Through Their Eyes: A Graphic History of Hill 70 and Canada's First World War 9780228012481

Table of contents :
Cover
THROUGH THEIR EYES
Title
Copyright
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 De-picturing the Great War
2 Lieutenant General Arthur Currie
3 Lieutenant Brock Chisholm
4 Private Frederick Lee
5 Victoria Crosses at Hill 70
6 Killing, Death, and Burial at Hill 70
Epilogue: “No Significant Fighting”
Graphic Notes
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

through their eyes

Matthew Barrett and Robert C. Engen

Through Their Eyes A Graphic History of Hill 70 and Canada’s First World War McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022 isbn 978-0-2280-1057-9 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-1248-1 (epdf) Legal deposit third quarter 2022 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding was also received from the Battle of Hill 70 Memorial Project.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Through their eyes : a graphic history of Hill 70 and Canada’s First World War / Matthew Barrett and Robert C. Engen. Names: Barrett, Matthew (Matthew K.), author. | Engen, Robert C. (Robert Charles), author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210390042 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210390069 | isbn 9780228010579 (hardcover) | isbn 9780228012481 (pdf) Subjects: lcsh: Canada. Canadian Army. Canadian Corps—History—Comic books, strips, etc. | lcsh: Hill 70, Battle of, France, 1917—Comic books, strips, etc. | lcsh: Lens, Battle of, Lens, France, 1917—Comic books, strips, etc. | lcsh: World War, 1914-1918—Regimental histories—Canada—Comic books, strips, etc. | lcsh: World War, 1914-1918—Campaigns—France— Comic books, strips, etc. | lcgft: Nonfiction comics. | lcgft: War comics. | lcgft: Historical comics. Classification: lcc d545.l45 b37 2022 | ddc 940.4/31—dc23

This book was designed and typeset by studio oneonone in Minion 11/15

Chapter 1

Contents

Acknowledgments | vii

Introduction | 3

1 De-picturing the Great War | 12 2 Lieutenant General Arthur Currie | 47 3 Lieutenant Brock Chisholm | 129 4 Private Frederick Lee | 172 5 Victoria Crosses at Hill 70 | 223 6 Killing, Death, and Burial at Hill 70 | 238 Epilogue: “No Significant Fighting” | 270

Graphic Notes | 289 Notes | 317 Bibliography | 323 Index | 335

Chapter 1

Acknowledgments

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his book would not have been possible without the generous support and funding of the Battle of Hill 70 Memorial Project. Through the creation of a monument in France and the development of an extensive education program, its dedicated volunteers, donors, and directors have ensured that the service and sacrifices of all Canadians who fought in the battle are not forgotten. This graphic history project evolved from our collaboration with the Hill 70 Project team to produce two graphic books as part of education kits distributed to secondary schools across Canada. As these books were designed to engage students, their creation also opened us to a new way to study, imagine, and understand the past in an illustrated form. We are tremendously grateful for the encouragement and support of Susan and Warren Everett and the entire Hill 70 education team in particular, and to the Hill 70 board more generally. We also thank Allan English, who supervised both of our dissertations at Queen’s University and through whom we first met. We have been privileged to benefit from his excellent mentorship and advice over the years. We have further depended on the support and collaboration of many friends and colleagues from Queen’s and beyond. We especially appreciate Sonia Dussault for sharing her knowledge of la bande dessinée québécoise with us and for her unfailing support of our work on graphic history. We also wish to specially thank Melanie Ng, whose terrific work as a research assistant for the Hill 70 Project helped us to imagine and contextualize Private Frederick Lee. As one of the first graphic histories published by a university press in Canada, Through Their Eyes depended on the hard work and enthusiasm of the entire team at McGill-Queen’s University Press. From the start, editor Kyla Madden has been incredibly supportive of our approach and this book would not have been completed without her advocacy and advice. We are grateful to editor Kathleen Fraser for all her work in moving the book through the production process. A special thanks to Alison Jacques for her thorough copyediting of the entire work. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable insights and suggestions as well as for their willingness to take graphic history seriously as scholarship.

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Robert primarily owes his thanks to Matthew, who has been the driving force behind Through Their Eyes and for the short graphic history vignettes that preceded it for the Hill 70 Project. Matthew’s efforts were particularly heroic during the early months of the covid-19 pandemic. On a personal role, Robert thanks his partner, Dr Claire Cookson-Hills, and their daughter, Posy, for their support and welcomes his son, Monty, who arrived just in time to make it into this book. Matthew has always loved drawing and history, so it was natural to eventually combine the two. The completion of this book took place while he was a sshrc postdoctoral fellow at the Canadian War Museum. His project explores the creation of graphic history scholarship as a visual form of historical interpretation and analysis. In this role, he benefited from Tim Cook’s enthusiasm for military history and for sharing stories about the past in ways that reach wider audiences. Most of all, Matthew thanks his family for their constant love and support. In pursuing his interests – both academic and artistic – the encouragement of his father and mother, Michael and Barbara, and older brother, Jeff, has made all his success possible.

Acknowledgments

through their eyes

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Chapter 1

Introduction

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ow historians represent the First World War is changing. Most visible are the changes in how we commemorate. The idea that we have anything in common with a conflict over a century ago is disdained by modern narratives of endless, exponential technological progress. But the First World War was an apocalyptic event in every sense but the literal: the world may not have physically ended, but the war killed the cultural milieus and social orders that preceded it. We need fresh ways to connect our experiences to those of the people who lived and died over a century ago, and new forms of representation are consequently emerging. Colourization of photographs became a staple of centenary celebrations, with the Vimy Foundation and the Canadian War Museum leading the way in Canada with the 2018 book They Fought in Colour.1 Filmmaker Peter Jackson directed the 2018 documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which transformed and colourized wartime film footage. In New Zealand, the national museum Te Papa partnered with Jackson’s Wētā Workshop studio to create Gallipoli: The Scale of our War, a museum exhibit featuring oversized, painstakingly detailed models of service members at Gallipoli in 1915.2 And the sounds of the last shots on the Western Front fired imaginations worldwide when the clip was released on Twitter by the Imperial War Museum. This clip was painstakingly created by a special effects company, based on archival images of sound ranging registers at 1100 hours on 11 November 1918 for counter-battery detection; a tool of war became a small piece of art, billed as being the authentic moment of armistice that we can experience for ourselves.3 These commemorative efforts are driven in part by marketing and the dynamics of modern technology, but these new modes of representation also speak to cognitive gaps that exist between us and the First World War as the past recedes. It is not just that the people who lived and fought the First World War are now all gone; it is the entire concept of war as it was fought from 1914 to 1918 that is gone too. David Kilcullen gives us our definition of “western” military methodology: “an approach to war that emphasizes battlefield dominance, achieved through high-tech precision, engagement, networked communications, and pervasive intelligence,

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surveillance, and reconnaissance.” It tends to be reluctant to think about consequences, focused narrowly on combat operations, and clueless about war termination.4 The First World War on the Western Front is the modern exemplar of this kind of fighting between nation-states. And this kind of fighting is now practically extinct, a victim of its own success and escalation.5 The rules and assumptions that structured the western military methodology are themselves under attack, usually at levels below the threshold of armed conflict.6 Proxy wars, plausible deniability, private military contractors, and irregular warfare are the order du jour now, largely because battlefield confrontations between any of the major powers is suicide. What even is the battlefield anymore? The Western Front of 1914 to 1918 was profoundly rooted in its own physicality and psychological geography as a battlefield: a seven hundred kilometre red tapeworm winding across western Europe, replacing fields with mazes of trenches and forests with dense hedges of barbed wire. The war’s emphasis on combat and the military defeat of a conventional, symmetrical opponent was absolute and transformative. If the First World War lacked the obsessive drive to minimize friendly casualties that today’s western military methods possess, it was because we learned to fear the terrible social implications of casualties on the Somme, at Verdun, and on the Aisne. War today seems unrecognizable from war in 1917. Derek Gregory describes twenty-first-century armed conflict as an “everywhere war,” a borderless conflict that understands the “enemy” as a plastic concept that can encompass almost anyone regardless of place or history.7 Data, surveillance, and advanced algorithms today create US drone warfare doctrines wherein targets are identified according to a “disposition matrix” of behaviours, geography, and contacts within a network, “disconnect[ing] identity, places, and events.”8 Our enemies are no longer uniformed combatants sharply defined by battlefield geography; most of the people we fight eschew uniforms and an open battlefield. Sometimes algorithms are used just to distinguish enemies from civilians, and sometimes they are wrong.9 On the surface, war’s monstrous scale would appear significantly reduced these days. Compare the 159 dead, 635 wounded, and 1,436 disease and non-battle injuries that Canada sustained over ten years of fighting in Afghanistan with the 2,200 Canadians killed in ten days of (highly successful) fighting at the Battle of Hill 70 in 1917.10 And Hill 70 was the least costly (in Canadian lives) of the three major battles fought by the Canadian Corps in 1917 alone (the other two being Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele). But the risk of casualties in the twenty-first century has been transferred away from combatants and onto civilian populations, despite their supposed protections under the laws of war.11 In today’s more shadowy conflicts, according to Sean McFate, “people are prey. Civilians are more than collateral damage; they are Through Their Eyes

useful military targets … slaughtering the innocent is used in such wars to bait, punish, or provoke” and to create indirect strategic effects. “And it works.”12 When it comes to how we fight, our basic ideas have changed as well. The military command system that the Canadian Armed Forces (caf) has adopted as a core part of its philosophy is called “mission command.” This is a decentralized approach to command that emphasizes delegation and subordinate initiative instead of centralized control. It does not always work in practice, but it is what the caf espouses as its philosophy.13 Where did mission command come from? Its origins are “in the German Army concept of Auftragstaktik.”14 This concept, “mission-tactics,” was pioneered by the Germans in the nineteenth century and was a cornerstone of their command culture through both world wars.15 The caf draws itself up in splendid array at the Vimy Memorial for ceremonies, but when the caf fights now, its guiding military philosophy is what the Germans fought the First World War with: the brainchild of Helmuth von Moltke, not Canadian Corps commander Arthur Currie.16 Even our professional warfighters now have nothing more than a sentimental connection to how the Canadian Expeditionary Force (cef) fought in 1917. It is little wonder that we are seeking out new ways to connect with the First World War. Our own contemporary world makes it seem like there is a widening chasm between our experiences of war and that of the 1914–18 generation. The Great War still looms large in our imagination as the archetype of what war looks like, but it is increasingly disconnected from our practices and our lived experiences. How we represent the war in meaningful ways for modern audiences needs to change as well.

Representations of War Through Their Eyes: A Graphic History of Hill 70 and Canada’s First World War is an attempt to come to grips with this gulf between representation and understanding through a new kind of historical study. Visual art has long shaped the popular imagination of military history, from sweeping battlefield paintings to simple soldier sketches and cartoons to pulp action comics. This book is part of a new academic movement to develop an alternative method of historical interpretation that combines richly illustrated narratives, sequential art, and graphic design with the rigour of academic history. This broad genre of graphic narrative uses pictures and text to communicate ideas or tell stories visually. While often categorized as “graphic novels,” the term is a misnomer because it suggests that the works are wholly fictional. We adopt the increasingly popular term “graphic history,” which identifies both the visual nature of the work and the historical focus of its content. Graphic history contains a Introduction

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strong creative component through its artistic method, but the images, text, and narratives are based on research, corroboration, and sourcing that stand up to the same level of scrutiny as any textual historical account.17 Graphic histories have gained traction over the past decade as valuable learning resources worthy of academic inquiry and literary analysis.18 Whereas comics were often stigmatized in the mid-twentieth century as low entertainment for children, it is not unusual for historians and scholars now to study works of graphic narrative and use them in high school education or undergraduate and graduate-level teaching.19 Art Spiegelman’s critically acclaimed Maus, the comics journalism of Joe Sacco, and the works of many other cartoonists and graphic novelists have significantly contributed to establishing academic interest in the graphic narrative genre.20 Canadian scholars Michael Cromer and Penney Clark explain that a graphic history approach not only encourages readers to develop visual literacy but also contributes to deeper historiographic understanding. They elaborate that the subjective nature of visuals “opens up possibilities for multiple readings and interpretations of their content. This process can develop students’ appreciation for the challenges involved in constructing nuanced and complex historical accounts in ways that are true to the primary sources on which they are based.”21 In Canada, the number of graphic histories is also growing.22 Chester Brown’s Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography, published in 2003, was an important step in demonstrating that graphic narratives can also be significant forms of historical interpretation.23 More recently, professional academics have been involved not only in the research and study of graphic histories but also in the actual production of such works. Oxford University Press, for instance, has established a graphic history series that tells lesser-known stories and explores the opportunities and challenges of imagining historical accounts through text and image.24 The American Historical Review now includes graphic history titles in an effort to expand its scope beyond the traditional monograph, and some academic journals are starting to publish original, peer-reviewed graphic scholarship.25 Our book joins an emerging field of graphic histories that not only critically examine military history and war but also reflect on the nature of representation, visualization, and narrative.26 Recent Canadian works that explore these crucial themes include Scott Chantler’s Two Generals, a graphic memoir based on his grandfather’s Second World War experience, and Enemy Alien by Kassandra Luciuk and illustrator Nicole Marie Burton, which visualizes the first-hand account of an interned Ukrainian Canadian during the First World War.27 Given the newness of the approach, potential methodological challenges, and questions about practicality, some scholars remain uncertain about where a visual approach fits into academic history. The creative and imaginative elements necessary in any graphic history may give some pause about their suitability as either research Through Their Eyes

or teaching resources. There are many challenges with translating historical knowledge into a graphic form, particularly regarding the balance between image and text. Historian Trevor Getz notes, “Many graphic histories suffer from a deficiency either as comics or as histories.”28 Historians generally make a living by filling pages with typeset text, which makes for dreary sequential art, whereas the artistic collaborators frequently have no formal historical training and place the emphasis on visual storytelling at the expense of deeper historical context and accuracy. This book benefits from both of its creators being military historians with PhDs from Queen’s University, where they did their graduate work together. Matthew’s illustrations are drawn by a professional historian with an eye for visual detail and an awareness of the methodological concepts that underpin graphic history.29 In creating any graphic history, writers and artists confront many choices about how to visualize and narrate the past. How do we know what any particular scene looked like? How do we know that what we have created is an accurate representation? Throughout this book all dialogue in word balloons and all text in quotation marks or italicized are taken from historical sources, documented in the endnotes. Many of the drawings are informed by contemporary photographic evidence and other primary source accounts, which are sometimes included or adapted alongside the imagined pictures. Visualization requires informed speculation into expression, gesture, weather, clothing, colours, and many other factors that constitute the minutiae of historical records. We can derive indications about certain details from many sources both written and visual but combining them to construct a sequence of scenes is still a matter of creation and educated imagination. In this regard, it is important to note that perfect technical accuracy is not the primary goal of this (or really any) graphic history. As Matthew explores in this book’s opening chapter, every form of visual representation is merely that: a representation. Photography, for instance, emphasizes stasis, iconicity, and an authoritative capture of a scene but is itself just a representation.30 Attempting to recreate the past as only a realistic representation or literal translation of text may miss the vast potential of visual art to employ multiple techniques across many different styles. Comics scholar Scott McCloud elaborates in Understanding Comics: “When we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential ‘meaning,’ an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t.”31 Visualizing the past forces the historian to consider how incomplete sources and silences in the archival record determine which specific details are featured. Graphic history can signal to the reader that what they are viewing is a construction based on pieces of evidence and historical accounts, assembled to make a truthful if not necessarily a realistic scene. As Matthew argues in an article for Canadian Military History, “graphic histories by their visual nature make evident that which written history Introduction

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can often obscure – fictive elements and informed imagination are central to the production of any historical narrative whether told primarily by text or primarily by illustration.”32 A key element of this kind of experimental graphic study is intentional incompleteness. The sequential art evident in comic books represents snapshots that only take on deeper meaning once the reader mentally links one image to the next. The need to fill the empty spaces between each panel means that a reader becomes a more active participant in completing the graphic history.33 For each illustrated chapter, the written introductory sections and the notes at the end of the book document our sources and clarify certain creative decisions. However, as readers inevitably will come to different conclusions and interpretations than originally envisioned, the graphic narratives should provoke more questions about the possibilities of historical representation than they definitively answer.

