by Mark Zuehlke
As they plunged in they found that “barely a few of them waited for us and these were shot or bayoneted at once. I jumped clear over the trench and rushed into the wood with some men. It was full of undergrowth and most difficult to get through but ultimately we came to the far side, the Germans flying before us. I cannot tell you everything that happened, but ultimately we established a line about 1000 yards back from the original German front.”29 Rae and the others who had spontaneously driven on through the wood rather than holding up at the trench began digging in where they were.
Moving through the woods one Can Scot “vaguely saw some Germans and rushed at the nearest one. My bayonet must have hit his equipment and glanced off, but luckily for me, another chap running beside me bayoneted him before he got me. By this time I was wildly excited and shouting and rushing into the wood up a path towards a big gun which was pointed away from us. Going through the wood we ran into several Germans, but I had now lost confidence in my bayonet and always fired.”30 The gun the soldier saw was one of the British field guns overrun by the Germans.
Urquhart, too, had plowed into the woods, firing his revolver at retreating Germans until it jammed. He scooped up a rifle lying next to a 10th Battalion man who had fallen seconds before right in front of him. Some horses were tied to trees in the wood and Urquhart noticed one “standing on three legs, holding one leg up as if it had been hit by a bullet. We rushed through the wood coming out on the further side from the German trench we captured. German flares were now going up behind us to the left and it looked to us as if we had broken through the German line. We started to entrench on the far side of the wood. … Col. Boyle of the 10th I met on the right of the wood a short time afterward, also Col. Leckie. … Col. Boyle was wounded about this time. Col. Leckie was directing the digging in and giving orders that the 10th who were collected in a group near a house were to connect up from the hedge where we were digging in to the right where a further party of the 16th had started to entrench.”31
Boyle had been asking a junior 16th Battalion officer about where the Canadian Scottish were deploying. Drawing out a map, Boyle turned on an electric torch, pronounced “he was satisfied with the information given,” and then started walking back to his men. Moments later he was struck by a machine-gun burst. Five slugs shattered his thigh. Mortally wounded, the battalion commander died three days later in hospital.32
As far as Urquhart could determine, the 10th Battalion men were not digging in, possibly because its command structure was in disarray after Boyle’s death. Hoping to help restore order, Urquhart approached the battalion’s second-in-command, Major Joseph MacLaren, and relayed Leckie’s orders about digging in. Seemingly distracted, MacLaren replied that “he was wounded in the leg” and headed toward the rear.33 MacLaren was eventually loaded into an ambulance, but it was struck by an artillery shell while passing through Ypres and the officer was killed.34
Urquhart and the few officers who were left finally got the men of both battalions entrenching. The situation was dangerously confused, with no clear idea about where the Canadian flanks rested or whether they could expect any support or reinforcement. German fire was coming from several houses to the north of the wood.35
Leckie told Urquhart he was going back to find out whether reinforcements would be forthcoming and advised Rae that he was in command of the forward position. Back at the captured trench, Leckie looked around and estimated that the Germans had lost about 100 killed, 250 wounded, and 30 uninjured men taken prisoner. More Germans seemed to be milling in the woods attempting to surrender, but Leckie could spare no men to deal with them. He cautioned the men within hearing “against dealing harshly with prisoners.” Tempers were hot as the battalions began assessing how badly they had been cut up. Leckie scribbled out a brief report and an urgent plea for reinforcements and sent it by runner to the brigade.36
About 0100 hours on April 23, one of 16th Battalion’s machine-gun squads brought its Colt machine gun forward. The machine-gun officer, Lt. Reginald Hibbert Tupper, had the gun set out on the flank in an attempt to enfilade the German trenches in front of Oblong Farm and the area extending back from the farm to the southwest corner of the wood. This section of wood had yet to be cleared and seemed strongly held by the Germans, who often shouted that the Canadians had best surrender for they were surrounded. While the men could ignore the verbal harassment, there was nothing they could do to stop the deadly crossfire cutting into their lines from the German positions. The enemy fire from the southwest kept intensifying.
