Vimy

by Pierre Berton

  Meanwhile, Andrew McCrindle, the baby-faced nineteen-year-old with the reserve platoon, Victoria Rifles, waited his turn to go over the top. Already McCrindle could see men falling-not in the dramatic way they did in illustrations or in the silent films of the day, flinging their hands in the air or clutching their hearts before toppling forward; here on the slopes of Vimy they just seemed to sink disconsolately into the earth. The dead did not distress McCrindle as much as the wounded who were left groaning and bleeding in the mud without help while the battle swept on past.

  Almost as soon as McCrindle went over the top he fell into a shell hole, up to his knees in mud and water. He felt like crying: there he was, floundering helplessly in the muck while everybody else shuffled past him. At that moment another youngster spotted him, leaned over, and with his rifle pulled McCrindle out. The smell of cordite was strong in his nostrils as he hurried to catch up. Shells were bursting all around him; but it seemed to Andrew McCrindle that some good fairy had equipped him with an invisible shield, for while others fell, he survived.

  A machine gun opened up on the left. McCrindle’s platoon sergeant deployed his men, just as in training, to attack from three sides with rifle grenades. One lone German survived the tactic; they sent him back on his own to the Canadian lines.

  Ahead lay the great Volker Tunnel, too deep within the ridge to be damaged by the Canadian artillery. It was packed with Germans armed with machine guns, waiting for the first waves to go by before attacking the second waves from the rear. But McCrindle’s company didn’t stop-the task of clearing the tunnel would be left for others. Up ahead they spotted a German officer leading a group of men, firing his pistol directly at them. One of McCrindle’s platoon mates, Arthur Abbey, rushed at him, knocked him down, took his pistol, forced the others to surrender and, for that deed, won the Distinguished Conduct Medal.

  The objective lay dead ahead. Not far away the troops could see the captain of a neighbouring company, V.E. Duclos, turning about and throwing open his overcoat so that the men of his company could spot the white lining and keep their alignment. Duclos was already wounded but kept going until his men had punched their way through the enemy’s forward defences to reach the Zwischen Stellung trench. This was the Black Line. Duclos’s men reached it at exactly 6:02, ahead of schedule. McCrindle’s company arrived twelve minutes later. Behind them a furious fight was taking place for the Volker Tunnel, which had been mined. Fortunately, the Canadians discovered the trap in time and cut the leads before they were all blown up. At 6:25 the soldiers, digging in, heard the sound of a klaxon above them as a British biplane swept past to see by the flag signals that the objective had been reached.

  In this first advance, the casualties had been remarkably low. Again the fury of the barrage had unnerved and surprised the Germans. McCrindle and his section rounded up one astonished officer still in his pyjamas. Piqued at having to surrender to mere private soldiers, he vainly demanded the presence of an officer. McCrindle stole his epaulettes as a souvenir and hustled him back to the Canadian lines.

  Over on the right, Sergeant Ellis Sifton’s platoon was digging in with their fellow units, all from Ontario. During the advance Sifton had performed an act of conspicuous gallantry, hurling himself at a machine gun that was mowing down his men, charging directly at its crew, clubbing some with his rifle and slashing at others with his bayonet. He didn’t know it, but that act would win him the Victoria Cross. Nor would he ever know it. As he supervised the capture of the prisoners, a wounded German managed to reach for his rifle, point it at the sergeant, and squeeze the trigger. Sifton was dead before he hit the ground.

  The enemy casualties were catastrophic. Entire battalions were wiped out. One of the battalions of the 79th Reserve Division, directly across from the Canadian 2nd, was so badly cut up that only one man escaped. This was Musketeer Hagemann, a quiet and sober farmer from the Lüneburg area of Germany. At first, Hagemann’s battalion held fast and Hagemann was reassured to see rows of the Canadian attackers felled by his machine gunners on the flanks. But the German artillery proved useless, firing over the heads of the Canadians and falling on empty areas in the rear. On the other hand, Hagemann noted, the Canadians directed their own artillery to points of resistance by means of Very light signals from their aircraft. Soon men began to topple all around him. The machine gun next to him, which had created such devastation, was put out of action, the entire crew dead. As the Canadians committed fresh troops to the attack, the Germans moved back from crater to crater, dying and bleeding as they retreated. It seemed to the stolid Hagemann that there wasn’t anybody left on his side who wasn’t hit. He himself was bleeding from three wounds. His right arm was paralysed. He could fight no longer and so fell back, the only man in his entire battalion to reach safety.

