Brave Battalion
Page 30
When it was almost dark, the German fire intensified—a sure sign of a feint intended to cover their retirement. Peck ordered two patrols forward to contact the enemy. After a long wait with no sign of activity in the village, Lt. William Stark returned at 2200 hours to report the Germans gone. Major Scroggie led the two companies out of the ditch into the village. As the company commanded by Captain Alec MacLennan started forward, Peck impulsively joined him. It was midnight, and the soldiers warily walked across the open ground, careful not to make much noise. Once they entered the village, Peck “knocked at the door of a small house standing a little bit away from the other houses and heard female voices pleading in great terror not to harm them. We finally persuaded them to open the door and found two old women so frightened out of their wits that they could give us no information on the enemy.
“We entered the village.… It was a bright, moonlight night, and the street was deserted; not even our patrols were to be seen. Knocking loudly at a street door, a woman came out—a middle-aged lady—cool and courageous. When we asked for the ‘Allemand,’ she pointed to a house in a little square, or rather a triangle, with a light showing over the transom. Alec MacLennan and the others went over to this house and entered it, returning afterwards with the news that the enemy had evidently just left, for all the place was in a medley, things scattered about and a candle … still burning on the table. We went over to the billet and as we were crossing the street heard the steady march of Number 3 Company coming up towards us. We then felt secure so sent back for the two remaining companies, placed our outposts on the double-track railway which runs east of the village and such of us as could, were soon comfortably sleeping in billets.”21
At his headquarters Currie noted that 1st Division “had now been in the line for two weeks without having an opportunity to rest and refit since the hard-fought battle of the Canal du Nord” and ordered it relieved by 3rd Division on October 22.22 The 43rd Battalion (Cameron Highlanders of Canada) passed through the Canadian Scottish outposts ahead of Vicoigne at noon and shortly thereafter the battalion joined went into reserve positions at Somain. The troops settled into comfortable billets after a “rousing reception” by the civilians Peck had liberated four days earlier.23 Although they didn’t know it, the Canadian Scottish had fired their last shots of the war.
Some fighting remained for Canadian Corps. October 23 brought it to the Canal de l’Escaut and the fortified city of Valenciennes. South of the city stood 150-foot-high Mont Houy. Five German divisions waited to defend the city and the low mountain to the south. First Army paused to prepare an attack and allow the 51st British Division time to catch up with the Canadians on the left flank. So confident was this division’s commander that he assaulted Mont Houy with just a single battalion on October 28. Although initially winning the hill, the battalion was soon driven off with heavy casualties.
Gen. Henry Horne ordered Canadian Corps to immediately launch another attack, but Currie refused unless allowed to conduct the kind of methodical operation he preferred. Throwing away Canadian lives because everyone was in a rush would not do, Currie warned. A heavy barrage on November 1 deluged the hill with steel and explosives. The hill soon fell and, after some heavy fighting for its outskirts, Valenciennes was taken the following day. Eighty Canadians died and three hundred were wounded.
Once again the pursuit was on, but slowed by terrain and weather. Heavy rain dogged the troops as they moved through a mélange of hills, fast-running brooks, fields bound by hedges, and dense woods. The transport trucks and wagons could not keep pace, so the men carried their daily needs in heavy packs. A stiff fight on November 5 won a crossing over the Aunelle River on the French-Belgian frontier. November 9 brought the Canadians to Jemappes, outside Mons. This was a country of coalfields, dominated by huge slag heaps that provided ideal positions for German machine gunners. Against stiffening resistance, the Canadians pressed on. On November 10, 3rd Division gained Mons at a cost of 116 men killed or wounded. The following morning, at 10:58 a.m., Pte. George Price was shot dead by a sniper inside Mons. Two minutes later the war officially ended.
