Vimy

by Pierre Berton

  The Canadians had one advantage. The German defences on the forward slopes of the ridge were also exposed, and the time would come when the Canadian guns would blast them into rubble. But for the moment the Germans had the upper hand. For six and a half miles, every piece of Canadian equipment, every gun, every ammunition dump, every lorry pool, every ration depot-everything that could be blown apart or could give the Germans some inkling of what was to come-had to be concealed in pits or camouflaged or hidden behind folds of ground or copses of foliage.

  The safest places of all were the big subways that went as far back as Neuville St. Vaast and as far forward as the front lines. The Germans knew they were there but had no clear idea of what was going on below ground. The presence of those subways – a dozen of them – some nosing forward inch by inch, foot by foot, dozens of feet below the surface, was the hole card in the game of poker being played out that winter in the shadow of the ridge.

  In this ravaged world, the French villages were little more than heaps of rubble. Arras, three miles to the south, which would give its name to the great spring offensive of which the Vimy attack was a part, was a shell. Restaurants, stores, cafés were battered to bits; the cathedral was a wreck, the railway station a ruin. Ecurie, on the southern border of the Canadian sector, once a haven for French farmers, was no more than a name on a signpost, a flattened expanse of brick dust, bisected by roads that could be used only at night. Neuville St. Vaast, once the White City of Flanders, was a desert of rubbled chalk, its inhabitants long since fled. Someone had erected a bitter sign: THIS WAS NEUVILLE ST. VAAST. Only in the cellars, tunnels, and caves below the surface, which concealed railway terminals, gun positions, and troop facilities, did life go on. The town cemetery was devastated, every monument knocked down, the vaults smashed, the coffins shattered. Beneath the broken trees, skeletons of Frenchmen long gone lay contorted among the clumps of rank grass.

  Souchez and its neighbour, Carency, had been blown away to their foundations by the dreadful struggle of 1915. One foggy morning Bob Brown, a Scottish immigrant from Regina, explored the ruins of Souchez with two others. The town was out of bounds, and Brown was curious to know why. He soon found out: Souchez was a human abattoir. Skeletons lay everywhere. At one point he found a spot where a Frenchman had been standing, rifle in hand, at the moment a building was hit. The man’s skeleton, still clutching the rifle, lay under a heavy beam. A trench dug across the main street and filled with skeletons had yet to be covered over. But the most affecting symbol was the schoolhouse, its roof gone, its walls blown in, but the teacher’s desk still standing with the roll book marking the day the school had been forced to close. Brown tore out the page, pocketed it, and left Souchez to its ghouls and ghosts.

  The ridge and its environs stank of death, and the trenches were sour with it. One of the first things that hit the newly arrived Canadians was the evidence of old and monumental struggles. At the ridge’s northern end, above the Souchez River, a promontory named for the Abbey of Notre Dame de Lorette butted out at right angles. Here the French had managed at fearful cost to wrest the plateau from the Germans, and the evidence of that struggle for what they then called La Butte de la Mort (the Hill of Death) was everywhere. When Will Bird, with his sensitive writer’s perception, first saw the carnage on the Lorette Spur, it made his flesh crawl: he had never before seen so many grinning skulls. Here was a maze of old trenches and ditches littered with the garbage of war-broken rifles, frayed equipment, rusting bayonets, hundreds of bombs, tangles of barbed wire, puddles of filth, and everywhere rotting uniforms, some French blue, others German grey, tattered sacks now, holding their own consignments of bones.

  Farther south lay the Labyrinth, another city of the dead, a bewildering network of caves, tunnels, trenches, and dugouts, circulating and radiating in all directions. Here again French and Germans burrowing beneath the ground had blown each other up and fought hand to hand with knives and clubs. French equipment, human bones, wire, and scores of homemade bombs-jam tins filled with scrap-iron, nails, and stones-lay everywhere. In the Aux Ruitz cave, it was said, there were so many dead that one tunnel had to be walled up.

  Through this tangle of decaying artifacts the souvenir hunters picked their way, insensible to the heart-breaking evidence of human waste. As Private Donald Fraser, a six-foot Scot from Calgary, confided to his journal, “rifling the dead used to be considered in pre-war times a ghoulish business but over here the dead are of no account, they are scattered all over the battle area.” An inveterate collector, Fraser spent many of his spare hours cutting the buttons off the tunics of corpses.

