Brave Battalion

by Mark Zuehlke

  Field Marshal Douglas Haig declared his objectives won and that therefore the Somme was a victory. Verdun had been relieved, the Germans subjected to heavy attrition. But if the German Army could ill afford the losses of another Somme, neither could the Allies. Attrition rates equal to those inflicted on the Germans would leave France and the British Empire so weakened of troop strength that neither would ever recover. Haig’s tactics had raised war’s horror and butchery to new heights, but the Germans struck back with equal ferocity and endured.

  There had been no seminal change. The long, winding trenches of the Western Front divided by the killing ground of No Man’s Land remained. Nobody knew how to break the stalemate. The Western Front, as Captain Hugh Urquhart wrote, had become the “Sphinx with the unsolved riddles. Each attempt to untie the Gordian knot met with further problems.” While the “violence of the Somme had shaken the enemy, it was equally true” that it had traumatized the British Empire. “Thereafter there was a gradual weakening of the will to conquer. The drain of blood, the disappointment at the lack of definite results had imposed too great a strain on the vitality of the nation; its main line of resistance had been broken into. For German and British Empires alike, the winter and spring of 1916-17 was a turning point of the war.”4

  As winter descended, the weather only imposed greater misery on the weary troops. Each return to trench duty plunged them back into a place that seemed a portent of what hell must be like. In this cold hell, the mud, noise, and putrid stench of death and decay were always present. Unnaturally engorged rats were everywhere, often seen feeding openly on unburied corpses. A sleeping man might well awake to find one beginning to nibble on his finger or staring directly into his eyes. Rations were never sufficient. The persistent diet of corned beef, hardtack, tea, and watery jam was both monotonous and nutrient-deficient. Water was often polluted and stale by the time it was brought up from the rear.

  New diseases thrived in this unsanitary and cruel environment. In 1915, doctors identified a new disease transmitted by the body lice that afflicted everyone. Soldiers afflicted with trench fever, as the disease was called, were left exhausted by fever, chronic headaches, and sore muscles, bones, and joints. Outbreaks of skin lesions on the chest and back worsened the condition. Recovery took about two months, but, as those suffering the disease were seldom evacuated to rear area hospitals; the majority were forced to just soldier on despite their symptoms. Trench foot—a literal rotting away of feet that could never be properly cleaned or dried—was a constant hazard, and sergeants routinely inspected men in an attempt to detect its onset at the earliest stages when it would be arrested by a proper cleaning and a fresh pair of socks. Trench mouth was a particularly disgusting malady caused by the difficulty of practising good oral hygiene, lack of fresh fruit, overuse of tobacco, and stress. It left a mouthful of bacteria called “acute necrotizing ulcerative gingivitis” that caused bleeding gums and rank breath. Men suffering an acute case often had all their teeth pulled after the gums turned grey and rotted. Highly infectious, it could be transmitted by sharing cups and gas respirators.5 Not all diseases were new. Pneumonia, diphtheria, typhus, tetanus, dysentery, and scabies were all prevalent.

  Battle fatigue was equally prevalent and paid little official attention, being often equated with cowardice. “He’s got the jitters,” men would say of a mate suffering it. Among the symptoms were inordinate irritability, insomnia, and responding to the slightest noise with body jerks and other startled gestures.

  Even when a man was not suffering some psychological or physical malady, there was the constant cold and wetness during the winter. Sheepskin coats and wool uniforms were hard to keep dry. Poorly made leather boots were equally so. With spring came warm temperatures, but these meant sweat that soaked uniforms and made them stink. Heat also bred lice and no amount of scratching provided more than a second’s relief.

  Always there was the tiredness. When not fighting or standing sentry duty, there were innumerable fatigues—the aptly named work parties that kept the trench systems functioning. Men dug and repaired trenches, carried wounded to the rear and brought supplies forward, buried their dead, and performed countless other tedious, menial tasks.

