XXV Canada Is Stubborn
What is Canada fighting for?—The Kaiser has brought Canadians together—The land of immense distances—Canada’s unfaltering spirit—Canada our nearest neighbor geographically and sentimentally—Ypres salient mud—Canadians invented the trench raid—A wrestling fight in the mud—Germans “try it on” the Canadians—“The limit” in artillery fire—Maple Leaf spirit—Baseball talk on the firing line—A good sprinkling of Americans.
One day the Canadians were to lift their feet out of the mire of the Ypres salient and take the high, dry road to the Somme front, and anyone with a whit of chivalry in his soul would have rejoiced to know that they were to have their part in the big movement of Sept. 15th. But let us consider other things and other fighting before we come to the taking of Courcelette.
When I was home in the winter of 1915-16, for the first time the border between the United States and Canada drew a line in sharp contrasts. The newspapers in Canada had their casualty lists, parents were giving their sons and wives their husbands to go three thousand miles to endure hardship and risk death for a cause which to them had no qualifications of a philosophic internationalism. Everything was distinct. Sacrifice and fortitude, life and death, and the simple meaning words were masters of the vocabulary.
Some people might ask why Canada should be pouring out her blood in Europe; what had Flanders to do with her? England was fighting to save her island, France for the sanctity of her soil, but what was Canada fighting for? As I understood it, she was fighting for Canada. A blow had been struck against her, though it was struck across the Atlantic, and across the Atlantic she was going to strike back.
She had had no great formative war. Pardeburg was a kind of expedition of brave men, like the taking of San Juan Hill. It did not sink deep into the consciousness of the average Canadian, who knew only that some neighbor of his had been in South Africa. Our own formative war was the Revolution, not the Civil War where brother fought brother. The Revolution made a mold which, perhaps, instead of being impressed upon succeeding generations of immigrants may have only given a veneer to them. A war may be necessary to make them molten for another shaping.
No country wanted war less than Canada, but when war came its flame made Canada molten with Canadian patriotism. As George III. brought the Carolinas and Massachusetts together, so the Kaiser has brought the Canadian provinces together. The men from that cultivated, rolling country of Southern Ontario, from New Brunswick and the plains and the coast and a quota from the neat farms of Quebec have met face to face, not on railroad trains, not through representatives in Parliament or in convention, but in billets and trenches. Whatever Canada is, she is not small. She is particularly the land of immense distances; her breadth is greater than that of the United States. All of the great territorial expanse of Canada in its manhood, in the thoughts of those at home, was centered in a few square miles of Flanders.
I was in Canada when only the first division had had its trial and recruiting was at full blast; and again when three hundred and fifty thousand had joined the colors and Canada, now feeling the full measure of loss of life, seemed unfaltering, which was the more remarkable in a new country where livelihood is easy to gain and Opportunity knocks at the door of youth if he has only the energy to take her by the hand and go her way. I may add that not all the youth about Toronto or any other town who gave as their reason for not enlisting that they were American citizens actually were. They were not “too proud to fight,” whatever other reason they had, for they had no pride; and if honest Quakers they would not have given a lying excuse.
Out in France I heard talk about this Canadian brigade being better than that one, and that an Eastern Canada man wanted no leading from a Western Canada man, and that not all who were winning military crosses were hardy frontiersmen but some were lawyers and clerks in Montreal or Toronto—or should I put Toronto first, or perhaps Ottawa or Winnipeg—and more talk expressive of the rivalry which generals say is good for spirit of corps. Moose Jaw Street was across from Halifax Avenue and Vancouver Road from Hamilton Place in the same community.
As I was not connected with any part of Canada, the Canadians, with their Maple Leaf emblem, were all Canadians to me; men across the border which we pass in coming and going without change of language or steam-heated cars or iced-water tanks. Some Canadians think that the United States with its more than a hundred millions may feel patronizing toward their eight millions, when after Courcelette if a Canadian had patronized the United States I should not have felt offended. I have even heard some fools say that the two countries might yet go to war, which shows how absurd some men have to be in order to attract attention. All of this way of thinking on both sides should be placed on a raft in the middle of Lake Erie and supplied with bombs to fight it out among themselves under a curtain of fire; and their relatives ought to feel a deep relief after the excursion steamers that came from Toronto, Cleveland and Buffalo to see the show had returned home.
