by Mark Zuehlke
The brainchild of Chief of Staff Gen. J.J. Joffre, the offensive rejected the stalemated reality of the Western Front. Joffre believed the salient could be pinched out through a massive commitment of forces—in the French case, fifty-three divisions supported by 5,000 guns.
Although, initially, some ground was gained, a swift German response poured reinforcements into the line and the battle soon conformed to rote until officially cancelled on November 4. The Allied casualty tally was about 60,000 British and 200,000 French, while the Germans lost 150,000. The Noyon Salient remained largely unchanged, with the British having gained only two miles on a two-mile front that left them inside their own difficult-to-sustain salient around Loos, while the French retained only a three-mile penetration at Champagne that left their forward troops dangerously exposed on flats facing ridges in German hands.13 Criticized for his handling of the offensive, particularly a failure to feed in reserves at what was later considered a decisive moment, Field Marshal Sir John French was shunted out of B.E.F. command in favour of Douglas Haig.
Canadian Corps played no part in this offensive except to conduct several demonstrations intended to prevent the facing German divisions being drawn away to reinforce the salient. Largely, the sector remained quiet and the troops were more bothered by October’s weather conditions than enemy action. Each day it grew cloudier and colder, with a clammy mist descending after nightfall that clung to the low ground well into the following morning. Then, on October 25, the skies opened and thereafter the rains carried on incessantly, turning the ground into muddy mire and causing streams to flood.
The Douve River overflowed its banks and inundated the valley behind the Canadian front lines, leaving the men there cut off from the rear as the communication trenches either filled with water or collapsed. A link was re-established in 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade’s sector only when engineers built a web of wooden walkways made by interlinking sections of two six-foot lengths of two by fours. These shaky structures lacked handrails and as each man, heavily burdened with packs full of supplies for the front, passed along their length the boards became heavily greased with slippery mud. Soldiers routinely skidded off into the watery and mud-soaked morass—sometimes nearly drowning before being hauled to safety. On the front line, the Canadian Scottish on the battalion’s right flank watched helplessly as their breastwork crumbled when the sandbags making up its walls became so sodden they burst and the sand gushed out in a muddy stream. Things were no better on the left flank. The trenches dug where the water table had allowed it were transformed into canals running knee-deep with liquefied mud.
At brigade reserve, in an area designated as Red Lodge, huts erected over the summer months leaked like sieves and the mud caking the floors dried hard as concrete. All roads were lost beneath the shifting flow of silt-laden river water and oozing mud. Only when the battalion was withdrawn to the divisional reserve area with its leak-proof huts were the men ever to get dry. The closing weeks of 1915 were largely spent by the Canadians in fruitless efforts to create workable drainage systems.14
Throughout the fall and early winter, the Canadians and Germans routinely harassed each other almost daily with artillery fire. Snipers stalked the unwary and nightly patrols prowled No Man’s Land looking for weaknesses in the opposing defences. Barely a day passed when the Canadian Scottish were in the line that the war diarist failed to record that at least one man had been wounded or killed. The journey to and from the front was looked upon as being even more treacherous. On December 4, Urquhart wrote that—there being no usable communication trenches—the men had “to come back [by] the dreary road overland across the Douve. Fell into various ditches and got soaking wet.” The narrow bridge spanning the river lacked handrails and the water roaring underneath was clearly “very deep.” With the men moving so slowly across such open ground, Urquhart feared being spotted by the Germans. Caught by artillery fire the Canadian Scottish, he knew, would “certainly have heavy casualties.”15
Each battalion spent five days in the trenches and then five days in the rear. The Canadian Scottish generally rotated duty with the 48th Highlanders while the Royal Montreal Regiment and the Royal Highlanders of Canada did likewise. This was not an altogether happy arrangement for the Can Scots, as they felt the 48th Highlanders seldom worked on trench maintenance and improvement during their stints at the front. “As usual 15th did no work,” Urquhart confided to his diary in one of all too many similar comments.16
The 48th Highlanders appeared no more impressed by the Canadian Scottish, though, with their battalion war diarist regularly recording that upon returning to the front lines work parties had to be immediately formed for “building new dugouts and draining trenches.”17
Badly mauled in the Ypres Salient fighting, the 15th Battalion had also been plagued initially by poor leadership. Its first commander, former Member of Parliament and personal friend of Sam Hughes, Lt.-Col. John Currie (no relation of Arthur Currie) had little military experience. In the midst of the Second Battle of Ypres he had fled the front under the pretence of rounding up stragglers and ended up taking shelter at 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade headquarters from which he was forcibly ejected. Lt.-Col. John Creelman eventually reported that Currie wound up at his 2nd Canadian Field Artillery headquarters clearly in a drunken condition.18 While the incident was largely covered up, Currie was soon sent back to Canada and Lt.-Col. William Renwick Marshall headed up the 15th Battalion as of June 28, 1915. A Royal Regiment officer from Hamilton, Marshall rebuilt the battalion from the ground up over the summer months and re-instilled its pride.
