For many battalions, especially those trudging through Death Valley on the far left of the line, the move forward was fraught with hazard. The 44th Battalion from Winnipeg found itself exposed to heavy German shellfire, which blew more than one man off the duckboards and into the mud. Fortunately the mud was so deep that the shells exploded well beneath the surface, smothering the troops with filth but not with shrapnel. Private Jack Spears, who had never been under shellfire before, was one who tumbled off the duckboards into mud to his waist. Another man pulled him out by grasping his rifle. Ahead, in the dark, Spears could dimly see a hole in the side of the ridge-the Cobourg Subway. He breathed a sigh of relief at the sight and, with the others, was soon scrambling about looking for a place to sleep. There was none. The floor of the subway was so wet no one could lie down. Spears, who was just twenty – another English immigrant from the West – philosophically turned his steel helmet upside down and sat on it with his feet in the water. He had a long wait ahead of him, since the 44th would not do battle until the following night. For twenty-four hours, Spears and the others sat or stood ankle deep in the muddy gruel of the subway.
The mud was so bad that some men couldn’t be extricated by simply grasping their rifles and pulling. It took several men to save the orderly-room sergeant of the 20th. He was so firmly stuck that he couldn’t be hauled out by hand. In the end, the party stretched a pole across the top of the trench, made slings of their belts, and finally tugged him to safety, minus his hip rubber boots.
Most trenches were in ghastly shape. The 48th Highlanders moved up Douai Avenue, which had once been a narrow communication trench leading to the front. Now under constant battering by the German 5.9s, it had been mashed into a gaping, dish-shaped quagmire, fifteen feet wide. To get past the support trenches, known as the Music Hall Line, attacking troops of the 4th Division had to wade through waist-deep water and then stand all through the cold night in the jumping-off trenches – soaking wet, crammed so tightly together in their full battle kit that for most sleep became impossible.
Conditions were the same all along the front. While Jack Spears of the 44th was treading warily along the duckboards crossing Death Valley, Lewis Buck, a former Ottawa lumberjack, almost four miles to the south was also moving forward with the 4th Battalion from Western Ontario, trying his best not to look scared. Like Spears, Buók and his brother Billy, both stretcher-bearers, spent an uncomfortable night in a filthy dugout with water pouring in from the main trench, a foot of mud on the floor, and so many rats crawling over their heads that they too were unable to sleep.
The troops of the 13th, shivering in their cramped positions, waited for hot soup to be brought up from the field kitchens in the rear. Many waited in vain: the cooks bringing it forward were killed by shellfire.
In the Goodman Subway on the 3rd Division front, there was a near disaster. Private Alfred Thomson, working by candlelight, was trying to clean mortar grease off his hands with gasoline. His hands caught fire from the candle, and in his excitement he knocked over the entire can of gas. To his horror, young Thomson saw the flaming fluid racing toward a pile of ammunition. In a few seconds the entire tunnel would have been blown. Fortunately, the man closest to the flames had the presence of mind to seize a blanket and beat them out, saving the battalion for the dawn assault.
There were other, grislier accidents. In an underground fort, twenty-five feet below the chalk pits behind the 3rd Division lines, David Moir of the 7th Machine Gun Company heard a sudden retort from a neighbouring gun crew and saw a man fall dead. The accident was the result of a breach of discipline. The orders were that all guns be half cocked so that they could be fired by a single pressure on the trigger. Since a mistake could lead to trouble, performing this ritual was reserved for the No. 1 man in the crew, and for him only. But here the No. 2 man had taken it upon himself to cock the gun in the belief that his superior hadn’t done it. The gun fired, and a sergeant who happened to pass by the muzzle was instantly killed. It was too late to bury him, and so the corpse was put in the storage dugout. The gun crew lay down to sleep beside it.
