Vimy

by Pierre Berton

  Claude Williams, meanwhile, had sited his four machine guns on the eastern side of the ridge to protect the front against counterattack. With that job done he found a dugout, climbed down its twenty steps, and proceeded to eat his iron rations. His batman miraculously produced a loaf of bread. Williams wanted to know how he got it.

  “Did you notice that stiff near our headquarters?” the batman replied. “He had a loaf in his haversack. It was a bit bloody so I cut out that part.” The two hungry men munched it without a second thought.

  On the crest of the ridge, Andrew McCrindle, with other Victoria Rifles, was guarding a large group of prisoners. To McCrindle, the captured Germans had a strange, sour smell, and he wondered if it came from eating too much liverwurst. “Maybe we smell like bully beef to them,” he thought.

  At that moment, one of the Germans spoke to McCrindle in excellent English.

  “24th Battalion,” he said, indicating McCrindle’s cap badge. “The Vies, eh? I knew where your armoury was-on Cathcart Street?”

  McCrindle was taken aback. “How did you know?” he asked.

  “I used to work in the restaurant in the Windsor Station,” the German said. “We used to go over to Mother Martin’s for a quick one.”

  McCrindle, who didn’t drink, had never heard of Mother Martin’s, a well-known Montreal watering-hole.

  “I guess you’re too young to know that joint,” the German said. He explained that his father had wired to him to come home as soon as the war started.

  His officers had warned their men, he said, not to be taken prisoner as the Canadians were all Red Indians who would scalp them. “I knew better,” he said. “So I thought it would be a good idea to be in a place where the Canadians would take me, so here I am.”

  McCrindle accepted all this, as he had accepted everything that day, without much thought. Only later did the odd-ness of that encounter begin to seep in.

  Duncan Macintyre had more time to reflect. The Brigade Major of the 4th left the Zivy Cave at three that afternoon and walked across the battlefield, surveying the scene around him. Everywhere he looked, men were digging in. Telephone lines and light railways were already being laid, and special parties were picking up the dead and taking them to the cemetery grounds. Some of the corpses were sadly familiar. There, lying with his pack still on his back, was Major Frank Thompson, who had played basketball with him in Regina and had eaten dinner with him just before the battle. Now Thompson lay crumpled, his pack giving him an odd, humpbacked look, as if he’d pitched forward from the weight of the load, face down, his knees buckled beneath him, his hands spread out in front.

  Macintyre turned away, saddened, but he could not escape the hideous concomitants to battle – a dead German spread-eagled on the back wall of a trench, his arms flung wide as if crucified, his head crushed to a red pulp like a mashed strawberry; others lying as if sleeping, their clothes torn from them by the shell blasts; still others ripped open, their entrails spilling into the mud. In that drab landscape, a new and brighter hue had been added: the water in the shell holes was now red with blood.

  All along the ridge men could be seen staring in astonishment at the pastoral scene to the east, marred only by one incongruous spectacle: a shell had struck a German freight train as it crossed a bridge over the road from Arras to Lens, and one car hung precariously over the side. The whole of the Douai Plain was wide open, with the enemy in full retreat; but the sudden collapse of his defence lines could not be exploited. Ironically, the very fury of the Vimy barrage had made that impossible: the ground was so badly broken that the guns could not be hauled forward between the shell holes.

  The men on the ridge stared helplessly at the enemy soldiers, fleeing out of their reach to the rear where no barrage could reach them. “Jesus Christ Almighty!” cried a Forward Observation Officer with the 27th. “For two fucking years, I’ve been waiting for a chance like this and now I can’t use it.”

  No one, it seemed, had expected such a sudden and overwhelming victory.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The 3rd Division

  1

  On the face of it, the 3rd Division had an easier task than the two divisions on its right. It had two objectives instead of four and it had little more than twelve hundred yards-about three quarters of a mile- to reach its final objective in the La Folie Wood below the steep eastern slopes of Vimy Ridge.

