by Mark Zuehlke
Many Can Scot officers would have disagreed. Lt. Urquhart, serving with the Winnipeg Camerons of No. 4 Company thought it “extraordinary how inefficient the Canadians are and yet how they think they know everything.” Scots born and raised, the thirty-four-year-old Urquhart was concerned about how his company commander, Captain John Geddes, “fusses a great deal because of over anxiety as to [the] men,” while the company’s second-in-command, Captain George Jameson, seemed “quite undisturbed” by anything, “absolutely disinterested” even. Urquhart felt that Lt.-Col. Leckie went “after Geddes quite a lot,” but for little apparent reason. As for Major John Leckie, Urquhart was amused at his views that there were “too many Imperial officers in Canada. If they had a few more Imperial officers,” Urquhart noted in his personal diary, “things would not be so horribly mixed up in [the] Canadian contingent.”11
The older Leckie had been born in Halifax, the younger in Acton-Vale, Quebec. Each had followed a remarkably similar track by first attending Bishop’s College School in Lennoxville, Quebec, then Royal Military College, and finally King’s College in Windsor. Robert Leckie had become a civil engineer and his brother a mining engineer. Both had spent the early part of the 1890s deeply involved in respective local militias before volunteering for South African service and, once back in Canada, renewed their militia ties. The two men were close friends and there was no trace of rivalry between them despite John Leckie’s being subordinate to his elder brother. Robert Leckie was a short whippet of a man with a lean, aesthetic face that appeared all the more so due to a deep scar on his right cheek inflicted by a leopard attack while hunting big game in Somaliland. Leckie often compensated for his natural shyness by affecting an aloof and superior air, which he then countered by over-playing the role of “courteous gentleman.” He treated subordinate officers with studied respect, praising them when deserved and rarely rebuking those in error. In combat, he remained perpetually calm and keenly observant, delivering orders in a soft, conversational voice. Seemingly unflappable, his battle demeanour would serve to steady the battalion from the top down.12
Leckie’s unflappability was steadily put to the test during these first days of overseas service. On the Sunday after its arrival in France, the battalion paraded for Church services, but despite the fact most of the men were Protestants, religious differences resulted in a “sad mix-up over Presbyterian and [Church] of [England] service.” Captain George Ross, a Cameron who was second-in-command of No. 1 Company’s primarily Gordon troops, loudly “objected to the Church of England clergyman, so left with some of his men.” In an attempt at mollification Leckie passed word down “that any Presbyterian who did not wish to attend service might fall out,” Urquhart wrote after, “and when I looked around only 4 of my Platoon were left, likewise large part of 16 [platoon].… [It] seems a pity more consideration should not be shown to Scottish National religion and Presbyterian chaplains.”13
After the Church parade sputtered to conclusion, Major John Leckie stumped off at the head of a group of officers and men for a short, five-mile march to the summit of Mont des Cats in hopes of catching a glimpse of the mystical front lines. Climbing a windmill that surmounted the summit, Leckie and the other officers “looked down on a panorama of field, wood and village stretching to the horizon line—thrilling experiences which in due time would be related in detail to their fellows; but there was not a sight of the trenches or a sound of battle, nothing but the quietness of a sunny, spring-like, Sunday afternoon.”14
Two days after the church-fealty fiasco, the 3rd Brigade marched 10 miles east from Caestre to Erquinghem for a period of front-line training in the Bois Grenier Trench system. Over five days all 1st Division battalions were to send small groups of officers and men to spend time in the line with British troops stationed there. Everyone from company commanders to private soldiers were assigned to individuals of equal rank for a forty-eight-hour period. Thereafter platoons of Canadians assumed responsibility of a trench section for twenty-four hours in association with a British infantry company. While this process went on, battalion commanders and their staff studied alongside their immediate opposite numbers “the many details of battalion administration in trench warfare.” Artillery officers and brigade and divisional staff meanwhile did the same with their British counterparts.15