Not far away at the neighbouring Grange Subway, Sergeant Evans, his day of rest now totally ruined, had finally reached his destination, loaded down with the signal equipment and carrying the precious bottle of Scotch. The subway at this point was like a scene from Dante – hundreds of men from the 7th Brigade, stumbling about in the dim, smoky light, some trying to sleep, others attempting to scribble a last letter home, or, like Evans, trying to squeeze through the narrow passageway to find a resting place or deliver messages or equipment. At this moment, the gas alarm sounded and the entire, squirming mass began to vibrate as men struggled with their respirators. Evans’s own eyepieces misted so badly that he couldn’t find his way and ripped off the mask in disgust. He found he had gone too far and retraced his steps once again, squeezing between protesting men until he reached the Brigade Signals room. “Did you bring the Scotch?” he was asked. Evans nodded wearily, handed it over, and, being too exhausted to return to his lines, finally found a place to rest. To cap it all, Evans learned the Germans had already put up a large sign reading “WE HOPE THE CAPTAIN GOT HIS WHISKY.” The water-soaked chalk was an easy conduit for clandestine listeners.
The Grange Subway was the connecting link between the front line and the dressing stations and ration dumps set up along the sunken road known as the Quarry Line, some five hundred yards to the rear. At eight that evening, as Evans moved up the Quarry Line to deliver his Scotch, Bill Breckenridge was squatting on the floor of one of the dressing stations playing poker, thankful that his long work day was at an end. Alas for him, it wasn’t; once again, the M.O. was calling for three men to fetch more water.
The nine card players separated into groups of three to flip a coin, the losing man from each group to join the work party. Breckenridge tossed a franc into the air, looked at it, sighed and mumbled: “It looks like me for it.” He had mistaken a head for a tail on the unfamiliar coin, and no one was about to point out his error. So off he went with two others heading for the wells at Neuville St. Vaast.
The shattered village was in turmoil. German shells were falling without let-up. In the moonlight, Breckenridge could see black clods of earth mixed with the debris of broken buildings hurled high into the air. He and the others stayed in the trench until the shelling stopped, then made a dash for the well. By a miracle it was still operating. Unfortunately, twenty men had reached it ahead of them; it would be hours before they could hope to fill their pails.
They knew there was another well some distance away, near the YMCA hut. For the next half hour they waded along the trench, waist deep in water, then struck out overland only to find a longer queue ahead of them and the well almost dry. It was growing late. The battle was only a few hours away now. All felt the need of sleep. They trailed back to report defeat, then, plastered in cocoons of mud, rolled onto the dugout floor and slept.
While Breckenridge was moving to the rear in search of water, Lieutenant-Colonel Cy Peck, the popular commander of the Canadian Scottish, was setting out, at 9:30 P.M., in the other direction to inspect his forward battle headquarters on the 1st Division front. Peck was known as one of the most belligerent battalion commanders in the Corps-a bulky, black-browed British Columbian with an enormous walrus moustache who believed that senior officers should not hang back in battle; indeed, it was his custom to move forward with the assaulting troops. “She’s a bear, boys!” Peck would shout over the noise of battle. “She’s a bear!”
Peck was accompanied by his artillery officer, his adjutant, S.G. Johnston, and three runners. The Bentanta Subway was so crowded they, too, decided to chance an overland journey. The C.O. wasn’t well. Shaking with fever, plagued by a splitting headache, he should have been in hospital, but nothing was going to keep him from the coming battle.
All his life Cy Peck had trained for moments like this one. He had taken every militia course available and had even gone overseas b
efore the war, intending to enlist in the British Army, a decision he found easy to abandon on closer inspection. For Peck was the quintessential Canadian, born in the Maritimes of United Empire Loyalist stock, schooled in Toronto, lured to the Klondike during the gold rush and later to Prince Rupert. Now a proud, if ersatz, Scot who wore the glengarry cocked over one bushy eyebrow, he insisted that no fewer than five pipers accompany him into battle – one for each of his companies and one for himself. He was nothing if not resourceful in his adopted Highland calling. Asked to speak Gaelic at a Hogmanay dinner, Peck extolled the haggis with a five-minute speech in Chinook, the West Coast traders’ pidgin. Few present knew the difference.
