Tag: 1921 Page 1 of 4

By Gregory Clark, June 4, 1921.

Lord Byng, then Sir Julian, was popular with the Canadians as corps commander insofar as general officers were capable of being known to the troops.

For brigadiers were rare enough birds in the select company of the old tin hats, let alone corps commanders.

But Sir Julian inspected us a few times – few enough, indeed, to win the real gratitude of the muddy trench hounds. He dropped in unexpectedly on us at our work or play. He popped without warning into billets or training field, saw us as we were, not as we pretended to be on carefully preened parades for him.

And to us, he appeared a real general. He seemed so entirely at his ease. Generals as a class were usually a fiercely tailored and starched lot, sitting their horses just so, uttering certain set clipped remarks, as if they were playing a part.

Sir Julian struck us as a man accustomed to his part. His uniform didn’t seem to distress him. He wore it easily, loosely, as if he had had it for years. He wore amazing grey- green canvas leggings! Yes, sir. Astonishing. No other general of our acquaintance could have dared forego the rich, shining knee boots of generalhood. But Sir Julian not only wore outrageous canvas leggings, but he carried an absurd little stick instead of the massive riding-crop of his high estate. And frequently – tell it not in G. H. Q – frequently he had one or more of his tunic buttons undone.

That made him a figure of interest to the rank and file. He came one day before the Vimy show to inspect us near Lillers. We were doing the tapes. And a watchful eye was kept for the party of horsemen or the red-flagged grey motor car that would advise us of his approach.

But around a copse, on foot, came a small party of brass hats and caught us unawares. The usual stiff group of immaculate red tabs, but at the head of them a tall, long-legged, easy figure who walked as though he were accustomed (like us, egad, poor gravel crushers), to walk.

This was Sir Julian, our leader. He came and walked along our platoons. Our buttons blazed. Not a button, not a strap was out of place. We scarcely breathed as the great corps commander strode close before us. But picture our rapture and relief when we noted that three of the august tunic buttons were undone.

Did he stop and tick our buttons? Did he examine our chins, or ask us to show him our iron rations? No. In a rather high voice, he asked the company commander –

“What are you doing?”

And when he was told –

“Let’s see you do it,” he said.

And we galumphed gaily over the mimic attack on the tapes, at our ease before a general who was at his ease and had three buttons undone. And when the sham attack ended on a hill-top, we looked back, and the corps commander waved his little stick to us and went on to other battalions in the next stubble field.

So we had a hunch that this man knew what he was doing with us. He didn’t seem highty-tighty. We began to appreciate the fact that we were getting a remarkably thorough training for this Vimy show. We noted the plenty of maps, air photos and intelligence reports that were showered upon us, even down to the humble lance-jack and section commander. We had a feeling of confidence, which was half the battle of Vimy Ridge.

And word was whispered down to us from colonel to captain, sergeant and buck, that this was the ingenious hand of Sir Julian. His good name followed him after he left the Canadians; and in that fateful March, 1918, when we heard Byng’s Third Army was on our right, we felt no alarm.

He started the Corps School in 1916, which proved the most invaluable liaison between divisions. For in those early days, the First Division did not altogether love the Second, and the Third Division was an unknown infant. Sir Julian dealt with this as soon as he took command of the corps. The Corps School brought officers and N.C.O.’s from all divisions together, put them to sleep together in tents, had them eat and live together in huts. And lo, the little antagonisms vanished.

He got his point of view on Jack Canuck at first hand. At Houdain, on the outskirts of which was his headquarters in the Chateau of Ranchicourt, he came suddenly one morning into the barn in which I was superintending a fatigue party cleaning the billet.

Hs asked numerous questions about us, our regiment, where from, how billets should be cleaned, what offenses the different members of the fatigue party had committed to win this distinction, had we been long out in France, what had we for breakfast, were we married, any children, had we been shooting lately, what was that man limping for, did many of the men get drunk ever, how old is that man there?

I had no idea who my inquisitor was. His red tabs confused me. But his perfectly easy, friendly manner set me at rest, in spite of the presence of another brass-hat, who stood stiffly and importantly at the door of the barn. Some brigade officer or other, I said —

When I described my friend to my seniors at mess that noon, I was horrified to learn it was without question the corps commander. Lumme, a lieutenant-general! But, as Ortheris¹ said, I was a recruity then.

Editor’s Note:

1. In the collection of short stories “Soldiers Three” by Rudyard Kipling, the cockney soldier Ortheris expresses deep contempt for recruits (“recruities”) who whine about their rights. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, May 7, 1921.

For one day spent in the trenches, the infantry soldier spent at least two or perhaps six or ten days well and safely back of the trenches – depending on what part of the war he saw.

We are just beginning to get perspective on the war. And it is astonishing the number of queer beliefs and misapprehensions that are entertained as to the kind of life the youth of Canada led for four years.

