Vimy

by Pierre Berton

  The barrage pounded the forward enemy lines-the mine craters and lightly held posts on the rim of No Man’s Land-for three minutes, then crept forward at the rate of one hundred yards every three minutes, the troops walking closely behind it as they had been trained to do.

  To former cavalryman Billy Bishop, now a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps, the scene below was astonishing. This wasn’t war-no men charging forward, bayonets at the alert. Instead they seemed to be wandering casually across No Man’s Land at a leisurely pace as if the whole thing were a great bore. From the air, the whole of No Man’s Land appeared clean and white, fresh snow masking the usual filth and litter. Bishop half expected to see the men below him wake up and run, realizing their danger, but that didn’t happen. He would see a shell burst, see the line of men halt momentarily, see three or four men near the burst topple over, see the stretcher-bearers run out to pick them up, while the line continued slowly forward. It was uncanny; Bishop couldn’t get it out of his head that he was watching a game and not a conflict. Were those little figures below him real? He seemed to be in a different world looking down on a weird puppet show. But the artillery was real enough. From the Canadian gun lines at the rear he could see a long ribbon of incandescent light, and more than once he felt his plane jerk and heave as a shell whistled within a few feet.

  On the ground the view was wildly different. A young private soldier from Sussex, New Brunswick, George Frederick Murray, had as good a vantage point as any, for he was waiting in reserve with the 5th Canadian Mounted Rifles almost at the very centre of the Canadian line and had time to absorb the spectacle unfolding before him. He looked up at the ridge and saw, through the wan light of breaking day, that the entire slope had become a shambles. Every foot of ground was churned and dug up; thousands of gaping shell holes were slowly filling with bloody water, arms, legs, pieces of dismembered bodies; and equipment of both sides was strewn about like garbage – abandoned rifles, steel helmets, bits of flesh, all bound together with a mucilage of mud over which long lines of haggard prisoners and the walking wounded stumbled and groped their way back to the Canadian lines.

  And still the guns roared over the carnage.

  BOOK ONE

  Marching As to War

  Q. Did you want to be in the war?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Were you crazy?

  A. Yes, we were crazy, but we didn’t know it.

  Q. Did you have any idea what it was going to be like?

  A. No, we didn’t have any idea of what it was going to be like.

  Q. What did you think war was?

  A. An adventure. We never thought about being killed, you know. I thought I was going to be able to come home and tell everybody about it. It never entered my mind that I might not come back. We wanted to get to it as fast as we could, because it might be over before we got there.

  Interview with Vimy veteran

  Leslie Hudd, aged 86, August 25, 1983

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sam Hughes’s Army

  1

  Almost every man who trudged up the slopes of Vimy Ridge on that gloomy Easter Monday in April 1917 had been a civilian when the war broke out, and this included four of the five Canadian-born generals who helped to plan the attack. In that last innocent summer of 1914, few expected that their lives and careers would be roughly altered by events that of course they could not foresee. Certainly, Arthur Currie, struggling to keep his foundering real estate business afloat in Victoria after the collapse of the Western land boom, had no inkling that he would, as a result of Vimy, lead the entire Canadian Corps in the final stages of a war few saw coming. The chief gunner at Vimy, E.W.B. “Dinky” Morrison, the man most responsible for the barrage that broke the Germans’ back, was quietly editing the Ottawa Citizen, while David Watson, who would command the embattled 4th Division in the bloodiest encounter of the day, was running the Quebec Chronicle. Before the outbreak of the war, young Andy McNaughton, aged twenty-eight, was calmly pursuing a scientific career in the engineering department of McGill University. In less than three years he would so master the techniques of counter-battery warfare that 82 per cent of the German artillery at Vimy was rendered useless.

