Painting by Richard Jack The Second Battle of Ypres (CWM COLLECTION)
By Mark Zuehlke
As far as Urquhart could determine, the 10th Battalion men were not digging in, possibly because its command structure was in disarray after Boyle’s death. Hoping to help restore order, Urquhart approached the battalion’s second- in-command, Major Joseph MacLaren, and relayed Leckie’s orders about digging in. Seemingly distracted, MacLaren replied that “he was wounded in the leg” and headed toward the rear. MacLaren was eventually loaded into an ambulance, but it was struck by an artillery shell while passing through Ypres and the officer was killed.
About 0100 hours on April 23, one of 16th Battalion’s machine-gun squads brought its Colt machine gun forward. The machine-gun officer, Lt. Reginald Hibbert Tupper, had the gun set out on the flank in an attempt to enfilade the German trenches in front of Oblong Farm and the area extending back from the farm to the southwest corner of the wood. This section of wood had yet to be cleared and seemed strongly held by the Germans, who often shouted that the Canadians had best surrender for they were surrounded. While the men could ignore the verbal harassment, there was nothing they could do to stop the deadly crossfire cutting into their lines from the German positions. The enemy fire from the southwest kept intensifying.
Canadian soldiers in a reserve position prior to moving forward into the Ypres salient, April, 1915.
As the machine gunners ventured forth to try and meet the German fire with their own, Lt.-Col. David Watson brought two companies of his 2nd Battalion into the woods while sending a third company to directly attack Oblong Farm. Soon intense gunfire could be heard from the direction of the farm and then all fell silent, leading Watson to advise Leckie that he thought his men had succeeded in taking that position. The two bat- talion commanders decided these reinforcements should consequently try and clear the trenches in the woods, but the two companies had too few men to succeed at this venture.
A thirty-minute assault launched at 0130 hours was finally repulsed. During the course of this fight, Tupper’s machine-gun squad was “practically surrounded and subjected to intense fire.” Tupper was “dangerously hit, and rendered so helpless that he was only able to drag himself back into the Canadian lines lying flat on the ground.” When the 2nd Battalion attack failed, the Germans used the opportunity to charge and overrun the gun, taking two of its crew prisoner. But the crew managed to destroy its breach and block, rendering it useless. One gunner, who managed to escape, had his hand smashed by a bullet. Later, he discovered his kilt had been riddled by fourteen rounds.
On the northern edge of the wood, the news that the flank remained exposed was sobering. Unless reinforced before morning, Rae considered his position would be untenable and that his men would soon be cut off from the rear. Rae ordered a withdrawal, just as the first glow of light touched the horizon.
Leaving behind small groups of men to guard the recovered British artillery pieces, Rae led the rest of the battalion back. The men moved so quietly that the Germans failed to twig to what was happening, so the withdrawal neither attracted artillery fire nor any pursuit by infantry. When these troops arrived back at the trench on the edge of the woods, however, it was clear there was insufficient room for all of them. A large group were sent 150 yards out into the field to create a secondary trench line, which they finished digging just before dawn.
April 24 dawned clear and sunny, bearing the promise of an unusually hot spring day to come. A lull descended on the battlefield, few sounds of gunfire or artillery heard. In their trenches, the men of the 16th and 10th Battalions took stock of their situation and reflected on all that had happened in that night “which seemed like a life-time.”
One Canadian Scottish diarist noted that “the fellows looked frightfully tired and discouraged.” As the light improved they saw on their left flank the German position in the woods that had subjected them to such deadly fire. Stretching back across the field they had crossed, rows of their dead lay strewn. “On certain parts of it the bodies were heaped; on others they were lying in a straight line as killed by the enfilade machine-gun fire. The men of the different companies of the 16 th could be picked out by the colour of the kilt—the yellow stripe of the Gordons, the white of the Seaforths, the red of the Camerons, the dark green of the Argylls—with the 10th Battalion men in their khaki uniforms mingled everywhere amongst the High- landers. [Despite the battalion officers having earlier decided that allowing the men to wear four different kilts would not do and a simple khaki one would replace the various tartans, the replacements had not yet reached the field so the men were still fighting in the tartans that identified their original regiment.]
By the Spring of 1915 artillery fire had turned the Ypres sector into a virtual moonscape of craters.
Slight movements of some of the bodies showed that life still lingered. Attempts were being made to get help to these men, but the spurts of dust, knocked up by the bullets hitting around the rescue party, indicated that the ground was under a fire. At last a stretcher-bearer was hit; he pitched forward on his face, whereupon the enemy’s fire was much increased, and the relief work came to an end.”
With Leckie in command of both battalions, his brother Jack was responsible for 16th Battalion while Major Dan Ormond—the most senior surviving 10th Battalion officer—had charge of that unit. Fearing a counterattack was imminent, the officers began hurriedly regrouping their battered forces. The trench remained overly crowded and the first action was to put the dead up over the parapet and to dig small nooks into which the wounded could be sheltered. While some men began extending the trench on the right flank, others were sent crawling back through the cover of a mustard patch to Leckie’s headquarters area in a trench about a thousand yards west of St. Julien. Within a couple hours a coherent defensive line had taken shape.
Following a failed counter-attack Canadians take a wounded German prisoner, Ypres, 1915.
Lt. Urquhart knew in his gut that they were in for a shelling like they had never seen before and so was not surprised when an aircraft appeared overhead at 0530, lazily circling, its Iron Crosses marking it as German. Surely it was an artillery spotter plane determining the co-ordinates of the trench. Shortly thereafter the first shells fell and with the plane still overhead to correct the fire the guns soon “got our mark. Some men were blown out of [the] trench, others injured by shrapnel, others killed by shock.” From the left flank of the woods, machine-gun fire made any move- ment hazardous and hindered evacuation of wounded. “Difficult to get back to dressing station with wounded and some men hit in so doing,” Urquhart noted in his diary, “so ultimately we had to forbid men to cross and kept wounded in trench, lifting dead over parapet. Very long day and glad when anxious time came to an end. All night we were standing to, every five minutes, and dawn was just as anxiously looked for as dusk.
