The platoon, along with dozens of other platoons, had nearly completed turning the vast hillside into a full-scale duplicate of the enemy’s defense system on Vimy Ridge.
Colored tapes were strung for miles across the vast hill. Based on photography from air balloons and from reports of enemy soldiers captured during trench raids, these tapes marked every twist and turn of the enemy’s known trenches.
Highly visible billboards were marked with the names of the German trenches. Pennants of different colors—like the pennants in the boxes that the mule packed—had been placed exactly where the enemy positions were at Vimy Ridge. Red pennants marked trenches. Yellow pennants marked machine guns. Blue pennants marked roads. Black pennants marked dugouts.
It didn’t stop there.
Every clump of rolled barbed wire known to the Canadians had been marked. So had every suspected mine position.
Nothing like a training mission of this scope had ever been done before. But the stakes were high, and General Byng was not going to send his soldiers into battle without giving every man the best chance possible to accomplish the mission.
In a few days, when all was completed, the full training would begin, matching the smaller scale training when the platoon had had to learn the Vimy Glide. After full training here, the final battle at Vimy Ridge would involve the entire Canadian force. All four divisions. There had been no greater battle before in Canada’s young history.
Jake knew all this. All of the soldiers knew this. It would be an epic battle.
Yes, Jake thought, an epic battle.
He grinned at a new thought.
Beside him was another epic battle.
Charlie the Mule against Thomas Northstar.
It would be very interesting to see which of the two was going to be more stubborn.
—
Charlie the Mule felt the pull on his halter. Charlie didn’t mind following orders if the orders were put to him respectfully. If one of the two-legged creatures mistreated him, that was a different matter entirely. He never forgot abuse and would wait for a chance to return that abuse with a well-placed and unexcited kick.
But even if the two-legged creature treated him nicely, Charlie wasn’t going to follow an order that might harm him. Sometimes, these smaller creatures had no sense of what was in front of them, but Charlie always knew.
Since he was far stronger than the two-legged creature trying to pull him forward, Charlie remained in place, flicking his tail calmly.
Sooner or later, the two-legged creature in front of him would learn why Charlie wasn’t about to take another step.
Until then, Charlie had the time and the patience to wait until the silliness of the two-legged creature was finished.
—
“Charlie,” Thomas told the mule, “I will stand here all day. Surely you are getting tired of this.”
Thomas dug in his heels and pulled the halter as hard as he could.
“I don’t think it is making him tired,” Jake told Thomas. “But I know it’s making me tired to watch you. Hand me the halter.”
Thomas glared at Jake. “I will not let myself be defeated by a mule. It is as simple as that. Even if it means standing here for the remainder of the war.”
“Please let me try,” Jake said. “Remember, I grew up on a farm.”
“Only if this is not seen as surrender.”
“Of course not.” Jake took the halter. He didn’t try to move the mule forward. Instead, he turned it sideways and Charlie the Mule took a step in Jake’s direction.
“Please give me that rope,” Thomas said.
“See,” Jake answered. “All you needed to do was choose a different direction.”
“That means a longer path,” Thomas said. “It also means that Charlie the Mule defeated Thomas the Cree. I will not accept that. This mule will go where I want it to go.”
Thomas used the halter to turn Charlie the Mule back to the original path. Charlie the Mule braced his front legs and began to bray.
When the loud, hideous sound stopped, Jake said, “I think that means Charlie the Mule will not accept defeat either.”
“Then we will be here until the war ends.”
“Much as I enjoy seeing you finally lose at something,” Jake said, “the platoon needs these pennants at the top of the hill. Before the war ends. So that we can end the war.”
“Can you hand me that rock?” Thomas asked Jake, pointing at one about the size of a softball. “Charlie the Mule needs to learn a lesson.”
“No!” Jake said. “Thomas. It’s not right to hit him with a rock. And you’ll feel bad about it later. I won’t let you do that to Charlie. Or to yourself.”
“Hit the mule?” Thomas said, still holding the halter. “That is not my intent. Anyone who even kicks an animal is a weakling. Now would you please give me that rock.”
Jake handed it over to Thomas.
“You must listen to me,” Thomas said to Charlie the Mule. “While I would never use a rock on a stubborn mule, someday your stubbornness might anger another soldier who would.”
Thomas touched the rock to the mule’s nose. “Imagine how much that would hurt if someone hit you with this.”
The donkey brayed.
“He’s laughing at you,” Jake said. “Obviously he doesn’t know you are like a North Star to guide us whenever times are dark.”
“He’s laughing because he knows I told you I would never hurt him. Maybe I should shoot a couple bullets to scare him.”
“It would scare everyone else too,” Jake said. “Not a good idea.”
“Then I will think of something else,” Thomas said. He was facing the mule as he spoke.
“I know,” Thomas said. “I will pretend he likes to chase things like Colonel Scruffington.”
Thomas said to the mule, “Fetch.”
He heaved the large rock over his shoulder in the direction he wanted the mule to go.
When the rock landed, a tremendous boom knocked Jake onto his back.