  2

  On the 2nd Division’s Black Line, the troops were being shuffled, the rear waves moving forward to take over from the leading waves in order to continue the next stage of the assault, following the creeping barrage to another great German trench known as the Turko Graben, just below the crest of the ridge. This was the Red Line; some of the troops would have to travel a mile to reach it. But the German resistance continued to crumble, and in a little less than half an hour the Turko Graben was in Canadian hands. Here, in a large shell hole, the troops were treated to a sight that might have been affecting had it not seemed so ludicrous: a dozen Germans, every man jack of them on his knees praying.

  The Germans, meanwhile, were shelling the ground just ahead of the Canadian trenches, long since vacated by all but the staff officers moving their battle headquarters forward over captured territory.

  Stranded in No Man’s Land, half-way between the old Canadian front and the Zwischen Stellung trench, Captain Robert Manion, the future politician, thought his last hour had come: his wife, back in Ottawa, would receive his pocket diary, but she would never know the details of how he, the Medical Officer of the 21st, had met his end, huddled in a trench with shells exploding all about him, a wounded colonel clinging to him and a padre on his knees beside him.

  For that was all that was left of the thirty officers and men who had set out that morning at 7:30 to establish a forward headquarters in the captured Zwischen Stellung trench. Shrapnel had sent all but this trio scuttling back to safety, and now the colonel was bleeding from wounds in the arm and the leg.

  To Manion it made more sense to go forward than back. It wasn’t easy. His wounded C.O. stumbled and fell to his waist in the mud. Manion pulled him clear. As they blundered forward again, the wounded man toppled into a shell hole. Clearly he couldn’t go on; they would have to turn back. Manion tried to carry the C.O. When that didn’t work, he dragged him for 250 yards to the shelter of another shell hole. They threw away their equipment and began crawling from hole to hole in a zigzag pattern toward their own lines. Miraculously, they made it.

  Captain Manion, who won a Military Cross for his efforts, finally reached the Zwischen Stellung by another route, passing on his way a group of tanks bogged down in the mud. They were supposed to support the advance of the division in its attack on Thélus, but they hadn’t even reached the Black Line. The mud was too thick, the shell holes too deep, the ground too treacherous, and the High Command too uncertain that these devices should be used. They looked awesome enough with their great snouts heaving over the lips of the craters, their engines snorting, and their treads rattling. But now, as Manion passed them, all were immobilized.

  Up ahead, on the Red Line-the Turko Graben-the barrage lifted and came down on the German positions two hundred yards farther on. The troops dug in, the moppers-up did their work, and fresh units of the 6th Brigade – “The Iron Sixth” – held in reserve until this moment, moved out of their positions and prepared to push through to the next objective.

  Back on the old Canadian front line, William Pecover’s battalion was the last to go over the top, since it was the reserve battalion in the reserve brigade. Standing at his post, both
horrified and enthralled by the spectacle before him, Pecover felt a strange elation. As the short word of command was passed along the trenches, he and his fellows clambered out into the mud. Here he came face to face with the horror of war: wounded men sprawled everywhere in the slime, in the shell holes, in the mine craters, some screaming to the skies, some lying silently, some begging for help, some struggling to keep from drowning in the craters, the field swarming with stretcher-bearers trying to keep up with the casualties. As Pecover trudged forward over the broken wire and the pocked terrain, he struggled to ignore the human agony around him.

  Captain Claude Williams’s machine gunners were also pushing off at almost the same moment. Williams had won the coin toss with a fellow officer to take them over the top. They lurched forward under back-breaking loads, heavily encumbered not only with normal kit and weapons but also with guns, tripods, ammunition belts, water, and spare parts.

