INTERIM
For a time there was little news from the Canadians at the front, for
they were not immediately placed in the trenches. Trench warfare was
then still a novelty; its exact principles had not been developed, and
all the training done on the Plain had been the ordinary open style of
fighting--quite useless against the strongly entrenched positions the
Germans had taken up.
So while lying in reserve behind the lines the First Division dug and
manned trenches and practised themselves in the new warfare. Selected
officers from each company spent days in the front line with other
battalions and returned to their men bristling with information.
A little later selected platoons and companies took their turn in the
front line, and before the end of February the Canadian Division was
holding its own sector of the British line.
Casualties began to drift back to the Canadian base, which had now
become centred at Shorncliffe, and letters began to arrive with details
of the new methods of fighting. There was other news, too, of a more
cheerful sort that showed brighter glimpses of life that occurred when
enjoying brief rests from the firing line.
"Don't sympathise with us too much," wrote one officer; "we would sooner
be here than on the Plain. Last night we gave an oyster and champagne
supper at ---- to three Ottawa ladies who are running a soup and coffee
waggon for our battalion. We had a great time. D---- Dang and the Cat
(another subaltern) were in fine fettle."
But more serious work was in view.
On March 10th the British commenced an offensive at Neuve Chapelle
which, had it proved successful, would have involved the Canadians in
the projected advance upon the Aubers Ridge, which formed the key to
Lille.
But Neuve Chapelle, although a victory in one sense of the word, was a
very costly lesson, but a lesson that showed that our artillery must be
enormously increased if any further effort to break through the German
line was to be made.
For, having taken their objective, the British troops found not only a
second but a third line of trenches protected by entanglements of a most
formidable nature, and so situated as to render the ground recently won
at such heavy cost almost untenable. To carry these lines would require
another bombardment more intense even than that which had preceded the
attack. Our line had advanced one mile and there it stayed.
So ended the first attempt on our part to renew the offensive after the
stagnation of a winter of trench warfare. For years we had been taught
that an army that relinquishes the offensive acknowledges itself as
beaten. It now began to look as though military science had undergone a
complete revolution and that trench warfare and the policy of attrition
were to be the normal methods of the future.
But Neuve Chapelle showed something else--it showed that the indomitable
spirit of our men had not been quenched by the misery and suffering of
the winter months and that the British bayonet was as much to be feared
as ever.
"We were kept pretty busy," wrote a friend, "doing rapid fire, and lost
quite a few from shell fire. But our artillery had the time of their
lives, and fired pretty steadily the whole three days of the show."
Later he wrote that they were moving northward--probably to Hill 60--and
we could expect there would be something doing shortly.
It was not to Hill 60 that the Canadian Division went, but further
northward in the Ypres salient to the left of the 27th Division, where
the "Princess Pats" were winning immortality at St. Eloi.
So the days wore on, the surplus officers chafing at the monotony of
drill on a barrack square, relieved as it was by "Thes Dansants" at the
Metropole and promenades along the Leas at Folkestone.
Then one day a medical officer dropped a sure tip. He had been warned to
prepare beds for a thousand casualties--the Canadians were in something
big at last!
Just how big it was we realised a week later when the newspapers broke
forth into flamboyant headlines, "CANADIANS SAVED SITUATION," "FOUR GUNS
RECAPTURED," and other startling sentences that danced before the eyes.
Lyte and the writer were returning from some light festivities, when
the hoarse cry "All about the Canadians" arrested their attention.
Papers were hurriedly bought, and the brief vague lines of the official
_communique_ eagerly scanned. "By Jove!" was Lyte's exclamation; "but
isn't that great!" The writer, however, hardly heard him; he was
thinking of the many good friends who had taken part and the price they
had to pay, and his answer was the monosyllabic "Huh!" of the aborigine.
That evening we packed our kits.