When No. 15 Platoon marched toward the trenches, Lt. Urquhart noted that his “men presented a weird appearance clad in their goatskin coats and laden down with heavy packs, surmounted by firewood and the long French loaves sticking well out to both sides, for in early 1915 the troops went into the line with all their worldly goods on their backs.” As they closed on the front in the gathering dusk “the distant rolling sound-waves of the machine-gun and rifle fire” intensified. Suddenly the farms were nothing but ruins, buildings reduced to burned-out shells with rotting corpses of animals strewn about. Bois Grenier village was a ruin. A British Argyll & Sutherland Highlander guide ticked off the names that had been given to various farms now used as marking points for passage into the trenches: Ruined Farm, Burnt Farm, and Dead Cow Farm. When one man lit a smoke a voice snapped out of the darkness, “Put out that damned cigarette!” Suddenly the Canadians discerned about them “small groups of British soldiers standing … with slung rifles, talking in low tones or passing silently to and fro with burdens of sandbags, shovels and rations, the nearer bang of musketry or rat-tat of the machine gun and the more frequent whine and crack of the bullet.” One patch of ground was cluttered with crude wooden crosses that marked the graves of men recently killed and hurriedly interred.16
Rather than the entire battalion being sent directly into the trenches, the men were quartered in several farms and then fed forward by platoons. Urquhart’s platoon billeted at Joseph Delecourt’s farm. “I have my horses no longer,” he told the lieutenant in French. “They are working for Germans.” About 300 yards away, a battery of large naval guns fired at irregular intervals with massive thundering roars that shook the house to its core.
On February 24, Urquhart joined several other officers in meeting their Argyll & Sutherland counterparts for a trench visit. He thought the trenches here were unreasonably wide and therefore “rather unsuitable for shell fire.” The following night, Urquhart and Captain Sydney Goodall took their No. 4 Company platoons into the trenches for forty-eight hours’ orientation. Soon the Canadians were warned they had entered a “fire zone” and seconds later heard “shots whizzing over our heads. Went forward with instructions to fall flat if flare went up. However, beyond bullets whizzing nothing happened.”17
The officers were guided to a dugout housing the company headquarters while the sergeants got their platoons situated. After dining with their British counterparts, Urquhart and Goodall joined the troops in the trenches and were surprised to find the defences here were not trenches at all but rather raised earthen banks called breastworks that had periodic overhead protection provided by sandbagged roofs. A thin line of barbed wire and some scattered forward listening posts that were also above-ground provided the only advanced defensive works. Urquhart again fretted over how exposed the men behind the earthen wall were to shellfire. Just 300 yards across the way the Germans had erected a similar embankment from which rifle and machine-gun fire emitted regularly at a desultory rate that ensured men new to this life remained anxious. The Canadians soon learned that neither side had erected above-ground defensive works out of choice. A system of trenches had been dug in the late fall but “in that flat country all of them, including communication trenches, had become completely water-logged.”18
The Canadians’ introduction to the trenches was alternately frightening and tedious, something they would soon realize was common fare for soldiers whose trench sectors were subject only to holding actions rather than full-scale battles. Snipers posed a constant danger, a bullet invited if one risked a glance over the parapet during daytime hours or lit a match at night. Seemingly at random, artillery fire would bracket one section of line,
so there was never warning of its arrival. Noise, particularly gunfire, continued around the clock and made sleep difficult. Dugouts were draughty, usually muddy, and generally uncomfortable. During its orientation period, the Canadian Scottish were fortunate to suffer only one man wounded. But another of its men was injured by flying glass while he lay sick in hospital after a concentration of high-velocity shells fell on the battalion’s rear area.19
On February 28 the division’s orientation was abruptly cancelled and the Canadians rushed to relieve 7th British Division, which was part of IV Corps in Gen. Douglas Haig’s First Army, instead of going to Gen. Horace Smith-Dorrien’s Second Army as originally planned. It took two days for the division to be quietly extracted from the front and on March 3 take full control of a 6,400-yard frontage in the area of Fleurbaix. Here 16th Battalion relieved the 2nd Battalion of the Border Regiment and looked out at Aubers Ridge, which rose toweringly in this flat plain to heights of 70 feet.
