Authors: Pierre Berton
The advance to the Red Line was punctuated by small tragedies, blunders, triumphs, and the occasional surprise. As the 7th Battalion approached the shattered copse known as the Nine Elms (the Red objective), a British Columbia officer, Arthur Pollard, was astonished to see two rabbits hopping across the exploding battlefield and equally astonished to see two of his platoon taking pot shots at them instead of at the enemy. True to their training, they didn’t stop but banged away on the move. The rabbits got away.
George Alliston, a young bugler with the same battalion – the 7th – also followed the rules even though it cost him many a heartsick night. His closest friend and fellow bugler, Georgie Brown, who had lived next door in Glasgow before the two emigrated to the Canadian West, keeled over and fell into a mine crater. Alliston ran to the crater to pull his friend out, but before he could do so an officer pointed his revolver directly at him and then skyward. The meaning was clear: don’t stop for casualties. Alliston trudged forward, leaving his friend dying in the muck.
Resistance was crumbling, yet some of the German machine guns were still firing from the Red Line. Here the indomitable Bill Milne of the Canadian Scottish clinched his hold on the Victoria Cross with a second feat of daring. Vicious fire was holding up the battalion’s advance. It seemed to be coming from a haystack directly in front of him. What was a haystack doing in No Man’s Land, where every other object had been ground into the mud? Milne crawled forward and discovered, with no surprise, that the haystack was a cover for a concrete machine-gun emplacement. His throwing arm didn’t fail him. The first Mills bomb put the gun out of action and terrified the crew, who looked up to see Milne charging directly upon them. They surrendered in a body and the advance continued. The V.C. was posthumous. Milne was killed later that day.
Some hundreds of yards to the rear the reserve battalion-the Little Black Devils of Winnipeg-had a worm’s-eye view of the scene on the slopes just above them. Lieutenant Clifford Wells would never forget the spectacle: the dark, scarred remains of Nine Elms in the distance-the battalion’s objective – the curtain of bursting shells creeping slowly toward the trees (like a flock of dragons, Wells thought) and the ragged line of khaki figures following close behind. Suddenly the sky darkened and a blizzard raged briefly. It seemed to Wells, peering through the veil of snowflakes, that the men in the advance paid no more attention to the shells and bullets thinning their ranks than they did to the white flakes whirling around them.
At this point the entire battlefield from the Souchez Valley to the banks of the Scarpe was humming with life-a scene of absolute confusion to the unmilitary eye. The three waves of steadily advancing troops, guided by scouts wearing green arm bands, were limned against the white and black puffballs of smoke and earth thrown up by the barrage. Moving behind them and sometimes through them, often apparently at cross purposes, were other clusters of men: the moppers-up, with their white arm bands and their short grenade launchers; the carrying parties marching stolidly forward, wearing yellow arm bands and lugging mortars, picks, shovels, ammunition, water, and bombs. Threading through this maze of men came the runners, wearing red arm bands, their messages tucked in the right-hand tunic pocket with another red marker on the lapel to signal that the message was there. Above the fray, the occasional low-flying aircraft swooped by, sounding its klaxon, seeking the flag wavers who would report another objective had been achieved. And in the face of this constant forward motion came another line of soldiers, these in mud-stained grey, their faces dejected, their weapons and watches confiscated, traipsing through to the Canadian lines across a terrain that had, until a few moments before, been in their possession for more than two years.
The fight had gone out of the Germans. The dreadful barrage, climaxing their week of suffering, had crumbled their trenches, shattered their guns, wrecked what little morale was left, and reduced them to impotence. They seemed pathetically eager to surrender. Gordon Chisholm, a former Toronto bank teller, heading back to have a wound dressed, suddenly found himself faced with six of the enemy, who seemed to spring out of the ground. As Chisholm limped back to his lines he found the Germans meekly following him like sheep.
Cyril Jones, a subaltern with the Canadian Scottish temporarily separated from his mopping-up crew, suddenly saw twenty Germans emerge from a dugout and beat their way toward him. They surrounded Jones like a swarm of bees, crying “
Kamerad! Kamerad!
Mercy!” and began to pull off their wristwatches and other possible souvenirs, which they pressed on the bemused lieutenant. Jones began to howl with laughter at the spectacle. He pointed helplessly to the Canadian lines and they loped off obediently.
