by Mark Zuehlke
It was a happy day on July 23, when a draft of Cameron Highlanders from Winnipeg arrived and the battalion was suddenly brought up to full strength. The day was also one of major command changes for 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade as Richard Turner was promoted to major general and left to head up 2nd Canadian Infantry Division. This division was readying for deployment to the mainland from England. Brigade command went to Robert Leckie, with John Leckie assuming leadership of the Canadian Scottish and Major Cyrus Peck becoming his second-in-command. Although the two Leckies were extremely close, their personalities differed markedly. Jack, as he was called by friends, had none of Robert’s shyness and consequent air of aloofness. Instead, he was dashing and impulsive and thrived on action and adventure. Where his brother was slender, Jack was stocky and possessed of great physical strength. He treated the men like equals and, in the role of battalion second-in-command had won their trust and respect, so that his advancement to command was welcomed. “We liked the way he talked, and the way he walked,” one soldier wrote.
Not a disciplinarian, Jack Leckie would chat cheerfully with men sentenced to field punishment. Coming across a habitual offender, Cpl. Edward Gallagher, scraping mud off boardwalks, Leckie was once heard to say: “Well, my lad, that’s better than shovelling snow in Canada.” Gallagher tilted his head to one side, considering the matter, and chuck-led. “Quit your kidding, Major,” he responded.
One soldier was even moved to verse, penning a poem entitled “Major Jack” that appeared in the battalion’s trench magazine, Brazier:
Come call your boys together,
Major Jack,
They will follow to the death,
Where you lead them, when you need them,
Major Jack.
For they know you’re tried and true,
Major Jack,
And they’ll each along with you
Do their whack.
In your heart no thought of fear,
On your lips a word of cheer,
Ever ready, cool and steady,
Major Jack.3
Not everyone was so enamoured of either Leckie. Urquhart had never warmed to the brothers and, at the news of their promotions, confessed to his diary of having “very mixed feelings when of all those men who are now gone and who were treated so badly by him [it’s unclear whether he was referring to Robert or Jack Leckie]. Yet there they are lying under the ground and those two who are far inferior to what they were [are] getting all the honours.” August 13, the day after this entry, was Urquhart’s birthday and also marked exactly a year since his regiment had mobilized. “I remember wondering then if I should be alive to-day and how it would feel to look back on experiences. I am very thankful at being permitted to be alive and that I was allowed to go through these experiences. I don’t know that I have done my best as I should have. Perhaps I will be forgiven for this. Why should I be left alive when such men as John Geddes and Merritt are killed? They made such sacrifices and had so much to live for. Very disappointed at many things and think we have not yet reached climax of misfortunes simply because our inefficiency so great. But the thing to look back on with gratitude is splendid courage and devotion of men.”4
At the company level there were also changes. When the redoubtable Captain William Rae was evacuated ill to England, No. 2 Company passed to Captain Roderick Bell-Irving. Illness also struck Captain Morison, so No. 3 Company was taken over by a newly arrived Cameron named Captain John Hall. The reconstituted No. 1 Company came under the command of Captain Stanley Wood. An American from the Deep South who had enlisted in the Canadian Army as a private at the war’s outset, Wood had won a commission and joined the battalion in May 1915. When Captain Victor Hastings was also evacuated with an illness that saw him returned to Canada, Lt. Urquhart was promoted to captain and awarded command of No. 4 Company.
The Canadian Scottish also lost their regimental sergeant major, Davie Nelson, when he was badly wounded on July 11. The only surviving company sergeant major after the spring fighting was Jimmie Kay from No. 4 Company, who moved up to try to fill Nelson’s shoes. Kay knew this would be tough, for Nelson had been less the battalion’s senior non-commissioned officer than an “institution.” The former Seaforth Highlanders of Canada’s sergeant major, Nelson had always provided a steadying hand for the officers and men through every battle.
