Vimy

by Pierre Berton

  Four days before the assault, Andrew Macphail recorded his awe over the meticulous preparations for the battle: “Tor two months I have had the plan of the battle before me in as much detail as if it were the plan of a house which an architect proposed to build,” he wrote. “The disposition of every man in the corps is settled and the moment for his movement arranged. Therefore every incident has its meaning for me and the significance of it is dreadful.” For medical men like Dr. Macphail would have to deal with the by-products of battle, the maimed and the mangled, brought back from the shambles of the ridge, blood-caked and mud-begrimed, clinging desperately to life in the overcrowded casualty clearing stations just behind the field of slaughter.

  2

  While the foot soldiers rehearsed their roles in the drama to come, Andy McNaughton, the shaggy counter-battery officer, worked with his staff trying to nail down the position of every one of the German guns, sited along the ridge or hidden in the woods under the steep eastern slopes.

  When McNaughton returned from his journey of inquiry at Verdun and the Somme, Byng had relieved him of all paper work and given him carte blanche to order all the guns and ammunition he needed to knock out the enemy batteries. His was a close-knit unit made up of men who had known each other in civilian life. His headquarters, by all accounts, was a lively place. What other senior officer on the Western Front kept a pet lion cub under the packing cases that did duty for his desk?

  The animal had been brought back from Paris by McNaughton’s staff captain, a former Prince Albert lawyer named Lennox Napier, who had clearly enjoyed his spot of leave. Napier and some friends, after a night on the town, saved the cub from execution at the Paris zoo; now it spent most of its day under McNaughton’s feet and, in spite of the fact that it was in no way housebroken, became a fixture. Great hilarity ensued when the cub began to snap at the shins of an air intelligence officer named Davidson. Poor Davidson would leap on a nearby table to screams of laughter. When McNaughton and Napier toured the back areas by car, the lion sat between them in the back seat, attracting more than a little attention from the gaping troops along the road.

  This gregarious and open atmosphere was bound to attract to McNaughton’s circle those dedicated scientists who felt themselves less than comfortable working with the hidebound senior officers of the British Army.

  The idea that you could actually pinpoint the position of an enemy gun and then knock it out was considered radical nonsense by the old-line British gunners. “Is there some kind of Free Masonry between the artillery of both sides?” Arthur Currie asked his artillery adviser in 1915. “They fire at the opposing infantry but never at each other.” A young Canadian, Harold Hemming, a McGill graduate serving in the British 3rd Army, had been experimenting with flash spotting, a method of locating a gun position by triangulating its muzzle flashes; but his general was not impressed. As he put it to Hemming, “You take all the fun out of war.”

  But McNaughton was an old friend of Hemming’s and, unlike some of the conservative gunners, was eager to listen to his theories. He was equally impressed by a remarkable trio of scientists whom he persuaded to quit the British and join his staff at Vimy. These three men – Lawrence Bragg, Charles Galton Darwin, and Lucien Bull – all became lifelong associates. They left the British Army because they were tired of being ignored as dangerous radicals and because they knew that the conditions for their research would be much improved under a man who was himself a scientist and who rejoiced in an elastic and questing mind.

  These men were experts in the new science of sound ranging-the companion to Hemming’s flash spotting. Bragg, whose father was a celebrated physicist, was only twenty-seven but already held a Nobel prize for physics. Darwin was the grandson of the author of On the Origin of Species. Bull had invented the first sound-ranging recorder.

  The key to sound ranging was the oscillograph, the same instrument that McNaughton had studied at McGill. But the novel idea of carrying a delicate device similar to an electrocardiograph into the lines, setting it up, and depending on a photograph of the vibrations to identify the enemy gun emplacements was, in McNaughton’s own words, considered “treason, literally treason.” The scientists were virtually ignored by the British. They had no real quarters, no dugouts, no friends. McNaughton changed all that, made them welcome, looked to their comfort, and encouraged their experiments.

