Brave Battalion

by Mark Zuehlke

  Currie kept negotiating postponements. Haig insisted he must gain possession of Passchendaele, the little Flanders crossroads village that stood on the centre of the ridge’s crest. Currie decided the only way to get there was by three limited advances with each phase remaining well inside the range of his artillery. Once on the objective, the infantry would dig in and pause for about three days while the gunners dragged their artillery forward to establish a new firing line. Because conditions were so vile and dangerous—every square inch being subject to German fire—Currie decided it was too obvious a signal that an attack was coming to assemble the assaulting brigades in the front lines only a short time before Zero Hour. Instead, they would occupy the front lines two days before the attack, even though this meant they would be exposed to all the normal stress of front-line duty during this period.

  Finally, Currie declared he was ready to attack on October 26. Third and Fourth Divisions would lead with their axis centred on the village but separated by the impassably flooded Ravebeek swamp. They would go up against German positions tied together by an array of concrete pillboxes concealing any number of machine guns and thickly protected by belts of wire. There would be two keys to victory: the firepower of the gunners—and the sheer guts of the infantry. If either failed the Canadians would be slaughtered to no avail.

  On October 25, the already cheerless weather broke with a heavy rainfall. At dawn the following morning the assault battalions picked their way forward behind a rolling barrage, trying to circumvent the shell-holes. Still, several men lost their footing and drowned as their heavy equipment pulled them under. Yellow mud clung to their gear and clothing. Soon each man dragged along an extra twenty to thirty pounds of muck in addition to their fighting kit.

  The platoon tactics practised so assiduously before Vimy Ridge served the Canadians well as they closed on the pillboxes, whose inherent strength also proved their weakness. Able to see only what lay in view through the narrow apertures, the German gunners depended on infantry in the trenches behind them to protect them from being attacked from blind sides. Recognizing this vulnerability, one platoon section would hit the rear trenches with withering fire from a flank while the rest rushed forward and eliminated the gunners with Mill bombs. German prisoners could be left there by the assault troops and mopped up later by follow-on forces. This was a deadly game, however, because the Canadians were exposed and under constant fire from German positions farther up the slope as they clawed their way toward the summit.

  The two divisions took three days to gain their first objective at a cost of 2,481 men. But they were still well short of the prize—Passchendaele. On October 30, the reserve battalions renewed the drive, gaining 1,000 yards across a 2,800-yard-wide front for 2,321 casualties. That left 3rd and 4th divisions spent, so Currie fed the 1st brigades of both 1st and 2nd divisions forward on November 6. The fresh troops succeeded with 2nd Division’s 27th Battalion, claiming the honour of eliminating the pillboxes where the village had once stood. Victory came at a terrible cost, with 734 men killed out of a total casualty toll of 2,238. There remained the ridge’s summit and Haig demanded its possession. On November 10, 1st Division’s 7th and 8th Battalions seized it and then desperately repelled a succession of counterattacks. At nightfall the Germans slunk back and the Canadians established a series of outposts in shell-holes and dugouts on Passchendaele’s east slope. Losses this day numbered 1,094 casualties of which 420 died. But the day’s action concluded the Third Battle of Ypres, also known as Second Passchendaele. Four days later the Canadians started handing off the front and by the 20th had departed the godforsaken salient for good. Passchendaele had cost the corps 15,654 casualties, just a few hundred less than Currie’s prediction.24

  “I look back on the Passchendaele show as a nightmare,” one Canadian Scottish soldier wrote. “The ground was strewn with our dead. I have never seen anything to compare with the holocaust. When I think of shell-holes filled with water; the road leading up to the ridge heavily shelled day and night; wading through water, mud up to the knees; the stretcher-bearers carrying the wounded, eight men to a stretcher, and sometimes the whole party would be smashed up before they reached the dressing station, it makes me wonder how the troops stood it all.”25

  The Canadian Scottish thanked their luck to have been spared an offensive role. But they could never forget the Ypres Salient or the fact that more than half their total casualties during the course of the war occurred inside its maw.

