Brave Battalion

by Mark Zuehlke

  It was a miserably cold day with heavy rain that drenched the men. The rain and thick overcast cut visibility so badly that the Canadian Scottish could see neither the Royal Highlanders at Sancourt nor any sign of the Royal Montreal Regiment supposedly advancing on their immediate left. Nor was 4th Division’s 102nd Battalion visible to the right. The persistently heavy gunfire from the direction of Sancourt told Bell-Irving that the Royal Highlanders were still engaged there and not moving on schedule toward Blécourt. That meant the battalion’s left flank was unprotected as it passed Sancourt and crossed the Cambrai-Douai rail line. Routine tactical doctrine would have held that Bell-Irving should hold the Canadian Scottish in place until the Royal Highlanders completed the execution of the original plan by capturing Blécourt. But one message emanating down from First Army headquarters had been crystal clear—every battalion was expected to press “forward irrespective of flanks.” These were instructions that appealed to Bell-Irving’s impetuous nature. And, as the battalion had yet to suffer a casualty, he was encouraged to believe little resistance would be met. Consequently, after only a few seconds’ hesitation, the major sent word to Mordy to continue advancing to the east of the railway.

  A moment later No. 4 Company surged over the raised railway bed and was immediately raked by machine-gun fire. Mordy fell, badly wounded. Lt. Frank Hill was also hit but—the wound being less serious—insisted on remaining with the company until wounded more seriously a few minutes later. Bell-Irving responded immediately by ordering No. 3 Company to slip sideways and come up alongside the staggered No. 4 Company while the other two companies adopted a two-company formation a little to the rear with the battalion headquarters between them.

  The two leading companies ran straight at the gunners to their front and overran a string of machine-gun positions that were mostly still in the process of being established along the verge of a sunken road south of Blécourt. Twelve machine guns and a hundred prisoners were captured. Ahead lay the village of Cuvillers, and Bell-Irving ordered the men to charge it. As the Can Scots emerged from the sunken road German artillerymen inside the village began firing at them over open sights while more guns and machine guns on an overlooking ridge poured fire in from the left. Had all this fire not been wildly inaccurate, the battalion would have been shredded. Instead, the advance continued with the Lewis gun crews scattering into firing positions and striking the German gunners in Cuvillers with such accurate fire that they fled. At 0745 hours Cuvillers was overrun, but as the Can Scots began consolidating to defend it they started taking heavy fire from Blécourt to their rear.

  Captain George McCreary’s No. 2 Company was most exposed to the fire coming from Blécourt, so he ordered Lt. James Rodgers to take his platoon back to the village and take out the Germans there. Working their way into the village, Rodgers closed on a church with an attached convent that the Germans had fortified. Men were firing out of every window and doorway and also from the steeple. The platoon busted into the church and cleared it, but stalled trying to get inside the convent until a Lewis gun crew arrived. Once they opened fire, the remaining Germans abandoned the convent.

  With Blécourt cleared and Cuvillers taken, the Canadian Scottish set up a defensive front to fend off any counterattacks. No. 1 Company, acting as the reserve, dug in along Cuvillers’ eastern outskirts. About 100 yards farther out, No. 2 Company established a support line from where they could quickly move to reinforce the other two companies dug in on a ridge about 200 yards ahead. Both Nos. 3 and 4 Companies had sent patrols almost a thousand yards beyond the ridge to the sunken road that marked their final objective. Bell-Irving confidently expected to complete the battalion advance to the road once the battalions on either of his flanks appeared. It was only 0900 hours, the day was young, and there was much daylight yet for finishing the assignment. The only German resistance in the battalion’s area consisted of sporadic artillery fire from the ridge that was concentrated on Blécourt, which the Canadian Scottish had withdrawn from once the church and convent had been taken. Such calm reigned that the battalion’s cooks rolled their kitchen wagons into Cuvillers and prepared a hot meal.