The Colonel’s chills were not helped by the mud. It grew so bad that one of the party had to unlace his boots, climb up the bank of a sunken road in his stocking feet, and pull his footwear after him. The continual shelling was less of an aggravation to Peck, who was used to it. Badly wounded at Festubert, he had insisted on returning to his battalion weeks before his doctors felt it was safe. But now tragedy struck. The little group had been out for only a féw minutes when a shell exploded among them. The adjutant, Johnston, was tossed high in the air. The artillery officer and two of the runners were killed outright, the third was seriously wounded. Bleeding heavily, Johnston tried to carry on but was soon a stretcher case. Peck, unscathed, kept on going alone and finished his inspection.
As the evening hours ticked by and the moon went down and the shells continued to fall, the men who would face death the following day slept, talked in whispers, or went on with small, necessary tasks. Major D.J. Corrigall of the 20th arranged for 150 scaling ladders to be placed along his assault trench during the night to enable the troops to scramble out quickly when the barrage began. Lieutenant-Colonel Jack Clark of the Seaforths crawled on his hands and knees along his own assault trenches to speak to every one of his men waiting for Zero Hour. Frank Ormiston of the 44th, sent back to bring up the officers’ rations, stole a gallon of their rum and proceeded to drink most of it. Private Lester Giffin of the 85th, carrying bags full of bread and bully beef to the assault troops, emerged from the Tottenham Subway into No Man’s Land and came face to face with a new corpse draped over the wire. He would see many more in the hours that followed.
In the Cobourg Subway, on the 4th Division front, Lieutenant J.E. Tait told himself that it was surely no weakness at that time to think of home-of canoes and guns, of trails threading through the woods, of the camp on the river and the smell of woodsmoke in the twilight and the sunset on the lake. In the chill of those last hours, Tait conjured up memories of another kind of cold – of the snowclad trails of winter, the yelps of the huskies, the howl of the Indian dogs. How far away it all seemed! How different, that fragrant world of his boyhood, from this world of mud and starshells, of continual thunder, of endless days and restless nights, of the crump of mortar and rum jar, of devastation, unspeakable misery, and death!
On the 2nd Division front, Lieutenant William George Mclntyre, battalion machine-gun officer for the 29th Battalion (Vancouver) – better known as Tobin’s Tigers – was writing a long letter to his mother.
“I hope not, but this may be a note of farewell,” he wrote, “for we attack tomorrow morning. If this must be goodbye I must try to acknowledge the unrepayable debt I owe you for love and tenderness, encouragement and sympathy, and high ideals all through my life-you have been the best of mothers to us – and to ask forgiveness-I know it has been granted already-for the pain and trouble I have sometimes cost you. God bless you for all your goodness!”
Mclntyre was typical of the very best the country had to offer. His family had homesteaded in Manitoba; he had studied under George Munro Grant at Queen’s. A good rugby player, he’d been president of his Alma Mater Society, had two seasons’ experience as a teacher in Saskatchewan, was working on his M.A. when the call came. When the war ended, he intended to become a minister.
“… I feel very cheery,” he wrote, “and if my feelings are an index I should get through this alive, but one never knows. I trust humbly in God, whichever way the issue goes and ask success for our arms, forgiveness for our sins and rest after much toiling.”
For William Mclntyre that rest came too soon. The following day he was felled by a burst of German shrapnel. He lingered on during the hours of the battle. By ten that evening, he was dead.
3
Midnight passed. It was now Easter Monday. Lewis Buck, the stretcher-bearer, lay beside his brother Billy waiting for the dawn, looking periodically at his watch. He came from a family of twelve who had emigrated from Birmingham to the Ottawa Valley. The watch was a cheap timepiece, long since thrown out of kilter by the reverberations of the guns. But Buck kept looking at it anyway. He couldn’t sleep and it was something to do.
F.C. Bagshaw, paymaster of the 5th Battalion from Saskatchewan, lay quietly, trying to sleep, when he heard the voice of his friend Dave McCabe boom out: “Bag, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I’ll recite Robbie Burns and you recite Shakespeare.” For the next three hours they did just that while the entire battalion listened.
At about the same time – 2:30 A.M. – a company of the 262nd German Reserve Regiment, facing the 3rd Division front, reported that the Canadian assembly trenches were filling up. The news came too late. The Canadian artillery had already destroyed the German telephone cables. By the time a runner made his slow way back to the German artillery batteries, the battle was on.