  Boredom was also a curse of trench life. Long lulls of quiet stretched between the terrifying times of battle and there was little to break the monotony. Men could only gamble, talk, work, and sleep so much of a day. Some men whittled or did other crafts that were possible in the trenches. Books were passed about until they fell apart. Singing was popular. But still the hours dragged.

  The winter of 1916-1917 also brought a period of intense reorganization of the Canadian army, as it recovered from the losses suffered that fall and began rebuilding for the new spring offensives. Prime Minister Robert Borden fired Sam Hughes on November 9 and appointed George Perley as Minister of the Overseas Military Forces. Perley possessed greater authority than the former Minister of Militia and Defence had enjoyed. From London, Perley concentrated on instilling a professional management style on an army that, under Hughes, had operated in an ad hoc, all too often chaotic, manner. Perley replaced Maj.-Gen. Henry Burstall with Maj.-Gen. Richard Turner and charged the former 2nd Canadian Infantry Division commander with running the Overseas Ministry. The Canadian Expeditionary Force had seventy battalions in England without plans for their posting to Canadian Corps or combat service. Turner amalgamated them into twenty-four reserve battalions and organized the battalions according to the soldiers’ Canadian region or province, thus reinstituting the territorial regimental system Hughes had so despised.6

  On the mainland, meanwhile, Canadian Corps had moved to a relatively quiet sector in the area of Lens and Vimy to rebuild. Each division now wore “Somme Patches”—coloured flannel rectangles sewn on the shoulders that provided recognition at a glance. In sequence from 1st Division to 4th Division, the colours were red, blue, grey, and green. Below the divisional marker another identified the soldier’s battalion.

  While unit flashes reinforced esprit de corps they also contributed to the growing friction between the divisions. In the winter of 1916-17, Canadian Corps was not a cohesive fighting force, but rather a grouping of four divisions whose men gave more allegiance to their division and battalion than the corps. A lingering animosity persisted between 1st and 2nd Divisions that had its roots on the 1914 Salisbury Plain training grounds. When in reserve, the two divisions maintained a wary distance. Third Division, having been shredded almost immediately after it deployed to the Ypres Salient and then mauled in the Somme, had suffered such casualties that it had lost all semblance of an identity. Its officers concentrated on building a sense of divisional esprit and cared less about how it fit within the Canadian Corps. Having just arrived on the scene, 4th Division was a stranger and the others had yet to decide if its officers and men could be trusted.7

  Lt.-Gen. Julian Byng tackled the problem head on by forcing small groups of battalion commanders from each division to work through various tactical schemes at Corps headquarters. Byng was no stereotypical British general. He cared little for spit and polish, concentrating instead on efficiency and results. Medical Officer Andrew Macphail described Byng as “large, strong, lithe, with worn boots and frayed puttees. He carried his hand in his pocket and returned a salute by lifting his hand as far as the pocket will allow.”8 Each group worked for about a week together and, every evening, Byng and his staff discussed solutions over dinner and drinks. This forced the officers to socialize. Drafts of more junior officers and non-commissioned officers were also sent to a corps school where exercises ensured they were mixed with counterparts from the other divisions.

  Byng also deliberately shuffled officers and personnel from one division to another, ignoring the complaints this engendered. This British general, who had originally bemoaned having to command Canadians, now championed national identity over all other considerations. Loyalty to battalion and division were admirable, he repeatedly told the troops, but “above all t
hings they were Canadians, and, accordingly, must devote themselves to the interests of that body which in the eyes of the world stood for Canada, namely, the Canadian Corps.”9

  It was a compelling argument and, as the winter wore on, a sense of corps identity took root and slowly began to blossom. Ever pragmatic, Byng knew a Canadian Corps identity would be greatly fostered by having himself and the other British corps officers replaced by Canadians. To this end he was already quietly mentoring Maj.-Gen. Arthur Currie to be his successor.10

