Vimy (21 page)

Two generations would pass before the psychologists came to understand what Currie had sensed. Had they listened to the survivors of the Great War, who talked so wistfully, even longingly, about the comradeship of the trenches – a comradeship so intense they were unable to duplicate it in civilian life-they might have reached their conclusions far earlier.

The platoon system adopted at Vimy had broader implications. Claude Williams, writing home as early as January, had quoted Byng as saying that “war in the future more than ever will be won or lost by platoon commanders.” It was a prescient remark. In the peacetime army, the veterans who stayed in uniform taught the platoon tactics adopted at Vimy. In the next war they were the basis for what came to be known as “battle drill.”

The Canadians had an advantage over their Allies. The social gap in the British army had led to a communication problem that affected the course of battle. On the first brutal day at the Somme, when officer after officer was mowed down, few rankers knew enough to assume leadership. At Vimy, Currie and Byng were determined that no one would be kept in the dark.

Canadians were baffled by the haughtier members of the British officer class. Captain Andrew Macphail, McGill professor and medical officer at Vimy, wrote in his diary in March 1917 that a certain British quartermaster-general, Lieutenant-Colonel E.L. Hughes, “is as foreign to me as the Prussian is to the German.” According to Macphail, Hughes “fails to conceal the contempt he feels for all who were not born in his own parish and attended the same school; but he is quite sure that they will accept that contempt as being perfectly natural and proper, and so take no offence.”

It did not pass unnoticed, either, that the British Guards officers insisted on being saluted in the trenches-something the easier-going Canadians dispensed with – and that those Imperial officers attached to the Corps sometimes ordered extra fatigues or other penalties for soldiers caught with mud on their greatcoats. Such officers did not last long in the Canadian lines: those who weren’t sent back to the British Army were shot in the back by their own men.

There was an easiness between the Canadian officers and men that was foreign to both the French and British forces. At times the Canadian Corps seemed like one big family where everybody knew everybody else-like William Klyne, a sixteen-year-old stretcher-bearer with the Royal Regiment who got into action only because the C.O. was his sister’s boyfriend.

Any graduate of Sandhurst would have been shocked right down to his polished boots by a scene that Gordon Beatty, a gunner with the 5th Field Battery at Vimy, witnessed in the battery’s orderly room. Beatty’s driver, Private Dan Surette, asked to be paraded before the commanding officer on “a personal matter.” Beatty marched him in, saluted smartly, and reported: “Driver Surette to see you, sir.”

Whereupon Private Surette turned to the C.O., extended his hand, and said, “Got a chew, Colonel?”

“Sure,” said the Colonel, reaching into his hip pocket for a plug. “Just keep it, Dan,” he said as he handed it over. The two men were old friends who had both worked for the town of Moncton, the C.O. as a city clerk, the driver as a garbage collector.

At 1st Army headquarters, Canadian sergeants and brigadiers rubbed shoulders as they clustered around a plasticine model of the Vimy sector, showing the German trench system and all the topographical features – every contour and fold in the ground-together with every strong point and pillbox. Byng himself often turned up to explain and to guide. “Make sure that every man knows his task,” he would say. “Explain it to him again and again. Encourage him to ask questions.”

The Corps commander had devised a catechism, which he handed out in pamphlet form at officers’ training courses. The would-be subalterns were required to ask themselves a series of questions beginning: “No. 1: Do I know all the NCOs and men in my platoon? Do I know my snipers, bombers, Lewis gunners, scouts and rifle grenadiers? Have I practised with my platoon in getting out of their dugouts quickly to meet an attack, and does each man know where to go?”

That a junior officer should know all the men under him seems elementary today, but in the British Army in the Great War, the platoon commander was more often than not a vague and distant upper-class figure who spoke with a different accent and dealt with the men only through his sergeant.

