Free Vimy by Pierre Berton Page B

the iron will.
    Byng had had plenty of time to study the failures at the Somme during those autumn days when his troops were attacking Courcelette and later the Regina Trench. At Vimy he proposed to put these lessons into practice. More than anything else, the Somme had demonstrated the need for more careful training and meticulous preparation. New tactics were required; the creeping barrage would have to be perfected. Better intelligence was needed. The enemy guns would have to be pinpointed and destroyed before the men on the ground could move; that meant artillery men with more elastic minds and a scientific approach to the art of gunnery. And better fuses would be essential if the shells were to destroy the enemy wire.
    A more flexible, less blinkered approach to static warfare was needed. There must be closer liaison with the air force, and better communication between the high command and the troops in the mud. Nothing could be taken for granted. It wasn’t good enough to assume that the German wire was cut or the trenches pulverized; somebody had to find that out. The lower ranks had to be given a better idea of what was planned and then trained to act on their own, instead of blindly following orders worked out by staff officers miles behind the lines.
    All this would take time, for the morale and the strength of the four Canadian divisions were badly shattered. The old soldiers who sat in the trenches before Vimy were weary of battle while the newcomers, arriving by the thousands, were nervous, green, and unblooded. To weld the Canadian Corps into a cohesive fighting force would require initiative, understanding, and innovative leadership of the highest order. The Battle of Vimy Ridge was still five months away.

BOOK TWO
The Build-Up
    What I want is the discipline of a well-trained pack of hounds. You find your own holes through the hedges. I’m not going to tell you where they are. But never lose sight of your objective. Reach it in your own way.
Lieutenant-General Sir Julian Byng to his officers,
Vimy sector, 1917

CHAPTER THREE
Marking Time
    1
    By mid-November 1916, the Somme offensive had petered out and the British Army in northern France, shivering in the coldest winter in half a century, was marking time. The shattered battalions of the Canadian 4th Division, which had fought so hard to capture the Regina Trench, had moved north to join their compatriots. By December, the exhausted Corps was united again, strung out thinly for ten miles along the Artois sector between Arras to the south and Loos to the north.
    Change was in the wind. The French commander, Joffre, had been cast aside in favour of the more aggressive Nivelle. The vigorous Welshman, David Lloyd George, had replaced the lethargic Herbert Asquith as Prime Minister of Great Britain. In spite of Haig’s doubts, these new and powerful personalities were determined to transform the war of attrition into a decisive war of movement. But before the great breakthrough could be achieved, one obstacle had to be eliminated. The Vimy bastion must be captured and held.
    Tactically, the ridge was one of the most important features on the Western Front, the anchor point for the new defence system that the Germans were carefully and secretly preparing to thwart the expected Allied hammer-blow.
    There it lay, facing the Canadian lines-a low, seven-mile escarpment of sullen grey, rising softly from the plain below, a monotonous spine of mud, churned into a froth by shellfire, devoid of grass or foliage, lacking in colour or detail, every inch of its slippery surface pitted or pulverized by two years of constant pounding. At first glance it didn’t seem very imposing, but to those who knew its history and who looked ahead to that moment when they must plough forward and upward toward that ragged crest aflame with gunfire, it took on an aura both dark and sinister.
    The high crest of the ridge-the part that counted tactically-lay between two river valleys, the