  As the morning wore on, however, and there remained no sign of friendly troops on either of their flanks Bell-Irving began to worry. With Assistant Adjutant Lt. Robert Kerans for company, he went forward to the ridge where No. 3 and No. 4 companies were deployed. Kerans was increasingly anxious. Gesturing to their flanks, he said, the battalion was “in the air.” Not looking up from the map he was studying, Bell-Irving replied, “I know that, but I’m going to push on to the men in the road.” Kerans was to go back and have the two companies back of the ridge change positions so that the Canadian Scottish was covering its own flanks. The two men parted, Bell-Irving walking down the slope and out into the countryside between the ridge and the sunken road. Major Roderick Ogle Bell-Irving would not again be seen alive.34

  Kerans was still on his way to the rear when the quiet was shattered by intense fire from the overlooking ridge on the left flank that ripped the battalion lines all the way from where Nos. 3 and 4 Companies were positioned back to Cuvillers. As Kerans sprinted into the village he saw Germans slipping into it from the direction of Bantigny to the north. The Royal Montreal Regiment was supposed to be over there, but clearly they weren’t. From the overlooking ridge the German machine gunners were able to cover every inch of ground the Canadian Scottish held and prevent them organizing a measured counterattack to meet the enemy infantry vying for control of the village.

  When the Germans first appeared, RSM James Kay had immediately ordered all the men in the village to fall back to a position on the northern outskirts. By the time Kerans joined him, Kay had broken the headquarters section into fighting details—strengthened by the cooks and other troops who normally provided support functions. Each detail was strategically placed in a house from which they could provide mutual fire support to the others while also maintaining control of the road that ran to Blécourt. The road was the battalion’s escape route, Kay told Kerans. He added that the situation they were in was untenable. Kerans agreed, but escaping it seemed equally untenable because there was now German fire coming from Blécourt. The four rifle companies, all to the front of Cuvillers, would be surrounded if the small force in Cuvillers was unable to turn the advancing Germans back. Kerans and Kay agreed that their current positions were no good. The only viable defensive ground for such a small unit was a sunken road that ran southwestward from the village. Once they were in place on that road, the rifle companies could fall back on them.

  Out to the front of Cuvillers, Captain Robert McIntyre of No. 1 Company had taken No. 2 Company’s lieutenant, James Rodgers, and his platoon out to the left in hopes of making contact with the Royal Montreal Regiment. He had just decided the Montreal regiment was obviously nowhere near where they were supposed to be when a wave of Germans suddenly appeared and began moving to cut the platoon off. The Canadians sprinted back to the company lines, which were being saturated with heavy fire. McIntyre learned that No. 3 Company’s captain, George Mason, had been killed and No. 2 Company’s captain, McCreary, seriously wounded. That left McIntyre the senior officer in the front area. He told Rodgers to go to battalion headquarters in Cuvillers and ask for reinforcements. As Rodgers ran off, McIntyre reorganized Nos. 1 and 2 Companies into a composite unit. There was nothing he could do for the two companies out on the ridge. All contact with them had been lost.

  As Rodgers entered the village he came face-to-face with a group of Germans. He sprinted back the way he had come until finally outdistancing the pursuing Germans, who gave up the chase. During his return to McIntyre’s position, Rodgers met four lost Royal Montreal Lewis gunners and took them under his wing. Rodgers reported that the Germans were in control of Cuvillers and McIntyre decided the only course of action open to him was to withdraw to positions west of the village. That meant leaving the two forward companies to their own devices, but there seemed no choice. As McIntyre’s
men moved back they came upon the group led by Kerans. The two officers decided to send patrols toward Blécourt and Bantigny, for surely the Royal Highlanders would be in the former while Bantigny was an objective for the Royal Montreal Regiments. Once they located either battalion, the Canadian Scottish could withdraw to their position.

  In the minutes it took to organize the patrols, the Germans appeared in strength south of Bantigny. Cut off from that village, McIntyre sent both patrols toward Blécourt. One happened on a Montrealer corporal with six men who were dug into the side of a sunken road southeast of the village. The patrol hurried back to McIntyre, who then moved his force there. Here he hoped to stand until the two forward companies caught up.

