Vimy (12 page)

Yet perhaps more than any other Byng belied the image of the spit-and-polish Great War career officer. He was casual in his dress, spartan in his habits, affable with all ranks, and, above all, unorthodox. He had none of the stand-offishness associated with his class; his senior Canadian commander, Arthur Currie, was far more aloof than Byng.

But Byng shared with Currie and the other Canadians a flexibility of mind, a refusal to conform to outworn rules, that won the day at Vimy. Andrew Macphail, who loathed most politicians and staff brass, was uncharacteristically enthusiastic about Byng. “This is a soldier!” he scribbled, “large, strong, lithe, with worn boots and frayed puttees.”

Byng had no desire to command the Canadians, of whom he knew next to nothing. The task was forced upon him, and since he was already a corps commander in the British army, it could not be considered a promotion.

“Why am I sent to the Canadians?” he wanted to know when the transfer order came in May 1916. “I don’t know a Canadian. Why this stunt? I am sorry to leave the old Corps as we are fighting like hell and killing Boches. However, there it is. I am ordered to these people and will do my best but I don’t know that there is any congratulation about it.”

Still, he had nothing to lose. Since he hadn’t been promoted, he didn’t have to keep in with the politicians to hold his job, as Sam Hughes had found out the previous August.

As it turned out, the appointment was one of the happiest of the war. Byng was the right man at the right time in the right place to take over the Canadian Corps from Alderson. It was a unique command. In the British Army, a corps wasn’t much more than a skeleton headquarters in which divisions came and went, dealt like cards according to the needs or whims of the general staff. The four Canadian divisions, however, were always kept up to strength. In fact, the 5th Division, still in training that January in England, was about to be broken up to reinforce the units in France, so that every battalion in the field would have one hundred more men on strength than its establishment called for. At full strength, a British division numbered about fifteen thousand men. At Vimy the Canadian figure exceeded twenty-one thousand. Julian Byng’s Canadian Corps, then, was more like a small army.

His personal style fitted that of his new command. In the larger units of the Allied armies during the Great War, the commander was a vague and distant figure who never ventured into the front lines and was rarely seen by the private soldiers. But Byng’s links to his troops were forged early in the game. He seemed to be everywhere, usually on foot, his boots spattered with mud, questioning, chatting, observing the ordinary soldier at work and at rest. Soon the Canadians began to call themselves the Byng Boys, after a popular musical revue at London’s Alhambra Theatre.

Byng preferred to live like the rank and file as closely as was practical. Because the troops got so little leave, he took very little himself; in the four war years his wife saw him only five times. The food at Corps headquarters was execrable. Not for Julian Byng the long, candlelit dinners with which most of the senior staff indulged themselves. He shovelled down whatever was offered and rose from the table to go back to work. After King George had the misfortune to lunch with him in France he insisted to Queen Mary that he’d been poisoned. “Bungo didn’t live-he pigged …” was the way the King put it.

Duncan Macintyre once spent a day guiding Byng around the Ypres salient. Byng wanted to see everything, so they both crawled out to observation posts and snipers’ nests and through tunnels. At noon, Byng squatted on a firestep in the front line, pulled a sandwich from his pocket, chewed on it, then lit a pipe and enjoyed a short chat with the men at the point where fighting was heaviest.

The physical descriptions of Byng by those who knew him are fascinating because no two are quite the same. Some call him big, some tall; some say he wasn’t tall but lithe, others that he was bulky. All say he was strong, with a strong jaw, strong hands, and a strong walk. The picture that emerges is one of a powerful and commanding presence, fit and muscular. He was fifty-four and looked younger, a handsome man with knowing blue eyes framed by a lean face, brown as shoe leather, and a large military moustache. In his photographs he looks a little terrifying, and he could be terrifying. But he also had the common touch.

He did not stand on ceremony, did not even take his hand out of his tunic to return a salute, merely raising it courteously inside the pocket. At a corps inspection, where a general and his staff customarily trotted down the road on sleek chargers, the new commander came into the horse lines through a hedge, jumping the ditches, as Andrew Macphail put it, “as unaffectedly as a farmer would come into a neighbour’s place to look at his crops.”