  There were subtler hints, however, of those earlier battles, certain nocturnal sounds-mere whispers between the crump of the guns – that could send a shiver up the spine of those who had been hardened by a long acquaintance with the dead. In the French cemetery at Villers-au-Bois, thousands of temporary crosses marked the resting places of those bodies that had been awarded a formal burial. On each of these crosses, the French had placed a small tri-coloured metal triangle as makeshift identification. In the night, when a chill breeze sighed through this city of the dead, the men in the trenches could hear the eerie clink-clink-clink of these thousands of tin triangles, a reminder of the vast and ghostly army that had preceded them.

  2

  For the Germans, most private soldiers felt no emotion other than a mild curiosity. The only Germans they really saw were either corpses or prisoners; the others kept their heads down or appeared as shadowy figures in the night raids that were a feature of the winter stalemate. The prisoners looked weak and weedy, but then prisoners generally do. Andrew Macphail thought them “cancerously yellow,” and Claude Williams thought they were “a very bowed, sickly looking aggregation.” But much of that was wishful thinking.

  The men opposite were Prussians and Bavarians, The latter were considered the better fighters, probably because the Prussian division included men of other nationalities, many of them dissident and willing to surrender. Their main complaint was the poor quality and scarcity of their clothing. The Allied blockade had done its work. Some men had no underwear. Shirts were no longer wool but thin cotton; some were woven of wood fibre. Prisoners told stories of starvation in the enemy lines, one Pole complaining that he’d had nothing but bread, jam, and tea for weeks, which was unusual. The Canadians, who were really not much better off, rose to the occasion. One of the Nova Scotians decided to taunt the Germans by holding up a loaf of bread on a bayonet to show how well his side was living. Almost instantly a German bayonet appeared on the far side of No Man’s Land. On it were stuck two loaves of bread. Between the opposing sides there existed a rough camaraderie born of common misery. When the Canadians first reached Vimy Ridge, a sign was hoisted above the German trenches: WELCOME CANADIANS. Another read: CUT OUT YOUR DAMNED ARTILLERY. WE, TOO, WERE AT THE SOMME.

  To the people back home-the young women handing out white feathers, the editorialists declaiming from their office chairs, the politicians making bold speeches on behalf of war loan campaigns – and, indeed, to the senior officers at the front, the enemy was known as the Hun or the Boche, terms devised to suggest a primitive bestiality. But to the men in the front lines, the German was universally and familiarly known as Fritz (or to the airmen as Jerry). The attitude was jocular, as expressed in such songs as “Keep Your Head Down, Fritzie Boy.”

  Letters and wartime reminiscences suggest that the Canadians often resented their own brass more than they disliked the grey-clad German. You shot at him because he was shooting at you, but it wasn’t a personal matter. He too was wallowing in the mud, only a few yards away.

  Will Bird, who reached France at the end of December, spotted his first uncaptured German on the second night of his sentry duty. Shivering at his outpost in No Man’s Land, the young Nova Scotian could hear the Germans walking about in their trenches, coughing in the cold, and turning the creaking handle of a windlass hauling up chalk from a half-finished dugout. Suddenly
a Canadian flare burst in the sky above, bathing the German positions in an eerie light. There, standing waist high in the opposing trench, less than a hundred yards away, was a young boy-no more than a teenager. Both men froze, as they’d been taught to do when a star shell exploded, but Bird knew the boy had seen him. They stared at each other for a moment, two young men made enemies by forces over which they had no control. Then, suddenly, the German waved at Bird. Some impulse caused Bird to wave back too. The German vanished, and the brief instant of eye contact between two men ended; but Bird never forgot that moment.

  Bombardier Jim Johnson had a similar experience on December 24, 1916. He was called to the parapet by his officer and, peering over the sandbags, was astonished to see an entire body of Germans, two hundred yards away, receiving their Christmas rations in full view of the Canadians.

  “What would you do in this case?” asked the officer.

  “I think this is Christmas Eve,” said Johnson tentatively.

  “Oh, yes it is,” the officer said. “But in case someone gets trigger happy, you fire a shot close enough to them as a warning.”