  While Canadian Corps was granted a long-deserved break, the British launched a new major offensive at Cambrai. Passchendaele had still raged as Lt.-Gen. Julian Byng and his Third Army put final touches to an audacious plan that, in one bold move, sought to “rupture…the German front from St. Quentin, seventeen miles south of Cambrai, to the canalized River Sensée, five miles north of the city. It was Byng’s intention to gain possession of the area lying between the Canal du Nord and the St. Quentin Canal, bounded to the north by the Sensée.… With this accomplished the whole German line west of the Canal du Nord would be endangered.”26

  Before being ordered to Passchendaele, Currie had hoped the Canadians would be part of this operation—recognizing that its execution might revolutionize the art of warfare. But Passchendaele left it too spent to participate.

  Third Army intended to unleash the war’s first truly mechanized and combined arms offensive, which the Cambrai front ideally suited. Low, gently rolling ground little pocked by the shelling that had chewed up most of the Western Front rendered it ideal tank country, and the British planned to employ 378 in support of five infantry divisions. Together this combined force would smash the Hindenburg Line. Once this formidable German defensive line was breached the Cavalry Corps astride their chargers would sweep across the open plain to isolate Cambrai and win a crossing over the Sensée while the infantry cleared the city and Bourlon Wood to the northwest. When the infantry and tanks caught up to the cavalry at the Sensée, the British would cut off any German forces still holding the front lines to the west by attacking their rear.

  Ahead of the army advance, hundreds of Royal Flying Corps aircraft would swoop down to plaster the German forward trenches with bombs, while 1,000 artillery pieces lay down a massive barrage. Coordinating the air strikes and artillery to occur in concert with the offensive represented another tactical innovation—employment of massed armour being the other. The commonplace protracted pre-assault bombardment was abandoned in order to gain surprise. The gunners would not even pre-register targets. Instead they would shoot from the map, relying on recent survey techniques and better calibration of guns.

  Intelligence reports indicated the Germans were unconcerned about this sector of front. They rotated three divisions into the area at a time, using it as a rest stop for battle-weary troops from the Ypres Salient—gaining it the sobriquet “Flanders sanatorium.” While German intelligence had noted that Third Army was more active here than normal, it had issued warnings only to expect more localized raiding.

  At 0620 hours on November 20, when the RFC suddenly swarmed from the skies and the guns unleashed one massive volley of fire the Germans were caught entirely surprised. The front-line troops, taking the brunt of the artillery and aerial attacks, looked out at No Man’s Land fearfully to witness “the unprecedented and awesome sight and sound of a long line of tanks rumbling forward” from a start line no more than 1,000 yards away. Behind came great waves of infantry. The tanks flattened the barbed wire. Then they released large clusters of wood called “fascines” that were attached to their front ends into the trenches and ground across these impromptu bridges.

  Six thousand dazed and bloodied Germans surrendered without offering the slightest resistance and the mighty juggernaut continued to advance despite stiffening resistance as reinforcements frantically tried to plug the hole. By evening, the British had torn the Hindenburg Line open with gains of three to four miles in depth at a cost of 4,000 casualties. But the tanks had suffered badly, 65 bein
g destroyed by German fire and another 114 breaking down or becoming stuck. The British had also failed to break the Masnières-Beaurevoir Line—the last major German trench—before it was heavily reinforced, which made it impossible to unleash the cavalry. A communication mix-up, however, had resulted in “B” Squadron of the Fort Garry Horse—part of the Canadian Cavalry Brigade serving in the British 5th Cavalry Division—believing the ground open. They rode instead into a slaughter from which only forty men returned.27

  The impetus lost, British Third Army was forced onto the defensive and, over the next three days, lost virtually all the ground gained. Had they been reinforced, Byng’s troops might have held, but Passchendaele had claimed all the British reserves. In the first week of December, a prolonged snowstorm ended the fighting. An attack for which expectations had run high cost 44,000 casualties with nothing to show but German losses of 41,000. The year ended with Allied morale at its lowest ebb. Not only had the costly offensives of 1917 largely ended in disaster, but Russia had surrendered, freeing up hundreds of German divisions for service on the Western Front. On October 24, the Allies had been given a foretaste of the import of Russia’s surrender when Germany and Austria launched a massive offensive against Italy at Caporetto. In a matter of days, the Italians lost 80 miles and 265,000 men surrendered. Only the hurried reinforcement by five British and six French divisions prevented a complete collapse.

