Brave Battalion (29 page)

In the early morning hours, the order came to leave the tunnel for the forward trenches. Weather was bitter—“squally showers of hail and sleet which chilled the bone; through this gloom the light of dawn was faintly struggling in.” On the right, Tupper stood with his men while Twidale shivered over on the left as part of Captain James Scroggie's No. 4 Company. Lt. Charles Stanley Bevan's No. 1 Company was in the secondary trench and would come up behind on the right, while No. 2 Company under Lt. Morton Joseph Mason would follow on the left.

At 0500 hours, the great bombardment that had been raging suddenly shifted gears and the rolling barrage began with the sky to the rear flashing with flame and streaks of fire hissed overhead that threw “a weird gleam over the wet ground and the slimy sides and stagnant water of the crater depths.” Some men prayed out loud; others jostled each other good-naturedly and cracked jokes; many stared quietly ahead with unreadable faces. Weapons were checked and rechecked. Tupper and Scroggie each had a company piper at his side.
²⁹

Seconds before the whistles blew, Twidale had a waking vision. “In front of me there was a bed with white sheets on it and my sister was kneeling by this bed with a white night dress on, praying for me.” Suddenly Twidale shed his fear. No matter what happened he was ready. Then, “somebody yelled, ‘We're away!' and we went over the top.” Despite the eerie realization that everything before him precisely mirrored his pre-enlistment dream, Twidale never faltered. He strode toward his fate into No Man's Land.
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Fifteen thousand men formed the leading companies of the twenty-one battalions that charged through gaps opened in the Canadian wire and entered a maze of water-filled craters and destroyed trenches left over from past battles. Scattered across No Man's Land were pockets of rusting wire entanglements the men had to pick a way through. Mud sucked at their boots and, at times, they waded through mucky swamps of brown water thick as gumbo.

The German response was immediate—a heavy counter-barrage that sent shells shrieking over the heads of the Canadian Scottish but did little other damage because across the front their fire was mostly long. Well before Zwölfer-Stellung—the trench that marked 1
^st
Division's Black Line—the Can Scots came under fire from German machine guns hidden in a string of craters. Men started to fall, but the platoons had trained precisely for this kind of moment. While one section slipped sideways and started throwing out covering fire, the other sections charged the guns, killing the crews with bombs and bayonets. The Canadian Scottish losses were heavy, but the new platoon tactics prevented the advance from stalling despite the unrelenting fire coming at them from both their front and flanks. “It was evident that these weapons were scattered everywhere in an irregular pattern on the shell-pitted ground over which the Battalion had to go forward. Men began to drop singly, others fell in huddled groups.” The action became “a running fight, men rushing from shell-hole to shell-hole, the bodies of the fallen, indicating by their position the locations of the enemy's guns towards which this fighting was directed.” One by one the machine-gun nests were silenced. Then, about 30 yards short of the sunken Arras-Lens road that passed within a few yards of the Zwölfer-Stellung trench, a line of German infantry opened fire from a deep ditch in front of the road. The men of Nos. 3 and 4 Companies ran straight into this devastating fire, gained the ditch, and then cleared it after a fierce mêlée of bayonet fighting. Many men were killed, their bodies left sprawled in the ditch. Among them was Major Gordon Tupper.
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Private Twidale came out of the ditch and stepped out on the road just as a shell exploded in front of him. A large piece of shell casing spun toward him, sickeningly mirroring the dream, only to strike his rifle and bend it “almost double. Instead of being cut in two, I threw the rifle down and picked up another rifle” from a fallen comrade. In that moment a piece of shrapnel pierced his leg, cutting clean to the shin-bone. Twidale hobbled forward, but the rest of No. 4 Company quickly pulled far ahead.

To the left, No. 3 Company gained Zwölfer-Stellung with little further difficulty, but No. 4 was struck by machine-gun fire coming from a gap that had developed between the two companies. Breaking quickly into platoon formation to assault the gun from three sides, the men went forward only to be thrown back. Around the gun emplacement, the bodies of those killed lay in a fan-shaped configuration. The survivors dived into the cover of shell holes. No. 4 Company was pinned down. One of the men, twenty-four-year-old William Johnstone Milne, could see the gun position clearly. Slinging a bag of Mills bombs over one shoulder, Milne crawled under fire through the mud to within throwing range and chucked several bombs into the position. Milne managed to either kill or wound the gun crew and gain control of it. His action enabled the Canadian Scottish to secure Black Line and prepare to move on Red Line as scheduled.
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Private Twidale did not join the next phase of the attack. He hobbled instead toward the rear with six German prisoners. Once they were handed into the waiting cage, Twidale carried on to the battalion dressing station. He sat down outside, but when his turn came was unable to stand. Twidale's leg was broken, his combat experience destined to last just twenty minutes because the war would end before his injuries healed.
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Meanwhile the battle raged on. No. 4 Company again met trouble, this time as it closed on Zwischen-Stellung and was struck by fire from two entrenched machine guns. A rifle grenadier knocked one gun out, but the other was protected within a concrete bunker concealed behind a large haystack. Once again, Milne crawled to within a few yards of the position, jumped up, and threw several Mills bombs into the gun aperture. The gun crew was killed and other Germans holding the trench fled, presenting perfect targets to the Canadian Scottish, who cut many of them down with rifle and Lewis machine-gun fire. In the midst of this confusion, Milne was seen moving behind a small knoll that was suddenly struck by German artillery fire. His body was never found. On June 8, 1917, the young Scot, who had immigrated to Canada to take up farming near Moose Jaw, was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.
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When they paused at Red Line the Canadian Scottish “could see that the success which had been theirs had also come to the assaulting troops everywhere in sight. On the high ground to the left, the 2
^nd
Canadian Division men, easily distinguishable by the dark patches on the point of the shoulder, were busily digging in or moving about from place to place; similarly engaged down the slope to the right as far as … nine tall elms—the landmark which so clearly defined the junction of the Canadian Corps and the Third Army—was a long line of Highlanders and infantry wearing on the arm the bright red patches of the 1
^st
Canadian Division. From north to south, behind the entire length of this ragged line of forward troops, advanced groups of men … all … moving at a deliberate pace, maintaining excellent intervals just as on the manoeuvre area.”

