Vimy (13 page)

Looks were deceptive. Currie was one of the most admired commanders on the Western Front. Borden considered him the equal of any corps commander in the war. Byng, going through a list of possible Canadian chiefs of staff, put his thumb against Currie’s name and said, “Of him, there are no ‘ifs’.” Philip Gibbs, the war correspondent, said that Currie reminded him of Cromwell. And Lloyd George, praising his “great ability and strength of purpose,” would settle on another Currie trait: his “lack of fetishism.” Currie, the civilian soldier, had no old fetishes to expunge. He approached each problem with an open mind, and it was this that appealed to the British Prime Minister, whose loathing of Sir Douglas Haig bordered on the pathological.

“The ablest brains did not climb to the top of the stairs,” Lloyd George wrote ruefully of the British officer class. “Seniority and Society were the dominant factors in army promotion. Deportment counted a good deal. Brains came a bad fourth.… The only exceptions were to be found in the Dominion forces.” If Lloyd George had been able to buck the system he would eventually have made Currie commander of all British forces with the Australian general, John Monash, his chief of staff. Even the tough little Welshman could not achieve that goal, but had the war continued past 1918, it would have come to pass.

3

Currie was not a military genius. The Great War produced none, at least on the Allied side. But he was a good tactician with a high sense of the practical and a strong capacity for administration. His grasp of detail was awesome, and his memory for names and faces seemed infallible. It was said of Currie that if you met him once, he’d remember your name four years later. He certainly knew his NCOs by name. One of his battalion commanders once came to him requesting that a sergeant-major, Jim Watchman, be given leave to get married. Said Currie: “You mean the man the fellows call Mustang Pete?”

His sense of tactics under pressure came to the fore at Ypres. When his flank was threatened, he threw away the rule book, abandoning the standard linear defence and opting for the kind of all-round defence that would become common in the Second War.

He was cool to the point of austerity, his features rarely betraying any emotion. Nothing seemed to ruffle him. He never raised his voice in anger. The only hint of displeasure was a sharp glint in his pale eyes. Andrew McNaughton, the counter-battery officer, who liked him-for Currie was a gunner who spoke the language of the artillery-found him “pretty sticky to deal with,” meaning that Currie could not be shaken by colleagues, underlings, or the high command.

F.C. Bagshaw, then an orderly-room sergeant with the 5th Battalion, a Saskatchewan regiment, had a first-hand view of Currie’s legendary coolness under fire at Ypres. On April 24, 1915, the third day of the attack, he looked up from the mud of the trench to see a portly officer casually strolling along a ridge, oblivious to the sniper fire around him. Finally the officer jumped down and made his way along the trench line. It was Currie. “Who was that shooting at me?” he asked, in the same casual way a friend might say, “Who was that waving at me?”

“That was the enemy, sir,” someone replied. Currie appeared quite unperturbed.

He showed the same courage in standing up to the High Command in 1915 when he thought the orders were wrong. As a junior brigade commander he bitterly protested what he believed were premature orders to go on the attack at Festubert and also, a month later, at Givenchy. For this he was rapped on the knuckles, but he wasn’t cowed. Told by the divisional staff that the order had come from the corps commander, he responded that “it is quite time that some corps commanders were told to go to blazes.”

The attacks failed at great cost, proving Currie’s point. What had bothered him was sloppy preparation: not enough time set aside for reconnaissance. In the opinion of BrigadierGeneral Jack Seeley, the Canadian cavalry commander, Currie had “an almost fanatical hatred of unnecessary casualties.” How ironic, then, that ten years later Currie, of all people, would have to defend himself against a newspaper’s libellous charge that he had needlessly sacrificed Canadian lives in the final days of the war.
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It is a measure of the admiration in which Currie was held that his disagreements with the higher-ups did not stand in the way of his promotion. He had tangled with Sam Hughes before the war, refusing to take part in a church parade for an organization he felt had political overtones. Hughes confronted Currie in Victoria but backed down. “Well, Currie,” he said, “I came out here to get your scalp but you’re all right.” At that time Hughes and his son, Garnet, were both Currie supporters.

