Vimy (2 page)

It is probable that with the exception of the Krakatoa explosion of 1883, in all of history no human ears had ever been assaulted by the intensity of sound produced by the artillery barrage that launched the Battle of Vimy Ridge on April 9, 1917.

In the years that followed, the survivors would struggle to describe that shattering moment when 983 artillery pieces and 150 machine guns barked in unison to launch the first British victory in thirty-two months of frustrating warfare. All agreed that for anyone not present that dawn at Vimy it was not possible to comprehend the intensity of the experience. The shells and bullets hurtling above the trenches formed a canopy of red-hot steel just above the heads of the advancing troops-a canopy so dense that any Allied airplane flying too low exploded like a clay pigeon. At least four machines were destroyed that morning by their own guns.

The wall of sound, like ten thousand thunders, drowned out men’s voices and smothered the skirl of the pipes-the Highland regiments’ wistful homage to a more romantic era. It was as if a hundred express trains were roaring overhead. To Corporal Gus Sivertz, an optometrist from Victoria, the encompassing cocoon of sound was so palpable he felt that were he to raise a finger he would touch a solid ceiling. Individual noises, so familiar to the old soldiers at Vimy-the crump of naval guns, the bark and screech of the field artillery, the whine and clatter of the Vickers – were lost in the overpowering cacophony of the great barrage. Tons of red-hot metal hurtling through the skies caused an artificial wind to spring up, intensifying the growing sleet storm slanting into the faces of the enemy.

The earth reverberated for miles around, as in an earthquake, and the faint booming of the guns was heard by David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, at Downing Street in London. Some men could scarcely bear the sound. Lewis Buck, a lumberman from the Ottawa Valley, deep in a dugout with his fellow stretcher-bearers, thought he would go crazy from the reverberations above his head. But then, he reasoned, “this is what we came over for.” Only the rats, he noticed, were unruffled by the noise.

The barrage began exactly at 5:30
A.M
. Technically, it was dawn, but the first streaks of light in the east were obliterated by the driving storm. Shivering in the cold, tense with expectation, their guts briefly warmed by a stiff tot of army rum, the men in the assault waves could scarcely see the great whaleback of Vimy Ridge, only a few hundred yards away. It angled off into the gloom-its hump as high as a fifty-storey building-a miniature Gibraltar, honeycombed with German tunnels and dugouts, a labyrinth of steel and concrete fortifications, bristling with guns of every calibre.

The Germans had held and strengthened this fortress for more than two years and believed it to be impregnable. The French had hurled as many as twenty divisions against it and failed to take it. In three massive attacks between 1914 and 1916 they had squandered one hundred and fifty thousand
poilus
, dead or mangled. The British, who followed the French, had no better success. Now it was the Canadians’ turn.

They lay out in No Man’s Land, twenty thousand young men of the first wave, stretched out along the four-mile front, crouching in the liquid gruel of the shallow assault trenches or flat on their bellies, noses in the mud, holding their breath for the moment of the assault. With the optimism of soldiers in every battle in every century, they did not expect to die, for death, in their minds, was a catastrophe visited upon others. Surely if they did as they’d been trained to do, if they hugged that advancing wall of shells-the famous creeping barrage – they would survive the day.

Directly behind, ankle deep in water, greatcoats and puttees caked with mud, bayonets fixed, packstraps biting into their shoulders, a supporting wave of ten thousand more infantrymen blew on chilled fingers, puffed on hand-rolled fags, and fidgeted as they waited their turn to advance.

And behind them were seventy thousand more troops – gunners, stretcher-bearers, surgeons, cooks, transport drivers, mule-skinners, foresters, engineers, signalmen, runners, and brass hats – all hived in a bewildering maze of tunnels, dugouts, sunken roads, and trenches that wriggled for more than two miles in a crazy-quilt pattern behind the front lines.

The Canadian Corps (which included one British brigade) faced an incredible challenge. In one day – in fact in one morning – these civilian volunteers from a small country with no military tradition were expected to do what the British and French had failed to do in two years. The timetable called for most of them to be on the crest of the ridge by noon. And they were expected to achieve that victory with fifty thousand fewer men than the French had
lost
in their own frustrated assaults.

