Brave Battalion (39 page)

Peck designated No. 1 and No. 2 companies to the first wave with the other two companies following at an interval of 30 yards.
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Three tanks would accompany the Canadian Scottish and it also would be followed by a mobile artillery piece from the 25
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Battery of the 6
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Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery to provide close support as directed by the battalion commander.
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Zero Hour was 0500 hours.

Several shells had fallen near the dugout while Peck had been reading the orders, shaking dirt down from the ceiling onto the maps spread across the table. As Peck finished up, a closer explosion rocked the dug-out and then someone shouted, “The M.O.'s killed!” Peck rushed out and discovered the battalion's medical officer, Captain John Cathcart, had been hit. “He's done,” Peck mournfully reported to the other officers, after examining the man's severe wounds (which, in the end, proved not to be fatal). Word flew through the ranks that the popular medical officer, who had never hesitated to go into No Man's Land to treat wounded, had been killed. The prospect of entering battle without a doctor to treat their wounds put many of the men on edge.
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After this calamity the company officers returned to their units while Peck and his staff remained in the dugout. With them was No. 2 Company's sergeant pipe major, Jimmy Groat, who had garnered the Military Medal in 1917. Peck noticed that Groat “was standing not far away from me, puffing a long black pipe and straining his eyes to read a paper in the flickering light from the candle on my table. I was leaning forward on the table close by, gazing at the map of the coming battle. Word is passed down the stairs, ‘Move on Number 2 Company.' Groat quietly lays down the paper, nods to me and turns to go. Then, in a moment another order comes: ‘Stand fast Number 2 for ten minutes.' He turns and lays down his Pipes on the wire bed, pulls out his old pipe and lights it, picks up the paper and reads. I don't think I ever saw a finer picture of mental control.”
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Beyond the dugout, things were anything but calm as Zero Hour approached and the forward companies scrambled to get into position amid “a turmoil of shellfire and bombing.”
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The redoubtable Captain Gus Lyons, who had led No. 1 Company into battle many times, was unable to reconcile the surrounding terrain to the map. A sunken road was to establish the boundary between the British troops and his company, but he found only a muddy track running directly eastward. Lyons decided this would serve and told his men to extend in line north from this point until they met up with No. 2 Company's right-flank platoon. No. 4 Company stood 30 yards to the rear.

No. 2 Company, meanwhile, had left the dugout and wandered through inky blackness with the clock ticking down to Zero Hour, its newly appointed commander increasingly anxious that he would fail to be in position left of No. 1 Company on time. Lt. Max Reid had taken over the company from Major James Scroggie on August 25 when he moved up to battalion second-in-command. Reid had served in the ranks until being wounded during the Battle of Festubert, returned to Canada for commissioning, and risen to the rank of Captain before voluntarily reverting to a lieutenancy in order to be posted back overseas. While not new to combat, Reid knew his debut as a company commander was off to a shaky start.

Reid was not the only one lost. Behind, No. 3 Company had also strayed off in the wrong direction only to be gathered in by a headquarters staffer and guided to its start point. The same officer then realized No. 2 Company was missing and Peck cast out a net of men to search for it.

No. 2 Company's whereabouts were still unknown when No. 1 Company's second-in-command, Captain Sydney Douglas Johnston, passed word from the right flank that there was no trace of the Royal Munsters. It was 0430 hours. Fifteen minutes later, “when every second was precious,” Johnston ran up to where Lyons was standing with a couple of other officers to report he had chanced upon a Munster outpost only to have the non-commissioned officer there claim he “knew nothing whatever of the attack about to take place, and … was positive his unit was not taking any part in it.”

Lyons greeted this news with dumbfounded silence. Just then Peck and his piper approached and Lyons gave him the news. “Well, it doesn't make any difference, we've got to go forward whether they do or not,” Peck said calmly.

The lieutenant-colonel was putting on a show, for the British absence worried him almost as much as the presence of increasing numbers of German soldiers mysteriously popping up in small holes running along the length of the battalion start line. Peck had dismissed the first ones to appear as men stationed in advanced listening posts—all eager to surrender when approached—but soon there were just too many for that explanation to hold. Finally, one prisoner confessed that his battalion had been forming precisely on the start line for a counterattack scheduled for 0600 hours. More battalions, he said, were deployed between 800 and 1,000 yards to the front of the German wire in preparation for this attack. Peck realized the Canadian Scottish would have to drive through these forward forces to gain the D-Q Line. If his leading companies got tangled in a point-blank shootout short of the wire, the attack would be stalled. But there was no option but to proceed as planned.

Right on schedule, the supporting barrage slammed down on the great drapes of wire and German trenches behind. The Canadians advanced toward the rising sun and the shells exploding in great gouts of flame and smoke. Lt. Reid had got his lost company into position at the last moment, so Nos. 1 and 2 Companies walked forward in a broad line. The artillery had dropped a covering smokescreen through which the Canadian Scottish glimpsed hundreds of German infantry approaching with hands raised in surrender. There was little resistance and the Canadians were soon closing on the wire, their only casualties being caused by friendly fire from one artillery battery whose rounds persistently fell short. Shrapnel from one exploding round cut down Captain Lyons with a wound that would cost him a leg.
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At headquarters, Peck was feeling like a helpless bystander as the attack unfolded. His angry calls did nothing to get the friendly fire lifted off his men. Nor could he establish contact with the promised tanks or single artillery piece that were supposed to be advancing behind the troops.
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As Reid's men closed on the wire, they came under machine-gun fire from a wood identified as “Trigger Copse.” The company's Lewis gunners immediately returned fire, while Reid sent one platoon from his company and another from No. 4 Company round to take the enemy from behind. As these troops pushed into the wood, the Germans surrendered.

