By now the weather was deteriorating, and both sides dug in for the winter, thus unintentionally changing the war from one of rapid movement to one based on 500 miles of trenches stretching from the English Channel to the border of Switzerland. What had been achieved by the end of November? The Germans had occupied Belgium—with the notable exception of the area around Ypres—and France’s northeastern industrial heartland, but the effort had cost them 750,000 casualties. The Allies had successfully stopped the German advance, but at a cost of 800,000 French and 95,000 British casualties, virtually the entire British pre-war army. A new and much larger army would have to be created, and it was obvious even to the most naïve or uninformed that the war would not be over by Christmas.
The First World War, although it became a global conflict, was fought primarily—at least as far as Britain, France, Canada, and eventually the United States were concerned—in a relatively small area that included western Belgium and northeastern France. Within that small area, it raged largely in Flanders, a territory that stretched from the North Sea in Belgium southwesterly to the French coast along the English Channel. The most important city in the area was Ypres, an ancient community that had become the center of the European cloth trade by the fourteenth century. It had since declined in importance but remained a regional market town popular with tourists because of its medieval buildings, most notably the Cloth Hall built in 1260. Ypres was, more than any other place, the focal point of the war on the Western Front for two reasons: because it was seen as the gateway to the strategically important ports on the English Channel and because it was an important railway center on the western edge of Belgium.
Ypres rests at the foot of several ridges, “an eight-mile arc of high ground to the east that semi-encircles it like a huge amphitheatre,” as the American writer Winston Groom has described it.[2] These ridges are not very high, reaching at most 160 feet, but they provide “a complete and commanding” view of both Ypres and Flanders. It was on or near these ridges that many of the war’s most infamous battles would be fought: Messines, Wytschaete, Ploegsteert, Hollebeke, St. Eloi, Hooge, St. Julien, Zandvoorde, Langemarck, Zonnebeck, Zillebeck, Pilckem Ridge, Polygon Wood, and Passchendaele.[3]
When the German advance was stopped in November 1914, Ypres was the center of a protrusion or salient which was the only part of Belgium that the Germans had not captured. Throughout the war, they wanted to straighten out their line, while the Allies were determined to deny this last piece of Belgium to them, even though a salient—surrounded on three sides—could only be defended at very high cost. Whether or not possession of the city and salient was important enough strategically to justify the four-year struggle over it is an open question, but the symbolic importance of Ypres appears to have trumped strategic considerations.
The number of casualties sustained at and around Ypres throughout the war was enormous—more than 180,000 on both sides in November 1914 alone. As Winston Groom rather dramatically but accurately puts it, it was at Ypres that “more than a million soldiers were shot, bayoneted, bludgeoned, bombed, grenaded, gassed, incinerated by flamethrowers, drowned in shell craters, smothered by caved-in trenches, obliterated by underground mines, or, more often than not, blown to pieces by artillery shells.” It became one of the largest graveyards on earth.[4]
Both sides spent the winter of 1914–15 entrenching themselves, training new troops, and building up their resources, with a view to launching new offensives in the spring. Because the power of artillery on both sides had already been clearly demonstrated—more than half of all wounds received during the war were caused by artillery—extensive, elaborate trench systems began to be built. From now until the summer of 1918, the war would be one of attrition, and no one quite knew how to wage war that way. Lord Kitchener frankly acknowledged, “I don’t know what is to be done,”[5] and if he didn’t, who did?
It was at this point that the first Canadians arrived. They did not come from the First Division, however, because it was still training in England. They were the Princess Pats, who entered the trenches at Vierstraat, just southwest of Ypres, on January 6, 1915, despite their limited training and having been in France for only two weeks. The urgency to bring them in doubtless reflected not cavalier self-confidence but the fact that British losses had been so catastrophic that they were desperately needed.