One of the commonest pictures in the minds of the elder generation is of two endless, straggling trenches, filled with thousands and thousands of fiercely-firing Britishers and opposing Germans, with cannon in rear of the respective trenches belching furiously a la Sebastopol¹ – a sort of insane, bloody, awful melee.

Stealth is the big, predominant idea to be borne in mind when visualizing the war.

Stealth.

A vast loneliness. A belt of country several miles wide in the broad day light, in which not a living thing moved.

A wide scene of wreckage; neglected meadows, smashed farm-houses. crushed villages, all still in the sunlight; all still and motionless and lonely.

For man was underground, in trenches, in cellars, in holes burrowed fifty feet down into the earth.

The cannon – little guns firing swift shells the size of a quart bottle, of and big, fat howitzers firing slow, droning shells as big as nail kegs² – the bright cannon were painted grey, covered with rubbish, and desperately, secretly, hidden away.

All the horses, all the motor lorries, the engines, the teeming camps, the “dumps” of food and shells and supplies all the machinery of war was back beyond those two opposing horizons.

But between those two horizons lay absolute peace.

The sun beat down beautifully, or the grey rain fell drifting, on a wide land of silence; motionless.

To be sure, once in a while, a far thud would wake the silence, a swift or slow but unseen creature would come wailing through the air and land with a terrific explosion in a cloud of blackish smoke and dust, somewhere in the peaceful scene. You would think this astonishing event would have disturbed the uncanny desolation.

But nothing happened. The smoke drifted away. Nothing stirred. Nothing appeared.

Oftentimes, for an hour at a stretch, those unseen missiles would come wailing and rushing in dreary regularity, a couple of minutes apart, to strike insanely in and about one particular spot. These were shells coming from some unseen, remote cannon to seek out a battery of our own unseen guns.

Other times, the shells would wearily drop one after another along the course of a dirty rambling ditch – sometimes hitting, mostly missing – “searching” a trench position, they called it – all through the lonely afternoon.

Stealth lay all day between those two horizons.

For each stricken plot of ground absorbed all the sensations of the plunging, aimless shells. Whatever horrors were created by the vicious bursts, nothing showed. Men agonized in secret, and died by stealth.

At evening, the hidden guns came alive, began barking and coughing, the dusk became filled with faint flashes and electric flickerings, and shells began to rush singly and in fearful flocks, to burst on trenches, on gun positions, on roads.

For at dusk all that stealthy world awoke. Over those ominous horizons came strings of wagons hastening in the first dark with food, ammunition, supplies for the thousands of men who lived in this eerie belt; came strings of wary-stepping soldiers to relieve some of those who had been living a week or more in it; came new guns: came muffled working parties to dig, to build, to improve that uderground world of the land of stealth.

All night men and horses came and went over the hidden horizons. All night men prowled – in the narrow strip between the two fierce front trenches: or repeating their ditches: carrying, distributing food, letters, water, bombs, shovels.

A regiment would come over the horizon in the night and “relieve” a tired regiment, take over its trenches, its tunnels, holes in the ground, its hidden “posts” out in the narrow plane called No Man’s Land. And the tired regiment would rack up and straggle in the darkness back over the horizon.

While all the long night the guns would flash and bark and cough heavily, the shells trying to seek out these furtive parties in the night far and near.

Then softly would come dawn, and silence.

A few guns would fire parting, bravado shots through the pearly mists. A belated wagon, a delayed platoon or working party, would scurry back over the horizon.

Then day – and silence, and stealth!

The weary troops greeted the sun; then sought out their burrows to sleep. Where the night had fostered a feverish activity, the sun found silence, with a few shying aeroplanes peeping and prying.

Of course, occasionally there was battle. The night or the dawn or the day would go mad with raving guns, and the curtain of mystery was torn aside in flame and smoke, while the thousands surged up out of hiding, and floundered in the open a little way; to disappear again, after a few days or a few weeks of wild confusion and abandon: when the sun would once more shine down on a desolation like unto Balclutha’s³.

But here is the point: the infantryman did not remain long in this unearthly country between the haunted horizons. He would do six or twelve or sometimes twenty days in it. He would return again to the same part of it a few times. But ever so often, he went weary and anxious in the night back over that horizon, to find himself at daylight in a camp of tents or huts. And ever so often, he would move still further back to a village, where there was baseball, little shops, drill, and taverns.

And then once in a longer while; he would go back twenty miles to a village or town, for two or three weeks, where there were civilians, girls, women, human beings, homes, hearths; just to remind him that all mankind was not in uniform, ordered about like galley-slaves, living like rats by night and hiding by day.

The war was stealthy, not at all like old valiant wars.

But the average soldier, counting up his days, finds he spent a minority of them in the blasted, forlorn country between the two horizons.

Editor’s Notes:

1. This is reference to Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War of the 19th century. ↩︎
2. Nail kegs were just barrels that nails came in. ↩︎
3. Balclutha derives from the Gaelic Baile Chluaidh (“City on the Clyde”, a poetic name for Dumbarton). ↩︎