Brave Battalion (6 page)

In the late afternoon the battalion reached Avonmouth and boarded the 8,500-ton transport
Maidan
—one of the many ships forming a convoy that would carry the Canadian contingent to France as the first step toward the trenches of Flanders.

- FEBRUARY-APRIL 1915 -

At 0400 hours on February 12,
Maidan
weighed anchor and sailed from Avonmouth at the rear of the convoy. As senior officer, Lt.-Col. Robert Leckie commanded all the troops aboard, which included not only the Canadian Scottish but also 3
^rd
Canadian Infantry Brigade's artillery headquarters section and three Canadian Field Artillery batteries. Close to 2,000 men were jammed into “bare holds, into which they were so closely packed that it was impossible to lie down.” Hatches were left open and permission was granted for the men to go up on deck, but as this was crammed bow to stern with horses, vehicles, and artillery pieces, only a handful could leave the holds at any given time. In addition to the battalion's 79 horses, 14 four-wheeled wagons, 21 two-wheeled wagons, 9 bicycles, and 5 motorcycles, the artillerymen had loaded 214 horses, 6 field guns, 4 four-wheeled wagons, 28 two-wheeled wagons, 2 bicycles, and one motorcycle.
¹

The predicted quick and straightforward crossing proved anything but when a sudden storm struck in the evening as the convoy entered the Bay of Biscay.
Maidan
pitched and rolled alarmingly in the growing swells prompting the ship's captain to order the hatches rammed home as waves crashed onto the deck and threatened to flood the holds. All night long the storm only worsened and by first light had transformed itself into a fierce gale “with incessant violent squalls.” The convoy had been scattered, each ship fighting alone to make way at whatever best speed it could manage. At 1600 hours,
Maidan
's captain scribbled in the ship's log that “a strong gale and squalls of hurricane force were experienced with high dangerous seas.”
²
Shortly thereafter, about 70 miles west of Ushant, he ordered the ship turned southwestward to meet the winds head on. The “gale could not be worse,” the ship's captain warned Leckie as waves surged over
Maidan
's bow and it wallowed forward at a mere two knots per hour.

Several hatch covers were punched in by waves that cascaded down to drench the helpless troops below. Icy saltwater mixed with the ever-increasing volumes of vomit sloshed around their ankles. The stench in the holds became almost unbearable. When the quartermaster doled out rations, most of the men who had not yet been sick became so. The battalion's medical officer, Captain G. E. Gillies, warned Leckie that seventy-five percent of the troops aboard were seasick, some critically so.

On deck, a massive wave smashed the starboard horse shelter to pieces. Two animals were swept overboard only to be hurled back onto the deck by the following wave so forcefully that each suffered multiple bone fractures and had to be shot on the spot. An artillery officer and four of his gunners who had rushed to the ruined shelter in a vain attempt to prevent the loss of the untethered horses there were injured under the animals' milling hooves. A Can Scot momentarily grasped the reins of one horse only to be plucked up by a wave and cast through an open hatch cover. Freefalling 15 feet, the man came down hard on his rear and cried, “By God, if I had landed on my other end, I'd have broken my neck.”
³

That evening the storm eased slightly and
Maidan
turned back on course for St. Nazaire. Finally able to take stock, transport officer Lt. Colin Marshall was happily surprised to discover that only four horses had been killed. Although the storm still blew at dawn, it was clearly weakening. Late on the afternoon of February 14,
Maidan
, which had been at the convoy's tail, was the first to drop anchor off St. Nazaire. To lift the spirits of his battered troops, Leckie assembled the Canadian Scottish's seventeen pipers and ten drummers on the forecastle and bridge to play a long medley of marches and reels that greatly entertained the hundreds of French civilians gathered dockside in their Sunday best.
⁴

The following morning, the troops started disembarking from
Maidan
and all men, animals, equipment, and stores were ashore by noon. Determined that 16
^th
Battalion's arrival at the head of the Canadian contingent should be appropriately recognized, Leckie obtained the base commander's permission to parade his men in a long circuit through the city's streets that would return them to the docks. With the pipe band at the fore, the thousand soldiers marched proudly past throngs of cheering civilians and French
poilus
, who were in St. Nazaire on leave from several nearby army camps. Along the way the Canadians were regularly besieged by children who insisted on carrying off their water bottles and bringing them back brimming with hearty red wine.

When the parade broke up at the dock, the men found stacks of “hairy, smelly goatskin coats” had been set out for them. After shrugging into these winter-issue coats, the battalion personnel quick-marched to a railroad wayside where a freight train waited. Thirty-eight men and nine junior officers were crowded into each boxcar while the senior officers settled into several first-class passenger carriages. Darkness was falling as the train chuffed out of St. Nazaire bound for Hazebrouck in France, just south of the Belgian border. A major railway centre connected by a spiderweb of lines to all points of the British front lines, Hazebrouck served as the British Expeditionary Force's major supply and reinforcement distribution depot.