  Johnson let go with a single round, placed about twenty feet to the left. The Germans scrambled for cover, but one man hesitated, turned, and raised his hand toward Johnson in a salute. Johnson was glad he hadn’t followed the rule book.

  The senior command was death on this sort of demonstration, no matter how tenuous, for everybody was supposed to hate the Hun. Earlier cases of Christmas fraternization had caused great uneasiness among the generals on both sides: what if the soldiers simply stopped fighting each other? So concerned were some staff officers at Vimy that on Christmas Day, 1916, some units cancelled the rum ration. But the Princess Pats got an extra ration that day and proceeded to arrange a truce with their opposite numbers. Private Norman Keys, a Montrealer who spoke German, acted as spokesman in the exchange that followed in No Man’s Land. Like his comrades, Keys was wearing his new rubber boots and fresh clothing issued that morning, and smoking a Christmas cigar-all of which impressed the Germans. Orders from above quickly put an end to the fraternizing and shelling resumed.

  The Royal 22nd or “Van Doos” were less charitable than the Princess Pats. Yuletide or no Yuletide, they raided the German lines and stole all their Christmas presents. At Vimy there was little peace and only a modicum of goodwill toward the men on the far side of No Man’s Land.

  3

  The Western Front was never quiet. Even in those early months, when the Canadians were supposed to be recuperating from the butchery of the Somme, the guns on both sides continued to fire. The trenches may have been eight feet deep, but the men in them never felt safe from the rain of Whizbangs, Minnies, Jack Johnsons, Rum Jars, and Coal Boxes, whose ingenious nicknames masked their deadly purpose. They could only hope that if a shell landed in their section, it would explode on the far side of one of the traverses, which were spaced out at intervals all along the zigzag line.

  The Minnenwerfers or “Moaning Minnies” were slow but deadly. Their range was short, their concussion dreadful. They were lobbed in a high arc over No Man’s Land-two hundred pounds of high explosive – leaving at night a faint trail of sparks that caused the uninitiated to believe they were dud flares. The old hands, who saw them coming and knew what they were, could not escape a creepy tingle in their spines as they ran away from the expected point of impact, flung themselves flat in the mud, and waited for the earth-shaking explosion, which could blow a crater ten feet or more wide and send debris, sandbags, and human fragments flying in all directions. Even if the shell didn’t score a direct hit, the concussion could kill. Jim Johnson, the Winnipeg bombardier, had a close call that winter when the Germans got the range of his mortar. Johnson heard the shell coming and had managed to scramble a hundred yards from the target when it landed, demolishing the mortar and exploding all the ammunition. The concussion ripped his tunic down the seam from collar to waist and also burst the seams in his pants. As he struggled to his feet, nearly naked, an officer rushed up from the communication trench. “What the hell happened to your clothes?” he asked severely.

  The German mortar shells also arced high over No Man’s Land to drop vertically into the crowded trenches. In the argot of the soldiers, the smaller ones were “piss tins” and the bigger “rum jars.” They varied in length from two to three and a half feet-as big as a nail keg- and were filled with scrap-iron. They operated on a time fuse that allowed no more than an instant’s warning.

  The German 5.9- and 8-inch shells were named for Jack Johnson, the famous black boxer, and sometimes called “coal boxes” because of the black smoke that erupted from the explosion (the Allied shells, which used lyddite as an explosive, sent up yellow smoke). But the greatest source of irritation was the smaller whizbang. The nickname, which to this day evokes the Great War, describes the sound: a whiz when it left the gun, a bang when it hit the parapet. But, as Claude Williams discovered, this small, 3-inch shell of low trajectory travelled so swiftly there was scarcely any time between the whiz and the bang to take cover.