He stared at the sky, trying to figure out what had just happened. Clods of dirt rained onto his face.
He rolled over and saw Charlie the Mule on his side. Thomas had landed on Charlie. Thomas had a stunned and dazed look on his face.
Jake looked past Thomas at a hole deep enough to bury Charlie the Mule.
That’s when he realized what had happened.
There had been an unexploded artillery shell in the ground. This was very common, even far away from the front line of trench warfare. It wasn’t unusual for soldiers, or even farmers, to step on one of the shells or bump one of the shells and cause a deadly explosion.
Charlie the Mule had saved their lives.
Charlie the Mule did a half roll and got to his feet. Thomas got up too and hung onto Charlie’s side to keep his balance. His eyes were wide and he tried to speak but couldn’t say a word.
“Hey, Thomas,” Jake said. He wiped dirt from his face. “You sure taught that mule a lesson, didn’t you.”
—
Joseph Wright, the man across the chessboard from Jake, was a soldier from a nearby platoon. They were halfway through the game, at the far end of a large tent that had been set up to feed soldiers.
Thomas sat nearby, watching the game. Colonel Scruffington sat at his feet, tongue hanging out.
Jake moved his queen and said, “Checkmate.”
Joseph stood and saluted.
“Well, thanks,” Jake said, “I thought it was a pretty good move, myself. Right, Thomas?”
No answer. Thomas was standing too, looking over Jake’s shoulder. Colonel Scruffington had one paw on his eye, in a salute like Thomas had trained him.
Jake realized it must be a visiting officer if everyone was going to be this official. He scrambled to his feet.
Major McNaughton was walking toward them.
“At ease, soldiers,” Major McNaughton said. “We’re all in the same army.”
Thomas had trained Colonel Scruffin
gton to put his paw down when he heard the phrase “at ease.”
Major McNaughton smiled at that. “Aahh, yes. Our British colonel.”
Major McNaughton looked at Jake and Thomas. “Good to see you again. I heard a story that Charlie helped you find an unexploded shell out on the training grounds. Excellent work. No doubt you saved the lives of at least a couple of soldiers.”
“We will pass that on to Charlie,” Jake said.
“I just spoke to him,” Major McNaughton said. “Strange thing is, he pretended not to know what I was talking about. He insisted I didn’t need to thank him.”
“Yes, sir,” Thomas said. “Charlie is very stubborn. A real mule.”
“Very stubborn,” Jake added. “Definitely a mule.”
“Sometimes, stubborn is not a bad thing,” Major McNaughton said. “Anyway, Thomas, I want to talk to you about how you broke the rules in the trenches. A complaint reached Lieutenant Norman that you and Jake did not ask permission from nearby officers to stop carrying ammunition in a sling.”
Thomas kept his shoulders square and his head high. “Lieutenant Norman was at the other end of the trenches, so I tried to show one officer that there was a better way to do it. He refused to listen. I thought that the only way to prove that it worked would be to do it.”
Anger crossed Major McNaughton’s face.
“I don’t like this,” Major McNaughton said, “but before I make a judgment, tell me exactly what you did.”
“It is called a tumpline,” Thomas said. “A broad strap across the forehead, tied to the weight at the other end, and the weight hangs down your back. It keeps your hands free. It helps you keep your balance and you can move faster. Fur traders and Cree use them to carry heavy loads through the forest. It seemed a better way to move through the trenches.”
Jake said. “It is my fault, Major McNaughton. Thomas made it look so easy that I tried it. I was the one who said we should go ahead even if that officer didn’t want to listen. Punish me, not Thomas.”
“Punish you?” Major McNaughton said. “That is the last thing on my mind. Lieutenant Norman told me that you managed to move double the number of boxes of everyone else. I am going to have a chat with that officer and he will regret not listening to you. After that, we are going to get everyone else to start moving boxes the same way.”
Major McNaughton turned his attention to the chessboard.
“It’s been a while since I played this game, but I think I have the hang of it. Jake, would you like a game?”
“Major McNaughton,” Jake said, “perhaps you should play Thomas and teach him a thing or two.”
I believe that every soldier who has anything to do with horse or mule has come to love them for what they are and the grand work they have done and are doing in and out of the death zones.
—British officer Captain Sidney Galtrey, autumn 1918
Mules are a combination of horse and donkey. It is a wonderful combination, because they have the tremendous athletic skill of a horse and the superior intelligence of a donkey. A horse’s instinct is to take advantage of its speed and flee any kind of danger before giving thought to the danger. Donkeys will sometimes decide that fighting is a better solution, so donkeys tend to try to decide what to do before doing it. Because of that donkey heritage, mules do not frighten easily and are more patient than a horse.
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A horse caught in the barbed wire of No Man’s Land might fight the wire in a panic and get tangled far worse. A mule would calmly try to understand the situation and wait for help. A horse might carry a load until it died from exhaustion. Mules know their limits and if forced to carry too much, simply would not move.
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Mules also have amazing smell and hearing, and can detect trouble that humans will not. When a mule makes a decision based on this information, it cannot be prodded to go into danger, unlike horses, who can be forced forward by riders. So while it may seem that mules are stubborn, their hesitation is a sign of intelligence.
