Brave Battalion (42 page)

In the minutes it took to organize the patrols, the Germans appeared in strength south of Bantigny. Cut off from that village, McIntyre sent both patrols toward Blécourt. One happened on a Montrealer corporal with six men who were dug into the side of a sunken road southeast of the village. The patrol hurried back to McIntyre, who then moved his force there. Here he hoped to stand until the two forward companies caught up.

It was a forlorn hope, for German machine guns positioned inside Blécourt opened up with fierce fire directed straight along the length of the sunken road. Staying in the funnel of the road meant dying there, so McIntyre and his men retreated cross-country to another road farther south. This one had a southwest-trending dogleg that prevented the Germans firing directly along it from Blécourt. It was now noon. McIntyre had no idea what was happening with the other 3
^rd
Brigade battalions.

Everywhere the brigade's situation was dire. At 1030 hours, Lt.-Col. Peck acted with disregard for Brig. Tuxford's orders to stay well back. With the battalion's acting adjutant Captain Robert Robertson, Peck had ridden forward to Sancourt only to be forced to dismount on the outskirts by German machine-gun fire. “This amazed us, as we thought ourselves well behind the battle line. We turned hastily about and galloped back on to the road in Sancourt, where we were sheltered by some buildings. We turned our horses over to the grooms, and proceeded forward on foot, being careful to seek such shelter as we could find.”

At the railroad in front of Sancourt the two men took shelter in a siding. From here they quickly determined “the whole position was one of uncertainty and that a serious situation had developed.” When a machine gun opened up on them, Peck and Robertson ran to a small brick tower where they found a company of 48
^th
Highlanders forming. Peck could see Canadian troops advancing to the left in a disorderly formation and surmised these must be part of 1
^st
Brigade. He suggested the 48
^th
Highlanders use the railway embankment's cover to join the other Canadians going forward.

A few minutes after the 48
^th
Highlanders headed out, Lt.-Col. Dick Worral appeared with a runner at his side. Worral told Peck he had lost all contact with his Royal Montreal Regiment. Peck said they could do nothing where they were and must go forward. Dodging heavy machine-gun fire, the four men dashed one at a time over patches of open ground until they finally encountered a platoon of Royal Highlanders in Blécourt. The platoon commander said he knew nothing of any units beyond his small group. Pressing on alone, the four men were finally driven to ground in an abandoned enemy dugout. Here they hunkered down until just how confused the situation had become was proven by the arrival of a party of signallers who, unreeling telephone line in their wake, walked into the dugout. Suddenly Peck was talking directly over a phone with Brig. Tuxford. After briefly describing what he had seen so far, Peck had the signallers pack up the line and ordered everyone to withdraw to the relative safety of a sunken road farther back. Here, he ordered Captain Robertson to locate the Canadian Scottish or any other battalion he could find on the brigade front.

Robertson took three of the signallers with him as runners and made his way to a chapel on the Blécourt road. This six-sided shrine had windows on every side and provided “a splendid view of the whole country.” Through his binoculars, Robertson could see “enemy movement … in the outskirts of Blécourt, on my extreme left, and at Cuvillers in front.” In the road running from the chapel to Cuvillers, Robertson could see McIntyre's Canadian Scottish while, off in the other direction, the road was packed with a lot of men from 4
^th
Division. Given the presence of so many Canadian troops, Robertson decided the road would serve as a rallying point. He sent word to the Canadian Scottish survivors to fall back on the chapel and dig in to the left of it while the 4
^th
Division men were ordered to do the same on the right. Once this line was established, Robertson put several patrols out to the east to bring any Canadians they found back to the road.

The road served fairly well as a trench and the Canadians were able to keep the ever-growing numbers of German infantry at bay with rifle fire. RSM Kay steadied the men by walking along the length of their line to offer encouragement and caution them against wasting their dwindling ammunition supply by firing when the Germans were not actually counterattacking.