In Victoria Currie had been a prominent Liberal, but by 1917 he was fed up with politics. He had no friends at court, no political allies, and sought no favours. “I do not believe in mutual admiration soldiers,” he once said. He was an advocate of promotion on merit, not political pull.
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He was concerned about his men and made it clear to his junior officers that the care of their troops must take precedence over their own personal comfort. That concern extended to an almost obsessive insistence that everyone from private soldier on up should know exactly what he was to do in battle. He had an ability, during inspections, to seize upon the most moronic member of a company and pepper him with questions, believing that if the slowest came up with the right answers, the rest must know their business. As a result, the cannier platoons would pick out such men in advance and give them a cram course before Currie arrived.

In the training plan that followed Currie’s winter assessments of the Somme and Verdun, he and Byng made sure that every man would be told the details of the plan of attack – everything except the date. Each soldier would know not only his own task in the assault but also the tasks of others; thus, if necessary, a private could take over from a corporal, a corporal from a sergeant, a sergeant from an officer. Indeed, there would be times when the casualties were such that sergeants ran companies and sergeant-majors ran battalions.

This was unprecedented in the British Army. “Maps to section leaders,” was Currie’s dictum, and that was unprecedented, too. The idea that every section of six or nine men would be given a detailed map of their portion of the front, that every lance-corporal would see his line of advance marked out on paper, was something new. It had the morale-building effect of making each man feel that he was trusted, that his leaders considered him intelligent enough to be let in on what had been secret information in previous battles. For the assault on Vimy Ridge, the Canadian Corps distributed forty thousand such maps to men newly trained to act when necessary on their own initiative rather than to follow orders blindly.

4

Arthur Currie’s record confirms the old adage that in certain men the furnace of battle causes hidden qualities to bubble to the surface. For there was little in Currie’s background to suggest his later military prominence. He was a big but sickly Ontario farm boy, suffering from stomach complaints, which, when they returned in early adulthood and later in the war, hinted at psychosomatic roots. He had moved to Victoria at the age of seventeen and taught school on Vancouver Island until he was twenty-two. Then his life reached a crisis point. He’d been in the non-permanent militia for two years and had achieved the rank of corporal. At that point he was offered a commission, which he desperately wanted to accept. But he could scarcely afford it on his teacher’s salary of sixty-two dollars a month. It was then that his stomach trouble returned.

Victoria had by far the most highly stratified society of any city in Western Canada, and there is little doubt that Currie coveted the status that a militia commission would bring in a community dominated by Imperial officers, not to mention the upper caste of the British Navy stationed at the Esquimalt base. Currie’s social aspirations may be gauged by his change of name. His immigrant grandfather’s “Corrigan” had already been transformed to “Curry.” Now the grandson adopted an even more acceptable spelling. And he rejected the more plebeian Methodist Church of his mother for the more fashionable Church of England.

A militia commission cost money. An officer had to pay for his own expensive kit and was expected to give his pay to the mess. And Currie also wanted to get married: his English-born fiancée had a double-barrelled name, which made her more than socially acceptable in Victoria. There was nothing for it but to quit the classroom and go into the insurance business and later into real estate. In those yeasty days of Western expansion these were much more attractive vocations.

He joined the Masons and became president of the Young Liberals but spent most of his free time in the local armouries. He was an ardent and energetic citizen soldier, out on the rifle range every Saturday, up at 6
A.M
. to shoot during the summer months. By the time the great land boom swept Western Canada, Arthur Currie was colonel of his regiment and senior partner in a real estate firm.

Those were heady days. With a population of thirty thousand, Victoria boasted 111 real estate agents like Currie, most of whom plunged wildly in the belief the boom would never end. Currie was a victim of his own unbridled optimism. The bubble burst, and by 1913, almost broke and due for militia retirement, the future general was about to fade into obscurity.