  The machine gunners had no sooner set out than a German gas shell landed among them. The six-foot Donald Fraser heard a “pop” close to his face and suddenly found that he could no longer exhale or inhale; his breathing was paralysed. With a celerity that astonished him, he slipped on his respirator and his breathing was at once restored. Soon he was stumbling across what had once been No Man’s Land, passing a series of shell holes full of dead Canadians.

  It occurred to Williams, as it had to others, that the scene of the attack was nothing like the popular conception of a line of soldiers racing forward and bayoneting the enemy. What he saw instead were clumps of men, scattered over the entire front, toiling slowly up the ridge. The scenes of death on all sides were not heroic but sickening. Williams passed one man lying in a deep shell hole crying “Water! Water!” The top of his head had been blown off, exposing his brains. Fraser noted it too, and couldn’t help thinking that the brains looked rather like fish roe. That sort of thing was never shown in the Victorian paintings of gallant officers expiring slowly in the arms of their comrades, a small pink stain on the shirt front, a hand raised languidly in a kind of greeting as if the hero were sinking into a peaceful sleep. Such scenes, if they had ever existed, were obsolete. Never again would war be referred to as “noble.”

  3

  Having reached their position on the Red Line, the forward battalions of the Iron Sixth watched the bombardment of Thélus and waited for their turn to move. Their task was to seize the blasted village, then head for the next objective-a series of German support trenches marked as the Blue Line on the maps.

  On their left, the fresh British brigade had also moved into the line. One of the regiments, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, formed up in front of the Nova Scotia Rifles. To the astonishment of the Maritimers, taking cover in the trench, the Scotsmen stood tall, following the sergeant’s command to “right dress ranks,” as if on a parade-ground, totally oblivious to the presence of enemy snipers. It was magnificent, of course, but it was not war as the twentieth century was coming to know it.

  At 9:35, right on schedule, the barrage again began to creep forward. All across the battlefield, observers in the rear could witness a spectacle they would never see again: the wall of exploding steel sweeping up the slopes of Vimy Ridge like a rainstorm with the youth of Canada following directly in its wake.

  There is, alas, no such thing as a perfect battle. Tragedy mars the best-planned assaults. Some of the so-called silent batteries of Canadian field guns, pushed forward at the last moment and concealed until now from the enemy, opened up, only to fall tragically short. In that short advance toward Thélus more men were killed by their own shells than by the Germans. The survivors soldiered on firing their Lewis guns from the hip.

  This was Harry Wilford’s first battle. He was a twenty-two-year-old Englishman who had come to Canada in 1904 to join the Barr colonists in the North West. War was in his blood: his ancestors had come to England with the Conqueror, and some member of his family had been in the armed forces since that day. To get to France Wilford had dropped his reserve commission and reverted to the ranks. Now, as he moved forward with the men of the 28th Battalion, all recruited in the Canadian North West, he spotted a group of Germans holding out in a crater directly ahead. Wilford dived head first into a smaller shell hole, pulled the pin on a Mills bomb, and to his horror fumbled it. The live grenade tumbled to his feet; he had four seconds to get rid of it or be blown to bits. Wilford took a running kick at the bomb, booted it out of the shell hole, and then straight-armed a second one at the Germans, only to discover that they had unaccountably vanished.

  Where had they gone? He found a small opening at the bottom of the crater that turned out to be the rear entrance to a chalk pit. Without a thought, Wilford squeezed down the narrow passage until he came to a turn. Now he cursed himself for a fool. There he was, all alone, with nobody behind him and God knew how many of the enemy lurking just around the corner. Gingerly, Wilford pushed his rifle around the corner and pulled the trigger. It was pitch black; all he could hear was the report of the gun. Back he squirmed into the crater, only to discover the Germans streaming out of the main entrance to the chalk pit. Fortunately, they were surrendering. One man who’d been hit in the stomach was carried out, and Wilford realized with a pang that it was his own blind shot that had done the job. For the rest of his life Harry Wilford was bothered by that incident. It was all so unnecessary, he realized: the Germans had been going to surrender anyway.

  By ten that morning, the forward battalions reached the outskirts of Thélus. Within forty minutes, the entire village was in British and Canadian hands. The town was a shell; no wall stood higher than six feet. Only in the medieval caverns beneath was there evidence of enemy life-a bedroom complete with wallpaper and a feather bed with real sheets, a fully equipped bar, a table set for a meal with no fewer than five waiters in attendance. Back they went to the POW cages.

