by Mark Zuehlke
While the offensive had raged on, rumours and constantly changing orders had whirled through the ranks of the Canadians so that everyone was constantly on edge. Expecting the battle to spill over into its area, divisional headquarters ordered night patrols sent across No Man’s Land to the German wire to explore how it might be breached. The 16th Battalion, like the rest of the division, had no previous experience in such patrols. But soon men by twos and threes were creeping about in the darkness of a No Man’s Land rife with slimy mud and crisscrossed by waterlogged trenches. One patrol from Urquhart’s platoon consisting of privates Jack Ross and Alick MacLennan came upon a seven-foot-wide trench “and to cross it MacLennan had to get down into the water well over the waist line, carry Ross over on his shoulders and in turn be pulled out by the latter when they reached the further side.”29
Back at the forts, Urquhart grew more anxious with each passing hour that the night patrols remained out—not because of concern that the patrols would be ambushed by Germans, but rather because the men around him “were exceedingly nervous and might fire on our own patrol.” He was much relieved when the men returned after three hours of scouting.30 The news they brought was far from encouraging. Rather than suffering from low morale as higher command insisted was the case, the Germans had been busily repairing gaps created in the wire by artillery. And on returning to their lines the patrols had discovered two lanes, each about 30 feet wide, cut through the battalion’s defensive wire by German patrols—hardly the behaviour of an enemy considering retreat.
The night of March 13 brought more of the same, with the battalion sending out patrols and the Germans doing likewise. At one point Pte. Walter Ahier, standing sentry duty in Fort 10, spotted some shadows prowling down one of the lanes cut in the wire that had not yet been closed and fired on them. When a flare went up a German patrol was spotted quickly beating a retreat. In the morning the corpses of two Germans were found hanging on the wire in the area where Ahier had directed his rifle fire.
For the next two weeks the division remained in place on what was now considered an inactive front. Yet this did not mean that the 16th was spared casualties. The day-to-day sniping and random artillery fire ensured some men were either killed or wounded. On the evening of March 27, the Can Scots along with the rest of the Canadian division were relieved by remnants of the Northampton and Sherwood Foresters battalions which had been badly mauled in the offensive. The Canadians marched out to Estaires, a town about six-and-a-half miles behind the front lines. Their first stay of duty holding a divisional line on the front was at an end.31
From the time it had entered the trenches at Fleurbaix on March 4 to its departure, 16th Battalion lost ten men killed and eight wounded—a casualty rate deemed light and reflective of being posted to a quiet trench sector.32
Estaires, a major B.E.F. rest area a couple of miles east of the transportation junction of Hazebrouck, was congested with British and Indian troops. Having experienced severe snowstorms in the trenches the week before, the sudden outbreak of brilliant sunshine—although temperatures remained unseasonably cold—gave the town a holiday camp air. But the Canadians were not allowed to relax. Field parties were formed daily, marched toward the front, and put to work digging and improving rear communication trenches. Those not so employed were either engaged in combat training or route marches. On the last day of March the Can Scots spent the morning on entrenching duties forward and then in the afternoon completed a nine-mile route-march that Lt. Urquhart “enjoyed … very much.”33
The Canadians would later look back nostalgically to their time at Estaires. Meals were regular with plentiful portions and the billets comfortable, so that soon everyone felt rested up. “This good time must finish, too good to last,” one soldier scribbled in his diary. “Looks to me as though we are being fed up for the slaughter,” an officer warily confided to another.34
So there was little surprise on April Fool’s Day when orders transferred 1st Canadian Division to Second Army’s recently formed V Corps under command of Lt.-Gen. Sir H. C. O. Plumer. One battalion after another, over a two-day period, marched to Cassel, about 17 miles west of Ypres, to take responsibility from two French divisions for the eastern section of the Ypres Salient.35
The Canadian Scottish made the move on April 7, rising at 0430 and marching off through light drizzle by 0645 in what soon became “a splendid day.” Lt. Urquhart reported that they happily left “the flat country and got into rolling uplands. … Men stood march fairly well altho[ugh] about [half] dozen had sore feet.” At 1400 hours, after marching about 17 miles, the battalion reached the Cassel billets from which it would spend the next week preparing to take over the French section.