The 48th Highlanders relieved the Canadian Scottish on December 20 so, on Christmas Eve, the Canadian Scots returned to the front. Just before the Battalion marched off, Lt.-Col. Jack Leckie had taken his company commanders aside and advised them that a sergeant from Royal Montreal Regiment had deserted “to the enemy this morning,” while another soldier from that battalion had disappeared the previous day from a listening post in which another man had been found mysteriously shot dead. This was part of a pattern, Urquhart thought, whereby the 14th Battalion was always having “extraordinary things happen.”19 Of immediate concern was the sergeant’s knowledge that a battalion rotation was underway. If the Germans gleaned that intelligence from him they could either heavily bombard the lines of approach from the rear or even attempt to overrun the forward changes while the changeover was under way.20
The brigade’s only non-Highland battalion, the Montreal-raised battalion had a reputation for severe disciplinary problems. Already the Montrealers were on their third commander, with Lt.-Col. F. W. Fisher having taken over in October. Fisher was having no better luck enforcing discipline than had his predecessors, the problem exacerbated by the fact its No. 4 Company was entirely French-speaking while most of the battalion’s officers spoke only English. Both deserters were from that company. The first deserter had clearly murdered the man standing guard with him in the listening post and then fled to German lines while the sergeant had slipped over the parapet in broad daylight in view of many men who made no effort to prevent his leaving.21 Desertion was a serious matter that normally warranted much analysis, yet the battalion’s official war diary made no mention of these incidents. Instead, the five pages forming the entire month of December’s entries were most often marked by nothing more than a shorthand entry for ditto—“do, do, do.”22
A hard rain fell that Christmas Eve as the Canadian Scottish marched toward the front. Word was that the Douve had swept away its bridges and might have to be waded—ensuring everyone would get drenched and that some men might be caught up and drowned. Fortunately one bridge still stood. Nor did the enemy make any moves with either artillery or infantry raids, so the handover was achieved peacefully.
By the time the men settled into the trenches, the rain lifted and the night proved clear and lit by a three-quarter moon that softened “with subdued light the scars and unsightliness of the battlefield into a picture of shades an
d shadows and still, stark forms.” About fifteen minutes past midnight a German soldier in an outpost facing the battalion’s left flank stood and shot off a Very light that bathed No Man’s Land in a ghostly light. “Guid Nicht, Jock, and a Merry Christmas,” the man shouted, turned his back to the Canadians, and walked nonchalantly back to the German trenches. About forty-five minutes later 1st Canadian Division’s Maj.-Gen. Arthur Currie and 3rd Brigade’s Brig. Robert Leckie arrived and the men formed shoulder to shoulder in the trench as the two officers passed down their line, pausing to personally wish many “a Happy Christmas.”
