Vimy

by Pierre Berton

  This trench, in the very centre of the brigade front, formed part of the Germans’ second line of defence. In hindsight it seems incredible that the commander of an attacking battalion would ask the artillery to hold off. At the time, however, Shaw’s reasoning seemed to make sense. The trench was only a short distance from the Canadian line-not much more than the length of a football field; no doubt he felt his men could rush it before the Germans could recover from their surprise. The slopes facing him were steep; if the trench were destroyed by the Canadian barrage, the heaped-up rubble could form a barrier over which the men, sweating up the incline, would have to scramble. But if captured intact, it would provide instant protection from the guns on the heights above.

  Whatever his reason, Shaw’s request was granted, with devastating results. In the first six minutes, the Grenadier Guards lost half their number. Of eleven officers, ten were wounded-five mortally. The fire from the undamaged trench slowed the advance; the troops, unable to maintain the timetable, lost the protection of the barrage, which leaped over the German positions. Nor did they ever regain it. Some tried to escape over to the right, only to find themselves inextricably mixed up with two other battalions. Many of the Mississauga troops-the “Jolly 75th,” who were supposed to back up the Guards-couldn’t even get out of the assembly trenches because of the pile-up in front.

  Jack Quinnell, the red-headed scout who had survived the March 1 gas raid, managed to force his way over the top directly behind the Guards. “My God,” he said to himself, “there’s no barrage at all.” Ahead of him there was only mud, shell holes, and corpses. All Quinnell could see were hordes of the enemy in his path, pouring out of the galleries and passages unscathed, slaughtering the men in front of him. He jumped into a hole full of refuse and was pinned down by an explosion that half covered him with earth. He didn’t dare move because he knew that if he popped into sight he’d be a dead man. He was certainly a sick one, suffering so badly from trench mouth he could scarcely speak and so seriously from trench foot he could hardly walk. But he didn’t die. When he finally made his way to the rear he kept asking himself: What went wrong?

  As a result of this stalemate, a dangerous enemy bulge appeared in the centre of the line – the kind that every commander fears-a salient bristling with machine-gun and mortar nests that the Guards had failed to destroy. From this vantage point the Germans could pound the flanks of Odlum’s remaining troops on the Canadian right (already under fire from Hill 145) and those of the neighbouring 12th Brigade on the left, bogged down in the swamps in the teeth of a blinding snowstorm.

  Now the 4th Division’s attack was divided into two separate skirmishes with the salient separating them like a knife piercing the line.

  The 12th ran into trouble early, for the terrain its troops had to cross was the soggiest in the entire Vimy sector. Scores of wounded men slid into the reeking shell holes and drowned. An eerie spectacle greeted the soldiers who finally relieved the 12th the next day – dozens of corpses sitting under the water at the bottom of the great slimy craters, as if pausing for a moment to rest.

  The going was so hard that some battalions could not keep up with the barrage. This left them sitting ducks for the machine guns in the salient. The 38th from Ottawa, which was closest to the German bulge, had by-passed three large craters in the confusion, all swarming with the enemy. The battalion now found itself attacked from front, flank, and rear.

  It was here that Major Thane MacDowell, a darkly handsome company commander from Lachute, won the Victoria Cross. With two battalion runners beside him, MacDowell leaped forward, bombed out two machine-gun nests, then acting entirely alone chased one of the survivors down the fifty-five steps of a long tunnel. Seventy-five feet underground, in the pitch blackness, he could hear human sounds. He shouted aloud, demanding surrender, his voice echoing in the confined space, but there was no answer. MacDowell kept going, turned a corner in the tunnel, and suddenly came face to face with two German officers and seventy-seven members of the Prussian Guard.