  Williams reached the Vimy sector in the late fall, bursting with enthusiasm, a stocky, bespectacled young officer in impeccable whipcord and tightly rolled puttees, his boots and Sam Browne glistening with polish. For more than a year he had chafed with impatience, waiting to get in on the fun; now he had finally achieved his ambition. It seemed too good to be true. Nor did his early enthusiasm entirely wane. He exulted in trench life, actually looked forward to quitting the monotony of the billets in the rest area. He loved the sight of the Canadian incendiary shells firing the German dumps and lighting up the night. Yes, there was mud and bitter cold, but in his letters home he made light of it. It was “just part of the life and it isn’t a bad life at all, nobody is grumbling about it.” There were some minor irritations – on some occasions he had to go all day without washing his hands and twenty-four hours without a bath. His batman, however, had once gone without a bath for three months during the Somme action; or so he claimed. Williams was less fastidious in other matters. He combed through the human garbage that littered the Lorette Spur until he’d collected enough French and German bones to construct a skeleton, which he kept under the bed in his dugout.

  The men in the machine-gun company were less enthusiastic about the war and not at all enthusiastic about Lieutenant Williams. Like so many new and ardent young officers he was a stickler for discipline, especially the discipline of dress. In spite of the mud and the watchful enemy he wanted his men shaved and scrubbed clean, their buttons polished, their clothing neat. But these veterans of the Somme had different priorities. Private Fraser, the inveterate souvenir hunter, who served under Williams, was one who “resented this from a newcomer who had yet to obtain battle experience and be able to differentiate between important and unimportant things.”

  Then, on January 3, 1917, Claude Williams received his baptism of fire. Until that moment the German shells had passed harmlessly over his head. Two days before Christmas he had even been able to pause in a letter to his mother and note: “Here come some ‘Whistling Willies’ ”- and then continue his report about the weather without a tremor. But on January 3 the Willies got to him.

  He was sloshing through a mud-filled trench when he heard the whiz and then the bang of a German shell. Down he went into the mud, half stunned by the concussion, then was up again trying to reach the nearest dugout before a second explosion, only to find that one of his rubber waders was half off. It was impossible to do anything but crawl.

  Williams felt like a man having a nightmare when some thing is chasing you and you can’t move. A second whiz … another bang, and Williams, dropping his head onto his arms, felt himself half smothered in mud. Now he scrambled forward to the dugout as a third shell exploded at the exact point he’d just left, blowing up the trench and blocking the dugout’s entrance. Another landed on the top of the dugout, which creaked and groaned with the force of the explosion, snuffing the candle and leaving
him in darkness.

  Williams forced his way out and back into the trench as another shell dropped up ahead, half filling the passageway with muck. Now he realized he was moving directly into the drop area, where the shells were thickest. He couldn’t turn back, could only pray that nothing would come too close. Suddenly there was another dreadful whiz, and Claude Williams knew it was going to drop right on him-there was no escape. He fell into the bottom of the trench and rolled himself into a ball, waiting for the worst.

  The concussion all but deafened him. A yard ahead a vast hole appeared, and an instant later clods of earth began descending on him, some chunks so big they knocked the breath from his body. More and more dirt fell, and Williams now feared he would be buried alive. Finally it stopped; he pinched himself and discovered that he was still in one piece with many bruises but no broken bones.

  Farther along the trench, Williams’s men could hear the explosions. Along came Williams’s sergeant, a Somme veteran named McGirr, laughing at his officer’s plight. “I don’t think he will bother you again about being good soldiers in the trenches,” Sergeant McGirr told his men. A few moments later a bedraggled Williams appeared and collapsed, totally unnerved. It was, in the opinion of Private Fraser, “an effective cure.… No more word about being fancy-line soldiers.” Three days after his narrow escape Claude Williams wrote to his mother: “Nothing much of importance happened last week-still plodding along in the same old way.”

  For most of that record winter, the Canadians were cold, wet, hungry, tired, and (though they did not admit it) frightened. The cold was unbelievable. The temperature did not rise above zero Fahrenheit for one month. The ground froze two feet deep, making it impossible to bury the horses and mules that died of cold and exposure. This was not the dry cold that the men of the prairies and the Northwest were accustomed to. Fog and rain mingled with snow and sleet; the water in the shell holes froze overnight; the mud turned hard as granite so that men were actually wounded by flying chunks of earth. They clumped along the duckboards, swathed in greatcoats and jerkins, hooded by balaclavas under their steel helmets, their rifles wrapped in sacking; and they took their boots to bed to keep them from freezing stiff. It was so cold the bread froze after it came from the ovens and had to be cut apart with a hacksaw. Colds were so common that before a man could be sent to the rear he had to be suffering from pneumonia.