Brave Battalion (12 page)

Lt. Urquhart knew in his gut that they were in for a shelling like they had never seen before and so was not surprised when an aircraft appeared overhead at 0530, lazily circling, its Iron Crosses marking it as German. Surely it was an artillery spotter plane determining the co-ordinates of the trench. Shortly thereafter the first shells fell and with the plane still overhead to correct the fire the guns soon “got our mark. Some men were blown out of [the] trench, others injured by shrapnel, others killed by shock.” From the left flank of the woods, machine-gun fire made any movement hazardous and hindered evacuation of wounded. “Difficult to get back to dressing station with wounded and some men hit in so doing,” Urquhart noted in his diary, “so ultimately we had to forbid men to cross and kept wounded in trench, lifting dead over parapet. Very long day and glad when anxious time came to an end. All night we were standing to, every five minutes, and dawn was just as anxiously looked for as dusk.”
⁴⁰

While the 16th and 10th Battalions endured a day of being battered by artillery fire, the Second Battle of Ypres raged on across an ever-widening front as more British and Canadian battalions rushed to close the dangerous gap created by the previous day's gas attack. Gen. Smith-Dorrien ordered V Corps to carry out an attack between Bois des Cuisiniers and the Yser Canal at 1440 hours, but then delayed it to 1626 while failing to notify the supporting artillery which duly began firing guns at 1445. Duly alerted, the Germans met the advancing battalions with withering fire from Mauser Ridge, attempting to deny heroic efforts that carried many troops to within 200 yards of the enemy trenches. Although unable to regain Mauser Ridge, the British troops established a strong defensive line 600 yards from the German forward trenches.

Although the initial impetus of their offensive had been blunted, the Germans were now committed to trying to destroy the salient. At 0400 hours on April 24 they attempted to create a new breakthrough at the salient's northern tip with a second gas attack directed at the 2
^nd
and 3
^rd
Canadian infantry brigades. As this attack struck well to the north-east of the woods, the Canadian Scottish were unaware of the cause behind the sudden crescendo of gunfire from that direction. Along with the remnants of the 10
^th
Battalion, they were in the middle of being relieved from their forward position by the 2
^nd
Battalion. Although the changeover was to have been completed before dawn, various delays resulted in the withdrawal taking place in full daylight. Their destination was 3
^rd
Canadian Infantry Brigade headquarters, which was now situated about a mile to the south near the hamlet of Wieltje. Rather than risk trying to move in the open, Leckie led the men in single file along a shallow ditch bordering a narrow road that ran in the desired direction. Crawling on hands and knees along the mud-mired ditch to avoid the sniper fire cracking overhead, each man deepened the parallel grooves that had been created by those who had passed down its length ahead of him. At Wieltje, the 16
^th
Battalion set up a defensive position in a series of dugouts near brigade headquarters.

Virtually the entire 1
^st
Canadian Infantry Division sector was being subjected to a massive artillery barrage, so that movement anywhere in the headquarters area was hazardous. Crouched in their holes, the Canadian Scottish could glimpse “the advance of our troops under shell fire [but] also … the advance of some of the Germans.” Urquhart recognized that much of the artillery raining down consisted of “woolly bears, loud-noised, green-smoked shrapnel shells.” He also heard “a constant rattle of musketry beyond St. Julien towards the north-eastern face of the Salient.” Soon the gunfire spread to the woods that the two battalions had handed over to 2
^nd
Battalion. It seemed the Canadians out on the sharp end were fighting for their very survival.
⁴¹

And so they were, particularly where the chlorine gas cloud drifted into the lines precisely at the join between 2
^nd
and 3
^rd
Brigade's frontages, held respectively by the former's 8
^th
Battalion and the latter's 15
^th
Battalion. Issued cotton bandoliers with instructions to urinate on these and then cover their mouths in order to ward off the effects of the gas, the men duly followed instructions but many collapsed vomiting, blinded, and writhing in agony as their lungs were seared anyway. In 8
^th
Battalion's sector the gas was less concentrated, which enabled some men to withstand its effects and still man their positions on the parapets, while the company farthest from the junction points was entirely unaffected. Consequently this battalion was able to maintain a rapid rate of fire despite many of their Ross rifles repeatedly jamming so that the men had to kick the firing bolts loose with their boots or the flat of an entrenching shovel. Faced with stiff resistance on this front, the German advance here foundered. But in the area held by the 15
^th
Battalion the gas had killed the majority of the men or rendered them helpless. German infantry flooded through the resulting gap and drove toward Gravenstafel Ridge. By mid-morning the apex of the salient began collapsing inward and at 1500 hours St. Julien was overrun.

Yet remnants of 2
^nd
Brigade still clung tenaciously to Gravenstafel Ridge and throughout Sunday, April 25, the slaughter continued as Canadian and British battalions frantically counterattacked the Germans, who were still seeking to keep the momentum of their advance going. For a week the battle raged until on May 3 the badly mauled Canadian division was pulled back. While the battle would continue almost to the end of May, the Germans were never able to regain the initiative, so the salient held. In those first few days, the Canadian division's holding “in the face of an enemy who by employing numbers of infantry supported by a preponderance of heavy artillery and machine guns attempting to exploit the advantage gained by his introduction of poison gas into modern warfare” saved the salient despite German advances in some sectors of three miles.

