The enemy charged like a wild bull against the iron wall which kept him from our submarine bases… But it held, although a faint tremor ran through its foundations.
Erich Ludendorff1
26 October–10 November 1917
Sir Arthur Currie made no secret of his opposition to fighting in Flanders, but his professionalism and sense of duty meant that, once the orders were issued, he lost no time in getting his corps into the best possible position to launch its assault. Artillery would be crucial, yet the problem of how to get enough guns into position without them being destroyed by German batteries or bogged down in the mud was maddening. When Brigadier-General E. W. B. Morrison, Currie’s head of artillery, inspected the front, he was horrified by what he encountered. There were supposed to be 250 heavy guns (used by the Australians and which the Canadians would take over), but he could only find 227, of which eighty-nine were already out of action. Regarding the field artillery, the situation was even worse. 306 18-pounders were supposed to be deployed within range, yet many of these were sunk up to their axles in mud and at least half were out of action.2 Currie even caused a scene when he was late one day for a meeting with Haig, who was attending a conference at Poperinge. When Currie came in, mud still clinging to his uniform, a sour look on his face, he stared at Haig and demanded to know where his guns were.3
Currie’s uncompromising attitude, combined with his absolute insistence that everything possible was done to ensure success, was commendable and, indeed, absolutely vital. But he could not work miracles. By the time the Canadian Corps launched its attack, it had been unable to get all its guns into position and had suffered heavily from the regular enemy bombing and strafing missions, which went on, with annoying regularity, every night. Mist and rain prevented observation of the battlefield and because the sound-ranging and flash-spotting sections–both of which were crucial for locating enemy batteries–had been unable to keep up with the advance, German guns were not subjected to the kind of intensive counter-battery fire that the Canadians had become used to. As a Canadian artillery report later noted, enemy guns kept up ‘harassing fire on routes of approach, long distance fire on railheads and depots, concentrations on billets, battery areas and forming-up localities’, which caused heavy casualties and continually delayed the work of repair and construction. Indeed, some were left wondering whether the German High Command truly realized how handicapped the attackers were, with British guns cramped in a narrow salient under little or no cover and dependent upon a few well-worn approach routes. Had the Germans made a really sustained effort to bombard the salient, they could have increased British and Canadian losses ‘many fold’ and may even have made future operations all but impossible.4
The first step involved 3rd and 4th Canadian Divisions making an advance of between 600 and 1,200 yards to the Red Line (the first of Currie’s three objectives). On the left 3rd Division would take the high ground at Bellevue, while 4th Division, on the other side of the swollen Ravebeek, would aim for a ‘tangle of shattered tree trunks’ on the Ypres–Roulers railway known as Decline Copse.5 The assaulting battalions moved up several days before–long, thin columns of troops making their way along the corduroy roads and duckboards, slick with rain; a via dolorosa through the trenches. In the sodden wilderness, with major landmarks and most trees having been erased from the surface of the earth, officers and men struggled to locate their positions, although they soon spotted the squat pillboxes, covered with earth or bricks, that blocked their way up the ridge. On 23 October, Lieutenant-Colonel G. F. McFarland, second-in-command of 4/Canadian Mounted Rifles, marched with his battalion to a forward position called Cluster House, where they would relieve Australian troops. ‘The Anzacs were more than delighted to hand it over to us,’ he wrote, ‘because they had had a very dirty time. Cluster House was a series of pill-boxes on a low ridge, and a more desolate, god-forsaken place I never expect to see. The route to it was bath-matted all the way, which alone made it passable. The ground was simply a morass, pitted with shell-holes full of water, and getting off the bath-mat meant sinking to one’s waist in the ooze.’6
One of McFarland’s junior officers was Lieutenant Tom Rutherford of Owen Sound, Ontario. ‘The trench we occupied was hardly worthy of the name’, he remembered; ‘just a broken down ditch with up to six inches of water in it.’ On the morning before the attack, he slithered up and down his sector, binoculars in hand, trying to familiarize himself with the ground over which they would attack:
The right flank of our company was in a little wood relatively much smaller than the Wolf Copse as it is called on the sketch-map in the 4th CMR History. It was elm trees about a foot through and, at that time of year, bare of leaves… Beyond Wolf Farm and the edge of the wood was what appeared to be an enemy pillbox covered on top and in front with broken bricks, apparently from Wolf Farm as the loose bricks had been gathered up around that area. Beyond this and about 300 yards to the right… and on the end of a small spur that dominated the whole area, was another very obvious pillbox.