As the machine gunners ventured forth to try to meet the German fire with their own, Lt.-Col. David Watson brought two companies of his 2nd Battalion into the woods while sending a third company to directly attack Oblong Farm. Soon intense gunfire could be heard from the direction of the farm and then all fell silent, leading Watson to advise Leckie that he thought his men had succeeded in taking that position. The two battalion commanders decided these reinforcements should consequently try to clear the trenches in the woods, but the two companies had too few men to succeed at this venture. A thirty-minute assault launched at 0130 hours was finally repulsed. During the course of this fight, Tupper’s machine-gun squad was “practically surrounded and subjected to intense fire.” Tupper was “dangerously hit, and rendered so helpless that he was only able to drag himself back into the Canadian lines lying flat on the ground.” When the 2nd Battalion attack failed, the Germans used the opportunity to charge and overrun the gun, taking two of its crew prisoner. But the crew managed to destroy its breach and block, rendering it useless. One gunner, who managed to escape, had his hand smashed by a bullet. Later, he discovered his kilt had been riddled by fourteen rounds.37
On the northern edge of the wood, the news that the flank remained exposed was sobering. Unless it was reinforced before morning, Rae considered his position would be untenable and that his men would soon be cut off from the rear. Rae ordered a withdrawal, just as the first glow of light touched the horizon. Leaving behind small groups of men to guard the recovered British artillery pieces, Rae led the rest of the battalion back. The men moved so quietly that the Germans failed to twig to what was happening, so the withdrawal neither attracted artillery fire nor any pursuit by infantry. When these troops arrived back at the trench on the edge of the woods, however, it was clear there was insufficient room for all of them. A large group was sent 150 yards out into the field to create a secondary trench line, which they finished digging just before dawn.
April 24 dawned clear and sunny, bearing the promise of an unusually hot spring day to come. A lull descended on the battlefield, few sounds of gunfire or artillery heard. In their trenches, the men of the 16th and 10th Battalions took stock of their situation and reflected on all that had happened in that night “which seemed like a life-time.”38
One Canadian Scottish diarist noted that “the fellows looked frightfully tired and discouraged.” As the light improved they saw on their left flank the German position in the woods that had subjected them to such deadly fire. Stretching back across the field they had crossed, rows of their dead lay strewn. “On certain parts of it the bodies were heaped; on others they were lying in a straight line as killed by the enfilade machine-gun fire. The men of the different companies of the 16th could be picked out by the colour of the kilt—the yellow stripe of the Gordons, the white of the Seaforths, the red of the Camerons, the dark green of the Argylls—with the 10th Battalion men in their khaki uniforms mingled everywhere amongst the Highlanders. [Despite the battalion officers having earlier decided that allowing the men to wear four different kilts would not do and a simple khaki one would replace the various tartans, the replacements had not yet reached the field so the men were still fighting in the tartans that identified their original regiment.] Slight movements of some of the bodies showed that life still lingered. Attempts were being made to get help to these men, but the spurts of dust, knocked up by the bullets hitting around the rescue party, indicated that the ground
was under a fire. At last a stretcher-bearer was hit; he pitched forward on his face, whereupon the enemy’s fire was much increased, and the relief work came to an end.”39
With Leckie in command of both battalions, his brother Jack was responsible for 16th Battalion while Major Dan Ormond—the most senior surviving 10th Battalion officer—had charge of that unit. Fearing a counterattack was imminent, the officers began hurriedly regrouping their battered forces. The trench remained overly crowded and the first action was to put the dead up over the parapet and to dig small nooks into which the wounded could be sheltered. While some men began extending the trench on the right flank, others were sent crawling back through the cover of a mustard patch to Leckie’s headquarters area in a trench about a thousand yards west of St. Julien. Within a couple of hours a coherent defensive line had taken shape.
