by Mark Zuehlke
But the cold only worsened, and on one particularly bitter night a 16th Battalion sentry died from exposure. Sickness was rampant through the division’s ranks with the war diarist reporting on December 22: “Many of the men have bad colds.” By January 15, an outbreak of spinal meningitis had infected about forty men, and killed several. With the entire divisional camp increasingly resembling a natural disaster zone, the men spent more days than not digging drainage ditches or in other ways trying to keep the mud at bay.22 This meant little time could be found for combat training. One 16th Battalion soldier noted in his diary that only forty of the days spent on the plain entailed any training.23
Even when training days were allotted, all too often they were disrupted by weather. Two out of the four days the battalion mustered on the firing ranges they were met by a heavy snowstorm and dense mist that made it impossible to see any targets.
Adding to the difficulties throughout the last months of 1914 was an inability on the part of the War Office to decide how the division’s battalions should be organized. At Valcartier each had been composed according to Colonial regulations of eight companies designated by the first letters of the alphabet. But the War Office now wondered if the division should conform to Imperial regulations with each battalion reduced to four companies numbered one to four, for this was the normal establishment adopted by the regular divisions of the British Expeditionary Force in Flanders. Unable to reach a decision, orders were issued that saw the battalions “see-sawing from single to double companies and the frequent transfer of officers from one command to another, instruction during the days entirely given over to it was subject to confusion, unnecessary repetition of effort in some directions and neglect in others.”24
While decisions such as this remained in the air, the War Office came down with a definitive verdict on the battalion’s petition to call itself the Princess Mary’s Canadian Highlanders by refusing it. On the evening of December 14, the officers gathered to discuss what title to seek next and decided to petition for designation as the 16th Battalion Canadian Scottish. Two days later the War Office approved this request. Informally the battalion members were nicknamed Can Scots.
Another issue that the battalion’s officers had been wrestling with was whether they should march into combat wearing their respective tartan kilts or adopt something a little less colourful but likely more practical for field duty—khaki kilts. On the 21st they settled on acquiring ones made of khaki.25
With the New Year, the War Office finally ruled that the Imperial battalion model would be adopted. The decision sent a shockwave through the battalions as each had to forfeit three officers from its headquarters and eight subalterns deemed superfluous due to the streamlining of command. Lt.-Gen. Alderson was not particularly happy with the decision as he was left with a hefty number of surplus officers. In mid-January a further shrinkage occurred as the entire 4th Brigade was disbanded and its battalions—save the 4th, which had been transferred to 2nd Brigade when its 6th Battalion (Fort Garry Horse) was transformed into a reserve cavalry regiment—were designated as reinforcing units that would remain in England to form the Canadian Training Depot.26
While all this reorganizing was going on, the unrelenting weather and mud had served to reveal many deficiencies in the Canadian-made equipment. In November a shipment of 48,000 overshoes arrived from Canada to great welcome, but within ten days most had come apart and the boots with which the men had been outfitted in Valcartier were proving equally worthless. Alderson ordered British regulation boots distributed and required every unit commander to return a certificate attesting “that every man is in possession of a service pair of Imperial pattern Army boots.”
Alderson would have liked to be rid of the unreliable, overly heavy, and unwieldy Ross rifle as well. Even without the bolt being exposed to mud or rain it jammed frequently and was difficult to properly clean in the field. But Hughes would hear none of it and the British had insufficient Lee-Enfields to entirely equip the Canadians. So there was no alternative but to take the rifle with them to France.
A lot of other Canadian equipment would not be going. Despite Hughes’s efforts to prevent it, the MacAdam shovel was declared ineffective as a shield, ridiculously heavy to carry, and a poor implement for the most essential soldier’s task of digging a slit trench. British shovels were secured and the MacAdam shovel would remain in Britain. Eventually, 2nd Canadian Infantry Division conducted extensive field trials with it in France only to prove its unworthiness. Withdrawn from use, the shovels were sold for $1,400 as scrap metal.