Byng’s inspections, unlike so many others, were starkly thorough, never perfunctory. He never kept the troops waiting but arrived promptly to the second. Once, it was said, he turned up seven minutes early and hid behind a hedge with his staff until the exact moment. Shiny buttons did not impress him; well-scrubbed mess tins did. He was an expert on the equipment of the ordinary soldier, from rifles to small packs. Nor did he indulge in the pleasantries that so often accompanied these rituals. As one officer in the 44th (Winnipeg) Battalion put it, “afterwards officers go around wringing their hands while hard-boiled sergeants burst into tears.” Major-General David Watson’s diary entry for December 15, 1916, at Vimy, speaks for itself. The 4th Division’s commander wrote a little ruefully that Byng had inspected the 54th Battalion from the Kootenay district of British Columbia and found it “in a most unsatisfactory state, dirty, and unorganized, and told Colonel Kemball so very plainly.”

But he cared about his men. In India, years before, his first action had been to alter the high collars of the men’s jackets so they could wear them open in the sweltering heat. To Byng, a soldier was never a cipher, never a statistic on the casualty lists. There was a strong religious streak in Byng. Macintyre once heard him say that he never ordered so much as a patrol to go over the top without getting down on his knees and praying for their safe return.

It was said of Byng that he could converse on subjects as far apart as Confucius and Canadian ducks. He had forgotten more than most of his junior officers had learned, for he had been a professional soldier and a keen student of military tactics for thirty-three years.

He had commanded the South African Light Horse during the Boer War, and in that free-wheeling atmosphere he made his reputation as a daring and often unorthodox commander. It was there that his character was moulded. Byng, the tireless young colonel, followed a different drummer from his colleagues’. In London on leave, while others were playing polo or dancing at fashionable clubs, Byng was down at the Smithfield Market learning about meat, trying to outwit the contractors who were supplying an inferior product to his troops.

When war broke out in 1914, he was a major-general in the Egyptian command. He distinguished himself at Ypres, was knighted, promoted to lieutenant-general, and sent to Gallipoli, where he drew up a successful plan to evacuate the embattled troops with a minimum loss of life. For that he received the blue ribbon of the Bath and, after a spell in Egypt, command of the Canadian Corps.

Now he was determined that every man under him would know his task when Zero Hour dawned. “Explain it to him again and again,” he told his officers. “Encourage him to ask you questions. Remember also, that no matter what sort of a fix you get into, you mustn’t just sit down and hope that things will work themselves out. You must
do
something in a crisis. The man who does nothing is
always
wrong.”

This kind of attitude fitted the Canadian character and helped to win the battle that followed. It was surely Byng’s greatest moment, as he himself acknowledged when he was elevated to the peerage. Four years after the battle he would be Viscount Byng of Vimy, Governor General of Canada. It is one of the ironies of history that future generations would remember him more for the constitutional battle with Mackenzie King that he lost than for the bloody battle he won on the muddy slopes of a battered ridge in France.

2

Six hundred thousand Allied soldiers had been killed or mutilated on the Somme, including twenty-four thousand young Canadians. Julian Byng was determined that there should be no repetition of that blood-bath, which had seen men with little training and less understanding of battle hurled in dense waves against the German machine guns. The Somme’s lessons must be studied and applied to the exercises that would take place behind the Canadian lines beyond reach of the enemy guns.

The man chosen to report on the Somme experience was Arthur Currie, the senior divisional commander and Byng’s most trusted general – the man who took command of the Corps when Byng was absent and who would shortly replace Byng as its commander.

In December Byng had given Currie two tasks: first, to analyse the Somme battle and report on the lessons learned; second, to advise how those lessons might be applied to the infantry tactics and training at Vimy. The methodical Currie took three weeks to prepare his first report on eleven foolscap pages. He had plunged into the second when he received a signal honour: he was the only Canadian chosen by the British to accompany a group of officers invited by the French to visit the Verdun battlefield in the first week of January. At Verdun the carnage had been even worse than on the Somme; there were lessons to be learned there, too.

The French invited questions and Currie was ruthless in his curiosity. As one British officer put it, “he pumped everyone dry.” He was not prepared to accept the word of the French brass hats; he checked every statement against the experience of junior officers and often discovered that the seniors were wrong in their assessment. The result was another careful analysis of what could be learned from the Verdun experience. After Currie finished his second Somme report, he began, on January 20, to give lectures on tactics to the senior officers of the Corps. It was his findings that dictated the way in which the troops were trained for the Vimy battle.