As had been the case in their orientation area, the ground here was so waterlogged that trenches had been abandoned in favour of breastworks constructed with sod and sandbags. Rather than being linked continuously together, however, this defensive system consisted of individual outposts that, by day, were cut off from each other and the rear areas because the intervening ground was exposed to enemy fire. These “forts,” as the British designated them were soon discovered to be only “just bullet-proof.” They were also small, with the largest of them capable of housing only two platoons while most could accommodate only one. Behind these frontline fortifications ran a network of more substantial breastworks termed “defended localities.” Having some overhead shelter, these afforded a degree of protection from weather but were still completely vulnerable to any artillery fire.
All around the Canadians lay “complete desolation. Broken farm implements lay around, the carcasses of dead animals tainted the air; no sign of life was visible in it beyond the occasional signaller charily testing lines. At night the scene was very different. The desolation of the day was hidden; its silence replaced by the sounds of the activity of many men engaged in the improvement of the defences, or on carrying and ration parties, and by the crack of rifle fire and bursts of machine-gun fire which went on from dusk to dawn. As dusk closed in the odd shot would be fired here and there, the fire gradually increasing in volume as it became darker until it reached a crescendo of sound up and down the whole front, gradually dying down as dawn approached, until, when daylight came, it ceased, as it began, with the occasional shot.”20
On March 4 the hazards presented to anyone trying to duck from one isolated fort to another became clear when Sgt. George Arthur Biddlecombe of No. 2 Company was hit in the chest by a sniper’s bullet that lodged in his body. Despite the severity of the wound he could not be evacuated from one of the forts until after nightfall. Even then the carrying party “had a hot time from snipers,” as it carried the man to the rear. Biddlecombe survived.21
At regular intervals the Can Scots swapped front-line duty with the 13th Battalion (the Royal Highlanders of Canada). Each transition reinforced the surreal nature of their war zone. Whereas, at the front, the risk to life was constant, in the rear area, only a short distance away, “there was no interference from the enemy. There was little hostile artillery fire and no aerial bombing. The houses as far forward as brigade reserve, say one thousand to 1,200 yards behind the line, were intact and occupied by the French people, old men and women who worked in fields within sight of the enemy.
“And there was a greater freshness and cheerfulness amongst the troops generally. The siege warfare outlook had not seized upon the imagination. The trenches were looked upon as temporary barriers only.”22 But the Canadians had yet to be exposed to a real battle—something that changed on March 10 when the Allies launched a major offensive at Neuve Chapelle, immediately to the right of the division’s frontage.
The Can Scots had just re-entered the fortification line under cover of darkness in the early morning hours of March 9 amid rumours that a major battle was shaping up. What should have proved an orderly changeover proved chaotic from the outset and took four-and-a-half hours to effect, as the Royal Highlanders guided their replacements into their positions in a “very haphazard” way while appearing “anxious to get out.”
Lt. Urquhart lost half his section in the inky blackness, and his sergeants—Murdo Ridge and John Steele—also lost contact with some of their sections leaving the platoon “at sixes and sevens.” When Urquhart visited Ridge’s designated fort, he found the sergeant “much flustered and [that Cpl. James Gordon] Craig also did not seem quite on the job and exceedingly nervous about position. [Sgt.] Steele was at Fort 10 and they also were in a most anxious, even dazed, position.”
Eventually the lieutenant got his platoon settled into its two forts and set them to filling sandbags to strengthen the positions. Captain Geddes warned Urquhart “there might be a general advance tomorrow and that at 8 a.m. we were to start bursts of rapid fire and machine-gun fire so as to give the idea to the Germans that an attack might be contemplated from this front.”23 This Canadian deception was intended to prevent the Germans shifting men to reinforce the line where the offensive was to fall. Only if the British to the right achieved a major breakthrough would 1st Canadian Infantry Division advance in earnest.