The Battle of Hill 70 This graphic history came about through the wider commemorative efforts of the Battle of Hill 70 Memorial Project. Two of the chapters within the volume – the stories of Brock Chisholm and Frederick Lee – were originally created for and distributed by the Hill 70 Project to every secondary school across Canada as part of a historical education kit. The demand outstripped the ability of the project to provide them at its own expense. The Battle of Hill 70 is better known now than it has been at any point since the end of the First World War, thanks to the memorial project along with articles run in collaboration with the Globe and Mail and other high-profile media events and publications. Douglas Delaney and Serge Durflinger’s edited collection Capturing Hill 70, also funded by the project, is as comprehensive a piece of battle scholarship as exists in Canada.34 The Hill 70 Project team’s efforts have ensured that it is no longer accurate to call it a “forgotten battle” in the public consciousness, but Canadians still lack a visual crux upon which to hang our imagination of that battle, in a way that we can with the Second Battle of Ypres (the first gas attack) or Vimy Ridge (the ridge and the monument) or Passchendaele (the sea of mire). What do we “see” when we think about Hill 70? We have no icons in common for this event. It is not a blank slate, but it carries little existing baggage. So, the Battle of Hill 70 is a singularly appropriate moment in the First World War to approach through the visual medium of graphic history. The battle was fought in August of 1917, after Vimy Ridge and before Passchendaele, on a chalky rise designated “Hill 70” near the coal mining city of Lens in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region of France. Lens had been captured by the Germans in Through Their Eyes

October 1914 during their initial invasion of France. A year later, the British Army launched its first of several attempts at war-winning offensives there, in what became known as the Battle of Loos – Loos-en-Gohelle being a suburb of Lens. Tens of thousands of British soldiers surged through Loos under cover of the first British poison gas attack, some of them famously kicking a football out ahead of them. They reached the slopes of Hill 70, the fortified German position behind the town, which almost sixty thousand British New Army soldiers were killed or wounded attempting to break through.35 They failed. Two years of vicious fighting on the Western Front passed before the area was fought for in earnest again. In the summer of 1917, a renewed British offensive took place at Ypres in Belgium. To divert German attention and reinforcements away from this “main show,” a second attack was mounted farther south, in France. The British chose Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Currie’s Canadian Corps to lead it. For his target, Currie selected the city of Lens, and more importantly, the high ground at Hill 70. Zero-Day was 15 August 1917. Rather than attempt a breakthrough, the Canadians assaulted Hill 70 directly and successfully, as the result of considerable planning, preparation, and battle procedure. They then dug themselves in on the far side of the hill, swiftly building up new defences and preparing for the Germans, whose counterattack-based “elastic defence” could be counted upon for its predictability. Over the next three days, the Germans flung some twenty-one separate counterattacks at the Canadians entrenched atop Hill 70. After several divisions had been bled white, the Germans finally had to cede the loss of the hill. To our modern imagination, Hill 70 is complicated. On the one hand, it was an unqualified success by the standards of the Western Front.36 “In its own time,” Durflinger writes, “the battle for Hill 70 was celebrated across the nation as the hardest fighting the Canadian Corps had experienced up to that point in the war and as confirmation of the apparently elite nature of Canadian soldiery.”37 Sydney Wise, the Royal Canadian Air Force official historian, called Hill 70 “a demonstration of how a set-piece attack should be carried out.”38 But, on the other hand, it is also iconic of the monstrousness of “success” on the Western Front: 8,677 Canadians died or were wounded at Hill 70 and Lens, and the Germans probably suffered half again or even twice that number. To what end? To keep the Germans from transferring reinforcements out of the Lens sector, to give the attack on Ypres and Passchendaele – which ultimately failed – as good a shot as possible. Hill 70 was a success, and an important milestone in the development of the Canadian Corps. But it is also instructive in showing that even the greatest successes on the Western Front were achieved at a high price in human lives. Hill 70 has a more elusive character than other Canadian battles. The fact that the battle is named for a geographic feature on a trench map instead of for the nearby town of Lens means it was grounded in abstraction rather than the familiar Introduction

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geography of human places. It is not quite seventy metres above sea level. The hill did not have a name before the trench maps were drawn. It is an important rise in the ground but it would be misleading to call it commanding. The highest point on Vimy Ridge, for comparison, is called Hill 145 for the same reason.39 The peak of Hill 70 is now a traffic circle, the memorial park being located some distance west in Loos-en-Gohelle. These are some of the contours of Hill 70: heroism, cunning, and triumph, but a victory that we would never, ever again think was justified by the scale of the losses that were suffered to achieve it. Chapter 1 examines how artists used visual media, whether photography or painting, to achieve an authentic picture of the First World War. It is an interrogation of the pursuit of truth and representation and addresses the problem of how historical figures are portrayed in art, illustration, and caricature. In encouraging readers to think critically about the meaning behind visuals, we can begin to deconstruct – or, more appropriately, to de-picture – the dominant images and narratives that many rely on when trying to imagine and comprehend the war.40 By introducing several visual concepts related to historical accuracy, realism, and informed imagination, the illustrations build important methodological scaffolding that enables readers to interpret and evaluate the artistic choices and narrative decisions in the subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 follows the promotion of General Arthur Currie and the operations at Hill 70 from his elevated perspective of high command. If Hill 70 is tied to anything, it is the rise of Currie, Canada’s most accomplished and celebrated soldier. Currie was part of the senior leadership team at Vimy Ridge, but he was only made commander of the Canadian Corps in July 1917, and Hill 70 was the first battle that he planned and orchestrated as the leader of the Canadian formation. The first part of the battle, which Currie spent weeks meticulously planning, went like clockwork. The second, a relatively slapdash follow-up attack on Lens by two brigades to see if the Germans would yield it easily, did not.41 August 1917 showed both Currie’s genius for war and how much he still had to learn.42 If Currie casts a long shadow in this graphic history, it is because his will and intellect were the driving forces behind this confrontation. Our memory of Hill 70 may well be inextricable from our memory of Currie. Based in part on his writings during and after the war, this chapter represents the battle variously through Currie’s personal struggles as corps commander and as an abstract, titanic clash of force and will. Chapter 3 gives the junior officer’s perspective of the battle as experienced by the 15th Battalion (48th Highlanders of Canada), which anchored the northernmost section of the advance. The attack on Hill 70 is primarily seen through the eyes of Lieutenant George Brock Chisholm, who earned the Military Cross and who would later become one of the most prominent Canadians on the global stage in the 1940s.

Through Their Eyes

While Currie’s perspective is high level, Chisholm’s is grounded in his experience at the sharp end of combat and in how the assault on Hill 70 might have unfolded for those on the ground. It is based largely upon a vivid description of the battle that Chisholm wrote in a letter home to his father, as well as the unit war diary as recounted by the 15th Battalion commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel C.E. Bent. Chapter 4 takes us into the shallow archival footprints of Private Frederick Lee, one of the only Canadians of Chinese heritage to be accepted into the infantry in the cef. Lee left no known accounts, and we have found none of his letters home, if there were any. This chapter highlights the problems and possibilities of tracing one almost-anonymous soldier through the scant military records that are left behind: How can we construct a meaningful story? What can we infer and deduce from a variety of sources, both directly and indirectly? And how can the informed imagination of the visual medium signal doubts and gaps in a fragmented historical record? Chapter 5 features the six Canadians who received the Victoria Cross (vc), the empire’s highest award, at Hill 70 and Lens. Medal citations offer rich, written descriptions of courage and duty that make them ideal sources to reinterpret as illustrated accounts. By using a range of styles to visually translate these sources, the chapter also explores the diverse artistic approaches adopted by many soldierpainters throughout the war. While some relied on realism fused with romantic notions of glory, others developed abstract techniques to highlight far less heroic notions of trench warfare. Chapter 6 examines broader themes of killing, death, and burial during the First World War with seven separate first-hand accounts about the fighting at Hill 70 and Lens. Through different artistic approaches, these stories reveal how primary sources assume new meanings once translated into an illustrated form. Each story reflects on how soldiers and officers coped with their circumstances and attempted to help those at home to picture their experiences and struggles. The chapter aims to demonstrate that visualizing these narrative sources gives voice to ordinary service members who endured days of fighting and dying. Together these six chapters explore how art and illustration when combined with historical research and narrative offer valuable opportunities to imagine and visualize the First World War. Each chapter focuses on different facets of the Hill 70 offensive, from the perspectives of high command, junior officers, and private soldiers. It is not the definitive history. Rather, it is a visual journey through the lives and experiences of several historical figures who lived through – or did not live through – the Canadian battle over the course of ten days in August 1917.

Introduction

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Chapter 1

De-picturing the Great War

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n attempting to capture a truthful image of the First World War, photographers and artists worked to achieve authenticity. Ivor Castle and William Rider-Rider did so by claiming first-hand experiences documenting scenes alongside Canadian troops at or near the front lines. In Castle’s case, he produced the iconic “going over the top” image that appeared to show a genuine action shot but was in fact pieced together from photos taken during training exercises.1 Acknowledging that many would now see this picture as faked, Tim Cook adds important nuance regarding how viewers evaluate truth in photography. “What about events that fall outside the lens’s view, remaining undocumented by choice?” Cook asks. “If we allow that art can capture the essence of an event, person, or place, is there no room for this in photographs? What happens when a photograph this evocative represents an imagined event better than any truthful representation?”2 A painter may imagine a scene that attempts to get most details right and that even uses a realistic art style, but viewers would not mistake the final picture for a genuine depiction of the actual event – though they could perhaps mistake a hyperrealistic painting for a photograph. In cutting and combining real photographs to produce the scene, another artist engages in a similar process of imaginative creation but the final image – a manufactured photograph – could appear realistic enough as to leave viewers with the impression that it had been taken at the time of the actual event. Thus, a drawing inspired by a real photo is considered an artistic interpretation whereas a drawing made to look like a photograph, such as the image on page 33, is regarded as artificial because it manipulates the viewer with an illusion of reality and authenticity. This is the concept behind what Matthew calls the potential uncanny valley in historical visual representation.3 From an artist’s perspective, attempting to get all the details precisely accurate reaches a point where a drawing must either pass into meticulous photographic realism or retreat into a simpler, more expressive, or more cartoon style.4 As illustrated by the image on page 33, a comic panel in the style of fabricated photos might achieve a type of photorealism but a sequence of images in this style would be jarring to a viewer because it confuses the distinctions between real and faked. From the historian’s perspective, claiming lifelike realism only makes inevitable inaccuracies about physical resemblance, clothing, setting, equipment, or weaponry more apparent because total accuracy is being presented as the primary standard upon which to judge the image. Even more fundamental than these technical details, associating truth only with a realistic art style fails to signal to the viewer

that the scenes, events, and personalities are being constructed through creative imagination informed by historical research and interpretation. As A.Y. Jackson observed, during the First World War many artists who experienced the fighting or witnessed the shattered landscape increasingly moved away from the realism favoured in nineteenth-century military paintings. Richard Jack exemplified the traditionalist style in his composition of a heroic Canadian stand at Second Ypres in April 1915. For many of the new generation of soldier-artist, truth and authenticity could be revealed by modernist abstract designs or emotional expression rather than fidelity to technical accuracy or lifelike realism. British painter Wyndham Lewis adapted a modernist movement called Vorticism that used geometric shapes and angles in several of his war paintings commissioned by the British and Canadian governments.5 Others including C.R.W. Nevinson created futuristinspired works early in the war before adopting more realistic compositions by 1918.6 Like Jackson, future Group of Seven member Frederick Varley used a bold, harsh style to convey the destructiveness of war and reflect themes of disillusionment. The result of these artists was a wide range of dynamic paintings that explored the complexities of the war from all contemporary artistic perspectives. The Canadian War Memorials Fund, established in 1916, commissioned works of both abstract and realistic styles to produce a lasting artistic record of Canada’s war effort. While the fund often purchased less conventional, more modernist works, such as Lewis’s A Canadian Gun-pit, many art critics and members of the public still favoured the flair of traditionalist military paintings. For them, the seeming lifelike accuracy and realism of a painter like Jack better represented what they imagined a battle actually looked like.7 For this reason, in part, the public also remained fascinated by exhibitions of war photographers who claimed to show first-hand accounts of the action, whether the picture had been actually taken in battle or not.8 General Arthur Currie understood well the ability of art to influence public perceptions of the war. He recommended Rider-Rider for the Order of the British Empire for his documentary efforts, but the Canadian Corps commander had little regard for official war painters who departed from realistic, representational art.9 “Many of the pictures which Canada has bought, and I presume paid for,” Currie remarked in 1920, “are what the ordinary uneducated person like myself regard as freak pictures. I have seen an exhibition of these pictures and also I spent all the months in France that Canadian troops were there. I never saw anything which by the wildest stretch of the imagination appears to be what some of these artists have painted.”10 Currie claimed ignorance of art and artists, but he could be a blunt and exacting critic. As explored in this next illustrated section, Currie’s perspective on what constituted good art and accurate representations of war warrants deeper examination.

