Vimy (18 page)

“Now men, you are going to the front. You are going to get your heart’s desire – a crack at the Hun and a German helmet.…”

It began to rain, the C.O. kept it up over a chorus of taunts and grumbles.

“Tell it to Sweeney!” somebody shouted. “Let’s get going.” But they couldn’t get going until the C.O. had finished and the padre had spoken a necessary word of prayer.

Breckenridge and thirty-nine others were herded into a boxcar marked 8 CHEVAUX OU 40 HOMMES-ARMEE ANGLAISE. For the next twenty-four hours, a rusty engine pulled its cargo at six miles an hour in a series of fits and starts to Doullens, where the guns of the Somme front could still be heard rumbling in the distance, and then on for another day, past shattered villages to Bruay in the heart of the mining district of northern France. This was the end of the line. As the Canadians tumbled off the boxcars, Breckenridge got his first glimpse of war-a German airplane directly above him dodging the black puffs of smoke sent up by the antiaircraft batteries.

They slept that night in a barn, sheltered from a sudden blizzard. The following morning, as the sun cleared away the snow, they set off on foot, a twenty-mile march to the battalion rest area near the town of Mont St. Eloi, some six miles behind the Vimy front. Long before noon, Breckenridge could feel the straps of his eighty-pound pack biting into his shoulders, as, one by one, the weaker members of the group fell by the wayside, exhausted.

As the others trudged on, the sights and sounds of war increased and the tension began to build. Observation balloons floated above the battle lines (“canteens for the aviators” one old-timer told a gullible rookie). Little trains rumbled by on narrow-gauge rails, loaded with shells. Long lines of battle-weary men began to appear, their faces grey with exhaustion, their uniforms spattered with mud, their puttees protected by ragged sacking. More planes buzzed overhead; lorries and limbers jammed the roadway. The new men threaded their way through the increasing traffic until they reached what was left of St. Eloi. There they enjoyed a bit of food and an hour’s rest before setting out again.

Suddenly, just past the ruins of Villers-au-Bois, there came a dramatic change, as if a gigantic but invisible hand had rung down a heavy curtain. All sound ceased. All signs of life vanished. The road was empty of traffic, for it was still daylight and the German positions astride the famous ridge were only six miles away. The marching men had come within the reach of the enemy guns and had entered the ribbon of stealth.

They had no choice but to continue. To keep casualties to a minimum, the draft was divided into parties of five, each marching at an interval of one hundred yards. In this fashion they reached the rest area, known as the Dumbbell Camp, unscathed. Here, in a swampy wood, the Black Watch was bivouacked – indeed, imprisoned. Because the entrance to the wood was in plain view of the German positions, no one could move out of the camp during the daylight hours.

Breckenridge and the other rookies spent the night in bivvies no more than three feet high, built of sandbags and draped with tarpaulins. To his dismay, the camp was a swamp. The ground squished beneath a foot of water, and the troops waded through the resulting muck to their knees. Nevertheless, Breckenridge thought to himself, if the others can stick it here, then there’s no use of me complaining.

That night the Canadian artillery opened a practice barrage to get the range of the German trenches. The noise was almost unbearable. Breckenridge felt as if he were in the middle of a blast furnace. In the distance, he could see the German flares go up, calling on their own guns to retaliate-a brilliant display of rainbow colours against the night sky.

What would war be like? he asked himself. He tried to picture the scene, with shells falling all about him, wounded comrades being carried from the field. He had heard that men were sometimes buried in their own trenches during a strafe. Could those stories be true? Thirty minutes after it began, the barrage ended, and the troops slept.

The rest period was over; orders came to move into the front line. One night at dusk, the battalion marched off by companies in single file through roads clogged with traffic, until the long communication trench that the French had named Pont Street was reached, and the files moved into the labyrinth of the Vimy trench system.

They had entered what might be thought of as the business section of a small city – a large city, in fact, by 1917 Canadian standards, as large as Vancouver and larger than any other Canadian community except Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg. In this eerie metropolis, silent by day, a-buzz and a-clatter by night, one hundred thousand khaki-clad citizens were hived.