Of 1st Division’s battalions, seven—including the 16th—had arrived mostly equipped with the obsolete Oliver pattern of webbing. Capable of carrying only 50 to 80 rounds rather than the regulation 150, it also lacked a pack or any means to lash an entrenching tool to it. The British War Office provided replacement webbing.27 Like most of the British Expeditionary Force (B.E.F.), the Canadians had been issued peaked caps for headgear—which provided no protection. (Steel helmets would not be introduced until just before the Battle of St. Eloi in the spring of 1916.28)
Both motor and horse-drawn vehicles manufactured in Canada were plagued with parts shortages and the division had far too many different models of each. Two types of the motor trucks were proven to suffer from serious defects, and fifty-one British lorries were substituted. Most of the horse-drawn wagons were replaced by British wagons, and the Canadian harnesses were scrapped in favour of British designs.
As these substitutions were put into effect, Hughes railed against every decision. “Our transport, our rifles, our trucks, our harness, our saddles, our equipment, our shovels, our boots, our clothing, our wagons,” he declared, “were all set aside and in many cases … supplanted by inferior articles.”29 But the troops on the sodden Salisbury Plain applauded each change.
On February 6, the battalion sent all unnecessary kit to stores and everyone knew the deployment was imminent as an advance party commanded by Captain Fleming departed for France that evening. As the replacing of equipment was still underway, the pace of getting ready became frantic. When Lt.-Col. Leckie discovered that the stamping of particulars on each soldier’s identity disc had not yet been done, shifts of men were required to work round the clock hurriedly carrying out this task.
Sickness and other calamities had also rendered the battalion under strength and efforts to draw reinforcements from the Canadian Training Depot based at Tidworth Barracks on Salisbury Plain came to naught. One officer sent to Tidworth to get reinforcements thought the depot’s commander either suffered “from nervous shock or sunstroke.” He could make no headway with the man and came away empty-handed, but also painfully aware of the disappointment “and irritation everywhere amongst the battalions left behind or being broken up.”
Finally, a second visit yielded an allotment of men but, upon arriving at the battalion, they refused en masse to don kilts and so had to be sent back to Tidworth only to be turned away at the gates. After much back and forth negotiation the men were returned to the 16th and told they had no choice but to wear kilts.
On February 10, with the battalion to sail for France the next day, an outbreak of measles among the Gordons, who made up No. 1 Company, was reported and the entire 16th Battalion found itself facing the spectre of being quarantined. The relief was palpable when it was discovered that only the forty men of No. 1 Company’s third platoon, all sharing two huts, had actually been exposed. This group was immediately isolated and would not rejoin the battalion until determined to be free of the disease.
Early on the morning of February 11, the rest of the battalion formed up and “a happy and proud bunch of boys bid farewell to our mud-hole.” Their last glimpse of the deserted camp where the men had endured such misery revealed a swarm of civilians descending on it “like vultures, making ready to cart away … everything they could lay their hands on.”30
In the late afternoon the battalion reached Avonmouth and boarded the 8,500-ton transpor
t Maidan—one of the many ships forming a convoy that would carry the Canadian contingent to France as the first step toward the trenches of Flanders.
chapter two
Learning War
- FEBRUARY-APRIL 1915 -
At 0400 hours on February 12, Maidan weighed anchor and sailed from Avonmouth at the rear of the convoy. As senior officer, Lt.-Col. Robert Leckie commanded all the troops aboard, which included not only the Canadian Scottish but also 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade’s artillery headquarters section and three Canadian Field Artillery batteries. Close to 2,000 men were jammed into “bare holds, into which they were so closely packed that it was impossible to lie down.” Hatches were left open and permission was granted for the men to go up on deck, but as this was crammed bow to stern with horses, vehicles, and artillery pieces, only a handful could leave the holds at any given time. In addition to the battalion’s 79 horses, 14 four-wheeled wagons, 21 two-wheeled wagons, 9 bicycles, and 5 motorcycles, the artillerymen had loaded 214 horses, 6 field guns, 4 four-wheeled wagons, 28 two-wheeled wagons, 2 bicycles, and one motorcycle.1
The predicted quick and straightforward crossing proved anything but when a sudden storm struck in the evening as the convoy entered the Bay of Biscay. Maidan pitched and rolled alarmingly in the growing swells prompting the ship’s captain to order the hatches rammed home as waves crashed onto the deck and threatened to flood the holds. All night long the storm only worsened and by first light had transformed itself into a fierce gale “with incessant violent squalls.” The convoy had been scattered, each ship fighting alone to make way at whatever best speed it could manage. At 1600 hours, Maidan’s captain scribbled in the ship’s log that “a strong gale and squalls of hurricane force were experienced with high dangerous seas.”2 Shortly thereafter, about 70 miles west of Ushant, he ordered the ship turned southwestward to meet the winds head on. The “gale could not be worse,” the ship’s captain warned Leckie as waves surged over Maidan’s bow and it wallowed forward at a mere two knots per hour.
