Vimy (37 page)

And the battle was not yet over. The north end of the ridge was still in German hands. The Nova Scotia Highlanders kept a precarious hold on the crest of Hill 145, but the enemy was still dug in directly beyond. That night ten volunteers crept out with rifle grenades to attack some of the concrete dugouts holding out on the steep slope. The work was dangerous: the first shots had to tell-there would be no second chance. The men got the job done, cleaned out all the dugouts, killed every German. The following morning, the C.O. sauntered over and spotted Lyle Pugsley, a twenty-two-year-old farmer from Beaconsfield, Nova Scotia. “Aren’t you one of the ten who went out last night in the attack on the dugouts?” he asked. Pugsley nodded. “You may have won a medal,” the C.O. told him. “Draw a number from one of the slips in this helmet.” Pugsley drew but didn’t win. One of the others, a man from River Hebert, was awarded the M.M.

Meanwhile, on the same front, Brigadier-General Victor Odlum had gone forward after dark to try to sort out the remnants of his tattered brigade. They were all in a state of confusion. Odlum started on the left flank and worked his way along to the right, unit by unit, moving some men forward, straightening out the line, placing the troops in position just over the crest of Hill 145. Like the medics, he had no sleep; it was daylight before order was restored. Just as Odlum and two of his staff finished the job, a lone German rushed at them. To the Brigadier’s vast relief, he didn’t open fire. All he wanted to do was surrender.

In the smoking ruins of Thélus that same Tuesday morning, Private Lewis Robertson of the RCRs came upon a bizarre sight. He had been sent out to bury the dead but now spotted four Albertans seated in a shell hole about four feet deep, playing cards. Their heads protruded over the lip of the cavity, and they seemed to be waiting for something – a signal of some kind. It was then that Robertson noticed that each had a little blood coming from the ears. They were all dead of concussion, their bodies otherwise unmarked. Robertson had to tear the cards out of their hands before burying them in the crater.

3

There was no rest for the 4th Division. The eastern slope of Hill 145 and the woods at its base were still held by the enemy. Fresh troops would have to clear them out. That meant that the attack on the Pimple, scheduled for Tuesday, April 10, would have to be postponed. To this point, the men of the 10th Brigade had not been blooded. They were all Westerners from Vancouver, Calgary, Regina, Moose Jaw, and Winnipeg. The success or failure of these final phases of the Battle of Vimy Ridge would depend upon them.

Two battalions of the 10th – the 50th from Calgary and the 44th from Winnipeg – were hurriedly moved south into the sector precariously held by the battered remnants of Odlum’s brigade. Their task was to pass through the captured trenches, vault over Hill 145, and reach the far edge of La Folie Wood at the bottom of the ridge. It was mid-afternoon before this transfer could be effected and a new barrage pattern drawn up to protect the attacking waves.

Now the same scenes that had illuminated the battlefield the previous day were repeated on the northern crest of the ridge. As they trudged forward under that floating canopy of hot steel, men began to topple into the mud. Victor Wheeler’s temples throbbed as he staggered up the slope with the Calgarians, bowed beneath his crushing load of signal wire, Mark 3 telephones, Lucas lamp, binoculars, bombs, and equipment. He watched as the first man of his battalion, Sergeant Harry Diller, was struck by a cluster of shrapnel. “Lucky devil,” somebody said. “He’s got a blighty.” Wheeler could see the gaps between the men around him widening as the German machine guns hammered away. He felt his insides writhe: would there be enough men left to take the objective? It seemed as if he might be the very last man to face the Germans, the carnage was so fearful: men on both sides were impaled on the broken wire like rag dolls or thrown face forward to splash and drown in the bloody water of the shell holes.

Over on Wheeler’s right, Private John Pattison was about to win the Victoria Cross. Pattison was forty-two-old enough to have a son serving in the same unit. As the battalion plunged forward and the Germans raked the front line with machine-gun fire, Pattison spotted an enemy stronghold. Hunched over, jumping from shell hole to shell hole, dodging the traversing bullets, he got within grenade range of the enemy, stood erect, lobbed three bombs, and put the guns out of action. The attack had slowed some of the men crouching in shell holes to escape the fire, but now it picked up momentum as the men behind Pattison moved in with bayonets. Pattison survived the assault but not the war. Seven weeks later, he was killed in front of Lens. His son, following tradition, wore his decoration.