At the head of one small group approaching Red Line trench were two Canadian Scottish pipers, Pipe Major James Groat and Piper Allan McNab, both “playing lustily.” Right behind the pipers was Lt.-Col. Peck and RSM James Kay. Peck's personal servant and Kay's batman were a few steps back, the latter carrying a large crock of rum under each arm—a sight that elicited a hearty cheer from the ranks.
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Peck's servant hovered close, fearful the battalion commander might collapse at any moment. As Peck looked along the trench his physical illness was matched by a sickness of the heart. He estimated that between 350 and 500 men had fallen and as many as seventeen officers had been either killed or wounded. Lt. Bevan was among the dead and Captain Scroggie had been wounded. That left only one company commander unscathed. Despite these losses, Peck judged “the whole action magnificent.” Officer casualties were later found to number twenty of the twenty-one who entered battle. This figure included Peck, ordered to hospital by the Medical Officer. Seven officers had been killed. As Major Hope came forward to assume command of the battalion, Peck started for the rear accompanied by two runners. A blinding snowstorm had descended on the battleground and Peck's party were lost for two hours before chancing upon an entrance to Bentata Tunnel.
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In less than ninety minutes the Canadian Scottish had lost almost as many men as the October 7-9 battle in the Somme had claimed, but this time fewer other ranks had died. Of the total 321 other rank casualties 99 perished, as opposed to 131 of 331 at the Somme.
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After seizing the Red Line, the 2
^nd
and 3
^rd
Brigade battalions became “spectators” for the rest of the April 9 battle. At 0940 the creeping barrage had pushed beyond the Red Line and 1
^st
Canadian Infantry Brigade passed through to carry 1
^st
Division's next objectives. Blue Line duly fell, as did Brown Line. The latter objective was indeed not protected by the trench that had been reported and so was taken without any resistance. From here, 1
^st
Brigade pushed onto the crest of Vimy Ridge and captured German artillery in Farbus Wood and Station Wood. “Between two and three o'clock the same afternoon, standing on the crest of the Ridge between Farbus Wood and Station Wood looking eastward, it was possible to realize fully the meaning of the victory of the morning.”

Major Hugh Urquhart, now serving as 1
^st
Brigade's Brigade Major, could see the next German trench line far beyond Vimy Ridge and realized it was there for the taking. But the “prize, however, could not be grasped. The troops had reached the final objectives as outlined in operation orders; the impetus of the attack was spent: the right flank was swung back over a mile; the guns could not be moved over the shell-torn ground. For the time being it was impossible to carry out any appreciable exploitation.”
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At corps headquarters, Byng had realized the opportunity and appealed for cavalry to take over the advance only to be told none was available. There was little time to worry about the potential opportunity lost, for on the left flank the fighting still raged as 4
^th
Division struggled to fight its way through to Vimy Ridge's highest point, Hill 145, and the knoll to its left nicknamed “the Pimple.” A storm of machine-gun fire had shredded the assault battalions and then chewed up the reserve forces until only the 85
^th
Nova Scotia Battalion, a work battalion virtually untrained for combat, remained. At 1745 hours this battalion attacked and, in an hour's fighting on a night rendered pitch black by the blinding snowstorm, cleared the Germans off Hill 145. But the Pimple remained in German hands for three more days until 10
^th
Infantry Brigade stormed through a heavy fall of sleet mixed with snow and cleared it on April 12 at a cost of half its men either killed or wounded.

Not until the Pimple fell was the Battle of Vimy Ridge concluded. In all, 40,000 Canadians had been directly involved in the fighting, and of these 3,598 died and 7,004 were wounded. One of the most impregnable sectors of the German front had been breached and the Canadians had taken 4,000 prisoners and overrun 54 guns, 104 trench-mortars, and 124 machine guns. Canadian Corps dug in 4,500 yards beyond its start line astride the Lens-Arras railway.
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Vimy Ridge was indisputably a great Allied victory, for it yielded the capture of more ground, prisoners, and guns than any previous British offensive. For Canada the battle was also a defining moment. For the first time all four Canadian Corps divisions had attacked as one and their determination and skill carried the day. It was Canada's proudest moment of the war and one that came to symbolize its emergence from colony to nation.