Vimy (17 page)

So Kemball was ignored. That gallant officer-the adjective in his case is deserved-defied orders and refused to stay in the rear when his men were in peril. He led them personally on an attack he knew was futile.

For the Germans knew everything. They had heard the clanking of the gas cylinders being brought forward days before. They knew the details of the plan from two of their own men, prisoners who had escaped from the compound and made it back to their own lines. They heard it from the chatter of the Canadians, caught on listening devices in the tunnels below the trenches. And so they set up new machine-gun posts, which they kept masked until the very moment of the battle. The young men from the Kootenays, the Seaforths from Vancouver, the boys from Mississauga, and the Highlanders from Montreal were mowed down almost before they left the security of their own lines. And when they tried to take cover in the shell holes they died horribly. The gas – the ultimate weapon, which was supposed to nullify all opposition – was waiting for them in the slime.

5

The human details of the gas attack are heart breaking. The poisonous clouds were released in two waves, the phosgene first at three that morning, the chlorine two hours later. It was more than ineffective; it killed the men it was supposed to cover. The first cloud hung heavy over the battlefield; the second was blown back in the faces of the advancing troops.

On the left of the line the Seaforths were badly mauled. They were supposed to jump off at 6:40 after the gas had saturated the enemy. But ten minutes before the assault, the Germans laid down a barrage on the Seaforth positions. The shells hit the gas cylinders, which exploded, putting half of “B” Company out of action. Because these men, strangling in the fumes, could not go forward, “C” Company behind them couldn’t go either and had to abandon its part in the raid.

Behind the lines, in the 50th Battalion from Calgary, which was held in reserve, Victor Wheeler lay in his bunk of chicken wire, waiting for the order to move into the trenches and go over the top. It seemed to that sensitive young signaller that every vestige of humanity was perishing that dark morning. Troubled and confused, he prayed for forgiveness for mankind even as the specialists nearby were discussing the details of releasing the gas from the cylinders. All Wheeler could think of was the young men who would soon die in agony. It did not occur to him that it was his own comrades who would succumb.

Not far away, in the forward trench of Lieutenant-Colonel Sam Beckett’s Mississauga Battalion, the eighteen-year-old scout, Jack Quinnell, heard a tremendous roar and realized it was the sound of gas escaping from the cylinders. Quinnell ruefully remembered the briefing he’d received. “Where’s all the quiet gas they told us about?” he asked himself. Was everything else they’d told him equally false? He peered over the top, saw the gas creeping into the shell holes, and realized he’d been sold a bill of goods.

Victor Wheeler, too, heard a frightening noise, like the sound of water rushing over rocks. But this was not the sound of escaping gas; it was far more horrifying. This was the noise of dozens of rats scrambling in terror into the entrance of the dugout, tails twitching, instinctively fleeing from the poison. They scurried under the blankets and ground sheets, hid under the signal boxes, and squeezed under any loose board. Unlike the troops, they sensed disaster.

The two battalions of Victor Odlum’s 11th Brigade went over the top after the gas was released and following the briefest of barrages-a mere seven minutes of shellfire. Sam Beckett, the commander of the 75th, followed Kemball’s example and insisted on leading his men personally in an attack that he too knew had little chance of success.

Kemball’s Kootenay battalion was immediately mowed down by the German machine guns. These had been sited on the pathways through the Canadian wire, a task made easy by the presence of large battalion signs marking the attack routes. Only five men of the Kootenay battalion actually reached the enemy front line. Of these only three managed to scale the parapet, all dying in the attempt. The surviving pair miraculously escaped, crawling back from shell hole to shell hole, through their own gas and the enemy fire. Of the four hundred and twenty members of the battalion who took part in the attack, more than two hundred were casualties, including thirteen officers. Kemball himself had died, as he almost certainly knew he would, caught on the German wire.

The 75th from Mississauga, on the Kootenays’ flank, was also badly cut up. When Jack Quinnell went over the top, gas mask firmly in place, he could see his friends dropping all around him. Then his vision blurred as his mask fogged. He flung it aside, dodged ahead coughing and choking until he found a hole to shelter him from the withering gunfire. The training program’s orderly progress by section, platoon, and company bore no relation to the ragged and confused mob of men crawling and stumbling back and forth between the opposing lines. Quinnell’s shell hole was already occupied by his own officer, who turned to him and said, “I’m going to make a run for it; you can do what you like.” He stood up, started to run, and was felled by an enemy bullet.