  Above ground, all familiar landmarks had vanished under the battering of the artillery. Claude Williams felt lost. He and his encumbered gun crew had trouble keeping up. Williams had plotted his route carefully to take him through the hamlet of Les Tilleuls on the Lens-Arras road-not far from the Red reporting line on his map. But he could find no trace of it. At last he came upon a military policeman and asked him where Les Tilleuls might be. “You’re in the middle of it, sir,” the M.P. told him. Williams looked about: nothing. Not even a stump to mark the passing of the scented lindens.

  Up ahead, Gerry Scott, a sniper with the 29th, searched vainly for Heros Wood, which lay beyond Thélus on the German side of the ridge. He’d been sent forward to scout the wood for signs of the enemy, but he couldn’t find any wood and he couldn’t find any enemy. He had a good map and knew he was in the right square, but there was no longer any wood. It had been smashed out of existence; here, too, the very stumps had been destroyed.

  Scott finally found a wood. He recognized it as Bois de la Ville – the division’s objective. It was supposed to be bristling with Germans, but Scott saw no one. He searched about, picked up some souvenirs, entered a German tunnel running under the ridge, and came face to face with an active howitzer whose crew, waiting apparently for any excuse to get out of action, fled immediately. Scott went back to his battalion to report that the objective was clear.

  Meanwhile William Pecover’s platoon had also reached the obliterated village of Les Tilleuls and was trying to get across the Lens-Arras road in order to reach their jumping-off position on the Blue Line. All Pecover could see ahead of him was bursting shrapnel. The Germans were trying to block the fresh troops from crossing the road. It seemed impossible that anyone could make it through that hail of steel balls. “We’ve got to get through,” cried Pecover’s officer. “It’s every man for himself. Keep the line as well as you can. When you get close to the road run for it.”

  Pecover dashed forward, men toppling all around him. Somehow he made it. At 11:30 the battalion was in position on the Blue Line, the men working their way forward through the old German support trenches,
crawling between the dead and the wounded and through the swarms of prisoners and the moppers-up with their white arm bands. Officers and NCOs scurried about straightening out the line. Pecover and the others crawled into the shell holes about 150 yards ahead of the new position, just short of the next barrier of enemy wire. There they waited for the barrage to move ahead and the last stage of the attack to begin.

  4

  On the right the barrage was already lifting and the 1st Division was starting to push forward. The 2nd Division troops could see the red patches on their neighbours’ shoulders, bright as new wounds. At 12:42 the barrage began to lift on the right of the 2nd Division, exactly as planned. By one o’clock the whole line was in motion. Bandsman Paddy Smith of Pecover’s unit went forward with the assaulting troops, piping a regimental march on his piccolo. The notes came through the rumble of the barrage, sweet and clear, a haunting reminder of older, gentler wars. Then suddenly the music stopped. Paddy Smith was dead.

  A machine gun opened up on the left of the Winnipeggers. Two rifle grenades blew it out of action. On the right, a battery of German 5.9s stood fast, the crew firing point blank at the advancing troops. One of the company commanders, Captain Lane, rushed forward, seized the guns, and killed those of the crew who refused to surrender. Later those same guns would be turned around to fire on their former owners.

  The barrage, which had been concentrating on Farbus and Farbus Wood on the 1st Division front, now lifted as the troops seized the Brown Line and began bombing the German dugouts. Again the cry of “Kamerad!” was heard. When no one came out of one dugout, William Pecover tried out his high school German. “Kommen sie hier, Herr Fritz,” he called at the top of his voice, and out they came, apparently delighted to be steered toward the rear.

  The Winnipeggers dug in on the lower east slope of the ridge, waiting for a counterattack that never came. It was bitterly cold, so cold that Pecover took a chance, climbed out of his funk-hole, and began to walk briskly up and down the sunken road that ran across the ridge. Suddenly a gas shell exploded a few feet away. He raced back to the security of his hollow, only to find that another soldier had appropriated it. A moment later a second shell blew the new occupant to pieces.