Vimy (7 page)

When Leonard Youell, a Canadian liaison officer, reached a French port with his battalion, he was struck by the spectacle of a solitary figure standing on the dock. He was, thought Youell, perhaps the most dilapidated human that he had ever seen, a contrast to the fresh-faced Canadians with their polished boots and glistening cap badges. An exuberant newcomer shouted the rallying call, “Are we downhearted?” and the entire battalion replied with a rousing “No!” But a silence fell after the man on the dock looked up and retorted, “Well, you bloody soon will be.”

If these Canadians had no real idea of what lay ahead, those at home had even less. Later generations raised on revisionist tales of the Great War-on the poetry of Sassoon and Owen or the novels of Romains and Remarque – find it hard to believe that the folk back home saw the war not as a hell on earth but almost as a kind of adolescent romp. It was not until the next decade that the novelists and poets as well as the returned soldiers managed to convey something of the ghastliness of those fifty-two months. By and large, the First War was not the holocaust for civilians that the Second became, but for the men in the trenches of that earlier conflict war was far more dreadful than it was for those in the foxholes of its successor.

The 1st Division arrived in France in the early spring of 1915, after their stint of training on Salisbury Plain. Only then did they begin to comprehend what they were in for. By the time of the gas attacks in the Second Battle of Ypres – in late April and early May-they had a pretty good idea. This was not the kind of school-book war that was part of the fuzzy background of their youth. It was, in fact, a throwback to medieval times when men with catapults hurled rocks and flaming missiles at walled and moated fortresses, whose defenders responded with showers of arrows and vats of boiling pitch. This was siege warfare brought up to date, the catapults replaced by howitzers, the crossbows with Vickers guns. But the principles were the same.

It was not possible to dash around the flanks because in this war there were no longer any flanks; such was the legacy of the machine gun. The Western Front was anchored by the North Sea on the left of the Allied line and the twin barriers of the Alps and the Black Forest on the right. For all that distance-more than three hundred miles of crow-flight, much longer by serpentine ditch-the trench systems of the two adversaries stretched in a double line never more than a few hundred yards apart.

This was static warfare, the warfare of attrition, where the gain of a few yards of ravaged real estate was hailed as a victory. But the real purpose was to kill so many of the enemy that he could no longer function. It was confidently believed that the mounting pile of corpses would force him to sue for peace. And so on both sides men crouched like hogs in the mud, waiting for one of those appalling ventures into blood-letting that every commander since Hannibal has tried to avoid but that could not be avoided in the Great War – a frontal assault against a heavily prepared fortress position. And Vimy Ridge-south of Ypres, north of the Somme-was the greatest German fortress of all.

And yet, in the thousands of letters home, yellowing in family archives, there are remarkably few hints of the war’s reality. The letters are generally brief and often impersonal.

“Censoring letters … is absolutely the most monotonous and tiring job we have to perform,” the young machine-gun officer Claude Williams wrote to his mother two days before the Vimy battle. “Letter after letter, everyone saying the same thing-first of all acknowledging a parcel, then they say they are well, afterwards the weather, finishing up with their opinion of when the war’s going to finish.” On the evening after the Vimy battle, following a day of bitter struggle, M.E. Parsons, a runner with the 2nd Division, opened a letter from his mother. “We do hope you are not near that dreadful fighting,” she wrote. Parsons picked up one of the Field Postcards or “Whizbangs,” which the troops were encouraged to use, ticked off the two lines on the printed form – “I am quite well” and “I hope to be home soon” – and mailed it home.

The Whizbangs were a convenient way of telling family at home nothing, except the fact that you were alive or wounded. Like Parsons, the sender simply ticked off the appropriate sentences. Letters had to be posted unsealed, the envelopes closed only after an examination by a company officer. Those who attempted to report the worst horrors usually found that these passages had been removed. But few bothered. One of the remarkable things about the Great War was that hundreds of thousands of soldiers on the Western Front practised a form of self-censorship, following an unwritten law that no one should discourage the people at home. Blue envelopes were available for those who preferred to have their letters censored at base rather than by their own company commanders. William Pecover, the young Manitoba teacher, got twenty-eight days’ field punishment when he tried, unsuccessfully, to circumvent the censor by using a rough code in such a letter.