  By rights MacDowell should either have become a prisoner or a corpse at that moment. Instead, with enormous aplomb, he called back to imaginary troops as if he were at the head of a small army. At that, all the Germans raised their hands. MacDowell was in a quandary. He knew that if he were to lead all seventy-nine of the enemy up the long stairway to the top the Germans would quickly overpower him and his two runners. He solved the problem by telling them off in small groups and sending these up in a series to the runners waiting up above. The first Germans to reach the top realized they’d been bluffed. One made so bold as to reach for his rifle. That was the end of him. MacDowell had already won the DSO for a similar capture of fifty Germans earlier in the war. Now he added the purple ribbon of the V.C. to his decorations.

  The Winnipeg Grenadiers, following behind MacDowell’s unit, were supposed to push on through to the next objective beyond the ridge. A few reached it but could not hold it; none returned alive. The rest of the battalion was unable to go further. By nightfall it had been reduced to two hundred disheartened men out of a total strength of seven hundred.

  Stewart McPherson Scott, a subaltern with the Winnipeggers, was totally confused. He sat in a big shell hole all day long, gathering together the wounded as best he could. He had no idea where his battalion had got to. He was being harassed by his own artillery but had no way of letting the gunners know that their shells were falling short – the snow was too thick for his flares to be seen. And he had no way of getting word back to find out where the other companies and platoons might be.

  Scott bound up the wounded who crouched with him in the shell hole; then, when dusk fell, he moved back a little where he found a confused mêlée of men from three battalions all mixed up together. Scott summoned the most reliable of the NCOs and did his best to straighten things out and hook up with the flanking units. For the next four days he stayed in the front line.

  The other leading battalion of the 12th Brigade, the Sea-forth Highlanders from Vancouver, was as badly off as its neighbours in the maze of shell holes and obliterated trenches. Under fire from the Pimple on their left and from the German salient on the right, they had lost all sense of direction. They too failed to reach their objective. By nightfall the battalion had only sixty men who were not killed or wounded. Of the thirteen officers, eleven were casualties. The Germans never let up. Harry Bond, a stretcher-bearer with the Seaforths, had the unnerving experience of trying to carry a wounded man back through the fire on a stretcher. Before he could reach his own lines a sniper had shot the wounded man through both hands.

  Of the four battalions in the 12th Brigade, only the 73rd reached its objective that morning with minimal losses, thanks to the protective presence of the 10th Brigade, acting as an anchor between the Canadians and the British on their left. The 10th had orders not to move until the other two brigades seized their objectives. Its job was to take the Pimple on the following day. But the discouraging events of Easter Monday had postponed that plan.

  2

  In the other mini-battle on the right, the remaining two battalions of Odlum’s brigade, faced by the unexpectedly strong opposition from Hill 145 and the flanking fire from the German salient, quickly lost their momentum. The 102nd Battalion from Northern British Columbia, dubbed “Warden’s Warriors” after their popular C.O., managed to gain its objective half-way up the slope, but only at terrible cost. With every officer knocked out, a company sergeantmajor took over until he, too, was put out of action by wounds in the hands and stomach.

  The Kootenay battalion was supposed to leap-frog through and seize Hill 145, but that proved impossible. Caught in the crossfire between the German machine guns on their undefended left and the nests hidden on the hill above, the Kootenay troops were pinned down. A few struggled toward their objective; none returned. The rest were thrown back into the arms of Warden’s Warriors, causing further confusion.

  All that morning, while the other divisions triumphantly se
ized the ridge and drove the Germans back across the Douai Plain, the headquarters staffs in the subways along the 4th Division front received confusing and demoralizing reports. Runners sent out to get information were often killed before they could get back. Telephones were out of commission. At least one reporting aircraft was shot down before it could send a signal.

  In the Cavalier Subway, at the battle headquarters of Warden’s Warriors, reports were so confused that the acting C.O., Major A.B. Carey, decided to go forward himself. He took his own runner and a scout sergeant; the latter was killed almost immediately, but Carey wandered about the battlefield for three hours, vainly attempting to find his men, and then returned, in the guarded words of the battalion’s war diary, “convinced that the battalion was securely dug in.”