  Both sound ranging and flash spotting are complicated procedures. The latter required a series of posts all along the front, each equipped with telephones and surveying gear and a reporting system back to a panel of lights at headquarters. So accurate did this system of lights and buzzers become that the Canadian artillery was able to locate a German gun position to within as little as five yards.

  The sound-ranging technique was even more complicated. When an enemy gun opened up miles away an entire sequence of events took place. A man in a listening post, often out in No Man’s Land, pressed a key activating a recorder at McNaughton’s headquarters. A series of microphones, placed all along the front a mile and a half back of the forward line, picked up the sound in turn as it travelled. From the time intervals between the microphones the gun’s exact location could be spotted. Similarly, the sound waves sent out by a shell bursting on the Canadian side, and picked up by a succession of microphones, could locate the target.

  There were many problems. Some shells travelled faster than the speed of sound, some slower. Heavy winds, temperature and pressure changes, the contour of the ground, the very condition of the layers of air above the battlefield – all these affected calculations. In spite of this, the scientific wizards who had joined McNaughton’s team were able to calculate not only the position of the enemy gun but also its type, its calibre, and the target on which it was registered. Under good conditions they could do it in three minutes, spotting the location within a twenty-five-yard circle.

  A steady flow of information from other sources poured into McNaughton’s headquarters-from the men who raided the enemy trenches in the dark of the night, from sweaty documents and maps ripped from German corpses or liberated from captured prisoners, from the coded reports of secret agents, and finally from the young men of the Royal Flying Corps, winging as close as they dared to the enemy lines.

  Aerial photography was in its infancy. The pilot shot his stereoscopic pictures using a cumbersome camera lashed to his cockpit directly behind the observer. It was dangerous work – each reconnaissance plane required a cover of five fighters – and it was exacting. Because the battlefield contained so few recognizable features, each photograph had to be carefully identified, otherwise it would be almost impossible for the gunners to string all of them together in an accurate pattern.

  The observation balloons, tethered to the ground and manned by men with strong field-glasses, overlooked the ridge itself. From a mile up, the observers could see far behind the German lines; but they were not popular, especially with the red-tabbed staff officers who were unaccustomed to up-front warfare. The balloons were sitting targets for the Germans’ long guns, and more than once a senior officer ordered their removal. Nonetheless, they provided the counter-battery unit with a stream of information.

  McNaughton, who didn’t like balloons, forced himself to spend hundreds of hours floating above the trenches, training his field-glasses on the enemy areas. He had some close calls. Yet his life would be saved and he would live to fight in another war because of his own scientific abilities and the knowledge he amassed at the Vimy front.

  He was soaring four thousand feet above the enemy lines when a gigantic shell exploded not far from the basket in which he and the balloon commander crouched. A few feet closer and both would have been blown to bits. McNaughton realized that it was the first of a salvo, and so the pair lowered themselves gingerly over the side of the basket, preparing to parachute to earth. At that point, McNaughton froze. His hands refused to loosen their grip. Both men decided there and then that a drop would be more terrifying than the German shel
ling. They pulled themselves up by their shins and fell back into the basket.

  McNaughton knew that he had to get the gun before the gun got him. He began working feverishly to locate its position from its flash, timing the arrival of the shells by their explosions and telephoning the information to his counter-battery staff on the ground. It must have given him enormous satisfaction to see the Allied long-range guns bombarding the German position and to realize that because of his expertise the shelling of his balloon had stopped and he was safe.

  Once the hidden guns were located, the trick was to hit them, blow them up, force the enemy to repair or move them, hit them again and again, and during the final assault, to make things so hot that the enemy gunners couldn’t operate. This all required stunning accuracy-the same accuracy that would be essential when the troops moved forward under a canopy of flying steel, exploding only a few yards ahead. If the range was slightly off or the shells faulty, men could die at the hands of their own gunners. All generals in the Great War expected a certain number of casualties from friendly fire; it was the artillery’s job to keep these to a minimum. The French, it was reckoned, lost fifty thousand men killed by their own shells, the result of faulty arithmetic. Discarding obsolete methods, the Canadians brought science to bear on the art of gunnery.