But the British Expeditionary Force's losses were staggering—59,275 casualties between April 22 and May 31. For its part, 1
^st
Canadian Infantry Division reported 208 officers and 5,828 other ranks killed, wounded, or taken prisoner between April 15 and May 3.
⁴²

Few Canadian battalions had suffered more than the Canadian Scottish. “We had a terrible charge,” Captain Rae had written his mother on April 28, “and it is only by God's mercy that I came out alive. 26 officers went in and only 9 came out unhurt. I lost all my officers.”
⁴³
Urquhart echoed Rae's dismay in his diary note of April 26. “What heavy casualties. 17 officers out of 26 put out of action. Captains [John] Geddes, [Cecil] Merritt, [Hamilton] Fleming, [James Herrick] McGregor killed. Captain [George Willis] Jamieson missing [and later found to have been killed]. Lieuts. George Ager, [John Gibson] Kenworthy, [Victor Alexander] MacLean, [Angus] Armour, [Graham] Ainslie, [Edward] Gilliatt, [Reginald] Tupper, Captains [Sydney] Goodall and [George] Ross all wounded. Loss in men about 450 and in Camerons 117—what a terrible toll!”
⁴⁴
Although Urquhart didn't know it, Captain Ross and Lt. Ager were also dead. Wounded, Lt. Victor MacLean had ordered his men to leave him where he had fallen in the woods as the Germans were but 20 yards' distant. “He had bade the men good-bye,” so they could escape unimpeded. MacLean was taken prisoner.
⁴⁵

Merritt, who had suffered a desperate wound during the charge, had been dragged to the safety of the captured trench. When two of his men volunteered to carry the officer back across the open ground to safety, Merritt refused to expose them to the risk. Shortly before dawn, worried the Germans were going to counterattack, Merritt raised himself up and started issuing orders to get his men ready. A German sniper round struck Merritt in the head and he fell over dead.
⁴⁶

Fleming, who had predicted his inevitable death would come “early in the game,” had been shot in the knee during the first moments of the charge. Pausing only a moment to bandage the wound with a handkerchief, he led No. 2 Company on to carry the trench. When fire from a German machine-gun post just in front of the woods threatened the tenuous Canadian hold on this position, Fleming quickly assembled a mixed force of men from both the 10
^th
and 16
^th
battalions. Jumping onto the parapet, Fleming led the men in a rush on the machine gun, but the fire from it was so intense that the force reeled back into the cover of the trench. Fleming carried on alone, disappearing into the darkness. Next morning, his body was found sprawled with one foot resting on the top of the post's parapet. Merritt, Fleming, and Geddes had been three of the battalion's original company commanders while the other, Major Lorne Ross, had died earlier on April 16. The loss of these four senior officers dealt the Canadian Scottish command chain a crippling blow.

The battalion's final casualty toll was 153 other ranks killed between April 22 and May 4, with another 239 wounded, and 30 lost as prisoners for a total of 422. Nine officers died, seven were wounded, and one was taken prisoner.
⁴⁷
The Canadian Scottish had been effectively cut in half. But there would be no rest to integrate reinforcements. On May 14, after only ten days out of the line, the Canadian division marched urgently toward the Festubert-Givenchy area and a return to battle.

- MAY 14-JUNE 13, 1915 -

During the eight months preceding the Second Battle of Ypres, the Canadian Scottish had overcome their initial distrust of those who wore different tartans or spoke with accents betraying differing roots or class backgrounds to become something akin to a family. Before that deadly charge on the night of April 22-23, casualties had been few and the Can Scots had often acted like older brothers to the replacements by helping hone their survival skills and teach them the tricks of trench life. By May 9, when Lt.-Gen. Edwin Alderson addressed the battalion by reading messages from all parts of the Empire that praised the stand the division had made at Ypres, the veterans stood among an equal number of strangers, and it was the distant rumble of artillery most of them heard more keenly than Alderson's voice. Out there in the distance somewhere men died and that “gave a warning of the chances of the future, which distracted their attention from listening to the praise of what had been done in the past.”
¹

On the evening of May 14, as 3
^rd
Canadian Infantry Brigade marched out of the salient, the survivors of Ypres kept a wary distance from the replacements. Most of these had joined the battalion on April 28, arriving from England as part of what was known as the Prince Rupert Company. Raised and commanded by Cyrus Wesley Peck, a forty-four-year-old businessman from the British Columbia coastal town, the company numbered 225 men. With a stout, egg-shaped body, and a thick, full moustache, Peck lumbered walrus-like about rather than strode, suffered asthma, and hardly looked a soldier. While Lt.-Col. Robert Leckie gave him command of No. 1 Company, he distributed the Prince Rupert men throughout the rest of the battalion. Leckie did the same with a 213-strong draft of reinforcements raised and sent overseas by the 50
^th
Gordon Highlanders in Victoria when it arrived on May 7.

Not all the reinforcements sent to the battalion were newcomers. A small number drawn from the battalion's base camp in England had been brought over by the popular Seaforth lieutenant Roderick Ogle Bell-Irving. This contingent included nine other lieutenants, who were a welcome addition because many platoons had fallen under the command of sergeants or even corporals when their officers had been killed or wounded. The son of a prominent Vancouver merchant and benefactor of the city's Seaforth Highlanders, the twenty-four-year-old Bell-Irving had quit a clerking job when war was declared and quickly been posted as a Seaforth lieutenant. To his dismay, the young officer had been designated surplus and left at the training depot in England when the battalion moved to France. Bell-Irving had vowed that nothing would keep him from seeing front-line service now that he was back in the Canadian Scottish fold.

Just before midnight the Canadian Scottish reached their billets near Merville where the First British Army's reserve camp behind the Festubert lines was situated. Reporting to 3
^rd
Canadian Infantry Brigade headquarters, Leckie learned that an attack was likely within twenty-four hours to support the French Tenth Army's staggering offensive in the area of the Artois Plateau between Lens and Arras.