  The Canadian Scottish closed the year facing Lens and Méricourt as part of a new Canadian Corps deployment. Despite the fact that both combatants practised active defence, which for the Germans entailed nightly raids while the Canadians concentrated on ambushing the raiders before they penetrated the outer defences, the sector was considered a quiet one. Since December the entire Western Front had shivered in the coldest temperatures so far recorded during the war. The Canadian Scottish rotated trench duty on a front running from immediately north of the Lens Canal on the left to a deep railway cutting south of the Lens-Béthune Road on the right. There was no contiguous trench. The front consisted instead of separated posts inside the ruins and cellars of houses that had once made up the village of Liévin.

  As usual, the Germans held overlooking high ground, so the Canadians played a game of “hide and seek” to prevent them from identifying which posts were actively held. All movement was at night, which had worked well until the front became covered in “a mantle of snow.” After that the Germans could clearly see the footprints leading to each post and were able to mark their positions before the snow melted. Then, on one of the “bright moonlight nights which prevailed, [the enemy] saw the relief parties moving out [and] opened on them with his large [trench mortars]. He could have employed no more effective weapons. The huge bombs burst amongst the houses and on the roadways, sending showers of bricks and stones in all directions and inflicting many casualties.”

  December 23, one Can Scot wrote in a letter, was “the coldest day I have seen out here.” The battalion spent the day on the move back to corps reserve at Canada Camp in Château de la Haie. This, the soldier added, was “the rottenest, coldest bare camp we have ever seen.” In these drab surroundings, in the midst of continuous cold and blustery weather, the battalion passed Christmas and New Years. “At midnight, 1917- 18, Last Post was blown, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ sung, and immediately afterward the Pipe Band played in the New Year.”28

  A week later, the Canadian Scottish cheerfully marched away from the front lines entirely to the town of Bruay. They narrowly beat being caught in a blizzard en route that left behind three to four inches of snow quickly blown into high drifts by a sharp wind. Having come to Bruay for a three-week training period, the troops could do little but hole up and wait for the snow to abate. After several days the skies cleared but the snow melted so rapidly it flooded much of the town and adjacent training area. Abandoning the training plan, the men were instead given “freedom to enjoy the comfort of their billets and the social enjoyments of the town” until they left Bruay on January 28.

  During this breathing space from front-line duty the complement of officers was brought to full strength. Major Roderick Bell-Irving became Lt.-Col. Peck’s second-in-command and Captain John Paton, who had enlisted in the Seaforths as a private and earned a battlefield commission in 1916, was the adjutant. The company commanders, some of whom returned after recovering from earlier wounds, were all respected veterans. No. 1 Company’s Captain Alan “Gus” Lyons had started out as a sergeant before a June 1916 commissioning. Major James Scroggie, wounded at Vimy Ridge, returned to command No. 2 Company. Fiercely ambitious, Scroggie was rumoured to have a Lt.-Col.’s star stowed in a pocket just in case fortune elevated him to battalion command. But Scroggie was also much respected, to the point that junior officers often asked during a crisis, “What would Scroggie do here?” Twenty-year-old Captain George Francis Mason retained No. 3 Company. He was another officer who had risen from the ranks. Mason had been present at every major engagement 1st Division fought and suffered a wound at the Somme. He was one of Peck’s most valued officers and a man whose judgement the battalion commander trusted implicitly. Major Arnott Grier Mordy had assumed command of No. 4 Company upon Major James Murphy’s death at Hill 70.