“Are my men full of keenness and as happy as I can make them?” the eighth and final question in Byng’s catechism asked. “Can I say that my platoon is one of the smartest, most efficient and most aggressive in the corps?” As the training period drew to a close and Zero Day approached, this keenness was evident. The knowledge that nothing had been overlooked had seeped down to the newest private soldier and contributed to the high morale of the Corps. In no previous British offensive had so little been left to chance. Every possibility, it seemed, had been considered. The Canadian gunners had been taught how to dismantle and use captured German artillery pieces. In a nearby wood, platoons took a unique course in bush-fighting, stalking hidden machine guns through the trees and knocking down dummy snipers with live ammunition. Byng, who had booby-trapped the Turks at Gallipoli, gave lectures warning men to shun attractive souvenirs. And the gunners were cautioned not to increase their fire in the hours before the attack because that might alert the Germans.

Four days before the assault, Andrew Macphail recorded his awe over the meticulous preparations for the battle: “Tor two months I have had the plan of the battle before me in as much detail as if it were the plan of a house which an architect proposed to build,” he wrote. “The disposition of every man in the corps is settled and the moment for his movement arranged. Therefore every incident has its meaning for me and the significance of it is dreadful.” For medical men like Dr. Macphail would have to deal with the by-products of battle, the maimed and the mangled, brought back from the shambles of the ridge, blood-caked and mud-begrimed, clinging desperately to life in the overcrowded casualty clearing stations just behind the field of slaughter.

2

While the foot soldiers rehearsed their roles in the drama to come, Andy McNaughton, the shaggy counter-battery officer, worked with his staff trying to nail down the position of every one of the German guns, sited along the ridge or hidden in the woods under the steep eastern slopes.

When McNaughton returned from his journey of inquiry at Verdun and the Somme, Byng had relieved him of all paper work and given him carte blanche to order all the guns and ammunition he needed to knock out the enemy batteries. His was a close-knit unit made up of men who had known each other in civilian life. His headquarters, by all accounts, was a lively place. What other senior officer on the Western Front kept a pet lion cub under the packing cases that did duty for his desk?

The animal had been brought back from Paris by McNaughton’s staff captain, a former Prince Albert lawyer named Lennox Napier, who had clearly enjoyed his spot of leave. Napier and some friends, after a night on the town, saved the cub from execution at the Paris zoo; now it spent most of its day under McNaughton’s feet and, in spite of the fact that it was in no way housebroken, became a fixture. Great hilarity ensued when the cub began to snap at the shins of an air intelligence officer named Davidson. Poor Davidson would leap on a nearby table to screams of laughter. When McNaughton and Napier toured the back areas by car, the lion sat between them in the back seat, attracting more than a little attention from the gaping troops along the road.

This gregarious and open atmosphere was bound to attract to McNaughton’s circle those dedicated scientists who felt themselves less than comfortable working with the hidebound senior officers of the British Army.

The idea that you could actually pinpoint the position of an enemy gun and then knock it out was considered radical nonsense by the old-line British gunners. “Is there some kind of Free Masonry between the artillery of both sides?” Arthur Currie asked his artillery adviser in 1915. “They fire at the opposing infantry but never at each other.” A young Canadian, Harold Hemming, a McGill graduate serving in the British 3rd Army, had been experimenting with flash spotting, a method of locating a gun position by triangulating its muzzle flashes; but his general was not impressed. As he put it to Hemming, “You take all the fun out of war.”

But McNaughton was an old friend of Hemming’s and, unlike some of the conservative gunners, was eager to listen to his theories. He was equally impressed by a remarkable trio of scientists whom he persuaded to quit the British and join his staff at Vimy. These three men – Lawrence Bragg, Charles Galton Darwin, and Lucien Bull – all became lifelong associates. They left the British Army because they were tired of being ignored as dangerous radicals and because they knew that the conditions for their research would be much improved under a man who was himself a scientist and who rejoiced in an elastic and questing mind.

These men were experts in the new science of sound ranging-the companion to Hemming’s flash spotting. Bragg, whose father was a celebrated physicist, was only twenty-seven but already held a Nobel prize for physics. Darwin was the grandson of the author of
On the Origin of Species
. Bull had invented the first sound-ranging recorder.