  Though they did not look it, these huge artillery pieces were sensitive weapons. The old hands didn’t treat them that way. Corrections for wind, weather, and barrel wear were primitive. As McNaughton later put it, anybody who tried to develop greater accuracy in shooting “was looked on as somebody who ought to have his head read-this wasn’t war at all, this was some sort of fandango going on.”

  But McNaughton persisted. To a layman, his meticulous experiments are breathtaking. One example is his investigation into the problems of barrel wear. As a gun barrel wears from constant use, its muzzle velocity drops and the shells start falling short. This can mean in the case of an 18-pounder, firing at a range of eight thousand yards, a loss of three hundred yards during a gun’s life-enough to kill all the troops moving behind the curtain of shells. Yet that is only an average barrel; some wear out faster than others. For this reason the tables showing gun corrections are not meticulously accurate.

  Here McNaughton’s scientific background came into play. He was familiar with a device known as a Boulengé electrical chronograph with which he could measure the time it took a shell to pass through two electrically charged wire screens. That knowledge enabled him to figure out the actual muzzle velocity of each weapon. As a result, every key gun in the Vimy battle would be individually calibrated.

  The old rules of thumb were no longer good enough. At the outset of the war the British field gunners had laughed at the idea of making any allowance for weather. Even as late as 1915, when the Royal Flying Corps offered to pass on the details of wind velocities each morning to the heavy artillery, the staff reply was: “We cannot make use of this information.” Astonishingly, the Somme was the first battle in which the artillery took weather reports into account.

  Yet a falling barometer could make a difference of three hundred yards on a five-thousand-yard shoot, while a strong wind could push a big shell fifteen yards off target. McNaughton and his counter-battery staff changed all that, adjusting the range tables to correct for weather and revising the dangerously inaccurate French maps. This was another reason why air observation was so essential to the artillery.

  Outworn ideas had almost deprived the army of its quintessential weapon, the 18-pound field gun. Before the war, many British gunners, looking back to the days of fire and movement, had wanted to standardize production on the lighter and more mobile 13-pounder, the choice of the nearly obsolete horse artillery. Only by the closest of votes-a tie broken by the British Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour – was the 18-pounder saved. In the siege warfare that followed it became the workhorse of the artillery. Sited close to the front, with its direct and wicked range, it could be fired like a peashooter to demoralize the enemy. It far outshone its lighter and more mobile cousin: for every shot fired by the 13- pounder, the Canadians fired seventy from the heavier gun.

  Its companion was the 4.2-inch howitzer, absolutely essential for trench warfare because of its high, looping trajectory. Its barrel slanted upward at a 45-degree angle, and its thirty-five-pound shell dropped into a trench or onto a parapet could create terrifying havoc.

  A heavier model, the 6-inch howitzer, placed farther back, weighed more than a ton. Firing from its wheeled carriage, it hurled its hundred-pound high-explosive shells for more than six miles into the German rear areas where McNaughton’s wizards had pinpointed targets that nobody but an airman could see.

  There were also heavier howitzers, set even farther back. The 8-inch lobbed a shell weighing 180 pounds, so heavy that only the strongest gunner could manhandle it in two lifts-one to the knees, a second chest high. The largest piece of ordnance in the Canadian Corps (the bigger howitzers and naval guns were under Army command by the British) was the gigantic 9.2-inch howitzer, so large that it travelled in three sections, each weighing four and a half tons and hauled by tractors. This gun, which took twelve hours to assemble, hurled a 290-pound shell that smashed pill boxes, gun emplacements, dugouts, and batteries into rubble.