Earlier that morning a telegram had been received by 1st Division headquarters and disseminated. “Hostilities will cease at 1100 hours on November 11th,” it read. “Troops will stand fast on the line reached at that hour, which will be reported to Corps H.Q. Defensive precautions will be maintained. There will be no intercourse of any description with the enemy. Further instructions follow—From Canadian Corps 0645.”24
The Canadian Scottish war diarist recorded: “Arrangements were made for a celebration at 2000 hours in conjunction with 15th Battalion. A great bonfire was made, all of the people of the village attending. During the night there were scenes of great enthusiasm.”25
The November 11 armistice ended the war, but there was still soldiering to be done. On November 13, 1st Division learned it would participate in an Allied occupation of the west bank of the Rhine and a series of bridge-heads east of it. Canadian Corps and II British Corps would lead a British Second Army march to one of these sectors.26In preparation, 1st Division was to concentrate near Mons and begin the march four days later. The troops were still savouring the taste of victory. Neither they nor their officers were inclined to make haste to the concentration area. Instead the pace of march was leisurely, the Canadian Scottish repeatedly stepping to the side of the road to let hordes of returning refugees—who had fled their homes in 1914—pass. “The scenes en route are indescribable,” noted the Canadian Scottish war diarist. “Every description of means of conveyance was met with, the road being packed with civilians returning to their homes.”27It was two days before the battalion reached Wasmuel, the town southwest of Mons where it was to concentrate.
That Sunday, November 17, the pipe—responding to a request by Wasmuel’s mayor—attended a celebration in the parish church where the Te Deum and Belgian National Anthem were both sung. In the afternoon word spread that Lt.-Col. Peck had been officially awarded the Victoria Cross for heroism during the Amiens battle for the D-Q Line. Peck was away from headquarters and preparations were quickly made in his absence for a full-scale battalion surprise celebration. When Peck returned that evening the band with the entire battalion in its finest Highland finery formed outside the headquarters and let out a loud cheer. The men shouted for Peck to come out and make a speech, which he did. “Afterwards they took him and carried him round the town with the band playing.”28 When the men finally released Peck and returned to their billets, he wryly noted in his diary: “[Battalion] celebrated elaborately in evening. A great day for the Irish.”29
The next morning the march to the Rhine began with 1st Division’s three brigades setting off from Wasmuel, past Mons, and toward Soignies. This village lay on the German side of the Armistice Line. Also on the move was 2nd Division, but each division followed a different route to reduce road congestion. The weather was good, the division covering the assigned 19 miles quickly and everyone was in billets by 1530 hours.30
Despite the armistice, the Canadians were wary of attacks by German army diehards. Each division was preceded by a cavalry screen travelling a day’s march ahead. The infantry also provided its own flank protection with patrols scouting on either side of the secondary roads they used to free the main road for use by divisional transport and heavy guns. Defensive outposts were established on overlooking heights and other tactically threatening terrain. Also working the flanks were sections of cavalry and cyclists drawn from the Corps Troops.
1st Division’s final destination was Cologne with 2 nd Division moving toward Bonn—both about 250 miles from Mons. The Rhineland area of occupation had been divided into zones wherein the Germans were instructed to leave all their war materiel before withdrawing precisely the day before the Allied forces arrived.