De-picturing the Great War

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Chapter 2

Lieutenant General Arthur Currie

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here is near unanimity among historians that Sir Arthur Currie was the most accomplished military mind produced by Canada in the First World War. He was forty-one years old when he was appointed commander of the Canadian Corps in 1917. He was a militia soldier, not a professional, and had only attended a short militia staff course in Canada; by British standards he had none of the credentials (and in particular lacked the psc [passed staff college] credential) that distinguished the fully trained staff officer.1 Currie had only a high school education to his name, had never been to university, and came from a prosperous but unremarkable family. There was no precedent for Currie’s elevation to the position that he achieved within the British Expeditionary Force command hierarchy.2 Currie embodied many complications and contradictions, as any “great” person inevitably does. He embezzled nearly $11,000 from his unit’s regimental funds to cover his real estate debts in 1914, just before taking up command – equivalent to over a quarter-million Canadian dollars in 2021.3 By reputation he had little magic with the troops and was not a charismatic leader. He lacked the common touch that Julian Byng, the previous Canadian Corps commander, had possessed when the Canadian troops referred to themselves as “Byng’s Boys.” But for all that the other ranks called Currie “guts and gaiters” because of his girth and distinctly unmilitary figure, he attracted a fierce devotion from the officers who worked under him, Canadian and Imperial alike. His calm, competence, and thorough devotion to the mastery of his (part-time!) profession set him apart. Currie knew the dreadful costs of industrial warfare as well as anyone and was determined to see his battles through by accomplishing as much as was possible with the fewest losses. When he died in 1933, 150,000 people lined the streets of Montreal to watch the procession, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired the funeral over the radio – it was the largest funeral in Canadian history to that point.4 What was the nature of Currie’s proclivity for war? South African field marshal and prime minister Jan Smuts described Currie as a rare man and saw in his process the workings of industrial regularity: “[Currie] studied his moves, and rehearsed them in advance with his officers and [soldiers] until the corps machine worked

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with clocklike regularity … He left little to chance in a sphere where chance plays so great a part.”5 Hugh Urquhart, Currie’s first official biographer and a decorated cef veteran, saw his former boss differently: “He knew the power of ordnance and weapons and the manner in which they had to be co-ordinated with the troops; but granted all these considerations, the well-being, stamina and morale of the [soldiers] had first place in his thoughts and plans. Therefore, he looked upon the army as an organism, not the human machine named Organization, and the strength of his leadership in many ways lay in this approach to his task.”6 F.F. Worthington, from the Canadian machine gun corps, described Currie as follows: “He was not a showman, he was not an inspiring man, but you all knew that you never went into a battle that wasn’t very carefully prepared and thought out.”7 While Currie was meticulous about military planning to safeguard the lives of those under his command, as noted above, many of his soldiers viewed him as something of an enigma.8 If he was a hard leader to understand, he was just as hard to draw. As explored in chapter 1, war artists captured distinct versions of Currie as each portrait highlighted different aspects of his personality, appearance, and build. The man himself physically changed throughout the war as the burden of command weighed heavily on his already broad frame. His own weight fluctuated from stress and recurring stomach problems.9 At times he appeared pear shaped while at others he looked gaunt and drawn out. One consistent element, evident in most paintings and photographs, was his sober and serious expression. For him, war was the most serious business. In his new role as corps commander, Currie found risks and stresses not only in battlefield operations. He also contended with political manoeuvring and rivalries from within the Canadian Overseas Ministry in England. Drawing in part from Currie’s own writings both during and after the war, this chapter explores how he attempted to secure his position at the head of the Canadian Corps while at the same time preparing for Hill 70 – the first crucial test in this job.

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Currie’s ideas about the character of the war he was fighting were well established by mid-1917. On 15 August 1916, precisely a year before he began his attack on Hill 70, Currie, in his previous role as general officer commanding the 1st Canadian Division, had written a lessons-learned precis on the fighting on the Somme. Some of his comments give an insight into his style: “I cannot two [sic] strongly emphasise the necessary [sic] of the attacking Infantry beginning their attack at the very second they are ordered to do so. All available watches must be synchronized. I want all watches in the Division synchronized at 7 o’clock each morning, and I will regard it as a serious neglect of duty if a watch is out of time at any hour of the day. In the course of our training I shall ask many officers the time just to see if any attention is being paid to the order.”10 Currie advocated for a flexible approach at the sharp tactical end of the infantry advance and the adoption of organic platoon fire tactics that would allow the smallest sub-units to attack and overcome points of resistance.11 This was not, however, the Auftragstaktik (mission-type tactics) of the Germans. He knew that the soldiers on the ground would benefit from dispersion and platoon-based small-group tactics, but he wanted them to operate within the framework of comprehensive, exhaustive planning and combined arms coordination. “The infantry should be taught to follow the Artillery barrage as closely as a horse will follow a nosebag filled with corn,” Currie wrote in his lessons-learned document from the Somme in August of 1916. “Unless they do this the enemy are sure to get a few machine guns into action, and two machine guns will stop a whole Battalion or a Brigade. It is far better to lose a few of our own men from our own Artillery fire than to sacrafice [sic] hundreds by hostile machine gun fire.”12 Hill 70 represented a milestone in the evolution of this mode of fighting. According to a 1st Canadian Division post-action report, one of the key lessons that Hill 70 reinforced was “the necessity of the plan being thoroughly worked out in every detail and of it being understood by all who took part; every officer and [soldier] to know [their] particular duty, however small.” There was to be no attempt at a breakthrough or a breakout into the enemy rear. “The plan [is] to be arranged that the final Objective selected is a suitable tactical feature for resisting counter-attacks. Its distance should not be so great that the troops detailed to take it are exhausted upon arrival – they should reach it as fresh as possible and be capable of meeting and beating off counter-attacks.”13 For days after the capture of the hill, Canadian troops had done exactly that as they repelled wave after wave of Germans armed with flamethrowers and Yellow Cross shells filled with sulfur mustard, commonly known as mustard gas. The Canadians did not pioneer these bite-and-hold tactics. Unlike the disingenuous Blackadder cliché of endless frontal assaults, both the British and the French developed tactical innovations to try to address the strategic quagmire of the WestThrough Their Eyes

ern Front, and Currie paid careful attention to both. He was a keen observer of what the British had done, both right and wrong, on the Somme in 1916, and he spent time with other Canadian and British senior officers observing the French Army at Verdun in January 1917. Currie knew the dreadful algebra of trench warfare and knew that for every advance there would be atrocious casualties. He devoted himself to learning, reading, surrounding himself with talented people, and listening to what they had to say. His corps staff and senior leadership were highly competent, and among those who distinguished themselves in the Canadian Corps were two future chiefs of the imperial general staff (cigs) in Britain (Alan Brooke and Edmund Ironside) and three future chiefs of the general staff in Canada (J.H. MacBrien, H.C. Thacker, and A.G.L. McNaughton).14 These luminaries were given significant latitude, resources, and independence, and together they helped forge one of the most potent war machines of the early twentieth century. Currie’s Battle of Hill 70 was in many ways a proof of concept for what would come later. The intense planning, staff work, and battle procedure that went into the preparations for the attack required weeks.15 By the time the Hundred Days Offensive began in 1918, in which Currie’s corps would play a spearhead role, the time needed for planning and battle procedure had been reduced to days or hours, even though it then had to encompass the vicissitudes of open warfare rather than the static conditions of the trenches.16 However, Currie also bore the psychological costs of what the nation had called upon him to do. “I suppose I am the proudest man in the British Isles tonight,” he said in a speech in London shortly before the Battle of Hill 70, “but I am not the happiest.” His sadness, he explained, came from his certain knowledge that “the Canadian Corps is going to die, and it is simply a question of who can stand killing the longer.” But he also knew that everything that could be done to prepare them for the trials ahead would be done: “I have never seen the corps in finer fighting fettle than it is to-day.”17 Hill 70 meant a great deal to Currie personally. It had been his first battle to conduct operationally, and was an opportunity to show his mettle as corps commander, even though the idea for an attack on Hill 70 was not originally his.18 It was also fought overwhelmingly with Canadian units, with only a handful of British artillery units and one Australian tunnelling company also attached. He wrote later, “When the committee on battle honours met after the war they were first determined not to include Hill 70. I wrote to the Chief [Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig] and he personally appeared before the committee for the purpose of insisting that a battle honour be given for that engagement. I daresay it is the only battle honour which the Canadians share with no one.”19 It was not a perfect battle, but it was his. And through it we can start to see the complexities and contradictions of Canada’s most distinguished soldier. Lieutenant General Arthur Currie

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Chapter 3

Lieutenant Brock Chisholm

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he war looked very different on the ground than it did from Arthur Currie’s headquarters. The meticulous planning, battle procedure, and staff work at headquarters needed to be translated into action and carried out by the soldiers of the fighting units in the four divisions and support troops that constituted the Canadian Corps. What did soldier and officer experiences of the battle look like from the sharp end? This chapter explores the execution of the attack through the perspective of the 15th Infantry Battalion (48th Highlanders of Toronto), which was assigned as one of the assaulting units on the morning of 15 August 1917. As part of the 3rd Brigade in the 1st Canadian Division, the 15th was responsible for the initial jumping-off attack and for seizing the northernmost sector of the Hill 70 battlefield. Theirs was a position of some special danger, as they anchored the far left of the Canadian line, and once they reached their final objectives they would be exposed to the Germans on two sides – the only battalion that needed to worry about this. In this battle, the individual, intimate violence of close-range trench warfare collided with unforgiving industrial-age weaponry and the dispassionate staff work needed to put tens or hundreds of thousands of troops in motion at once. No matter how thorough the planning and preparations – and they were thorough – battle was a disorienting experience. We have tried to recreate this in the graphic journey that follows. Much of the narrative of this chapter is from the crisp prose of the 15th Battalion’s commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Edward Bent, who recounted the attack in the unit’s war diary.1 Bent was a slight, bookish man from Nova Scotia, a pre-war militia member and customs officer in his civilian life who had joined at Valcartier in 1914. By May of 1916 he was in command of Toronto’s 15th Battalion and would lead the unit through almost every major battle that the Canadians fought until the end of the war. His precise mind, attention to detail, and cool disregard for danger were on full display in August 1917. However, we give life to the narrative of the attack through the eyes of Lieutenant George Brock Chisholm, who led a platoon at Hill 70. He had joined the Canadian Army at the earliest moment he could, on his nineteenth birthday in 1915. He came

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from humble origins and joined as a private soldier but was an able student and a very quick learner. Chisholm had been commissioned from the ranks in late 1916 based on excellent combat performance and leadership potential. He fought at Vimy Ridge, and then spent three months at brigade, division, and corps schools of instruction, returning to his unit just in time for preparations for the attack on Hill 70. For his endurance and survival through many engagements, his fellow soldiers nicknamed Chisholm “Nemo” after the popular character in cartoonist Winsor McCay’s comic strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland.2 For Chisholm’s actions and platoon leadership in that attack on 15 August he received the Military Cross, the empire’s third-highest gallantry award after the Victoria Cross and Distinguished Service Order. After the battle, still grappling with what he had seen and done on that hill outside Lens, he was awarded fourteen days’ leave; he got as far away as he could, going all the way down to Rome to briefly lose himself in the ancient city while his battalion fought at Passchendaele.3 A year later he was badly wounded during the Hundred Days Offensive and invalided home toward the very end of the war. His service as a highly decorated Canadian platoon commander was the part of his life that Brock Chisholm was least known for. After the war he decided to explore his own recurrent shell shock symptoms by training to be a doctor and a psychiatrist, founding a successful private practice along psychoanalytic lines in Toronto and keeping his “hand in” on military affairs through the Canadian militia. During the Second World War he returned to active duty, serving first as director of personnel selection and then, with a promotion to the ranks of the general officers, became the director-general of medical services, the top medical command in the Canadian Army. He implemented key health protection and personnel selection processes that were widely imitated throughout the British Commonwealth and the United States. In 1948, Chisholm was appointed the first director-general of the World Health Organization, where he worked to enact public health measures on a global scale.4 To picture the ground view from the trenches, this chapter illustrates a single day of fighting from the early morning advance over the top to counterattacks and closequarter combat through dusk. The graphic style is particularly influenced by the 1980s British war comic Charley’s War, written by Pat Mills and illustrated by Joe Colquhoun. Their work notably subverted the bold art found in action comics to expose far less heroic themes of death, futility, and trauma.5 In this chapter, Chisholm’s quotes are excerpted from a letter that he wrote to his father back home, dated 29 August 1917. His message is quite remarkable and provides a vivid, impressionistic description of the attack on Hill 70, which the pictures attempt to capture in tone and emotion. His narrative has been interposed with visualizations of the Through Their Eyes

battle drawn from other sources related to the 15th Battalion, namely Bent’s more clinical account in the unit war diary. Chisholm’s story is just one of hundreds from the battle. It is not unique. But it demonstrates the knife’s edge of war. How close did the world come to losing a man who would become one of its greatest champions at mid-century? How many soldiers were killed at Hill 70 who might otherwise have gone on to equally monumental lives? Such questions beggar the imagination and ought to leave us all humbled.

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Chapter 4

Private Frederick Lee

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here is an old trope in military superstition: the bullet with your name on it. If you are killed in action, it is because someone was carrying a specific bullet (or shell, or land mine, or other tool of violence) that was destined to strike you, and you alone. Leaving aside the notion of destiny, the idea of the bullet with your name on it is perfectly true on a literal level. For every life lost in a battle, there is a parallel journey taken by a munition or implement that, admixed with human will and agency, collides with human flesh to create the end results of wounding and death. The life cycle of a munition must intersect with the life cycle of a human being. As Thomas Stubblefield reflects in his 2020 book Drone Art, “The spent casing of a … missile, the broken stones that were once a home, the craters that mark the point of impact – these signs serve as prompts to reverse engineer the logic of the kill chain, to draw out the series of conditions that produced the attack.”1 This chapter reverse engineers the chain of events leading up to one particular encounter on the outskirts of Lens in August 1917 that ended in the fatal intersection of human flesh and munition. An ordinary individual soldier often escapes the attention of historians when compared with the grander strategies devised by Currie, or with the later prominence and accomplishments of a junior officer like Chisholm, or with the commemoration of a select number of vc recipients. Private Frederick Lee of Kamloops, British Columbia, was typical of the young Canadian-born soldiers who fought and died in the Battle of Hill 70, while also being quite unique. He was almost certainly the only Canadian of Chinese ancestry to be killed during the battle and was one of only a few Chinese Canadians who served in an infantry battalion. Even though he was Canadian born, Lee experienced the legacy of discriminatory policies that had restricted immigration from China and denied certain civic rights such as voting because people of Asian heritage were deemed incapable of integration into Canadian society.2 These racist beliefs and assumptions in turn shaped which people were regarded as acceptable citizen-soldiers for national defence. One of the researchers from the Hill 70 Project, Melanie Ng, studied the experience of racialized minorities enlisting in the cef. She notes that the king’s Regulations and

Orders for the Canadian Militia did not have any explicitly racial colour bar that prevented minorities from enlisting. The main requirement was that the person be a British subject by birth or naturalization. Chinese domiciled in Canada, especially if they had emigrated from or through the British crown colony of Hong Kong, were usually considered British subjects; second-generation immigrants like Frederick Lee, who were born in Canada, definitely were.3 Nevertheless, recruiting officers and battalion commanders had great latitude in whom they would accept and reject, and until late 1915 recruiters across Canada uniformly rejected most racialized minorities (including Indigenous men) from joining their units. It was only due to a looming wartime manpower shortage that, on 19 December 1915, the cef put in place explicit policies to accept volunteers from previously barred communities, including First Nations and Chinese Canadians.4 Japanese Canadians had been permitted to volunteer from an earlier point in the war, but those of Chinese heritage were accompanied by a set of racial presumptions about their abilities and capacity for military service.5 Even after December of 1915, men of Chinese ancestry were not readily accepted into fighting units. Most were mobilized as labourers, a role that aligned more closely with white expectations about their place in society: the pejorative image of the “coolie” became synonymous with Chinese to white Canadians, implying a proclivity for degrading, slave-like, low-skill work.6 Somewhere between eighty and three hundred Chinese Canadians managed to volunteer directly in the cef during the war.7 Many of these men seem to have been employed in forestry battalions rather than fighting units and so could not escape the “coolie” stigma even while in uniform.8 One of the few exceptions was Frederick Lee, who served in a cef infantry battalion on the Western Front. How he managed to enlist with the 172nd Battalion (Rocky Mountain Rangers), based in his hometown of Kamloops, is not known. His thin service file, typical of most soldiers, offers few details beyond his arrival to England in October 1916 and his transfer to the 47th Battalion (British Columbia) for frontline duty in February 1917. We know that Private Lee died on 21 August 1917, which gives us some possible clues as to his fate. On that date, the 10th Infantry Brigade, of which the 47th Battalion was part, attacked south of the Lens-Bethune road into Lens, supported by two divisions’ worth of artillery fire. But, as Hill 70 historian Douglas Delaney argues, “the trouble was that the attackers, who would be fighting in a devastated urban environment, something that was entirely new to them, did not have a very clear idea of how many Germans were in Lens and how they were disposed – and little time with which to figure it out.”9 Over a month of battle procedure, reconnaissance, and the gathering and Private Frederick Lee