The Winnipeggers advanced on the right of the Calgarians. Sergeant Wesley Runions was cheered at the sight of his commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Dick Davis, who had rebuilt the battalion following the Somme débâcle, nonchalantly swinging his cane – the only weapon he carried – as casually as if he were on a Sunday jaunt. His officers had followed his example; none carried rifles. But just as they leap-frogged through Victor Odlum’s weary troops, a whiz-bang exploded on the crest, and a cloud of shrapnel tore into Runions’s stomach and shoulder. As the medics bound up his wounds, pulled off his outer clothing and snipped off his undershirt, the nose of the German shell fell out. Runions recognized the legendary quality of his close call: he had been spared by a circumstance that had already become a wartime cliché. The shell had struck a New Testament in his tunic pocket. The little book had stopped it from tearing out his heart.

Sergeant Ed Russenholt with the Winnipeg battalion was also heartened by the sight of Davis swinging his cane. He was badly shaken by a grisly spectacle that had faced him when the battalion went over the top. As he watched, the lines of men ahead of him parted to right and left, leaving a gap as if to avoid some hidden obstacle. He couldn’t understand what was happening until he reached the spot himself and saw what it was that had caused them to make the detours. In front of him lay a long triangle of khaki-clad bodies, about one hundred and fifty yards broad and narrowing to a ghastly apex. These were the corpses of the men who had jumped off the previous morning to walk directly into the traversing fire of the German machine guns in the undamaged trench. They lay face down, these dead men, with their rifles in their hands, the bayonets fixed, all pointing forward to their objective as if signalling a ghostly advance.

Now, as he passed over the crest of the ridge, Russenholt could see the devastation caused by the machine guns. On Hill 145 the fire had been so heavy that balls of barbed wire the size of kitchen chairs had been beaten as hard as iron.

In the plain below, the Germans were burning their papers. William Darknell spotted them from the ridge above-a long line of men throwing boxes of documents into an open fire. He trained his machine gun on them and mowed them down.

Within one hour the two battalions had secured their objective and were digging in. But the cost was fearful: the attacking companies of the Calgary battalion lost 228 men, more than a quarter of their total strength, killed, wounded, or missing. Bob Forrest, a runner with the unit, could not hold back his tears as he searched vainly for his buddies from Okotoks, Alberta. Eighteen had gone into battle; only one survived.

4

On the following day, Wednesday, April 11, the Canadians licked their wounds. A full twenty-four hours of rest and reorganization would be needed before the stubborn little Pimple could be attacked. As reserve battalions moved up to relieve the exhausted men in the front lines, the troops awoke to find that everything – horses, wagons, guns, and trenches-was covered in a thick blanket of snow. With the temperature still dropping, it was more like December than April. Andrew Macphail had already noted his first view of the rear areas: lorries mired, wagons in the ditches, a tram car overturned-its load of shells strewn like potatoes over the ground-a crumpled airplane poking its nose over a bank. With the field cleared of wounded and two thousand prisoners in the 2nd Division’s cages, Macphail and his colonel headed out on a tour of inspection of the forward dressing areas. They had no idea what they were in for.

The terrain was worse than the Somme. They tripped over wire and old bones, pit props and iron stakes, praying they wouldn’t set off an unexploded shell lurking beneath the surface. They skirted craters as wide as a small lake and others deep enough to hold a cathedral. The evidence of German defeat was everywhere-the old enemy line was all but indistinguishable from the ruin around them. The Canadians had ploughed and harrowed the enemy, “riddled him like a sieve” in Macphail’s words. Looking down from the slopes of the ridge, he was reminded of a tumultuous sea suddenly frozen and turned to earth.

The engineers were laying a new tram line, so they followed the stakes to what had been the Lens-Arras road, now only a borderline of stumps. German shells began to fall amid the ruins of Thélus; they took refuge in a half-dug gun pit. A young soldier had clawed a coffin-sized hole out of the earth and was sound asleep in it. Macphail crawled in beside him.

The shelling stopped. The two doctors moved out, seeking a regimental aid post supposed to be hidden in a church cellar. Before they could find it the shells rained down again. They scrambled from crater to crater but even as they moved other craters formed. Ahead of them the earth exploded once … twice … three times. Just twelve feet away three new cavities appeared.

