Vimy (11 page)

The mud flowed like gruel around men’s puttees, filled their boots, squeezed into their socks, and had to be scraped out from between the toes with a knife. Trench mats – “bath-mats” in the soldiers’ argot-made of slatted wood, like ladders, were supposed to keep the men’s feet above the mud. But these were soon swallowed up. In some places three layers of mats were dug up, the earliest having been laid by the French in 1915.

If a man slipped and fell in a muddy trench he could easily vanish and smother in the mire, invisible to those who came behind, slogging over his body. One eighteen-year-old, Gordon Lawson, was flung forward when a broken trench mat flew up and hit him in the stomach. Lawson felt one foot on his buttocks and another bite into his shoulders as the file began to move over him. Kicking wildly, he managed to alert the third man in line, who extricated him just in time.

There was no real remedy, as Corporal Eric Forbes of the 6th Field Company, Engineers, realized when the commanding general of his division, Henry Burstall, arrived at his trench. Burstall was wearing hip waders because the mud and water had reached mid-thigh. As the general stepped out onto an unanchored trench mat, Forbes shouted a warning. It came too late. The mat came up, struck the general in the face, and knocked him into the gruel up to his waist.

“Corporal,” cried the general. “I want these trenches pumped out. Get the pumps!”

Forbes well knew that no pumps were capable of doing the job; but Burstall was adamant. “I’ll get the pumps for you,” he said. “I’ll send pumps up.”

But, as Forbes remarked that night to his fellow engineers, you might as well try to pump the Atlantic Ocean dry. The pumps never arrived.

Andrew Macphail once spent five hours trying to negotiate a trench with mud reaching to his knees and shrapnel screaming overhead. It took all his energy to extricate each foot before lurching forward, ever aware that if he toppled he’d smother under the tramp of those behind. It was, as he confided wanly to his diary, “all so unlike the pomp of war.” This was not the Scots Greys galloping down the slopes of Waterloo or even Middleton’s scarlet-clad volunteers leaping out of the rifle-pits at Batoche. Each time Macphail went to the front he confessed to a new sense of desolation. Even when the sun came out in an occasional blink it brought out “the hideous detail: a German with a leg bone protruding, a cow’s head, rifles and bayonets rusted and bent, the raw, gaping trenches and the men performing menial tasks, scraping their boots, shovelling mud, rubbing their extremities with whale oil to prevent trench feet.”

The whale oil came up in jugs, ice cold. Each man was required to rub it on every twenty-four hours, for it was a crime to suffer from trench foot. But some men were too weary to use it and others purposely courted the affliction in order to escape the trenches. Will Bird saw one man who could no longer walk taken out on a stretcher, his feet huge blobs of misshapen flesh, ready for amputation. The ailment became so bad that winter that if a man was evacuated for trench foot, his entire unit was punished by a loss of leave for two or three months. In Arthur Currie’s 1st Division, officers were ordered to witness their men applying the whale oil; if a soldier had to be evacuated, his superior could be court-martialled.

It wasn’t enough that the men in the forward lines were wet, cold, and weary; they were also hungry. As the Canadian railway contractors and logging firms had learned in the early days of the century, men can abide harsh conditions if the food is plentiful and good, but in the forward trenches before Vimy, the fare was monotonous, skimpy, and cold. A single potato was considered a luxury. As many as seven men were required to share a loaf of bread. For Will Bird, these were the hungriest years of his life. He was so famished that if he spotted a fragment of hardtack trampled into the mud, he would seize it, rub it clean, and wolf it down.

In the front line the food was eaten cold – mainly bully beef, biscuits, cheese, or plum-and-apple jam – from mess tins washed out in shell holes. Scores suffered from skin diseases because of the lack of vegetables. The divisional ration dumps were usually eight or ten miles behind the lines at the railhead. From there, each morning, horse transport brought supplies forward to battalion stores, where they were sorted into gunnysacks for platoons and sections and moved farther up by limber, light railway, or pack mule. Ration parties from the support trenches took them into the front line, but a stray shell or a sniper’s bullet often meant that the men at the front went hungry, maddened sometimes by the odour of the sausages the Germans were cooking only a few yards away.

