The winter of discontent had passed. Summer had come with a wealth of
beauty in the fields of France this side the belt of blasted earth. The
grass was a tapestry of flowers, and tits and warblers and the golden
oriole were making music in the woods. At dusk the nightingale sang as
though no war were near its love, and at broad noonday a million larks
rose above the tall wheat with a great high chorus of glad notes.
Among the British armies there was hope again, immense faith that
believed once more in an ending to the war. Verdun had been saved. The
enemy had been slaughtered. His reserves were thin and hard to get (so
said Intelligence) and the British, stronger than they had ever been, in
men, and guns, and shells, and aircraft, and all material of war, were
going to be launched in a great offensive. No more trench warfare.
No more dying in ditches. Out into the open, with an Army of Pursuit
(Rawlinson's) and a quick break-through. It was to be “The Great Push.”
The last battles were to be fought before the year died again, though
many men would die before that time.
Up in the salient something happened to make men question the weakness
of the enemy, but the news did not spread very far and there was a lot
to do elsewhere, on the Somme, where the salient seemed a long way off.
It was the Canadians to whom it happened, and it was an ugly thing.
On June 2d a flame of fire from many batteries opened upon their lines
in Sanctuary Wood and Maple Copse, beyond the lines of Ypres, and
tragedy befell them. I went to see those who lived through it and stood
in the presence of men who had escaped from the very pits of that hell
which had been invented by human beings out of the earth's chemistry,
and yet had kept their reason.
The enemy's bombardment began suddenly, with one great crash of guns, at
half past eight on Friday morning. Generals Mercer and Williams had gone
up to inspect the trenches at six o'clock in the morning.
It had been almost silent along the lines when the enemy's batteries
opened fire with one enormous thunderstroke, which was followed by
continuous salvos. The shells came from nearly every point of the
compass--north, east, and south. The evil spell of the salient was over
our men again.
In the trenches just south of Hooge were the Princess Patricia's Light
Infantry, with some battalions of the Royal Canadian Regiment south of
them, and some of the Canadian Mounted Rifles (who had long been
dismounted), and units from another Canadian division at the extreme end
of their line of front. It was those men who had to suffer the tempest
of the enemy's shells.
Earth below them opened up into great craters as high-explosive shells
burst continually, flinging up masses of soil, flattening out
breastworks and scattering sand-bags into dust.
Canadians in the front trenches held on in the midst of this uproar.
“They took it all,” said one of the officers, and in that phrase, spoken
simply by a man who was there, too, lies the spirit of pride and
sacrifice. “They took it all” and did not budge, though the sky seemed
to be opening above them and the earth below them.
The bombardment continued without a pause for five hours, by which time
most of our front trenches had been annihilated. At about a quarter past
one the enemy's guns lifted a little, and through the dense smoke-clouds
which made a solid bar across No Man's Land appeared a mass of German
infantry. They wore their packs and full field-kit, as though they had
come to stay.
Perhaps they expected that no one lived in the British trenches, and it
was a reasonable idea, but wrong. There were brave men remaining there,
alive and determined to fight. Although the order for retirement had
been given, single figures here and there were seen to get over the
broken parapets and go forward to meet the enemy halfway. They died to a
man, fighting. It seemed to me one of the most pitiful and heroic things
of this war, that little crowd of men, many of them wounded, some of
them dazed and deaf, stumbling forward to their certain death to oppose
the enemy's advance.
From the network of trenches behind, not altogether smashed, there was
time for men to retire to a second line of defense, if they were still
unwounded and had strength to go. An officer--Captain Crossman--in command
of one of these support companies, brought several men out of a trench,
but did not follow on. He turned again, facing the enemy, and was last
seen--“a big, husky man,” says one of his comrades--as he fired his
revolver and then flung it into a German's face.