Jack Quinnell had no intention of following his example. At eighteen he was an old soldier who’d enlisted at sixteen young enough to be called “baby face” by his comrades. Now a veteran, he carried the more adult nickname of Quinnie. Wounded at the Somme, he knew enough to keep a low profile and so removed his steel helmet and crawled on his belly, nose in the mud, until he saw the sign marking the gap through which his battalion was supposed to advance.

This was one of the markers that had alerted the Germans, who had trained machine guns on the gaps. The closer Quinnell got to his battalion sign, the more corpses he encountered. He caught his breath: there, on a pile of dead, lay the body of one of his closest friends, George Meade; and there, too, was the corpse of his C.O., Sam Beckett, who’d been killed trying to collect his scattered troops. One of Beckett’s men was trying to cut his way through the wire to reach his colonel’s body, but the German machine-gun fire frustrated the attempt.

Meanwhile, Victor Wheeler, hearing the cry “Stand to!” had strapped his Lucas lamp to his belt, fingered his telegraph key, stuffed four grenades into his pocket, and prepared for the attack. The first wave of phosgene had been let off in the face of a terrible German barrage and now the second wave of the less deadly chlorine was ready to go. But the wind had risen and changed, and the phosgene was already blowing back in the faces of the Canadians. It made no sense to release any more. The Calgarians tried desperately to climb over the parapet; it was not possible in the face of the German barrage. The first six men to reach the top were killed instantly. Others were collapsing in the green clouds of phosgene blowing back upon them. But Wheeler and his comrades were luckier than most; they lived, those who were not gassed, to fight another day.

Jack Quinnell found himself in an apparently hopeless situation. Looking back he could see fresh troops being hurried into the division’s empty front lines-a precaution against a German counterattack. Somehow he managed to crawl back under the wire, coughing and choking, his buttons and brass insignia green from the gas, his eyes in dreadful shape. It was daylight when he fell into the forward trench. Somebody handed him a large insulated jug of tea. He swallowed a mugful and immediately vomited over the man who gave it to him. He continued to vomit, and that probably saved his life. But for all of his years, his lungs would bear the scars they sustained before dawn on the first of March, 1917.

Others weren’t so lucky. The dying and the wounded lay out in No Man’s Land, waiting for help that never came. Phosgene is an insidious gas, eighteen times as powerful as chlorine. Its effects build slowly: breathing becomes shallow, the victim begins to retch, the pulse rises to 120, the features turn ashen grey; over the next forty-eight hours the victim drowns slowly as the lungs discharge pints of yellow fluid. As the day wore on, the suffering of those who had been gassed increased as the phosgene ate into their lungs.

Such scenes of adversity in battle are always illuminated by small epics of courage and endurance. Six hundred yards behind the German front, two privates of the Seaforths, Black and Debouchier, found themselves stranded, cramped and muddy, in a shell hole with a wounded comrade. They would not leave him and so lay out all through that long, hideous day. When dusk fell they drew lots to see which would go for help. Black won and somehow managed the extraordinary feat of crawling for six hundred yards right through the enemy trenches, dodging between groups of Germans, guided only by the stars. At one point, the sleeping enemy soldiers were so tightly packed that Black had to crawl up and down the back wall of the trench seeking a place to slip through. He made it at last to his own barbed wire, convinced the sentry that he was friendly, and then, in spite of the fact that he was grey with fatigue, insisted that he lead a party back to save his friends. His pleas were denied: any attempt that night would have failed. Black’s comrade, Debouchier, was captured. The wounded man died. Black survived to be killed in the mud of Passchendaele.

Two days later, at ten o’clock on the morning of March 3, when the gas had dissipated and No Man’s Land was a silent, corpse-littered waste, the Germans offered a truce to allow the Canadians to bury their dead. Representatives of both sides met under a Red Cross flag at a spot equidistant from both lines. The Germans-all picked men in smart new uniforms-carried the Canadian dead and wounded half-way across and handed them over to their enemies, who picked them up and carried them to their own trenches. The body of Lieutenant-Colonel Kemball was treated with great respect by his adversaries; one of the Germans who spoke English mentioned the commander of the Kootenay battalion by name, an indication of the laxness of security that had preceded the attack.

