Our actions during those weeks were minor. Like everybody else in the British Twenty-seventh Division, the Patricia’s were employed on quiet stretches of the front. The entire division was still recuperating from its near fatal mauling at the Second Battle of Ypres four months prior to my arrival. Other fresher divisions weren’t so lucky. To relieve pressure on the Russians and draw German troops from the east, the French and British armies chose to attack in the areas of Champagne and Artois, as well as around a small village called Loos. We were glad to be out of that one too. What we heard from our own rear-area troops was disturbing. British casualties at Loos were staggering and we were thankful at having been spared the horrors of that bloody campaign. Our stretch of the front was no more comfortable and it was often dangerous, but we felt immensely lucky that it was our turn to be tasked with relatively safe reserve and flank guard roles.
One morning in February stands out clearly during one of those stretches in the trenches. I was on a tour of my platoon area talking to the men, conducting routine inspections of weapons and sanitary arrangements. It was a grey, cold, foggy day and wet enough that we were thoroughly miserable. My boots were sodden and my trousers were caked with wet mud. I was chatting to one of my corporals about nothing in particular when we heard the whistle of incoming trench mortar fire a little further down the line. We threw ourselves against the parapet wall. Several rounds landed in the space of a few seconds and no sooner had they stopped than I heard men cheering and catcalling. The shouting was a good sign; it seemed all the mortar fire landed either in front of or behind our trench lines.
I hurried to the sound of the cheering, but as I rounded one of the bends in the traverse between Two and Three Sections, I was electrified. Private Reid, the young man who acted as my guide on my first night at the battalion, was on his stomach clawing at the duckboard. His face was drained of colour; his mouth twisted in a horrible grimace. Reid lay in a grotesque smear of blood and dirt, his legs shredded into trailing ribbons of mangled flesh and ragged bits of uniform. He died in my arms seconds later.
That morning was the first feeling of genuine hatred I had for the enemy. I wanted Reid to survive the war. He’d been kind to me. He was cheerful, resourceful, and I knew he would have made a difference to those whose lives he touched. For him to die so suddenly, so capriciously and in such agony and filth filled me with loathing and rage.
After Reid’s death I continued to be shocked by the closeness of death – but that morning something inside me went numb. I suppose it was what psychologists now call a survival mechanism. Whatever it was, it was another watershed moment in my life, one that fifty-five years later I recall in vivid detail. When the Loos offensive finally came to a shuddering stop over seventy thousand young men like Private Reid were dead. When the war was over, twenty million Private Reids had been slaughtered on both sides.
A week later, the entire British army went onto the defensive and the Patricia’s were at last transferred to join the rest of our fellow countrymen in the Canadian army.
When we joined the Canadian army, the battalion was tasked to man the line around the town of Hooges. At Hooges, we received another reinforcement draft from Canada; and for the first time in my experience, the Patricia’s were at full fighting strength. Like me, most of the new men were recruited from universities in Quebec and Ontario. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of potential officers in this new draft and, as I was to learn later, senior army planners were angry that the upstart PPCLI had again creamed off more than its share of the available talent. Elitist recruiting didn’t help us escape the destruction lying in wait for the Canadian army. Like the rest of the university men, I was soon involved on a section of the line with the deceptively tranquil sounding name, Sanctuary Wood. It was to be horrific and was my last pitched battle. Sanctuary Wood was another link in a chain inexorably dragging me into a new life.
Our arrival in the new sector of the line was ominous. To go forward we had to pass through a patch of ground near Hooges that had once been the intersection of two country lanes. Because the crossroads was directly observable to German troops on the high ground to the north of us, several months earlier British troops nicknamed it Hellfire Corner. Anything that moved by day on Hellfire Corner was shelled mercilessly, and at night, the Germans regularly blasted it with speculative shrapnel and high explosive bombardments. To get to our new positions we had to pass through Hellfire Corner. On our first tour in the sector, despite moving through the crossroads at night, we lost seven men just getting to the trenches. That month we crossed and re-crossed Hellfire Corner three times.
Our new position was an utterly godforsaken piece of ground. The battalion’s trenches meandered across a waterlogged bottomland and the Germans looked down on us. Because the Salient was Belgian ground, the Allies refused to surrender an inch, and we found ourselves defending a low-lying salient jammed like a provocatively scolding finger into the German lines.
Behind our trenches, the ground was deeply cratered. Over the winter those craters filled with black water, turning the larger shell holes into small evil-looking lakes. On dark nights, men from my platoon frequently crawled back there, cracked the ice, and washed away as much of their filth as they could. We stopped that soon enough.
When the warm weather came, the ice disappeared and the mud at the bottom of the crater gave up the bloated corpse of a long-dead French soldier. Our poor Frenchman wasn’t the only unburied veteran in the area. At several points along our trench walls men repairing collapsed sand bag revetments came across the decomposing bodies of French and British soldiers who died there months before. God knows what terror and agony those men died in, but their rotting arms and legs routinely fell into our trenches. There was nothing else we could do – we dug through those remains and sealed off the dead with sand bags. The memories of those corpses were less easy to lock up.
On June 1, Number Two Company was manning the “Loop,” a semi-circular section of trench that sat like a wart on the very tip of the Salient. The Loop’s trenches were deeper and in better repair than those occupied by the companies on either side of us. But although our trenches may have been deep, their approaches were exposed on both sides and we could only get safely into the area in daylight by crawling on all fours for several hundred yards.
On that final stint in the Loop, Number Two Company was stronger than we had been on our previous tour. In addition to our new reinforcements, in our last period in rest billets we’d received two Lewis guns on an experimental basis. The Lewis gun looked like an oversize rifle with a large, circular, pan-shaped magazine on top. I had been introduced to it in England on training and knew it would become a fearsome addition to our weaponry because it increased our firepower several-fold. We needed it.
A year and a half into the war the majority of troops on both sides were only a few months away from civilian life. Few of us were good marksmen. By June 1916, two-thirds of the soldiers in the PPCLI were Canadian; and despite whatever personal strengths we Canadian-born members of the regiment may have had, we had only been in uniform for a few months and couldn’t shoot anything like as well as the British originals who’d spent their peacetime years on the British army’s rifle ranges. We took great delight in getting this new weapon, little realizing that the automation of war was reducing all our chances for survival.
In late May, there were indications the Germans were going to attack but we’d no idea when their offensive was to begin, or how fierce and determined it would be. The morning it all started was gloriously sunny; larks were singing somewhere behind us. I was in a philosophic mood thinking about home and watching a starling sitting on the trench lip. I’d become superstitious in a half-believing take-no-chances sort of way and I was puzzled whether this was a good or a bad sign.