Over the next two days, the Germans shelled their position, and two men were killed, while several others were wounded. Thus, Norman Fry and Henry Bellinger became the first Canadian soldiers to be killed in action in Europe. Like virtually all the men in the Princess Pats, Fry and Bellinger had been born in England and had emigrated to Canada before the war. Both had lengthy previous service in the British army—Fry with twenty years in the Coldstream Guards, and Bellinger with ten years in the Rifle Brigade. Bellinger was buried at a nearby military cemetery, but Fry’s body was never found, and his name is among the thousands who have no known graves whose names are inscribed on the Menin Gate Memorial at Ypres.
A little over a month later, in the middle of February, the First Canadian Division arrived to join Sir John French’s British Expeditionary Force, two divisions of which were holding the line in the eastern part of the Ypres Salient. It was the first division that was not a regular formation from the British army, and not a great deal was expected of the Canadians by the British, who looked down on them as untrained colonial amateurs, or the Germans either. General Gustav von Fabeck, one of the generals who had led the German assault on Ypres in October 1914, lumped the Canadians in with the “Indians, Moroccans and other trash, feeble adversaries who surrender in great numbers if attacked with vigor”[6]—even though he had never had any dealings with Canadian troops.
Even though the division went into the trenches during a relatively quiet period, it sustained 278 casualties in March, an indication that the meaning of “quiet” was relative. It was, needless to say, a sobering adjustment. Harold Baldwin recalled that the land was full of holes, large and small, from the shelling, and “in places there were heads, hands and feet sticking out of the ground. In one old trench laid [sic] fully sixty dead Boches half exhumed. Broken rifles, ammunition, equipment, [and] broken machine guns of every kind lay about.”[7]
The division’s introduction to combat took place early in the great battle known as the Second Battle of Ypres. The Canadians were assigned to help the British capture the village of Neuve Chapelle and Aubers Ridge, which overlooked Lille, La Bassée, the Yser Canal, and the railway lines that ran between them. The British attacked on the morning of March 10 and achieved some initial success, until the Germans counterattacked on the 12th, stopping the British advance. The Canadians did not participate in the actual assault but were placed on the British flank, with orders to tie down the German forces in the trenches facing them with heavy gunfire backed up by artillery fire.
When this futile assault was abandoned, the British had lost nearly 13,000 men, including one hundred Canadians who were what is now callously described as collateral damage. The 2nd Battalion’s Colonel Currie concluded, rather curiously, that the battle “was a great victory for the British,” although he acknowledged that the Canadians “did not gather much of the fruits of victory.”[8] Tim Cook claims that “few complained,” however, because Canada “had begun to do its part at the front, but few suspected they would soon be called on to save the British army from catastrophic defeat.”[9]
That came a month later. In early April, the First Division was shifted from Sir Douglas Haig’s First Army to Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien’s Second Army near St. Julien, another village near Ypres, because a German assault was anticipated. It began with an artillery barrage on the still largely intact city for a week, which did huge damage, including the destruction of the medieval cloth hall. The Germans then redirected their artillery to the Allied trenches. According to Currie, “the streets of St. Julien were covered with a curtain of shell fire” and “the air was filled with the weird sound of the
rifle bullets as they rattled a deadly tattoo on the few tiles that remained clinging to the charred and battered roofs.”[10]
A couple of hours later, a heavy, low-lying, greyish-yellow cloud was observed drifting westerly from the German lines. It was chlorine gas, which the Germans were using for the first time, despite having signed the 1907 Hague Convention banning the use of such weapons. This seemed at the time to be a great surprise to the British and French officers, although it should not have been. General Edmond Ferry, commander of the French Eleventh Division that was holding the line next to the Canadians, had learned about it in advance from a captured German soldier and had sent a warning to the commanders of both the British Twenty-Eighth Division and the Canadian division.[11]
Major Andrew McNaughton, who commanded the Canadian artillery, took the threat seriously, but aerial reconnaissance, if there was any, failed to reveal the 5,730 gas canisters that had been brought up to the German line before the attack. He nevertheless shelled the German lines anyway in an effort to damage the gas canisters, if they were in fact there, but obviously without effect.