Christmas Day dawned cloudy and proved “as strange as the preceding night.” There was no fighting. Instead the Germans milled about openly behind their trenches—looking “well fed and well clothed, having on a great variety of uniforms, slate colour, green, khaki.” Some ventured beyond their forward parapets, waving bottles of wine and cigarettes to tempt the Canadians into joining them. When some of Urquhart’s company began singing Scottish songs while others started walking out into No Man’s Land, the officer barred their way and ordered them back into the trench. But he had “great difficulty keeping men down.” Later an artillery linesman dashed over to join the Germans and then the irrepressibly ill-disciplined Cpl. Edward Gallagher from No. 3 Company went out and exchanged cigarettes with one German—an act that drew cheers from both sides. When Gallagher refused demands by his company’s acting commander, Lt. David Bell, to return, Lt.-Col. Leckie lost his patience and ordered both Gallagher and Bell arrested. Urquhart saw little sense in this. Rather, he admitted to having a “strange feeling looking at these fellows in perfect friendship and shooting at them next day. What an insane thing.”23
Leckie and the other senior battalion officers were increasingly nervous that the situation threatened to get out of hand, for what happened if the men became too friendly with the Germans? Before they could decide a plan of action, however, a machine gun somewhere on the front burned a long burst into the air and “everyone ran to cover like rabbits, and all social intercourse came to an end.”24 In the future there would be no uncertainty about whether to permit Allied soldiers to fraternize with their German counterparts at Christmas, as sufficient shelling, sniping, and patrolling was scheduled to ensure No Man’s Land remained too dangerous.
The Canadian Scottish spent New Year’s Day out of the line and enjoyed a fine dinner. January also brought improving weather that allowed for repairs on many of the defensive works and communication trenches destroyed by the rains. On February 3, the brigade moved to a rest area at Meteren, a town about one mile from Bailleul. The Ploegsteert tour was winding down for Canadian Corps, but there remained several weeks of front-line duty. And the front remained hazardous, a fact rammed poignantly home to the ranks of 3rd Brigade when Robert Leckie was badly wounded in both thighs by shrapnel from an artillery shell on the night of February 17-18.25
A few days later the command went to Brigadier George Tuxford. Welsh-born, the newly married twenty-year-old Tuxford had immigrated to Canada in 1890 to take up ranching near Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. In 1898 he drove a herd of cattle across the Rockies and up to the gold miners at Dawson City, Yukon, for what was then the longest cattle drive in Canadian history. Back home, he joined the 16th Mounted Rifles as a militia officer in 1910 and when war broke out went overseas as commander of the 5th (Western Cavalry) Battalion of 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade. At Second Ypres he had led this battalion with distinction through a desperate fight that prevented the division’s right flank being turned.26 Tuxford would prove a highly capable brigadier.
Little more than a week after Tuxford assumed command of the brigade, Canadian Corps left the Ploegsteert front toward one that held little in the way of good memories for the men of 1st Division—a return to the Ypres Salient. On March 28, as the Canadian Scottish marched into the salient they “could hear ahead heavy gun fire, and in front of us shell bursts could be distinctly seen.” This was the “dreaded front” that they remembered from the bitter spring of 1915.27
chapter six
Return to the Salient
- MARCH 28-AUGUST 9, 1916 -
The Ypres Salient was reputedly the most miserable, dangerous place on earth. Abandoning it entirely had been advocated repeatedly as this would straighten the Allied line through the ruins of Ypres and eliminate being overlooked from three sides by German guns on the ridges. But Chief-of-Staff Gen. J.J. Joffre summed up the prevailing French and British belief when he declared it was better his poilus “be killed in their tracks rather than draw back.” The salient had become a symbol of defiance sanctified by the blood of the thousands who had died there. To abandon it would render those deaths meaningless. 1 Captain Hugh Urquhart had another theory—pure bloody British doggedness refused to let go of anything. Only the tenacity of the soldiers caught in its maw prevented its “unpardonable” loss.
