Brave Battalion (18 page)

The Canadian Scottish spent New Year's Day out of the line and enjoyed a fine dinner. January also brought improving weather that allowed for repairs on many of the defensive works and communication trenches destroyed by the rains. On February 3, the brigade moved to a rest area at Meteren, a town about one mile from Bailleul. The Ploegsteert tour was winding down for Canadian Corps, but there remained several weeks of front-line duty. And the front remained hazardous, a fact rammed poignantly home to the ranks of 3
^rd
Brigade when Robert Leckie was badly wounded in both thighs by shrapnel from an artillery shell on the night of February 17-18.
²⁵

A few days later the command went to Brigadier George Tuxford. Welsh-born, the newly married twenty-year-old Tuxford had immigrated to Canada in 1890 to take up ranching near Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. In 1898 he drove a herd of cattle across the Rockies and up to the gold miners at Dawson City, Yukon, for what was then the longest cattle drive in Canadian history. Back home, he joined the 16
^th
Mounted Rifles as a militia officer in 1910 and when war broke out went overseas as commander of the 5
^th
(Western Cavalry) Battalion of 2
^nd
Canadian Infantry Brigade. At Second Ypres he had led this battalion with distinction through a desperate fight that prevented the division's right flank being turned.
²⁶
Tuxford would prove a highly capable brigadier.

Little more than a week after Tuxford assumed command of the brigade, Canadian Corps left the Ploegsteert front toward one that held little in the way of good memories for the men of 1
^st
Division—a return to the Ypres Salient. On March 28, as the Canadian Scottish marched into the salient they “could hear ahead heavy gun fire, and in front of us shell bursts could be distinctly seen.” This was the “dreaded front” that they remembered from the bitter spring of 1915.
²⁷

- MARCH 28-AUGUST 9, 1916 -

The Ypres Salient was reputedly the most miserable, dangerous place on earth. Abandoning it entirely had been advocated repeatedly as this would straighten the Allied line through the ruins of Ypres and eliminate being overlooked from three sides by German guns on the ridges. But Chief-of-Staff Gen. J.J. Joffre summed up the prevailing French and British belief when he declared it was better his
poilus
“be killed in their tracks rather than draw back.” The salient had become a symbol of defiance sanctified by the blood of the thousands who had died there. To abandon it would render those deaths meaningless.
¹
Captain Hugh Urquhart had another theory—pure bloody British doggedness refused to let go of anything. Only the tenacity of the soldiers caught in its maw prevented its “unpardonable” loss.

But none of the veteran Canadians welcomed returning, wondering instead “what move fate would now make for or against them in this place, where the odds were so heavily piled against the soldier.” It was a feeling Urquhart thought shared by “all infantrymen, who were compelled to renew acquaintance with this spot.” Seconded to 3
^rd
Brigade headquarters, Urquhart was fairly confident of surviving despite having to regularly shunt back and forth from the battalion to brigade on various errands. Unlike a company officer or a lieutenant leading a platoon, whose lives were often measured in minutes from the moment the whistle sounded for an advance, Urquhart faced a reasonable probability of being killed or maimed by a chance shell or sniper's bullet.

What made the Ypres Salient so dangerous was that the Allied troops there were trapped “inside a sort of saucer having but a precarious hold on the edge, with the enemy close up peering over on three sides, hurling destruction from the complete assortment of his weapons.” In such a place, Urquhart ruefully noted “it requires great tenacity and a bit of humour to hold on.”
²

After the First Battle of Ypres wound down, the crescent-shaped salient had stood about eight miles wide at its base with a six-mile-deep apex. The Second Battle of Ypres had shrunk those dimensions, but only a little. Its citizens had long ago abandoned the once glorious Flemish capital of Ypres when the German artillery came into range. Soldiers still thronged like rats amid the city's ruins, billeting inside half-destroyed buildings and cellars. The city's long-destroyed streetcar line terminus on Menin Road near a north-south junction was so frequently shelled it was nicknamed Hellfire Corner. To hide the movement of men and supplies, the British had circled Ypres with huge tarpaulins to obstruct the view of German artillery observers who responded by regularly drenching known routes of movement with shellfire.
³

The Canadian Corps arrived three divisions strong with another slated to deploy in August 1916. But lacking the 4
^th
Canadian Infantry Division, and with the newly deployed 3
^rd
Canadian Infantry Division short of its own artillery, the latter was supported by gunners from the Indian 3
^rd
(Lahore) Division. Fifty-six-year-old Maj.-Gen. Malcolm Smith Mercer, who had formerly commanded 1
^st
Division's 1
^st
Brigade, headed up 3
^rd
Division.
⁴

A hiccup in the relief plan saw Canadian Corps beginning to take over from V Corps precisely at the same time that its British 3
^rd
Division was scheduled to put in an attack on the village of St. Eloi. An extensive artillery bombardment was to precede the assault, but hopes for success were really pinned on a scheme to detonate six massive mines that would destroy a 600-yard section of German frontage. Noting that the British division was badly worn out and depleted by casualties, Lt.-Gen. Edwin Alderson suggested that 2
^nd
Canadian Infantry Division assume responsibility for the attack. But, as the British troops had specially trained for the operation and there was no time to similarly train the Canadians, it was decided to go ahead as planned. Once St. Eloi was captured during the March 27 operation, 2
^nd
Division would take over the objective.
⁵

Tunnelling under enemy lines to sow mines was an increasingly common tactic, and the predominantly clay soil in the salient made it an ideal area of operation. Engineers had started the tunnels running from the British front to St. Eloi in August 1915, working at depths ranging from 50 to 60 feet. By late March, six mines, sized in accordance to the destruction desired on the given section of German trench overhead, were deployed in a matching number of tunnels. One contained only 600 pounds of ammonal while another held a massive 31,000 pounds. Detonated in combination, the mines were expected to obliterate the German defenders so that the attacking infantry could then plunge through the gap and advance about 300 yards.

