Brave Battalion (32 page)

Canadian Corps relieved the 2
^nd
Anzac Corps on October 18, moving into a front that ran along the Stroombeek Valley between Gravenstafel Ridge and the heights of Passchendaele. The Canadians had known this ground during previous deployments, but they barely recognized it now. The villages of St. Jean, Wieltje, and Fortuin had disappeared without a trace. So had the woods that had been green in 1915 and the farms that had still looked prosperous. In their place was a wasteland.

The shelling that destroyed all the natural drainage had combined with relentless rains to transform the low ground facing the ridge into a deep bog of yellow mud. The countless shell-holes were brimming with brackish water. Oozing mud had swallowed the roads and footpaths whole. Duckboard pathways built over the mud were perilous, and soldiers could conceivably drown with a misstep. Strewn everywhere were corpses, entangled in the wire on the slopes of the ridges, floating in the shell-holes, and laying half-buried in the mud. There had been no ceasefires and the removal of wounded alone was almost beyond the resources of the stretcher-bearers. It was not uncommon for sixteen men to be required to carry out a single wounded soldier and inevitably some members of a stretcher-bearer party would be shot down by the machine guns on the ridge. Rats picked through the mud for their next meal and, more boldly—chattering and flapping—did thousands of crows. Until temperatures dropped to freezing, flies continued to swarm by the millions, combining with the omnipresent lice and fleas to constantly crawl upon the men's skin and uniforms. The stench of rotting meat mixed with human and animal waste was appalling.

Currie, who “consistently sought to pay the price of victory in shells and not the lives of his men,” concentrated on getting the guns needed before Haig forced an attack upon him. Inherent to the Canadian Corps were 350 field and heavy guns manned by 20,000 men, but he had been forced to leave some of these behind in the Lens area. Promised that 250 heavies had been left by the Australians for Canadian use, Currie's gunners found only 227 and 89 of these were non-operational. Of 306 18-pounder field guns, only half were serviceable and many were “dotted about in the mud wherever they happened to get bogged.” Because of the mud, most of the guns were closely and dangerously bunched together.

The gunners and engineers set about putting things to rights with construction. Between mid-October and mid-November they constructed two miles of double plank road and more than 4,000 yards of heavy tramlines that enabled the movement of guns, ammunition, and men. Entire brigades were put to carrying and building.
²¹
1
^st
Division's 3
^rd
Brigade drew the lot of serving as a workforce and so the Canadian Scottish “for miles … trudged under the shell fire, up the roads and narrow board walks to Passchendaele, at the apex of the salient; they supplied work parties and carrying parties; they held the scratches and shell-holes dignified with the name of front line; No. 16 Platoon, by means of a minor operation, captured a ruined house on the left of the Battalion front; but neither the 16
^th
nor any other unit of the 3
^rd
Brigade took part in a major attack.”
²²
Meanwhile, the corps paid the cost of the construction work with 1,500 casualties.
²³

Currie kept negotiating postponements. Haig insisted he must gain possession of Passchendaele, the little Flanders crossroads village that stood on the centre of the ridge's crest. Currie decided the only way to get there was by three limited advances with each phase remaining well inside the range of his artillery. Once on the objective, the infantry would dig in and pause for about three days while the gunners dragged their artillery forward to establish a new firing line. Because conditions were so vile and dangerous—every square inch being subject to German fire—Currie decided it was too obvious a signal that an attack was coming to assemble the assaulting brigades in the front lines only a short time before Zero Hour. Instead, they would occupy the front lines two days before the attack, even though this meant they would be exposed to all the normal stress of front-line duty during this period.

Finally, Currie declared he was ready to attack on October 26. Third and Fourth Divisions would lead with their axis centred on the village but separated by the impassably flooded Ravebeek swamp. They would go up against German positions tied together by an array of concrete pillboxes concealing any number of machine guns and thickly protected by belts of wire. There would be two keys to victory: the firepower of the gunners—and the sheer guts of the infantry. If either failed the Canadians would be slaughtered to no avail.

On October 25, the already cheerless weather broke with a heavy rainfall. At dawn the following morning the assault battalions picked their way forward behind a rolling barrage, trying to circumvent the shell-holes. Still, several men lost their footing and drowned as their heavy equipment pulled them under. Yellow mud clung to their gear and clothing. Soon each man dragged along an extra twenty to thirty pounds of muck in addition to their fighting kit.

The platoon tactics practised so assiduously before Vimy Ridge served the Canadians well as they closed on the pillboxes, whose inherent strength also proved their weakness. Able to see only what lay in view through the narrow apertures, the German gunners depended on infantry in the trenches behind them to protect them from being attacked from blind sides. Recognizing this vulnerability, one platoon section would hit the rear trenches with withering fire from a flank while the rest rushed forward and eliminated the gunners with Mill bombs. German prisoners could be left there by the assault troops and mopped up later by follow-on forces. This was a deadly game, however, because the Canadians were exposed and under constant fire from German positions farther up the slope as they clawed their way toward the summit.