Here a confusing network of trenches and sunken roads, more than two miles thick, so complex that men could easily get lost in the maze without a guide, wriggled and squirmed through the mud along the four-mile front. This was the heart of the city that Breckenridge’s battalion now entered. Behind lay the suburbs from which they had just emerged, a land of billets, rest areas, and training centres, the haunt of heavy artillery and brass hats.

The city came complete with streets and avenues, each with an identifiable name: Indian Trench, Border Lane, Stargate Street, Spadina Avenue, Tottenham Road, Gallows Gate. Most lay eight feet below the surface; some were not even open to the sky, for the city was underlain with tunnels and caves, some used from medieval times. Even as the Black Watch negotiated the trench system, thousands of men were slaving beneath their feet, chipping away at the soft chalk, probing closer to the enemy lines. The Germans, too, were hacking away underground, lengthening their own tunnels on the forward slopes of the ridge, seeking their enemy in a subterranean war of nerves that would last until the day of the offensive.

It was a gloomy world that Breckenridge entered, devoid of any hue, a monotonous, mud-coloured monochrome. The trenches were mud coloured, the water in the shell holes was mud coloured, the dugouts were mud coloured; the men themselves in their muddy khaki with their mud-coloured helmets, mud-coloured packs, and mud-coloured webbing blended with their surroundings. Everything-trains, ration boxes, guns, even the sullen skies above-was the colour of mud, and so were the rats that scuttled through the mud-coloured garbage.

The trench system was like a grid that had been squashed out of shape by a giant’s paw. Three more or less parallel lines of trenches – forward, support, and reserve – faced the Germans, all linked and criss-crossed by the long communication trenches, such as Pont Street, down which the Black Watch sloshed and stumbled.

This cobwebby maze was never static. Many trenches were disused, others falling in, still others being obliterated by shelling. Lines that seemed firmly planted on the map scarcely existed on the ground. Dug and re-dug, battered and cratered, half filled in, they reverted to the mud and were abandoned or became part of another trench line.

As the battalion drew nearer to the front there came the faint rattle of machine guns and the whine of the occasional bullet directly overhead. All talking ceased as the troops in crouching position negotiated the wooden trench mats that lay in the slime beneath their feet. Occasionally a whisper was passed back from the company commander: “Step down, hole in mat,” or “Wire underfoot.” Sometimes the file would break and all would halt until it closed up. In the distance, Bill Breckenridge could see the sky light up as a star shell fell over No Man’s Land.

As the company entered the forward lines, the only sound was the thud of heavy boots. The front lay just ahead. Beyond that were the great mine craters in which sentries were posted. Beyond that lay the dead world of No Man’s Land, and beyond that, invisible in the darkness, the great bulk of the ridge.

The battalion that had been garrisoning the line was about to be relieved by the Black Watch. “Relieved” is the proper word, for relief was written on the faces of those who had survived a week of standing at the alert, eating cold food, sleeping in their clothes, twelve hours on and twelve off, never free of rats, lice, rain, snow, or mud and the constant hammering of the guns – the drumfire of their own artillery and, far worse, the roar, whine, crump, and moan of the German mortars, minnies, howitzers, and whizbangs plus the sharp stutter of the machine guns and the snap of the snipers’ bullets.

Guided into the forward trench by old hands detailed for that purpose, Breckenridge could hear the nervous whispers around him: “Does he shell around here?” “What sort of place is this?” “Isn’t it quiet?” And the varying answers: “It’s a little hell at times,” or “He hasn’t made a direct hit yet,” or “It’s jake-a-loo around here.”

As the battalion settled down, Breckenridge decided to wait and form his own opinion. Soon he had become an old hand, standing from dusk to dawn in his soaking boots, never changing his clothes or taking off his equipment for the six or eight days spent in the line, climbing up on the firing step when his turn came, clambering over the parapet at night to join a wiring party, learning to freeze at the burst of a flare in No Man’s Land, and waiting his turn on that last nervous night for the new relief to arrive-a long, uneasy vigil, when the minutes seemed like hours and the guides, with their welcome group of followers, seemed to take forever to arrive.