After a tour of duty at the front everyone was exhausted, and that included junior staff officers – men like Captain Duncan Macintyre, late of Moose Jaw. One night in February, Macintyre dragged his weary body back to Mont St. Eloi, reaching brigade headquarters in a battered chateau at 2
A.M
., took off his muddy boots and equipment, rolled into his sleeping bag on the hard floor, and slept like a dead man. When he awoke late the next morning in bright sunlight, he discovered that an enemy shell had destroyed the right wing of the chateau, causing seventeen casualties. While Macintyre snored, as if under ether, others were working to haul out the wounded and bury the dead.

It was hard to stay awake, even if sleep itself meant death. Leslie Hudd, the cyclist, worked all day until he was exhausted and then discovered that he would have to stay up all night on gas patrol in a lonely part of the front line. He tried to stay awake, leaning against the back of the trench to support himself, but his eyes closed, and the next thing he knew his company commander was standing in front of him.

“Are you awake?” the officer asked. Hudd nodded.

“No you weren’t,” the officer told him. “You were asleep. You know what that means?”

“I could be shot,” said Hudd, miserably.

“Hudd,” said the captain, “I don’t know how I’m going to get you out of this.”

By this time the wretched cyclist was shaking like a leaf.

“I’ll leave it to you, sir,” he said. “I’m guilty. You caught me at it. I just dropped off not five minutes ago.”

Hudd’s young superior was faced with an agonizing decision. He was, in effect, judge, jury, prosecutor, and executioner. If he reported Hudd, the sentry’s blood would be on his hands and his first victim would be not a German but a fellow Canadian. So he told Hudd quietly that if he promised not to say anything, he wouldn’t report the dereliction. Leslie Hudd breathed a sigh of relief.

For many others, sleep was almost impossible, even in the support trenches where the dugouts were. In Claude Williams’s dugout there was barely room enough to turn around, and Williams, as a machine-gun officer, had more space than most. To reach his underground room Williams had to go down a flight of stairs on all fours. The room was three feet high; two bunks took up three quarters of the space, a table an eighth, a small stove a sixteenth; that left a tiny area to move about in. If one man wanted to use the table, the other had to get into bed. Williams accomplished this difficult feat by crawling
under
the table, slipping his feet into his sleeping bag, and wriggling in the rest of the way by a series of convulsive twists and squirms. A rat the size of a cat had gnawed a hole in the bottom and kept trying to get into the bag with Williams, who spent most of a sleepless night kicking it out.

4

The only bright spots at the front were the arrival of mail and parcels from home and the daily rum ration. Even the strictest temperance advocates came to realize the morale-building effect of a stiff tot on a cold night or before a trench raid. The Reverend Charles Gordon, better known as Ralph Connor, the novelist, shelved his temperance principles during the war and declared that “rum is an absolute necessity to the soldier in the field. I would rather dispossess them of their rifles.…”

In the rest areas, the troops enjoyed the unbelievable luxury of a bath or shower, even though the shower might be only half a bucket of water. Many, like Claude Williams’s batman, went for weeks without even a change of underwear. In the shell holes and trenches of Vimy there was water, water everywhere, but clean water for bathing was hoarded as carefully as cigarettes.

Some fortunate men were billeted during these rest periods in the homes of the French who, in spite of their own short rations, were unfailingly hospitable. Corporal Harold Barker, the Gloucestershire farmer, added to his workload by helping a French farmer with his chores in exchange for bread. He never forgot the taste of the loaves, fresh and crusty, as they came from the outdoor oven. Some of the hosts even cleaned the boots of the men who stayed with them. Claude Williams told his mother that the French housewives refused to take money from the men whom they deluged with coffee-as much as fifteen cups a day. “You could never believe that people could take such utter strangers into their homes and treat them as one of the family,” he wrote.

Sometimes the hospitality went further than that. Victor Wheeler, a virtuous young signalman from Calgary, was billeted with other members of the 50th Battalion in a farmer’s barn. One morning, he was sitting in the kitchen drinking fresh cow’s milk when the youngest daughter smiled at him, and opened her hand to reveal a contraceptive.