  The division’s two forward brigades swept through the triple defences of the Germans in half an hour, right on schedule. Some did not bother to wait for the barrage to lift but, in their eagerness, risked being raked by Canadian gunfire as they moved right through it. The second and final objective – the Red Line-was seized by eight that morning; there were no Blue or Brown objectives to attain because of the configuration of the ridge. And so, for the 3rd Division, the main attack was over in just two and a half hours. While the 1st and 2nd Divisions were still engaged in a fighting advance, the battalions of the 3rd were already over the crest, mopping up and digging in.

  In spite of this, the division faced a hazard that no one had expected. Its left flank was in peril. Something had happened to the 4th Division, which was supposed to have seized the heavily fortified defences on Hill 145. They hadn’t done it; the hill was still in German hands. The battalions advancing in its shadow-RCRs, Princess Pats, and especially the Black Watch-found themselves exposed to a merciless fire, raining down on their left from the highest point on the ridge.

  The four battalions of the Canadian Mounted Rifles-former cavalry units now recycled as the 8th Brigade infantry-had an easier time on the division’s right flank. At Zero Hour, Corporal Gus Sivertz, a twenty-two-year-old optometrist from Victoria with a pugnacious face and blue Icelandic eyes, was in the middle of the brigade front. He lay with his nose in the mud, his backside pulled down as low as feasible so that his buttocks wouldn’t be ripped by machine-gun bullets when the barrage exploded. Over the top he went at dawn and almost immediately tripped over some wire. At that very moment a German shell landed three feet from him, burrowed into the mud, and exploded. Sivertz felt a terrible blow on his helmet, which was pushed down over his ears. “I’m killed,” he thought, and was surprised to find himself alive. The shell had blown a huge piece of chalk out of the mud, and it was this that had struck him.

  Suddenly he was all alone on the battlefield; already his little group of section mates had passed him by. Standing there in the carnage he felt that the entire German army was aiming at him. Like so many others that day he was swept by a helpless feeling of terrible loneliness. He wanted desperately to reach out and touch a friendly shoulder, to cry out “Here I am!” And so he stumbled forward, tottering in the debris, hunched under the weight of his equipment, blindly searching for his friends until, to his relief, he saw them ahead and caught up with them.

  Not far away, John Alvis from Saskatchewan found himself in a similar fix. He was lost and he was scared-not of the enemy but of his reputation. He’d tried to help some machine gunners floundering in the mud of an enemy trench and got too far behind. Now he couldn’t find the identification discs stuck in the mud by the advancing platoons. He wandered first to the right and then, trying to correct his position, to the left, where machine-gun fire drove him into a shell hole. There he sat and worried. Had he brought shame to his unit? Would he be charged with desertion? It seemed to him that an eternity passed while he strove to get his bearings, but it wasn’t much more than a minute before he spotted the comforting figure of his company commander searching about for other lost men. In spite of his problem, Alvis went on to win the Military Medal and a promotion to sergeant.

  From this point on nothing could stop the 8th Brigade. Gus Sivertz’s battalion, the 2nd CMRs, was in the Zwischen Stellung trench in twenty-five minutes, and there Sergeant Al Swanby ate the German commander’s Easter Monday breakfast-three eggs with beautiful white bread. In a corner of the dugout Sivertz spotted a case of Carnation Milk, sent from Seattle and marked “Hoove
r Belgian Relief Fund.”

  Ahead Sivertz could see the barrage, which had moved 150 yards beyond the captured trench. In forty minutes it would begin to creep forward again as fresh troops pushed through to the Red Line on the far side of the ridge. But Sivertz’s group couldn’t hold back. Fred Selke nudged Sivertz and pointed ahead: “I believe there’s a bunch of Huns in that dugout.”

  “Toss down a Mills bomb,” Sivertz advised.

  “No, to heck with it. I’ll go down there and get them,” said Selke.

  He descended six feet into the dugout, turned a corner, and came face to face with a German officer who fired his Luger directly at him, missing Selke’s heart by a mere two inches and crippling his arm. It was the German’s last act. When he came out of the dugout, Selke’s friends shot him.