Those Germans who survived had remained in their dugouts, twenty, sometimes forty, feet below the ground. These could not be left alive to attack the advancing troops from the rear. As they passed over the dugouts, the Canadians tossed Mills bombs into the openings and moved on while men were mangled beneath their feet.
If one of the enemy showed the least sign of resistance, he was shot at once or dispatched with a grenade. But few wanted to fight, as Jim Church discovered when he reached the Red Line. Church was only seventeen, a bullet-headed, firm-jawed Slav from Saskatchewan. Just ahead, in a crater, he saw a group of some sixty Germans. This was what he’d been trained for. He reached into his sack of Mills bombs, pulled the pin on one, straightened his arm as he’d been taught to do, and was about to hurl it when an officer shouted, “No! Don’t throw it!” The Germans had raised a white flag and were pouring out of the crater, forming a tight circle around their commander who stood on a ration box in their midst, waving the flag and pleading to surrender.
Church protested. The Germans, all armed, outnumbered his small group. But even as the officer spoke they began to throw down their rifles. Church, however, had a problem: he was clutching an armed grenade. Once he released his grip it would explode in four seconds. He tossed it as far as he could; it exploded, and suddenly another crater came alive with surrendering Germans, many of them bleeding from the results of the explosion. They seemed relieved to be out of action. “Me good to go over there,” one of them told Church, pointing at the Canadian lines.
The prisoners were a problem. As the battalions couldn’t afford to waste men to guard them, they were sent back without escorts, often under the fire of their own guns, which were pouring shrapnel on the old Canadian lines. Others were used as stretcher-bearers and many more were given shovels and told to help their former enemies dig in.
Again, the intensity and brevity of the barrage had caught the Germans off guard. Many were still asleep when the attack took place. So swift was the Canadian advance that some surrendered trouserless. The Canadians were delighted to find that the officers’ dugouts, at least, were stacked with food. Cyril Jones, who had burst out laughing when the Germans surrendered, now found himself in sole command of his company; all the other officers had been killed or wounded. When the Red Line was reached, Jones proceeded to enjoy the privileges of command, establishing himself in a comfortable bed in an officer’s dugout lit by electricity and supplied with cases of fresh eggs, soda water, and wine.
3
The forward battalions of Currie’s division had reached the Red Line from the Black in twenty-eight minutes. Then the barrage lifted and moved two hundred yards beyond the Zwischen Stellung trench to pour a rain of hot steel on the Germans’ defence in depth. It was 7:13
A.M
. The leading waves had advanced a mile beyond the Canadian forward line, and for them the battle was over. They had two hours and twenty-two minutes to dig in, consolidate, mop up, and rearrange themselves to allow the 1st Brigade to take over and continue the second stage of the assault.
Over the roar of the guns came a faint but familiar sound-the skirl of the pipes. Looking back to their own lines, the kilted troops of the Canadian Scottish spotted a small group of officers and men stumbling forward toward them. In the lead was the stocky figure of their commanding officer, Cy Peck. The events of the previous night had not helped Peck’s illness. He was suffering terribly from stomach cramps, nausea, and diarrhoea, but it is doubtful if any of his men were aware of that. With Peck were his regimental sergeantmajor and two batmen, one of whom carried a jar of rum under each arm. At that sight, a ragged cheer went up and became a roar as Peck distributed the rum and set up his headquarters in the captured German trench.
From their vantage point high on the slopes of the ridge, the men of the 1st Division could survey the battlefield. On their right, the British 51st Highland Division was toiling up the slopes and into position. On their left they could see the blue patches on the shoulders of the men of the 2nd Division, also digging in, and beyond that point, through the smoke, two miles away, some of the 3rd Division troops who had also reached their objective. Above and to the left, almost on the crest, the remains of Thélus village could be seen, a haven for German machine gunners. Suddenly a Canadian barrage descended on the already shattered town, and what was left of it was blown to bits.
