Hell crept up on 'zero hour' as Canadians fired as one

When the silence fell over Vimy Ridge on Easter Monday morning, it seemed to Canon Frederick Scott, chaplain of the 1st Canadian Division, as if the war had gone to sleep.

The silence lasted only a few minutes, perhaps as long as a quarter of an hour. But it seemed so much longer, and was remembered long after the fact because of the cacophony that would follow.

Every soldier waiting that April morning for the battle to begin in the ravaged field in northeastern France noted the quiet and an unnatural stillness.

Canon Scott, a 55-year-old Anglican minister who just six months earlier had personally recovered the body of his son from the No Man's Land of a battlefield near Courcelette, settled into the silence, walking over to a place by himself where he could not hear the other men talking. And he waited.

"I watched the luminous hands of my watch get nearer and nearer to the fateful moment, for the barrage was to open at 5:30."

He had signed up along with the members of his Quebec City congregation when the war broke out in 1914, and since then, had endured the death of his eldest son, and shared in all of the hardships and dangers of the soldiers to whom he ministered. Now, here he was in the front line, waiting with them for the assault to begin.

"At 5:15 the sky was getting lighter and already one could make out objects distinctly in the fields below. The long hand of my watch was at 5:25. The fields, the roads, and the hedges were beginning to show the difference of colour in the early light.

"5:27! In three minutes the rain of death was to begin. In the awful silence, it seemed as if Nature was holding her breath in expectation of the staggering moment."

In a gun position just a few kilometres away, Sergeant Raymond Ives, a 28-year-old gunner with the 48th Battery of the Canadian Field Artillery, synchronized his watch in preparation for "zero hour" and also took in the silence.

The strange quiet, he said, was broken only by the pattering of rain that began to fall. He gave his gun a last dab with a polishing rag and gave it a final feed of oil.

Like most of the nearly 100,000 Canadian troops who had come to this bleak field four months before, many of them barely out of their teens, he could barely contain his excitement at the prospect of launching the attack and finally having a go at the Germans.

The notion that this was a day like none other here was established early on when, in the darkness before zero hour, the troops were treated to a rare hot breakfast. There was bacon, bread, butter, tea and oranges -- and after the meal, an issue of rum for every soldier, "which was rather small," grumbled Private Leo Kelly, a 19-yearold, who nonetheless remarked, "We don't need rum to fight. All we need is grub and cigarettes."

Maybe so for the young Quebec private, full up on a rare warm breakfast and energized by the prospect of battle, but for Lieutenant Stuart Kirkland and his platoon, who had spent the night packed into a front-line trench in the cold and muddy darkness, the rations of rum were essential.

"We stood there in mud to our waists all night waiting for the eventful hour. After fifteen minutes before the time set, I took two water bottles of rum and gave each of the men a good swallow, for I was bitter cold standing in the mud all night."

Lieut. Kirkland, a lawyer from Dutton, Ont., just shy of his 34th birthday, stood for hours, watch in hand, waiting.

When the time finally arrived, it fell to the gunners like Private Ives, manning their massive howitzers and field guns, to rally their fellow artillerymen to begin the crescendo of explosives and steel.

"Five minutes to go. Four minutes to go. Three minutes to go. Two minutes to go. One minute to go. 10 seconds. Five seconds. "Whistle!We're off."

Even before the battle began, Vimy Ridge had begun to assume the proportions of legend on the Western Front.

The British war correspondent Philip Gibbs called Vimy Ridge "that great, grim hill" for a geography that gave it natural defence qualities and its seeming impenetrability in the war.

The ridge was an 11-kilometre-long rise that was the highest ground for hundreds of kilometres around, dominating the terrain of much of the surrounding countryside.

From Vimy Ridge, one Canadian officer observed, "more of the war could be seen than from any other place in France."

The Germans had captured the ridge during their initial drive into France at the start of the war and, since then, they had spent three years improving its already formidable natural defences.

Three separate networks of trenches criss-crossed the field, each of them up to 500 metres deep with concrete machine- gun posts and bastions interconnected by a labyrinth of deep trenches and tunnels. Each line was protected by belts of barbed wire more than 100 metres wide and included deep shelters large enough to hold hundreds of German soldiers.

From their perch atop the ridge, the Germans could see for kilometres behind the Canadian lines.

Hill 145 was the highest point of the ridge. It had been attacked by the French Army in 1915, and held briefly before the force was driven back with a loss of more than 150,000 men.

