A Higher Form of Killing (17 page)

No longer doubting some catastrophe had happened, Mordacq hurried outside, mounted his horse, and made for the Yser Canal, which he could no longer see because of drifts of yellow smoke. Approaching the village of Boesinghe on the canal’s west bank, his nose and throat began to tingle violently, his ears buzzed, and his breathing was becoming labored. An “unbearable stench of chlorine” hung over everything. With his horse refusing to go on, Mordacq dismounted and walked into Boesinghe to a sight “worse than lamentable, it was tragic. Men who had fled their positions were everywhere: territorials, ‘Joyeux,’ zouaves, artillerymen without their guns, haggard, greatcoats thrown away or hanging open . . . running hither and thither like madmen, crying loudly for water, spitting blood, some even rolling on the ground in a desperate struggle to breathe.” One “Joyeux” called out to Mordacq, “Those [bastards] have poisoned us.” Meanwhile, “a mass of crazed unfortunates” crowded the canal banks hoping water would relieve “their horrible sufferings.” Mordacq—one of several to liken the sights of that day to scenes from Dante’s
Inferno
—decided there was no point trying to prevent those who could still walk from fleeing since they were “no longer soldiers . . . but poor beings who had suddenly turned mad.”

By six forty-five
P.M.
—less than two hours after the start of the gas attack—German advance troops were approaching the east bank of the Yser Canal and would soon establish a bridgehead over it at Het Sas, north of Boesinghe. So far, the gas had done its work. Haber had chosen to release a mixture of one thousand parts chlorine to one million parts air—a level that burned the throat, distended the chest, and destroyed the lining of the lungs which, engorged with liquid, swelled to twice their normal size. An Allied soldier described how the victim drowned in his own body fluids: “It produces a flooding in the lungs . . . the coughing-up of a greenish froth off the stomach and lungs, ending finally in insensibility and death. The colour of the skin turns a greenish-black and yellow, the tongue protrudes and the eyes assume a glassy stare.”

Another soldier saw several hundred men in an orchard “wriggling and writhing . . . their faces black . . . tearing at their throats” watched by a medical officer who lamented, “Look at the poor bastards and we can’t do anything for them.” Lieutenant Colonel Edward Morrison, a Canadian officer who had been a journalist in Ottawa before the war, described demoralized French troops “absolutely in rout” and “ambulances loaded with unwounded men, ammunition wagons, transport vehicles crowded with infantry . . . galloping across country through hedges, ditches, and barbed wire . . . After this rabble came men on foot, without arms [weapons], singly and in groups, alternately running and walking, and only intent on getting away” and men “tearing madly through the crush of fugitives with staring eyes and their faces flecked with blood and froth. Frequently these men would fall down under the feet of the mob, and roll about like mad dogs in their death agonies.” Another Canadian officer commanding a battery one thousand yards south of Saint-Julien, a village northeast of Ypres, saw Algerians “running back as if the devil was after them, their eyeballs showing white, and coughing their lungs out—they literally were coughing their lungs out: glue was coming out of their mouths. It was . . . very disturbing, very distressing.”

In the initial chaos and with many field telephone lines—the principal means of communication—severed by shell fire, Allied commanders found it hard to gauge what had happened, beyond that the Germans appeared to have used some type of poison gas and that French troops had fled their position along the northern edge of the Ypres Salient. In fact, the French flight had created a breach to the left of the Canadians of four to five miles between the Poelcapelle to Ypres road and Steenstraat on the Yser Canal. No organized French units remained east of the canal. Therefore, the Canadian front line, despite still holding firm, was in imminent and grave danger of being outflanked. Until reserves could be called up, only five hundred Canadian troops in Saint-Julien, a Canadian battery of four eighteen-pounder field guns protecting the approach to the village, a British battery in Kitcheners Wood west of Saint-Julien, and some scattered French troops stood in the way of the German advance.

The most imminent danger was to the Canadian Royal Highlanders in the trenches immediately adjoining the abandoned French lines. Major D. Rykert McCuaig at once pulled men out of the front line to establish a protective flank while Major Edward Norsworthy, together with two platoons and some French troops he had gathered up, for a while succeeded in holding up the German infantry as they tried to cross the Ypres-Poelcapelle road to outflank the Canadian front line. Norsworthy’s entire force was either captured or, like him, killed.