Although Nelson’s combat days were ended by a wound, the RSM had been obviously past his prime—a fact that plagued many of 1st Division’s senior officers and non-commissioned officers alike. One of the reasons so many company commanders were falling to critical illnesses was that they were older men. Nelson, who had once been the Seaforth’s champion light-weight boxer and had a lean, wiry build, was already “slightly bent” when the battalion reached Europe. Many Can Scots thought nothing but sheer determination of spirit kept the RSM going during the ensuing months of combat and trench duty. Often he was to be seen standing outside his tent, shifting his pipe from side to side in his mouth, gaze fixed toward some faraway point, and nobody could hazard what he was thinking during these moments.5
While 1st Division had been rebuilding, its role in the B.E.F. was also changing due to the buildup of Canadian forces in Europe as part of the nation’s commitment to supporting Britain. The arrival of 2nd Canadian Infantry Division fulfilled a government pledge on October 6, 1914, “to place and maintain in the field a second contingent of twenty thousand men.” The arrival of those troops led Britain’s War Office to agree to the formation of a Canadian Corps in which the two divisions and all subsequent Canadian divisions would serve. This represented a departure from normal British military doctrine where little emphasis was placed on committing divisions to particular corps service. Rather divisions were shifted from one corps to another as deemed necessary—precisely the experience of 1st Canadian Division during the spring operations. But a precedent for some Commonwealth powers keeping their troops together had been set earlier by Australia and New Zealand, who insisted that all their divisions be permanently retained inside an ANZAC Corps. The British now agreed that Canada should adopt this innovation.
Initially Sam Hughes wanted to be ordained corps commander, claiming Canadians desired this. But he lacked both military and government support. Nor was the unrepentant Anglophobe able to inject a Canadian officer into the post. Instead, 1st Division’s lieutenant general, Edwin Alderson, got the job. On September 13, 1915, corps headquarters opened for business at Bailleul, about 15 miles behind 1st Division’s front on the Ploegsteert line. With Alderson’s promotion the die was cast: henceforth, Canadian divisions would be commanded by Canadian officers, with the promotion of Arthur William Currie to major general.
Currie had been instrumental in raising the 50th Gordon Highlanders as a militia unit in Victoria. Six-foot-four, weighing 250 pounds, and possessed of a voice as robust as his size, the forty-year-old former realtor had entered the war with no professional military experience. But his handling of 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade during the Second Battle of Ypres had been so masterful that B.E.F. commander-in-chief Field Marshal Sir John French had declared him “as the most suitable of the three [Canadian] brigadiers” for divisional command. French had wanted Currie to guide the inexperienced 2nd Division through its combat learning curve but Hughes, backed in this by Prime Minister Robert Borden, intervened in favour of Turner in a blatant show of political cronyism.
At the end of September the newly operational corps boasted a total strength of 1,354 officers and 36,522 other ranks.6 If Hughes was not to have its command, nothing would keep him from constantly meddling with its operation. While basing himself in England, he shuttled regularly to the mainland to lobby for an enlarged role for Canadian officers at corps headquarters. But neither the British War Office nor Field Marshal French considered the Canadians sufficiently experienced in such demanding staff work, and so most corps positions were staffed by British officers. At every opportunity Hughes would review and address the troops. When th
e Canadian Scottish drew the dubious honour of parading for him, Captain Urquhart’s acid comment was that Hughes delivered the “usual foolish bombastic speech. ... Men took it as a sort of joke.”7
For the 1st Division battalions, the time spent waiting for the corps to become fully operational ensured that it remained posted in a quiet sector. But this meant that the men “had, therefore, to content themselves with the … drudgery of trench warfare” in increasingly “dreary surroundings” as summer gave way to fall. More importantly it provided time for the division to adjust to and incorporate a number of tactical innovations conceived as a result of the spring fighting.
British infantry tactics in early 1915 had been little changed from those the army had followed for a hundred years. There were two simple and important weapons—the rifle and the bayonet. Accordingly, battalions had a straightforward organization consisting of a headquarters section and four rifle companies. When machine guns and signalling equipment were added to the roster, a section responsible for each was created, but these were attached to and controlled by headquarters. As the war had devolved into one of deadlocked trench fighting, new sniper, gas specialist, and bomber sections were created that also remained under headquarters control. The role of the companies was still to provide simple riflemen.