  These were Saturday night soldiers, members of the militia, which had fifty thousand recruits on paper, most of them poorly trained and at least half either unfit for service or unwilling to serve. For Canada in 1914 had scarcely any military tradition, no military aspirations, and little knowledge of war. Out of a population of eight million, she had barely three thousand permanent force soldiers, and these were under British command. If Canadians were to fight and win battles they would have to start from scratch with no background of experience- and also no preconceived ideas, which was not necessarily a bad thing.

  They knew very little about war – especially this war – yet under the stress of battle they found they could perform impossible feats for which they’d had no previous training.

  At Vimy, Duncan Eberts Macintyre, a Saskatchewan storekeeper, became, in effect, the managing director of a brigade of three thousand men, the brigadier’s right-hand man, every detail from rations to signals at his fingertips.

  At Vimy, a bespectacled twenty-year-old medical student from the University of Toronto named Claude Williams – a man who had never fired a gun-not only operated a water-cooled, belt-driven Vickers but also taught others to do it and led them under fire.

  William Markle Pecover was also twenty years old when the war broke out. He’d been teaching school in Manitoba for the previous two years. The only contact he’d had with his future enemies was the course in German he’d taken in high school. How could he know that those few half-remembered guttural phrases would one day be the means by which he would capture a dugoutful of prisoners?

  Leonard Lynde Youell was working a fifty-five-hour week at the Toronto Electrical Company that summer. He’d got the job through the father of a friend. It paid fifteen cents an hour and he was glad to have it, for jobs were scarce and he needed money for his fees as a student at the university. Len Youell would not have believed that summer that in less than three years he too would be performing a strange, unwonted task: crouching in a forward observation post overlooking No Man’s Land, with a telephone in one hand and a pair of binoculars in the other, correcting the ranges of the big guns at the rear by spotting the exact position of the shell bursts.

  How could they know? Few Canadians gave much thought to events in Europe in those last peacetime months. People lazed on their front porches, or wound up the gramophone to listen to the great Al Jolson hit, “The Spaniard Who Blighted My Life,” or Joe Hayman’s smash best-selling recording of “Cohen on the Telephone.” The English suffragettes were making more news than the German Kaiser, and the Keystone Kops were far better known than an obscure Austrian archduke.

  Canada before 1914 was a peaceable kingdom and these were gentle times, where work was hard and pleasure innocent. Divorce was all but unknown; no decent woman was ever seen smoking a cigarette; saloons, where they existed at all, were male preserves. Sunday was sacrosanct; there was nothing else to do on the Sabbath but go to church. In 1912 Stephen Leacock caught the small-town mood of the country exactly in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, with its emphasis on local politics, backroom boozing, church socials and picnics.

  For Canada was still a frontier country of farms and villages, of outdoor plumbing and rutted concession roads. The Model T, wheezing and coughing its way down the unpaved streets, was emerging as a symbol of a new and radically different era, and so were the ungainly mechanized tractors on the prairie farms. But the railway remained king. Two more transcontinental lines were being pushed westward to compete with the Canadian Pacific. Conceived at the height of the Western boom, they symbolized the ebullience of a nation that in spite of the boom’s collapse still basked in the optimism of the frontier.

  Wilfrid Laurier had said it: this was Canada’s century! Nothing was impossible for a man who used his hands an
d his brains; hadn’t that been proved time and again out West? Magazines like the new Maclean’s (once the Business Magazine) glowed with true stories of men who’d pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, penniless youths who had become millionaires.

  To a very large extent the men who fought at Vimy had worked on farms or lived on the edge of the wilderness. Almost half the infantry came from west of Ontario, even though the Western provinces and territories made up less than a quarter of the Canadian population. An extraordinary number were English-born pioneers or their sons, men who had settled in the West during the immigration period and learned to adapt to unfamiliar conditions. “You may be interested to know that most of the men in my platoon, as in the rest of the battalion, are farmers, ranchers, cowboys, trappers, etc. from the far west and northwest,” Clifford Wells, a young archaeologist, wrote to his mother four days before the battle. “Splendid stalwart men, most of them.” One, Wells reported, was the champion rider of Alberta and Saskatchewan, king of the stampedes.