Although the phrase “stubborn as a mule” is usually meant as insult, it should probably be taken as a compliment.
Equally important during World War One was the fact that mules do not need as much food as horses and are better able to handle heat and cold. Better yet, they can last longer without water, and during battles where clean water was scarce, this made a big difference.
Mules also proved to be tougher than horses. They were less affected by disease and died from infection from bullet wounds half as often as horses. It is no surprise, then, that well over a quarter million mules were used throughout the course of the war.
THE MULE WITH NO NAME
Among the soldiers who handled mules, it was widely understood that mules would not respond to any kind of punishment. Instead, it was said, that mules would remember who mistreated them and use that knowledge against the soldier in the future.
These handlers also found that mules had a “sixth sense” when it came to danger. While it often frustrated the handlers and looked like plain old stubbornness, this awareness of surroundings and situations saved loads and lives.
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One mule in particular was traveling down a soft steep hillside, and a portion of the hill began to slide loose. This mule had the presence of mind to buck his handler off his back to safety. As the hill continued to collapse, the mule also managed to free itself of a precious load of mail before the massive shift of dirt swept it away. All who saw this declared the mule deserved a medal.
THE NEAR IMPOSSIBILITY OF TAKING VIMY RIDGE
As part of a plan for the Allied forces to break through the German trench system, it was considered extremely important to take Vimy Ridge, and in 1917 this near-impossible task was given to the Canadians.
Vimy Ridge was 8 kilometers (5 mi.) long and up to 110 meters (360 ft.) high. The ridge dominated the landscape and had been captured early in the war by the Germans, who made it into a very strong defensive position, guarded by highly trained soldiers armed with devastating machine guns and artillery.
At the beginning of the war, some British officers thought the machine gun was an improper form of warfare, not to mention heavy and cumbersome, so the British Army essentially dismissed it as a weapon and entered the war with only a few hundred of them.
But as they showed with the first poison gas attacks, the Germans were not bound by traditional views on how gentlemen officers fought battles. They saw the potential in this single weapon that could provide as much firepower as hundreds of rifles. At the beginning of the war, they had 12,000 machine guns and eventually reached 100,000.
Machine guns tended to jam, so they were grouped together in fixed positions, often in concrete “pillboxes” along the trenches. A machine gun was set on a tripod, and it took a crew of 4 to 6 soldiers feeding the fabric belt of bullets to maintain a firing rate of 400 to 600 rounds per minute. (By the end of the war, this rate doubled, and machine guns also included one-man portable guns.)
So with up to five machine guns firing, a small group of men could spray the open land in front of them with up to 3,000 bullets per minute, a staggering 50 bullets per second. Because of this incredible rate of firing, the massed infantry attacks that had worked in earlier wars were futile, but it was a lesson that the French and British high command often seemed to ignore. On the first day of the Battle of Somme, for example, the British suffered over 57,000 casualties—a total, in a matter of hours, that was greater than the combined British casualties of the Crimean, Boer and Korean wars.
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Vimy Ridge, with its high vantage point and secure pillboxes that covered all the angles of attack, was so well defended that in 1914 and 1915, the French and British troops had suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties in trying to take Vimy Ridge from the Germans and had not succeeded.
When the Canadian soldiers attacked, they would be crossing an open graveyard, where the bodies of tens of thousands of fallen French and
British soldiers still remained.
THE DUPLICATE VIMY RIDGE
“Chaps, you shall go over exactly like a railroad train, on time, or you shall be annihilated.” This was the warning by General Julian Byng.
At the Battle of Somme, some entire brigades had been ordered to advance in neat waves, with no idea of the strategy of battle or even a specific location to reach. The Canadian high commanders had a response to this, as explained by General Arthur Currie, who said, “Take time to train them.”
And as noted by Byng’s warning, this training was designed to help the soldiers follow a plan as precise as a train timetable.
Behind the trenches, on broad slopes in the Vimy area, the Canadians undertook something on a scale that was unheard of before then—troops rehearsed the battle again and again. Miles and miles of tape and thousands of flags marked replicas of the actual German trenches. This included suspected mine positions, machine gun locations and barbed wire tangles. Again and again, troops practiced the Vimy Glide, with officers on horseback representing the advance shelling that would give them cover during the real attack. This ensured that soldiers covered exactly 100 yards (91 m) in exactly 180 seconds.
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A second and important innovation was that the soldiers were trained to advance in small clumps, widely spread apart from other clumps. This was a significant change in tactics because it defied the military tradition of sending men forward in lines: lines that were far too easily shredded by machine gun fire.
CANADIAN INGENUITY ON THE FRONT
From the beginning of the war, the Germans had held an advantage in weapons, and their grenade launchers were no different, capable of sending grenades twice as far as British launchers.
Nicknamed Whizbang, Lieutenant-Colonel George Chalmers Johnston, the commander of the Second Canadian Mounted Rifles, wondered if shorter rifle barrels would give more thrust to escaping gases and decided to experiment.
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