Several hatch covers were punched in by waves that cascaded down to drench the helpless troops below. Icy saltwater mixed with the ever-increasing volumes of vomit sloshed around their ankles. The stench in the holds became almost unbearable. When the quartermaster doled out rations, most of the men who had not yet been sick became so. The battalion’s medical officer, Captain G. E. Gillies, warned Leckie that seventy-five percent of the troops aboard were seasick, some critically so.
On deck, a massive wave smashed the starboard horse shelter to pieces. Two animals were swept overboard only to be hurled back onto the deck by the following wave so forcefully that each suffered multiple bone fractures and had to be shot on the spot. An artillery officer and four of his gunners who had rushed to the ruined shelter in a vain attempt to prevent the loss of the untethered horses there were injured under the animals’ milling hooves. A Can Scot momentarily grasped the reins of one horse only to be plucked up by a wave and cast through an open hatch cover. Freefalling 15 feet, the man came down hard on his rear and cried, “By God, if I had landed on my other end, I’d have broken my neck.”3
That evening the storm eased slightly and Maidan turned back on course for St. Nazaire. Finally able to take stock, transport officer Lt. Colin Marshall was happily surprised to discover that only four horses had been killed. Although the storm still blew at dawn, it was clearly weakening. Late on the afternoon of February 14, Maidan, which had been at the convoy’s tail, was the first to drop anchor off St. Nazaire. To lift the spirits of his battered troops, Leckie assembled the Canadian Scottish’s seventeen pipers and ten drummers on the forecastle and bridge to play a long medley of marches and reels that greatly entertained the hundreds of French civilians gathered dockside in their Sunday best.4
The following morning, the troops started disembarking from Maidan and all men, animals, equipment, and stores were ashore by noon. Determined that 16th Battalion’s arrival at the head of the Canadian contingent should be appropriately recognized, Leckie obtained the base commander’s permission to parade his men in a long circuit through the city’s streets that would return them to the docks. With the pipe band at the fore, the thousand soldiers marched proudly past throngs of cheering civilians and French poilus, who were in St. Nazaire on leave from several nearby army camps. Along the way the Canadians were regularly besieged by children who insisted on carrying off their water bottles and bringing them back brimming with hearty red wine.
When the parade broke up at the dock, the men found stacks of “hairy, smelly goatskin coats” had been set out for them. After shrugging into these winter-issue coats, the battalion personnel quick-marched to a railroad wayside where a freight train waited. Thirty-eight men and nine junior officers were crowded into each boxcar while the senior officers settled into several first-class passenger carriages. Darkness was falling as the train chuffed out of St. Nazaire bound for Hazebrouck in France, just south of the Belgian border. A major railway centre connected by a spiderweb of lines to all points of the British front lines, Hazebrouck served as the British Expeditionary Force’s major supply and reinforcement distribution depot.