Originally, 3rd and 4th Divisions were to have followed the leading two divisions to the Cologne occupation zone, but the German destruction of railways and road damage created
a logistical nightmare that made it impossible to supply such large numbers of troops. The decision was soon made that only the two divisions already on the march, along with Corps Headquarters and some inherent troops, would participate in the occupation. All the rest of Canadian Corps—the 3rd and 4th Divisions, 8th Army Brigade Canadian Field Artillery, 1st and 3rd Brigade’s Canadian Garrison Artillery—transferred to IV Corps of the British Fourth Army and billeted initially in Belgium until the end of the year before moving to England to begin demobilization.31
The divisions bound for occupation duty, meanwhile, enjoyed a near triumphal march through Belgium en route to Germany. In every town where the Canadian Scottish billeted they were feted as liberators. Their reception at Soignies was typical—the mayor renaming the village’s main square “Place Canadian Scottish.” On November 21, the battalion entered Nivelles and was greeted by throngs of cheering civilians. “Nothing was too good for us at Nivelles,” wrote one soldier, “soft feather beds and warm billets. Eight thousand bottles of wine were dug up from the château grounds.”32
Until November 25, the weather remained favourable, but from then on it rained almost daily. With the side roads reduced to muddy quagmires each division abandoned them, and infantry, trucks, and horses moved in one great column stretching along the main road. To avoid overtaxing the small towns in the Ardennes and Eifel districts, each division broke into brigade formations separated by a day’s march, so as one moved forward the town in which it had stayed the night before became available for use by the next in line. “The long hours of marching over cobblestones or through heavy mud,” noted the army’s official historian, “were taking a toll in blistered feet, and the continual drizzling rain had an added depressing effect.”33
Despite these problems the Canadian Scottish completed its longest march to date on November 27—23 miles—with only a few men falling out en route, arriving at its billet in Stant d’Avril at 1730 hours. But there was grumbling aplenty when no rations arrived that evening for the following day and the men had to set off without breakfast.34 Each division had advanced about 100 miles at this point from the single supply railhead west of Valenciennes, and the deteriorating road conditions made it increasingly difficult for the Army Service Corps to get supplies up to the troops. After what was a thankfully short march, the Canadian Scottish solved the immediate problem by breaking open the canteen stock and buying whatever they could acquire from the local citizenry.
November 29 brought no respite as the Canadian Scottish headed for Andenne, a town in the Meuse valley on the edge of the Ardennes mountains. This was “a barren country, the hunting ground of the wealthy in times of peace and fit for little else,” the battalion’s historian recorded. “The home of a peasantry, who toiled from morning to night, summer and winter, raising miserable crops and cutting faggots and peat to earn a living. Up the slopes and over the rough roads of those pine-clad hills rising bleak and forbidding in front through the driving sleet of a November storm, lay the next stage of the journey.”
At Andenne the battalion was dismayed to find no billets. The preceding brigade had not advanced as scheduled, but word of this change reached 3rd Brigade headquarters only after the Canadian Scottish—who led that day—had long departed. “Everybody’s [up] in the air,” the war diarist wrote, but the officers scrounged up sufficient barns and other buildings to provide the men with some shelter. And to the relief of all, rations arrived after nightfall.
The next morning the battalion climbed the “steep, torturous roads that led into the mountains.” With the ration supply continuing to be problematic and the marching conditions continuing to be difficult, the grousing in the ranks worsened. Two days later, three platoons from one company refused to move, their spokesmen claiming that they “had been told … the brigade in front had not moved when rations were short, and why should they be asked to march.” The company commander bullied the “insubordinate platoons” into forming up and the march proceeded on schedule.
Learning of the problem with these platoons, Lt.-Col. Peck had the men pulled aside and “in one of those ‘straight from the shoulder’ rebukes which he could deliver when the occasion demanded, let the trouble makers know exactly how any repetition of such conduct would be dealt with.”35
Next morning the battalion recovered its usual good spirits despite marching through “a thick, damp mist which later in the day turned to a steady rain.” Marching over a rough road that was little more than a muddy horse track, the men logged a remarkable 24 miles. “The troops,” one officer noted, “were in fine form. The last two laps of the journey they perked right up, and came into billets—which were not reached until after dusk—singing, merry and bright.”
They were closing on the frontier and passing through Belgian territory where the civilians were pro-German. No longer did the crowds cheer the soldiers tramping through their villages and towns. Instead they showed only a “forced politeness.” Provost marshals preceded the marching troops, posting notices bearing Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s signature that warned any “acts of hostility against His Majesty’s Forces or any wanton destruction of roads, railways or telegraph lines would be punishable by death.”