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processing of intelligence had preceded the attack on Hill 70. The attack on Lens received barely two days’ worth of this work. The war diaries, however, show that the units did reconnoitre forward outposts and trenches, pushing aggressively into the ruined outskirts of Lens and clashing with German fortified points.10 Although it is possible that Frederick Lee was killed by a stray shell somewhere else in the 47th Battalion’s lines, the weight of probabilities is that he was in a forward, exposed position carrying out reconnaissance prior to the coming attack when he was hit. The fact that Lee’s body was never recovered supports the theory he had been in a forward area, somewhere in the urban maze of Lens. If he had been in unit lines at the time of his death, his body probably could have been recoverable. Others from Lee’s original 172nd Rocky Mountain Rangers (#688046 Private Frank Sidney Fauchon, #687428 Lance-Corporal Arthur James Rogers, and #687408 Sergeant John Joseph Mills) also died that day. Their bodies were never recovered either. Thirty soldiers from the 47th Battalion were killed on 21 August and all but one of them are commemorated on the Vimy Memorial for those with no known grave. This chapter presents a possible narrative of Lee’s war experiences to explore the limits of historical knowledge and the bounds of artistic licence in graphic history. Throughout the section we connect these fragments of evidence and acknowledge instances of speculation to illustrate how historians assemble a coherent story based on research and partial documentation as well as informed imagination. In 2015, artist Nathaniel Hartman produced a piece of 3-D printed artwork, ASM_frag, a re-created fragment of a Hellfire missile used in a drone strike in Pakistan. On his website gallery, he described the artistic intent behind this piece as “physical missile, to exploded fragment, to virtual fragment, to exploded physical form once more.”11 We have no fragments of the shell that killed Fred Lee. We must infer its presence and reality from the records. Our progression instead might be physical missile, to exploded fragment, to human flesh, to archival record, to an exploded and dissected physical form once more – now in two dimensions across these pages.

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Chapter 5

Victoria Crosses at Hill 70

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ver the course of the First World War, seventy-three Canadians received the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy. Between 15 August and 25 August 1917, at Hill 70 and Lens, six Canadians earned the vc, including three posthumously: Private Michael James O’Rourke, 7th Battalion Private Harry Brown, 10th Battalion † Sergeant Frederick Hobson, 20th Battalion † Major Okill Massey Learmonth, 2nd Battalion † Company Sergeant-Major Robert Hanna, 29th Battalion Corporal Filip Konowal, 47th Battalion

The citations for each medal paint a picture of heroism and bravery amid the brutality of a battle that so often involved close quarters and hand-to-hand combat. However, reading the pure text of the rich descriptions is not the only way to interpret the experiences of these six Canadians. Whereas the previous two chapters adapted the stories of Brock Chisholm and Frederick Lee largely through a war comic style, this short chapter adapts six different artistic techniques developed during the First World War to illustrate the multiple ways that primary sources may be reimagined. Private O’Rourke, a stretcher-bearer who struggled financially after the war and throughout the Great Depression, is depicted in a style similar to the controversial cubist work of David Bomberg.1 His own experiences as a soldier left Bomberg disillusioned by mechanized warfare, as reflected in his distorted, geometric designs. One of his paintings for the Canadian War Memorials Fund, Sappers at Work, was rejected as a “futurist abortion.”2 He repainted the scene in a more realistic style that still retained hints of his original abstracted vision. Private Brown, who acted as a message runner dodging bullets and exploding shells, is imagined in a maze of dazzle camouflage. Introduced in 1917, the dazzle paint pattern of geometric shapes and contrasting colours on troopships was intended to

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confuse an enemy’s ability to target a moving vessel at sea.3 Although the actual effectiveness of the paint scheme at evading submarine attack was inconclusive, it is ironic that Allied militaries embraced a strategy rooted in a modernist art genre that some contemporary critics, and generals like Currie, regarded as “freak pictures” and unpatriotic. Sergeant Hobson, a South African War veteran killed in a melee with Germans, is shown in a romanticized style resembling that of Richard Jack. Although painted in a traditionally realistic manner, Jack’s work reflected the impressions of a painter who had not seen combat and who based his compositions on nineteenth-century historical battle scenes. As Jonathan Vance points out, while some contemporary critics observed stark realism in Jack’s style, his paintings in fact “bear the most obvious hallmarks of studio concoctions.”4 Major Learmonth, an officer who lobbed grenades from atop a trench parapet, is imagined as the cover picture on an issue of The War Illustrated. Under the subtitle “A Pictorial Record of the Conflict of the Nations,” this popular British magazine first published in August 1914 offered the public glimpses of the war effort through photographs and drawings. The featured cover images began as highly patriotic and sensationalist, but editors and illustrators became more sober and diligent about verification as the war progressed.5 Company Sergeant-Major Hanna, who killed three Germans and “brained” a fourth, is depicted in a style similar to the Vorticist movement favoured by Wyndham Lewis, most notably displayed in his painting A Battery Shelled. Many traditional art critics dismissed Lewis’s modernist style, and one bitterly complained that the painter’s work “might possibly prove an acceptable addition to a collection of German war caricatures intended to ridicule the British soldier.”6 Corporal Konowal, who killed as many as sixteen Germans and reportedly fought like a man possessed in the ruins of Lens, is set in the harsh style of German soldier-artist Otto Dix. A veteran deeply affected by the scenes he had witnessed, Dix published fifty dark and nightmarish etchings in Der Krieg in 1924.7 The macabre and grotesque imagery of the series had no equivalent in the official Canadian war art, which sometimes provoked its own controversy and disapproval for depicting less-than-heroic scenes. Critics who viewed the experimental work of Bomberg and Lewis as libel on Allied troops would have found Dix’s style, if ever applied to Canadians, anathema. Exploring the six vc citations in six different art styles allows us to imagine the diverse ways that the war has been visualized, from realist to abstract, from romanticized to grotesque. As explained in chapter 1, each painter’s goal was not necessarily to depict lifelike representations. Many of the soldier-artists who engaged in abstraction rather than realism could claim a unique kind of authenticity that instead evoked the unspoken emotions and memories of war. Through Their Eyes

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Chapter 6

Killing, Death, and Burial at Hill 70

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y the end of the operations at Hill 70 and Lens, almost nine thousand Canadian troops had become casualties, including approximately two thousand who were killed in action or died of wounds. Of this number, over half were lost to the battlefield with no known grave, like Private Frederick Lee. As depicted at the end of chapter 2, Currie participated in a large memorial service shortly after the battle to pay tribute to all those who fell in his first major victory as corps commander. One Lewis gunner from British Columbia recounted that the aftermath of the fighting was “as bad, if not worse than the actual thing. That was the time when men – strong in action – went limp with grief, not for themselves, but for their comrades, who at one time marched and joked beside them. Now they were cold and stiff and out of the game for all time, or perhaps they were horribly mutilated, sometimes beyond recognition. Then, and not before, some of us would show signs of breaking up. That was how it affected me.”1 After ten days of attack and counterattack, Canadian soldiers had witnessed countless scenes of killing, death, and burial. As Tim Cook writes of trench warfare generally, “The blurring of the living and the dead only added to the apocalyptic landscape ... And in a sick irony, the artillery bombardments often buried the living and disgorged the dead.”2 The trenches and dugouts that were constructed to offer some degree of cover frequently became many unfortunate soldiers’ tombs. Remains of Allied and enemy soldiers could become mingled together as shells exploded the earth. Under a heavy barrage, individual bodies were entirely obliterated. Sometimes lost in the carnage and in the movements of mass armies was that each of these scenes represented a unique person and story. In early nineteenth-century conflicts, nameless, ordinary soldiers had been hastily buried in mass graves with individual commemoration reserved for higher-ranked officers. The mobilization of so many ordinary civilians during the First World War stirred a desire and expectation that every fallen service member should be honoured by name. By 1919, the Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission) organized the creation of official cemeteries on the former battlegrounds where British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealander, and other Imperial dead were

to be properly reburied alongside one another row by row and marked with uniform headstones.3 Unidentified remains were buried with stones engraved “A Soldier of the Great War known unto God.”4 The Canadian missing from the entire war were commemorated by name on the Vimy Memorial, unveiled in 1936. The importance of a decent burial remains a priority for Canada today through the work of the Department of National Defence’s Casualty Identification Program. Using archival, archaeological, and forensic evidence, sometimes supported by dna testing, the program locates and identifies Canadian soldier remains on former battlefields around the world. In recent years, the remains of seven Canadians killed at Hill 70 were found and reburied in an official war cemetery.5 By emphasizing no distinction of rank and equal treatment for all in death, the program “attempt[s] to give a name to each missing Canadian military fatality.”6 Through different artistic styles or techniques, this chapter illustrates seven firsthand accounts of the battle to reflect on themes of individuality, killing, death, and burial. The primary source documents selected for these graphic vignettes comprise memoirs, diaries, and letters that speak poignantly to the struggles many ordinary soldiers and officers encountered in the trenches and many families at home endured from a long distance. Private Arthur-Joseph Lapointe, a young French-Canadian soldier with the 22nd Battalion (Canadien-français), recalled the moral dilemma of killing another man. An artillery captain described the determined efforts to recover the body of Lieutenant Jack Gooch for proper burial. Lieutenant Lancelot Bertrand consoled the families of dead soldiers not knowing that his own number was nearly up. Corporal Mike Mountain Horse recounted his survival after being buried alive and left for dead. Meanwhile, from her home in Winnipeg Betty Mayse, the wife of a wounded corporal, read with increasing concern the long newspaper casualty lists. A newly commissioned officer, Lieutenant Horace B. Grant, offered reassurances to his worried mother in case he should not return. And Canon Frederick George Scott witnessed perhaps the last fatality from Hill 70 in the execution of Sergeant William Alexander following his conviction by court martial for desertion before the 10th Battalion’s assault on 16 August 1917. Throughout this book, we have attempted to combine art, narrative, and historical research to visualize and personalize experiences from the Battle of Hill 70 as well as to place the individuals and events featured within the wider context of the war. The four previous chapters each focused on the perspective of a single protagonist or, in the case of the vc recipients, on a small group united by their shared award and honours. In this chapter, by mixing artistic styles and juxtaposing imagined interpretations alongside primary source text, the stories attempt to subtly subvert some stereotypical ideas about glorified war heroism often found in popular visual sources such as The War Illustrated or later pulp action comics. Each story represents just one snapshot of the battle from an individual perspective. The goal Killing, Death, and Burial at Hill 70

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of this chapter is not to provide the complete context or background behind the seven experiences featured. Instead, our aim is to draw from separate primary sources that combine written historical text with a visual representation of the scene. Further details about each story and narrator are in the graphic notes section at the end of the book. By linking these seven experiences to the postwar desire to honour each fallen service member by name in official cemeteries, the chapter shows how reimagining these narrative sources can give voice to ordinary soldiers and officers who endured the Battle of Hill 70.

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Epilogue

“No Significant Fighting”

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ne newspaper correspondent writing about the fighting at Hill 70 and Lens correctly noted that no painter could truly represent the experiences of being in battle under fire and gas while surrounded by scenes of carnage and death.1 No official war artist ever tried to depict this attack in the same way Richard Jack immortalized Second Ypres and Vimy Ridge on canvas. At Hill 70, just as in any battle, neither visual art nor the written word could capture the destructive scale of the operations, the emotions of the thousands of soldiers, or the personal meaning of their struggles. Yet, through this graphic history we have attempted to visualize the horrors and heroism of the operations and convey what the fighting meant to a number of participants, from Currie at high command to a junior officer like Chisholm or an ordinary soldier like Lee. In doing so, however, we have also used a graphic history approach to explore the opportunities and challenges of imagining and interpreting the First World War in different visual art forms from multiple perspectives. As chapter 1 argued, representations of the past are never precise reconstructions. Truth and authenticity are not simply found in realistic depictions that claim accuracy in every detail. The seeming objectivity of photographs or the lifelike quality of highly realistic, traditional art may in fact obscure the uncertainties and unknowns that historians grapple with when trying to convey the complexity of the past. Rather than claiming to reconstruct an event based only on available archival traces such as letters, memoirs, and war diaries, historians engage in a creative process of connection, construction, and imagination, based on historical research, to assemble coherent and meaningful narratives. The subjectivity of drawing, the simplified, illustrated style of graphic history, and the limitation of sequential art to depict individual snapshots visualizes this interpretive research process. The pictures assume greater meaning and context once readers mentally connect a series of images with one another as well as with the text. These pictures and words are arranged to form narratives that are interpreted through different prisms depending on the perspectives of creator and viewer. Imagery and iconography may reinforce older narratives of heroic glory, as in many patriotic posters, traditionalist paintings, and illustrated periodicals, but art has been just as important in puncturing some of the dominant images of the First World War. As explored throughout the book, many soldier-artists adopted a range of abstract painting styles to better represent their experience of war. Others left the

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most traumatic pictures up to readers’ imaginations. One Canadian gunner who fought at Hill 70 described a particularly gruesome portrait of the battle: We witnessed some terrible slaughter when the massed [German] counterattacks on our front were repeated again and again over the bodies heaped up where the first attacks melted under the hellish fire of the 1st Canadian Artillery. At one time there was a high-piled and gruesome mass of mangled humanity like a sea-wall or dyke. Some of the ones underneath were still living while the hail of death heaped hundreds more on top. At one time you could see the whole quivering mass heave up and down in queer jerky spasms and convolutions. A lot of men had their minds almost unbalanced by this and other ghastly sights that they were compelled to witness.2 Such a desolate and traumatic image contradicted the realistic, inspirational art style favoured by Currie, but abstract and symbolic versions of the battlefield expressed an authentic experience for many, but by no means for all, veteran soldiers. The different ways that the First World War – and Hill 70, specifically – has been visually represented in this book raise a final question about the battle’s ultimate significance, which in turn provokes deeper consideration about the very meaning of the term. In writing an epilogue to this graphic history, Robert started out by typing, “After the battle ended on 25 August 1917, no significant fighting occurred at Lens for the rest of the war.” He was struck by the thought that this was both true and a complete lie, depending upon the perspective that one chose to adopt. The paradox of this statement further underscores the broader questions of remembrance, interpretation, and perspective that this graphic history has addressed. What narrative do we use to determine the significance of the fighting? No significant fighting occurred at Lens for the rest of the war. Within the wider context of the First World War and the Western Front, this is a true statement. The Battle of Lens shuddered to an end on 25 August 1917 and would not be resumed. Although the Canadian victory at Hill 70 had been decisive, it did not convince the Germans that Lens was untenable, and the defenders left the 4th Canadian Division bloodied from their attempts to seize the ruined city. But even as the 4th Division was pulling back, leaving many of its soldiers behind unburied on the Green Crassier, Currie planned for a continuation of the offensive from a new direction. His intention was to conduct an assault like that of Hill 70 on Sallaumines Hill, a promontory to the south of Lens.3 With Lens outflanked from two directions, the Germans might yield it without forcing the Canadians into the meat grinder of urban combat again. With the approval of his superiors, Currie undertook a detailed

