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Chapter Two
Off to War: Training and Trenches
In September 1914, a story appeared in the Vernon News with the headline “Good Riflemen Wanted—Kitchener Would Prefer That Recruits Be Good Shots Rather Than Well Drilled.”
“Never mind whether they know anything about drill,” Lord Kitchener wrote to his officers. “It does not matter if they don’t know their right foot from their left. Teach them how to shoot and do it quickly.”
Only weeks into the war, the Western Front was proving to be a bloodbath where conventional armies were quickly swallowed up by the slaughter. Kitchener needed more men who could shoot and fight, not just march and polish badges. British Columbia’s soldiers seemed to have the right stuff.
In a CBC Vancouver interview in 1998, Pierre Berton, the author of Vimy, said this about the recruits from Western Canada:
There was a large number who were outdoors people. There were people used to sleeping out in the rain, or digging the equivalent of trenches, or living in sleeping bags or blankets. They were good horsemen—very good at riding. They were good shots...They shot rabbits and squirrels—and some things larger—They knew how to use a gun.
Men who enlisted in BC went for training at a number of camps around the province. Vernon Camp in the north Okanagan drilled many of the men from regiments in the Interior.
Contents
Letters from Training Camp
Article: Stories of Camp Life from the Vernon News
Heading Overseas for Training Camp and Leave in London
Private Theo Dickson Writes Home for England
Westerners at the Front
Article: Extra, Extra! Get Your Trench Journal
Dolphe Browne at Ypres, the Somme and Vimy Ridge
Ted Dickson, Stretcher Bearer in the Canadian Army Medical Corps
Sidebar: From Our Listeners
Letters from Training Camp
Hubert Evans, who would become one of the province’s best-known novelists, joined the 54th Kootenay Battalion in 1915. By June he was training at Camp Vernon. The young newspaperman wrote back to Nelson, BC, with his observations already showing a literary flair:
Since the day our long train of 15 coaches drew into Vernon station, we have had little time to read the ancient philosophers or study French. It was a very ordinary trip from the region of stern mountains of rock to this place among the milder rolling hills. Undoubtedly you want some news of the camp, and especially of the 54th battalion. Some fatigue uniforms have been served out, and you would not know your old friends now. Everyone is tanned brown, and though the men higher up may not agree with us, we think that some day in the not too distant future, we will be real soldiers.
I will someday send a postal card which will show the camp spread out on a plain between two great hills, with its symmetrical lines of white tents. We were inspected by Col. Davis this afternoon. By “us” I mean the whole battalion. About every other man in A company seems grieved that he didn’t make a better showing: but you know how that is—all the same as the blushing soloist at the amateur concert who knocks her act but gets supremely sore when anyone else does the same. The Vernon News, I heard someone say, ran a story the other day saying the men of the 54th were very well behaved, which might imply that some others were not. Really I think the fellows are “jake” and can be compared with an equal number of civilians with credit.
Everyone is anxious to have the Kootenay battalion canteen opened. A regimental fund for this and other purposes has been started and we look for big things from it. The 47th battalion and the11th CMR’s each have one. Of course they are dry, but all sorts of eats are sold, and both are well patronized by us.
[Click here for Stories of Camp Life from the Vernon News]
Heading Overseas for Training Camp and Leave in London
When our men got to England, the British military establishment was of the view that many were not yet ready to fight. So there was more training in the muddy fields of the Salisbury Plain and in Kent. The hardship of unremitting rain and living in tents actually killed some men before they made it to the front. Disease spread easily, and the men were vulnerable physically and mentally. It was a sad way to die, though it saved some from the horrors of the trenches.
Private Theo Dickson Writes Home from England
March 18, 1916 (West Sandling, Kent): The first thing we did here was get ready for drill which we did, and we have drilled ever since. It mostly consists of practice and musketry from 8 am to 5:30, then supper and as a rule we sit around and smoke and talk till bed time at 9:30. We all have six days off and free tickets to anywhere in England and Scotland, but I will just see London this trip.