  Such men were used to hard work, long hours, and rough conditions. At Vimy, far more time was spent in back-breaking toil-endless digging with pick and shovel, toting heavy loads over difficult ground-than in firing any weapons. The Canadians adapted easily to these familiar conditions, made the best of them, and used age-old Canadian devices, such as the Indian tumpline, to alleviate the work load.

  These were men whose arms and shoulder muscles had been toughened by years of playing the two indigenous Canadian games, lacrosse and ice hockey. It was no great feat for them to march for hours with a rifle at the slope or high port, or to lunge with a bayonet. These were also men who were used to working with horses, who had laboured on the railways and in the mines, and who had tinkered with farm machinery. All these skills dovetailed neatly into the Vimy requirements, where thousands of feet of rails and plank road had to be laid, hundreds of yards of tunnels had to be blasted from the chalk, and fifty thousand horses had to be fed and cared for.

  Trench life in France was appalling for everybody, but at least a good proportion of the men at Vimy had known what it was like to sleep out in the mud and rain, to eat a cold meal in the wilderness, and, in many cases, to knock over a deer with a rifle. It was the same with those in the sky above. All of Canada’s leading flying aces came from backwoods communities, mainly from the West. In civilian life they were crack shots and good riders. After all, to manhandle a Sopwith Camel in the Great War wasn’t that different from riding a spirited steed.

  The Canadians who went off to war in 1914 from the fields and the forests were not yet soldiers; in or out of uniform they could not have prevailed against a disciplined enemy. But they had guts and stamina and, perhaps more important, a habit of self-reliance that would help to carry them through those weary months when the mud and the vermin were almost unbearable, and those tense few hours when the guns roared and the trenches ran with blood.

  2

  The last day of peace was enlivened in Ottawa by a moment of pure farce, starring the Minister of Militia, Sam Hughes, the most belligerent public figure in a most unbelligerent nation. Hughes did not fight at Vimy, though he would have loved to; his battles were all political. In fact, he was finally kicked out of office by an exasperated prime minister in November 1916, just as the Canadian Corps was settling into the Vimy sector. Yet he deserves his place in the annals of the war in general and Vimy in particular because, without the force of that overpowering and maddening personality, it is quite possible that the Canadians would never have fought together as a united corps.

  Hughes’s astonishing career is marked by incidents so incredible as to give the serious researcher pause. Yet, at each encounter, one has the firm evidence of witnesses of impeccable veracity and sober mien. On this morning of August 3, 1914, there was one such present in the person Of Charles Winter, the minister’s private secretary.

  Winter had arrived at 8:30, but Hughes was in his office before him, a massive figure with a square jaw and piercing blue eyes, now snarling and cursing and hammering on his desk. Spread before him was a copy of the Ottawa Citizen announcing that war had been declared against Germany and Austria by France, Russia, and Serbia. England had not yet declared, but a decision was expected when the Imperial cabinet met that afternoon. That was not good enough for Sam Hughes.

  “They are going to skunk it!” Hughes cried, banging the paper with his fist. “They seem to be looking for an excuse to get out of helping France. Oh! What a shameful state of things! By God, I don’t want to be a Britisher under such conditions …”

  Winter intervened to point out that everybody expected the British cabinet to decide that afternoon, but Hughes was certain Britain would back down.

  “They are curs enough to do it; I can read between the lines,” he cried. “I believe they will temporize and hum and haw too long- and by God I don’t want to be a Britisher under such conditions-it’s too humiliating.”

  Hughes then asked if the Union Jack was flying over the building and Winter said he’d seen it up as usual.

  “Then send up and have it taken down!” shouted Hughes. “I will not have it over our Canada’s military headquarters when Britain shirks her plain duty-it is disgraceful.”

  Winter did as he was told. When the Militia Council met at nine that morning the offending banner lay neatly rolled on the Minister’s desk. Only with great difficulty was he persuaded to return it to the flagstaff until the afternoon dispatches revealed whether or not the Empire was at war.