Few thought they could succeed. The Germans didn’t believe that any force could dislodge them. A few days before the battle, one confident Bavarian put up a sign reading: “Anybody can take Vimy Ridge but all the Canadians in Canada can’t hold it.” A German officer taken in a raid before the battle told his captor: “You might get to the top of Vimy Ridge but I’ll tell you this: you’ll be able to take all the Canadians back in a rowboat that get there.”

The new generalissimo, Robert-Georges Nivelle, agreed with the Germans. A few weeks before the battle he had declared flatly that the Canadian attempt would end in disaster. He allowed himself to be persuaded to go ahead with it by the British commander-in-chief, Douglas Haig, but even Haig seems to have had doubts. Certainly he saw Vimy as a limited objective at best, something to be won at enormous cost, with no chance of a breakthrough (he prepared for none). It’s clear that he felt it would be hard enough just to hold the ridge in the face of the furious counterattacks for which the Germans were noted.

The Canadian Corps had been in the Vimy sector five months, and they had known since late January that they would be given the task of seizing the ridge. Now they were as ready as they’d ever be. They were, at this point, the best-trained, best-equipped, and best-prepared troops on the Allied side. The Corps with its four Canadian divisions was remarkable in its homogeneity. In an army where divisions were shuttled about like chess men, the Canadians had stuck together, enjoying an
esprit
that was not possible for other British corps. They had been gassed at Ypres and blooded on the Somme, and the shoulder badge “Canada” had made them all brothers, no matter what their language or region.

From the moment he enlisted to the day of his discharge the Canadian soldier was under Canadian control. At Vimy, the men spoke a common idiom. There were certain things that were
theirs
and nobody else’s, certain things they knew about that others did not know: Cyclone Taylor and Newsy Lalonde; Eaton’s catalogue and Marquis wheat; CPR strawberries and Labatt’s India Pale Ale; Tom Longboat, Kit of the
Mail
, Big Bear, and Louis Riel; Mackenzie and Mann; the Calgary
Eye Opener
and
Saturday Night;
Nellie McClung, Henri Bourassa, Pauline Johnson, and the Dumbbells. This was the glue that held them together and made them peacock proud. The British had done their best to frustrate this – to scatter the Canadian units through the British army; but the Canadians would have none of it.

“All we ask,” a member of the Canadian Scottish wrote to his father, “is that we should not be drafted in with the Regular Battalions … we would be better by ourselves … we want to show by our own efforts that Canadians are as good as Territorials … a lot of our unique enthusiasm would be lost if we were doubled up with the Regulars. Take our own battalion; our physique is second to none; the standard of intelligence and individual initiative is, or certainly should be, higher than the ordinary British Regulars. That is why we want to be tried.…”

Now they were about to be tried. The Corps was up to strength: for the first time all four divisions would advance in line over a battlefield they had made their own. They knew every square inch of the ground. They had been trained meticulously to follow the attack plan to the minute. They had pinpointed the German gun positions, mapped the German trenches, and mined the German forward posts. Their moment had come. Peering out into No Man’s Land a few seconds after the barrage began, they could see the German front line catch fire as a continuous line of bursting shells pounded the triple row of enemy trenches guarding the forward slopes of the ridge. This trench system stretched back for seven hundred yards. The first wave was expected to punch through it in just thirty-five minutes.

They could take some comfort in the spectacle opposite. An ocean of lightning seemed to have struck the German positions, obliterating everything and everyone who wasn’t securely underground. A solid barrier of smoke and debris composed of burst sandbags, broken pieces of wood and equipment, and even human bodies was flung up from the opposing lines. “The pounding did not cease. In the space of an hour and forty minutes a quarter of a million shells would be thrown onto the German positions, a barrage rendered more deadly by a hail of seven million machine gun bullets.”

At the same time, the earth trembled as mines, hidden in tunnels under the enemy positions, were touched off, creating miniature volcanoes – glowing infernos masked by pillars of black smoke. To add to the spectacle, huge drums of burning oil were hurled at the enemy strong points. When they exploded into flame they turned night into day, so that the whole ghastly battlefield was illuminated. It was as if a curtain had been suddenly raised to reveal a moonscape of shell holes and gigantic craters, crumbled trenches, broken wire, bits of wood and sacking, old skulls, all poking out of a porridge of gumbo through which the troops, burdened by forty-pound packs, would have to flounder.