And so the brutal truth never got through, and Canadians were lulled by a false picture of a struggle in which their clean-limbed, courageous boys, heroes all, fought against a black-hearted and beastly enemy.

Why this conspiracy of silence? There was more than one reason: Sergeant James Montgomerie of the Black Watch, for instance, laundered his letters because he didn’t want the people at home to be sorry that he’d joined up with such enthusiasm. How was it possible to rush off to war, eyes glistening, bands playing, patriotic slogans on your lips, with everybody cheering you on, only to discover you’d been had? Nobody wants to be seen as a fool.

Besides, real soldiers didn’t whine. The gallant understatement, the light quip in the face of adversity, this was part of the traditional image of the fighting man. The youngsters who flocked to the colours had been raised on tales of the British stiff upper lip under pressure-the Light Brigade stoically charging the Russian guns, the schoolboy rallying the ranks with the cry of “Play up! Play up! and play the game!”

More important, however, was the general feeling that it was bad for civilian morale and hence the war effort to emphasize the casualties and conditions, and callous to terrify one’s mother unnecessarily with tales of bloated bodies rising out of the slime or cronies trying to stuff their entrails back into their abdomens.

With one or two notable exceptions the generals and staff officers who committed thousands to the slaughter rarely saw the results of what they’d done, and the men in the forward areas, in the words of Andrew McNaughton, “didn’t know enough to resent it.” In 1917 they hadn’t yet realized it wasn’t the kind of thing to be expected of men at war.

But perhaps the overriding reason why the men at the front had no desire to speak the truth about conditions in the trenches was that these conditions truly
were
unspeakable. Even in 1985, old men in their nineties, veterans of Vimy, asked to describe the mud and the lice, the filth and the rats, could only shake their heads and say, “You had to be there. It’s not possible to describe it to somebody who wasn’t.”

You could, if you wished, recreate something approaching the trench life in Flanders during those years. You could dig in your backyard a ditch about eight feet deep, fill it during a rainstorm with two feet of thick clay mud, and then crouch in it, day and night, for a week, living on tinned bully beef, a few slices of mouldy bread or hardtack, and plum jam. Yet even if you filled the ditch with live rats and infested it with so many lice that your shirt crawled, it would still be a pale counterfeit of the real thing. The ceaseless rumble of guns, the crack of bullets overhead, the crump of trench mortars, the stench of mangled bodies, and the command on certain nights to emerge from your filthy hole and crawl in terror across No Man’s Land-these cannot be simulated.

Nor can the uncertainty. Any healthy young man can survive a few days in a ditch, but
four years
? A week in a ditch, a week out, bored to death, committed to back-breaking toil, with only a little leave, no chance of seeing home and family and no idea when it would all end – this was the lot of those who survived. Small wonder that they did not attempt to describe the indescribable.

Half a century later, one Canadian who was there did undertake to describe trench life and came as close to it as any, perhaps because he was a journalist and a raconteur-one of the best Canada has produced. Gregory Clark’s picture of the trenches, delivered as part of a CBC interview forty-eight years after Vimy, deserves to be quoted at length:

… [the] historians … have forgotten to remind us of one thing, that from the sea up near Ostend, some hundreds of miles, waving and weaving across Belgium and down through France over hill and valley, and plain and river, down across and back up into the mountains, three hundred and some miles … was this ribbon of stealth. Some places it would be only a mile wide, other places, because of the flat terrain, it was wider. This ribbon or belt of absolute stealth, day and night, week after month after year for four years – never changing; this band of deathly stealth in which no man moved or spoke loudly.