Rutherford returned to his company headquarters (just ‘a projection cut in the side of the trench and covered with some old boards’) and arranged frontages and attack plans with the other subalterns, flinching as the occasional shell or mortar round exploded around their positions. They settled down that night with just ‘a couple of hunks of bread’ for their provisions and no water.7 It was an inauspicious start to the renewed attack: this was not like Vimy Ridge.
The lack of water in the forward positions–when it lay everywhere around them in muddy pools–only added to the discomfort of the troops and, perhaps, their urgency to get going on the morning of 26 October. At Zero Hour (5.40 a.m.), in the chill dawn, the creeping barrage lifted and the leading lines, stiff with cold, caked with mud and filth, crept forward to their objectives through the drizzle and mist. The rows of barbed wire that had stopped the attacks on 9 and 12 October had now been blown away, but the attack only made slow, grudging progress. 8 Brigade (3rd Division), which pushed on past Wolf Copse, north of Bellevue, recorded that its front-line battalions were ‘heavily and continuously shelled’ during the night prior to the attack. When they went over the top–their helmets painted a dirty brown colour to prevent reflection–the enemy resisted as long as they could, with machine-gun and rifle fire being ‘severe’.8
It was a hard, brutal day’s fighting. 4/Canadian Mounted Rifles progressed just 500 yards in two hours, the men gradually mastering the pillboxes that littered their front.9 ‘At 5.45 the leading companies commenced to move forward, and the first line of pill-boxes was reached on time with the barrage’, remembered Lieutenant-Colonel McFarland, who watched the attack go ahead. ‘Here very serious casualties were inflicted upon our people, particularly among the officers who were picked off by snipers from the pill-boxes. Two garrisons of these strongpoints fought bravely, keeping their rifles and machine-guns in action until they were bayonetted or bombed.’ Once they had re-formed, the battalion tried to push on to a second line of pillboxes, but ‘such a devastating fire was poured upon them that they were completely held up’.10 With units on either flank having been unable to keep pace, the battalion had little choice but to consolidate its gains and hope for the best. As for Tom Rutherford, he fell into a pool of water, three feet deep, and lost most of his equipment, before leading an assault on a pillbox that was blocking a neighbouring battalion. He later explained his success as down to being ‘just crazy’, ‘fighting like a guerrilla’, and being covered in mud, which made him difficult to spot.11
Similar acts of bravery helped the Canadians on to most of their objectives that day. The Canadian Corps would win nine Victoria Crosses between 26 October and 6 November, with three on the first day alone.12 In 43/Battalion (the Cameron Highlanders of Canada), Lieutenant Robert Shankland led his platoon up the Bellevue Spur into a storm of machine-gun and sniper fire. ‘When dawn broke sufficiently our men could be clearly seen moving slowly over the skyline and around the two formidable looking Pill Boxes on the crest of the ridge’, recorded the battalion war diary. Yet progress rapidly slowed, and as the morning wore on, more and more stragglers began to turn up at battalion headquarters, having lost their officers and become shaken by the intensity of the shelling. 58/Battalion, on the right, had been held up by a strongpoint, which left Shankland and his men in an exposed and increasingly dangerous position. All the officers of ‘C’ and ‘B’ Companies had been hit and it was unclear whether the battalion would be able to hang on. At ten o’clock Shankland returned to battalion headquarters and reported that he was holding the ridge with about forty men, but they were ‘suffering considerable annoyance from snipers’ and if their ammunition ran out they would be unable to maintain their position. The Canadian advance seemed to be on the point of failure.13