But the spring fighting had shown that these specialist sections were too estranged from the companies they supported, sometimes—as had been the case in the first attack on Canadian Orchard—balking at commands given by junior officers under whose authority they did not strictly fall. Communication problems also resulted in headquarters often not sending the specialists to where they were most desperately required. Recognizing these issues, the British high command ordered more battalion troops trained in one or another specialization with the intention that in most cases some specialists would be integrated directly into a company. Each company commander was instructed to select his best men for specialist training, but this drew protests that the companies were being gutted of the self-sufficient men who could most be depended on in combat. “Why so many first-class men?” the Canadian Scottish company commanders grumbled to their battalion adjutant, which as this post was being rotated between officers until Major Gilbert Godson-Godson returned from hospital after being wounded on April 22, happened to be Urquhart. “How is it possible to make specialists out of inefficient men?” Urquhart snapped back and the duly selected men were sent off to be schooled in their new duties.8
Two classes of snipers, company and battalion, were created. The first were put on a company’s strength and practiced their deadly trades from positions along its front. Battalion snipers operated “from specially built shelters in the front trench or from ruined houses, trees, haystacks or other posts which gave them cover and a view of the enemy territory behind his front line.” While company snipers were not excused from ordinary company duties, nobody seemed to know who commanded the Canadian Scottish battalion snipers. Lacking an officer’s oversight, they tended to either hunt alone or in co-operation with a couple of their peers. Whether by nature or design, battalion snipers—armed with their special telescope-mounted rifles and lugging along a host of ancillary camouflaging and spotting gear—were considered loners and left to ply their deadly trade as they saw fit so long as the often intricately camouflaged firing posts posed no hindrance to company movement within the trenches.
Company troops generally valued gas experts more than snipers, because the former could save their lives while the latter might draw undue attention of German snipers or even artillery should his presence in a nearby section of trench be noted. Gas experts were easily recognized by their black and red armbands, but their specialty often seemed as mysterious as alchemy. For their job was not only to identify when a gas wind—one blowing from the German lines toward their own—prevailed, but also to detect when the Germans were deploying the means to deliver a gas attack. At first small flags were strung along the trench to monitor wind currents but soon—often aided by anyone in the battalion possessed of carpentry skills—the gas experts erected small weather-vanes or miniature windmills that looked incongruously like toys in the grim trench environment. Detecting an attack before it was launched generally proved impossible, but once a gas cloud was sighted the specialists sounded a warning by blowing klaxon horns, banging gongs, or ringing bells. All down the trench men would don the recently issued Smoke or Hypo helmet. Invented by Major Cluny McPherson of the Newfoundland Medical Corps, this “consisted of a piece of thick grey flannel … impregnated with hyposulphite, soda and glycerine solution kept in bulk at the quartermaster’s stores; and fitted with mica eye pieces. This cloth could be drawn over the head, tucked under the tunic, and gave good protection against [chlorine gas].” It was also claustrophobic and heavy and limited vision to the point that there was a temptation to tear the helmet off despite the risk of gas exposure.
The formula of chemicals with which the helmet was impregnated changed regularly as the Germans introduced new types of gases. Phenates were initially added to counter phosgene and later hyomine added yet more anti-phosgene protection while also combatting prussic acid. In November 1915 the Hypo helmet was replaced by the “P” Helmet, which had a rubber tube fitted with a valve to allow breathing. A year later, the “PH” Helmet added a small box respirator.
