Read Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 Online
Authors: Gwynne Dyer
Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (13 page)
Very early on April 9, Easter Monday (having spent Sunday at church services), the men of the four Canadian divisions were given a stiff tot of rum and began moving forward under cover of a heavy barrage. For once the weather was in their favour: the snowstorm in which the Canadians crept forward across no man’s land was unusual for April, but the snow was flying into the Germans’ faces, concealing the Canadian advance. The Canadian Official History says the attack “went like clockwork,” but nothing in battle goes like clockwork: some regiments in the 11th Brigade, which had suffered heavy losses in other recent fighting, had just “lost their confidence” (as the saying went):
When they were supposed to get up, out over the top and go forward, they tended, after some casualties had occurred, to just not go on any further. And actually, with many of the troops being
quite green, you couldn’t expect them to do any better than that. When you got a bit forward, you found that the advancing troops had sort of stuck in the mud, somehow or other, and the attack as planned just fell apart.
“Tommy” Burns
Nevertheless, the bulk of the Canadian army swarmed up over the ridge and seized the German trenches. Although the Germans were very well dug in, a lot of the forward positions were taken by surprise, but the attackers were taking heavy losses.
I got bowled over nearly at the start, but picked myself up and ran on with the boys towards the German trenches, and believe me it was some fighting. It was like hell let loose. I was through the Somme but that was nothing compared to this one.… It was at the second line that I was knocked out by the concussion of a high explosive shell that burst right near me. By this time there were only two of us left of our machine gun crew.
The shock of the explosion threw me into a shell hole. Corporal Lang … came into the hole after me and gave me a drink of rum and water, which soon pulled me around and we started off for Fritz’s third line. By this time the enemy were calling for quarter and surrendering fast.
J.M. Thompson, Paris, Ontario, April 1917
We went over Vimy Ridge just at dusk. The Canadian attack … had left it a jungle of old wire and powdered brick, muddy burrows and remnants of trenches.…
Two hours later we found Fourteen Platoon, hardly recognising it. The sergeant was there, and MacDonald, but most of the others were strangers.… MacDonald told us our company had gone straight through to the objective in spite of sleety snow and
mud and confusion, but a flanking fire from the left, where the 4th Division had been held up, had taken a heavy toll. Belliveau and Jenkins and Joe McPherson had been killed in one area. One shell had wiped out Stevenson and two others.
MacMillan had been shot in the stomach and had died after waiting hours in the trench. Gilroy and Westcott and Legge had been killed by machine-gun fire. Herman Black had run amuck. They found him almost at the bottom of the Ridge, near a battery position, with eight dead Germans about him, four of them killed by bayonet.
Will R. Bird,
Ghosts Have Warm Hands
After two days of futile counterattacks the German commander, Crown Prince Rupprecht, ordered the withdrawal of his troops onto the plain below. He had lost a dominating position, and 4,000 Germans had been taken prisoner. But the Canadians had suffered 10,602 casualties, including 3,600 dead.
On April 10, word reached us of the splendid victory of the Canadians in taking Vimy Ridge on the preceding day.
Fine tribute from Haig [the British commander-in-chief]. Some mention in editorials, but none in “Times,” which is disgraceful.…
Dispatched telegrams of congratulations to General Byng. Robert Borden,
Memoirs
, vol. 2
It was partly in recognition of the Canadian Corps’ achievement at Vimy that it was finally given a Canadian commander in the early summer of 1917, and so became the first completely Canadian field army in the country’s history. But while Lieutenant General Sir Julian Byng, the British officer who had commanded the Corps since May 1916, was well liked by the troops, his Canadian successor, General Sir Arthur Currie
(who had been an insurance agent and part-time militia officer when the war broke out), was not. Leslie Hudd, by now a seasoned veteran, met Currie after he was recommended for a French Croix de Guerre and a British Military Medal for single-handedly taking a German machine-gun post.
I was just a buck private. So the [French] General came down and he embraced us all, and I was kissed on both cheeks. Currie came, and he shook hands with the officers and sergeants, but he just pinned it on the privates.… I never had much use for Currie. I thought it was his job to congratulate us the right way. All the privates thought that; thought they were worth a handshake from their commander. Not that I’ve got anything against him as a general, but you could say he wasn’t too popular.
Leslie Hudd
Currie was a shy, ungainly man who had none of the actor’s skill at currying favour with the troops that is cultivated by so many successful generals. But although his later life was blighted by a campaign of slander directed by Sam Hughes and his cronies, who claimed that he wasted men’s lives needlessly, Currie actually worked very hard at keeping them alive. He was an excellent and conscientious commander who was once considered by Prime Minister David Lloyd George as a possible replacement for Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief in France.
However, despite Currie’s success in his unending struggle to keep the Canadian Corps together and prevent it from being frittered away in small packets by the British High Command to plug weaknesses in various sectors of the front, he could exercise little control over the way the Corps as a whole was actually used. Nor was there any senior Canadian military voice in Ottawa to give Prime Minister Borden strategic advice from the point of view of Canada’s own interests: during
the entire war the chief of staff of the Canadian army was a British officer, Major General Sir Willoughby Gwatkin. As in all Canada’s wars down to the present, the strategic thinking was being done elsewhere.
The victory at Vimy Ridge confirmed Borden’s belief that the Canadian army was the finest of the allied armies and made it even more difficult for him to contemplate reducing the Canadian commitment. However, no army could afford to go on taking such losses unless it received a steady flow of reinforcements, and voluntary enlistments were drying up. The prime minister had also been much affected by his visit to the front, where he was shocked by what he saw, and by the nerve-racking visits he insisted on paying to all the Canadian military hospitals. (He visited fifty-seven during his 1915 trip.)
