From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade Part 4

It is hard to imagine anything sadder than rejoining a battalion after fighting such as that unless it is the saying of good-bye.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MANOEUVRES ON SALISBURY PLAIN.]

CHAPTER VII

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 sh.e.l.l 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 hoa.r.s.e 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.

CHAPTER VIII

YPRES, 1915

The Second Battle for Ypres, as the fighting at Langemarck and St.

Julien is officially designated, was largely a regimental and company officers' battle. This does not, however, reflect adversely on the brigade and other staffs, who did all that was humanly possible with the information that was at hand. Even at this date there are questions about the action that cannot be cleared up until it will be permissible to reproduce the whole of the war diaries of the various units that took part.

On the 2nd and 3rd Canadian Brigades fell the brunt of the fighting in which the Canadians took part, as the 1st Brigade was in rest billets in reserve.

But, without detracting from their work, it must be admitted that the account by the official "Eye Witness" does not give the 1st Brigade the credit it deserves. This, however, is inevitable. In a modern battle one sees nothing but what happens in the immediate vicinity of the observer, and we must therefore depend largely on the accounts furnished by others of what occurred in other parts of the field.

It will do no harm, however, to quote from the description by an officer, since killed, of the action of one of the battalions of this brigade, which from respect for the censor must remain nameless.

It would, however, serve no purpose to conceal the true names of those officers and men whom he thought fit to mention, for the majority of them have also laid down their lives in the field.

"During the latter part of the evening of April 22nd French and Algerian troops in large numbers began retreating through _Vlamertinghe_ in the utmost confusion, throwing away their arms and crying 'Asphyxie!

Asphyxie!!' Empty limbers and gun teams without their guns dashed down the road, already thick with refugees and fugitive soldiers. Captain Culling therefore ordered the company to stand to arms and be ready to move off as soon as orders were received.

"Orders came about 9 p.m., and we moved off to the battalion rendezvous at the junction of the _Brielen_ road, where we found the rest of the battalion formed up. From here we continued north easterly up the _Brielen_ road, across the ca.n.a.l toward _St. Julien_.

"A short distance past the ca.n.a.l the battalion deployed from the road, No. 3 Company being on our (No. 2 Company's) left and continued to advance.

"Moving forward in this formation was very difficult owing to the thick darkness and the ground being so cut up by hedges, but Captain Culling got in touch with the battalion on our left, which turned out to be the _Canadian Scottish_ under Lieutenant-Colonel Leckie, at about the farmhouse that afterwards became our dressing station. The advance continued slightly more to the north, and a few minutes later the company lay deployed about fifty yards in rear of a trench (A B) occupied by the 10th Canadian Battalion. They were enfiladed from a German trench to their right rear (C) and an adjoining farmhouse (M G).

"Wounded men, including their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Boyle, lay everywhere about the trench and parados, but they were too weak to attack this short piece of trench, although it was rendering their position quite untenable.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"One of our platoons successfully attacked this trench, while another under Mr. Doxsee attacked the neighbouring house and succeeded in driving the enemy from it with a loss of only two men killed and another wounded.

"Steps were then taken to improve the position by reversing the parapet of the captured trench (C) and extending the original trench to the right. The house (M G), too, was prepared for defence, and thus the night was pa.s.sed and no man slept.

"At dawn of the 23rd the enemy commenced sh.e.l.ling the house and trench, but the losses inflicted were slight owing to the two parallel hedges, which made both ranging and observing difficult. They then commenced an attack on the house supported by machine-gun fire, which proved a far more serious affair, as in the house itself we lost two men killed and some wounded, while in the trench we lost two valuable men, Platoon-Sergeant Abelarde and Lance-Corporal McGurk. The former had crawled out along the hedge to a dangerous and commanding knoll, and from there put eighteen of the enemy out of action before a sniper's bullet found him. The dead lay exposed where they fell, and could readily be counted from the house.

"About 9 o'clock, while Captain Culling was organising a counter-attack on a small portion of the German trench (D E), two companies of the Toronto Battalion under a major arrived as reinforcements, and took cover behind our parados as there was no room in the trench. Captain Culling asked that they take on the attack, and Mr. Doxsee volunteered to lead it. The response was feeble, and the attack petered out to nothing, Bugler Hunt and a man of the _Toronto_ Battalion being killed by the side of Doxsee, who, finding himself alone, returned to the trench unharmed.

"The _Toronto_ men now tried a flanking movement on our immediate right, but lost eight men and had to abandon the attempt. However, coupled with our fire from the second story of the house, the effect was sufficient to cause the enemy to retire from this point, and the remainder of the day pa.s.sed quietly, though the enemy's artillery continued to sh.e.l.l our position and a machine-gun played on the house at every sign of movement. By evening we had some seventeen casualties, a remarkedly small number considering the sh.e.l.ling.

"As soon as darkness set in, under cover of a few skirmishers, two platoons continued our original trench (A B) along a line (B B 1) about fifteen feet in rear of the forward hedge surrounding the house and linked this trench to the position in our right rear with a communication trench, the majority of this work being done with the small entrenching tool.

"This enabled us to get the whole company under cover, and with a machine-gun of the _10th Battalion_ in the house we felt fairly secure.

Captain Hooper held a house immediately in front of our lines called _Hooper House_, and our original trench was held by a mixture of our own men and the Canadian Scottish under Mr. Hugill.

"Dawn on Sat.u.r.day found our positions unaltered, but about 7 o'clock orders came from Lieutenant-Colonel Rodgers, our second in command, to take over all of the original trench and relieve the _Scottish_.