Meanwhile, David Moir and his machine gunners, roused from their sleep in the chalk pits, had left the corpse of the dead sergeant behind and were making their way forward through the Grange Subway. It was not an easy passage, for they were loaded down with guns, tripods, spare parts, and ammunition boxes, and the tunnel was full of sleeping members of the PPCLI. Moir tried to avoid stepping on the sleeping men but couldn’t avoid one, who awoke with a grunt. The oath died on his lips when the two recognized each other. He was an old friend from Winnipeg named Anderson, whom Moir hadn’t seen for years. Led by guides, the machine gunners crept out into craters half-way between their own lines and the Germans. There they took cover until dawn. Just before daylight a bold sergeant named Catherwood crawled out to bring them a bottle of rum. A German machine-gun crew spotted him creeping back and opened fire, but he managed to roll into his forward trench unharmed.
Not far away in the Bentanta Subway, Gordon Tupper of the Canadian Scottish, a scion of one of Canada’s most notable families, had finally convinced his C.O., the indomitable Cy Peck, that he should be allowed to fight that day. With his headquarters staff gravely decimated, Peck had sent word back to battalion headquarters that Tupper should take over as second-in-command. Since Peck meant to lead his men in battle, that meant that Tupper would have to stay behind. “Sir, if you order me to do so I will,” said Tupper, “but otherwise I want to stay with my boys.” Peck relented, and now Captain Tupper was writing home to his father, Sir Charles Hibbert Tupper, the son of one of the original Fathers of Confederation, Canada’s seventh prime minister.
“If I am going to die,” young Tupper wrote, “this is worth it a thousand times. I have ‘been over’ two or three times before but never with a company of my own. Think of it-150 officers and men will follow you to hell if need be!.… I have seen this game for two years and I still like it and feel my place is here.… The war has done wonders to me and makes me realize a lot of things I would not have done otherwise.…”
He was an attractive young officer, barely old enough to vote but already mature beyond his years, strong and supple, erect of carriage, a company commander of poise and judgement, “as proud as Punch on the most glorious day of [my] life.” It was the third time that he had written what he called “one of those ‘in case’ letters.” Unhappily, it would also be the last.
The dark hours of the morning moved leadenly toward their climax. At three o’clock, Andrew McCrindle moved out of the Zivy Cave with his battalion and entered the front line trenches. Sud
denly, seemingly out of nowhere, came cartons of chocolate bars and chewing gum. As he munched gratefully on a Lowney’s bar, thinking how odd it was to be enjoying a Canadian confection under these tense conditions, a vagrant thought popped into McCrindle’s head: if only somebody had thought to bring a camera, what an advertisement that would make for the Toronto chocolate firm!
McCrindle’s unit was to be in the second wave of the assault, which meant that he and his friends had to move back to allow the first wave room to get a footing and climb over the parapet. McCrindle stripped off his overcoat to give himself more freedom of action. Like so many others he would spend the hours before dawn standing in a sea of mud.
At 3:40 A.M., “C” Company of the RCRs reached the jumping-off trenches. Lieutenant Robert England’s immediate task was to lead a work party out into No Man’s Land to cut the Canadian wire. His best wire cutter was a tough Russian-born private, too impatient to use gloves, who simply rolled the wire aside with his bare hands and uprooted the steel stakes. Suddenly a sniper’s bullet struck one of the party, and to everybody’s consternation the wounded man let out a shrill cry. Had the enemy been alerted? Flares went up from the German trenches as England and a fellow officer carried the man back. There a stretcher-bearer did his best for him. It was no use. The man was dead before dawn, but fortunately the German line was silent.
At about the same time, Bill Breckenridge and his fellow signallers in the dressing station on the Quarry Line were awakened to the corporal’s shout: “Stand to! Get up soldiers and prepare for breakfast in the Zwischen Stellung!”
The men threw off their blankets, crawling with lice, and began to talk about their prospects in the coming battle.
“I’m going over this morning and I’m not looking for a blighty,” the corporal declared. “If I’m with the boys after the battle, I’ll be satisfied.”
Vimy Page 20