A Higher Form of Killing (16 page)

It was not much better for the German troops although occupying as they did more of the higher ground their trenches were somewhat drier. A commander of a cavalry troop, Rudolf Binding, thought

the battlefield . . . fearful. One is overcome by a peculiar sour, heavy and penetrating smell of corpses. Rising over a plank bridge you find that its middle is supported only by the body of a long-dead horse. Men that were killed last October lie half in swamp and half in the yellow-sprouting beet-fields. The legs of an Englishman, still encased in puttees, stick out into a trench, the corpse being built into the parapet; a soldier hangs his rifle on them. A little brook runs through the trench and everyone uses the water for drinking and washing; it is the only water they have. Nobody minds the pale Englishman who is rotting away a few steps farther up . . . At one point I saw twenty-two dead horses still harnessed, accompanied by a few dead drivers. Cattle and pigs lie about half-rotten; broken trees . . . crater upon crater in the roads and in the fields. Such is a six month’s old battlefield.

To the right of the Forty-fifth and Eighty-seventh French divisions and holding a forty-five-hundred-yard front were four battalions of the Second and Third Canadian Infantry Brigades that had recently replaced French general Ferry’s Eleventh Division. During the handover some Canadians had gotten lost in the cratered terrain. Sergeant Raymond MacIlree described to his parents in Victoria, British Columbia, how “a Frenchman found us, for it was a French Regt. we were relieving and he steered us over all kinds of obstacles, shell holes polka dot the whole place, some so big that a Frenchy drowned in one, also there were dykes and ditches galore.” A further eight Canadian battalions were in reserve behind the lines and some of the men were playing football in the sunshine on the afternoon of the attack.

The Canadian troops belonged to the First Canadian Division. Since Canada was a British dominion, the division was part of the British army. Its British commander, Lieutenant General Edwin Alderson, reported to General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, commander of the British Second Army. When Britain entered the war, many Canadians and especially the dominion’s numerous British immigrants had greeted the news with patriotic enthusiasm. The
Toronto Globe
related how people came out onto the streets, stood for a few moments in silence, then broke into a cheer. “It was not for the war, but for the King, Britain, and—please God—victory . . . Heads were bowed and the crowd began to sing ‘God Save the King.’” In towns and cities including Vancouver and Regina mobs attacked property thought to belong to Germans. In Berlin, Ontario, a metal statue of the first kaiser was thrown in a lake, then fished out and melted down.

As soon as recruiting offices opened, men converged on them in such overwhelming numbers it was clear there was no need yet for conscription. At one office in Toronto, guards with fixed bayonets had to restrain eager volunteers. By early September 1914 nearly thirty-three thousand men were in training at a specially constructed camp in Quebec and a month later the first Canadian troops were disembarking in England. Churchill, never concerned about straying outside his naval brief, sent them a rousing cable:
CANADA SENDS HER AID AT A TIMELY MOMENT. THE CONFLICT MOVES FORWARD AND FIERCER STRUGGLES LIE BEFORE US THAN ANY WHICH HAVE YET BEEN FOUGHT
. The
London Times
remarked that “nothing like the Canadian contingent has been landed in this country since the time of William the Conqueror.”

In February 1915, after rigorous training on Salisbury Plain, the Canadian Division embarked in stormy weather for Saint-Nazaire at the mouth of the Loire where they boarded trains for the five-hundred-mile journey to the front in Flanders. Once arrived they accustomed themselves to their muddy, dangerous environment, suffering the constant itching and scratching caused by lice. One soldier recalled it as “enough to make a saint swear . . . We did not notice the lice so much when standing, perished with cold on look-out. But when we got in our tiny dug-outs, and our bodies began to get warm, then out would come the lice from their hiding places in our clothing, forming up in columns of fours, [they] would start route marching over our flesh . . . There have been times when utterly worn out, both mentally and physically, yet unable to sleep because of the lice, I have known men to actually cry.” Meals were of bully beef so solid that the soldiers sometimes used the unopened tins as bricks to line their trenches. The Canadians also quickly developed respect for the German snipers who, an officer commented, “are the very deuce. They pick off our men whenever they get a chance.”