Thirty seconds later, as the first wave of Canadians clambered out of the trenches there came a moment of spectacular beauty as hundreds of German rockets sizzled up from the dark bulk of the escarpment. These were SOS flares calling for an artillery bombardment of the Canadian front lines-four miles of dazzling fireworks, daubing the sky in gaudy streaks of green, yellow, orange, and red. For a few seconds the menacing scarp shimmered and danced in the reflective glow. Then those German guns that were still intact answered the call. But most had already been silenced by the Canadian barrage, and the remainder uselessly hammered assembly trenches that were already empty of men.

The Canadians lurched forward, loaded down with equipment, hugging the barrage. Most were frightened and many were terrified, but almost every man was more afraid of showing fear than he was of the enemy guns. Nobody hung back; that was not possible. They were like automatons, trained for months to respond instantly to any order.

Hundreds, in fact, bored by hours of waiting, stiff with cold, soaked through by gumbo, were eager to get under way-so eager that some got too far ahead of the main force and were killed by their own shells. Most were slightly tipsy on the strong army rum and some were roaring drunk. One diminutive platoon commander with the 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles was so intoxicated that he pointed his men the wrong way and ordered them to open fire on the shattered towers of the church at Mont St. Eloi, several miles behind the lines. His sergeant picked him up by the scruff of the neck and dropped him into a shell hole.

But even as the assault was launched men were falling. Royden Barbour, a young subaltern in the 25th Battalion from Nova Scotia, would have no memory of the attack. One moment he was going over the top, impressed by the perfection of it all-the pinpoint timing, the split-second barrage-elated to be a part of the action. The next, he was lying bleeding in a shell hole from wounds in his back and sides, with no idea of where or when he’d been hit.

At about the same time, Billy Buck was helping to pull his brother Lewis out of the trench, using their stretcher as a ladder. Lewis Buck wondered what he’d see first when he advanced. It came as a shock: there, hanging on the barbed wire, was a Canadian corpse blown to bits. The two stretcher-bearers had been told they’d be able to locate the wounded by a rifle stuck into the ground. Now, as far as the eye could see, the Bucks were confronted by a forest of rifles pointing at the sullen skies. Up ahead, the survivors followed the barrage.

One third of the Canadian guns had concentrated their fire on the main German trench system. The remainder formed part of the creeping barrage that moved just ahead of the advancing troops like a protective screen. Again, men would try to describe that deluge of exploding shrapnel. One likened it to a lawnmower cutting a field of grass, another to a rainstorm crossing a lake, a third to a moving Niagara of steel, a fourth to a curtain of water falling off a tin roof in a hailstorm, a fifth to a mass of shooting stars thicker than the Milky Way, a sixth to a line of red-hot fragments sizzling in the chill dawn. All agreed on one thing: the barrage was a moving shield that gave them confidence.

The barrage pounded the forward enemy lines-the mine craters and lightly held posts on the rim of No Man’s Land-for three minutes, then crept forward at the rate of one hundred yards every three minutes, the troops walking closely behind it as they had been trained to do.

To former cavalryman Billy Bishop, now a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps, the scene below was astonishing. This wasn’t war-no men charging forward, bayonets at the alert. Instead they seemed to be wandering casually across No Man’s Land at a leisurely pace as if the whole thing were a great bore. From the air, the whole of No Man’s Land appeared clean and white, fresh snow masking the usual filth and litter. Bishop half expected to see the men below him wake up and run, realizing their danger, but that didn’t happen. He would see a shell burst, see the line of men halt momentarily, see three or four men near the burst topple over, see the stretcher-bearers run out to pick them up, while the line continued slowly forward. It was uncanny; Bishop couldn’t get it out of his head that he was watching a game and not a conflict. Were those little figures below him real? He seemed to be in a different world looking down on a weird puppet show. But the artillery was real enough. From the Canadian gun lines at the rear he could see a long ribbon of incandescent light, and more than once he felt his plane jerk and heave as a shell whistled within a few feet.