Chlorine gas very quickly destroyed the lungs of those who breathed it in. “A man dies by gas in horrible torment,” Harold Peat said. “He turns perfectly black, . . . black as black leather, eyes, even lips, teeth, nails. He foams at the mouth as a dog in hydrophobia; he lingers five or six minutes and then—goes West.”[12] McNaughton described it similarly, if somewhat less dramatically. The men exposed to it “literally were coughing their lungs out; glue was coming out of their mouths. It was a very disturbing, very disturbing sight.”[13]
The German chlorine gas at Ypres was directed mainly at the French and Algerian troops who held the line on the left flank of the Canadians. About 6,000 troops were killed in a matter of minutes, and, not surprisingly, the Algerian troops, having no defense against a gas attack, panicked and fled. This created a four-mile gap in the line that enabled the Germans to take Kitcheners Wood,[14] where the British heavy artillery was located. The road to Ypres was now open, with only the newly arrived and inexperienced Canadian First Division in their way.
Remarkably, the Canadians, together with some French troops, stood their ground. This did not reflect bravery alone. When a Canadian Sanitary Corps officer with a background in chemistry quickly noticed that the brass uniform buttons of men exposed to the gas were turning green, indicating chlorine, the men were instructed to urinate into their handkerchiefs and hold them over their mouth and nose because the ammonia in urine would at least to some extent neutralize the chlorine.[15]
This did not mean that the Canadians were not affected by the gas. Baldwin, who was sent with a message to a dressing station at the back of the line, described what he saw there: “row after row of brawny Canadian Highlanders lay raving and gasping with the effects of the horrible gas, and those nearing their end were almost as black as coal. It was too awful.”[16]
The fact that the Canadians, totally inexperienced troops, held their line, while others around them fled when attacked by a shocking weapon against which they had no defense, is astonishing. As Cook says, “few would have suspected before the war that ordinary men,” meaning non-professional volunteer soldiers, “would rise to the occasion under such terrible strain. But most of the Canadians did, and their quiet heroics staved off defeat at Ypres.”[17]
Then, in the first major Canadian operation of the war, General Turner sent reserve companies of his Third Brigade into St. Julien, while Alderson ordered the Canadians to retake Kitcheners Wood. The problem was that Kitcheners Wood was on a hill overlooking St. Julien, so they would have to attack uphill. This became, in fact, a constant reality on the Western Front throughout the war: the Germans almost always held the high ground, which was relatively easy to defend, and Allied troops almost always had to attack uphill.
The attack by 1,600 men of the 10th and 16th Battalions took place just before midnight on April 22, even though there had been no opportunity to reconnoitre the ground. Inevitably, the Germans heard them coming, fired flares, and began shooting. When the surviving Canadians reached the German trenches, they were in a foul temper and took few prisoners, even though several Germans did try to surrender. In the process, the 10th Battalion was reduced to 5 officers and 188 men and the 16th to 5 officers and 260 men. In other words, two-thirds of the officers and men involved in the battle were lost.[18]
At this point, they dug in for the night. The Germans spent the 23rd shelling and firing on the Canadians, who managed to hang on despite serious losses. Then, early on the morning of the 24th, they launched another gas attack—this time aimed directly at the Canadians just west of St. Julien, hoping to drive them back with a view to capturing Poperinge, the Allied supply center eight miles west of Ypres. This gas attack was, of course, not unexpected, and the men had been issued cotton bandoliers which, when soaked in tubs of water that had been placed along the line and held to the nostrils, constituted some protection, albeit not much, from the gas. David Shand, a British soldier who happened to be in the area, later reported seeing between 200 and 300 Canadian soldiers at a casualty clearing station, some of them “still writhing on the ground, their tongues hanging out.”[19]
By noon on the 24th, most of the Canadian battalions had been shattered into company- and platoon-level units and had little or no communication with Alderson’s divisional headquarters, which were several miles to the rear and clearly out of touch with the situation. As a result, Turner found himself trying to direct a battle with scattered bits of information that were out of date by the time he got them. What was worse was that his headquarters were being shelled as well. In this situation, “the exhausted, slightly gassed, and increasingly shell-shocked” Turner made a serious error.[20]
Despite Alderson’s order to hold St. Julien, Turner instead moved his troops back to a stronger defensive position. It is not clear if he misinterpreted the order or concluded—rightly—that Alderson did not grasp how desperate the situation was. His decision, however, was suicidal for his troops because, in the middle of an intense, closely fought battle in broad daylight, he was ordering them to disengage and withdraw. This was when the 2nd Battalion, according to Colonel David Watson, suffered its heaviest losses in the battle.