On December 6, while marching across “a stretch of scrubby bog-land high up in the Ardennes, the Battalion reached the German frontier. The pipe band drew to one side, struck up ‘The Blue Bonnets’ and the 16th passed into the enemy’s homeland. The Battalion had travelled 140 miles from the starting point; three weeks had elapsed since the march to the Rhine had begun. Thereafter the marches daily grew easier, roads gradually improved, and billets became more comfortable.”36
Hereafter the only spectators who watched the passing troops were “children with close-cropped heads who stared, curiously from the roadside. Their elders remained discreetly out of sight, peering through half closed doors or shuttered windows at the marching columns.” Lt.-Gen. Currie was anxious about a potential German threat and issued a warning for them to remain “a close-knitted army in grim, deadly earnest” that afforded lurking German agents no “evidence of disintegration in your fighting power.” Discipline would remain strict. “In short, you must continue to be, and appear to be, that powerful hitting force which has won the fear and respect of your foes and the admiration of the world.”37
Finally, on December 12, the long march ended when the Canadian Scottish reached Bayenthal, a western suburb town of Cologne. Here they billeted preparatory to crossing Hohenzollern Bridge the next morning. “We have a large flat in an apartment house,” one soldier wrote of his billet. “The Hun gent occupying the house resents us very much; we had quite a row with him. The flat we have was occupied by a Guard’s officer and his wife. They apparently fled in haste, for clothing, jewelry and money are lying about. I called the janitor but he refused to have anything to do with it.”
Friday, December 13, was dark with heavy rain. The men formed up at 0745 hours. As the Germans might oppose the crossing, the men were in battledress. By the time the order to advance came at 0830 everyone was drenched and shivering in the icy cold. Despite the discomfort, as the troops tromped along the cobbled streets of Cologne toward the bridge they sang lustily, deriving some pleasure from the fact their marching songs appeared to unsettle the small groups of Germans watching bleakly.
3rd Brigade was to lead the division over Hohenzollern Bridge and the battalion commanders had drawn lots earlier to see which unit would be first. Peck had been unlucky, so the Canadian Scottish were third in line. He ordered bayonets fixed and the men “stepped on to the bridge which was the end of the road to victory.”38 On the other side Maj.-Gen. Archie Macdonell and his staff took the salute, as the battalion passed through the city to its assigned destination—the suburb of Heumar.
No resistance was offered and it became clear that occupation of the Cologne Bridgehead garrison was to be an exercise in tedium. The biggest worry came from persistent rumours that Canadian Corps and all the units therein were to
be broken up and the men returned home on the basis of a priority system dictated by length of overseas service and marital status. General feeling in the battalion was that they should go home as they had served, together. Finally it was announced that, at a November 23 meeting of all divisional and brigade senior commanders, a unanimous decision had been agreed “that from every point of view it was most desirable to demobilize the Corps by Units and not by Categories.” Initially the Canadian federal cabinet maintained the opposing view, but when Currie dug in his heels the politicians had grudgingly agreed to the wishes of the Canadian Corps officers.39
On Christmas Eve, half the battalion attended midnight mass in a Cologne cathedral. The troops awoke on Christmas morning to find snow blanketing the ground. In the windows of houses, Christmas trees adorned with lit candles provided a festive setting. The real celebration came, however, on New Year’s Day when, by companies, the battalion held sumptuous dinners.
The new year proved a time of ever-quickening numbers of farewells. On January 3, 1919, Peck departed for Canada after emotionally reviewing the battalion. In absentia he had stood as the Unionist candidate for the British Columbia riding of Skeena in the December 1917 federal election and won. But he had refused any suggestion of taking his seat in the House of Commons until his army duties were done. Now he was free to go. Peck would hold the seat until 1921 and then turn to provincial politics—sitting in the British Columbia legislature from 1924 to 1933.
The battalion passed to James Scroggie, but it would be under the temporary command of Major John Hope that the Canadian Scottish turned their backs toward the Rhine on January 6 and left the army of occupation. Along with the 13th and 14th Battalions of 3rd Brigade, they were the first units of 1st Division embarked by train to new billets in Belgium. By January 18, the entire division was gone with 2 nd Division and the rest of the Canadian Corps units engaged in the occupation completing the move on February 6.