When you entered it from behind whatever hills or other cover enabled you to be yourself (chatting and marching and slouching along with your unit) suddenly you entered this strange, mysterious, unearthly land of stealth. And in that stealth, millions of men … lived years of their lives.…

There were sounds: there was the distant sound of the guns firing. There was the weird, unearthly howling of shells … the crack and explosion of shells. There would be strange, meaningless rifle shots, little random unassociated rattles of half-dozen bursts of machine guns in the night.… These sounds in this stealth only accentuated it and gave it a more unearthly and slightly lunatic sense. You were living in this strange, weird and wonderful thing not a little while. Battles came and broke it and smashed it into a thousand million pieces but then the battles subsided and the stealth returned.

Now they speak of trenches in this strange ribbon of deadly stealth across Europe. Trenches is too romantic a name.… These were ditches.… As time went by we had no garbage disposal, no sewage disposal – they became filthy. You threw everything you didn’t want out over the parapet.… And if you ever stood at a place where, with powerful binoculars, you could look at the trenches you saw this strange line of garbage heap wandering up hill and down dale as far as the eye could see. And in that setting men lived … year after year [in] … a sort of garbage dump ditch … the latrines were little trenches off the main trench. These, when they became too offensive, were filled in and a new one dug; but these main trenches were held sometimes months on end. They became very sour. The smell … in those dugouts was a sour, strange odour overlaid in winter by the smell of coke gas.…

This land of stealth went through towns, villages but mostly through farm fields, abandoned and of course running wild with turnips and some other farm crops. A weird tangle-you [would] think it would come alive with game, but no. There was nothing in it except rats by the countless million. I don’t think it was possible to exaggerate the number of rats in that stealthy land- and [they] added that last mad feature. Wherever you went, in daylight and at night, the whole place was squeaking and squealing with these huge, monstrous rats living on this garbage.…

The tension never for one moment relaxed. The stealth never relaxed day or night, winter, spring, summer, autumn. The tension never ended. You never knew at what moment one of those perfectly meaningless sounds … would get you.… It wouldn’t have taken a great deal in this dreadful, prehistoric circumstance for men to have lost heart and they never did. We had a thing called shell shock in our war.… A great many of us were hostile to the phrase.… It wasn’t anything of the kind. It was just fatigue-not so much in battle as in these long intervals of living under these conditions.…

3

Although the men at the front never really told their families the truth about the war, it is possible to detect a subtle lessening of enthusiasm in the letters they dispatched to Canada after a spell in the trenches. The correspondence of Claude Williams, the medical-student-turned-machine-gunner, provides one example. Williams, a gung-ho enthusiast if there ever was one, didn’t use the Whizbang forms; his letters are long and effusive. The early ones, from Shorncliffe, Kent, where he trained in 1916, fairly bubble with excitement. “Oh, it is grand to be a Machine Gunner!” he wrote home in July. “We are just aching to go,” he exclaimed in August. “You should just see the scramble to discover who has been signed on the next draft. I have known four or five pounds being offered for a man’s place … but it is never accepted.”

Williams had wanted to join the infantry, specifically the PPCLI, but was turned down because he wore glasses. His father, an army padre and a friend of Sam Hughes’s, got him into the officers’ training course at Niagara camp in May of 1915. There he was chosen to be part of a machine-gun unit privately raised and paid for by Colonel John Labatt, of the Ontario brewing family. Now, more than a year later, he feared nothing so much as the possibility that he’d be made an instructor and miss the fun. If so, he told his family, “I will deliberately make the poorest marks possible.… ” If necessary, he would stow away to get to France; other officers had already done that.

His correspondence continues in this vein. News of the Somme massacre only made him more eager to join the fight: “I have been so sick of waiting whilst every other fellow gets ahead of me.… “ Finally, in October, 1916, as the first Canadians began to move toward Vimy, the call came. To Williams it was “almost too good to be true … the next happiest time since I heard I was to take out a commission.…”

Once he was in France, however, Williams’s letters lost some of their glow. In training there he saw a man blown to shreds while handling a Mills bomb, the officer next to him decapitated, a third badly maimed. One morning two soldiers were shot by a firing squad. “I am enjoying this fine,” he hastened to add, but then: “Please excuse this letter’s lack of neatness. I am covered in mud … writing by candlelight.”