To listen to certain narrators you might think that it was the Allies who always got the worst of it in the Ypres salient, but the German did not like the salient any better than they. I never met anybody who did like it. German prisoners said that German soldiers regarded it as a sentence of death to be sent to the salient. There are many kinds of mud and then there is Ypres salient mud, which is all kinds together with a Belgian admixture. I sometimes thought that the hellish outbreaks by both sides in this region were due to the reason which might have made Job run amuck if all the temper he had stored up should have broken out in a storm.
This is certain, that the Canadians took their share in the buffets in the mud, not through any staff calculation but partly through German favoritism and the workings of German psychology. Consider that the first volunteer troops to be put in the battle line in France weeks before any of Kitchener’s Army was the first Canadian division, in answer to its own request for action, which is sufficient soldierly tribute of a commander to Canadian valor! That proud first division, after it had been well mud-soaked and had its hand in, was caught in the gas attack. It refused to yield when it was only human to yield, and stood resolute in the fumes between the Germans and success and even counter-attacked. Moreover, it was Canadians who introduced the trench raid.
If the Canadians did not particularly love the Germans, do you see any reason why the Germans should love the Canadians? It was unpleasant to suffer repulse by troops from an unmilitary, new country. Besides, German psychology reasoned that if Canadians at the front were made to suffer heavy losses the men at home would be discouraged from enlisting. Why not? What had Canada to gain by coming to fight in France? It does not appear an illogical hypothesis until you know the Canadians.
However, it must not be understood that other battalions, brigades and divisions, English and Scotch, did not suffer as heavily as the Canadians. They did; and do not forget that in the area which has seen the hardest, bloodiest, meanest, nastiest, ghastliest fighting in the history of the world the Germans, too, have had their full share of losses. The truth is that if any normal man was stuck in the mud of the Ypres salient and another wanted his place he would say, “Take it! I’m only trying to get out! We’ve got equally bad morasses in the Upper Yukon;” and retire to a hill and set up a machine gun.
When a Canadian officer was asked if he had organized some trenches that his battalion had taken his reply, “How can you organize pea soup?” filled a long-felt want in expression to characterize the nature of trench-making in that kind of terrain. Yet in that sea of slimy and infected mush men have fought for the possession of cubic feet of the mixture as if it had the qualities of Balm of Gilead—which was also logical. What appears most illogical to the outsider is sometimes most logical in war. It was a fight for mastery, and mastery is the first step in a war of frontal positions.
Many lessons the Canadians had to learn about organization and staff work, about details of discipline which make for homogeneity of action, and the divisions that came to join the first one learned their lessons in the Ypres salient school, which gave hard but lasting tuition. I was away when at St. Eloi they were put to such tests as only the salient can provide. The time was winter, when chill water filled the shell-craters and the soil oozed out of sandbags and the mist was a cold, wet poultice. Men bred to a dry climate had to fight in a climate better suited to the Englishman or the German than to the Canadian. There could be no dugouts. Lift a spade of earth below the earth level and it became a puddle. It was a wrestling fight in the mud, this, holding onto shell-craters and the soft remains of trenches. The Germans had heard that the Canadians were highstrung, nervous, quick for the offensive, but badly organized and poor at sticking. The Canadians proved that they could be stubborn and that their soldiers, even if they had not had the directing system of an army staff that had prepared for forty years, with two years of experience could act on their own in resisting as well as in attacking. “Our men! our men!” the officers would say. That was it: Canada’s men, learning tactics in face of German tactics and holding their own!
When all was peaceable up and down the line, with the Grand Offensive a month away, the Germans once more “tried it on” the Canadians in the Hooge and Mount Sorrell sector, where the positions were all in favor of the Germans with room to plant two guns to one around the bulging British line. For many days they had been quietly registering as they massed their artillery for their last serious effort during the season of 1916 in the north.