Cassel’s 3,000-strong population was overrun by French troops comprising a divisional headquarters, but also by an equally large number of men who seemed to have no unit affiliation. When Urquhart raised the matter with a French officer he learned that the majority of one regiment had been ordered to the rear after it broke because of collective cowardice. “What a fearful fate,” Urquhart thought.36
April 14 saw the battalion on the move again, with 3rd Brigade in the vanguard of a Canadian divisional relief of the French 11th Division to be completed over a three-day period. The move began after dark, but the Can Scots did not enter Ypres until after midnight. Two large searchlights cut the sky with their harsh, wide beams and cast the place in an eerie incandescent glow. Ypres was “sadly battered,” the historic Cloth Hall (built in 1200) shattered. Once through the ruins, the pace quickened and the men trotted over another three-mile stretch of road. A halt was then called and the battalion stood for forty-five minutes, men stamping feet to keep circulation flowing in the hard, cold night. Then they set off on the final leg of the journey to the trenches about three more miles away. “Flares were going up on all sides and again we seem to be on a salient. Passed through village of St. Julien which was shelled almost to pieces. Passed on to Reserve trench where we found Infantry officers of charming disposition and also discovered we were to relieve 79th R[égiment] of French Infantry. This officer was through all war and wounded on 20th August. Other officer attached from cavalry. He also had much experience and at Marne accounted for 8 Germans.” Although most pleasant in their manner, the French officers had bad news for the battalion. There was no room in the trenches for them as the French were not yet ready to hand off to the Canadians. So the battalion trudged wearily back to Ypres. Here they remained for two days until finally going back up to the trenches on the night of April 16 on a cold, rainy night.37
While the rest of the battalion moved into the front line, No. 4 Company remained in reserve at St. Julien which, its houses destroyed by artillery, was a complete ruin. “A place badly shelled smells far from pleasant,” Urquhart noted. Being in reserve entailed responsibility for carrying ammunition through the communication trenches to the front, and the job was not completed until 0500 hours.38
With the dawn, the Canadians looked about them in dismay at the parlous condition of the trenches. “The French must have slacked a great deal to leave trenches in such condition,” Urquhart groused.39 They soon learned that the forward trenches being so ill-constructed reflected a difference between British and French tactics. British doctrine held the front trenches must be defended at all costs and so they were constructed to withstand German attack. By contrast, the French only lightly manned front trenches in anticipation that when attacked a retirement to stronger lines behind would ensue. This enabled the 75-millimetre artillery to turn the front lines into a killing ground that created a “defence in depth.” As they intended no final stand in the front trenches and wanted to avoid presenting the attacking Germans with good positions, the French built only minimal forward trenches. Consequently the field works, whether below or above ground, were unconnected in many places and lacked traverse lines to offer protection from flanking fire. As water was struck at just two feet of depth it was necessary to build breastworks of sod, mud, an
d sandbags to a height of four feet or more. While the French had carried this work forward to some degree, they had not thickened the walls to British standards and most were deemed incapable of stopping even a bullet’s penetration. In some places the French had merely dug down to the waterline without erecting any form of breastwork above the shallow trench. Also lacking were Parados—low walls behind the breastworks that provided protection from shrapnel.
But not only negligent French fortification work disgusted the Canadians. More germane, one divisional report claimed, was that the defences were in a “deplorable state and in a very filthy condition, all the little broken down side trenches and shell holes apparently being used as latrines and burial places for bodies.” Behind the Canadian Scottish position both the communication trenches leading to the rear and the open ground behind the front lines were littered with French dead, either half buried or left sprawling on the surface. Many times a soldier started digging only to disinter a French corpse.40
On that first morning in the Ypres Salient, Captain William Rae, who commanded No. 2 Company, looked over a parapet with binoculars toward the German lines and puzzled over oddities in the way the enemy frontage was constructed. “The whole top of it had been pulled about and altered, and there were various openings in it, unlike anything seen before.” Rae reported his observations to battalion headquarters, which could make no sense of the German changes and so did not pass the intelligence up the line.41 That the openings were points enabling hoses linked to poison gas cylinders to release their contents was never considered. Although intelligence gathered had alerted the high command that a chemical warfare attack might be imminent, nobody at the lowly level of 1st Canadian Infantry Division had been advised of the danger. So the Canadian Scottish set to improving their defensive works, fearful only of being struck down by shell or bullet as April 22 drew ever closer—when the division would face its first true battle in the most cataclysmic day the war had yet seen.
chapter three
Baptism
- APRIL 22-MAY 4, 1915 -
The British Expeditionary Force had no idea a German offensive was in the works. Instead, Brigadier Field Marshal Sir John French had confidently expected to wrest the initiative into his hands with a British assault on Hill 60 in the southern sector of the Ypres Salient on April 17. This 60-metre hill was really just a tailing pile created during construction of the Ypres-Comines railway in the 1860s, but standing atop the Messines-Passchendaele ridge crest it provided the highest point overlooking the salient, and its loss would deny German artillery spotters an ideal vantage.
To facilitate the attack British engineers had tunneled under Hill 60 and emplaced five mines each loaded with five tons of explosives. Just before the 13th Brigade of II Corps’s 5th Division led the assault forward, the mines were set off in one earth-shattering detonation. The German garrison on the hill was decimated, many bodies and body parts hurled pin-wheeling through the air. Fifteen minutes later the British infantry started digging in on the smoking and hugely holed earth mound. German reaction was swift; the hill was subjected to withering artillery fire and repeated counterattacks that came close to throwing the British off. But they hung on tenaciously through four days of bitter fighting. Finally, 5th Division’s alarming casualty rate became so severe that on April 21 Brig. Malcolm Smith Mercer’s 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade was sent as reinforcements, warned to be ready to join the beleaguered troops on Hill 60 at only an hour’s notice.1 Mercer’s 2nd and 4th Battalions were consequently standing by in forward trenches as the Germans put in motion a devastating attack they hoped would force the Allies to abandon the salient entirely.