Peck, meanwhile, had phoned Tuxford again and been ordered to take command of the front line. With a semblance of a defensive line established, he was able to direct artillery against targets threatening it. Cuvillers was quickly reduced to ruins. He also arranged an ammunition re-supply. A stalemate set in. The Germans held Blécourt, the Canadians the road position. Each attempted to drive the other out of their position with artillery and machine-gun fire, but neither budged. When night fell, Tuxford ordered further offensive action abandoned.
³⁵

The determined resistance that 3
^rd
Brigade had met had been matched all along the Canadian Corps front and convinced Lt.-Gen. Currie that to “continue to throw tired troops against such opposition, without giving them an opportunity to refit and recuperate, was obviously inviting a serious failure, and I accordingly decided to break off the engagement. The five days' fighting had yielded practical gains of a very valuable nature, as well as 7,059 prisoners and 205 guns.

“We had gone through the last organized system of defences on our front, and our advance constituted a direct threat on the rear of the troops immediately to the north of our left flank, and their withdrawal had now begun.

“Although the ground gained on the 1
^st
was not extensive, the effects of the battle and of the previous four days' fighting were far-reaching and made possible the subsequent advances of October and November, in so far as the Divisions engaged against the Canadian Corps drew heavily on the enemy's reserves, which had now been greatly reduced.” Intelligence reports indicated the Germans had been forced to commit ten divisions to block the Canadian advance while only requiring three divisions to reinforce the front running from Honnecourt to Cambrai, which was 18,000 yards in length. He was proud of his troops and their commanders, believing they had effectively seized the initiative for the Allies and it now rested with others to ensure the Germans had no time to regroup.
³⁶

But the cost in blood had been terrific. When relieved from the road position on October 2, the Canadian Scottish had only three officers and seventy-five men fit for combat. Five officers and nineteen men were dead, eight officers and two hundred men wounded. A further 103 men were missing, presumed captured.
³⁷
Major Bell-Irving was originally considered to have been captured, but on October 15 his body was discovered about a hundred yards from where he and Kerans had last exchanged words.

The Canadian Scottish casualties were not unique. The RMR had been reduced to just ninety-two men. In his account of the action, Lt.-Col. Worral said the battalion had gone into the battle with only thirteen officers, even fewer non-commissioned officers, and seriously under-strength. He was not surprised that, under such circumstances, the offensive failed in the face of determined resistance.
³⁸
Since August 8—what would later be called the beginning of the Hundred Days that ended the war—Canadian Corps had lost 30,000 men killed, wounded, or missing. By October 1, the Canadian Corps was simply too weak to carry the brunt of the Allied offensive. Currie had committed his troops with the understanding that 11
^th
British Division would bolster his strength with three full battalions. But this division had been so badly beaten up, it provided just three companies that proved of no value. Currie angrily decried the lack of support from First Army headquarters as an “absolute betrayal.”
³⁹

- OCTOBER 2-NOVEMBER 11, 1918 -

The question at the beginning of October was which army would collapse first: the German or the Allies? The French Army endured only because the American Expeditionary Force assumed some of its front. But, on September 26, the inexperienced Americans ventured into the Argonne Forest near Verdun and narrowly avoided decimation as their generals adopted tactics that mirrored the Allied blunders of 1914 and 1915 rather than those now practised. A bloody seesaw battle ensued in the Argonne that dragged interminably into October. The B.E.F., meanwhile, was so reduced by casualties it slashed divisional strengths from twelve battalions to nine, a decision that rendered each division less capable of prolonged combat. Australia's rejection of conscription left its corps so under-strength that the troops were in a mutinous mood. Despite conscription, Canadian morale was equally poor with many a bunkhouse orator telling anyone within earshot that Lt.-Gen. Arthur Currie was “a glory-seeker, demanding the bloodiest tasks for his corps.”
¹
The reality was that Field Marshal Douglas Haig and his army commanders realized at this juncture in the war that the Canadians and ANZACs were indisputably the B.E.F.'s best fighting soldiers and that realization put them repeatedly on the sharp end.