Lt. Urquhart knew in his gut that they were in for a shelling like they had never seen before and so was not surprised when an aircraft appeared overhead at 0530, lazily circling, its Iron Crosses marking it as German. Surely it was an artillery spotter plane determining the co-ordinates of the trench. Shortly thereafter the first shells fell and with the plane still overhead to correct the fire the guns soon “got our mark. Some men were blown out of [the] trench, others injured by shrapnel, others killed by shock.” From the left flank of the woods, machine-gun fire made any movement hazardous and hindered evacuation of wounded. “Difficult to get back to dressing station with wounded and some men hit in so doing,” Urquhart noted in his diary, “so ultimately we had to forbid men to cross and kept wounded in trench, lifting dead over parapet. Very long day and glad when anxious time came to an end. All night we were standing to, every five minutes, and dawn was just as anxiously looked for as dusk.”40
While the 16th and 10th Battalions endured a day of being battered by artillery fire, the Second Battle of Ypres raged on across an ever-widening front as more British and Canadian battalions rushed to close the dangerous gap created by the previous day’s gas attack. Gen. Smith-Dorrien ordered V Corps to carry out an attack between Bois des Cuisiniers and the Yser Canal at 1440 hours, but then delayed it to 1626 while failing to notify the supporting artillery which duly began firing guns at 1445. Duly alerted, the Germans met the advancing battalions with withering fire from Mauser Ridge, attempting to deny heroic efforts that carried many troops to within 200 yards of the enemy trenches. Although unable to regain Mauser Ridge, the British troops established a strong defensive line 600 yards from the German forward trenches.
Although the initial impetus of their offensive had been blunted, the Germans were now committed to trying to destroy the salient. At 0400 hours on April 24 they attempted to create a new breakthrough at the salient’s northern tip with a second gas attack directed at the 2nd and 3rd Canadian infantry brigades. As this attack struck well to the north-east of the woods, the Canadian Scottish were unaware of the cause behind the sudden crescendo of gunfire from that direction. Along with the remnants of the 10th Battalion, they were in the middle of being relieved from their forward position by the 2nd Battalion. Although the changeover was to have been completed before dawn, various delays resulted in the withdrawal taking place in full daylight. Their destination was 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade headquarters, which was now situated about a mile to the south near the hamlet of Wieltje. Rather than risk trying to move in the open, Leckie led the men in single file along a shallow ditch bordering a narrow road that ran in the desired direction. Crawling on hands and knees along the mud-mired ditch to avoid the sniper fire cracking overhead, each man deepened the parallel grooves that had been created by those who had passed down its length ahead of him. At Wieltje, the 16th Battalion set up a defensive position in a series of dugouts near brigade headquarters.
Virtually the entire 1st Canadian Infantry Division sector was being subjected to a massive artillery barrage, so that movement anywhere in the headquarters area was hazardous. Crouched in their holes, the Canadian Scottish could glimpse “the advance of our troops under shell fire [but] also … the advance of some of the Germans.” Urquhart recognized that much of the artillery raining down consisted of “woolly bears, loud-noised, green-smoked shrapnel shells.” He also heard “a constant rattle of musketry beyond St. Julien towards the north-eastern face of the Salient.” Soon the gunfire spread to the woods that the two battalions had handed over to 2nd Battalion. It seemed the Canadians out on the sharp end were fighting for their very survival.41
And so they were, particularly where the chlorine gas cloud drifted into the lines precisely at the join between 2nd and 3rd Brigade’s frontages, held respectively by the former’s 8th Battalion and the latter’s 15th Battalion. Issued cotton bandoliers with instructions to urinate on these and then cover their mouths in order to ward off the effects of the gas, the men duly followed instructions but many collapsed vomiting, blinded, and writhing in agony as their lungs were seared anyway. In 8th Battalion’s sector the gas was less concentrated, which enabled some men to withstand its effects and still man their positions on the parapets, while the company farthest from the junction points was entirely unaffected. Consequently this battalion was able to maintain a rapid rate of fire despite many of their Ross rifles repeatedly jamming so that the men had to kick the firing bolts loose with their boots or the flat of an entrenching shovel. Faced with stiff resistance on this front, the German advance here foundered. But in the area held by the 15th Battalion the gas had killed the majority of the men or rendered them helpless. German infantry flooded through the resulting gap and drove toward Gravenstafel Ridge. By mid-morning the apex of the salient began collapsing inward and at 1500 hours St. Julien was overrun.