A deep bulge thrusting about four miles into the German line, the Ypres Salient had been created at the end of October 1914. Salients are naturally dangerous because the troops inside them are exposed to attack from three flanks. But they also require the opponent to commit sufficient forces to guard these three sides, meaning the Ypres Salient was tethering thousands of Germans in place who might have been committed to offensive operations elsewhere. This was precisely why the Allies saw it as strategically vital real estate to hold onto while the Germans equally sought its elimination.
Having lain in readiness since April 15, while waiting for the fickle prevailing winds that would carry the gas into the Allied lines to turn in their favour, conditions finally were right for the Germans on the morning of April 22. The German plan envisioned only two corps—the XXIII Reserve and XXVI Reserve—advancing across a four-mile front to Pilckem Ridge, which was delineated by the Boesinghe-Pilckem-Langemarck-Poelcappelle road. Here the Germans would dig in, their presence on the ridge expected to render it “impossible for the enemy to remain longer in the Ypres salient.”2 The decision to limit the scope of the attack reflected German ambivalence over the attack’s purpose. While pinching out the salient was desirable, this offensive arose to achieve two other goals deemed more important. First, the offensive should divert Allied attention away from the Russian front where the Austro-German armies were concentrating for a major offensive in Galicia. Second, it would test the use of poison gas on the battlefield.
Although a signatory to the 1899 and 1906 Hague Conventions banning chemical warfare, Germany had started developing gas weapons in late 1914 for assaults on “positions which were constructed with all the modern methods of the art of fortification.” Soon German scientists had the means to release “chlorine gas as a cloud, propelled towards the enemy by a suitable wind.” Chlorine, a staple in the dye industry, was readily available and cheap, and could be confined as a gas in existing cylinders. By 1915 Germany was producing thirty-seven tons of chlorine gas daily. Just five days’ worth of this production—loaded into 6,000 cylinders—was required for the attack. Although cheap and convenient to produce, chlorine gas remained a crude weapon. Much heavier than air, the gas was slow to dissipate and clung to the ground like a heavy fog, dependent on the all-important wind to carry it in the right direction. Chlorine gas, however, was a brutal weapon that attacked the lungs and immediately incapacitated anyone exposed to it. For the Germans following behind, the gas would serve well. It left no noticeable residue in its wake, and being a visible green cloud, it was easy not to advance into its deadly wake.
The Germans had finished deploying 5,730 gas cylinders and the troops forming the assault wave across a 1,200-yard front running from west of Poelcappelle to a little east of Steenstraat eleven days before the winds finally permitted the attack to proceed. With each passing day, preventing the Allies from discovering the cylinders or concentration of soldiers became more difficult. The Canadian Scottish company commander, Captain William Rae, had not been alone in filing a report about the strange openings appearing at intervals along the German front. A couple of deserters also offered precise intelligence that predicted an imminent gas attack. But British high command gave the reports little credence and French Army general headquarters was even more dismissive, resorting to scolding one divisional commander who instructed his men to prepare themselves to withstand a gas assault. “All this gas business,” the French officer was told, “need not be taken seriously.” As a result, on April 22 the Allies were completely unprepared.3
The Canadian Division at this time held Second Army’s left flank, a 4,500-yard front astride a low valley through which flowed the Stroombeek, a tributary of the Steenbeek River. Winding along at distances of one to 2,000 yards behind the division’s front was Gravenstafel Ridge, which drew its name from a small hamlet close to the Canadian boundary line with the 28th British Division on its right. To the left was the 45th Algerian Division with the dividing line between these French troops and the Canadians being a road running south from German-held Poelcappelle to Ypres.
On this Thursday, 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade was deployed next to the Algerians with 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade to its right. The divisional reserve was provided by 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade, which was also on standby to possibly relieve the Britis
h troops embattled on Hill 60. The two brigades holding the front each had two battalions forward, one a short way back providing close support, and its fourth battalion stationed as divisional reserve on the northern outskirts of Ypres.4 Brig. Richard Turner’s 3rd Brigade had the 13th Royal Highlanders and the 15th (48th Highlanders) forward, with the 14th Royal Montreal Regiment providing close support. The Canadian Scottish were back in divisional reserve. Turner’s brigade headquarters was in St. Julien.5
On this morning Lt.-Col. Leckie had his No. 3 and No. 4 companies placed around a little village called la Brique, which lay east of the Canal de l’Yser within a stone’s throw of St. Jean. His other two companies were positioned on the northern edge of Ypres where a factory stood at the head of the canal. Turner’s battalion headquarters was on the Rue Dixmude—a road paralleling the canal that led to city centre. When the Germans began shelling the French sector immediately west of the battalion, Leckie ordered the two companies at la Brique moved farther out on the flank so they were hard up against the canal’s west bank just outside of Ypres, across the water from the nearest Algerian troops.6
Leckie did not act out of any sense of alarm. The tactical move was just a standard precaution in response to the German artillery fire. In the Canadian lines, the air was relaxed with the Canadian Scottish forming by platoons to receive their back pay and learn whether they were among the lucky few to be granted an extended leave period. As the day was milder than normal, some took the opportunity to bathe in the canal while others strolled off into the battered city of Ypres.