Just before 10
A.M
., the barrage that had been pounding the German defences lifted and began to move forward again. Now the 1st Brigade passed through to take their turn in the front lines, the men laughing, smoking, and calling out to the cheers of the others. And there, strolling along with the final wave, to the consternation of his C.O., was Lieutenant Leslie “Tubby” Tubman of the 2nd Battalion, an Eastern Ontario unit. Tubman was in full battle kit, but he had no business being on the field; he’d been given strict instructions to stay back in the transport lines. In army parlance he was “L.O.B.” – Left Out of Battle with other officers to form the nucleus of a restored battalion in case of severe casualties. Reproached for disobeying orders, Tubman blandly replied that he was merely on hand as an “adviser.” His sergeant was in full command. The eager Tubman survived the Vimy battle but not the war. Not long after, he was killed in action.
The brigade had to go six hundred yards to reach the next objective – a German strong point known as the Chain Trench because of its resemblance to a linked cable. This was to be the Blue reporting line. Once it was taken, the brigade would be given one hour and ten minutes to consolidate before moving on to the final objective.
The damaging fire originating at Thélus had been neutralized by the artillery barrage. Now as the men of the three fresh battalions-all from Ontario-toiled up toward the crest of the ridge, some began to be hit by their own guns: too many shells were falling short. There are certain grisly moments in battle that happen so quickly and so unexpectedly they cannot be absorbed at the moment of impact. All over the battlefield that morning men were experiencing such moments, scarcely comprehending, in the confusion and terror of combat, what they had just witnessed, numbly filing away the horror in the recesses of memory to be retrieved at a later time when it could never again be discarded. Such a moment came to Private Bill Green of New Hamburg as he struggled upwards with his battalion. Suddenly a dud shell whizzed past, barely missing him. It sliced off the head of the machine gunner beside him and took the leg off a lance corporal. The severed head flew through the air like a football, struck another man and nearly felled him. And the headless corpse, blood spouting from the severed arteries, actually took two steps forward before toppling into the muck.
It all took place in an instant, like a scene caught and frozen by a lightning flash. Green had no time to think about it; like everybody else, he had been trained to keep moving. But the incident was seared into his memory to return again and again over the next seven decades. Other scenes would blur and fade, but for Bill Green that brief, explosive incident would never lose its hideous clarity.
In less than an hour, the reserve brigade had reached the windswept crest of Vimy Ridge. Almost at that moment, the sun emerged briefly from the scudding clouds and bathed the countryside to the east in a warm glow. The effect was mystical. The sleet had ended. The smoke of the barrage was gone along with the fog of early morning. Now, spread out before their astonished eyes, the troops were offered a panorama that had been hidden from them for all those months. Here was mile upon mile of verdant countryside, virtually unscarred by war. In the woods just below, the trees were sprouting into leaf. Patches of green appeared in the farmers’ fields beyond. The enemy had fled the crest and could be seen below, grey-clad figures, moving eastward, limbering their guns and dragging them along.
But there was little time to stop and stare. The Blue objective lay half a mile away below the crest. Three quarters of a mile beyond that the Brown Line ran directly through Farbus Wood. The troops burst down the ridge, seized the Chain Trench, which was not wired, before 11:15 and signalled to the reporting aircraft that they’d reached the Blue Line. As they dug in, the barrage began to soften up the German lines ahead.
At this point, the division faced a problem. The British on the right of the Canadian Corps weren’t keeping up. Currie’s right flank, held by the Eastern Ontario battalion – the 2nd-was therefore exposed to German machine-gun fire. The British had encountered great rolls of wire that had not been destroyed by their own barrage or discovered by their forward patrols. Unlike Arthur Currie, who had insisted on checking the wire in front of his own sector and had immediately pulled his troops back so that it could be obliterated, their commander, “Uncle” Harper, hadn’t taken this precaution. The 51st suffered heavily because of Harper’s oversight and so did the troops from Eastern Ontario, who were forced to put Mills bombers on their flanks to hold back any German attempt to attack with enfilade fire.
In spite of this, the advance of the 1st Division continued with remarkably few casualties. The Germans were in no position to rally their troops for any counterattack. Without waiting for the British, the Canadian 1st Brigade left the Blue Line at 12:25 as the barrage crept eastward to shatter Farbus Wood. The eastern side of the ridge was steep-almost clifflike in spots – and thick with underbrush. Down the Canadians scrambled, wondering how the Germans could have allowed themselves to be pushed off such a promontory. By 1:30 they had seized the German battery positions in the wood. So hasty was the enemy retreat that in one officer’s dugout, lunch had been abandoned untasted on the table. The forward platoons of the 4th Battalion devoured it greedily.