April 23, 1916: I just arrived back from London after four days of real pleasure. I spent [one] morning up at the West End checking over the Bank of England and St. Paul’s and London Bridge... and it was all grand. After dinner I started out for Westminster Abbey and was just in time to see a society wedding pulled off there, and then I went into the Abbey and as they were holding a service I had to sit down and wait until they were finished. I had the pleasure of meeting one of the most beautiful girls who sat beside me. And I asked her if she would mind showing me through. My good looks must have got her because she did, and she showed me her uncle’s grave in there also. So I guessed she must be some society girl which she turned out to be. She was a dream. She took me over to Buck Palace, Hyde Park, Piccadilly and all around, and I took her to a big theatre and it cost me 10. Next day, she came around to the YMCA [where Theo was staying] with her car and took me all over London. Best of it was she ran the car herself. So we were all alone and saw all the different gardens...and stopped at a beautiful house which was her home and had dinner and spent the evening there. Her mother was awful nice to me and they both smoked lovely cigarettes, and I was wishing, “if my mother could only see me now.” I was about broke so I said farewell and said I was going home to camp on the morning train. So Miss Eleanor took me back to my YMCA in her car and when I said farewell, she let me hold her dear little hand a few moments longer than was good for me.
June 2, 1916: I have been down to the range again all this week and we start early in the morning and arrive home about 8 pm. I hear from Ted [his brother who was at the front] quite often and he always tells me not to come over to France. Poor kid, I suspect he is afraid I’d get hit, but with you people all praying for us, why we should be ready to meet any danger. My throat and neck are pretty well swollen up and I’m afraid it’s mumps...
July 10, 1916 (in hospital): My mail has all gone astray since [my unit] went over to France. I received a couple of letters from the boys over there and the fellow who took my place in the section where I should have been has been killed. So I guess it was God’s will that I should go to hospital instead of France. By the time you get this I will be out of hospital. I am sick of England and its beauty. It gets on one’s nerves...but I am awful anxious to get home and down to something else. One gets tired of this life but I guess I will be lucky if I get a chance to get over to France as we all expect to be home for Xmas but perhaps not.
Private Theo Dickson died in hospital of spinal meningitis on July 23. He was twenty-two years old.
Westerners at the Front
It must have been a shocker to go from the tedium of a farm or office in British Columbia to a muddy trench in Flanders, surrounded by rats and lice, under enemy fire, your nose constantly assaulted by the stench of dead men and animals. But that was what most recruits faced once the stalemate of trench warfare took hold in the fall of 1914.
Soldiers were loath to share the sorrows of trench life with the folks back home, and most letters contain only veiled references to the horrors they faced. It was not until after the war that more realistic narratives started to surface. Even the newspapers and pictorial magazines contained a whitewashed version of the Western Front. Photographs were staged, or sanitized drawings were used to illustrate articles.
Some newspapers published letters from the front lines because real news of life at the front was hard to come by. The casualty lists and medical reports speak eloquently about the toll that bullets, shrapnel, machine guns and gas took. And through postwar interviews with soldiers, we can piece together a clearer picture of what those young British Columbians faced.
[Click here for Extra, Extra! Get Your Trench Journal!]
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Dolph Browne at Ypres, the Somme and Vimy Ridge
As told to grandson Jeremy Webber
Dolph Browne was an Irishman who had immigrated to Alberta and British Columbia about 1912. In January 1916, he signed up with the 5th University Company, reinforcing the Princess Pats Canadian Light Infantry, and saw action at Ypres, the Somme and Vimy Ridge.
In 1970, his grandson Jeremy Webber interviewed him for a school project. Browne first saw action at Ypres:
The Ypres Salient was a bulge into the German lines and they held all the hills and we were down in the hole so that you had fire coming in from all directions. And there, our rations and our water had to be carried in every night. If the shelling was too bad, you didn’t get any rations or water. The water table was up within three feet of the surface of the ground so that you couldn’t make any dugouts. You had to throw up breastworks for trenches. And we just slept in the bottom of the trench when we were in the line.