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planning and battle procedure study for the attack on Sallaumines, which he intended to be the third and final act of his triumph at Lens, in September 1917.4 The attack on Sallaumines Hill was cancelled at the end of September when Currie’s Canadian Corps was abruptly pulled away from the Lens front and sent to Belgium. They were needed in a more direct capacity to buoy the Passchendaele offensive, which was by then wallowing in a mud-drenched stalemate. After the fighting at Passchendaele, which cost an additional 15,654 Canadians their health, liberty, or lives, the Canadian Corps trudged back down to the Lens sector, mud soaked and shell shocked. Currie took over command at Lens again on 20 November 1917.5 The Canadians wintered there, holding the line from Hill 70 to Vimy Ridge over the winter of 1917–18, and were still there when the final great German offensive of the war began in the spring. The far northern edge of the German Somme offensive from 21 March to 4 April 1918 passed just south of Vimy Ridge, and the German Lys offensive of 9 to 29 April 1918 (which retook the ground captured at Passchendaele) passed just to the north of Loos and Lens. The Lens sector was the only part of the Western Front held by British Empire forces in 1918 that escaped assault by the German Stoßtruppen divisions.6 Currie never had a second chance to seize Sallaumines and complete the capture of Lens. No other operations of size were launched upon that front. When advancing German troops had entered Lens on 4 October 1914 few could have imagined that the resulting death and destruction would continue for four more years. In September and October 1915, the British suffered terrible casualties during the Battle of Loos in the suburbs of Lens when they failed to hold the Hill 70 high ground. Nearly two years later, Canadians troops avenged that disaster to some degree with the capture of the hill even as Lens remained under German occupation. Canadians were not present when the Germans finally abandoned the city without a fight in early October 1918 as part of their general retreat back into Belgium. They systematically demolished what little remained before they left. The general director of the Lens Mines returned to his city shortly thereafter and described how “as far as the eye could see there were no houses standing, no living trees. I tried to find the place where my house once stood on Douai Road, guided in my search by a charred tree, but it was not to be found; like elsewhere in the city, I found shell holes instead.”7 The war spasmed on further east until the armistice of 11 November 1918, but there were no more large-scale battles for the Lens sector after August 1917. By any strategic measure of events, the area would see no more important clashes until the Battle of Arras in 1940, during the next world war. No significant fighting occurred at Lens for the rest of the war. This statement is also a lie. G.W.L. Nicholson’s official history of the Canadian Expeditionary Force includes a terse three paragraphs about the Canadian Corps after it returned to Lens

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following the Passchendaele battle. Between December 1917 and March 1918, the policy for both sides was one of “active defence, which meant as far as the Germans were concerned, sending out almost nightly raids. It was the familiar pattern of previous winters.”8 Violent clashes, sporadic shelling, and constant fear of enemy raiders prevailed on both sides of the snowed-over trench system. On the morning of 4 March 1918, the Germans launched a sudden attack against Aloof Trench in the northwestern ruins of Lens, not far from where Frederick Lee had fallen back in August. They gained “a small footing but were quickly counterattacked and driven out” by the 21st Canadian Battalion.9 There was further desultory fighting back and forth across No Man’s Land along the Lens sector. On the day that the German spring offensive began, 21 March 1918, the Germans launched a major raid against Hill 70 itself, “leaving behind a score of German dead and wounded.”10 In the end the line at Lens remain stable, if systematically terrorized by both sides, until it was abandoned and dynamited by the Germans in October 1918. Nicholson buries the lede in his cursory examination of the long aftermath of the Battle of Hill 70 on the Lens sector. What was the butcher’s bill for 1 December 1917 to 21 March 1918, a period of calm along the front? A “fairly substantial toll,” in Nicholson’s words, of 3,552 Canadian casualties, including 684 killed.11 The Commonwealth War Graves Commission database of war dead lists the higher number of 875 members of the Canadian Army who died in France between those dates, including some from disease and non-battle causes and a few who finally succumbed to wounds sustained at Hill 70 or Passchendaele. From another perspective, then, during a four-month winter stretch of “inaction” on the Western Front, the Canadian Corps suffered between four and six times the number of killed that the Canadian Armed Forces sustained in Afghanistan in the decade between 2002 and 2012. Almost (but not quite) every one of the Canadians who were killed in Afghanistan was ushered home in convoy along the “Highway of Heroes” between cfb Trenton and Toronto.12 It would be unthinkable to suggest that those who died in Afghanistan did not die for something significant. But what of those hundreds of Canadians who died on and around Hill 70 in the routine attrition of trench warfare, just to keep the enemy on their toes over a long and dour winter? They barely receive mention in the official histories, but they had names and lives cut just as short as anyone who fought in Afghanistan. Private Niels Christensen, an immigrant from Denmark who had made a life farming in Manitoba: he fought with the 52nd Battalion cef at Hill 70 and Passchendaele and was killed in action near Lens on 29 December 1917.13 Or Private Joseph Annesley of County Armagh, Ireland, who had been a firefighter in Saskatoon before enlisting in 1916: he was with Brock Chisholm’s 15th Battalion cef at Hill 70 and had just returned from two weeks’ leave when he was killed in the trenches on 8 February 1918.14

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Or Private Montague Alexander Andrews, a cook from Cape Town, South Africa, and an original Rocky Mountain Ranger, who joined the 172nd Battalion cef at about the same time as Frederick Lee. Andrews and Lee almost certainly knew each other, having both lived in Kamloops, British Columbia, and were taken on drafts to the 47th Battalion cef in the field at the same time. Andrews was wounded just after Vimy Ridge, missed Lee’s death at Hill 70, and rejoined the 47th as a reinforcement at Passchendaele. He died on 16 January 1918 at a casualty clearing station, holding the unusual distinction of being one of the first of millions who would die that year of bronchial pneumonia caused by influenza, a forerunner to the global H1N1 influenza pandemic.15 All these soldiers, amid hundreds of others, perished on or near the Lens sector, their activities warranting only the briefest footnote in history. Could any of their lives, their intersections, and their relationships be judged to be insignificant? No significant fighting occurred at Lens for the rest of the war. So, this statement is both true and false. It lays bare one of the central paradoxes of the First World War that this graphic history has grappled with: Where can we find meaning in what happened? The macroscopic? The microscopic? Somewhere in between? The problem with war narratives is that they are beggared in all directions by the scale of what occurred. It is necessary to hold multiple, conflicting perspectives of the war in our heads at the same time. The Battle of Hill 70 has provided us with a prism through which to ask these questions in graphic form. We see how those at the top of a hierarchical organization, like Sir Arthur Currie, were able to exert some influence, direction, and even a measure of control over the mechanistic system composed of hundreds of thousands of living soldiers in the Canadian Corps. When looked at through Currie’s lens, that of the first Canadian commander of the Canadian Corps, we can search for meaning in a national story as well as a personal experience. John Scott Cowan has argued that Currie’s leadership in the attack on Hill 70, and particularly his pushing his plan with Field Marshal Haig, was “a crucial way station on the road to Canadian independence.”16 J.L. Granatstein, by comparison, identifies the heavy casualties of the 1917 battles at Vimy, Hill 70, and Passchendaele as the cause of the conscription crisis that would remake Canadian politics and, arguably, the Canadian national character.17 Currie himself tried to use the victory at Hill 70 as leverage for recruitment and to support conscription in Canada. From his perspective of high command and in recognition of pressing reinforcement concerns, Currie believed that the sacrifices at Hill 70 and Lens proved compulsory military service essential to maintain full corps strength.18 Conscription, which Parliament enacted on 29 August 1917, provoked intense political controversy and dissent at home, but Currie’s chief priorities were always

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the lives of his soldiers and the measures necessary to win the war.19 However, the political opposition, eager to criticize the federal government’s war strategy, exploited the heavy losses at Lens to begin twisting the image of Currie into that of a gloryseeking butcher. A bitter Sam Hughes soon seized on this gross distortion to level scathing attacks on his former friend from the House of Commons. Currie’s struggle against this caricatured image culminated in a libel trial in 1928, in which the general successfully sued the Port Hope Evening Guide for accusing him of wasting soldiers’ lives in the final hours of the war during the push on Mons.20 Under Currie’s command, from a military standpoint, the Battle of Hill 70 marked an important milestone in the fighting technique and skill of the Canadian Corps itself.21 However, if we look further out, to a true macroscopic view of the war, the significance of the battle fades. The Battle of Hill 70 was a diversionary attack meant to hold down German formations that might otherwise reinforce the larger fight at Ypres. The attacks on Hill 70 and Lens were certainly important and had been assigned a high priority by Haig. But when viewed as one piece in motion across the entire Western Front, it barely created a susurration in the line and was never intended to be more than a highly localized success. No breakthrough and exploitation was ever going to be possible on the Lens-Vimy front, and both sides knew it. Two Canadian divisions struck Hill 70, a third made a diversionary attack on Lens, and a fourth was held in reserve in case things went wrong. This battle required something from every major formation Canada had in the field, but even then, in context it was a small endeavour. The nature of the Western Front meant that no meaningful strategic movement was possible without dozens, if not hundreds, of divisions being poured into the fight, with all the concomitant casualties and destruction this would entail. Nine British and two French divisions were part of the initial attack at Ypres on 31 July 1917, and fifty British and six French divisions would be thrown into the fighting there before its end. The Flanders battles of 1917 produced no breakthrough. The latest scholarship suggests that Haig’s offensive did not press the Germans nearly hard enough to break them. When the British attacked out of the Ypres salient on 31 July, the German Fourth Army that faced them did not need to call for any reinforcements. Three days into the battle, General Ludendorff asked the Fourth Army to give up divisions in Flanders for the sake of operations in Russia. And at the beginning of September, just after the fighting around Hill 70 had ended, the Germans transferred three divisions and twenty-five artillery batteries away from Ypres, as they were not required.22 The fighting in Flanders went badly enough for the British that there was simply no need for the Germans to move reinforcements there from Lens, which was what the Canadian objective had been to prevent. At this scale, the victories at Vimy Ridge and Hill 70 were identical: conspicuous local successes that

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seized commanding positions and demonstrated the ability of the Canadians to break German defences, and kill German soldiers efficiently, but which were only small parts of much larger failed offensives. However, it is more complicated still. The Third Battle of Ypres and Passchendaele succeeded in grinding down the Germans in bloody attrition to divert attention away from the weakened French, and while the British lost about the same number of soldiers as the Germans, the Germans could not afford these losses.23 It was never meant to be a war-winning offensive but was instead part of a strategy of limited attacks to help keep the Germans off balance and bleeding while the French recovered. At best, good positions might be captured and the German hold on the Channel coast made untenable.24 This was the logic of attrition, and in the end it won the war. If such calculations are cold, it is because there was no other way to fight on the Western Front, as this graphic history explored in chapter 2. Even the most dramatic success came at a price in lives that made victory difficult to distinguish from defeat. By such a metric, the Canadian attack on Hill 70 weighs favourably even by the most critical assessments.25 But it looks very small indeed, one cog grinding away in the vast machine of the Allied war effort, and suffers under the dehumanizing chill of the strategist’s gaze. We can also search for significance and meaning at the level of the individual. In some ways this is the easiest approach, but one that is the most problematic for the limits of its perspective. The battle itself ended over two thousand Canadian lives and left thousands more maimed or psychologically injured. Currie’s attack on Hill 70 was, for many of these individuals, one of the most pivotal events of their lives. But so many of them lost their lives there that it beggars the imagination to put faces, stories, and histories to the number. And there are so many unanswerable questions. Surely for every Brock Chisholm, who escaped the fighting with his life and went on to change the world, there are ten like Frederick Lee, who might have moved the world in their lifetime but who had a shell or bullet or pathogen with their name on it. What did any of the soldiers at Hill 70 die for? The possession of a small hill outside of Lens that did not even warrant a name before the war? The wider strategic aims and objectives for which they perished seem utterly alien and inhumanly distant from the horrors of industrial killing that soldiers experienced. In this graphic history, we have attempted to show how historians can visualize the past from different perspectives: Currie’s strategic view from high command, a junior officer at the platoon level, six Victoria Cross recipients, an ordinary Canadian like Lee, and many other lesser-known individuals. What we have done is present the Battle of Hill 70 in as complex a fashion as we can, drawing out contradictions, tensions, and conflicting world views. Art can help the historian immeasurably with this. It allows an avenue by which multiple contradictory ideas can be held in the mind’s eye at the same time. Through Their Eyes

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By provoking questions about historical accuracy, truth, and meaning, this work is both focused on a particular battle of the First World War and interested in expanding the ways that history may be researched, communicated, shared, and represented. By presenting this unique and relatively experimental approach to history within the pages of a scholarly book it is our hope that more historians will explore opportunities to visualize the past in a graphic form. Combining image and text not only invites the readers to consider different ways of interpreting history but also, importantly, helps historians to appreciate their own role in connecting, constructing, and imagining the stories of the past that we tell. 286

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Chapter 1

Graphic Notes

Chapter One: De-picturing the Great War Pages 13 to 14 Ivor Castle’s famous series of photographs of Canadian troops going over the top are from a training course at a trench mortar school. pa-000648, pa-000683, and pa-000766, Library and Archives Canada (lac). All are modified or colourized from the originals. Castle’s description of his work is from “With a Camera on the Somme,” 68–9. Page 15 William Rider-Rider replaced Castle as Canada’s official war photographer in July 1917. His quotes are from Robertson, “Canadian Photojournalism,” 43; originally from Peter Robertson Interview (18–19 May 1971), acc. 1972-27, Rider-Rider Collection, lac. Remarks from seated soldiers are from Rider-Rider’s recollection in same interview. Ironically, the pair has been created through the manipulation and piecing together of many real photos, including pa-000989, pa-002403, pa-005192, pa-002452, and pa-001580, all at lac. Page 16 Rider-Rider’s photographs along the right-hand side of the page, top to bottom, are Canadian stretcher bearers returning to camp after a hard night’s work in the mud, August 1917, pa-001580; Canadians in captured trenches on Hill 70, August 1917, pa-001718; A wounded Canadian enjoys a cigarette on his way from captured Boche trenches, August 1917, pa-001698 and pa-001719; A wounded Canadian leads in a Boche whose nerves have been shattered during our advance on Hill 70, August 1917, pa-001597; (Japanese Canadian) with Souvenir Cap, August 1917, pa-004328; Rifle inspection in Canadian trenches, near Lens, September 1917, pa-001864; all in lac.

Pages 16 to 17 Rider-Rider’s quotes are from “With a Camera at the Front,” 107–8. Photographs are Captured ground which was No Man’s Land, August 1917, pa-001645 and pa-001635, lac. Colourization by Matthew Barrett. Page 18 Rider-Rider’s recollection of Hill 70 is quoted from Wilson, “He Brought Back the Front,” 29–35.