Lieutenant David Thompson, a bank clerk from Niagara Falls, was present at that truce. It gave him a queer feeling to be standing there in the broad daylight, not on his stomach but upright, without a shot being fired over that pock-marked field. It was almost as if he were in a dream. It was strange to see the Canadians exchanging cigarettes with the men they had tried to gas to death, but there they were, attempting to talk to any who spoke English. The German brigadier, who had been stationed at Esquimalt before the war, asked after old friends. He had words of praise for Travers Lucas, a Hamilton officer who had led his men gallantly to the wire-a practice uncommon in the German army. The officer, a Bavarian, spoke perfect English, having been educated at St. Paul’s, a famous British public school. He didn’t like the war, he said, hoped it would be over soon, and remarked how queer it would be to go back to the lines when the truce ended at noon, to, in his phrase, “pot at one another again.” The whole affair was rather like the atmosphere in a public house after a football game, when the players of both sides gather for a beer to discuss the contest. It lasted two hours and was hurriedly cancelled when the High Command got wind of it and ordered the immediate resumption of hostilities. But the guns were silent for the rest of the day; no one on either side had any stomach for further shooting.

The losses in the raid were staggering-687 casualties out of a total of 1,700 attackers, including the very serious loss of two seasoned battalion commanders. The abortive attack had greatly weakened the 4th Division, a tragedy that had its effect on the battle that followed five weeks later.

The press, of course, treated the raid as a victory, as the press always did.
The Times
reported that “the whole affair was carried out with great gallantry” and wrote of the heavy casualties inflicted and “valuable information gained.”

Such reports incensed Captain Andrew Macphail, who confided his disgust to his diary. “Nothing could be more utterly false,” he wrote. “The dispatch is the grossest and lowest form of journalism.”

CHAPTER SIX
Not What They Expected

1

The news of the failure of the March 1 gas raid swept through the lines like a sour wind. The men of the 4th Division, especially, were shaken. If an attempt of that size and complexity could fail so dismally, what hope was there for a larger venture? But the trench raids continued. More men died or were wounded or went missing – captured by the enemy, or ground into the mud of No Man’s Land to be lost forever, no more than a name on a post-war monument. By the end of March the total casualties would number the equivalent of two infantry brigades.

The men in the trenches lived with death- and slept with it. Jim Curtis of Calgary was so cold and so tired one night that he crawled under the blankets with a group of strangers only to discover the following morning that they were all corpses awaiting burial. It did not faze him. Will Bird’s first task on arriving at the Vimy front had been to gather up in bags the legs and flesh of three men who had been shredded by the premature explosion of their own mortar bombs. A group of ten gunners digging a pit for a trench mortar in a French cemetery worked their way down through six layers of corpses and thought nothing of hanging their canteens on protruding shinbones: the dead were part of the landscape.

Fresh troops poured in to fill the gaps left by the casualties. In Canada, those who had once been rejected as unfit found themselves wooed by the army. Healthy-looking civilians were reviled as slackers. There was increasing talk of conscription.

Out of Halifax the convoys steamed, loaded with reinforcements bound for England and, after a few days of training, for the French port of Le Havre. Here, in the first week of March, a draft of new recruits disembarked, destined for the signals section of the 42nd Battalion, Royal Highlanders of Canada, better known as the Black Watch. Among them was a twenty-one-year-old Scottish-born Canadian from Sherbrooke named William Breckenridge. A quiet, down-to-earth young man, Bill Breckenridge had arrived in Canada at the age of nine and had completed a course at the Ontario Business College in Belleville when the war broke out. He’d been in training ever since enlisting in 1915, and at Le Havre the training continued for another ten days before the reinforcement draft was ready to move to the front. By this time Breckenridge and his fellow signallers were sick of training and eager (if a little nervous) to encounter the real thing. But first they had to suffer the usual pompous send-off. As they stood fidgeting on the parade ground, the commanding officer appeared, hoisted himself onto a box, and made the kind of speech that commanding officers like to make and private soldiers don’t care to hear: