bullet got him in 1918. But Will Bird never forgot that meeting and kept the photograph for the rest of his life.

  Henry Burstall, commander of the 2nd Division, was that rarest of all Canadian birds, a regular army officer. A Quebecker, Burstall had had more experience than any of the others. He had been to the Klondike as part of the Yukon Field Force, had fought in the Boer War, had served with the South African constabulary, and had been selected as aide-de-camp to the Duke of Connaught during the latter’s viceregal tenure. A big, bluff six-footer with a hearty laugh that hid an inner shyness, he had been selected to command the 2nd Division over Garnet Hughes, son of the Minister of Militia, whom Borden was trying to placate just before firing him. But Byng would not tolerate political interference, especially in the case of Brigadier-General Hughes, an indifferent leader at best.

  On paper, all three of these men seemed better fitted than Currie for command. Currie didn’t look like a general. There are fashions in the military image just as there are in women’s hats. Currie did not adhere to the Great War stereotype of a ramrod-fit, gimlet-eyed, lean-faced, moustached leader. Haig looked the part and so did Currie’s divisional colleagues, with their firm, chiselled features and clipped military moustaches. Currie was one of the few senior officers who was clean shaven. His face was flabby, he sported a double chin, his eyes were a watery blue, and he was shaped like a gigantic pear. He was, in fact, so bulky that he had difficulty making his way through the narrower trenches. There was nothing dapper about Currie: his uniform always looked a little sloppy. His men called him, not without affection, “Guts and Gaiters.”

  Looks were deceptive. Currie was one of the most admired commanders on the Western Front. Borden considered him the equal of any corps commander in the war. Byng, going through a list of possible Canadian chiefs of staff, put his thumb against Currie’s name and said, “Of him, there are no ‘ifs’.” Philip Gibbs, the war correspondent, said that Currie reminded him of Cromwell. And Lloyd George, praising his “great ability and strength of purpose,” would settle on another Currie trait: his “lack of fetishism.” Currie, the civilian soldier, had no old fetishes to expunge. He approached each problem with an open mind, and it was this that appealed to the British Prime Minister, whose loathing of Sir Douglas Haig bordered on the pathological.

  “The ablest brains did not climb to the top of the stairs,” Lloyd George wrote ruefully of the British officer class. “Seniority and Society were the dominant factors in army promotion. Deportment counted a good deal. Brains came a bad fourth.… The only exceptions were to be found in the Dominion forces.” If Lloyd George had been able to buck the system he would eventually have made Currie commander of all British forces with the Australian general, John Monash, his chief of staff. Even the tough little Welshman could not achieve that goal, but had the war continued past 1918, it would have come to pass.

  3

  Currie was not a military genius. The Great War produced none, at least on the Allied side. But he was a good tactician with a high sense of the practical and a strong capacity for administration. His grasp of detail was awesome, and his memory for names and faces seemed infallible. It was said of Currie that if you met him once, he’d remember your name four years later. He certainly knew his NCOs by name. One of his battalion commanders once came to him requesting that a sergeant-major, Jim Watchman, be given leave to get married. Said Currie: “You mean the man the fellows call Mustang Pete?”

  His sense of tactics under pressure came to the fore at Ypres. When his flank was threatened, he threw away the rule book, abandoning the standard linear defence and opting for the kind of all-round defence that would become common in the Second War.

  He was cool to the point of austerity, his features rarely betraying any emotion. Nothing seemed to ruffle him. He never raised his voice in anger. The only hint of displeasure was a sharp glint in his pale eyes. Andrew McNaughton, the counter-battery officer, who liked him-for Currie was a gunner who spoke the language of the artillery-found him “pretty sticky to deal with,” meaning that Currie could not be shaken by colleagues, underlings, or the high command.

  F.C. Bagshaw, then an orderly-room sergeant with the 5th Battalion, a Saskatchewan regiment, had a first-hand view of Currie’s legendary coolness under fire at Ypres. On April 24, 1915, the third day of the attack, he looked up from the mud of the trench to see a portly officer casually strolling along a ridge, oblivious to the sniper fire around him. Finally the officer jumped down and made his way along the trench line. It was Currie. “Who was that shooting at me?” he asked, in the same casual way a friend might say, “Who was that waving at me?”

  “That was the enemy, sir,” someone replied. Currie appeared quite unperturbed.

  He showed the same courage in standing up to the High Command in 1915 when he thought the orders were wrong. As a junior brigade commander he bitterly protested what he believed were premature orders to go on the attack at Festubert and also, a month later, at Givenchy. For this he was rapped on the knuckles, but he wasn’t cowed. Told by the divisional staff that the order had come from the corps commander, he responded that “it is quite time that some corps commanders were told to go to blazes.”

  The attacks failed at great cost, proving Currie’s point. What had bothered him was sloppy preparation: not enough time set aside for reconnaissance. In the opinion of BrigadierGeneral Jack Seeley, the Canadian cavalry commander, Currie had “an almost fanatical hatred of unnecessary casualties.” How ironic, then, that ten years later Currie, of all people, would have to defend himself against a newspaper’s libellous charge that he had needlessly sacrificed Canadian lives in the final days of the war.*It is a measure of the admiration in which Currie was held that his disagreements with the higher-ups did not stand in the way of his promotion. He had tangled with Sam Hughes before the war, refusing to take part in a church parade for an organization he felt had political overtones. Hughes confronted Currie in Victoria but backed down. “Well, Currie,” he said, “I came out here to get your scalp but you’re all right.” At that time Hughes and his son, Garnet, were both Currie supporters.

  In Victoria Currie had been a prominent Liberal, but by 1917 he was fed up with politics. He had no friends at court, no political allies, and sought no favours. “I do not believe in mutual admiration soldiers,” he once said. He was an advocate of promotion on merit, not political pull.*He was concerned about his men and made it clear to his junior officers that the care of their troops must take precedence over their own personal comfort. That concern extended to an almost obsessive insistence that everyone from private soldier on up should know exa
ctly what he was to do in battle. He had an ability, during inspections, to seize upon the most moronic member of a company and pepper him with questions, believing that if the slowest came up with the right answers, the rest must know their business. As a result, the cannier platoons would pick out such men in advance and give them a cram course before Currie arrived.

  In the training plan that followed Currie’s winter assessments of the Somme and Verdun, he and Byng made sure that every man would be told the details of the plan of attack – everything except the date. Each soldier would know not only his own task in the assault but also the tasks of others; thus, if necessary, a private could take over from a corporal, a corporal from a sergeant, a sergeant from an officer. Indeed, there would be times when the casualties were such that sergeants ran companies and sergeant-majors ran battalions.

  This was unprecedented in the British Army. “Maps to section leaders,” was Currie’s dictum, and that was unprecedented, too. The idea that every section of six or nine men would be given a detailed map of their portion of the front, that every lance-corporal would see his line of advance marked out on paper, was something new. It had the morale-building effect of making each man feel that he was trusted, that his leaders considered him intelligent enough to be let in on what had been secret information in previous battles. For the assault on Vimy Ridge, the Canadian Corps distributed forty thousand such maps to men newly trained to act when necessary on their own initiative rather than to follow orders blindly.