The rail trip took two days, the train shunting into Hazebrouck at 1230 on February 17. While the men began marching on foot the seven miles to the village of Caestre, where 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade was to be billeted, Leckie raced ahead on horseback to report to the commander of the advance headquarters there. He arrived only to find all the officers were absent, and learned that nobody had anticipated the battalion’s arriving so soon. Consequently, no preparations for housing the men were in place. An icy rain fell while Leckie frantically got the headquarters staff to have billets readied before his cold and soaked soldiers arrived. Yet when the battalion marched into Caestre, billets still had to be finalized. Despite the bitter rainfall, Lt. Hugh MacIntyre Urquhart later recorded in his personal diary that the battalion was forced “to stand in the street for a full hour before anything [was] done.” Finally the battalion was broken into groups by platoons or even sections and directed to houses in town or marched out into the countryside to occupy farmhouses or barns. Urquhart’s platoon trudged up a muddy road to a farmhouse only to be kept waiting outside for a half hour before being marched back to town and then out into the countryside again to another farmhouse that turned out to already be full of soldiers. Returning to Caestre, Urquhart finally managed to divide his platoon between a small schoolroom, a nearby hayloft, and a couple of cottages shortly before midnight.5
While the men were long in getting settled, the battalion’s senior officers had been assigned “most comfortable” billets in the village. The battalion’s official war diarist, however, noted with slight concern that the sound of “gun fire [was] quite audible” in the distance.6 A mere subaltern, Urquhart did not rate a comfortable billet. He bedded down at brigade headquarters. There were “no blankets, so slept on mattress with my wet coat above me. It was cold and very uncomfortable but being terribly tired I slept a little.”7
Caestre lay about 15 miles south of a front line that had remained largely unchanged since German and Allied forces had battered each other to a standstill in mid-October of the previous year. Initially the German invasion in the summer of 1914 had carried through to the village itself, but a British counterattack had regained Caestre and driven the enemy back about 10 miles before running out of steam a little less than three miles north of the Belgian textile town of Ypres. Both sides had begun digging in and, by year’s end, the two lines of facing entrenchments snaked for 500 miles from the North Sea across Belgium and France to the Swiss border. The two British armies, Gen. Sir Douglas Haig’s First and Gen. Horace Smith-Dorrien’s Second, held a 28-mile section of this front. First Army’s 11 miles centred on Neuve Chapelle while Second Army, to the immediate north, manned 17 miles running through the Lys and Douve valleys north from Bois Grenier to just beyond the Ypres-Comines railway immediately south of Ypres. Second Army’s left flank was guarded b
y the French Eighth Army, while First Army had the French Tenth Army to its right.
As Commander-in-Chief of the B.E.F., Field Marshal Sir John French’s initial intention for 1st Canadian Infantry Division was that it would form a reserve for Smith-Dorrien’s III Corps (each British Army being composed of three corps) after receiving a short indoctrination in trench warfare methodology.8 On February 19, however, the 16th Battalion’s training exercise consisted of the routine bayonet practice that saw the men in company formation “charging and thrusting at Sacks filled with Straw, strung on Rope between Trees,” the war diarist recorded. While the men vigorously tore straw enemies apart, Lt.-Col. Leckie and the other three battalion commanders of 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade accompanied Brig. Richard Turner in an examination of ground selected for a brigade parade before Field Marshal French. At one point Turner drew Leckie aside and warned him that, in just four days, the 16th Battalion would enter a section of trench for an on-the-ground orientation.
The front north of their village remained mysterious and unknown to the Canadians, a source of boundless rumour and speculation that substituted for the gap in factual knowledge. During the day, camp sounds close at hand dominated, but after nightfall the distant, rumbling thunder of artillery and the crackling sound of rifle and machine-gun fire came to the fore. On the night of February 18, the war diarist noted: “Lights of firing line show up brilliantly tonight.”9
At 1130 hours on February 20, a Saturday, 3rd Brigade paraded through heavy rain before Field Marshal French, Gen. Horace Smith-Dorrien, and 1st Canadian Infantry Division commander, Lt.-Gen. Edwin Alderson. After, French confided to Turner his opinion that “if the Canadians fight as well as they look, they will prove a formidable enemy.” He was particularly impressed by Leckie’s men complimenting him for having “a very smart Battalion.”10