Brave Battalion (33 page)

The Canadian Scottish closed the year facing Lens and Méricourt as part of a new Canadian Corps deployment. Despite the fact that both combatants practised active defence, which for the Germans entailed nightly raids while the Canadians concentrated on ambushing the raiders before they penetrated the outer defences, the sector was considered a quiet one. Since December the entire Western Front had shivered in the coldest temperatures so far recorded during the war. The Canadian Scottish rotated trench duty on a front running from immediately north of the Lens Canal on the left to a deep railway cutting south of the Lens-Béthune Road on the right. There was no contiguous trench. The front consisted instead of separated posts inside the ruins and cellars of houses that had once made up the village of Liévin.

As usual, the Germans held overlooking high ground, so the Canadians played a game of “hide and seek” to prevent them from identifying which posts were actively held. All movement was at night, which had worked well until the front became covered in “a mantle of snow.” After that the Germans could clearly see the footprints leading to each post and were able to mark their positions before the snow melted. Then, on one of the “bright moonlight nights which prevailed, [the enemy] saw the relief parties moving out [and] opened on them with his large [trench mortars]. He could have employed no more effective weapons. The huge bombs burst amongst the houses and on the roadways, sending showers of bricks and stones in all directions and inflicting many casualties.”

December 23, one Can Scot wrote in a letter, was “the coldest day I have seen out here.” The battalion spent the day on the move back to corps reserve at Canada Camp in Château de la Haie. This, the soldier added, was “the rottenest, coldest bare camp we have ever seen.” In these drab surroundings, in the midst of continuous cold and blustery weather, the battalion passed Christmas and New Years. “At midnight, 1917- 18, Last Post was blown, ‘Auld Lang Syne' sung, and immediately afterward the Pipe Band played in the New Year.”
²⁸

A week later, the Canadian Scottish cheerfully marched away from the front lines entirely to the town of Bruay. They narrowly beat being caught in a blizzard en route that left behind three to four inches of snow quickly blown into high drifts by a sharp wind. Having come to Bruay for a three-week training period, the troops could do little but hole up and wait for the snow to abate. After several days the skies cleared but the snow melted so rapidly it flooded much of the town and adjacent training area. Abandoning the training plan, the men were instead given “freedom to enjoy the comfort of their billets and the social enjoyments of the town” until they left Bruay on January 28.

During this breathing space from front-line duty the complement of officers was brought to full strength. Major Roderick Bell-Irving became Lt.-Col. Peck's second-in-command and Captain John Paton, who had enlisted in the Seaforths as a private and earned a battlefield commission in 1916, was the adjutant. The company commanders, some of whom returned after recovering from earlier wounds, were all respected veterans. No. 1 Company's Captain Alan “Gus” Lyons had started out as a sergeant before a June 1916 commissioning. Major James Scroggie, wounded at Vimy Ridge, returned to command No. 2 Company. Fiercely ambitious, Scroggie was rumoured to have a Lt.-Col.'s star stowed in a pocket just in case fortune elevated him to battalion command. But Scroggie was also much respected, to the point that junior officers often asked during a crisis, “What would Scroggie do here?” Twenty-year-old Captain George Francis Mason retained No. 3 Company. He was another officer who had risen from the ranks. Mason had been present at every major engagement 1
^st
Division fought and suffered a wound at the Somme. He was one of Peck's most valued officers and a man whose judgement the battalion commander trusted implicitly. Major Arnott Grier Mordy had assumed command of No. 4 Company upon Major James Murphy's death at Hill 70.

Of the forty-seven platoon commanders in the four companies, thirty had been commissioned from the ranks. Major Hugh Urquhart, who often visited his old battalion, believed that this gave the Canadian Scottish “a treasure of experience and ability. They had to bear a load of responsibility during critical times in the history of the Battalion, and they shouldered it with a competence and keen fighting spirit which proved them to be officers of a high calibre. It can be said of them, as a body, that at no time did the Battalion possess more efficient subalterns.”
²⁹

Two of these officers demonstrated their ability clearly on February 13, when two raiding parties ventured into No Man's Land near Loos. Scroggie headed one team of raiders, but when his men ran afoul of heavy wire in front of the German trenches and could not get through he led them back home without contacting the enemy. The other party under Lt. Sydney Johnston, who had been commissioned in 1916, fared better. Accompanying Johnston was Lt. Ben W. Allen, commissioned almost precisely the year before the raid. Before the raiding party had set out Johnston split it into two groups so that twenty men were under his command and twelve Allen's.

Johnston also meticulously inspected the extra equipment the men carried. “Mills grenades; ammonal tubes; twenty pound ammonal charges, wire cutters, rolls of chicken wire with slats nailed across, Very pistol flares, and flash lamps. We are like a traveling circus,” he wrote afterward. Two men led, tasked with laying white tape up to a gap found in the German wire during a previous reconnaissance. The two lieutenants had agreed on a simple anvil and hammer plan with Allen's party serving as the anvil. At Zero Hour, Allen would blow a captured German gas-alarm horn, rush a trench called Horse Alley, seize a good fighting position, and then intercept the Germans Johnston's “hammer” party drove their way during their push along the trench from the right.