Advancing German troops attempted to capture the guns of the Canadian battery blocking their path to Saint-Julien but machine gunner Lance Corporal Frederick Fisher of the Royal Highlanders, who had come out from Saint-Julien with his crew, held them off, winning time for the guns to be loaded on their limbers and dragged off to safety. Like Norsworthy and his men, Fisher and his team paid with their lives. Fisher was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross—the first to a Canadian soldier in the war. Meanwhile, the two Canadian frontline brigades were doing what they could to plug the gaps the French had left in the trenches adjoining theirs while Canadian reserves were rushed up. As night fell, the German troops had met enough resistance to convince them to halt for the night and dig in.

At eight o’clock that evening, a French liaison officer told Lieutenant General Edwin Alderson, commander of the First Canadian Division, that the French Forty-fifth Division was about to counterattack toward Pilckem and asked for help in clearing the Germans from Kitcheners Wood. Unaware that as a fighting force the Forty-fifth no longer really existed and had anyway lost most of its artillery, Alderson agreed. At eleven forty-eight
P.M.
the order to advance was issued (by whisper rather than by whistle to avoid alerting the enemy) and fifteen hundred soldiers from two battalions (the kilted Sixteenth Canadian Scottish and the Tenth Calgary-Winnipeg) went forward, bayonets fixed, toward the south side of the woods, five hundred yards away. In the bright moonshine a subaltern reflected “what a picture the flashing bayonets made.”

When they were still two hundred yards from the wood, the leading men found their way obstructed by a high hedge of twigs, branches, and barbed wire. As they forced their way through, the noise alerted the German troops ahead of them in the woods. A German flare lit the sky and the Canadians dropped to the ground. Then urged on by a company commander they stood and charged forward to be met by small-arms fire so intense it sounded “like hailstones on a zinc roof.” Many fell but those who could crossed a shallow trench the German defenders had dug to engage in what a survivor called “dreadful hand-to-hand conflict.” “We fought in clumps and batches, and the living struggled over the bodies of the dead and dying . . . All who resisted were bayoneted; those who yielded were sent to the rear.”

As the Canadian troops pushed deeper into the trees, German machine gunners fired at them from the protection of banks of sandbags. Nevertheless, by two
A.M.
the Canadians had flushed the Germans from most of Kitcheners Wood, driving one thousand yards north into enemy lines. However, in doing so they exposed themselves to fire from all sides. After attempts to reinforce them failed, they were ordered to pull back to the wood’s southern edge. Of the original Canadian force, less than one third was still standing.

That same morning of April 23—Saint George’s Day—commander in chief of the British forces, Sir John French, visited General Ferdinand Foch at his headquarters in the hilltop town of Cassel twenty miles west of Ypres. Commander of the northern wing  of the French armies, Foch was also responsible to the French commander in chief, Marshal Joseph Joffre, for liaising with the British and Belgian forces. Sir John French intended to inform Foch that the defense of the current positions within the Salient was unsustainable and that he was going to pull back his troops. Foch, however, told French that he had called up fresh divisions. Once they were in position, his troops would counterattack and regain their lost ground. He asked for British support. Persuaded by Foch’s passion, French agreed to maintain his present line within the Salient and even to cooperate in a counterattack later that day. Returning to his headquarters at Hazebrouck, he duly ordered troops he had already placed on standby to move up to the front.

The counterattack was to begin at three
P.M.
and German positions on Mauser Ridge, directly north of Ypres, were the initial target. However, congestion on the roads delayed the arrival of British reserve troops so that the assault did not start until an hour and a half later. Even so there had been little time to reconnoiter. Worse still, because of poor communications the British and Canadian batteries ordered to launch a preliminary bombardment of the ridge were not informed that the attack had been postponed. They therefore wasted ammunition by firing their guns too early. When eight British and two Canadian battalions finally did advance on the ridge, first German artillery, then rifle and machine gun fire cut them down. The only significant assistance from the French troops promised by Foch came from a few hundred men of the Forty-fifth on the east bank of the Yser Canal, and even this was only brief as they soon fell back. By seven p.m. the counterattack was over with the loss of more than half the British and Canadian troops and the majority of their officers. The British Official History records: “No ground was gained that could not have been secured . . . by a simple advance after dark, to which the openness of the country lent itself.”