  It was a forlorn hope, for German machine guns positioned inside Blécourt opened up with fierce fire directed straight along the length of the sunken road. Staying in the funnel of the road meant dying there, so McIntyre and his men retreated cross-country to another road farther south. This one had a southwest-trending dogleg that prevented the Germans firing directly along it from Blécourt. It was now noon. McIntyre had no idea what was happening with the other 3rd Brigade battalions.

  Everywhere the brigade’s situation was dire. At 1030 hours, Lt.-Col. Peck acted with disregard for Brig. Tuxford’s orders to stay well back. With the battalion’s acting adjutant Captain Robert Robertson, Peck had ridden forward to Sancourt only to be forced to dismount on the outskirts by German machine-gun fire. “This amazed us, as we thought ourselves well behind the battle line. We turned hastily about and galloped back on to the road in Sancourt, where we were sheltered by some buildings. We turned our horses over to the grooms, and proceeded forward on foot, being careful to seek such shelter as we could find.”

  At the railroad in front of Sancourt the two men took shelter in a siding. From here they quickly determined “the whole position was one of uncertainty and that a serious situation had developed.” When a machine gun opened up on them, Peck and Robertson ran to a small brick tower where they found a company of 48th Highlanders forming. Peck could see Canadian troops advancing to the left in a disorderly formation and surmised these must be part of 1st Brigade. He suggested the 48th Highlanders use the railway embankment’s cover to join the other Canadians going forward.

  A few minutes after the 48th Highlanders headed out, Lt.-Col. Dick Worral appeared with a runner at his side. Worral told Peck he had lost all contact with his Royal Montreal Regiment. Peck said they could do nothing where they were and must go forward. Dodging heavy machine-gun fire, the four men dashed one at a time over patches of open ground until they finally encountered a platoon of Royal Highlanders in Blécourt. The platoon commander said he knew nothing of any units beyond his small group. Pressing on alone, the four men were finally driven to ground in an abandoned enemy dugout. Here they hunkered down until just how confused the situation had become was proven by the arrival of a party of signallers who, unreeling telephone line in their wake, walked into the dugout. Suddenly Peck was talking directly over a phone with Brig. Tuxford. After briefly describing what he had seen so far, Peck had the signallers pack up the line and ordered everyone to withdraw to the relative safety of a sunken road farther back. Here, he ordered Captain Robertson to locate the Canadian Scottish or any other battalion he could find on the brigade front.

  Robertson took three of the signallers with him as runners and made his way to a chapel on the Blécourt road. This six-sided shrine had windows on every side and provided “a splendid view of the whole country.” Through his binoculars, Robertson could see “enemy movement … in the outskirts of Blécourt, on my extreme left, and at Cuvillers in front.” In the road running from the chapel to Cuvillers, Robertson could see McIntyre’s Canadian Scottish while, off in the other direction, the road was packed with a lot of men from 4th Division. Given the presence of so many Canadian troops, Robertson decided the road would serve as a rallying point. He sent word to the Canadian Scottish survivors to fall back on the chapel and dig in to the left of it while the 4th Division men were ordered to do the same on the right. Once this line was established, Robertson put several patrols out to the east to bring any Canadians they found back to the road.

  The road served fairly well as a trench and the Canadians were able to keep the ever-growing numbers of German infantry at bay with rifle fire. RSM Kay steadied the men by walking along the length of their line to offer encouragement and caution them against wasting their dwindling ammunition supply by firing when the Germans were not actually counterattacking.

  Peck, meanwhile, had phoned Tuxford again and been ordered to take command of the front line. With a semblance of a defensive line established, he was able to direct artillery against targets threatening it. Cuvillers was quickly reduced to ruins. He also arranged an ammunition re-supply. A stalemate set in. The Germans held Blécourt, the Canadians the road position. Each attempted to drive the other out of their position with artillery and machine-gun fire, but neither budged. When night fell, Tuxford ordered further offensive action abandoned.35

  The determined resistance that 3rd Brigade had met had been matched all along the Canadian Corps front and convinced Lt.-Gen. Currie that to “continue to throw tired troops against such opposition, without giving them an opportunity to refit and recuperate, was obviously inviting a serious failure, and I accordingly decided to break off the engagement. The five days’ fighting had yielded practical gains of a very valuable nature, as well as 7,059 prisoners and 205 guns.