Because of their heavy loads and a nerve-wracking few moments when the Germans shelled an approach trench with gas rounds that forced everyone to don their box respirators, the party finally caught up to the advance party by the wire only at 0250 hours. The two men reported they had been unable to find the gap and the wire seemed intact all along the line. Johnston was little surprised and had taken the precaution of having his men carry with them several large rubber bath mats. As a pre-planned artillery bombardment hit the German lines to cover their move, Johnston took one section of the party forward “and before the barrage lifted we had bath mats over the old trench and others across the first line of barbed wire. Someone in rear yelled to come back, that I was in the barrage. Second line of wire was on screw pickets—tore it off pickets and pulled it around the bottom of them—get over and barrage lifts just then. [Private] Tommy [Thompson] comes up to me, section following, and we scramble over the third row of wire. Tommy and I rush for the trench, bombing as we go, and I get in first, Tommy landing on the top of me. The section gets all in and to my joyful surprise the other sections also rush forward; machine guns are silent by this time.”

The hammer and anvil plan, Johnston realized, was out the window because the party had been forced to go through the wire in a single group with no time to split up before the fighting began. So Johnston placed the men in line with Allen commanding the right-hand sections while he oversaw the left-hand group with the intention of just seeing how the Germans would respond to their incursion. Soon they heard tramping noises approaching and the men “crouched down at the corner of a traverse, all ready for them, and when we reckoned they were about on us I sprang out, revolver pointed ahead. Behold a solitary bespectacled Hun, who when he saw us, threw down his rifle with a bang on the trench-board, off with his equipment like a flash, and up with his hands. 'Twas funny! He did it, as if he was doing rifle exercises to numbers. The corporal sprang on him and pummeled his face, but I hauled him off.”

Johnston decided to lead a charge in the direction the prisoner had approached from. “Then followed a very busy, thrilling time—ammonal tubes in dug-outs and a good deal of wrecking and killing. It was hard work getting prisoners, but eventually we managed to preserve a few, for what good would it be if we don't bring back prisoners, the staff frown on us and doubt our stories. It was funny to see some of our fellows shove a mobile [ammonal] charge down a dug-out, then stand back to watch it go up—darned wonder they didn't go up too. We were absolutely at home and dominated the sector we occupied. A Hun kneeling at the bottom of a dug-out fired at me, striking me in the arm—put mobile charge down on him.”

When the battalion recall rocket arced into the sky, Johnston's first thought was that he hated to leave. But he realized their luck would soon run out when the Germans rallied, as they surely would. Johnston and Cpl. Stuart Rankin hung back, ensuring all the party got safely away with the prisoners in tow. Then not wanting to carry back their remaining twenty-pound ammonal charge, the two men hunkered beside a dugout, yanked the gas curtain back and were just about to chuck it in when Johnston saw that the occupants were “two Huns, youngsters; badly scared and apparently wounded. As they were wounded we left them, but the corporal didn't like the idea of letting them be an excuse for not putting the mobile charge down, but I chased him along to the next dug-out.

“We are just preparing to leave the trench when a light and a moving figure appears in No Man's Land coming along above the trench. Wind-up; think it's a counter attack. We crouch down in the trench and against the sky-line see one man—very large. I yelled at him our half pass-word and to my surprise got the other half back. Then towards us stalked this figure, cursing to beat blazes—it's Gus Lyons, my company commander; and he came over by himself to see what the blankety blank, etc., was keeping us. He stood on the top of the trench and just gave us the very devil. So the three of us started back across No Man's Land walking, talking and using our flash lamps—no war at all. However, when we reach our line it isn't so pleasant, an awful strafe of minnies and funs is on, but we barge through the strafe with our six prisoners and a machine gun as jubilant and happy a crowd as could be imagined.”
³⁰

Trench raids provided valuable intelligence and kept the opposing side on its guard, but they could not yield victory. Save a negotiated peace, victory would go to the side that succeeded in breaking free of the trench system and marched either to Paris or Berlin. On March 21, 1918, in a stunning reversal for the Allies, the Germans struck first along a 50-mile-long front between Arras and St. Quentin held by British Fifth Army. The offensive's mastermind, Gen. Erich Ludendorff, believed he could shatter the British before the French could rally to their aid. In an all-or-nothing effort, the Germans struck with their very best troops in the lead. After less than three days all the gains won during the Somme offensive were erased and entire British divisions annihilated as the Germans drove a wedge between the British and French forces. Ludendorff kept enlarging this hole, pushing the British toward the sea while the French contributed to its size by swinging to the east to protect Paris. Within a week, however, the offensive fell victim to the problem that had plagued everyone since the war began—Ludendorff 's storm troops outran their supplies and reinforcement stream while suffering huge casualties for the ground won. On April 5, with British resistance stiffening, the offensive sputtered to a halt while the Germans were still short of their primary objective of Amiens, a town at the juncture of the Somme River and its major tributary, the Avre. The butcher's bill was 163,500 British and 77,000 French casualties compared to 238,000 German losses. But most of Germany's best troops were now dead or wounded.

Canadian Corps played no part in meeting the German offensive. But the crisis had almost precipitated its dissolution when Haig sought to send the Canadian divisions individually to plug holes in the shattered line. Only Lt.-Gen. Currie's vigorous objections saved the corps this fate. As it was, to enable First Army to send divisions to reinforce the beleaguered Fifth Army, the Canadian 1
^st
and 2
^nd
Divisions were allocated as a reserve to the former army. Currie was left with just two divisions holding a 10-mile front, which he charged was “altogether too much, but owing to lack of men in British Army it cannot be helped. I am told we have 430,000 men in Mesopotamia. What a splendid place for a reserve!”
³¹