Battlefields
Ypres, Vimy Ridge, The Somme, Passchendaele
Soldiers serving on the Western Front fought mostly in trenches that were, for the most part, filthy. Battles were often fought on terrain that was formerly rich farmland. These fields, when saturated with rain and churned up by shellfire, became a mass of mud, rotting corpses and human waste. Rats and lice tormented the troops. Many battles were fought under these horrific conditions.
YPRES
By mid-April 1915, the Germans occupied most of Belgium, and the small portion remaining out of German hands had symbolic importance for the Allies. The area around Ypres had been relatively quiet, so Canadian, French, and British divisions set to work to strengthen their trenches.
The Germans – wearing gas masks – launched a surprise attack in the late afternoon of April 22. During this attack a cloud of yellow-green chlorine gas was released toward the French lines.
The French North African troops – stunned by this first major use of gas in warfare – fled, leaving a gap of six kilometres in the Allied line. The Canadians, their left side now open, struggled to hold their positions, though the gas attack had not hit them.
On April 24, the enemy launched another chlorine gas attack supported by heavy artillery at the two Canadian brigades holding the line. A Canadian officer with a scientific background identified the gas as chlorine and urged men to moisten their handkerchiefs with urine if necessary, and hold them to their noses. The urine was supposed to help counteract the gas. The soldiers struggled to fire and reload their Ross rifles while others, foaming at the mouth, their lungs destroyed, fell to the ground. However, the Canadians managed to hold on to most of their positions.
Maj. Herbert Wickens, a 31-year-old soldier noted in a letter home that two companies from the 3rd Batallion “put up a magnificent fight. They drove off the Germans time and time again though they kept coming in hordes, but at last were cut off and surrounded.” The two companies, Wickens observed, were from the Queen’s Own Rifles and the Governor General’s Body Guard. Fewer than half the men of Wickens’ Battalion survived the six days of fighting. The enemy had made gains, but it had not broken through despite the deployment of a new and dreadful weapon.
Just over 6,000 Canadian soldiers were killed, wounded or taken prisoner in the fighting in the Ypres Salient.
Maj. Wickens summed up the result of the battle: “the part that the Canadians took at Ypres was a splendid thing, and, though it was terribly costly, was most important in holding the Germans in check, and they went through what it hardly seemed possible flesh and blood could stand.”
Ypres remained in Allied hands and was the scene of repeated battles into 1918.