York. She ended her days in late 1917, a day out from the coast of Ireland, when a U-boat torpedoed her.
We didn’t see any submarines; but for the first time in my life I saw whales. I was taken by their majesty and their sense of serenity. Early one morning when I was standing on deck, just after a torpedo drill, a very large blue whale surfaced alongside us. It blew a great geyser of water, flapped its enormous tail several times, and rolled cheerfully back into the depths. All of us on deck were thrilled and the men cheered spontaneously.
The only other occurrence of note had to do with our fellow passengers, a company of nursing sisters headed for duty in field hospitals. After my training in Valcartier, the sight and proximity of these lovely creatures was a real reminder of the new life I had volunteered for. Life in the army was much different from civilian life for many reasons, not the least of them was that it was an entirely masculine culture. I managed to chat briefly with some of the nurses before we landed in England, but for the most part we just exchanged smiles and nods.
The day we saw the whales I managed to engage two of the nurses in conversation at the ship’s rail. Long after the whales went their own way, we stared out into a steadily rolling grey nothingness. One of the sisters was a woman in her late twenties from Toronto and the other, whose name was Hannah, was closer to my age. She was a petite honey-blonde from Vancouver and she laughed easily. We chatted for almost an hour about so many things, none of which was of any importance and after these years I don’t remember any of it anyway; but I do remember the delight I took in her company. Years later, I began to think what a strange thing war was, for apart from its violence, it put us into situations that were completely different from the natural way of things. The ship was very crowded and although I kept my eyes peeled throughout the rest of the voyage I didn’t run into Hannah again, but I enjoyed her brief company immensely. On the last day out there was much guffawing and ribald comments one morning when, as part of the normal ship’s bulletins, the officer in charge of the trooping announced over the tannoy that the matron had complained of instances of “unseemly conduct and anyone caught embracing a nurse would be charged.”
Our arrival in England was something of an anti-climax. We’d all read about the delirious reception given to the Canadian troops when the First Division embarked in England. The papers were full of patriotic nonsense about how the locals were saying it was the largest embarkation of foreign troops since William the Conqueror. As a routine reinforcement troop ship, we docked with no fanfare and came ashore quietly one evening. On the quayside, we were given tea and scones by the Salvation Army. We waited for an hour for our personal kit, and a short time later we found ourselves on a troop train to Salisbury Plain. Our embarkation was a well-organized operation and proceeded with a mechanical efficiency that I found impressive. While the residents of Southampton slept in their beds, we slipped unseen through the countryside to our next stop on our journey to the trenches in France.
England was a much more intense repetition of what we had already gone through in Canada. I was put into an officer replacement training company. Our instructors, both officers and noncommissioned officers, were almost all British. Except for the sergeant major, who was a greying and leather-faced veteran of the Indian army, the instructors we saw the most were sergeants and corporals from the old regular British army. Most of them had received wounds of varying degrees of severity in the earliest days of the war. These NCOs had a cheerful cockiness about them and treated us firmly, but with a kindly good nature.
Our affection for the NCOs of the old army didn’t extend to our bayonet-training instructors, who were recently recruited bullies whose mission was to put “fighting spirit” into us. They were all younger, more athletic men, who worked us to exhaustion; and had never been to the front themselves. They took immense pleasure from their graphic descriptions of how to skewer the enemy on the end of a bayonet. Being of German blood – a fact I took pains to conceal – I had more reason than most to loathe these posturing men in their safe jobs.
The few British officers I met at the time were on the whole distant, and they exuded a sense of disdain for their colonial counterparts. It was hard to warm to them, and except for our company officer, a quiet and devout Captain Wallace from the Royal Scots, I never really got to know any British officers prior to arriving at the battalion so I was at a loss to form any kind of useful opinion of them. Wallace was a precise, if unimaginative man with a salt-and-pepper moustache. He had taken a bullet through the knee in October of 1914.
While I was in England, the British army ensured that we received instruction in those subjects that had been quietly glossed over in Canada. I learned how to site and maintain the Vickers and Colt machine-guns, how to remedy their stoppages, and how to clean them in the dark. Because they were still in short supply, we also received a half-day’s instruction on the Lewis gun, which was eventually to become our new light machine-gun. The Lewis gun looked like a wonderful weapon – except for the fact that the gunner had to expose himself by climbing on top of it to reload it.
Much to my relief, we studied the developing science of trench warfare. In a wooden hut we were tutored on the design of a battalion’s defensive layout using a carefully crafted plaster model. I never saw anything quite as elaborate or as flawlessly designed as our model – but the wire entanglements on the model proved to be child’s play in comparison to the murderous belts of wire we were to encounter on sections of the front.
One cold rainy night we spent a frustrating thirteen hours pick-axing our way three feet deep into the chalky Salisbury soil. Captain Wallace half-seriously called us “a pack of lazy dogs” for not completing the trench in our allotted time, but once the captain was out of earshot Sergeant Halstead, pretending he hadn’t heard a thing, quietly told us that we’d done reasonably well. Most courses only got a foot down into the rocky soil in that area.
“Remember, gentlemen,” he said, “if you are ever planning an operation, you and your men will dig a little faster when someone is shooting at you, but don’t expect miracles.”
Halstead was a grey-haired Cockney who had spent half his life in distant parts of the Empire. He had a large measure of common sense and I often thought he would have been far more effective commanding a brigade than supervising entrenching demonstrations on Salisbury Plain.
I spent the better part of a day in London on the single day’s leave we were given before moving to France. Most of my fellow officers had never seen the city before and we spent most of our time dashing in and out of pubs and sitting on the top of a double-decked omnibus driving about the city viewing the sites. Normally I loved London, but in wartime she looked grey and dismal. Everything was overpriced and I found it a bit disconcerting when the shopkeepers repeatedly asked us, “Ah, Canadian lads, eh? Looking forward to getting over there to have a go at the Hun?” I don’t think any of us were wildly enthusiastic about the prospect of battle. We were prepared to go, but deep inside we all wanted it to be safely over. Even then, we would happily have foregone the adventure ahead of us.
After a further two days of training, we were assembled on the edge of the parade square in the pre-dawn darkness under the light of a single weak electric street lamp. There was a steady, cold drizzle of rain and we were informed we were to get our kit ready, for that evening we would be entraining for Portsmouth to catch the night’s ferry to Le Havre.
Captain Wallace, leaning heavily on his cane, gave an encouraging and fatherly speech. “You should remember what you’ve been taught. Make examples of yourselves to the men and make all your decisions as if the shoe was on the other foot. Guide yourself by whatever you would expect as fair treatment from your platoon officer if you were a soldier. Do that and you won’t go too far wrong.” He assured us we would do splendidly and make our regiments, Canada, and the Empire proud. He sincerely bid us “Good luck and God bless,” saluted us, and limped off the parade square.
The train