Anything done to the Canadians always came close home to me; and news of this attack and of its ferocity to anyone knowing the positions was bound to carry apprehension, lasting only until we learned that the Canadians were already counter-attacking, which set your pulse tingling and little joy-bells ringing in your head. It meant, too, that the Germans could not have developed any offensive that would be serious to the situation as a whole at that moment, in the midst of preparations for the Somme. Nothing could be seen of the fight, even had one known that it was coming, in that flat region where everyone has to follow a communication trench with only the sky directly overhead visible.
There was an epic quality in the story of what happened as you heard it from the survivors. It was an average quiet morning in the first-line trenches when the German hurricane broke from all sides; but first-line trenches is not the right phrase, for all the protection that could be made was layers of sandbags laboriously filled and piled to a thickness sufficient to stop a bullet at short range.
What luxury in security were the dugouts of the Somme hills compared to the protection that could be provided here! When the first series of bursts announced the storm you could not descend a flight of steps to a cavern whose roof was impenetrable even by five-hundred-pound shells. Little houses of sandbags with corrugated tin roofs, in some instances level with the earth, which any direct hit could “do in” were the best that generous army resources could permit. High explosive shells must turn such breastworks into rags and heaps of earth. There was nothing to shoot at if a man tried to stick to the parapet, for fresh troops fully equipped for their task back in the German trenches waited on demolition of the Canadian breastworks before advancing under their own barrage. Shrapnel sent down its showers, while the trench walls were opened in great gaps and tossed heavenward. Officers clambered about in the midst of the spouts of dust and smoke over the piles and around the craters, trying to keep in touch with their men, when it was a case of every man taking what cover he could.
“The limit!” as the men said. “The absolute limit in an artillery concentration!”
But they did not go—not until they had orders. This was their kind of discipline under fire; they “stayed on the job.” One group charged out beyond the swath of fire to meet the Germans in the open and there fought to the death in expression of characteristic initiative. When word was passed to retire, some grudgingly held on to fight the outnumbering Germans in the midst of the débris and escaped only by passing through the German barrage placed between the first and second line to cover the German advance on the second. The supports themselves under the carefully arranged pattern of shell fire held as the rallying-points of the survivors, who found the communication trenches so badly broken that it was as well to keep in the open. Little knots of men with their defenses crushed held from the instinctive sense of individual stubbornness.
To tell the whole story of that day as of many other days where a few battalions were engaged, giving its fair due to each group in the struggle, is not for a correspondent who had to cover the length of the battle line and sees the whole as an example of Maple Leaf spirit. The rest is for battalion historians, who will find themselves puzzled about an action where there was little range of vision and this obscured by shell-smoke and the preoccupation of each man trying to keep cover and do his own part to the death.
In the farmhouses afterward, as groups of officers tried to assemble their experiences, I had the feeling of being in touch with the proof of all that I had seen in Canada months previously. Losses had been heavy for the battalions engaged though not for the Canadian corps as a whole, no heavier than British battalions or the Germans had suffered in the salient. Canada happened to get the blow this time.
The men, after a night’s sleep and writing home that they were safe and how comrades had died, might wander about the roads or make holiday as they chose. They were not casual about the fight, but outspoken and frank, Canadian fashion. They realized what they had been through and spoke of their luck in having survived. From the fields came the cry of, “Leave that to me!” as a fly rose from the bat, or, “Out on first!” as men took a rest from shell-curves and high explosives with baseball curves and hot liners between the bases, which was very homelike there in Flanders. Which of the players was American one could not tell by voice or looks, for the climate along the border makes a type of complexion and even of features with the second generation which is readily distinguished from the English type.
“What part of Canada do you come from?” asked an officer of a private.
“Out west, sir!”
“What part of the west?”
“‘Way out west, sir!”
“An officer is asking you. Be definite.”
“Well, the State of Washington, sir.”
There was a good sprinkling of Americans in the battle, including officers; but on the baseball field and the battlefield they were a part of the whole, performing their task in a way that left no doubt of their quality. Whether the spirit of adventure or the principle at stake had brought her battalions to Flanders, Canada had proved that she could be stubborn. She was to have her chance to prove that she could be quick.