  Eedson Burns, a twenty-year-old engineer with the brigade communications group- and a Second World War general – had reported initially by phone to Odlum that the attack was going well. Warden’s Warriors had got past the German front line, and he himself had taken one prisoner, a diminutive Bavarian who hopped up and down in terror, in Burns’s words “like a small boy who had wet his trousers,” until he realized he wasn’t going to be slaughtered. Burns sent him back on his own. Then, with his signals team, he began to work his way up the slope of the ridge. His plan was to get a telephone operating on top of Hill 145 as observation for the Canadian gunners, and so his group moved right behind the forward troops.

  Suddenly he noticed a change. The troops hadn’t been able to keep up with the barrage. As the shells passed them by, enemy machine gunners began to crawl out of their concrete shelters. Stragglers from several battalions began to join his party. Burns could see the German bullets smacking into the mud no more than a hundred yards ahead.

  He leaped into a shell hole. As he did so a bullet creased his helmet. Burns looked up and saw one of the stragglers grinning at him in a peculiar apologetic way. “Get down, you damn fool!” Burns shouted. The grin faded, the man gently collapsed, his legs doubling under him, his eyes rolling upward until the whites showed. There was no blood, but he was stone dead.

  Burns waited ten minutes, then headed back to round up the rest of the telephone section, crouching in a shell hole. Most were wounded; none could move; a German machine gun stuttered from a mine crater up ahead and to the left. Burns could see the machine gunners, exposed from the waist up, standing as if at target practice.

  The effects of the March 1 gas raid were only too obvious. These were green replacements. Frustrated, Burns turned to a rifleman and told him to take a shot at the Germans. To his astonishment, the man gaped at him and confessed he’d never fired a rifle since arriving in France; that was the job of the snipers. Burns told him to loose off a few rounds anyway. None hit the target.

  Burns now got on the phone to report the deteriorating state of affairs to brigade headquarters, explaining that his signals party couldn’t advance because the infantry had divided to the left and the right, leaving an enemy strong point directly in front. Odlum told him that was all poppycock. But nobody at brigade really knew what was going on. Up ahead, Burns spotted a scouting party, sent out by brigade to find out what was happening. It was blundering directly into the enemy. He couldn’t warn them-the noise of the barrage made anything but close conversation impossible-so he leaped from shell hole to shell hole and headed them off. He suggested they might get forward by moving over to the right; he’d seen some 3rd Division troops there, but nothing of his own brigade. They took his advice.

  Burns made his way back to the old German front line and there found a group of men lounging about with a Lewis gun so covered with mud that it wouldn’t fire. He ordered them to clean it, gather up some Mills bombs, and wait for reinforcements. Fifteen minutes later, as he explored an old German dugout, a soldier ran down shouting: “Mr. Burns! Mr. Burns! Quick! Fritz is counterattacking!”

  Up the stairs he went, doing his best to appear calm, only to find that the “counterattack” consisted of a dozen German prisoners being escorted back. At that very moment a German 5.9 shell landed in the midst of the group, blowing several into the air.

  Burns could see the Germans still standing waist high in their trenches no more than fifty yards away. By now he was thoroughly frustrated and angry. He turned to one buck private and demanded to know what he thought his rifle was for. He seized it himself and got off several shots at the enemy gunners, who vanished below their parapet. Burns had no idea whether he’d scored a hit, but a moment later a bullet smashed into his own parapet, sending a shower of splinters into his face. At the same moment, a small, redheaded intelligence officer staggered into the trench, unable to speak, his throat emitting strangling, whistling sounds. He’d been shot through the jugular by the same bullet that had just missed Burns. As Burns tried to close the inch-long split in the officer’s neck, the man’s face turned scarlet, then purple, and he died.

  Burns now tried to work his way around to the right to see where his brigade had got to. A bullet struck his gas respirator. That was enough. He made his way back to brigade signal headquarters and gave his report.