The key to sound ranging was the oscillograph, the same instrument that McNaughton had studied at McGill. But the novel idea of carrying a delicate device similar to an electrocardiograph into the lines, setting it up, and depending on a photograph of the vibrations to identify the enemy gun emplacements was, in McNaughton’s own words, considered “treason, literally treason.” The scientists were virtually ignored by the British. They had no real quarters, no dugouts, no friends. McNaughton changed all that, made them welcome, looked to their comfort, and encouraged their experiments.

Both sound ranging and flash spotting are complicated procedures. The latter required a series of posts all along the front, each equipped with telephones and surveying gear and a reporting system back to a panel of lights at headquarters. So accurate did this system of lights and buzzers become that the Canadian artillery was able to locate a German gun position to within as little as five yards.

The sound-ranging technique was even more complicated. When an enemy gun opened up miles away an entire sequence of events took place. A man in a listening post, often out in No Man’s Land, pressed a key activating a recorder at McNaughton’s headquarters. A series of microphones, placed all along the front a mile and a half back of the forward line, picked up the sound in turn as it travelled. From the time intervals between the microphones the gun’s exact location could be spotted. Similarly, the sound waves sent out by a shell bursting on the Canadian side, and picked up by a succession of microphones, could locate the target.

There were many problems. Some shells travelled faster than the speed of sound, some slower. Heavy winds, temperature and pressure changes, the contour of the ground, the very condition of the layers of air above the battlefield – all these affected calculations. In spite of this, the scientific wizards who had joined McNaughton’s team were able to calculate not only the position of the enemy gun but also its type, its calibre, and the target on which it was registered. Under good conditions they could do it in three minutes, spotting the location within a twenty-five-yard circle.

A steady flow of information from other sources poured into McNaughton’s headquarters-from the men who raided the enemy trenches in the dark of the night, from sweaty documents and maps ripped from German corpses or liberated from captured prisoners, from the coded reports of secret agents, and finally from the young men of the Royal Flying Corps, winging as close as they dared to the enemy lines.

Aerial photography was in its infancy. The pilot shot his stereoscopic pictures using a cumbersome camera lashed to his cockpit directly behind the observer. It was dangerous work – each reconnaissance plane required a cover of five fighters – and it was exacting. Because the battlefield contained so few recognizable features, each photograph had to be carefully identified, otherwise it would be almost impossible for the gunners to string all of them together in an accurate pattern.

The observation balloons, tethered to the ground and manned by men with strong field-glasses, overlooked the ridge itself. From a mile up, the observers could see far behind the German lines; but they were not popular, especially with the red-tabbed staff officers who were unaccustomed to up-front warfare. The balloons were sitting targets for the Germans’ long guns, and more than once a senior officer ordered their removal. Nonetheless, they provided the counter-battery unit with a stream of information.

McNaughton, who didn’t like balloons, forced himself to spend hundreds of hours floating above the trenches, training his field-glasses on the enemy areas. He had some close calls. Yet his life would be saved and he would live to fight in another war because of his own scientific abilities and the knowledge he amassed at the Vimy front.

He was soaring four thousand feet above the enemy lines when a gigantic shell exploded not far from the basket in which he and the balloon commander crouched. A few feet closer and both would have been blown to bits. McNaughton realized that it was the first of a salvo, and so the pair lowered themselves gingerly over the side of the basket, preparing to parachute to earth. At that point, McNaughton froze. His hands refused to loosen their grip. Both men decided there and then that a drop would be more terrifying than the German shelling. They pulled themselves up by their shins and fell back into the basket.

McNaughton knew that he had to get the gun before the gun got him. He began working feverishly to locate its position from its flash, timing the arrival of the shells by their explosions and telephoning the information to his counter-battery staff on the ground. It must have given him enormous satisfaction to see the Allied long-range guns bombarding the German position and to realize that because of his expertise the shelling of his balloon had stopped and he was safe.