The Ypres Salient was a ghastly place where the Canadians were exposed all the time. To Browne it seemed hopeless:
I think the Ypres Salient was the dirtiest place that I ever fought because we would go on the line for five days and lose 90 men and we hadn’t done one thing except hold the line. When we went down to the Somme, there we were in two attacks and then we were in supports on attack on the Regina Line. There was a lot more satisfaction to that because you were accomplishing something.
But conditions at the Somme weren’t much better:
Well, at the Somme, we had no shelter at all. You just slept outside because we were pushing the Germans back and you just didn’t have any shelter and you just slept outside. As far as the fighting was concerned, it was alright. The things that bothered us most was the wet, and the dirt and the rats and the lice because we didn’t have any spray or powder to deal with them.
For an Irishman, used to getting potatoes each day, the food was pretty grim:
In France, well we usually got a loaf of bread to three men, sometimes four. At breakfast time we had one piece of bacon. At noon, we got mulligan, but it was usually just meat and water with Italian chestnuts thrown in. For months, we didn’t see a potato. Then at night, we just had our bread and some jam and tea. In other words, what we got for 24 hours was less than what we would eat in one meal in civil life.
There were iron rations for emergencies. But they weren’t much use:
Well, the original iron rations were a can of bully beef, and two hard tack biscuits. But the bully beef wasn’t practical because your iron rations were supposed to be used in an emergency. Well when you were in a spot that was an emergency, you didn’t have any drinking water. And only a fool would eat highly salted corned beef. In the fall of 1916, they issued a chocolate ration which was very, very highly concentrated. And it was so rich, that it was in a tin. It was impossible to eat a third or at the outside a half of it at one time.
If they took prisoners, they had to feed them out of their own food supply:
Well, the customary thing was that they were fed out of our rations for the first day after they were captured. This didn’t always apply if you could get them off your hands quickly but that was the rule. Of course, you didn’t take too many prisoners unless you were attacking and advancing.
Sometimes you went into battle without anything to eat:
The night we went in on the attack by Courcelette we had no lunch. We were just going to be served with supper when the order came to fall in and we went around the shoulder of a hill and over the top. And we didn’t have any supper. Then we were in there for two nights and day without food or water except what we had in our own water canteen or what we could pick up from men who had been killed.
When soldiers went in on the attack, there was supposed to be a carefully timed artillery barrage but sometimes, things didn’t work out as planned:
It was getting dusk and we moved forward to take [a German] trench. It was very strongly held and of course we had lost a lot of men and our commanding officer decided that we weren’t strong enough to take it so the order came to retire. I was on the left and there were six bombers covering our flank and when the order came to retire, I walked out about sixty yards to try and contact these bombers and tell them to retire and I couldn’t find them. As it happened, they had gone into the German trench and they stayed there with the Germans on both sides of them. They stayed there all night and all the next morning. And then about two o’clock in the afternoon, there was a bunch of bombs exploding and the Germans started to pour out over the trench and it looked like an attack. But (actually) the Germans had decided to bomb the six bombers out and instead of that the bombers bombed the Germans out. And when we saw these Germans pouring out over the trench, we opened up with everything we had until they started waving white handkerchiefs and we realized that they wanted to surrender. And if my memory serves me correctly, we took 272 prisoners.
So things were going pretty well for the Princess Pats, but they were a little too far ahead of schedule:
The plan was that, when they last told us to retire the night before, the plan was that they were going to have an artillery barrage on this trench at 20 minutes to 5 in the afternoon and that at 5 o’clock we would go over and take it. So of course, we went over and took it at 2:15 when these Germans were surrendering and they sent two runners back for to call off this barrage. The one runner was evidently killed by shellfire because he was never heard of again. And we heard of the second one about two days later when he was in hospital in England. In other words, they never got there. We went into the trench and were straightening it up and at 20 minutes to 5 when our own guns opened up and gave us an awful pasting. We didn’t have any shelter, and it was worse than any German artillery fire that I had ever been in up until that time. I don’t know how many men that we lost from our own barrage but when we went in on the attack we had somewhere between 1,000 and 1,100 men and when we came out two days later we had 163.