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Page 19 Photographs, top to bottom, are A wounded Canadian enjoys a cigarette on his way from captured Boche trenches, August 1917, pa-001698; A wounded Canadian leads in a Boche whose nerves have been shattered during our advance on Hill 70, August 1917, pa-001597; Rifle inspection in Canadian trenches, near Lens, September 1917, pa-001864; all in lac. Page 20 Rider-Rider took a series of photographs of his Canadian assistants chatting with French women acting as “gleaners,” picking up grain left behind in the field after the harvest. Canadian troops spent significant time out of the line in close contact with French civilians, though the half has never been told. These photographs are Two members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force and three French gleaners interested in a possible German aeroplane, August 1917, pa-001685; Two Canadians telling French gleaners how their comrades won Hill 70 & how the Boche ran, pa001688; “Très Bon Canadians, eh?” French gleaners talking to Canadians, pa-001713; Canadian troops talking to French gleaners, August 2017, pa-001739; all in lac. Page 21 Photograph is Canadians in captured trenches on Hill 70, August 1917, pa-001718, lac. Colourization by Matthew Barrett. Since it now adorns the cover of the only serious academic study of Hill 70, this photograph is likely the most famous one from the battle. See Delaney and Durflinger, Capturing Hill 70. Page 22 The extracted photographs are Canadian machine gunners dig themselves in, in shell holes on Vimy Ridge, April 1917, pa-001017; Canadian Cavalry Machine Gun Section in training, August 1917, pa-001758; Quarry hq of Hill 70 battle, 1919, pa004431; all in lac. The Photoshopped quality of the faked scene is intentionally imperfect, though it gives an indication that a manipulated photo could be made realistic enough to mislead a viewer. Notes to graphic pages 16–22

Page 25 A.Y. Jackson’s quotes are from his memoir, A Painter’s Country, 39. Painting at top right is Jackson, Cité Jeanne D’Arc; Hill 70 in the Distance, 19710261-0187, Canadian War Museum (cwm). Painting at bottom left is Jackson, The Green Crassier, 19710261-0183, cwm. Other landscape paintings of the Hill 70 sector include Mary Riter Hamilton’s Loos from the Crater, Hill 70 (1920) and David Milne’s Loos from the Trenches on Hill 70 (1919). Pages 26 to 27 Quotes are from Jackson, “Record of Total War,” 150. The War Illustrated was an actual British war magazine, first released on 22 August 1914. At its peak in the First World War, The War Illustrated had a circulation of 750,000. Issues of The War Illustrated, 1914 to 1919, can be viewed online at the Internet Archive. This fictional cover uses a cartoon version of the graphic-style signature of The War Illustrated but is of course not a real cover. Page 28 Quote is from Jackson, Painter’s Country, 40. Photograph is Canadian picture being painted by Major Jack, n.d., pa-004879, lac. The colourization of Jack’s painting – The Second Battle of Ypres, 22 April to 25 May 1915, C-014145, lac – is superimposed on the black-and-white photo. Page 30 The left-hand image merges two separate photos to create a new scene above and below the trench. Top: A Boche concrete gun pit used by Canadians, August 1917, pa-001595, lac. Bottom: 21st Battalion officers summer house attached to dugout not many hundreds of yards from Boche line, August 1917, pa-001609, lac. Page 33 The faked-photo version of this drawing at the bottom of the page is created from extracts of several separate photographs: A new invention for the Lewis Gun, n.d., pa-005175 and pa-005184; Canadian pigeon carriers watering the birds in captured Boche trenches on Hill 70, August 1917, pa-001686; Canadian stretcher bearers returning to camp after a hard night’s work in the mud, August 1917, pa-001580; all in lac. Pages 36 to 38 Arthur Currie’s quotes are from Michel, “General Portrayed,” 78; original is from Currie’s letter to Sir Edmund Walker, 5 March 1924, rg2, C38, file 152, McGill University Archives, Montreal. Sir William Orpen was a prolific Irish war artist Notes to graphic pages 25–38

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best known for his battlefield landscapes and portraits of soldiers and generals. The painting by Orpen, Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Currie, Knight Grand Cross of the Most Distinguished Order of St-Michael and St George, Knight Commander of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, February 1919, is held by the Canadian War Museum, 19710261-0539.

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Page 39 The picture adapts the photo General Currie & General MacBrien at a practice attack near the Canadian front, September 1917, pa-002004, lac, depicted at bottom of the page. Currie’s dismissive comment about studio artists is quoted from Michel, “General Portrayed,” 94. Page 40 Photo of Currie is General Currie, Commander of the Canadian troops in France, and A.D.C., 1917, pa-001370, lac. Page 41 Photo of Currie is cropped from General Pershing at Canadian Corps Headquarters, April 1918, pa-002699, lac. Quote by General Frith is from Michel, “General Portrayed,” 77. Page 42 For a selection of sources on the complexities of officership in the British Army during the First World War, see Sheffield, Leadership in the Trenches; Jones, Stemming the Tide; Hodginkson, British Infantry Battalion Commanders; Harris, Men Who Planned the War. Page 43 On Currie’s nickname, see Gibbs, Realities of War, 192; Hyatt, General Sir Arthur Currie, 23. Lt-Col. Harry Crerar of the Canadian artillery would rise to the rank of full general and command the First Canadian Army during the Second World War. Crerar’s quote is from Michel, “General Portrayed,” 77.

Chapter Two: Sir Arthur Currie Page 53 Bombing incident is quoted from Currie’s diary, 3 June 1917, reprinted in Humphries, Selected Papers, 42–3.

Notes to graphic pages 39–53

Page 54 Currie’s letter to David Ker quoted on this page is from Dancocks, Sir Arthur Currie, 99. The various congratulatory telegrams and letters are from Arthur Currie papers, mg 30 E100, lac. Page 56 On Arthur Currie’s step into command of the Canadian Corps, with Byng’s endorsement, see Gardner, “Higher Command,” 30–46; Humphries, “Best Laid Plans,” 78–98. The drawing at the bottom imitates Richard Jack’s famous painting of Vimy Ridge. Page 58 For a classic study of the Canadian Overseas Ministry, see Morton, Peculiar Kind of Politics, 84–126. George Perley was a Canadian member of Parliament who took over the Overseas Ministry in October 1916. Richard Turner was a Boer War Victoria Cross recipient and had commanded the 2nd Canadian Division in France until being relieved in 1916. Garnet Hughes, son of the former militia minister Sam Hughes, had commanded a brigade at the front before being given the 5th Canadian Division, which never deployed to France. The Canadian-born Max Aitken was a member of the House of Lords and helped to create the Canadian War Records Office. Sam Steele was commanding officer at Shorncliffe. Aikens and Hughes supported Turner for the appointment as corps commander. While Steele opposed Turner and supported Currie, he hoped to secure the promotion of a friend to Currie’s former post at the 1st Division. Page 59 William Stewart’s reappraisal of Major-General Richard Turner has attempted to redeem a man who has been long disregarded by the historiography, in large part thanks to Currie. As Stewart makes clear, Turner’s deficiencies as a commander have been overstated, though it remains certain that in 1917 Currie did not believe him to be competent or suitable for active service at high command. Stewart, Embattled General, 207–38. Turner’s remark is from a letter to George Perley and Perley’s suggested resolution is from a message to Robert Borden. Both are quoted in Dancocks, Sir Arthur Currie, 100–1. Photograph of Turner is Visit of Lt.-General Sir R.E.W. Turner, V.C. to the Canadian Training School Bexhill, n.d., pa-005522, lac. Colourization by Matthew Barrett.

Notes to graphic pages 54–9

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Page 60 Robert Borden’s quote is from “Congratulations Sent to Sir Arthur Currie,” Toronto Globe, 21 June 1917, 3. Currie’s suspicions about a conspiracy are from Morton, Peculiar Kind of Politics, 121. Although Currie met separately with Turner and Perley, this imagined confrontation in a smoke-filled room is symbolic of Currie’s sense of intrigues against him rather than a literal scene.

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Page 61 Currie’s quote is continued from Morton, Peculiar Kind of Politics, 121. The bellicose and controversial Sam Hughes had been dismissed from cabinet in October 1916 for overstepping his powers. Garnet Hughes would not receive a combat command and remained in administrative duties in England. For more on the tortured Hughes-Currie relationship, particularly relating to Currie’s elevation to corps commander, see Cook, Madman and the Butcher, 270–318. Currie suspected that Garnet Hughes finally extracted revenge a decade later in his famous libel trial. See Sharpe, Last Day. Page 62 Currie reimbursed the embezzled regimental funds with money borrowed from Maj-Gen. David Watson and Brig-Gen. Victor Odlum. Borden remained disappointed by the incident and it coloured his opinion of Currie as reckless and extravagant with money. After Currie’s death in 1933, Borden confided, “I greatly feared that his default would become a public scandal and destroy his usefulness.” Memo respecting the late Sir Arthur Currie, 13 August 1934, mg 26 H, C-4430, 150492, lac. Page 63 Photograph is General Currie, Commander of the Canadian troops in France, and A.D.G., June 1917, pa-001473, lac. Modification and colourization by Matthew Barrett. On the incident between Currie and British general Thomas Snow at Second Ypres, see Travers, “Currie,” 7–9. Pages 66 to 67 Currie’s remarks are from a letter to Borden, reprinted in “Keep Canadian Corps at Full Strength,” The Province (Vancouver), 25 June 1917, 13. Photograph of Currie being knighted by King George V is General Arthur Currie being knighted by King George V at Albert, France, June 1917, C-014917, lac. Colourization by Matthew Barrett.

Notes to graphic pages 60–7

Page 68 Photograph of the king’s tour of the trenches is His Majesty the King traversing the Vimy Ridge, centre figure Gen. Currie, Commanding Cdns., right Gen. Horne, July 1917, pa-001502, lac. Colourization by Matthew Barrett. On Currie’s priority to keep the corps at full strength, see Hyatt, “Sir Arthur Currie.” Page 69 Cover is The War Illustrated 7, no. 159 (1 September 1917). Colourization by Matthew Barrett. On the Canadian Corps as a part of Henry Horne’s British First Army, see Gardner, “Higher Command,” 30–50. For some of the prelude, see Bechthold, “Shadow of Vimy Ridge.” Page 70 The British Mark series tanks, first used in battle in September 1916, were seeing widespread use in the British Expeditionary Force by late 1917. General Byng, who had previously been commander of the Canadian Corps, was responsible for launching an attack with some 437 massed tanks at the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917 with his British Third Army. However, there were no tanks assigned to the attack on Hill 70, in part because a breakthrough was neither foreseen nor attempted and in part because they were being massed for use both at Cambrai and at Passchendaele. See Turner and Dennis, Cambrai 1917. Page 72 For the classic essay on the dilemmas of the offensive in the decades leading up to the First World War, and the development of the “fire-swept zone,” see Howard, “Men against Fire”; Travers, Killing Ground. The imagined painting in the middle panel depicts the Battle of the Frontiers in August 1914. In the early days of the war French cuirassiers still resembled Napoleonic-era cavalry, though their armour was covered in cloth to reduce shine. On change in uniform design as the war progressed, see Sumner and Embleton, French Army; and Miller, Vanished Armies. Page 73 The top panel shows the 9th Lancers at Elouges, Belgium, on 24 August 1914. Such charges became increasingly rare as British cavalry largely fought dismounted by 1915. The second panel depicts the death of Second Lieutenant John Kipling at the Battle of Loos near Hill 70 on 27 September 1915. On the manner of his death and the mourning of his father, Rudyard Kipling, see Holt and Holt, My Boy Jack.

Notes to graphic pages 68–73

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Page 74 For more detail on the Battle of the Somme from July to November 1916, see Strohn and Strachan, Battle of the Somme; Stewart, Canadians on the Somme. On German “stormtroop” tactics, see Gudmundsson, Stormtroop Tactics; Hull, Absolute Destruction; Corum, Roots of Blitzkrieg. On Australian “peaceful penetration” tactics – a mixture of trench raiding and aggressive patrolling that would dominate and capture the enemy outpost line and thereby gain ground – see Bean, Australian Imperial Force, 345. On the French “elbow-to-elbow” tactics at the beginning of the war, see Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory, 4–45. After the disastrous Nivelle Offensive of April 1917, almost half of the French Army experienced episodes of mutiny and disobedience among their troops, as soldiers protested the apparently careless ways in which their lives were being expended. The French Army would find 23,385 of its own soldiers guilty of mutiny and in the end shot 55 of the mutiny’s ringleaders as examples to the others. Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience, 175–243. Page 75 On the planning of the Hill 70 operation and its wider strategic context, see Gardner, “Higher Command,” 30–46. On the Battle of Loos, see Holt and Holt, My Boy Jack; Sheffield, The Chief, 139–50; Corrigan, Loos 1915. Pages 76 to 77 The map of Europe across the two pages evokes the work of the German artist Walter Trier, whose satirical “Karte von Europa im Jahre 1914” (Map of Europe in 1914) was quite popular and has been imitated since. Trier’s work appears to have been based on similar, older stylized maps from around 1870. See Trier, “Karte von Europa im Jahre 1914,” illustrated map, 1914, British Library (bl), https:/ /www.bl.uk/collection-items/europe-satirical-map. A very imaginative version of this map was done for Scott Westerfeld, Leviathan (New York: Simon Pulse, 2009). Page 78 For a visual overview of the war situation in 1917 across many fronts, see Willmott, World War I, 203–43. Page 79 On the relationship between the German U-boat offensive and the strategic picture on the Western Front, see Sheffield, The Chief, 217, 241–75. Occupied Belgium was where the Germans placed U-boat ports and aerodromes for the Gotha “G IV” bombers that were striking England on a regular basis. The Third Ypres offen-

Notes to graphic pages 74–9

sive into Flanders was meant to neutralize both threats. See Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 279. On Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig and the planning of the offensive in Flanders, which would eventually see Canadian involvement at Passchendaele later in 1917, see Sheffield, Douglas Haig. Pages 80 to 86 Currie’s quotes on these pages are from his letter to Lt-Col. J.G. Rattray, 22 April 1920, reprinted in Humphries, Selected Papers, 333–5. For more critical commentary on Currie’s role in the planning of the battle, see Humphries, “Best Laid Plans,” 78–98. Page 81 Photo of Canadian troops at top of page is Canadian troops returning from the trenches, Battle of the Somme, November 1916, pa-000839, lac. David Lloyd George, pictured here, had become British prime minister in December 1916 with a coalition government and advocated a more vigorous war strategy. It is sometimes speculated that if the war had gone into 1919 George would have replaced Haig with Currie as commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force. While there is no clear evidence that this was his intention, George nevertheless thought highly of Currie as a leader. Humphries, Selected Papers, 7. Page 82 Photo at the top of the page is Passchendaele, now a field of mud, Battle of Ypres, November 1917, pa-040139, lac. We can see here that Currie’s assessments of Haig were not fully accurate – or perhaps he was deliberately simplifying (the letter quoted here having been written several years after the events in question). Haig’s primary concern was the preservation of the Atlantic lifeline via an offensive that would recapture the Belgian ports along the English Channel, which the Germans were using for the U-boat offensive. See Sheffield, The Chief, 217, 241–75. Pages 83 to 85 In anticipation of the Hill 70 offensive, during July and early August Currie ordered a series of raids around Lens to gain intelligence, capture prisoners, and disrupt enemy positions. On 23 July 1917, Lt-Col. Sam Sharpe’s 116th Battalion launched a nighttime raid near Avion, a suburb of Lens, which Currie deemed “very successful.” For a critique of the effectiveness of such raiding tactics see Jackson, “What Was the Point?”