Here was a remarkable figure, plucked from obscurity by the onrush of history. A failed real estate operator in Victoria, close to bankruptcy, without professional military experience, Currie had risen to major-general in less than three years and would soon climb up another notch in the military hierarchy. With only a high school education and a third-class teacher’s certificate, he would be propelled after the war into the principalship of Canada’s most famous university, McGill.

It is inconceivable that a man with Currie’s background could have risen past field rank in the British Army, where education and breeding counted for more than tactical skills. But Currie was not the only unschooled Canadian to wear a major-general’s red tabs. His colleague David Watson, commander of the 4th Division, had never got past Grade 8. Unlike Currie, Watson had enjoyed a spectacular business career. An orphan in Quebec City, he had gone to work as a youth on the commercial side of the Quebec
Chronicle
and ended up owning it. His rise in the ranks from militia private to lieutenant-colonel, and then to wartime major-general, was equally startling. Now he was a junior to Currie, a lean and supple man with an old, lined face, cadaverous and saturnine. The marks of Ypres, where he had personally carried out a wounded man under heavy fire, were on him. At forty-eight, he was the oldest of the divisional commanders and looked even older. It was said that Ypres had aged him ten years.

In his own meteoric rise, Currie had leaped over two other officers, both his seniors in age and experience. Louis James Lipsett, commander of the 3rd Division, had actually taught Currie tactics in Victoria when the latter was a militia colonel. A firm-jawed Irishman, Lipsett was a professional soldier, lent to the Canadians during the war as commander of Winnipeg’s Little Black Devils. There the Imperial officer became a convert to the Canadian style.

Lipsett was much loved, for he was tireless in the care he took of his men. His troops were well aware of his dictum that no officer should think of his own comfort until the ordinary soldiers were fed, warmed, and sheltered. His blunt declaration, as a battalion commander at Ypres, that he would “stick to the last in the trenches” was legendary, as was his fearlessness under fire. Any officer who showed the slightest fear, he warned, would be sacked. He himself liked to prowl the front lines in order to be close to his men.

Will Bird ran into him one night in a crater post fifteen yards in front of the main trench. The strange officer seemed genuinely interested in Bird’s background, asking about his home in Nova Scotia and his years out West working for various eccentric ranchers. When he revealed who he was, Bird was stunned and tongue-tied, whereupon Lipsett pulled a snapshot from his pocket to identify himself, making Bird promise he wouldn’t tell his mates. Perhaps because of these nocturnal ramblings, Lipsett didn’t survive the war; a sniper’s bullet got him in 1918. But Will Bird never forgot that meeting and kept the photograph for the rest of his life.

Henry Burstall, commander of the 2nd Division, was that rarest of all Canadian birds, a regular army officer. A Quebecker, Burstall had had more experience than any of the others. He had been to the Klondike as part of the Yukon Field Force, had fought in the Boer War, had served with the South African constabulary, and had been selected as aide-de-camp to the Duke of Connaught during the latter’s viceregal tenure. A big, bluff six-footer with a hearty laugh that hid an inner shyness, he had been selected to command the 2nd Division over Garnet Hughes, son of the Minister of Militia, whom Borden was trying to placate just before firing him. But Byng would not tolerate political interference, especially in the case of Brigadier-General Hughes, an indifferent leader at best.

On paper, all three of these men seemed better fitted than Currie for command. Currie didn’t
look
like a general. There are fashions in the military image just as there are in women’s hats. Currie did not adhere to the Great War stereotype of a ramrod-fit, gimlet-eyed, lean-faced, moustached leader. Haig looked the part and so did Currie’s divisional colleagues, with their firm, chiselled features and clipped military moustaches. Currie was one of the few senior officers who was clean shaven. His face was flabby, he sported a double chin, his eyes were a watery blue, and he was shaped like a gigantic pear. He was, in fact, so bulky that he had difficulty making his way through the narrower trenches. There was nothing dapper about Currie: his uniform always looked a little sloppy. His men called him, not without affection, “Guts and Gaiters.”