The rail trip took two days, the train shunting into Hazebrouck at 1230 on February 17. While the men began marching on foot the seven miles to the village of Caestre, where 3
^rd
Canadian Infantry Brigade was to be billeted, Leckie raced ahead on horseback to report to the commander of the advance headquarters there. He arrived only to find all the officers were absent, and learned that nobody had anticipated the battalion's arriving so soon. Consequently, no preparations for housing the men were in place. An icy rain fell while Leckie frantically got the headquarters staff to have billets readied before his cold and soaked soldiers arrived. Yet when the battalion marched into Caestre, billets still had to be finalized. Despite the bitter rainfall, Lt. Hugh MacIntyre Urquhart later recorded in his personal diary that the battalion was forced “to stand in the street for a full hour before anything [was] done.” Finally the battalion was broken into groups by platoons or even sections and directed to houses in town or marched out into the countryside to occupy farmhouses or barns. Urquhart's platoon trudged up a muddy road to a farmhouse only to be kept waiting outside for a half hour before being marched back to town and then out into the countryside again to another farmhouse that turned out to already be full of soldiers. Returning to Caestre, Urquhart finally managed to divide his platoon between a small schoolroom, a nearby hayloft, and a couple of cottages shortly before midnight.
⁵

While the men were long in getting settled, the battalion's senior officers had been assigned “most comfortable” billets in the village. The battalion's official war diarist, however, noted with slight concern that the sound of “gun fire [was] quite audible” in the distance.
⁶
A mere subaltern, Urquhart did not rate a comfortable billet. He bedded down at brigade headquarters. There were “no blankets, so slept on mattress with my wet coat above me. It was cold and very uncomfortable but being terribly tired I slept a little.”
⁷

Caestre lay about 15 miles south of a front line that had remained largely unchanged since German and Allied forces had battered each other to a standstill in mid-October of the previous year. Initially the German invasion in the summer of 1914 had carried through to the village itself, but a British counterattack had regained Caestre and driven the enemy back about 10 miles before running out of steam a little less than three miles north of the Belgian textile town of Ypres. Both sides had begun digging in and, by year's end, the two lines of facing entrenchments snaked for 500 miles from the North Sea across Belgium and France to the Swiss border. The two British armies, Gen. Sir Douglas Haig's First and Gen. Horace Smith-Dorrien's Second, held a 28-mile section of this front. First Army's 11 miles centred on Neuve Chapelle while Second Army, to the immediate north, manned 17 miles running through the Lys and Douve valleys north from Bois Grenier to just beyond the Ypres-Comines railway immediately south of Ypres. Second Army's left flank was guarded by the French Eighth Army, while First Army had the French Tenth Army to its right.

As Commander-in-Chief of the B.E.F., Field Marshal Sir John French's initial intention for 1
^st
Canadian Infantry Division was that it would form a reserve for Smith-Dorrien's III Corps (each British Army being composed of three corps) after receiving a short indoctrination in trench warfare methodology.
⁸
On February 19, however, the 16
^th
Battalion's training exercise consisted of the routine bayonet practice that saw the men in company formation “charging and thrusting at Sacks filled with Straw, strung on Rope between Trees,” the war diarist recorded. While the men vigorously tore straw enemies apart, Lt.-Col. Leckie and the other three battalion commanders of 3
^rd
Canadian Infantry Brigade accompanied Brig. Richard Turner in an examination of ground selected for a brigade parade before Field Marshal French. At one point Turner drew Leckie aside and warned him that, in just four days, the 16
^th
Battalion would enter a section of trench for an on-the-ground orientation.

The front north of their village remained mysterious and unknown to the Canadians, a source of boundless rumour and speculation that substituted for the gap in factual knowledge. During the day, camp sounds close at hand dominated, but after nightfall the distant, rumbling thunder of artillery and the crackling sound of rifle and machine-gun fire came to the fore. On the night of February 18, the war diarist noted: “Lights of firing line show up brilliantly tonight.”
⁹

At 1130 hours on February 20, a Saturday, 3
^rd
Brigade paraded through heavy rain before Field Marshal French, Gen. Horace Smith-Dorrien, and 1
^st
Canadian Infantry Division commander, Lt.-Gen. Edwin Alderson. After, French confided to Turner his opinion that “if the Canadians fight as well as they look, they will prove a formidable enemy.” He was particularly impressed by Leckie's men complimenting him for having “a very smart Battalion.”
¹⁰

Many Can Scot officers would have disagreed. Lt. Urquhart, serving with the Winnipeg Camerons of No. 4 Company thought it “extraordinary how inefficient the Canadians are and yet how they think they know everything.” Scots born and raised, the thirty-four-year-old Urquhart was concerned about how his company commander, Captain John Geddes, “fusses a great deal because of over anxiety as to [the] men,” while the company's second-in-command, Captain George Jameson, seemed “quite undisturbed” by anything, “absolutely disinterested” even. Urquhart felt that Lt.-Col. Leckie went “after Geddes quite a lot,” but for little apparent reason. As for Major John Leckie, Urquhart was amused at his views that there were “too many Imperial officers in Canada. If they had a few more Imperial officers,” Urquhart noted in his personal diary, “things would not be so horribly mixed up in [the] Canadian contingent.”
¹¹

The older Leckie had been born in Halifax, the younger in Acton-Vale, Quebec. Each had followed a remarkably similar track by first attending Bishop's College School in Lennoxville, Quebec, then Royal Military College, and finally King's College in Windsor. Robert Leckie had become a civil engineer and his brother a mining engineer. Both had spent the early part of the 1890s deeply involved in respective local militias before volunteering for South African service and, once back in Canada, renewed their militia ties. The two men were close friends and there was no trace of rivalry between them despite John Leckie's being subordinate to his elder brother. Robert Leckie was a short whippet of a man with a lean, aesthetic face that appeared all the more so due to a deep scar on his right cheek inflicted by a leopard attack while hunting big game in Somaliland. Leckie often compensated for his natural shyness by affecting an aloof and superior air, which he then countered by over-playing the role of “courteous gentleman.” He treated subordinate officers with studied respect, praising them when deserved and rarely rebuking those in error. In combat, he remained perpetually calm and keenly observant, delivering orders in a soft, conversational voice. Seemingly unflappable, his battle demeanour would serve to steady the battalion from the top down.
¹²