Originally the offensive had been conceived as an Anglo-French joint assault. But on March 7, Gen. J. J. Joffre apologetically advised Gen. Sir Douglas Haig that, as the French army was already conducting an offensive in the Champagne area, it lacked sufficient reserves for an offensive alongside the British. Rather than cancelling the operation, Haig decided to go it alone with an assault aimed at piercing the German front and advancing out of First Army’s centre a half mile to secure the gaggle of buildings that made up Neuve Chapelle. The attack was to begin on March 10 with a massive artillery barrage shattering the German breastworks and shredding their wire defences to open the way for two corps—the IV and Indian—to strike like a “battering ram” and “carry the Germans off their legs.” Once through Neuve Chapelle the combined Indian-British force would advance a further three miles to gain Aubers Ridge. Haig and Field Marshal French confidently predicted the preponderance of men they were committing to such a narrow-frontage assault assured success.24 Against an estimated three German battalions manning the defensive works with four more standing in immediate reserve, First Army was committing forty-eight. The British also had, as described in Haig’s Order of the Day, artillery “both more numerous than the enemy’s and also larger than any hitherto used by any army in the field. Our Flying Corps has driven the Germans from the air.” With the Germans so weak on the ground, Haig hoped to overwhelm and send them reeling backward without losing his momentum. “Quickness of movement is therefore of first importance to enable us to forestall the enemy and thereby gain success without severe loss. “At no time in this war has there been a more favourable moment for us, and I feel confident of success. The extent of that success must depend on the rapidity and determination with which we advance.”25
In the grey light of dawn, on a welcome and rare clear morning, the Canadians looked to their flank as the massive barrage began thundering at 0730 hours. Half an hour later British troops could be seen advancing on Neuve Chapelle. Within twenty minutes a 1,600-yard gap had been punched through the German front lines. An hour later Neuve Chapelle was declared clear, the leading British battalions meeting virtually no resistance as they paused on the first phase halt line to await orders from corps headquarters to resume the advance.26
Meanwhile, Canadian riflemen and machine gunners had opened up as scheduled with rapid bursts of fire they continued to lay down at fifteen-minute intervals throughout the day. At about 1000 hours, forty-two-year-old L/Cpl. Duncan Patterson was blazing away when a German sniper’s bullet struck his rifle “between stock and barrel, glanced off into Patterson’s cheek and then into his body.” Lt. Urquhart and a couple other men “tried t
o staunch [his] blood but it was impossible.” Stretcher-bearer William Mowat quietly cautioned that it was no use. “Jugular,” he whispered. Patterson quickly bled to death. “We could see him die and, as he was the first man killed and we were covered with his blood, we got quite a turn.”27
The Canadians kept up their fire while wondering how the attack on their flank was developing. There seemed little indication now that a major offensive was underway, the gunfire from that area desultory and seemingly coming from static positions. In fact, the rigid dictates that higher command must control the pace of the offensive had brought it to a grinding halt when enemy counter-artillery fire destroyed telephone and telegraph lines. Forced to rely on runners, orders from corps headquarters and reports from the front were taking more than an hour to travel to and fro. Trying to keep the battalions aligned across the breadth of their frontages, the corps commanders waited on their lagging outer flanks to catch up to those in the centre, which had broken deep into the German lines. Farther ahead than the Indian Corps, IV Corps halted to allow the other to come abreast.
At 1530 hours, French realized the attack was losing all momentum and ordered each corps to advance from where they were without regard to the position of the other. But as the order trailed from corps to each division and then down to each brigade and subsequently to the battalions, time trailed away. Not until 1730 hours, with dusk falling, did the offensive get moving again. With five hours to reorganize, the Germans had doubled their forces by this time, and as the British infantry moved in broad lines across flat fields, German machine guns opened up from well-sited positions and the slaughter began.
For the next two days the British tried to renew the offensive but were repeatedly brought to a bloody halt by heavy defensive fire. At 2240 hours on March 12, Haig cancelled the operation. Neuve Chapelle cost First Army 12,892 casualties. This included about one hundred men from the Canadian division, which was deemed to be “no more than the normal wastage period for that [length of] period in the line.”28