What was worse was that the withdrawal of Turner’s Third Brigade created a 2,500-yard gap in the line, leaving Arthur Currie’s Second Brigade dangerously exposed. “Utterly bewildered” by the situation[21] and the failure of Major General Thomas Snow, commanding the British Twenty-Seventh Division, which included Canada’s Princess Pats, to respond to his calls for reinforcements, Currie now compounded Turner’s error by deciding to appeal personally to Snow at his headquarters.
This was tantamount to deserting his command during a battle. It was also futile. Snow, who had the “well-deserved reputation” of being “the rudest man in the British army” and had never made any secret of his contempt for “colonial” troops, not only refused to send reinforcements but told Currie to return to the front and “give them hell.” Currie later said it was the most “stupid remark” he had ever heard.[22]
Currie did return to his post and eventually pulled his men back to join what was left of the Third Brigade on Gravenstafel Ridge, a slightly better position. Curiously, Snow did in fact release five British battalions to fill the gap between Currie and Turner but didn’t deign to let Currie know he was doing it. Meanwhile, Turner had also abandoned his post, going to divisional headquarters to plead for reinforcements. When Alderson learned that Turner had withdrawn his brigade from the line and ordered them back, Turner refused, calling it suicide.
This entire situation was extraordinary. At the very beginning of their participation in the war, two Canadian generals were disobeying, or at least challenging, orders from British generals on the grounds that those generals didn’t understand the situation! It was undoubtedly true, but their behavior was insubordination. Meanwhile, the Germans had occupied St. Julien, but when Snow’s fiv
e battalions arrived, they counterattacked and drove the Germans back all along the front, enabling Currie to withdraw his forces.
The Princess Pats remained in the field to help defend Frezenberg Ridge against a German attack, which took place on May 8. Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Farquhar, had been killed by a sniper some weeks earlier, and his successor, Lieutenant Colonel H. C. Buller, had been wounded on May 4, so Major Hamilton Gault assumed command. He, too, was wounded during the heavy German bombardment on the 8th, and Captain Agar Adamson took charge.
By nine o’clock that morning, all of the battalion’s field and company officers were casualties from the savage artillery barrage, and NCOs had to take their places. Then Adamson was wounded that evening as well, and one of the NCOs, Lance Corporal A. G. Pearson, had to take command. The Princess Pats were cut off until eventually a British rifle brigade came to their rescue. The day’s fighting had cost them nearly 700 casualties out of their total strength of less than 1,000. Pearson was awarded the Military Cross for his part in the action and rose eventually to the rank of acting lieutenant colonel and commanded the regiment at the end of the war. The battle for Frezenberg, while largely forgotten by the general public, remains the most treasured battle honor of the Princess Pats to this day.
The Second Battle of Ypres dragged on until May 25 when it ended, like the first, in a stalemate. It had cost the Allies more than 70,000 men and the Germans about 35,000—a total, as Groom points out, of about 100,000 men “shot down for less than three miles of real estate.”[23] While neither side could be said to have won, the salient was now smaller than it had been, and the Germans occupied not only the high ground at the far edges of the ridges but also the high inner ridges close to the city. The Allies had given up the villages of Langemarck, Gravenstafel, St. Julien, Zonnebeck, and Westhoek, as well as Pilckem Ridge in the north and Frezenberg Ridge in the south.
Canada's Great War, 1914-1918 Page 10