Captain Walter Moorhouse, a Toronto architect serving with the 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles, toured the old French lines when the Canadians took over the sector in late 1916, and was shocked to find them still filled with decomposing bodies from the battle a year and a half ago. "They had never been cleared and were still well [reinforced] and in fair condition," he remarked on the French trenches, "but with many corpses lying around."

The British had attempted to take Vimy Ridge a year after the French, but with even less success. So when the British High Command began laying plans for a spring offensive, they handed the job of capturing the ridge to the Canadian Corps and gave Lieutenant- General Sir Julian Byng, the English commander of the newly formed unit, just two months to plan his attack. The suspicion was that the British gave the Canadians little chance of success taking a defensive position that their troops and the French twice tried and failed, and that the attack on Vimy was to be a minor part of a much larger offensive by the British Third Army just to the north.

No matter. The preparations began in February. Soldiers like Sgt. William Bird, a 26-year-old from Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, were lined up for inspection several days in a row by a series of colonels and generals to assess the Canadians' readiness for what was to come.

"The old hands said we were in for bloody slaughter after so many inspections, and the next day we began to train over tapes representing the German trench system at Vimy Ridge," said Sgt. Bird, who only enlisted after his younger brother was killed at Ypres in 1915, but fought for almost the entire war with the 42nd Royal Highlanders of Canada (Black Watch).

The Canadian plan of attack on Vimy Ridge revolved around a combination of immense firepower -- 1,097 howitzers, mortars and field guns were assembled for the task -- and an assault tactic known as "the creeping barrage," in which the artillery fires about 100 metres ahead of the advancing soldiers, gradually raising their aim as the infantry moves forward to take one trench after another. The technique required perfect timing and coordination.

If the foot soldiers took too long to reach their objectives, the artillery fire would be too far ahead and the defending Germans would have time to climb out of their shelters and get into their machine-gun nests. If the infantry went too quickly, they risked being killed by their own shells.

To make it all work, Lt.-Gen. Byng ordered full rehearsals of the attack for every member of the Canadian Corps using maps, scale models and full-size mock-ups. Borrowing an idea from the French Army, he also insisted that maps and plans be distributed to every one of the soldiers to ensure that everyone knew their jobs in detail.

In the months leading up to the attack, the Canadians had to arrange supplies to sustain the more than 100,000 soldiers, military engineers, gunners and other troops -- more than 800 tonnes a day in everything from food to ammunition.

The battlefield infrastructure included 75 kilometres of pipeline to pump an estimated one million litres of water every day, 32 kilometres of light railways, built using small engines or more often mules or horses, and enough wood-surfaced roads to allow supplies to be brought to the front despite the ever-present mud.

Just as much work was going on underground as well, with the building of kilometres of tunnels, some of them long and wide enough to protect Canadian soldiers in the hours before the attack, others that ran underneath the German trenches, packed with explosives to be detonated before the attack began.

The work had to be carried out in complete silence to avoid detection from the Germans who were tunnelling as well.

Sgt. Bird spent days digging tunnels, tying sandbags over his boots and, crouching on all fours, creeping along a tunnel in solid chalk just four feet high and hardly three feet wide.

"The air was dank and close and we sweated a great deal. It was amazing how far we proceeded in that one night. The man in charge forbade anyone speaking. At any moment it was possible the removal of a newly cut chunk might reveal a German dugout filled with men! For weeks afterwards my whole body would tense when I thought of that night."

Above ground, the daily routine was just as tense. Separated by as little as 100 metres in places, the Canadians and Germans took sniper shots and shelled each other at every opportunity.

Fresh from his tunnelling duty, Sgt. Bird volunteered to work as a sniper, watching the German lines through a high-powered scope. On his first day, perched in a shell-hole with a more experienced sniper, he spied a German soldier just minutes after taking up his hidden post, his finger taut on the trigger.

He shot him as soon as he appeared. "Hardly had he fallen than a soldier without any pack and a rifle in his hands stepped up on the piled earth.

"I could count his tunic buttons through the telescopic sights and shot him through the left breast."

As he fell downward, two more Germans suddenly appeared at a spot to the left. Sgt. Bird shot one of them, but when it came time to shoot the other, he balked.

"Shoot!" urged the other more experienced sniper, gripping his shoulder. "You won't get a chance like this all day."