But none of the veteran Canadians welcomed returning, wondering instead “what move fate would now make for or against them in this place, where the odds were so heavily piled against the soldier.” It was a feeling Urquhart thought shared by “all infantrymen, who were compelled to renew acquaintance with this spot.” Seconded to 3rd Brigade headquarters, Urquhart was fairly confident of surviving despite having to regularly shunt back and forth from the battalion to brigade on various errands. Unlike a company officer or a lieutenant leading a platoon, whose lives were often measured in minutes from the moment the whistle sounded for an advance, Urquhart faced a reasonable probability of being killed or maimed by a chance shell or sniper’s bullet.
What made the Ypres Salient so dangerous was that the Allied troops there were trapped “inside a sort of saucer having but a precarious hold on the edge, with the enemy close up peering over on three sides, hurling destruction from the complete assortment of his weapons.” In such a place, Urquhart ruefully noted “it requires great tenacity and a bit of humour to hold on.”2
After the First Battle of Ypres wound down, the crescent-shaped salient had stood about eight miles wide at its base with a six-mile-deep apex. The Second Battle of Ypres had shrunk those dimensions, but only a little. Its citizens had long ago abandoned the once glorious Flemish capital of Ypres when the German artillery came into range. Soldiers still thronged like rats amid the city’s ruins, billeting inside half-destroyed buildings and cellars. The city’s long-destroyed streetcar line terminus on Menin Road near a north-south junction was so frequently shelled it was nicknamed Hellfire Corner. To hide the movement of men and supplies, the British had circled Ypres with huge tarpaulins to obstruct the view of German artillery observers who responded by regularly drenching known routes of movement with shellfire.3
The Canadian Corps arrived three divisions strong with another slated to deploy in August 1916. But lacking the 4th Canadian Infantry Division, and with the newly deployed 3rd Canadian Infantry Division short of its own artillery, the latter was supported by gunners from the Indian 3rd (Lahore) Division. Fifty-six-year-old Maj.-Gen. Malcolm Smith Mercer, who had formerly commanded 1st Division’s 1st Brigade, headed up 3rd Division.4
A hiccup in the relief plan saw Canadian Corps beginning to take over from V Corps precisely at the same time that its British 3rd Division was scheduled to put in an attack on the village of St. Eloi. An extensive artillery bombardment was to precede the assault, but hopes for success were really pinned on a scheme to detonate six massive mines that would destroy a 600-yard section of German frontage. Noting that the British division was badly worn out and depleted by casualties, Lt.-Gen. Edwin Alderson suggested that 2nd Canadian Infantry Division assume responsibility for the attack. But, as the British troops had specially trained for the operation and there was no time to similarly train the Canadians, it was decided to go ahead as planned. Once St. Eloi was captured during the March 27 operation, 2nd Division would take over the objective.5
Tunnelling under enemy lines to sow mines was an increasingly common tactic, and the predominantly clay soil
in the salient made it an ideal area of operation. Engineers had started the tunnels running from the British front to St. Eloi in August 1915, working at depths ranging from 50 to 60 feet. By late March, six mines, sized in accordance to the destruction desired on the given section of German trench overhead, were deployed in a matching number of tunnels. One contained only 600 pounds of ammonal while another held a massive 31,000 pounds. Detonated in combination, the mines were expected to obliterate the German defenders so that the attacking infantry could then plunge through the gap and advance about 300 yards.
At 0415 hours the attack began with an opening artillery salvo and detonation of the six mines followed over an interval of only a few seconds. The British Official History described that “it appeared as if a long village was being lifted through flames into the air.”6 Lord Beaverbrook (Sir Max Aitken), serving as the General Representative of Canada at the front, wrote in his 1917 Canada in Flanders that it was “like the sudden outburst of a volcano.”7 The explosions were felt and heard in southern England.
At Ground Zero the results exceeded anticipations alarmingly. Existing landmarks were decimated and some British trenches collapsed as well as the German targets “like packs of cards.” Two German infantry companies were annihilated and the previously important piece of tactical real estate known as The Mound was reduced to a gaping hole. A tailing pile from a brickfield, the thirty-foot-high Mound had covered a half acre. Heavy shelling over many months had whittled away half its height, but now The Mound was entirely gone.