The brigade commanders of the Canadian troops settling into their new positions at Ypres were tall, heavyset, thirty-nine-year-old Brigadier General Arthur Currie, whose prewar career had included teaching, selling insurance, and speculating on property on Vancouver Island, in charge of the Second Brigade; and forty-three-year-old Brigadier General Richard Turner, a Quebec wholesale merchant who had won Britain’s highest military decoration, the Victoria Cross, during the Boer War, in charge of the Third Brigade. Many of their soldiers were of Scottish stock or recent emigrants from Scotland. Turner’s Third Brigade included the Canadian Scottish, Royal Highlander, and Forty-eighth Highlanders of Canada regiments who fought in kilts. Other Canadians were in the khaki uniforms adopted by their British counterparts in the Boer War when in their red coats they proved all too easy for Boers to pick out and pick off.

Since relieving the French, the Canadians had worked under cover of darkness, when the risk of being sniped was less, to improve the trenches the French had bequeathed them. To their dismay, they found that these trenches were shallow, badly connected, and inadequately protected by barbed wire. To give proper cover, entrenchments needed to run in long, continuous lines that zigzagged to prevent an infiltrating enemy firing down the length of them. They also had to be protected by high bulletproof parapets to the front and further parapets behind to provide some shelter from shell bursts. Instead Sergeant MacIlree found his position had only “a mere breastwork, bullet proof for about two feet up, no cover behind.” The Canadians also discovered, as another sergeant complained, that “the French have used the trenches as latrines.” Even worse, bits of body protruded through the earthworks like the hand dangling through a parapet that some men “used to shake hands with.”

To the Canadians’ right the British Twenty-seventh and Twenty-eighth Divisions held the rest of the British army’s ten-mile portion of the Salient’s front line, including its easternmost point. Major Cuthbert Lawson described in a letter to a friend how the British were situated: “The position round Ypres has always been like a horseshoe—Ypres is in the centre of the heels and we are right in the toe.”

For all these Allied troops, April 22 had passed much as usual except for exceptionally beautiful weather. A Canadian officer recalled how “we spent the time basking in the sun and writing letters” before enjoying “a glorious tea of Scotch shortbread and chocolate biscuits.” To another officer it seemed “the very essence of spring . . . when the spring feeling suddenly gets into the blood, when one throws work to the winds and takes to the woods in search of the first violets.” For most of the day German artillery had continued pounding Ypres with its masterpieces of Gothic architecture—the Guild Hall of the Cloth Merchants and Saint Martin’s Cathedral—so that, as a soldier noted, “a dark red pall of dust and smoke” hung over it. Many of its once seventeen-thousand strong population were streaming out of the city, “in scattered groups . . . in Sunday black or rags; old men sweating between the shafts of handcarts piled high with household treasures; deep-chested dogs harnessed underneath and straining at the axle with lolling tongue; aged women on wagons stacked with bedding or in wheel-barrows trundled by the family in turn, bewildered children and anxious mothers, all hastening in stricken flight before the breaking storm.”

Allied troops observed little untoward except that British aerial reconnaissance reported an unusual amount of activity to the rear of the enemy lines, including the forming up of long lines of troops. However, at four
P.M.
, as the revised time set by the German command for the gas attack approached, the German artillery shortened its range and began bombarding not Ypres but the French and Canadian lines. Then shortly before five
P.M.
their guns fell silent.

Soon afterward, French sentries saw the three red rockets shoot across the sky followed by puffs of white smoke rising from the German trenches. The smoke was the chlorine that began to condense as it absorbed moisture from the atmosphere. As its volume increased it changed color; the pale wisps were soon a grubby-looking yellow-green cloud rolling across no man’s land toward the French trenches. Haber’s “Stinkpioneere” had taken only five minutes to release the 150 tons of compressed chlorine gas billowing forward along a front nearly four miles wide to engulf the soldiers of the Forty-fifth “Algerian” Division. A German airman observing the advancing gas from above was struck by “how extraordinary it looked when the clouds came up to the enemy trenches, then rose, and after as it were peering curiously for a moment over the edge of the trenches, sank down into them like some living thing.”

The war diary of the First Battalion of the African Light Infantry relates how “the north wind that blew that cloud towards our lines . . . brought on our companies asphyxiating vapours of chlorine and nitrous products.” A French medical officer saw troops suddenly scrambling from the trenches on all sides. Wondering what had caused “this panic” he looked around to find “the sky totally obscured by a yellow-green cloud.” Moments later the vapor enveloped him so that he felt he was peering “through green glasses.” At once he experienced effects on his respiratory system: “throat burning, chest pains, choking and spitting of blood, dizziness. We believed we were all lost.” An officer beside him turned purple and no longer had the strength to walk.

