Authors: Pierre Berton
4
When the saps were blown, new depressions appeared in No Man’s Land, just beyond the forward line, to join the ragged succession of gigantic craters that ran the whole length of the Canadian sector. These water-filled hollows, some deep enough to swallow a four-storey house, seemed to have been carved out by meteorites or volcanic action. Many were legacies of the British, who had exploded earlier saps to nudge their front line a few yards closer to the Germans.
For the soldiers of both sides who clung to the opposite lips of the craters, sentry duty was particularly trying. One never knew what was going on below the ground. Was it the enemy boring away beneath your feet or your own people? It was silent work, squatting on the crater’s edge, unable to cough or smoke. A sneeze could give you away. Wet, cold, and cramped after their tour, the sentries must then work their way cautiously back, crater by crater, to the comparative safety of their own front lines.
The crater line constantly changed shape as new cavities were formed and older ones refashioned. Each crater had a name and even a personality. The older ones had been named by the French and the British (Duffield, Durand, Crassiers); the new ones bore Canadian names. Earlier that season, George Hambley had watched the Montreal Crater blown: “The whole earth shook and heaved and erupted, blowing up at least 50 yards of trenches.” Unfortunately the sappers blew up more than they intended, burying a number of Canadians. Hambley, who helped dig some of them out, almost lost his own life in the shower of earth and stones thrown up by the explosion. A hand-to-hand fight followed for possession of the crater. When the Royal Highlanders of Montreal seized it and drove off the Germans, the crater was named in their honour.
The tunnelling companies had tried to make the craters easier to defend by consolidating and reshaping the old ones. The resulting explosions were Brobdingnagian. They had used eleven thousand pounds of the high explosive ammonal to create the Longfellow Crater out of four earlier depressions on the 3rd Division front. It was well named, being two hundred feet long and twenty feet deep.
The neighbouring Patricia Crater was named for the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, the unit that had seized and held it after it was blasted out of the mud. Two parties of the battalion, each consisting of thirty men, dashed through lanes previously cut in the wire, ran across several smaller shell holes spanned by duckboards, and seized the lip of the new crater. The first man to reach it, Private Walter Scott, was actually under arrest for drinking too much rum. But all was forgiven when the seventeen-year-old Scott returned with three blood-spattered German helmets. A few days later, 1st Army headquarters honoured the unit by giving its name to the crater.
Battalion commanders had mixed feelings about the craters. They could be an impediment to the assault; they could harbour German machine gunners and snipers; and wounded men could (and would) drown in the water that collected in their depths. On the other hand, the craters could provide shelter for the advancing troops, who zigzagged forward from one depression to the next, and they could even harbour elements of the assaulting force before Zero Hour and – if a safe entry could be found – signal crews and telephone lines as well.
The ingenious Captain Duncan Macintyre, who had been promoted to Brigade Major of the 4th Brigade, discovered such a safe entry by simple deduction. As he pored over a series of aerial photographs, his trained eye prompted an inspired hunch. Directly in front of the Zivy Subway he noticed the presence of the Phillips Crater, the product of a French mine explosion months before. It occurred to Macintyre that the French couldn’t have blown that mine under the German lines unless they’d first dug a sap out from their front line in which to carry and place the explosive. The end would have been blown up when the ammonal was touched off, but the rest should still be intact.
Macintyre got the old records from the French, located the sap, and set his men to digging down to find it. Sure enough, the little tunnel was there, three feet wide, three feet high, still timbered. It ran for two hundred feet out into No Man’s Land, its forward end still blocked by the debris of the explosion.
Working in absolute silence (for no one knew whether the Germans had a listening post above it), the tunnellers grubbed their way through the rubble, shaving off the chalk with their bayonets, scooping it up silently with their hands, and dragging it away in gunny sacks until, with a rattle of falling earth and timber, they saw a tell-tale glimmer of light at the tunnel’s end. That night they returned to find that they had indeed broken through to the Phillips Crater, on whose far lip a German sentry was posted. This meant that the signals party, which followed the attacking troops, unrolling spools of telephone wire, could reach the crater from the reserve lines without being exposed to enemy fire.