Notes to graphic pages 80–4

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Page 90 Currie’s discussion of Haig, which runs across this and the next three pages, is from a 9 February 1928 letter to Col. J.L. Ralston shortly after Haig’s death, reprinted in Humphries, Selected Papers, 363–4. Photograph of Currie and Haig is Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig with General Sir Arthur Currie, February 1918, pa-002597, lac. Colourization by Matthew Barrett. The Allied generals, left to right, are Ferdinand Foch, Philippe Petain, Fernando de Abreu e Silva, John Pershing, Henry Plummer, Julian Byng, Henry Rawlinson, Hubert Gough, and John Monash. 298

Page 91 Photograph in third panel is Canadians marching past Gen. Horne after church service, September 1917, pa-001906, lac. Photograph in bottom panel is Gen. Sir Arthur Currie and Staff, Battle of Passchendaele, November 1917, pa-002150, lac. Readers may question the extent to which Currie’s analysis of Haig also applied to his own reserved personality. Pages 94 to 96 Currie’s description of the “Hill 70 incident” on these pages is from his letter to Lt-Col. J.G. Rattray, 22 April 1920, reprinted in Humphries, Selected Papers, 333–5. By illustrating from Currie’s perspective, we follow Humphries, who points out that “much of what we think we know about Currie’s actions at Hill 70 comes from a few passages extracted from his postwar letters to friends and acquaintances. Not surprisingly, these tend to place Currie at the centre of the story so that the influence of Horne, British corps commanders, and even Currie’s own staff has been obscured. And as personal letters also tend to do, they cast the general’s actions in the best possible light, concentrating on the Hill 70 attack while … ignoring the poorly planned and executed push into Lens days later.” Humphries, “Best Laid Plans,” 78. Page 97 Photograph is General Sir Arthur Currie’s Car, August 1917, pa-001768, lac. The number in the rear window counts the 29,731 Canadians who had died in France and Flanders over the previous thirty months, between 1 February 1915 and 1 August 1917. This figure, which is a little over half of the eventual total of Canadian dead, is based on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database for Canadians commemorated in French and Belgian cemeteries.

Notes to graphic pages 90–7

Pages 98 to 99 The four Canadian divisions under Macdonell, Burstall, Lipsett, and Watson each comprised three infantry brigades, which in turn were made up of four infantry battalions. For a study of the internal workings of the corps staff at the Battle of Hill 70, see Delaney, “Corps Nervous System,” 51–74. For profiles of Currie’s generals, see Brennan, “Byng’s and Currie’s Commanders.” Page 101 One of the major reasons why the attack on Hill 70 succeeded to the degree that it did was Currie’s insistence on a delay for better weather. Haig’s offensive into Flanders went ahead on 31 July 1917 despite heavy rains, with tragic results, and it is very likely that the same fate would have awaited the Canadians had they been pushed into attacking on the original schedule. Page 102 On 2 August 1917, Currie recorded in his diary that he attended a concert and dinner at the 1st Division hq in Bracquemont. Humphries, Selected Papers, 47. The metaphor of the orchestra applied to the Canadian Corps was first used by Schreiber, Shock Army. Page 103 Photograph is Model reproduction of German lines N.W. of Lens (36.C.N.1), September 1918, pa-003666, lac. On the training, trench replicas, and “taped courses” developed behind the Canadian lines to help plan the attack on Hill 70, see Cook, Shock Troops, 265; Kerry and McDill, History, 137; “Report on Capture of Hill 70 & Puits 14 Bis, by 1st Canadian Division,” 4 September 1917, rg 9-III-B-2, vol. 3850, lac. Page 104 Currie married Lucy Sophia Chaworth-Musters, the daughter of a British military officer, on 14 August 1901. The drawing of Currie’s wife and children deliberately evokes the British propaganda poster “Women of Britain Say ‘Go!,’” 1915, Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, London, poster no. 75, Imperial War Museums (iwm). Pages 105 to 109 The panorama from Currie’s headquarters to the trenches around Lens is inspired by Sacco, The Great War: July 1, 1916. These images compress the actual distance (roughly 25 km) between Canadian hq at the Château, Camblain-L’Abbé, and the Hill 70 front lines. Notes to graphic pages 98–109

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Page 111 Immediately facing the Canadian lines on the north end of Hill 70 was a former mining complex turned German fortress called Puits no. 14-bis, or “mine-head 14A,” part of the extensive coal mining network in the Lens area. The projection of liquid fire served the triple purpose of burning away the strongest point of the German outpost line, creating a curtain of smoke over Hill 70 that would hide the movement of Canadian infantry during the first phase of the attack, and producing a “pillar of fire” visible all over the battlefield by which Canadian troops could orient themselves. See “Report on Capture of Hill 70 & Puits 14-bis by 1st Canadian Division,” 4 September 1917, rg 9-III-B-2, vol. 3850, lac. 300

Pages 113 to 117 Map is reproduced from Nicholson, Official History of the Canadian Army. Currie’s quotes on this and subsequent pages relating to the attack are from his diary for 15–18 August 1917, reprinted in Humphries, Selected Papers, 48–9. Although it was a significant success in a tactical sense, and certainly prevented the Germans from using any formations on the Lens front to reinforce Flanders, Currie did overestimate the strategic impact of Hill 70. His official biography quoted him as saying, “Not only did we hold the Germans on our front but the enemy brought down two divisions from Ypres.” This did not happen; Currie was probably thinking that the two fresh divisions from the German Sixth Army, which had been part of the army reserve, had come from farther away than they did. See Urquhart, Sir Arthur Currie, 171; Foley, “Other Side,” 201. Page 118 The Germans lost at least ten thousand troops and perhaps as many as over twenty thousand as they were torn down by machine gun and counter-battery fire in wave after wave of failed counterattack. On the high enemy death toll, Haig remarked that Canadians “feel that they can beat the Germans every time! They have now made up their minds to take more prisoners in future. It will be less trouble, because now they have to dig so many graves for the slain Germans! This is hard work!!” Quoted in Farr, Silent General, 173. Despite the German losses, the enemy generals were critical of the Allies’ failure to exploit initial success and overall did not give much consideration to the capture of Hill 70 in the postwar historiography. Foley, “Other Side.” Nevertheless, the chief of staff for Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, who commanded the German forces on the northern sector of the Western Front, later commented, “The fighting at Lens cost us, once again, the expenditure of considerable numbers of troops … the whole previously worked-out plan for relieving the fought-out troops in Flanders had been wrecked.” Quoted in Delaney, “Introduction,” 21. Notes to graphic pages 111–18

Page 119 From the perspective of the British generals, Currie’s plan was a complete success and achieved its purpose of preventing enemy reinforcements from deploying from Lens to Flanders. Haig is quoted in “Sir Douglas Haig Sends Message of Congratulation to Canadians,” Kingston Daily Gleaner, 23 August 1917, 1. Horne’s praise is from a letter to his wife, quoted in Farr, Silent General, 172. Page 120 The assault on Lens, which followed the capture of Hill 70, was by contrast disappointingly unsuccessful. The push by the 2nd and 4th Canadian Divisions was designed to see if the city could be seized with little effort now that Hill 70 was in Canadian hands. The last day of the Battle of Lens, on 25 August 1917, was particularly disastrous with a significant portion of the 44th Battalion (Manitoba) trapped and wiped out atop the Green Crassier on the southeast corner of Lens. Delaney, “Corps Nervous System,” 68–74. Maj-Gen. Watson’s quote on surveying the Green Crassier is from his diary on 26 August 1917, in vol. 4, David Watson fonds, Military Museums Library and Archives, University of Calgary. Page 121 Photos are Boche concrete gun emplacement reinforced with iron girders, smashed by Canadian Artillery in Lens, September 1917, pa-001824; Wounded Canadian Kiltie coming in during the attack on Hill 70, August 1917, pa-001603, both at lac. Pages 122 to 123 Henry Morgenthau, former US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, provided a unique outsider account of the battle in progress. His arrival at Canadian hq on 25 August 1917 occurred just as the unsuccessful Battle of Lens was petering out and much of the 44th Battalion was trapped on the Green Crassier. Quotes are from Morgenthau, All in a Lifetime, 271–3. Page 124 Photo at top of page is A view of Lens during bombardment from Canadian lines, August 1917, pa-001793, lac. Photos at bottom of page are 14th Battalion who fought on Hill 70 on way to rest camp, August 1917, pa-001986; Boche prisoners captured by Canadians on Hill 70, August 1917, pa-001726; both in lac. Page 126 Photo at the top of the page is Gen. Sir Arthur Currie watching his men who took Hill 70, marching to rest camp after being relieved, August 1917, pa-001826, lac. Colourization by Matthew Barrett. In this photo we can see Lt-Col. C.E. Bent of Notes to graphic pages 119–26

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the 15th Battalion (48th Highlanders), who appears in and partially narrates the next chapter. Bent is the one mostly eclipsed behind Currie. Photo at the bottom of the page is 15th Bn. going out to rest after Hill 70, August 1917, pa-001760, lac. Page 127 Currie’s quotes are from a letter from Arthur Currie to parents of Major James Louitt Sclater of the 7th Battalion, reprinted in “Gen. Currie Praises Fallen Officer,” Daily Colonist, 22 September 1917.

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Page 128 Photo in middle panel is Memorial Service to men who fell during Hill 70 advance, September 1917, pa-001865, lac. Bottom photo is General Currie at a Memorial Service to men who fell during Hill 70 advance, September 1917, pa-001834, lac. Colourization by Matthew Barrett.

Chapter Three: Lieutenant Brock Chisholm Pages 133 to 134 An earlier version of this chapter originally appeared as The Battle of Hill 70 for the Hill 70 Project’s education package. Reproduction of the modified and revised images is courtesy of the Hill 70 Project. Lieutenant Brock Chisholm’s quotes on these and the next nine pages are from a letter he wrote to his father in Oakville, Ontario, dated 29 August 1917. Brock Chisholm fonds, vol. 9, file 3, mg 30 B56, lac. Page 135 The 15th Battalion was part of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Canadian Division, and had been among the first units mobilized at Valcartier Camp in August 1914. It initially consisted almost entirely of volunteers from a single militia regiment, the 48th Highlanders of Canada out of Toronto. By 1917 there were precious few of the “old originals” left in the unit, though the drafts of reinforcements generally came from the same part of Canada: Toronto and eastern Ontario. Chisholm served as a platoon leader in No. 1 Company though during the first chaotic hours of the attack on Hill 70. Page 137 Many details about the 15th Battalion’s advance are drawn from the war diary for 15 August 1917. rg 9-III-D-3, vol. 4924, reel T-10718, lac. Other details are pro-

Notes to graphic pages 127–37

vided by the 48th Highlanders’ official regimental history, which devotes significant attention to the fighting at Hill 70. Beattie, 48th Highlanders, 236–60. Page 138 Counter-battery fire is heavy artillery fire that targets enemy artillery batteries themselves rather than the troops in between. It has historically been one of the more difficult types of fire mission but in 1917 was becoming highly feasible. The Canadian counter-battery plan at Hill 70 was the brainchild of LieutenantColonel A.G.L. McNaughton and his staff in the corps Counter-Battery Office. McNaughton was one of Canada’s most capable scientist-officers and helped pioneer new techniques in sound ranging and flash spotting that significantly increased the accuracy and lethality of counter-battery work. See Swettenham, McNaughton, 97–103; McNaughton, “Development of Artillery.” Page 139 For more on the infantry-artillery creeping barrage tactics employed at Hill 70, see Cook, Shock Troops, 274; Cook, “Fire Plan,” 70, 102–36. Page 143 This drawing is based on the photograph A dead Boche half-buried by shell fire on Hill 70, August 1917, pa-002013, lac. Page 144 American cartoonist Winsor McCay created the Little Nemo in Slumberland comic strip for the New York Herald, where it ran until 1911. McCay extensively experimented with the comic page layout through creative use of colour, size, detail, and perspective among many other artistic techniques. Roeder, Wide Awake in Slumberland. For an annotated deluxe reprint see Maresca, Little Nemo in Slumberland. Chisholm’s “Nemo” nickname remained with him throughout his life. Pages 145 to 164 Bent’s quotes in this chapter are from his narrative of the attack in the 15th Battalion unit war diary, rg 9-III-D-3, vol. 4924, reel T-10718, lac. Page 146 On the “taped courses” see Cook, Shock Troops, 265; Kerry and McDill, Royal Canadian Engineers, 137; “Report on Capture of Hill 70 & Puits 14 Bis, by 1st Canadian Division,” 4 September 1917, rg 9-III-B-2, vol. 3850, lac.

Notes to graphic pages 138–46

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Pages 149 to 150 Details of the capture of the German trench mortar, nicknamed “Moses,” and the German prisoner who, “evidently anxious above all things to remain at peace with these terrible Ladies-from-Hell, volunteered to demonstrate,” are also from Beattie, 48th Highlanders, 247. Page 151 Photo in the central panel is German machine gun emplacement between Hill 70 and Lens, September 1917, pa-003824, lac. 304

Page 152 After No. 3 Company lost most of its officers (top panel), the only one left had never seen combat before. Chisholm saved the situation by temporarily taking over the leaderless company and got it moving again. Each company was normally commanded by a major, two ranks higher than Chisholm. Beattie, 48th Highlanders, 249. Page 161 A small patrol of a dozen Germans succeeded in crossing over No Man’s Land to the north of the 15th Battalion’s front, cutting across the empty front line of the British 2/4th South Lanes Regiment (which had been pulled back). They infiltrated through the old front line into Meath Trench and were only spotted when they closed in on Bent’s 15th Battalion hq. They were driven back by Bent, his staff, and message runners. Beattie, 48th Highlanders, 254. It was not part of a wider breakthrough of the 15th Battalion’s lines, which was fortunate for the Canadians, though the incident does demonstrate the decentralized cunning and Auftragstaktik of the German counterattack. Pages 166 to 167 “Nemo’s” adventure pulling pins on hand grenades for Lieutenant Macklin of No. 1 Company – who, by reputation, could throw a Mills grenade the “Homeric” distance of sixty yards, or twice as far as a German “Potato-masher” stick grenade could go – is recounted in the regimental history. Macklin’s remark here is also quoted from Beattie, 48th Highlanders, 253. Page 169 Photograph is 15th Bn. going out to rest after Hill 70, August 1917, pa-001760, lac. Chisholm’s Military Cross citation is quoted from Farley, Brock Chisholm, 29–30. Details of Chisholm’s further career during the First World War can be found in his cef service file, acc. 1992-93-166, box 1685-22, lac. Notes to graphic pages 149–69

Page 170 Chisholm’s achievements during the Second World War were too many to summarize here. The fact that a psychiatrist rose to the post of highest prestige and importance in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps and acted as the country’s top military doctor was nothing short of remarkable – as was his later election to the post of first director-general of the World Health Organization (who). See Farley, Brock Chisholm; Engen and English, “Leading Change,” 87–90; Irving, Brock Chisholm. Page 171 One of the things that propelled Chisholm’s career during the Second World War was a pamphlet he wrote at the beginning of the war on morale and the platoon commander’s responsibility for the morale of the troops. It contained, in five pages, virtually everything that needed to be said on the topic and was a distillation of his own experiences of junior officership during the First World War. There are echoes of Hill 70 and other First World War actions in this document, which stresses morale as an armament and the elements of group cohesion as necessary to stave off fear and combat neurosis. It was widely distributed, attached as an appendix to the Canadian Army Training Memorandum in 1941. Col. G. Brock Chisholm, “A Platoon Commander’s Responsibility for the Morale of His Men,” mg 30 B56, vol. 1, no. 10, lac.