  Meanwhile, the Canadian Corps was struggling to absorb hundreds of reinforcements and still remain an efficient fighting unit. As was true for most battalions, many of 16th Battalion’s wounded during the Somme were being invalided out of active service. This meant the majority of replacements were “strangers to the unit,” being supplied from England in “haphazard fashion.” Happily, the Canadian Scottish officers observed, these new soldiers “could not have been improved had the unit had a choice in the selection of reinforcement. They quickly imbibed the spirit of the Battalion; they were loyal to its traditions; they made it their own, just as if they had served in its ranks from the beginning of the war.”11

  Credit for how quickly the new men identified with the battalion went in large measure to its new commander, Lt.-Col. Cyrus Peck. On November 3, Lt.-Col. Jack Leckie had been promoted to command of the 2nd Canadian Reserve Brigade in England. While both Leckie brothers had maintained some degree of studied distance from everyone under their command, Peck was eminently approachable. Imaginative, thoughtful, and able to infuse humour into most situations, Peck’s manner was such that people sought his approval. No crisis seemed to dent his confidence. He charmed the officers’ mess with recitations from Shelley and Keats—poets Peck revered—and could draw upon a vast knowledge of the works of history and philosophy that he devoured at a prodigious rate. His wit was keen, but never used to diminish others. Although he was intellectually inclined, Peck’s years on the British Columbian frontier set him at ease talking with the roughest soldier. Peck talked down to nobody and he made known his fierce pride in the battalion’s troops. Repeatedly, he told visitors: “No such men as his own had ever lived before.”

  Peck also spent only as much time in battalion headquarters as necessary to ensure its smooth running. During combat operations, he was to be seen striding along the front—personal piper at his side. And when the signal to go over the top came, Peck normally “went forward with the Battalion in the attack; and sometimes, contrary to orders … ahead of it.” Cautioned repeatedly—given his ample proportions—against presenting such a conspicuous target, Peck countered that as “an aid to morale and comradeship, nothing … could take the place of the personal example where officer and men took equal chances with death.”

  One thing Peck was adamant about. The Canadian Scottish was a Highland regiment and he recognized that heritage at every turn. Never was the skirl of pipes heard more often within a Canadian battalion’s lines. Peck insisted on five pipers, one each for the companies and a fifth personal piper, accompanying the troops into battle. Each piper was allowed to play just two tunes, one to identify the position of his assigned company and the other to rally the troops he served and guide them to their objective.

  “When I first proposed to take pipers into action,” Peck later wrote, “I met with a great deal of criticism. I persisted, and as I have no Scottish blood in my veins, no one had reason to accuse me of acting from racial prejudices. I believe that the purpose of war is to win victories, and if one can do this better by encouraging certain sentiments and traditions, why shouldn’t it be done? The heroic and dramatic effect of a piper stoically playing his way across the modern battlefield, altogether oblivious of danger, has an extraordinary effect on the spirit of his comrades.”

  Too much noise on the modern battlefield to hear pipers, skeptics countered. Peck volleyed back that the overwhelming din of combat seldom was continuous or long-lasting. “When you got under the enemy’s barrage, which was only the work of a few moments, and when your own barrage got ahead of the advance, which generally happened, after the first one or two ‘lifts’ of the artillery, the skirl of the pipes could be heard for a considerable distance.”

  Another objection was that pipers presented easy targets. “Well,” Peck replied, “that is part of the game. Officers, machine gunners and runners are conspicuous. People get killed in war because they are conspicuous; many get killed when they are not, and that’s part of the game, too.”12

  War was a game with ever-changing rules. Verdun and the Somme had proven that, to avoid futile slaughter, new offensive tactics were required. Field Marshal Douglas Haig had sought to loosen the deadlock with the creeping barrage and tanks, but these had proved insufficient. Artillery could inflict massive damage, but it was unlikely to decide the battle and the tanks were still too crude and unreliable to carry the day.