The two divisions took three days to gain their first objective at a cost of 2,481 men. But they were still well short of the prize—Passchendaele. On October 30, the reserve battalions renewed the drive, gaining 1,000 yards across a 2,800-yard-wide front for 2,321 casualties. That left 3
^rd
and 4
^th
divisions spent, so Currie fed the 1
^st
brigades of both 1
^st
and 2
^nd
divisions forward on November 6. The fresh troops succeeded with 2
^nd
Division's 27
^th
Battalion, claiming the honour of eliminating the pillboxes where the village had once stood. Victory came at a terrible cost, with 734 men killed out of a total casualty toll of 2,238. There remained the ridge's summit and Haig demanded its possession. On November 10, 1
^st
Division's 7
^th
and 8
^th
Battalions seized it and then desperately repelled a succession of counterattacks. At nightfall the Germans slunk back and the Canadians established a series of outposts in shell-holes and dugouts on Passchendaele's east slope. Losses this day numbered 1,094 casualties of which 420 died. But the day's action concluded the Third Battle of Ypres, also known as Second Passchendaele. Four days later the Canadians started handing off the front and by the 20
^th
had departed the godforsaken salient for good. Passchendaele had cost the corps 15,654 casualties, just a few hundred less than Currie's prediction.
²⁴

“I look back on the Passchendaele show as a nightmare,” one Canadian Scottish soldier wrote. “The ground was strewn with our dead. I have never seen anything to compare with the holocaust. When I think of shell-holes filled with water; the road leading up to the ridge heavily shelled day and night; wading through water, mud up to the knees; the stretcher-bearers carrying the wounded, eight men to a stretcher, and sometimes the whole party would be smashed up before they reached the dressing station, it makes me wonder how the troops stood it all.”
²⁵

The Canadian Scottish thanked their luck to have been spared an offensive role. But they could never forget the Ypres Salient or the fact that more than half their total casualties during the course of the war occurred inside its maw.

While Canadian Corps was granted a long-deserved break, the British launched a new major offensive at Cambrai. Passchendaele had still raged as Lt.-Gen. Julian Byng and his Third Army put final touches to an audacious plan that, in one bold move, sought to “rupture…the German front from St. Quentin, seventeen miles south of Cambrai, to the canalized River Sensée, five miles north of the city. It was Byng's intention to gain possession of the area lying between the Canal du Nord and the St. Quentin Canal, bounded to the north by the Sensée.… With this accomplished the whole German line west of the Canal du Nord would be endangered.”
²⁶

Before being ordered to Passchendaele, Currie had hoped the Canadians would be part of this operation—recognizing that its execution might revolutionize the art of warfare. But Passchendaele left it too spent to participate.

Third Army intended to unleash the war's first truly mechanized and combined arms offensive, which the Cambrai front ideally suited. Low, gently rolling ground little pocked by the shelling that had chewed up most of the Western Front rendered it ideal tank country, and the British planned to employ 378 in support of five infantry divisions. Together this combined force would smash the Hindenburg Line. Once this formidable German defensive line was breached the Cavalry Corps astride their chargers would sweep across the open plain to isolate Cambrai and win a crossing over the Sensée while the infantry cleared the city and Bourlon Wood to the northwest. When the infantry and tanks caught up to the cavalry at the Sensée, the British would cut off any German forces still holding the front lines to the west by attacking their rear.

Ahead of the army advance, hundreds of Royal Flying Corps aircraft would swoop down to plaster the German forward trenches with bombs, while 1,000 artillery pieces lay down a massive barrage. Coordinating the air strikes and artillery to occur in concert with the offensive represented another tactical innovation—employment of massed armour being the other. The commonplace protracted pre-assault bombardment was abandoned in order to gain surprise. The gunners would not even pre-register targets. Instead they would shoot from the map, relying on recent survey techniques and better calibration of guns.

Intelligence reports indicated the Germans were unconcerned about this sector of front. They rotated three divisions into the area at a time, using it as a rest stop for battle-weary troops from the Ypres Salient—gaining it the sobriquet “Flanders sanatorium.” While German intelligence had noted that Third Army was more active here than normal, it had issued warnings only to expect more localized raiding.

At 0620 hours on November 20, when the RFC suddenly swarmed from the skies and the guns unleashed one massive volley of fire the Germans were caught entirely surprised. The front-line troops, taking the brunt of the artillery and aerial attacks, looked out at No Man's Land fearfully to witness “the unprecedented and awesome sight and sound of a long line of tanks rumbling forward” from a start line no more than 1,000 yards away. Behind came great waves of infantry. The tanks flattened the barbed wire. Then they released large clusters of wood called “fascines” that were attached to their front ends into the trenches and ground across these impromptu bridges.

Six thousand dazed and bloodied Germans surrendered without offering the slightest resistance and the mighty juggernaut continued to advance despite stiffening resistance as reinforcements frantically tried to plug the hole. By evening, the British had torn the Hindenburg Line open with gains of three to four miles in depth at a cost of 4,000 casualties. But the tanks had suffered badly, 65 being destroyed by German fire and another 114 breaking down or becoming stuck. The British had also failed to break the Masnières-Beaurevoir Line—the last major German trench—before it was heavily reinforced, which made it impossible to unleash the cavalry. A communication mix-up, however, had resulted in “B” Squadron of the Fort Garry Horse—part of the Canadian Cavalry Brigade serving in the British 5
^th
Cavalry Division—believing the ground open. They rode instead into a slaughter from which only forty men returned.
²⁷

The impetus lost, British Third Army was forced onto the defensive and, over the next three days, lost virtually all the ground gained. Had they been reinforced, Byng's troops might have held, but Passchendaele had claimed all the British reserves. In the first week of December, a prolonged snowstorm ended the fighting. An attack for which expectations had run high cost 44,000 casualties with nothing to show but German losses of 41,000. The year ended with Allied morale at its lowest ebb. Not only had the costly offensives of 1917 largely ended in disaster, but Russia had surrendered, freeing up hundreds of German divisions for service on the Western Front. On October 24, the Allies had been given a foretaste of the import of Russia's surrender when Germany and Austria launched a massive offensive against Italy at Caporetto. In a matter of days, the Italians lost 80 miles and 265,000 men surrendered. Only the hurried reinforcement by five British and six French divisions prevented a complete collapse.