2

By the time Bill Breckenridge joined the Black Watch in March the tempo of work and planning had reached a new pitch of intensity. The troops did not know the exact date of the attack-it had, indeed, been postponed for several days – but they knew it was coming soon. Those who were not shivering in the front lines toiled and sweated in the rear. For this was a drudge’s war, and that had not occurred to those who rushed to the colours in the early days. Many had been raised on tales of derring-do in
The Boy’s Own Paper
and in the novels of G.A. Henty: nothing there about hacking away in tunnels and gloomy caves, laying rails, toiling on road gangs, hauling back-breaking loads for miles over rough terrain, or swinging a pick or shovel for hours on end.

The Canadians hated pick-and-shovel work: many had joined the army to get away from it. They had come to fight, not to scrabble in the dirt. Once at the Somme, after they’d been ordered to dig in, aerial photographs revealed a line of ineffectual scratches rather than the well-sited and deeply dug trenches that were called for. Julian Byng examined one photograph, then turned wryly to a group of Canadian officers.

“You Canadians are a very brave people,” said the general. “You would, I know, fight and die if necessary to the last ditch. But,” and he raised his voice, “I’m damned if I can get you to
dig
that ditch.”

They hadn’t bargained on ditch-digging, nor had they contemplated burrowing underground like so many moles, squeezing through narrow, airless passageways, clawing away at the dripping chalk walls.

But if the ridge was to be taken the work had to be done. The army, which scorned euphemisms, called it “fatigue.” It was especially fatiguing for those who had joined those branches of the service that seemed to be the least irksome and possibly the safest: the medical corps, the cyclist corps, and the regimental band. Most of these ended up with a shovel in their hands or a burden on their shoulders.

There was a great deal of this fetching and carrying in spite of the fifty thousand horses and the narrow-gauge railways. It irked a young staff captain in the 11th Brigade named F.R. Phelan to think of the hours used up in lugging ammunition from the wagons and railheads. Here were hundreds of soldiers, slogging along in pairs, each pair carrying two boxes of ammunition between them in a sling made with their rifles. Here were others, toiling through the mud, bowed down with heavy packloads of supplies biting into their shoulders. Surely there was a better way!

And of course there was. Like Whizbang Johnston, Phelan decided to build a better mousetrap. On camping trips in Quebec he had seen Indians loping through the bush with their backs straight, the weight of their packs distributed evenly by means of a broad strap supported by the forehead. After Captain Phelan demonstrated this Canadian tumpline, the method was adopted, special tumpline companies were formed, and thousands of man-hours were saved.

And every man-hour was needed if the Corps was to be ready by Zero Day. Like any other small city, Vimy required a network of supporting services. Unlike other cities it needed them in a hurry- and all at once. Water-mains had to be constructed, reservoirs dug, pumping stations installed. There were roads to be built, ties to be tamped, rails to be laid, tramways to be put into operation. Sweating troops buried twenty-one miles of electrical cable in trenches seven feet deep and strung eleven hundred miles of telephone wire, some of it carried on aerial supports, which also had to be erected. And all this work had to be carried out at night in the cold by men constantly slopping about in water or muddy gruel and under constant fire.

Water alone was a major problem. Every man needed five gallons a day, every horse ten gallons. That meant a total of one million gallons daily, but the planners, with grisly realism, cut it to six hundred thousand, knowing there would be daily casualties among both men and animals. The horses, tied in unprotected lines, were especially vulnerable and died by the hundreds.

The water came from springs behind the lines, but it wasn’t easy to move it forward. Twenty-two pumping stations were installed and forty-five miles of pipeline built, every inch of which had to be buried three feet below ground level. Two reservoirs, each holding fifty thousand gallons, had to be dug by hand. And every piece of equipment – every nut, every bolt, every foot of pipe, every bracket-had to be brought in by road, hauled by horses or on the backs of men.

The engineers built, maintained, or improved thirty miles of road in the shadow of the ridge in full view of the enemy. Heavy guns dragged over a well-laid thoroughfare could pulverize it in a single night, destroying the work of weeks. Thus the roads were constantly in need of repair.