  Seeking new innovations, Byng had dispatched Currie to study French tactics. Currie came back impressed with the importance they placed on detailed reconnaissance, particularly the basic principle that every man spend time in the front trenches being thoroughly briefed on the ground to be covered, the location and nature of objectives, and the likely resistance. The French used aerial reconnaissance more than the British, providing even junior officers with aerial photos they could use to brief their men. Instead of designating trenches or numbered reference points marked on a topographic map as objectives, the French now selected recognizable geographical features—a summit, wood, or river—that would serve as highly defensible ground for repelling the inevitable German counterattack. Making a defensive stand in a just captured German trench, the French had concluded, was a mug’s game—for these were designed to be defended against Allied attacks from the opposite direction.

  Not only had the French revamped platoon tactics, but they also had begun conducting elaborate dress rehearsals on ground as similar to the real terrain as possible. At the company and platoon level, the poilus drilled in new fire and movement tactics that enabled each platoon to fight independently.

  Some of this was not new. British training manuals pre-dating the war emphasized the need to adapt infantry tactics to the situation faced. But the French not only stressed fluidity and adaptability. They armed the platoon to ensure it possessed innately formidable prowess. Infantry, the French officers told Currie, must be the masters of the battlefield rather than artillery. In keeping with this dictum, French tactics insisted that the leading wave of an attack press through to the objective by flowing around strongly defended German positions, leaving them to follow-on forces.13

  Infantry either prevailed or failed. And the platoon was the unit at the heart of infantry. Currie advocated adopting the French system by rote, an opinion also soon championed by the British War Office itself. The “efficiency of its platoon commanders will often be the measure of an army’s success,” declared one War Office memo. Remodelling of the platoon began.14

  Suddenly, B.E.F. platoons were being given the weapons and organization to survive and dominate the battlefield. Canadian Scottish platoons were first equipped with one Lewis gun and then two to supplement the rifle, bayonet, rifle grenades, and bombs already employed. Each weapon had its special purpose. The “Lewis gun—a weapon of opportunity—and the rifle to deal with the enemy in the open, the rifle grenade and bomb to get at those behind cover, and the bayonet for hand-to-hand fighting. With the combination of these weapons, each supporting the advance as the need arose, it was possible for the commander and his men to initiate tactics suitable for a variety of conditions and ground … the purpose behind this grouping was to create a balanced, self-sufficient fighting body which could act as the spearhead of the attack, ready at a moment’s notice to exploit the advantage of battle. Towards the attainment of this end all existing battalion organization was adjusted.”15

  Individual initiative was nurtured. Everyone was to know how to operate all the weapons. Should the platoon l
eader fall, the non-commissioned officer must be ready to take over. Command would keep devolving downward until no man remained. The platoon was to be a dynamic organism able to adapt to circumstances rapidly rather than adhering rigidly to a prescribed plan. Horrific losses were still expected, but the survivors should be able to fight through to the objective and hold it until reinforced.

  As 1916 gave way to 1917, Byng maintained a grinding training pace, for he knew that come the spring Canadian Corps would face its greatest challenge—the capture of Vimy Ridge. Situated north of Arras, this five-mile-long ridge stood just 457 feet at its highest point, but in a country of open plains Vimy Ridge dominated the surrounding terrain. After its capture in 1914, the Germans had transformed it into their most heavily fortified area in France. Its western slope and the crest line were honeycombed with deep underground caverns capable of housing entire battalions. A formidable trench system provided three lines of defence intended to hold the heaviest Allied assault until reinforcements could arrive to erase any gains won. Placed at regular intervals along the advanced trench line were concrete machine-gun emplacements. Completely surrounded by barbed wire, these bunkers served as independent fortresses. But their fields of fire also overlapped, so that the well-protected gunners jointly could cover the entire front. Because the Germans possessed the heights, it was impossible for the Allies to pull off a surprise attack, for their lines were completely exposed to observation. Unlike the slope facing the Allies, which rose gradually to the crest, Vimy Ridge’s reverse slope fell away steeply to the Douai plain where thick woods provided excellent concealment for German artillery. With good reason the Germans had declared Vimy Ridge impregnable.