  Over in the Cavalier Subway, the commander of the Kootenay Battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel V.V. Harvey, was also totally confused by the scattered reports coming in. Clearly his men had been unable to take Hill 145. Even now, at the headquarters of the neighbouring Black Watch, Bill Breckenridge was listening to his people demanding to know what had happened. Harvey couldn’t tell them.

  He decided to send his newest subaltern, Alex Jack, forward to try to find out what was going on and to do his best to reorganize the battalion. Jack, a former company sergeantmajor, had been commissioned the week before and was assigned as a reserve officer at headquarters. Now he set off with a Lewis gunner and half a dozen middle-aged batmen carrying ammunition. As the heaviest fire came from the German salient on the left, they hugged the right flank. Harassed by sniper fire, they got too far over and found themselves in the 3rd Division sector. Just as they jumped into a captured trench, a sniper hit the Lewis gunner.

  Jack left him and, using the trench as cover, headed to the left where he eventually came upon remnants of his own battalion and some of Warden’s Warriors. All the officers of both units were casualties and so Jack, the youngest and newest of all, aged twenty-five, found himself in command of two battalions.

  But he knew what to do. He sorted out the men, placed three Lewis guns on the exposed left flank with the remaining ninety men of his own unit, then moved the men from the 102nd over to the right to link up with the Black Watch. That done he went forward to find out what was going on up front. He knew there must be scores of men pinned down in shell holes by snipers. One volunteer, Private Bob Hall from the Arrow Lakes district of British Columbia, came with him, and the two managed to crawl for six hundred yards to the far side of Vimy Ridge. There, looking down on the Douai Plain, they marvelled at the sight of peaceful farmers’ fields, unmarked by war.

  They were now in the main German trench system. Jack posted Hall at one end of the German communication trench and then began to explore the lateral trench, noting that the machine-gun posts on both sides were still manned. Somehow the two Canadians had got right into the enemy position without being observed. It was time to beat a retreat.

  A sniper perched in what was left of a tree spotted them. Both men tried to duck the bullets, but Hall was hit in the back. Jack, crawling on his stomach along the bottom of an empty trench, tried to pull the wounded man to shelter. Two bullets in quick succession chipped the chalk above his head. Hall was dead; Jack got back alive to report that the Kootenays were so badly shattered they could not move past the position held by Warden’s Warriors.

  3

  By early afternoon, Victor Odlum at 11th Brigade headquarters in the Tottenham Subway was haggard with worry. He had never felt so helpless. He had sent thirty scouts out to find out what was going on; only one had got back, and his report was confusing. But one thing was clear: Burns’s acc
ount had not been poppycock after all. The set-piece attack had disintegrated. If Hill 145 was to be taken that day, fresh troops would be needed. But where were they to come from? His brigade and the 12th were fully committed and badly cut up. The 10th, holding the line at its junction with the British corps, was tapped to attack the Pimple, once the rest of the ridge was in Canadian hands. There was only one source of fresh troops: the 85th Battalion, better known as the Nova Scotia Highlanders.

  At this point the tangled narrative of the 4th Division’s assault on Vimy Ridge takes on a chimerical quality. The Nova Scotia Highlanders were an ugly duckling battalion. They belonged to no brigade. They had never fought a battle. Two hundred were still in England, laid up with mumps. The others had only recently arrived in France, and on the channel crossing they had all been seasick. Most were big, strapping fellows, but their tasks were menial: building and filling dumps, digging deep dugouts and assembly trenches, carrying and stringing wire, lugging forward loads of ammunition, escorting and guarding prisoners of war. They were, in short, a work battalion, not a fighting unit. The others sneered at the Maritimers as “the Highlanders without kilts.” Now these hewers of wood and drawers of water were assigned to do what the other battalions had been unable to do: attack and seize the stubborn defences in front of Hill 145.