  Others followed with their hands up, but as one passed Corporal Jock MacGregor, he pointed his rifle at MacGregor’s face and pulled the trigger. Sergeant Swanby, who’d just eaten the commander’s breakfast and was a good amateur boxer, caught the motion out of the corner of his eye, swung his entrenching tool, sank it right through the German’s helmet, and deflected the bullet.

  Five minutes later a German machine gun began to chatter from a steel slit in a concrete pillbox on the right, threatening to hold up the advance to the Red Line. Sivertz offered to work his way around and attack it with grenades from the rear. He circled for sixty yards on his belly and then, growing impatient, stuck his head up to get his bearings. He felt a shattering blow, as if somebody had hit him with a mallet. There was no pain, just the stunning power of the blow.

  The world had gone unaccountably silent. “That’s funny,” he thought, “what am I doing here?” He couldn’t stop spitting for some reason, but it didn’t help; his mouth kept filling up with a salty fluid. He put his hand to his face; it came away covered with blood. He felt the top of his head; it was swathed with bandages. He looked about for his comrades; there was no one there, no one at all. “By God, I’ve been hit,” he realized. “I’ve got a blighty and I’m going to get the hell out of here.”

  Vaguely he remembered somebody turning him over – a stretcher-bearer – and then, on leaving him bandaged, dismissing him with the words: “It’s a stiff.” Semi-conscious, he had been unable to reply.

  As the brigade plunged on down the steep eastern slopes of the ridge, as the battalions on his left continued to endure the German fire from Hill 145, as the fresh troops of the 1st and 2nd Divisions were nearing the Blue and Brown Lines and the embattled 4th tried vainly to fight its way to the highest point of the crest, Gus Sivertz, still bleeding from a four-inch gash across his temple, staggered back to the Canadian lines.

  The world had reverted to slow motion. Sivertz felt like a man taking gigantic seven-foot steps, almost as if he were floating over the top of the ground. He felt hilarious; he wanted to laugh out loud, to speak to strangers. He threaded his way through reserve troops moving forward, maintaining a running conversation with the reinforcements as they passed by. He asked one man for rum. The soldier took one look at his head wound and told him nothing doing.

  By this time the Germans, rallying from their initial shock, had put up a heavy artillery barrage on the rear Canadian areas to try to stop fresh troops from getting forward – the same shellfire that Dr. Manion and his C.O. were facing over on the right. But Sivertz, despite his light-headedness, was shrewd enough to notice something about the enemy barrage. McNaughton’s counter-battery work had knocked out so many German guns that the artillery could cover only one divisional sector at a time. Sivertz got as close to the line of falling shells as he could, then waited for it to jump to the next divisional front. When it did, he made it through.

  He had no idea where he was. The guns had obliterated every distinguishing feature. At last he spotted a piece of white-painted wood with a two-inch triangle, sticking out of the mud. He pulled it out, wiped it clean on his pants, and saw that it read “Cross Street.” With relief he flung it into the air. That was his trench-the exact point from which he’d started that morning at dawn!

  A few moments later Sivertz spotted two big strips of red cloth and realized he’d reached the medical trench. He was sitting patiently with six other wounded men waiting for aid when a medical sergeant, picking out the haemorrhage cases, spotted him and dragged him through the door of a dugout. In the roulette wheel of battle, this arbitrary action saved Gus Sivertz’s life. Just as they stepped down into the dugout they heard a sound above them like a freight train roaring across the sky. A moment later a shell exploded in the trench they had just quit. All that was left of the other wounded men were tatters of uniforms and bits of flesh.

  He was moved back to one of the rear dressing stations, where he received an anti-tetanus shot and an indelible blue cross on his forehead. An eager YMCA officer, handing out cigarettes by the handful, was so excited that he kept pushing them into Sivertz’s mouth one after another. It was no use; Sivertz had lost control of his jaws and couldn’t hold them.