Sgt. Bird had had enough. He quit the sniper section that day and returned to regular duties with his platoon - not that that provided much relief with its dangerous routine of sentry duty, patrols and work details that included crawling out at night to repair the masses of barbed wire just metres from German trenches.

Private Joseph Albert, of the 43rd Battalion, was on sentry in one such trench one night, not far from German lines. One of the other sentrymen passed around cigarettes and lit up, but Private Albert headed back to smoke his cigarette in a secure trench.

"During that time there were a few forward explosions from German shells. When I returned to the sentry post I discovered where the shells had landed -- the Germans had observed the cigarette glows in the darkness and zeroed in on them.

The two weeks before the assault on Vimy were so intense, with hundreds of Canadian and British guns pounding the long, low ridge night and day, that the German troops huddled in their dugouts below ground called it "the time of suffering."

Then, exactly on schedule, at 5:30 a.m. April 9, the full assault of the artillery opened fire and thundered down on the German positions in a massive and unprecedented explosion of gunfire.

"Hundreds, thousands of big guns, from 18-pounders to 15-inch guns, opened at the same second," said Lieut. Kirkland, shivering with his men in the trenches when the assault began. "Imagine 15-inch guns firing from miles behind the line and throwing each of them about 1,400 pounds of explosives. The very Earth rocked, and the noise and thunder was awful and maddening."

He rhapsodized that it was "the most wonderful artillery barrage ever known in the history of the world."

Gunner Harold Panabaker, a 20- year-old who left his job in a woollen mill in small-town southwestern Ontario to sign up with five of his brothers and cousins, was waiting in a tunnel 20 metres below the front lines and said even so far underground the blasts sounded "like a vast roll of thunder."

He hurried out of the tunnel and saw, a couple hundred yards in front of him, the desolation wrought by the first wave of the Canadian attack.

"Trenches were completely demolished; mere ditches but a foot or two deep was all that remained of one of the most elaborate and intricate systems of trench defences on this whole front," he said. "Machine-gun emplacements were blotted out. The landscape was pitted with shell holes, some small, some almost incredibly large ?

"The figures of the men were outlined against the murk and the smoke of the most stupendous barrage the war has seen."

The Canadian Corps advanced toward the enemy trenches, approaching panicked Germans who were sending up flares in a frantic attempt to warn their commanders of the attack.

When 24-year-old Lieutenant Gordon Chisholm, a Toronto bank accountant before the war, climbed out of his trench, he saw a long line of his countrymen marching steadily forward. "Looking to either side, one could see thousands of men walking slowly, but nonetheless certainly into the German lines. Ahead of us, our artillery cleared the way. When we reached the German lines, we hardly recognized them.

"What had once been trenches were only mere sunken lines. There was not a point in them that had not been touched. The ground between the trenches was so pitted with shell holes that it resembled a gigantic honeycomb."

Laden down with 90 pounds on their backs, in rounds of ammunition and grenades, the Canadians advanced in the rolling barrage, sweeping easily over the Black Line, where most of the Germans were still in their shelters, taken by surprise.

"It was a joke going over," one soldier wrote home to a friend. "Fellows were stopping to light cigarettes and everybody was acting as if they were walking down the Strand."

Private William Elder, a Saskatoon law student who fought with the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, was among the troops advancing just behind the rolling barrage. The 23-year-old could feel every part of his body tingling: "The air seemed just charged with electricity. The snapping and cracking of the higher explosives added to the din of the crashing reports of the heavy shells. It was beautiful and magnificent, and yet how dreadful."

As the Canadians advanced toward the Red Line, where they first encounter German snipers, they began limping back to their lines in ones and twos, then in threes and fours.

Despite the increasing German resistance, the Canadian Corps took the second line by noon, and pushed deeper into German territory.

In the northern half of the ridge however, the Canadian Fourth Division ran into a wall -- Hill 145, the highest point on Vimy Ridge, and a smaller hill nearby called The Pimple.

Both had been heavily fortified by the Germans. By nightfall, the Canadians had taken only the western half of the hill and their repeated attacks had been thrown back with heavy losses.

Victor Wheeler, a 22-year-old signalman with Calgary's 50th Battalion, watched scores of his fellow soldiers disappear to the left and right of him. "We took frightful punishment from the well-disciplined Brandenburgers," he said. "The Bavarians fought like animals at bay to drive us back up the eastern slope [of Hill 145]."

The attack on the key hill almost faltered then, until the 85th Battalion North Nova Scotia Highlanders were called up from reserve and charged the German lines.