On the one hand, I was inspired by the astonishing courage with which my fellow-countrymen bore their sufferings, inspired also by the warmth of their reception, by a smile of welcome, by the attempt to rise in their beds to greet me. In many cases it was difficult to restrain my tears when I knew that some poor boy, brave to the very last, could not recover.
On the other hand, the emotion aroused from these visits had an exhausting effect upon one’s nervous strength: and frequently I could not sleep after reflecting upon the scene through which I had passed.
Robert Borden,
Memoirs
, vol. 2
He felt a tremendous obligation to the troops in this army.… He thought that having “his boys” reinforced was necessary for Canada’s defence, which he regarded as being across the ocean.
On the other hand, he also, being the man he was, felt what a terrible disgrace it would be to Canada and the people of Canada if this wonderful army that had been built up, that had fought at the Somme, at Ypres and Vimy, and so forth, had to be disbanded, in effect, because of the terrible casualties which they had suffered.
Henry Borden (nephew of Robert Borden)
As much as Borden’s solicitude for “his boys,” the deteriorating military situation of the Allies in general was now pushing him very strongly toward conscription. He spent from the middle of February to early May 1917 in England attending the first Imperial War Cabinet meetings. He was appalled by what he learned. The Allies’ situation was growing worse: they might even be losing the war.
Astonishing news of the abdication of Czar and revolution in Russia. Evidently due to dark forces, the Monk Rasputin, the pro-German Court and bureaucratic influences, the meddling of the Empress, the weakness of the Czar, and his inability to realize or comprehend the forces of liberty and democracy working among the people.
Robert Borden,
Memoirs
, vol. 2
The early optimism that the Russian Revolution would improve matters soon turned to fears that Russia would withdraw from the war. If that happened the whole weight of the German army could be concentrated on the Western Front, and things were bad enough there already. The French offensive that had begun at the same time as Vimy Ridge in the spring of 1917 had pushed their army past the breaking point. One French regiment went to the front making bleating noises like lambs being led to slaughter, and when the offensive collapsed, fifty-four divisions—almost half the French army—mutinied. It took 100,000 courts martial to restore discipline, and even after that the French army seemed to be finished as an offensive weapon, perhaps for years.
Meanwhile, German submarines were sinking a million tons of Allied shipping a month, and the first sea lord, Admiral John Jellicoe, had concluded: “It is impossible for us to go on with the war if losses continue like this.” Only one bright spot loomed on the horizon: the German campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare, by sinking neutral shipping, was pushing the United States into the war on the side of the Allies. (Washington declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917.) But it would take almost a year before American troops reached Europe in large numbers, and meanwhile France, Britain and the colonies had to hold out somehow on the Western Front. There was only one solution, and Lloyd George put it very bluntly to the Imperial War Cabinet on March 20, 1917:
Let us look quite frankly at the position. [Germany] has more men in the field than ever she had.… She is in a very powerful military position.…
The Allies are depending more and more upon the British Empire.… We started with 100,000 men, we now have 3,000,000 in the field.… What is it necessary for us to do in order to achieve the very sublime purpose which we have set before us? The first thing is this: we must get more men.
Lloyd George’s “very sublime purpose,” of course, was to make sure that the British empire won the war—no matter what the cost to Britain or anybody else. By 1917 the first total war had brought a new breed of men to power in Britain, France and Germany: Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau and Erich Ludendorff owed their positions to promises that they would wage the war unrelentingly and uncompromisingly until total victory. In fact, there was probably no choice by 1917: it was not only in Russia that revolution was a danger. After so much sacrifice, any major European government that stopped the fighting short of victory now faced the risk of overthrow by an angry and disillusioned
populace: only victory could make them safe. Even in Britain the cabinet was seriously worried about domestic political stability.
In Canada there was no danger of revolution, but the English-speaking majority would not forgive any government that failed to prosecute the war to the utmost, while the French-speaking minority would not forgive any government that resorted to compulsion. Four days after he returned to Ottawa from the Imperial War Cabinet meeting, Borden made his decision: he announced that the government would impose conscription.
BREAKING THE STALEMATE
Ludendorff
: The English soldiers fight like lions.
Hoffmann
: True, but don’t we know that they are lions led by donkeys.
Falkenhayn:
Memoirs
“L
UDENDORFF
”
WAS
G
ENERAL
E
RICH
L
UDENDORFF, EFFECTIVELY
the supreme commander of the German army in 1917–18. “Hoffmann” was General Max Hoffmann, who was an old associate of Ludendorff’s and chief of staff on the Russian front for much of the war. “Falkenhayn” was General Erich von Falkenhayn, the chief of the German General Staff for the first two years of the war. The conversation is quoted at the beginning of
The Donkeys
, a book published by British military historian Alan Clark in 1961 which ruthlessly dissected and analyzed the shortcomings and failures of the British army’s senior officers in the battles of 1915.
Clark’s book set the fashion for blaming the slaughter of the First World War on arrogant, stupid and callous commanders that has largely dominated popular accounts and dramatizations of the war ever since. Indeed,
The Donkeys
was the principal inspiration for the satirical
musical
Oh, What a Lovely War!
, which spread the fashion even more widely. (Clark, later a maverick Conservative Member of Parliament and cabinet member under Margaret Thatcher, even took the play’s authors to court in order to obtain proper credit and a share of the royalties.) So it’s a pity, really, that the whole conversation between the German generals that gave Clark his title never happened. Clark simply made it up.