  “We had gone through the last organized system of defences on our front, and our advance constituted a direct threat on the rear of the troops immediately to the north of our left flank, and their withdrawal had now begun.

  “Although the ground gained on the 1st was not extensive, the effects of the battle and of the previous four days’ fighting were far-reaching and made possible the subsequent advances of October and November, in so far as the Divisions engaged against the Canadian Corps drew heavily on the enemy’s reserves, which had now been greatly reduced.” Intelligence reports indicated the Germans had been forced to commit ten divisions to block the Canadian advance while only requiring three divisions to reinforce the front running from Honnecourt to Cambrai, which was 18,000 yards in length. He was proud of his troops and their commanders, believing they had effectively seized the initiative for the Allies and it now rested with others to ensure the Germans had no time to regroup.36

  But the cost in blood had been terrific. When relieved from the road position on October 2, the Canadian Scottish had only three officers and seventy-five men fit for combat. Five officers and nineteen men were dead, eight officers and two hundred men wounded. A further 103 men were missing, presumed captured.37 Major Bell-Irving was originally considered to have been captured, but on October 15 his body was discovered about a hundred yards from where he and Kerans had last exchanged words.

  The Canadian Scottish casualties were not unique. The RMR had been reduced to just ninety-two men. In his account of the action, Lt.-Col. Worral said the battalion had gone into the battle with only thirteen officers, even fewer non-commissioned officers, and seriously under-strength. He was not surprised that, under such circumstances, the offensive failed in the face of determined resistance.38 Since August 8—what would later be called the beginning of the Hundred Days that ended the war—Canadian Corps had lost 30,000 men killed, wounded, or missing. By October 1, the Canadian Corps was simply too weak to carry the brunt of the Allied offensive. Currie had committed his troops with the understanding that 11th British Division would bolster his strength with three full battalions. But this division had been so badly beaten up, it provided just three companies that proved of no value. Currie angrily decried the lack of support from First Army headquarters as an “absolute betrayal.”39

  chapter twelve

  Drive to Victory

  - OCTOBER 2-NOVEMBER 11, 1918 -

  The question at the beginning of October was which army would collapse first: the German
or the Allies? The French Army endured only because the American Expeditionary Force assumed some of its front. But, on September 26, the inexperienced Americans ventured into the Argonne Forest near Verdun and narrowly avoided decimation as their generals adopted tactics that mirrored the Allied blunders of 1914 and 1915 rather than those now practised. A bloody seesaw battle ensued in the Argonne that dragged interminably into October. The B.E.F., meanwhile, was so reduced by casualties it slashed divisional strengths from twelve battalions to nine, a decision that rendered each division less capable of prolonged combat. Australia’s rejection of conscription left its corps so under-strength that the troops were in a mutinous mood. Despite conscription, Canadian morale was equally poor with many a bunkhouse orator telling anyone within earshot that Lt.-Gen. Arthur Currie was “a glory-seeker, demanding the bloodiest tasks for his corps.”1 The reality was that Field Marshal Douglas Haig and his army commanders realized at this juncture in the war that the Canadians and ANZACs were indisputably the B.E.F.’s best fighting soldiers and that realization put them repeatedly on the sharp end.

  However, the Germans had even more problems than the Allies. By September’s end, all the gains of the spring offensive had been erased with the massive casualties the German troops had suffered. Bulgaria and Turkey were lost as allies. At home, influenza and famine raged. On October 2, the German army high command advised the Reichstag’s party leaders that “we cannot win the war.” A negotiated peace was attempted for the first time by tentatively extending feelers to U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, whose Fourteen Points proposal offered a possible face-saving resolution. But the Allies sought unconditional surrender, which the Germans would not agree to. So the war would continue until one side or the other was crushed.2