Yet remnants of 2nd Brigade still clung tenaciously to Gravenstafel Ridge and throughout Sunday, April 25, the slaughter continued as Canadian and British battalions frantically counterattacked the Germans, who were still seeking to keep the momentum of their advance going. For a week the battle raged until on May 3 the badly mauled Canadian division was pulled back. While the battle would continue almost to the end of May, the Germans were never able to regain the initiative, so the salient held. In those first few days, the Canadian division’s holding “in the face of an enemy who by employing numbers of infantry supported by a preponderance of heavy artillery and machine guns attempting to exploit the advantage gained by his introduction of poison gas into modern warfare” saved the salient despite German advances in some sectors of three miles.
But the British Expeditionary Force’s losses were staggering—59,275 casualties between April 22 and May 31. For its part, 1st Canadian Infantry Division reported 208 officers and 5,828 other ranks killed, wounded, or taken prisoner between April 15 and May 3.42
Few Canadian battalions had suffered more than the Canadian Scottish. “We had a terrible charge,” Captain Rae had written his mother on April 28, “and it is only by God’s mercy that I came out alive. 26 officers went in and only 9 came out unhurt. I lost all my officers.”43 Urquhart echoed Rae’s dismay in his diary note of April 26. “What heavy casualties. 17 officers out of 26 put out of action. Captains [John] Geddes, [Cecil] Merritt, [Hamilton] Fleming, [James Herrick] McGregor killed. Captain [George Willis] Jamieson missing [and later found to have been killed]. Lieuts. George Ager, [John Gibson] Kenworthy, [Victor Alexander] MacLean, [Angus] Armour, [Graham] Ainslie, [Edward] Gilliatt, [Reginald] Tupper, Captains [Sydney] Goodall and [George] Ross all wounded. Loss in men about 450 and in Camerons 117—what a terrible toll!”44 Although Urquhart didn’t know it, Captain Ross and Lt. Ager were also dead. Wounded, Lt. Victor MacLean had ordered his men to leave him where he had fallen in the woods as the Germans were but 20 yards’ distant. “He had bade the men good-bye,” so they could escape unimpeded. MacLean was taken prisoner.45
Merritt, who had suffered a desperate wound during the charge, had been dragged to the safety of the captured trench. When two of his men volunteered to carry the officer back across the open ground to safety, Merritt re
fused to expose them to the risk. Shortly before dawn, worried the Germans were going to counterattack, Merritt raised himself up and started issuing orders to get his men ready. A German sniper round struck Merritt in the head and he fell over dead.46
Fleming, who had predicted his inevitable death would come “early in the game,” had been shot in the knee during the first moments of the charge. Pausing only a moment to bandage the wound with a handkerchief, he led No. 2 Company on to carry the trench. When fire from a German machine-gun post just in front of the woods threatened the tenuous Canadian hold on this position, Fleming quickly assembled a mixed force of men from both the 10th and 16th battalions. Jumping onto the parapet, Fleming led the men in a rush on the machine gun, but the fire from it was so intense that the force reeled back into the cover of the trench. Fleming carried on alone, disappearing into the darkness. Next morning, his body was found sprawled with one foot resting on the top of the post’s parapet. Merritt, Fleming, and Geddes had been three of the battalion’s original company commanders while the other, Major Lorne Ross, had died earlier on April 16. The loss of these four senior officers dealt the Canadian Scottish command chain a crippling blow.
The battalion’s final casualty toll was 153 other ranks killed between April 22 and May 4, with another 239 wounded, and 30 lost as prisoners for a total of 422. Nine officers died, seven were wounded, and one was taken prisoner.47 The Canadian Scottish had been effectively cut in half. But there would be no rest to integrate reinforcements. On May 14, after only ten days out of the line, the Canadian division marched urgently toward the Festubert-Givenchy area and a return to battle.