By noon the German guns had been temporarily silenced by the Canadian artillery. The church was rubble. The two officers helped set up a new medical post in a cave, then headed north to inspect a second post. They had only a vague idea where they were, for every landmark had been obliterated. When the shelling started again, Macphail was certain his end had come. Instinctively, he tried to protect his right hand from shrapnel wounds. Somehow they escaped, found the post, ordered it evacuated, and searched about to get their bearings. The only landmark on the horizon was the broken tower of the church at Mont St. Eloi, three miles to the west, stark against the glowering sky. With the shells still bursting around them, they hurried back through a field of corpses.

The dead lay everywhere that day: in the shell holes, the craters, the ditches, and by the roadsides. Indeed, they outnumbered the living. Two days before, this muddy plateau had teemed with men. Now only a few clusters could be seen: burial parties picking up the corpses, gunners hauling the artillery forward, a work party extending the tram line, a few others laying signal wires, digging gun pits, or putting up a wireless station. The Canadian Corps had gone to earth, hiding in holes and niches, catching its breath. Even the shell-fire seemed to Macphail to have lost its power. Fragments splintered on his helmet, thudded into the mud, or splashed in the pools of bloody water without affecting him. Nonetheless, he didn’t breathe freely until he reached the old Canadian front line. He and his companion had spent seven hours under fire, unable to relax for a single moment in all that long day.

5

The Pimple-a small wooded knoll at the northern end of the ridge – was another German stronghold. Strengthened with concrete pillboxes, bristling with machine guns, most of them still undamaged, it was a maze of tunnels, dugouts, holes, trenches, and entanglements, all carefully camouflaged and protected by mines, barbed wire, and booby traps. In the pits and craters on the slopes, the German snipers and gunners waited for the inevitable assault.

The original plan had called for a British brigade on the left to attack this objective. But four days before the battle the task had been assigned to the Canadian 10th.

Parts of the 10th had already been blooded two days before in the battle to secure the eastern slopes of the ridge below Hill 145. Now, on Thursday, April 12, other companies of the same two battalions-the 50th and 44th from Calgary and Winnipeg-together with the 46th from Regina and Moose Jaw were assigned to complete the job.

Once again at dawn the Westerners left their trenches to toil up the hill behind the furore of the creeping barrage and in the teeth of a raging snowstorm. It was still dark; the blizzard had wiped out the dawn’s first light. But this time the snow was the soldier’s friend. The men on both sides groped blindly in the blizzard, but it was the German machine gunners who suffered most, for they were unable to see the Canadians stumbling forward. The whirling snow was as much of a shield as the curtain of shells.

There was no respite for the signallers. For the second time in two days, Private Victor Wheeler, the twenty-one-year-old with the Calgary battalion, went over the top with his equipment. Until this moment, he had been numb to gruesome spectacles around him. Now, for the first time, the horror and tragedy of war struck home. A German 5.9 shell exploded in the midst of his section, blowing some men sky high, tearing others to pieces. One of his closest friends, Harry Waller, was blasted into the mouth of an old mine shaft, so badly ripped up it was difficult to pull him free. Waller had been Wheeler’s intimate companion for two years, one of three brothers, all in the same battalion. As Wheeler cradled Harry’s head in his arms, something inside him snapped, and he felt his throat choke with sobs. Waller’s back was twisted out of shape, one arm and one leg were broken, a shin bone protruded through the flesh, and shell fragments stuck out of his head. His eyes were already filming over as his brother Art knelt above him, weeping. His wounds were mortal, but it took him five days to die. Wheeler couldn’t linger. The Calgarians swept forward, leaving the two brothers alone on the battlefield.

The postponement of the battle had given the Germans time to bring up fresh troops, the élite Prussians of the 5th Guard-six footers all, who sneered at the Canadians as “untrained Colonial levies.”

In spite of that, the despised colonials captured the Pimple in less than two hours. By then the Germans were pouring out of the shell holes begging for mercy. Not all got it. Some of the Calgarians remembered the gruff advice of the battalion’s second-in-command, Major J.R.L. Perry, a tough Boer War veteran, who had told them: “I don’t want any
angels
in my battalion, when you get to France. I don’t want you to take any
prisoners!
I hope you understand.”