Free Vimy by Pierre Berton

the time it petered out the following winter, gaining nothing but the possession of a few acres of ground, all four Canadian divisions had been blooded. The first three divisions fought from September 3 to mid-October when they went north to the Vimy front. The newly created 4th Division stayed on the Somme from October 10 to the end of November when they joined their comrades at Vimy.
    What is loosely described as the Battle of the Somme was actually a series of battles, a mosaic of ghastly setbacks and minor victories in which the obstinate British commander, Sir Douglas Haig, who seemed to learn very little from adversity, threw away tens of thousands of lives by repeating tactics that had proved ineffectual on the first day of the struggle.
    Indeed, the early tactics at the Somme were reminiscent of those nineteenth-century wars when men armed with muskets marched solidly forward in line, shoulder to shoulder, spraying lead at their enemies. The rifle and the machine gun had long since replaced the musket, but the British troops still attacked the German positions in closely packed waves. The men, lined up like ten pins, each wave from fifty to one hundred yards behind the next, depended on an artillery barrage to soften the German positions, but in every case the barrage was too little and too late.
    The idea was that the Germans would be pinned down in their dugouts by the barrage, sitting ducks when the British reached them. But the advancing troops were too far behind the barrage. When it lifted and moved on, the Germans simply leaped out of the trenches and, with their machine guns, mowed down the rows of British, many of whom were still far from their objective, held up by the heavy wire entanglements that masked the German positions.
    In the first day of the Somme battle – the day that was supposed to blast a gap in the German line that would start the troops forward on a dash to Berlin – almost sixty thousand men were killed or wounded. The blood-letting continued all that summer. The Newfoundland Regiment, in one single tragic day, lost 710 of its 801 officers and men. Incredibly, the same tactics continued, and the lessons of the Somme only began to sink in when the Canadians attacked Courcelette in mid-September.
    Here, for the first time, a new expression entered the military lexicon: creeping barrage . Now the wall of shells crept forward just ahead of the advancing troops in hundred-yard lifts at three-minute intervals. Thus the Canadians were able to reach the enemy before he had a chance to rise out of the protecting trenches. And they moved forward not in a blind and steady advance but in a series of bounds, each to a specific, predetermined objective, and each one covered by artillery fire. It was this innovation, refined to the split second and drilled into every man on the Vimy front, that helped the Canadian Corps seize the ridge from the Germans.
    At Courcelette, the Canadians showed an initiative that was rare among the Allied troops in the Great War. Having captured their objective, a sugar factory and a farm on the outskirts, they kept on straight through the village, taking a thousand prisoners and holding their ground against the inevitable counterattacks, a bold stroke praised by the High Command as “without parallel in the present campaign.” It was this action that confirmed them as shock troops. As David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, was to put it in his memoirs, “Whenever the Germans found the Canadian Corps coming into the line, they prepared for the worst.”
    The Somme was the training ground for Vimy-but at the cost of twenty-four thousand Canadian casualties. The worst experience came in October with the Canadian assault on the Regina Trench, a strongly fortified line that was the Germans’ second position in the battle for possession of the Thiepval Ridge. The trench held out. The British artillery failed to cut the German protective wire, and so the German