  The episode was entirely typical of Hughes, a staunch Britisher but also a staunch Canadian nationalist, who was absolutely determined that Canada should not be a vassal of the mother country. In this he reflected a growing awareness on the part of his less bombastic countrymen. English-speaking Canadians were proud to be British, but they were also becoming intoxicated by the heady atmosphere of the boom years. For more than a decade the eyes of much of the world had been focused on the Canadian West. Scores of magazine articles, dozens of books had raved about this promised land. Canadians could be forgiven for being cocky about themselves and their country, and this cockiness would be reflected in the spirit of the troops who, after more than two years of battle, came into their own at Vimy.

  On that Monday, August 3, the entire country awoke to the reality that war was inevitable. The European crisis had been on the front pages for no more than ten days, but now it was clear to the man on the farm, if not to Sam Hughes, that Britain would fight. It was a civic holiday in Ontario, and in Toronto, ten thousand people jammed the streets in front of the newspaper offices. Aflame now with war fever, they greeted each bulletin with a roar, flinging hats high into the air, waving Union Jacks, beating drums, and shouting out their enthusiasm. Similar scenes took place all across the nation. In Vancouver, it seemed as if the entire populace was on the streets to watch the Seaforth Highlanders on parade.

  The following day, as if to match the fervour of the populace, the temperature soared, reaching 101 °F on the prairies. By evening, the news was out: Britain was at war. Almost everyone (except Sam Hughes) assumed that Canada was at war as well, not as a full partner, not as an ally, but as a subsidiary force. The Canadian war effort was to be organized by the British. Canada would be fighting for the Empire, for British ideals. As the Mail and Empire of Toronto explained: “For all practical purposes the wishes of the British war office govern the raising of Canadian contingents.…”

  Most English-speaking Canadians thought of themselves as British first, Canadian second. In spite of the waves of European and American immigrants who had helped people the West, the majority of Canadians outside Quebec were either British born or of British stock. Any schoolchild opening a Canadian reader was caught by the phrase “One Flag, One Fleet, One Throne,” which appeared with the Union Jack as the frontispiece.

  English Canada’s heroes were English mariners and soldiers – Drake and Nelson, Wellington and Cromwell. English Canada’s great holidays – Victoria Day a
nd the Glorious Twelfth-were British. Most school texts were published in England and peddled by Canadian jobbers. Kipling, the voice of Imperial Britain, was probably the most quoted poet in Canada, followed by Robert Service, whose mimicry of the master’s style caused him to be known as “the Canadian Kipling.” The rightness of all things British was unquestioned. The Canadian way was the British way, except in Quebec, which had its own heroes, holidays, and poets and its own differing attitude to nationalism and European war.

  But in those days of “exaltation and enthusiasm,” to use the Prime Minister’s phrase, everyone seemed caught up in the excitement. “We stand shoulder to shoulder with the British Dominions in this quarrel,” Sir Robert Borden told the House, and even Henri Bourassa, the Quebec ultra-nationalist, murmured approval. Later Bourassa had a change of heart: England’s war was not French Canada’s war. But there were some in Quebec who attacked that stand as treason.

  By and large the continental immigrants did not join the rush to enlist. The Slavs and the Scandinavians stayed on their new farms. The Germans found it difficult to fight their countrymen. The Doukhobors, Mennonites, and Hutterites would not fight for religious reasons. And many of the Americans who had swarmed into Saskatchewan and Alberta a few years before went back across the border.

  It was the British and especially the British-born who flocked to the colours in the early days of the war and who made up the bulk of the Canadian Corps at Vimy. To many there was no question of choice: the Old Country was in danger. “What outfit are you going to join?” was the way a friend put it to F.C. Bagshaw, an English immigrant in Winnipeg. It did not occur to either of them that there was any other decision or that Bagshaw, at thirty-five the oldest man in the 5th Battalion, might beg off because of his age.