“Voulez vous aller à ma chambre à coucher avec moi, Monsieur?” she invited. To Wheeler’s astonishment, the mother nodded cheerfully and invited him to accept. Wheeler, who kept a pocket Bible in his tunic and neither smoked nor drank, stiffly refused the offer. He never knew whether it was made for monetary reasons, personal pleasure, or as an act of patriotism, but he did notice that the girl’s unmarried sister was already bringing up two children whose father was said to be unknown.

There were other diversions, ranging from the travelling theatrical groups, such as the famous Dumbbells, to the local bordellos. George Henry Hambley, a future United Church minister from Swan Lake, Manitoba, was shocked by the presence of bawdy houses among the ruins of Neuville St. Vaast. “They have right in town here licensed houses of debauchery,” he wrote in his diary, “and it is the most common thing.… Even these old married women are after our lads- and how can the poor lads help it I don’t know, when the temptation is so great and the access so horribly easy.… Yet it is too bad … that our lads who have been comparatively perfectly clean and innocent have to be drawn into the vortex.…”

With such delights awaiting them only a few miles to the rear, it’s no wonder that men prayed for a “blighty” – a small wound that would not incapacitate them for life but would get them out of the line for a month or even a week. Such men were looked on with envy by their comrades; the pain of a bullet in the fleshy part of the arm or leg was nothing to the ecstasy brought on by visions of crisp hospital sheets and decent grub. Victor Wheeler observed one such moment of elation while standing next to his friend Dicky Moore, watching an aerial dogfight involving the famous von Richthofen. As the flimsy craft wheeled and circled above them, a stray bullet pierced Moore’s left foot. Moore cried out, not with pain, but with delight.

“Oh,” he shouted, “it’s a beauty, Vic! What a present from the Red Devil! It’s a Blighty, I’ll bet a dollar.”

And off he went to the luxury of a hospital ward, far from the rats, the lice, the cold food, and the ever-present mud.

CHAPTER FOUR
The Byng Boys

1

On January 19, 1917, Henry Home, the dapper commander of the British 1st Army, informed Julian Byng that in the coming spring offensive the Canadian Corps would be responsible for capturing all of the four-mile crest of Vimy Ridge except for the Pimple. The British 1st Corps, also in Home’s army, elements of which would be placed under Byng’s command to strengthen the assault, would protect the Canadians’ left flank. On the right, the British 3rd Army astride the River Scarpe would attack simultaneously on an eight-mile front. The exact date had not yet been set, but the timetable called for the job to be completed before April 1. Byng and his staff had about two months to plan the operation and train the men.

It wouldn’t be easy. Raw reinforcements were still pouring in to fill the gaps in the ranks of the battered battalions. The veterans of Ypres and the Somme had learned something about war and discipline, but the new men could not be described as trained. These small-town Canadians would have to be drilled day after day, week after week to walk at a steady pace, timed to the second, directly behind their own barrage. This would require more than courage: it would require discipline; and the Canadians, as Byng well knew, were notorious for being undisciplined.

But the discipline would not be mindless. Unlike most British senior officers, Byng insisted on treating his troops as adults. The old assault machine in which every soldier was an automaton, blindly slogging forward without any clear idea of the battle plan, was about to be scrapped. At Vimy, Byng was determined that everyone would know exactly what was planned.

This represented a radical change in orthodox military thinking and it came from one who, at first glance, appeared an unlikely choice to lead the rambunctious Canadians into battle. On paper he seemed the very personification of the stiff-necked aristocrat. His father was an earl, his mother a peer’s daughter and a Cavendish at that-the bluest of the bluebloods. His grandfather had been a field marshal. He himself was a product of the playing fields of Eton, an intimate of royalty whom the King addressed by his nickname, Bungo. He came from the cavalry, a service so myopic that some of its officers – Haig was one-believed the bullet was not made that could stop a horse. His military background was pukka sahib: he had served in the outposts of Empire-India, the Sudan – where the British lived by the old rules, making no concessions to climate or environment, buttoning their collars tightly in the heat of the noonday sun, spurring their ponies across Imperial polo fields, enjoying ritual stengahs on the porches of their bungalows.