Colonel Shaw of the 1st Battalion, C.M.R., rallied eighty men out of the
Cumberland dugouts, and died fighting. The Germans were kept at bay for
some time, but they flung their bombs into the square of men, so that
very few remained alive. When only eight were still fighting among the
bodies of their comrades these tattered and blood-splashed men, standing
there fiercely contemptuous of the enemy and death, were ordered to
retire by Major Palmer, the last officer among them.
Meanwhile the battalions in support were holding firm in spite of the
shell-fire, which raged above them also, and it was against this second
line of Canadians that the German infantry came up--and broke.
In the center the German thrust was hard toward Zillebeke Lake. Here
some of the Canadian Rifles were in support, and as soon as the infantry
attack began they were ordered forward to meet and check the enemy. An
officer in command of one of their battalions afterward told me that he
led his men across country to Maple Copse under such a fire as he had
never seen. Because of the comrades in front, in dire need of help, no
notice was taken as the wounded fell, but the others pressed on as fast
as they could go.
Maple Copse was reached, and here the men halted and awaited the enemy
with another battalion who were already holding this wood of six or
seven acres. When the German troops arrived they may have expected to
meet no great resistance. They met a withering fire, which caused them
bloody losses. The Canadians had assembled at various points, which
became strongholds of defense with machine-guns and bomb stores, and the
men held their fire until the enemy was within close range, so that
they worked havoc among them. But the German guns never ceased and many
Canadians fell. Col. E. H. Baker, a member of the Canadian Parliament,
fell with a piece of shell in his lung.
Hour after hour our gunners fed their breeches and poured out shells.
The edge of the salient was swept with fire, and, though the Canadian
losses were frightful, the Germans suffered also, so that the
battlefield was one great shambles. Our own wounded, who were brought
back, owe their lives to the stretcher-bearers, who were supreme in
devotion. They worked in and out across that shell-swept ground hour
after hour through the day and night, rescuing many stricken men at a
great cost in life to themselves. Out of one party of twenty only five
remained alive. “No one can say,” said one of their officers, “that the
Canadians do not know how to die.”
No one would deny that.
Out of three thousand men in the Canadian 8th Brigade their casualties
were twenty-two hundred.
There were 151 survivors from the 1st Battalion Canadian Mounted Rifles,
130 from the 4th Battalion, 350 from the 5th, 520 from the 2nd. Those
are the figures of massacre.
Eleven days later the Canadians took their revenge. Their own guns were
but a small part of the huge orchestra of “heavies” and field batteries
which played the devil's tattoo upon the German positions in our old
trenches. It was annihilating, and the German soldiers had to endure the
same experience as their guns had given to Canadian troops on the same
ground. Trenches already battered were smashed again. The earth, which
was plowed with shells in their own attack, was flung up again by our
shells. It was hell again for poor human wretches.
The Canadian troops charged at two o'clock in the morning. Their attack
was directed to the part of the line from the southern end of Sanctuary
Wood to Mount Gorst, about a mile, which included Armagh Wood,
Observatory Hill, and Mount Gorst itself.
The attack went quickly and the men expected greater trouble. The
enemy's shell-fire was heavy, but the Canadians got through under
cover of their own guns, which had lengthened their fuses a little and
continued an intense bombardment behind the enemy's first line. The men
advanced in open order and worked downward and southward into their old
positions.
In one place of attack about forty Germans, who fought desperately, were
killed almost to a man, just as Colonel Shaw had died on June 2d with
his party of eighty men who had rallied round him. It was one shambles
for another, and the Germans were not less brave, it seems.
One officer and one hundred and thirteen men surrendered. The officer
was glad to escape from the death to which he had resigned himself when
our bombardment began.
“I knew how it would be,” he said. “We had orders to take this ground,
and took it; but we knew you would come back again. You had to do so. So
here I am.”
Parts of the line were deserted, except by the dead. In one place the
stores which had been buried by the Canadians before they left were
still there, untouched by the enemy. Our bombardment had made it
impossible for his troops to consolidate their position and to hold the
line steady.
They had just taken cover in the old bits of trench, in shell-holes and
craters, and behind scattered sand-bags, and had been pounded there. The
Canadians were back again.