Macintyre was typical of the young breed of civilian officers who were breaking new ground at Vimy. He came from pioneer Canadian stock. His grandfather was a Hudson’s Bay trader and his uncle, the famous Walter Moberly,
*
had helped survey the original Pacific railway line through the Rockies. Resourceful and independent-minded, Macintyre was unfettered by the barrack-room mentality. He had been on his own since the age of seventeen on survey gangs in the Quebec bush and on the rail line north of Lake Superior. As a storekeeper in Moose Jaw and later a real estate salesman,
*
he’d watched the West develop from empty prairie to boom country. He’d had little military experience when he joined the army, but as Brigade Major he acted, in effect, as the general manager of a military corporation that employed several thousand men.
He set to work to wire the new tunnel, making sure that a heavy cable line should run all the way from brigade headquarters in the Zivy Cave to the new Phillips gallery, two hundred feet beyond the forward line. Here switchboards could be set up and surface lines run forward to follow right behind the attacking units on the day of the battle. Macintyre had hundreds of feet of cable and several telephones ready for the moment when the brigade punched through the German front defences. In that way, he hoped to avoid the snarl of surface wire that had frustrated communications in earlier battles.
Macintyre had written a booklet on communications with the help of an old school friend, Captain Talbot Papineau of the PPCLI, a grandson of the leader of the 1837 rebellion in Lower Canada. The Corps used the booklet, but its keenest student was Macintyre’s own communications officer, Ken McKinnon, a young subaltern from Nova Scotia.
McKinnon was obsessed by the need to get back word from the front, both to brigade headquarters and to the artillery. In the confusion of battle this would not be easy. Because no single system could be considered foolproof, McKinnon came up with no fewer than
seven
ways to get word back: by runner, by semaphore, by pigeon, by aircraft signals, by telephone, by wireless, and by Morse buzzer. It was, Macintyre always insisted, a record in ingenuity, and it would be no more than enough. On the day of the battle, when the barrage deafened the ears, drowned out all speech, and inhibited communication, these seven options could help make the difference between success and failure. Useful though it would prove, Macintyre’s plan held one hazard neither he nor anyone else foresaw: when the signalmen emerged from their haven far out in No Man’s Land, the advancing Canadians might mistake them for the enemy.
*
See The National Dream, pp
. 156-64.
*
See The Promised Land, p
. 323.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Things Worth Remembering
1
In one of his handwritten memos to himself entitled “Things Worth Remembering” the methodical Arthur Currie had included as Item 3: “Thorough preparations must lead to success. Neglect nothing” and as Item 19: “Training, Discipline, Preparation and Determination to conquer is everything.”
He could not accept the excuse given at the Somme, where entire brigades had advanced blindly in neat waves to vague spots on the map with no clear idea of the tactics or strategy of battle: the men, it was said, were not sufficiently trained for anything more sophisticated. To this alibi Currie had a blunt response: “Take time to train them.”
As a result, the thoroughness and scope of the training that took place on the broad slopes in the back areas of Vimy that March were entirely new to the Western Front and, indeed, the British Army. Troops had rehearsed battles before, using tapes to represent enemy trenches, but never with such detailed, split-second timing.
Miles of white and coloured tapes and thousands of flags were used to mark out full-scale replicas of the German trench system. Suspected mine positions, buildings, topographical features were all pinpointed, thanks to the information received from the trench raiders and from the photographs taken by the Royal Flying Corps. Enemy forward, support, reserve and communication trenches were outlined with tape. Every stronghold, every pillbox, every redoubt, every barbed-wire entanglement known to the Canadians was marked and labelled. Big signboards named the German trenches; coloured pennants outlined the enemy positions – red for trenches, blue for roads, black for dugouts, yellow for machine guns.
By the end of March entire divisions were going through manoeuvres. The advance behind the creeping barrage had to be choreographed to the split second; men’s lives depended on it. Officers on horseback carried flags to represent the advancing screen of bursting shrapnel. Behind them the troops walked slowly-not in line but in groups (“lumps,” to use Gregory Clark’s descriptive phrase) – carrying their rifles at the high port, bayonets fixed, ready to shoot or lunge when the red tapes were reached. Over and over again they practised the “Vimy glide,” walking at the rate of one hundred yards every three minutes, while the instructors checked their watches, halting the troops to allow the barrage to lift, then ordering the advance again. Beside them other officers with megaphones pointed out strong points and suggested methods of dealing with them.