"Adjacent battalions waved and beckoned to them to stoop down and take cover, but on they swept with head erect," goes the battalion's lore, "the very audacity of their demeanor was one of the greatest factors of their success."

On April 10, the day after the Canadian attack, German Crown Prince Rupprecht, commander of the sector that included Vimy Ridge, wrote in his diary: "No one could have foreseen that the expected offensive would gain ground so quickly."

Three days after the attack began, the Crown Prince ordered a retreat to new lines well back from the ridge, accepting the inevitable. By dawn on April 13, all of Vimy Ridge was in Canadian hands and the battle was over.

In four days, the Canadian Corps had advanced nearly five kilometres and captured 158 guns and more than 4,000 prisoners. The Canadian victory led to the resignation of the chief of staff of the German Sixth Army for "this heavy defeat."

Still, the victory came at a price. The number of Canadian casualties amounted to over 10,000 killed and wounded, which, as Bombardier James Johnson, of the 5th Canadian Mounted Rifles, noted, was "not too bad considering the numbers of troops involved and the magnitude of our achievement.

"However, it was a big price to pay to occupy an area six-by-four miles square."

In a war that measured success in terms of metres of ground taken and counted casualties in the hundreds of thousands, the success of the Canadian Corps shocked the British and French command almost as much as the Germans.

Within a few hours, the Canadians had driven deeper into enemy territory, taken more prisoners and suffered fewer casualties than any previous offensive in the long and bloody stalemate on the Western Front. Although the battle raged on for four days, the German defenders who had considered the ridge impregnable had been largely broken in the first few hours of fighting by a relentless Canadian assault.

The battle marked the first time the four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force had fought together as one unit and the men who went over the top on that Easter Monday were keenly aware of the historic nature of their undertaking.

Private James Mathieson, 34, and a farmer before he enlisted, was among the wounded shipped to England on a hospital boat not long after the battle. Someone in the crowd gathered at dockside that day noticed he was Canadian and let up a cheer: "All of a sudden somebody says this: 'The Canadians. They've taken Vimy. Nobody did it before.' And what a cheer went up.

"They threw chocolate bars. They threw flowers. In fact, I broke down and cried. We achieved something that nobody had done before. I think myself that was where Canada was born."

The French, still reeling from their horrific bloodletting at Verdun the year before, called the victory an Easter present from Canada. The British reaction was more reserved. King George V sent a message of congratulations, saying: "Canada will be proud that the taking of the coveted Vimy Ridge has fallen to the lot of her troops."

And the official Canadian announcement, issued by the Canadian War Records Office in London a few days after the battle, said with stereotypical Canadian understatement: "The Canadians have acquired merit."

For the men who fought at Vimy, and survived to tell the tale, they were forever changed by the experience.

Sgt. Bird, the sniper-cum-tunnel digger from Nova Scotia, caught up with a group of his friends resting near the top of the ridge after the battle. He was struck by the change in them.

"Each man suffering from bodily fatigue, crawling vermin and the clammy chill of mud-caked clothing, their faces brooding, enigmatic ... looking curiously old," he said.

"Months before we had marched eagerly to Mount St. Eloi, our tin hats askew and with a cheeky retort for every comment, hiding whatever secret apprehensions we had. Now we had changed."

Letters, diaries and memoirs of soldiers at Vimy from the Canadian War Museum Archives, the Canadian Letters & Images Project and the Royal Canadian Military Institute.

I have had the pleasure of reading Canon Scott’s book, The Great War as I Saw it, which is available on Project Gutenberg. It tells a moving story of a man who, despite his age and profession, was with the Army from the beginning to just before the Armistice, where he fell wounded. He was a chaplain for all who came to him, including those who were to be shot for desertion and the wounded Germans who came his way. A finer example of Christian is rarely found.

Soldiers like Sgt. William Bird, a 26-year-old from Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, were lined up for inspection several days in a row by a series of colonels and generals to assess the Canadians’ readiness for what was to come.

“The old hands said we were in for bloody slaughter after so many inspections, and the next day we began to train over tapes representing the German trench system at Vimy Ridge,” said Sgt. Bird, who only enlisted after his younger brother was killed at Ypres in 1915, but fought for almost the entire war with the 42nd Royal Highlanders of Canada (Black Watch).

Read Will Bird’s own story, “Ghosts with warm hands.”
He credits his dead brother with saving his life on Two occasions.

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