  He was, in the army vernacular, one of the “walking wounded.” Back he walked to his own artillery lines, where the turbaned Sikhs of the Lahore heavy artillery were manning the big guns. They had already moved forward to lengthen the range into the German back areas. Sivertz, now completely punch-drunk, oblivious to his surroundings, walked directly into the muzzles. He dimly heard an officer give the order to fire. Four gigantic shells screamed not more than a foot above his head.

  Sivertz had lost all sensation in his knees. They seemed to have turned into rubber. As he stumbled down the cobblestones of Mont St. Eloi, like a fish thrown out of a stream, he spotted an Oriental in a Canadian uniform, one of the Japanese-Canadian volunteers. The Japanese had been blinded by shellfire. Sivertz could no longer walk. The blind man propped him up; Sivertz gave him eyes. The two crippled men, clinging to each other, managed to work their way to a dressing station where the wounded were queued up in droves waiting for attention. Two days later, Gus Sivertz was still there, the mud of the battlefield still caked on his clothes, the blood partially dried in his boots, and his long underwear stuck to his body hair.

  By the time he was taken to the hospital train, Sivertz was all in. The dressing station had been so crowded there was no place to lie down. He climbed into an upper berth and didn’t have the strength to pull off his boots. A nurse came by and gave him a package of Wrigley’s, but he couldn’t move his jaws to chew the gum. The world around him turned black and stayed that way until he awoke in a hospital to find a nurse with a strong Aberdonian accent cutting away his clotted hair with a knife. Gus Sivertz thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

  2

  While Sivertz was lying unconscious in the mud, bleeding from his head wound, some of his comrades, unable to contain themselves, were still rushing forward against all orders, directly through their own barrage, to seize La Folie farm on the very crest of the ridge. They occupied it before seven o’clock-nothing more than a heap of ruins and fallen trees flattened by shellfire. An hour later the 3rd Division’s final objective-the woods on the far side-was in Canadian hands.

  On the crest of the ridge, over to the left, a dangerous gap had opened up between the two brigades of the 3rd Division: the RCRs hadn’t kept up. The battalions on either side would have to send men over quickly to plug the hole in the line. Gregory Clark, the youngest and shortest officer in the 4th CMRs, got his orders at 8:30. He was to take an armed squad at once and meet a similar force from the Princess Pats at the centre of the gap and hold it until the RCRs arrived.

  Off went Clark, a roly-poly figure loaded down with a Lewis gun and a sack of bombs, leading his men as they bobbed and wove from shell hole to shell hole, tripping over mine craters, ducking German grenades, spraying pockets of resistance with bombs and bullets, desperate to link up with the neighbouring battalion. At last he spotted a squad from the Pats stumbling toward him, led by a tall, gangling soldier, twice his height. As they flung themselves t
oward each other gratefully, the newcomer looked at Clark. “Don’t I know you?” he said. Clark nodded slowly. It was the bully who had made his life a living hell back at school in Toronto. Clark was never so glad to see anybody in his life. Together the two former adversaries closed the gap.

  Here too the Germans in the forward lines had been stunned by the speed of the attack. Otto Schroeder, a Berliner with the 262nd Reserve Regiment facing the 3rd Division front, had just got to sleep after a long, weary night of duty. Suddenly there came a heavy drumfire, and he awoke to the shouts of the dazed sentries, crying: “Outside! The British are coming!”

  Schroeder was up in an instant, all tiredness gone, knowing his life was at stake. Even as he started to hand out grenades, the sound of rifle fire on his left told him the enemy had broken through and were rolling up the German positions. Schroeder’s corporal ordered him into the dugout to bring up another box of hand-grenades. He was half-way back up the thirty-two steps when he heard the corporal shout: “Come up to the left! The British have already passed the trench.” Schroeder dropped the grenades, climbed up into the trench, and found himself alone, except for a corpse draped over what was left of the parapet.

  Very gingerly he made his way past the lip of the trench. All he could see in every direction were khaki-clad soldiers in the flat steel helmets the Germans dubbed “straw hats.” To Schroeder they looked like men on a rabbit hunt; some, surprisingly, seemed drunk.