Perfect timing was essential. If the troops moved too quickly they would be killed by their own artillery. If they moved too slowly they wouldn’t be able to pounce on the German dugouts before the enemy recovered. As Julian Byng put it, “Chaps, you shall go over exactly like a railroad train, on the exact time, or you shall be annihilated.”
Officers were under orders to grill their men to be sure they knew exactly what to do and where they were at every stage of the advance. Duncan Macintyre, during his brigade’s turn at the tapes, picked one man at random during the practice advance and asked him where he was supposed to be. “On the Red Line, sir,” came the reply, indicating the second objective of the division.
“Right,” said Macintyre. “And what are you going to do?”
“Stay right here and hang on like hell.”
The troops grew weary of the repetition. Harold Barker, the RCR scout who had joined the army from homesickness, pronounced himself heartily fed up with it; he was to change his mind on the day of the battle. A.E. Wright, a private with the 18th Battalion from Western Ontario, asked himself, “What are we doing?” and agreed with his friends that they were just playing games. Harry Wilford and his fellow soldiers in the 28th Battalion, all from the Canadian North West, treated the whole thing as a joke. Leslie Hudd found his boots wearing thin because his unit was an hour’s march from the training area. The constant rehearsals added to the drudgery. Although Currie had insisted that troops in training be relieved of heavy fatigues and given as much rest as possible, there were still sandbags to be filled, dugouts to be propped up, and parapets to be repaired.
Nonetheless, as the training progressed, the men began to gain a sense of confidence. “We are going to give them a tremendous licking right here,” one stretcher-bearer wrote on March 29. “[I] am absolutely sure of it; every tiniest detail is perfect … confidence is absolutely the limit – everyone is laughing and cheering like a bunch of kids.” His enthusiasm is striking, for the weather that day was dreadful. In the training areas, only ground sheets rigged up as makeshift tents sheltered the infantry from a howling wind.
One reason for their high morale was Currie’s insistence on a return to the pre-war tactics of fire and movement at the platoon level. The basic technique is easily described: while part of the platoon keeps the enemy occupied with heavy fire, the others sneak around his flank and rear to bomb him into submission. In the stationary war of 1914, these tactics had been discarded or forgotten, but Currie saw how useful they could be in dealing with isolated machine-gun nests or other pockets of resistance that might hold out during the advance. An old maxim was dusted off: reinforce success, not failure. If a brigade or a division was held up during the attack, the units on its flanks would not stop, as they had been ordered to do at the Somme. Instead they would defend their own flanks with machine guns but continue to push on, encircle and mow down the resistance.
For the first time, junior officers, NCOs, and ordinary soldiers would all be given specific responsibilities. On Currie’s advice each platoon was reorganized into a self-contained fighting unit made up of a lieutenant, three sergeants, fifteen riflemen, eleven bombers, eleven rifle grenadiers, six Lewis machine gunners, two scouts, and a stretcher-bearer, all of whom could be interchangeable in the event of casualties. By the end of March, every platoon and every section had developed into a tightly knit group of cronies who knew each other well and knew exactly what their job was to be in the battle that followed.
There was more to this than a mere increase in efficiency, and no doubt Currie sensed it. For he had stumbled, perhaps unwittingly, on a principle that was only partially understood even in the wars that followed: the reason why men fight-why, in the face of all human logic, they continued, in that war as in other wars, to stumble forward into the whirlwind. They did not do it for patriotism or love of country. They did not do it for mothers, fathers, sweethearts, or wives. They did not do it for the colonel, the lieutenant, the sergeant, or even the corporal. They did it for their closest friends-the half-dozen private soldiers with whom they slept, ate, laughed, worked, and caroused, the men in their own section – grenade throwers or riflemen or Lewis gunners-whom they could not and would not let down because in moments of desperation and terror their virtual existence was woven together as tightly as whipcord.