In October 1916, Browne’s unit marched to Vimy Ridge to prepare for the most sophisticated attack the Canadians had been involved in up to that time:
Well of course, we went to Vimy—we got there in the latter part of October. The dugouts were excellent because it was a chalk country and you could dig deep dugouts. We were there all winter because the Vimy attack didn’t come until April 9, 1917. And when you’re in one location for a matter of fi ve or six months, you can do quite a lot of things to make yourself comfortable.
When the attack at Vimy finally came in April 1917, Browne was hit before he could put up much of a fight:
We attacked right from the position we had been holding for six months. Up in front of Neuville St. Vaast. I didn’t see much of the fighting because we moved off on the attack about 20 minutes to 5 and I got over about a mile and a quarter and I got hit in the foot with a spent bullet and had to crawl back. I had to crawl back a mile and a quarter to our own line, and when I got there, our colonel quizzed me on what had been happening and then he went out and got four German prisoners and made them pack me back on a stretcher to the light railway. At the base near Mt. St. Eloi, they had a field ambulance and we were lying on stretchers on the ground and they picked us up with ambulances and took us back to the railhead. And sometime late that afternoon we were put on the train for Boulogne. And the next morning I was operated on at the Boulogne Hospital and two days later moved to England.
That was the last time he saw action:
I was in the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital for about seven weeks and then was sent to the convalescent camp at Epsom, and from there I got passed as fit to train for France again. And after spending a leave at my old home in Ireland, I came back to Seaford and put in one morning on the parade ground and was back in hospital for four and a half months.
Ted Dickson, Stretcher Bearer in the Canadian Army Medical Corps
Ted Dickson signed up in Vernon in September 1915. He was eighteen years old and was soon working as a stretcher bearer with the 1st Canadian Army Field Ambulance on the Western Front. He kept a trench diary in 1916 and early 1917, which was discovered in his papers many years later. While at the front, he learned that his older brother Theo had suddenly died at a training camp in England.
August 16, 1916: Heard of the death of my dear brother Theo. He died on the July 23rd Sunday which I shall never forget. Poor kid. The people at home must [have] suffered a lot from the shock and sorrow.
The next month, he found himself in a German trench and was impressed with the work the Germans had done to make themselves comfortable:
September 8, 1916: Up the line is a German dugout which the Australians took and then the Canadians relieved them. They certainly do nice dugouts, soft as can be made, step down and about forty feet below the ground. This one has wallpaper in it. It’s some joint. One would think they were going to stay here for keeps.
In April 1917 he was at Vimy for the big attack:
April 4, 1917: Spent the morning going for water about a mile away. Coming back, Fritz put one about ten yards ahead [a shell or grenade], and trench mortars, and killed a man right in a dugout. One fellow was standing on top. He was going through the air. I was behind a plank and shrapnel was coming all around me. [Another soldier] was ahead of me, and then he beat it around a corner and I followed down a dugout. We got half buried because Fritz puts one in the doorway. Ten minutes after, we beat it for our dugout and then we had five stretcher cases. We got about fifty yards from our dressing area ramps and Fritz blew up some more trench mortars—and also a bridge. A very exciting time.
Ted Dickson survived Vimy but that was the last diary entry from the front. Years later, one Sunday morning, he sat down and wrote an unusual letter to his maker in which he described another incident at Vimy:
What about that time at Vimy Ridge after we delivered the stretcher case and they started shelling? And the shells started exploding around me and I jumped in a hole, and a rat was a foot away from my face, and he was wounded and bleeding. And [through] the light of shells exploding I could see I had a friend, and that minute I knew you were there with me and the rat.
From Our Listeners
Passing the Eye Test: Harry Robert Burton, my father, was born in 1896 and joined the Canadian Army in 1916. He said it was because he was going to fail calculus in his first year of engineering at University of Toronto and the university would promote a student who enlisted to the next year... [Read more]
Surviving the Trenches: Like other patriotic youth, James joined one of many informal militia camps which sprang up after war broke out in August 1914. According to his sister, Anna, their mother thought James—then just sixteen—was simply continuing on with something like Boy Scouts... [Read more]