“Excuse me,” said the colonel; “things seem to be happening. I must go at once.”
He went through the window, leaping the sill, and a look of bad tidings went with him.
His men had been blown out of the craters.
A staff officer sat in the brigade office, and when the acting-brigadier had gone raised his head and looked across to me.
“I am a critic of these affairs,” he said. “They seem to me too expensive. But I’m here to do what I am told.”
We did not regain the Vimy craters until a year afterward, when the Canadians and Scottish captured all the Vimy Ridge in a great assault.
XX
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 breakthrough. 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 2nd 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 sandbags 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.