However, the Germans had even more problems than the Allies. By September's end, all the gains of the spring offensive had been erased with the massive casualties the German troops had suffered. Bulgaria and Turkey were lost as allies. At home, influenza and famine raged. On October 2, the German army high command advised the Reichstag's party leaders that “we cannot win the war.” A negotiated peace was attempted for the first time by tentatively extending feelers to U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, whose Fourteen Points proposal offered a possible face-saving resolution. But the Allies sought unconditional surrender, which the Germans would not agree to. So the war would continue until one side or the other was crushed.
²

The day the Reichstag finally determined that Germany could not win, the 1
^st
Canadian Division had left the rest of Canadian Corps facing Cambrai and withdrawn to a rest position west of the Canal du Nord. The Canadian Scottish knew nothing of the larger picture around them. They saw only their battalion's dire condition. “The future is anything but certain, and the days of yore belong to another world;” one soldier wrote, “a world we feel we will never see again. All is dead but hope, so who should worry? I think we shall end our days here, from what we have gone through. I can't see any daylight as to when this damn war will end.” But he did not regret marching to war in the summer of 1914. “I did the right thing … whether the war was wrong or not does not alter that fact.”
³

Death seemed inescapable. The fate in past weeks of so many veterans proved that. There was the case of twenty-nine-year-old Sgt. Mathew Barrett. An Irishman who had enlisted in Winnipeg and joined the battalion in December 1914, he had been wounded on May 10, 1915, and again in the Ypres Salient on April 4, 1916. This tough, courageous survivor died on August 8 during the opening phase of the Amiens Battle.
⁴

The same day Barrett was cut down, Pte. Robert Murdoch had been blessed with a “Blighty.” Entering the ranks on March 20, 1917, he had been wounded that September and again in November. At Amiens he scored passage home with a wound so severe he was invalided to England and then to Canada.
⁵

Physically debilitating wounds were seen as the only road to survival. And many a man envied Murdoch and also Pte. George Nairn this escape. Nairn had been taken on strength March 2, 1916, wounded twice within months, and again on April 28, 1917. Each time the wound was too minor to earn more than a brief hospitalization, but on September 2, 1918, when the Canadian Scottish carried the Drocourt-Quéant Line, Nairn was hit hard and was now convalescing in England with a homeward ticket assured once his health was sufficiently improved.
⁶

RSM James Kay, the tough veteran who had come to the battalion as the Cameron Highlander company sergeant major, was considered one of the rocks upon which the foundation of the Canadian Scottish was built. The twenty-eight-year-old had distinguished himself as “a splendid battle leader, cool and clear-headed.” At 2
^nd
Battle of Ypres he had gathered in 150 men from a hodgepodge of battalions, kept them in the fight, and been awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. The Military Medal followed. Only in February 1918 had Kay reluctantly left the battalion for a three-month leave that was part of a program ensuring all married men who had deployed with 1
^st
Division in 1914 a brief return to Canada. Everyone was happy to see Kay, who had been showing clear signs of extreme exhaustion, sent home and the general sentiment was that he should remain with his family in Winnipeg. But on August 21, just five days before the great Battle of Arras, Kay had reported for duty—having shrugged off offers from the staff at the regimental headquarters in Winnipeg of postings that would keep him at home. His worth in combat was quickly proven on October 1 in the fight for Cuvillers that resulted in a Military Cross recommendation. But Kay's colour was visibly poor, his face an ashen grey. It looked as if the respite had done him little good.
⁷

Then there was Lt.-Col. Cyrus Peck. The battalion commander had been ordered to his bed by the medical officer on the evening of October 3. There he remained for six days before insisting on returning to duty only to be evacuated to hospital the following day. Major James Scroggie became the Canadian Scottish acting commander.
⁸
It was feared that Peck would not return. Scroggie was popular, but he could not fill Peck's shoes. The rotund battalion commander might never look the part of a soldier, but his fearlessness in action and his obvious concern for the well-being of the old originals in particular was recognized by everyone. “The poor skipper,” one soldier wrote, “he hates like hell to see the old fellows go.” While the men knew that Peck would put them in harm's way as needed, they trusted him to know when it was
needed
.
⁹