  To put any of these guns into action and keep them firing required a complicated infrastructure. Two hundred men were needed to handle one battery of four 18-pounders; these included mechanics, saddlers, blacksmiths, drivers, and cooks as well as gunners. Fifty men were always on duty at the guns. Caisson drivers came up at night, halting several hundred yards from the gun positions in order to leave no revealing tracks for the German air observers. Though it was safer to be a gunner than an infantry man, the work was hard. It took stamina and training to manhandle a three-hundred-pound shell and fling it into the breach with shrapnel bursting all around. In battle the emphasis is usually on the infantry; but at Vimy it was the gunners, stripped to the waist, sweating despite the wind and the sleet, labouring hour after hour without rest or let up, who were the real victors in the battle to seize the ridge.

  3

  Completing the arsenal of howitzers, guns, and mortars was the deadliest weapon of all – the one that had transformed warfare. The heavy, water-cooled Vickers machine gun and the more portable Lewis, with its cylindrical feed drum, spewing out bullets at rates that could exceed five hundred rounds a minute, had mechanized the science of killing. They dominated the battlefield. The firepower of each weapon exceeded that of a platoon of riflemen. Until the tank was invented nothing could stand up to machine-gun fire. Men were torn in two by its hail of bullets. Entire sections dropped like grain before the scythe. But it took a long time for the High Command to understand this truth.

  The British thought of the machine gun as a kind of super rifle. It took the Canadians to demonstrate at Vimy that it could also be employed as light artillery. The man behind this innovation was another adopted Canadian, whose unorthodox views and keen mind had been honed on the frontier of the Canadian North West.

  Raymond Brutinel, a twenty-three-year-old reservist in the French Army, had emigrated to Edmonton in 1905. For several years he roamed the West from Pembina to Fort Macleod, from the Skeena to the Peace. He was an explorer, a prospector, a land developer during the great boom, and, on occasion, a newspaper editor. In that yeasty era, Brutinel amassed a fortune. By 1914, still in his early thirties, he was living the life of a millionaire businessman in Montreal.

  In his photograph, Brutinel looks as if Central Casting had sent him into the lines to play a comic Frenchman. With his neat little moustache, his pince-nez, his snapping eyes, and his smallish but definitely Cyranoesque nose, he is a caricature of an officer. In reality, he was a dedicated and dynamic figure who saw in the machine gun possibilities that others had overlooked.

  One of the remarkable features of the 1st Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigade, which Brutinel commanded, was that it was raised and underwritten largely by private mone
y. Some of Canada’s biggest industrialists footed the bill. It’s significant that all were self-made millionaires, that most had had frontier experience, and that none had had a previous military background. They included Herbert Holt, the former CPR mountain contractor, J.R. Booth, the Ottawa lumberman, Clifford Sifton, the Western politician, J.W. McConnell, the Montreal broker, and, later, John Craig Eaton, the Toronto merchant, and “Klondike Joe” Boyle, the Yukon mining magnate. Boyle, for instance, raised an entire battalion of Klondikers, paid for it himself, and brought it out of the Yukon at his own expense. The least Sam Hughes could do was to make him an honorary colonel. Boyle, who went on to further adventures in Russia and Rumania, had his maple leaf lapel badges fashioned out of pure Klondike gold.

  As a result of this remarkable demonstration of faith in the new weapon, and thanks to Brutinel’s importuning, Canada entered the war with a machine-gun arsenal stronger than that of the British. In England, however, Brutinel met with incredible resistance. The machine gunner’s enthusiasm was temporarily dashed by Kitchener himself, who announced that too many machine guns would throw the divisional fire power out of balance! Lieutenant-General Alderson, then in charge of the Canadians, tended to agree with Kitchener, but by the summer of 1915, when the machine-gun brigade joined the 1st Division in France, Brutinel was able to change Alderson’s mind. The Second Battle of Ypres and the brutal engagements that followed had opened the commander’s eyes to the possibilities of the new weapon.