While gas helmets provided individual protection, the specialists also ensured that dugouts had army blankets soaked in anti-gas solution at the ready to cover entrances during gas attacks. They also roved the trenches carrying small portable spray tanks filled with the solution to smother pockets of gas that lingered in hollows within the trenches following an attack.9
It was the job of the gas specialists to train a company’s officers and non-commissioned officers in proper helmet use so these could in turn train the soldiers they commanded. A form of live-fire training was also practised whereby the specialists would pump a section of trench full of gas and then guide men in small groups through the misty clouds to safety on the other side. Urquhart found this training proved the helmet “very effectual,” but when one soldier inexplicably “lifted his helmet and got slightly gassed,” he collapsed unconscious. After resuscitation, the man confessed to deliberately lifting the helmet out of curiosity over how breathing in gas would feel.10
Gas experts and snipers were trained in the summer of 1915, but bomber specialists had come earlier to the battalions—fighting at Ypres and Festubert. Their weaponry had been crude, mostly “jam pot” bombs. Developed in the early weeks of the war, the formula for building a jam pot bomb was simple. “Take a tin jam pot, fill it with shredded gun cotton and ten-penny nails, mixed according to taste; insert a No. 8 detonator and a short length of Bickford’s fuse; clay up the lid, light with a match, pipe, cigar or cigarette, and throw for all you are worth,” stated one recipe. Their other weapon was the Mark 1 grenade, which was canister-shaped and weighted to ensure it landed nose-down to ignite a 16-inch fuse. As dangerous to the throwers as to the enemy, their weapon led to bombers often being described as members of a suicide club.
The hazardous nature of their trade had contributed to the decision to keep the bomber section under headquarters’ command and they were only sent as required to support a company during offensive operations. Usually advancing ahead of the rifle companies, they attempted to chuck bombs into the German trenches as the riflemen closed in and once inside the trenches raced along their length throwing bombs into every dugout passed to wipe out any pockets of resistance.
Regulations strictly forbade non-bombers from using or even touching bombs unless directed by a bomber, which fostered men in the section to assume an air of self-importance and elitism that irritated everyone else in the battalion. It little helped that the bombing officer was usually a junior subaltern who operated independent of company command. In May 1915, the elitist nature of the bombing trade began to diminish with the introduction of the Mills bomb. Weighing one-and-a-quarter pounds, with a serrated she
ll that fragmented on detonation and fitted with a four-second fuse ignited by pulling a safety pin while holding down a strike lever, the Mills was the precursor of most modern grenades. A model was also developed that could be fired from a rifle. As Mills bombs became prevalent, it was decided to increase the number of bombers by training men within the companies to perform this task. The result, Urquhart noted happily, was that the bombers, “who used to stroll through company trenches dictating to company men with an air of authority, were shorn of their privileges by absorption into the companies.”11
During the late summer of 1915, 1st Division had continued to maintain its presence on the Ploegsteert front even after the Canadian Corps assumed overall responsibility for the 4,400-yard line on September 13. Coinciding with the corps being declared operational, the division’s front was actually extended northwestward from Ploegsteert Wood across the Douve River valley to Wulverghem-Messines road. Six days later Second Division began a four-day relief of British formations on the left that broadened the Canadian sector northward three miles to the Vierstraat- Wytschaete road. This road marked the divide between the Canadian area and that of V British Corps. Three divisions of II Bavarian Corps stood opposite the Canadian line where the opposing trenches wriggled along at distances ranging from a maximum of 500 yards to an easy stone’s throw apart. From the Messines-Wytschaete spur rising up on the Douve’s left bank to intersect the 15-mile-long Messines Ridge the entire Canadian sector lay exposed to enemy observation.12
As Lt.-Gen. Alderson completed his dispositions of Canadian Corps on September 23, he learned that a major Allied offensive was set to begin in just two days’ time. Once again the British participated only at French insistence. With the Gallipoli Campaign in the Dardanelles in full swing, the British were overextended to the point that further reinforcing the B.E.F. was predicted to be problematic until early 1916. There was also a grave munitions shortage for both British and French artillery, also not to be rectified until the new year. Until then, the War Office preferred to keep casualties to a minimum by remaining on the defensive. No autumn offensive was anathema to the French, however, and the British government reluctantly acquiesced. Two thrusts would be delivered against either side of a large German salient that reached its apex at Noyon. To the south near Champagne, France’s Second and Fourth Armies would advance northward while the French Tenth Army and British First Army drove eastward at Artois—the intent being to cut off and destroy the three German armies holding the Noyon Salient.