Canadian troops stationed to the right saw “a heavy greenish cloud hanging over the French lines” and “the French running back.” However, at five ten
P.M.
German field guns, ordered to hold fire while the gas had been released for fear that shells might disperse the chlorine before it could form a cloud, opened up once more. As the barrage descended again, for the moment the Canadians “could find out nothing more.” By now German infantry in their uniforms of
feld grau
(field gray) were advancing cautiously in the wake of the cloud, many wearing crude face masks of dampened cotton and gauze. Skeptical whether the gas would indeed immediately knock out the enemy as their officers had promised, many had ignored the order not to load their rifles, only to fix bayonets. As cautiously they approached the shallow trenches of the Forty-fifth Division; some defenders, coughing and choking though they were, managed for a short while to return fire before being quickly overrun or fleeing. On entering the French trenches the German troops found them crammed with the dead and the dying, some of the latter vomiting green phlegm. The official German account of the attack records how “even before [the gas] reached them the enemy could be seen to waver.”

Capitaine Tremsal of the African Light Infantry had been resting in a cellar when the sounds of heavy machine gun fire brought him rushing toward his front line. Running the opposite way was one of his men shouting that he and his fellows had been poisoned. Looking beyond the soldier, the captain saw “an enormous cloud several meters high, yellow in the centre and green on the edge masking and discolouring the landscape.” As more of his men staggered choking toward him from the now gas-enshrouded trenches he tried to rally them, shouting, “The Joyeux have never lost a trench!” However, within moments “the asphyxiating cloud” overwhelmed both him and them. He experienced “a horrible sensation of burning” in his throat as his lungs “refused to receive that poisoned air” while blood-tinged mucous ran from his nose and mouth. Some men of the Forty-fifth rushed toward the Eighty-seventh Territorials on their left to collapse in their trenches. Soon the Eighty-seventh too were fleeing, clogging the roads as they made for the bridges over the Yser Canal hoping to cross to the west bank, or heading for the Canadian lines. A Canadian Royal Highlander watched French troops “pouring into our trench, coughing, bleeding and dying all over the place.”

At around six
P.M.
French gunners of the Eighty-seventh Division east of the canal spotted the gas cloud and the advancing Germans. Spared the worst effects of the gas by a shift in the wind, they trained their sixteen modern seventy-five-millimeter “quick-firers” and twenty-nine older ninety-millimeter guns, brought out of “retirement” for the war, on the enemy, claiming heavy casualties. However, they quickly exhausted their limited ammunition. Soon, as an artillery officer related, “we distinctly heard the cries of their officers, ‘Vorwaerts!’ ‘Vorwaerts!’ and the rolling artillery barrage which preceded them intensified more and more. Finally groups of the enemy surged to the right and to the left. We had to extricate the guns as quickly as possible or abandon them. A great many of the gunners were unable to escape in time and were taken prisoner.” By seven
P.M.
most of the forty-five guns were also in enemy hands.

The first that Colonel Jean Mordacq, commander of the Forty-fifth Division’s Ninetieth Brigade, knew of the attack was when, some twenty minutes after the arrival of the gas cloud, Major Villevaleix of the First Tirailleurs telephoned him and “in a gasping voice, punctuated, barely distinct . . . announced to me that he was being violently attacked, that immense columns of yellow smoke issuing from the German trenches were now extending across his entire front,” that the Tirailleurs were starting to evacuate their trenches and beating a retreat—“many falling asphyxiated.” Mordacq’s first reaction was to ask himself whether the major “had not lost his head a little or suffered one of those shocks to the brain I’d seen so often since the start of the campaign . . . In any case a gas attack was far from my thoughts, having never entertained the possibility or heard it being discussed since my arrival in Belgium.” However, a subsequent call from a hoarse-voiced other officer, of the First Tirailleurs, told a similar story and reported that “he was being forced to abandon his command position” since he could not breathe and the situation was untenable. Whole groups of Tirailleurs were collapsing all around him due to the gas and German shelling. Moments later Villevaleix rang again: “Everyone around me is falling, I am leaving my position.” Then the line went dead.