The Canadian corps came into the final campaign with certain very evident advantages which stood them in good stead. They had suffered no losses—apart from the cavalry and machine-gun sections—in the terrible battles of March and April when the German drives down the valley of the Somme and through Flanders towards the sea were stopped just before they culminated in allied disaster. This does not mean that during this anxious period the Canadian corps, as some seem to think, enjoyed a luxurious and reposeful existence removed from the perils and anxieties of war. When the German offensive began the Canadians were holding a front along Vimy Ridge of 9,000 yards; when it ended they were in charge of 35,000 yards of front line trenches. They did no fighting because the Germans did not attack them; had they done so they would have got a warm reception. During this anxious period the Canadians deepened their defensive position by five miles—in the rear of Vimy Ridge the new trenches then dug can be seen on every side; they reorganized their machine-gun detachments, increasing their fighting power by fifty per cent.; and they had organized every Canadian in the area down to the cooks into fighting bodies—all inspired by a common determination to resist until the death. In those dark days, they served by standing and waiting!
Nevertheless they profited, of course, by their happy escape at that time from the fearful sacrifice which other British divisions on the western front had to make. When the time came to take their place in the line for the great—and as it developed—the decisive offensive, they were in splendid condition—divisions over-strength, thoroughly equipped, hardened by an iron discipline cheerfully borne and uplifted by a consciousness that the days of inaction were over and that their hour had struck.
As the Canadian troops moved south from their long-held positions at Vimy to take their place in the line of battle at Amiens one phenomenon—which was rightly interpreted as a portent of victory—was noted. The troops began again spontaneously to sing as they covered the miles along the straight undeviating French roads which are heartbreaking to infantry on the march. In the early days the Canadian was a singing army; but as the iron of war entered its soul it fell silent and the long marches to the battlefields were made in dogged silence. But in those bright days in early August serene confidence in their power to conquer filled the hearts of the Canadian soldiers; and their cheerful and confident voices filled the air with Canadian songs. From then to the end the Canadians sang as they fought their way from victory to victory.
The participation by the Canadian corps in the battle of Amiens was a well-kept secret until they went over the top. The Germans were misled by a calculated manoeuvre into believing that the Canadians had been moved north into Flanders; the French lining up for their drive forward south of the Roye road did not know until the eve of the battle that the troops immediately to their left across the highway, which were to move forward with them, were the Canadians. The news was not unwelcome to them; for the reputation of the Canadians as shock troops of the first order was already established. The road runs through the large semi-open wood where the whole Canadian army remained hidden during August 7th; with the falling of darkness they moved forward in the charge of guides to their appointed posts—the ground being quite unfamiliar to them. The plan of battle called for the advance at zero hour by the Canadians between the Amiens-Roye road and the Amiens-Ham railway, an initial front of 7,000 yards; on the left beyond the railway were the Australians and on the right across the road were the French. The dividing line of the highway was not rigidly observed. The 9th brigade, forming the extreme right of the Canadian force, delivered its attack from the right of the road and captured Rifle Wood—a daring and successful stroke well worth the telling which had much to do with the almost instantaneous success all along the line of the Canadian advance, and further along the road on the following day the Canadians stormed across the road in support of the French and taking the Germans on the flank and in reverse made possible a break through at one of the most obstinately defended points of the enemy front.
This was the first occasion upon which the Canadians met the enemy in open fighting; and the German expectation that troops experienced only in trench fighting would be at their mercy in field manoeuvres developed at once into a catastrophic disappointment. Of all the battlefields of the war the terrain here shows the least signs of conflict—due to the rapid retirement of the Germans once their front lines were smashed. From the highway most of the battlefield can be seen; and the story of the extraordinary advance of the Canadians by which a huge wedge was driven into the German front can be easily told by a competent guide—of which there never should be any lack. No Canadian making a pious pilgrimage over the Canadian front should overlook the Amiens battlefield. An eminent military authority has made the prediction that in the ultimate judgment of the historian of the tactical developments of the 1918 campaign, the complete smashing of the German defence at this point by the Canadian corps in the early hours of August 8, will be regarded as one of the decisive turning points of the campaign. It is worth noting, in this connection, that Berlin despatches, quoting from advance proofs of his book on the war, credit Ludendorff with the statement that the success of the Franco-British offensive at Amiens on August 8th destroyed the last hope of the Germans for final victory. The Canadians were the spear-head of that attack and made the deepest advance, on the opening day of the offensive, into the enemy's territory.