At 0415 hours the attack began with an opening artillery salvo and detonation of the six mines followed over an interval of only a few seconds. The British Official History described that “it appeared as if a long village was being lifted through flames into the air.”
⁶
Lord Beaverbrook (Sir Max Aitken), serving as the General Representative of Canada at the front, wrote in his 1917
Canada in Flanders
that it was “like the sudden outburst of a volcano.”
⁷
The explosions were felt and heard in southern England.

At Ground Zero the results exceeded anticipations alarmingly. Existing landmarks were decimated and some British trenches collapsed as well as the German targets “like packs of cards.” Two German infantry companies were annihilated and the previously important piece of tactical real estate known as The Mound was reduced to a gaping hole. A tailing pile from a brickfield, the thirty-foot-high Mound had covered a half acre. Heavy shelling over many months had whittled away half its height, but now The Mound was entirely gone.

At first the attack went well with the first three craters on the right quickly overrun and the British troops managing to bull their way through to the German third line 200 yards beyond. On the left flank, however, devastation from the explosions rendered landmarks unrecognizable. Confused, the assault troops halted in a large crater designated as Crater 6 in the mistaken belief they were on the assigned objectives of Craters 4 and 5. For three days the fighting raged with neither British nor German troops taking command of the two craters. But then German troops set up a machine-gun post inside Crater 5 and the British matched this with one of their own in Crater 4. On April 3, the British managed to overrun Crater 5 and the week's fighting drew to a close with all assigned objectives but one taken. The sole objective remaining in German hands was Point 85, a height of ground in No Man's Land the Germans immediately began using as a forming-up point for counterattacks.

At noon the following day, 2
^nd
Canadian Infantry Division took over the front, finding its original trenches all but destroyed by the mine explosions and the 1,000-yard new line running in front of the craters defended by a trench no deeper than a drainage ditch. Bloated corpses and body parts protruded out of the mud or floated in the watery pools inside the craters. Tactically the position posed a nightmare to garrison—the ground so disturbed that the water table had risen virtually everywhere almost to the surface making trench digging a futile enterprise. Four of the craters were so closely clustered they formed an impassable barrier that forced troops moving from the rear to the front to carry out a wide detour around them. Crater 5—part of this cluster—was 50 feet deep and 180 feet across. The earth blasted from its heart formed a massive rampart that rose between 12 and 20 feet above ground and spilled outward for 50 yards in all directions. The Canadian Official Historian later declared that rarely had any troops been required to take over a “less advantageous position.”
⁸

1
^st
Canadian Infantry Division held the front lines immediately north of 2
^nd
Division, but its troops had little idea of the precariousness of the situation to their south. The sounds of bombardments and counter-bombardments clearly indicated a fierce contest was underway, but with the Ypres-Comines Canal cutting between the divisional lines, 1
^st
Division could play no useful role there.

The Canadian Scottish found their area of operations—so familiar to the veterans—difficult enough. “There stood ‘The Snout,' ‘Hill 60,' the village of Wytschaete perched on the northerly shoulder of our old friend, the Wytschaete-Messines Ridge, and the ruins of Hollebeke or Blue Château on the banks of the Ypres-Comines Canal at the foot of it. ... Prostrate before the gaze of the watchers on those ramparts, lay the city of Ypres, the hub of the salient, which radiated derelict canals and railways, and the roads and paths over which hastened the specks of humanity. … Even the rest camps in distant areas were at the mercy of the enemy, for every trace of habitation—the smoke or the dust by day, or the glimmer of light by night—lay open to his observation.”
⁹

South of Ypres, behind the Canadian front, stood 511-foot-high Mont Kemmel, the eastern anchor for a range of hills stretching westward across the otherwise flat Flanders plain to the sea.
¹⁰
But Kemmel and the rest of the range was too far back to serve as an observation point or defensive position. Their heights only reinforced the sense that soldiers in the salient lived inside a saucer. Movement by daylight was safe only for men moving warily in ones and twos. Anything larger drew immediate artillery or mortar fire. This meant conducting all supply and unit movement at night, but knowing this the Germans subjected all likely routes to sporadic artillery fire from dusk to dawn.
¹¹

Night in the salient was surreal, the flash and rumble of the German guns giving the impression of an endless sheet-lightning storm. Very lights and other flares bathed No Man's Land in a ghostly light under which the barbed wire aprons glimmered. Nowhere was safe from shellfire, the shriek of incoming rounds usually heard too late for those struck by it to find cover. “When your number's up …” the soldiers declared.

No Man's Land was routinely subjected to untargeted searching fire by German machine guns, and snipers were always lurking and ready to shoot at the slightest movement within their range. At night, the racket was worse than during the days, so soldiers had to learn to sleep through it as best they could. And always there was the cold and damp that pervaded the trenches.

Dawn brought a welcome respite. Urquhart noted then that “nature, as if aware that she would be left undisturbed, reasserted herself. The haze of the night's bombardment still floated around; the smell of the high explosive still tainted the air; but the skylark mounted up singing gaily. The fragrance of the blossoming hedges, the scent of flowers in the neglected gardens, the freshness of the morning air mingled in a draught of sweetness and advanced bravely to defeat the poison of death. The sun peeped over the summit of Wytschaete and gilded Kemmel with its tints; the war and its carnage dissolved for a fleeting moment into a mirage of beauty and peace.”
¹²