  Of the forty-seven platoon commanders in the four companies, thirty had been commissioned from the ranks. Major Hugh Urquhart, who often visited his old battalion, believed that this gave the Canadian Scottish “a treasure of experience and ability. They had to bear a load of responsibility during critical times in the history of the Battalion, and they shouldered it with a competence and keen fighting spirit which proved them to be officers of a high calibre. It can be said of them, as a body, that at no time did the Battalion possess more efficient subalterns.”29

  Two of these officers demonstrated their ability clearly on February 13, when two raiding parties ventured into No Man’s Land near Loos. Scroggie headed one team of raiders, but when his men ran afoul of heavy wire in front of the German trenches and could not get through he led them back home without contacting the enemy. The other party under Lt. Sydney Johnston, who had been commissioned in 1916, fared better. Accompanying Johnston was Lt. Ben W. Allen, commissioned almost precisely the year before the raid. Before the raiding party had set out Johnston split it into two groups so that twenty men were under his command and twelve Allen’s.

  Johnston also meticulously inspected the extra equipment the men carried. “Mills grenades; ammonal tubes; twenty pound ammonal charges, wire cutters, rolls of chicken wire with slats nailed across, Very pistol flares, and flash lamps. We are like a traveling circus,” he wrote afterward. Two men led, tasked with laying white tape up to a gap found in the German wire during a previous reconnaissance. The two lieutenants had agreed on a simple anvil and hammer plan with Allen’s party serving as the anvil. At Zero Hour, Allen would blow a captured German gas-alarm horn, rush a trench called Horse Alley, seize a good fighting position, and then intercept the Germans Johnston’s “hammer” party drove their way during their push along the trench from the right.

  Because of their heavy loads and a nerve-wracking few moments when the Germans shelled an approach trench with gas rounds that forced everyone to don their box respirators, the party finally caught up to the advance party by the wire only at 0250 hours. The two men reported they had been unable to find the gap and the wire seemed intact all along the line. Johnston was little surprised and had taken the precaution of having his men carry with them several large rubber bath mats. As a pre-planned artillery bombardment hit the German lines to cover their move, Johnston took one section of the party forward “and before the barrage lifted we had bath mats over the old trench and others across the first line of barbed wire. Someone in rear yelled to come back, that I was in the barrage. Second line of wire was on screw pickets—tore it off pickets and pulled it around the bottom of them—get over and barrage lifts just then. [Private] Tommy [Thompson] comes up to me, section following, and we scramble over the third row of wire. Tommy and I r
ush for the trench, bombing as we go, and I get in first, Tommy landing on the top of me. The section gets all in and to my joyful surprise the other sections also rush forward; machine guns are silent by this time.”

  The hammer and anvil plan, Johnston realized, was out the window because the party had been forced to go through the wire in a single group with no time to split up before the fighting began. So Johnston placed the men in line with Allen commanding the right-hand sections while he oversaw the left-hand group with the intention of just seeing how the Germans would respond to their incursion. Soon they heard tramping noises approaching and the men “crouched down at the corner of a traverse, all ready for them, and when we reckoned they were about on us I sprang out, revolver pointed ahead. Behold a solitary bespectacled Hun, who when he saw us, threw down his rifle with a bang on the trench-board, off with his equipment like a flash, and up with his hands. ’Twas funny! He did it, as if he was doing rifle exercises to numbers. The corporal sprang on him and pummeled his face, but I hauled him off.”

  Johnston decided to lead a charge in the direction the prisoner had approached from. “Then followed a very busy, thrilling time—ammonal tubes in dug-outs and a good deal of wrecking and killing. It was hard work getting prisoners, but eventually we managed to preserve a few, for what good would it be if we don’t bring back prisoners, the staff frown on us and doubt our stories. It was funny to see some of our fellows shove a mobile [ammonal] charge down a dug-out, then stand back to watch it go up—darned wonder they didn’t go up too. We were absolutely at home and dominated the sector we occupied. A Hun kneeling at the bottom of a dug-out fired at me, striking me in the arm—put mobile charge down on him.”