Within ten days the Canadian contribution to the Allied offensive in the Amiens sector was completed. On August 22, the decision was reached by the high command to shift the whole Canadian force north to Arras in preparation for the attack upon the Drocourt-Queant position; in the early hours of August 26—less than 100 hours later—the Canadians burst through the early morning mist upon the astonished Germans, who thought them fifty miles away, and wrested the high ground at Monchy le Preux and the positions in alignment with it from them. From this jumping-off place the Canadians advanced resolutely and steadily towards Cambrai; in a week's time the much vaunted Hindenburg line was behind them; towards the end of September, upon the very morning upon which the Germans planned the recovery of lost ground the Canadians forestalled them, pushed across the Canal du Nord and enveloped Bourlon Wood where the British advance a year earlier had been stayed; then driving forward across the Arras-Cambrai highway they put in jeopardy the German control of Cambrai, the pivot upon which the whole western German defence swung. There followed the desperate attempt by the Germans to save Cambrai by the recapture of Bourlon Wood; their failure involved the evacuation of the city and the undermining of the defensive lines to the south. At Cambrai the Canadians passed the crest of the hill—thereafter the "going" was rapid and comparatively easy to a goal already in sight. The capture of Valenciennes was an interesting incident in a widespread advance by the whole Allied front from the Meuse to the sea; and the last day of the war found the Canadians as the advance guard of the British forces victoriously encamped upon the very ground where in August, 1914, the Old Contemptibles—that immortal vanished army—first threw the British sword into the rapidly-rising scale in a determination, amply vindicated by legions animated by their example and inspired by their achievements who followed them, to right the balance. This completion of the full circle of British sacrifice in the last hours of the war by the troops of an overseas Dominion which, when the first shots were fired, had no military history and dreamed not of its aptitude for war is one of those profound historic coincidences which make an appeal, to be felt rather than expressed, to that sense of Destiny which in times of Fate takes possession of the human soul.
CHAPTER VI
THE CIVILIAN AS WARRIOR
Not the least astonishing of the many surprises of the war to the Germans was the, to them, incredible capacity for swift preparation for war which was shown by the democratic and unmartial British nations under the spur of deep national feeling plus driving necessity. In their careful preparation for sudden war and overwhelming victory they had believed with reason, judging by all that the past could teach, that their margin of advantage, because of their mighty armies and the vast numbers of their trained officers, could never be overcome by those nations which in time of peace had failed to educate their people into a psychological readiness for the mass war and to equip them to wage it. They remembered how vain had been the rally of the French levies under Gambetta's leadership in 1871. For Kitchener's army, when Great Britain set herself to create out of nothing but the valor and willingness of the people a buckler to stem the German flood, the German chiefs expressed a contemptuous and pitying scorn; while they did not give even this measure of regard to the Dominions' contingents when they rushed overseas to take their part in the defence of civilization. These they regarded as mere mobs of untrained militia men, unkempt, undisciplined and without competent leaders, who would be scattered, like leaves before the tempest, by a mere handful of drilled and well-bullied German soldiers. At that time no German mind could have conceived the possibility of such an impossible fact as that within two years it would be a fixed rule of the German army that Canadian troops in the front line trenches must always be faced, across No Man's Land, by Prussian Guards or Bavarian shock troops.
Nor was the low opinion of the military worth of these volunteer armies confined to arrogant Germans; there were doubters a-plenty at home. Thus a Canadian public man held forth despairingly to me at that time upon the hopelessness of opposing to the highly-trained German armies these hastily organized battalions of men summoned from civil occupations. For one thing was it not a fact, confirmed by all military experience and accepted as veritable holy writ, that an officer, capable of commanding men, could not be made in less than seven years? Unless the French, who were a military nation, had a sufficient surplusage of officers partly to equip the British armies it would be nothing but slaughter to pit these untrained hordes against the Prussian hordes. Nor was this Jeremiah alone in his gloom!