As darkness fell on April 23, the Allies’ consolation was that most of the German troops had remained in the positions they had dug the previous night and shown no sign of launching an all-out infantry assault. The only significant German push was in the north of the Salient where troops were extending their bridgehead over the Yser Canal at Het Sas and advancing toward the village of Lizerne, on the canal’s west bank.

The German behavior puzzled the Allies. However, just as confused intelligence had hindered their decision taking, so it had clouded the judgment of the German high command. Their troops had met greater resistance than anticipated and suffered higher casualties. Therefore, German commanders were convinced they had insufficient reserves to advance further at present. The result was orders to one division (the Fifty-second Reserve) “not to go beyond the southern slope of Pilckem Ridge” and lukewarm instructions to another (the Fifty-first) to take Saint-Julien “if possible.” An official German war diary attributed the German failure to capitalize on their advantage to low morale, declaring that “the infantry . . . had lost its daring and indifference to heavy losses.” Whatever the case, the result was that instead of pushing on, the Germans concentrated on bringing up field guns and trench mortars to their new front line while waiting for supplies. They did, however, have more than enough stocks of their new weapon—chlorine gas—and of containers from which to release it.

*
The writer H. H. Munro, better known as “Saki,” was shot dead by a German sniper in France in November 1916 while as a lance sergeant sheltering with his men in a shell crater. His last words reputedly were “Put that bloody cigarette out.”

CHAPTER TEN

“This Filthy Loathsome Pestilence”

On the night of April 23–24 German troops hauled further cylinders into place so gas could be released on the still unbroken Canadian lines facing them to the east. This time the attack was not so unexpected. Lieutenant Colonel Louis Lipsett, commander of the Eighth Battalion of the First Canadian Division, had received reports of German activity “in the ditch in front of his trench.” Suspecting this meant an assault was imminent he ordered shelling of the positions where the Germans seemed to be massing, though this apparently did not destroy or damage the gas canisters. Lipsett also devised a special SOS signal to be used in the event of a gas attack and ordered more telephone wires to be laid to improve communications with the artillery batteries supporting his battalion.

In addition, though only thirty-six hours had passed since the first attack, some general precautions against gas, albeit primitive, had already been devised. Reporting to London the previous day that the Germans had used “powerful asphyxiating gases very extensively in attack on French yesterday with serious effect,” Sir John French had noted that “as a temporary measure, [I] am arranging for troops in trenches to be supplied with solutions of bicarbonate of soda in which to soak handkerchiefs.” If no sodium bicarbonate was within reach, men were to moisten a piece of fabric with any liquid “to hand”—a euphemism for their own urine. Private Alfred Bromfield recalled, “I don’t mind admitting that I didn’t think much of the urinating on handkerchiefs. I didn’t think it was sufficient protection, so I went to one of the trench latrines, you know just a bucket stuck in a hole, and I stuck my head in the bucket . . . I stopped down long enough till I couldn’t hold my breath any more, came up, took a good breath of air, down again!”

The attack came at four o’clock in the morning of Saturday, April 24. Captain George McLaren of the Fifteenth Battalion’s Forty-eighth Highlanders watched scarlet flares drop from a balloon tethered behind the German line. Then in the dim predawn light he saw “men (perhaps 2 or 3) appear over the German parapet.” They seemed to be wearing helmets “much like those worn by divers, with hoses in their hands from which came a heavy green gas.” One of his subalterns, Lieutenant Herbert Maxwell-Scott, a descendant of the novelist Sir Walter Scott, thought the flares, resembling “red stars,” made “quite a pretty sight” but recalled how “our gaze must have lingered on this sight a little too long, for when I turned the men were leaving the trenches on our right and a great wall of green gas, about 15 to 20 feet high was on top of us.” To battalion commander George Tuxford the gas looked like “a heavy Scotch mist, swallowing up the landscape as it came.”