From the heights to the right of the Canadian Scottish a hellish rate of fire was cutting right across their front and many a man cursed the Royal Munsters for their absence that day. Lt. Reid's No. 2 Company pushed through this hail of lead to the first band of wire only to find the artillery had failed to open any holes. Unable to find a way through, the two companies on this flank were rapidly shredded by the German machine gunners. All eight officers were wounded, five of them mortally.

One survivor wrote: “I saw John Elliott dead.… [Alex] Campbell-Johnston and [Eric] Drummond-Hay gone west. Drummond-Hay was playing his [kazoo] during the advance, and when I saw him dead he had the [kazoo] in his hand.

“We came up against the ‘darndest' mess of barbed wire I ever saw; the Hun in front and on the right, doing a lot of damage. The wire is perfect and there we stick. I got a machine-gun bullet in the shoulder, and it entirely dispelled any preconceived notions I had as to the burning pains or sting of a bullet; it was more like the village blacksmith swinging on one with a thirty-pound hammer. It whirled me around and I heard someone laugh. Looking down I saw it was [Captain] Joe Mason in a shell-hole with one of our fellows and a scared-looking Hun.”
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Sgt. Frank Earwaker of No. 1 Company's No. 4 Platoon had taken cover in a shell hole until Lt. Campbell-Johnston ordered another advance. About twenty men accompanied the officer, who was only eighteen and had enlisted as a private when not yet sixteen. “We all got up together,” Earwaker wrote, “and didn't get more than five yards before we met with the heaviest fire from the trench in front of us that I have ever faced. Down I went into a shell-hole; Lieutenant Campbell-Johnston flopped on his stomach right in the wire about twelve feet to my right.… [He] raised himself on his hands, looking to the front, evidently trying to see how much chance he would have to go forward, when they got him in the head.” Earwaker and the survivors from the two companies were trapped in the shell-holes, unable to go further or to retreat. They could hear a tank grinding around behind them and, on spotting it, a number of men waved their helmets to draw its attention to their plight. But the tank stayed back.
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Peck had also spotted a couple of tanks. Running out in front of them, he pointed to the high ground where the German machine gunners were stationed and gestured that they should advance against that position. Instead, to Peck's consternation, the tanks “turned about and left the vicinity.” Accompanied by Lt. John Dunlop, Peck decided to go back to headquarters and use the phone to direct artillery fire on the heights. En route he came upon a large number of Royal Munsters and encouraged them to attack the German positions, but his remonstrations “had no effect upon them.” Finding a number of Canadian heavy machine gunners in a trench near the start line, Peck pointed out the ridge and soon had them firing on it. Deciding this was as good as the artillery, he and Dunlop started back toward the front only to be driven into a shell hole by heavy enemy fire.
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The Canadian Scottish, who were having difficulty penetrating the wire, were, meanwhile, being subjected to intensifying rates of fire from their right. Sgt. Earwaker risked a glance out of his hole to investigate the cause and spotted a lone tank advancing toward them with Can Scot signaller L/Cpl. William Metcalf “walking beside it, a little to the right in front of it, pointing with his signal flags in our direction. It was still pretty early and you could hardly recognize him [in the poor light] except by the flags. The tank was coming on at an angle from the left flank. I saw Metcalf walking about thirty yards and then we decided it was our turn to help. We made a dash for the trench and made it before the Germans got their guns on us. When we captured the trench, we found a nest of machine guns on not more than a fifty-foot frontage.”

Metcalf stayed alongside the tank, using his signal flags to direct it across the trench and toward the German positions behind. Heavy fire continuously hammered against the tank's armour, and, as it spanned the trench, German infantrymen attempted to knock it out with grenades. Pte. J. H. Riehl later recalled the thirty-seven-year-old signaller—an American from Maine—strolling calmly alongside the tank and wondered how “Metcalf escaped being shot to pieces.” Metcalf's courage this day would be recognized with the Victoria Cross.
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The soldier's bravery got the advance going and within minutes the battalion broke through the main D-Q Line. Making use of the opportunity the distraction Metcalf and the tank presented to escape their shell-hole, Peck and Dunlop managed to join No. 2 Company as it moved through the centre of the D-Q Line's wire. Pushing right up to the front ranks, Peck led the men toward a wooden hut used for storing tools and wire during the defence line's construction. Upon gaining the building the men discovered a wide lane behind it that provided a clear run through the rest of the wire to the trench that formed the heart of the D-Q Line. Moments later the barrage that had been methodically working forward struck the trench and then lifted. With Peck out front, the Canadian Scottish rushed the trench only to find most of the garrison, which outnumbered them three to one—standing on the fire-step with hands raised in surrender. As Peck stepped to the edge of the parapet a non-commissioned officer suddenly pointed a rifle at him. Peck was saved from being shot by a German soldier who knocked the rifle from the man's hands.

Peck called a halt to reorganize. The remnants of Nos. 1 and 4 Companies were put under command of Major James Scroggie and formed up alongside what was left of Nos. 2 and 3 Companies. The battalion struck out for the D-Q Intermediate Support Line just 250 yards away on the summit of a gradual slope. Several gaps in the wire provided easy routes, and the Germans that the Canadians encountered generally surrendered without firing a shot. This also proved the case as the Canadian Scottish reached the defensive trench.
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Peck later commented that he had “never seen the enemy so cowardly; prisoners surrendered in shoals. They outnumbered us vastly and had they made a determined stand could have hindered our advance to a considerable degree.”