At this point he was suddenly pressed to take over command of a new militia unit, and a Highland unit at that-the 50th Battalion, known as the Gay Gordons, after the mother regiment in Britain. He could scarcely afford the splendid but expensive (and for a man of Currie’s physique slightly ludicrous) Highland kit, let alone the mess bills and his expected contributions to the regiment. But he could not resist. And when he was offered an overseas brigade the following autumn of 1914, he could not resist that either.

What was not known to the officers who served under him, and to only a handful who served over him, was a truly dreadful secret. Currie kept it locked within himself for all those years at Ypres, Festubert, Givenchy, the Somme, and Vimy: a secret that must have caused his stomach to turn and his dreams to become nightmares. For nearly three years, as he later admitted, it was the last thing he thought of at night and the first thing when he awoke each morning.

To be blunt, Currie was an embezzler. He had diverted eleven thousand dollars of the regiment’s funds, intended to pay for uniforms, to cover his own personal debts. There were extenuating circumstances involving the Gordon Highlanders’ honorary colonel, William Coy, a newly rich New Brunswick entrepreneur who bought himself social status in Victoria by promising to underwrite the regiment to the tune of thirty-five thousand dollars. Coy not only welched on the deal but also bought up Currie’s note at a fat discount. Bankruptcy would have meant the end of Currie’s career as an officer and the collapse of his social position, and so he appropriated the government’s cheque intended for the regimental contractors.

In France, Currie was bombarded with letters demanding explanations or payment. To these he did not reply –
could
not reply. In Victoria, his friends tried to raise money to cover the missing sum; but Victoria was floundering in depression, and the debt remained outstanding. Borden was brought into the matter-he had received, in 1915, an anonymous letter calling Currie a thief- and so was Sir George Perley in London. Currie’s delinquency was a court-martial offence; but how could you court-martial Canada’s best soldier? That would shatter both army and civilian morale. And so for three years the government, the army, and the contractors themselves conspired in a cover-up that would end only in the fall of 1917, when David Watson of the 4th Division and Brigadier Victor Odlum, both wealthy men, lent Currie the necessary funds.

Of Currie’s inner turmoil the officers and men rehearsing day after day the careful plans for the attack on the ridge knew nothing. The big, fleshy face remained impassive, the pale eyes clear and unblinking. No lines of worry creased that smooth brow, no hunch of the shoulders betrayed the shadow of the Damoclean sword that, during those final days before Zero Hour, hung suspended over the senior divisional commander of the Canadian Corps.

5

Byng and his staff knew very well that all the training in the world would not save the Canadian Corps if the German wire remained intact. The British High Command had been sobered by the tragedy of the Somme, where twenty thousand British soldiers, on the first day of the offensive, had been blown to bits. The guns had not been able to cut the enemy wire, which formed an impregnable barrier, eighty feet thick in places. The rolls of heavy, tempered steel were as high as a house, with five-inch barbs, stronger and thicker than anything seen on a rancher’s fence. To get caught on that wire was to suffer a fearful fate.

In the Second World War, the Canadian troops, marching on manoeuvres, used to sing a silly song:

Has anyone seen the sergeant
?
I know where he is
I know where he is
I know where he is
.
Has anyone seen the sergeant?
I know where he is
,
Hanging on the old barbed wire
.

The implications of that piece of gallows humour, revived from an older conflict, were lost on most of the young men studying the more adventurous tactics of fire and movement. It dawned on only a few that the sergeant, hanging on the old barbed wire, was enmeshed like a fly in a web, unable to advance or retreat, impaled on the barbs, blood pouring from a dozen gashes, a sitting target for the German machine gunners.

The nocturnal moaning of such men, dying slowly in No Man’s Land without hope of succour, haunted many a veteran of the Somme, as it must have haunted Byng. That is why he and his brilliant chief gunner, Brigadier-General Edward “Dinky” Morrison, the former newspaperman, pressed hard through every available channel for supplies of the new No. 106 fuse, which allowed shells to explode on contact with the wire rather than above it.