Free Vimy by Pierre Berton Page A

machine gunners could not be dislodged. Although there were plenty of shells available by this time, the British gunners were still husbanding their supplies, out of habit. Thus the trench remained intact.
    It would be up to the 4th Division to try to take the trench, for the other three, sadly depleted by the events of that bloody summer, had already been taken out of the line. They were a subdued company, moving north through the rolling farmland of Picardy toward the Vimy sector. Duncan Macintyre, the one-time prairie storekeeper, now a staff captain with the 2nd Division, rode back along the line of march to meet his brigade, the 6th, on its way out. These were all Westerners from Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, and the Territories. To Macintyre, astride his horse on a little rise, they seemed a surprisingly small group, winding along the valley road out of La Vivogne so slowly that they scarcely seemed to be moving.
    He cantered forward and spotted a man he knew well, Major Alex Ross, leading his old battalion, the 28th, composed entirely of Northwesters.
    “Where’s the rest of the battalion, sir?” Macintyre asked him.
    “This is all of the battalion, Mac,” replied Ross in a choked voice, and Macintyre could see the tears glistening in his eyes.
    There were more losses to come as the 4th Division prepared once again to attack the Regina Trench. On October 25, “the day of death” as it came to be called, the 44th, a Winnipeg unit, lost two hundred officers and men. Once again, the artillery barrage was insufficient to quiet the enemy fire. As the Canadians advanced across No Man’s Land, they could see the German machine gunners emerging untouched on the parapets. At last, on November 10, the barrage was perfected and the trench taken. The 4th Division vacated the charnel house of the Somme and moved north to join its fellow divisions holding the line at Vimy.
    They had all suffered a costly lesson. When Greg Clark joined the 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles in the Vimy sector that month, he figured that there were 4,200 members of that regiment whom he had never seen and would never know. They had been there in France before him and now they were gone. At the Somme, the battalion had gone into action 1,200 strong. In six weeks it had suffered a thousand casualties. Some of the platoons, with a normal strength of thirty-eight, were down to ten men. Thus the Corps that fought at Vimy was a mixture of hardened veterans and raw newcomers.
    There were other changes. Sam Hughes had finally been given his walking papers that month, fired after nine days of soul-searching by a vacillating prime minister who could not, in the end, stomach a grossly insulting letter. The Ross rifle, which Hughes had espoused with all the fanaticism of a dervish, had also been discarded in favour of the more rugged Lee Enfield. The snipers loved the all-Canadian Ross, which was a marksman’s delight, but the ordinary soldiers hated it because it jammed in the mud. Ignoring orders, they threw it away and picked up the British weapon from the nearest corpse. Alderson, the British commander who had had the temerity to attack the Ross, was also gone, a victim of Sam Hughes’s pique. His replacement, Lieutenant-General Sir Julian Byng, was a tougher nut for Hughes to crack.
    Three months before, on August 17, the two had dined for the first time in France and discussed the matter of promotions and appointments within the Corps. In his usual bombastic manner, Hughes told Byng that he had never made a single mistake in his selections during the whole time he had held office and proposed to continue to make all appointments.
    The Corps commander replied that he would always make recommendations to the Minister as a matter of courtesy. Nevertheless, the moment that Hughes attempted to override his suggestion, then he, Byng, would resign-a politically disastrous eventuality. That was that. Hughes had met his match in the deceptively casual general with