Chapter Four: Private Frederick Lee Page 175 The journey of this one mortar shell (identified with red stripes) from a manufacturing plant to the battlefield is symbolic rather than literal. However, it is truthful insofar as many deaths could conceivably be traced back to a single bullet or shell. For some background on German industry and manufacturing during the war, see Broadberry and Harrison, Economics; Ferguson, Pity of War; Winter, Cambridge History. Page 176 An earlier version of this chapter appeared as The Road to Lens: The Story of Private Frederick Lee for the Hill 70 Project education package. Reproduction of the modified and revised images is courtesy of the Hill 70 Project. The original production of that book was made possible by funding from the Jack and Sylvia Gin Foundation. It benefited from connections with Jack Gin’s “Finding Fred Lee” project, which has operated both separately from and in collaboration with the Notes to graphic pages 170–6

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Hill 70 Project. “Fallen Soldier, Forgotten Hero: Uncovering the Legacy of a Chinese-Canadian Hero,” Who Is Freddy Lee, accessed 31 August 2021, http://find ingfredlee.com.

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Page 177 The sketch at the top evokes early twentieth-century discriminatory cartoons and caricatures against Chinese immigration. Lee and his two older brothers, Charles and Thomas, were Canadian born but for official purposes were still viewed as foreigners. On census records, for example, many immigrants from the United Kingdom were identified as Canadian while the Lee brothers’ nationality was listed as Chinese. For background on Chinese Canadian enlistment in the army, see Wong, Dragon and the Maple Leaf. Acceptance of Chinese Canadians, as of many other racial minorities, in the cef was inconsistent. For instance, while Wee Hong Louie enlisted in Kamloops in 1917, his brother Wee Tan Louie was rejected there before joining an Alberta battalion. Lee’s attestation form is from his cef service file, acc. 1992-93/166, box 5522-48, lac. In the first iteration of this graphic history that was distributed to Canadian secondary schools, we posited one possibility: Frederick Lee was about the same age as Desmond Vicars, the son of the 172nd Battalion’s commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel John Vicars. Kamloops was not a large town, and both Frederick and Desmond went to school there. It is probable that Lee, a distinguished honours student, either knew Desmond or at least was known by him. We can only speculate given the absence of corroborating evidence, but having an “in” with a well-placed family connection was a triedand-true method of getting into particular fighting units. Page 178 Photo is 172nd Royal Mounted Rifles on parade on Victoria Street, Kamloops, June 1916, B-03407, British Columbia Archives. To fill Canada’s pledge for half a million men in uniform, the militia department authorized prominent citizens and militia leaders to recruit local battalions for overseas service. As commanding officer of the Rocky Mountain Rangers militia regiment based in Kamloops, Vicars raised the 172nd Battalion in early 1916. This new unit adopted the old militia regiment’s nickname, the Rocky Mountain Rangers, which still exists as a Primary Reserve infantry regiment of the Canadian Army. Page 179 The illustration of the 172nd camp at Vernon features four of the battalion mascots: Biddy the black bear, Lizzie the fox, Pete the bulldog, and Jack the crow. Photos of the mascots and camp can be found at the Greater Vernon Museum & Archives Photograph Collection. Notes to graphic pages 177–9

Page 180 Throughout this chapter we have depicted Lee as a Lewis machine gunner as a creative, though plausible choice because he had trained with the machine-gun section of the 172nd. We have also simplified the operation of a Lewis gun, which typically was manned by two soldiers with four or five carrying ammo in support. Therefore, even if he were assigned to this weapon with the 47th, he would not necessarily have been the gunner. For more on the tactics and operation of the Lewis gun, see Rawling, “Technology.” Page 181 Photo of the 172nd Battalion Machine Gun Section is courtesy of the Hill 70 Project. Page 182 The cef as a whole drew in people from all over the globe. In the early twentieth century, much of the settler population of Canada had been born elsewhere and immigrated to Canada, particularly from Europe and the United Kingdom. According to a study carried out by the Hill 70 Project, only 41 per cent of the Canadian Corps soldiers killed at Hill 70 and Lens in August 1917 had been born in Canada. The number of Canadian-born soldiers who served and fought with the corps only passed the 50 per cent mark with the introduction of conscription late in 1917. Morton, When Your Number’s Up, 47–70. Page 183 Newspaper clippings are Kamloops Standard-Sentinel, 17 October 1916, 1; “Warm ‘Send-Off ’ Given Soldiers,” Daily Colonist, 15 June 1916, 7. Page 184 Description of the overseas journey is a letter from Private F.E. Macmillan to family, reprinted as “172nd Battalion now camped at Bramshott,” Kamloops StandardSentinel, 28 November 1916, 3. The ship that the 172nd Battalion sailed on was the rms Mauritania. This would have been one of its last trips across the Atlantic with this appearance; in early 1917, dazzle camouflage was introduced on Allied ships. This was a type of visual disruption pattern that, while not hiding the ship, made it more difficult for an enemy to visually gauge its direction and speed and therefore made it more difficult to hit with a gun or torpedo. Page 185 Studio portrait of Frederick Lee is courtesy of the Hill 70 Project.

Notes to graphic pages 180–5

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Page 186 On the breakup of the new infantry battalions and the effect on senior surplus officers, see Barrett, “Natural Leaders.” Sometimes soldiers resented older officers who appeared to stay safe while they were drafted to the front. After losing the 172nd, Vicars reverted to major and joined the Forestry Corps in France before ill health forced him home. Vicars quote from “Letter From Lieut.-Colonel Vicars,” Kamloops Standard-Sentinel, 21 September 1917, 1.

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Pages 188 to 189 The 47th Battalion had disembarked in France in August 1916. Within five months, nearly 150 soldiers in that unit had been killed. Lee arrived in early February 1917 with a reinforcement draft of 112 other ranks and one officer. The 172nd reinforced several other British Columbia battalions as well, including the 72nd and 54th. Page 190 The documents on this page are from Frederick Lee’s cef service file, acc. 199293/166, box 5522-48, lac. Page 191 Lee’s first taste of combat would have likely been the day after he arrived at the front, when the 47th was still in the trenches. Referring to the nicknames for German shells, the war diary entry for 10 February 1917 noted, “Enemy threw over quite a number of ‘Rum Jars,’ ‘Minnies’ and ‘Coal Boxes’ – no casualties.” The blasé understatement of the diarist would have likely been in stark contrast to the feelings of Lee and his fellow newcomers from the 172nd Battalion. War Diary, 47th Battalion, February 1917, rg 9-III-D-3, vol. 4940, lac. The running count of the unit dead by month in the grey boxes through this chapter is based on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database. Pages 193 to 195 The encounter with the “red plane” is plausible, though of course we do not know if Lee would have witnessed it himself. The 47th Battalion war diary notes the practice of sniping at enemy planes with Lewis guns. War Diary, 47th Battalion, March 1917, rg 9-III-D-3, vol. 4940, lac; Franks and McCrery, Under the Guns. Page 197 The map for the planned operation is adapted from the unit war diary. The 47th Battalion’s major raid on the German lines near Vimy on 31 March 1917 was one of the major preparatory actions for the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Many of the soldiers Notes to graphic pages 186–97

listed as killed, wounded, and missing had service numbers with the prefix “687” or “688,” which indicates they had just joined from the 172nd Battalion. It is a reasonable supposition that the many newcomers to the 47th were deliberately sent out as a group, led by experienced officers and nco s, to get them “blooded” and give them a taste of combat so that a big “show” like Vimy Ridge or Hill 70 would not be their first experience of close fighting. In such a case, it is likely that Frederick Lee was with them that night. Page 199 Lieutenant Keith Macgowan of the 47th Battalion would go on to receive the Military Cross at Vimy Ridge. The quote here is from a letter home to his mother, dated 2/3 April 1917. Keith Macgowan fonds, ca uvicarch sc074, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Victoria. Pages 200 to 202 A similar revolver fitted with a bayonet is on display at the Canadian War Museum. Lieutenant O.R. Matthews’s remarks about the 31 March raid are from a letter reprinted as “Interesting letter from a Canadian Soldier Severely Wounded in Service,” Redondo (ca) Reflex, 26 July 1918, 1. The depiction of the raid is based on Matthews’s Report on Minor Operation, 1 April 1917, rg 9-III-D-3, vol. 4940, lac. Pages 203 to 204 Matthews’s report and Lieutenant Macgowan’s letters describe the retreating Canadians and their German prisoners sinking into the rain-sodden mud of No Man’s Land. The nineteen identification discs are from all 47th Battalion members killed in the 31 March 1917 raid. Note that six have the prefix “687” or “688.” The blood is symbolic; typically, before raids, soldiers were ordered to remove all identification and regimental badges. The tally at the bottom, sixty-one, marks the total number killed in the battalion for the entire month of March. Page 205 The decomposing corpse here is stylized and symbolic rather than a literal representation of the trenches. A dead body would not have been allowed to remain in a permanently held area for any longer than it took to remove it to a grave site. Page 206 This series of trench cartoons is inspired by Captain Bruce Bairnsfather, best known for his humorous, fanciful sketches, “Fragments from France,” and his curmudgeonly character Old Bill. For more on how soldier-cartoonists satirized the duties of trench life, see Cook, “I Will Meet the World.” Notes to graphic pages 199–206

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Page 207 A similar trench periscope fitted for a Lewis gun is on display at the Canadian War Museum. Following a minor operation on 25 June 1917, the 47th moved out of the trenches. For seven weeks, soldiers enjoyed a period of rest and recreation (with training) behind the lines. By summer 1917, the Allies increasingly relied on the Chinese Labour Corps (clc) to repair roads and railways. Compared to the estimated three hundred volunteers with Chinese ancestry who joined in the cef, nearly one hundred thousand Chinese workers served in the clc. Many had arrived on the Western Front from China via railway across Canada. For more detail, see Xu, Strangers. China declared war on the Central Powers on 14 August 1917. Page 209 On 1 July 1917, the Canadian Corps paused for services to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Confederation. On that day and in the preceding months, dozens of soldiers received military medals and Lieutenant Matthews was earlier awarded the Military Cross for the 31 March raid. The 47th also recorded several field general courts martial (fgcm) in the spring of 1917. For an illegal absence on the eve of the 31 March raid, Private Harry Barkwill, who had arrived with Lee from the 172nd, was sentenced to three months’ Field Punishment No. 1. For two hours a day, the convicted soldier was tied to a post in a stress position. The humiliating punishment was sometimes referred to as crucifixion. Barkwill’s conviction was later quashed. He was killed in action at Lens on 26 August 1917. fgcm of H.D. Barkwill, rg 150, reel T-8654, file 649-B-19483, lac. As a private, Lee earned $1.10 per day. He assigned $15 per month to his brother in British Columbia. Pages 210 to 211 To keep troops entertained and active, battalions and brigades organized sport days for soldiers to compete against other units. Just before moving back into the front lines, the 47th enjoyed a “very exciting” baseball game between the company officers and battalion headquarter officers. According to the war diary, the latter won 13 to 4. On the important role baseball served in the cef, see Horrall, “KeepA-Fighting!,” 27–40. Page 212 On learning of Lee’s death on 21 August 1917, one fellow Kamloops soldier remarked in a letter home, “Isn’t it too bad Fred Lee was killed? He was such a fine young fellow and absolutely couldn’t be persuaded to drink, smoke, or swear over here.” Sydney Winterbottom, letter, 31 August 1917, Canadian Letters and Images

Notes to graphic pages 207–12

Project, Vancouver Island University. Special thanks to Melanie Ng for this reference. For many soldiers the boundary between virtue and vice was not always so closely observed. Page 213 Photo at the bottom is A view of Lens during bombardment from Canadian lines, August 1917, pa-001793, lac. Pages 214 to 215 The 47th Battalion soldiers were reconnoitring the labyrinthine ruins in part because their unit had only just moved forward into the area and was due to begin an attack the next day. This contrasted highly unfavourably with the meticulous staff planning and battle procedure that went into the attack on Hill 70. Lens was a slapdash affair that should have been abandoned at the first sign that the Germans would put up a stiff fight for the city, because the Canadian Corps had no training or experience in urban warfare. Delaney, “Corps Nervous System,” 68–74. Pages 216 to 220 Lee’s exact actions on his final day are conjecture but informed by the facts as we know them. According to the war diary, the 47th Battalion took their place in the line east of Lens on the night of 17–18 August, relieving the 75th Battalion. Patrols were pushed forward to reconnoitre the area and see how strongly held the city’s outskirts were. The attack on Lens by the 4th Canadian Division, of which the 47th Battalion was a part, was due to start on 21 August. On that date, thirty 47th soldiers were killed. Most of their bodies were never recovered, and they are commemorated on the Vimy Memorial. Some may have been obliterated by enemy shells while other bodies were lost in the urban ruins. Others were likely left behind when the 4th Division withdrew from Lens. Page 222 The list of service numbers for the dead and wounded is from the 47th war diary. By the time of his death, Lee had served just over six months in France. During that period, 266 soldiers in the 47th, including Lee, had been killed or died of wounds – more than a quarter of the battalion’s strength. From the first reinforcement drafts in February 1917 to 21 August 1917, just over one hundred 172nd recruits had died serving across several different battalions (twenty-nine in the 47th alone). This total represented one-tenth of the one thousand men who had joined the 172nd in spring 1916.

Notes to graphic pages 213–22

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Chapter Five: Victoria Crosses at Hill 70

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Pages 226 to 237 Michael James O’Rourke was born 19 March 1878 in Limerick, Ireland. He enlisted with the cef from British Columbia and served as a stretcher-bearer for the 7th Battalion at Hill 70. At the time of his award of the vc, he had already earned the Military Medal for his conduct in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. He survived the war but struggled to make a living owing to poverty and declining mental health. He died in relative obscurity in 1957. For details on O’Rourke’s postwar economic difficulties and labour activism in 1930s Vancouver, see Dooley, “Our Mickey,” 171–84. O’Rourke’s vc citation is from London Gazette, no. 30372, 8 November 1917. Pages 228 to 229 Harry Brown was born in Gananoque, Ontario (where a memorial still stands to him), on 11 May 1898. He served with the 10th Battalion, the most decorated unit in the Battle of Hill 70. Brown was killed at Hill 70 and was awarded the vc posthumously. Brown’s vc citation is from London Gazette, no. 30338, 17 October 1917. Pages 230 to 231 Frederick Hobson was born in London, England on 23 September 1873. He was a British Army veteran of the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) and had settled in Cambridge, Ontario, shortly after the war’s end. Being just over forty when the First World War began, he lied about his age so that he would be allowed to enlist in the cef. He served for three years and achieved the rank of sergeant with the 20th Battalion (Central Ontario), before being killed at Hill 70. He was awarded the vc posthumously. Hobson’s vc citation is from London Gazette, no. 30338, 17 October 1917. Pages 232 to 233 Okill Massey Learmonth was born in Quebec City on 20 February 1894. He enlisted as a private soldier in the cef in November 1914 and was granted a field commission as an officer with the 2nd Battalion (Eastern Ontario Regiment). He was killed during the German counterattacks against Hill 70 on 18 August 1917 and was awarded the vc posthumously. Learmonth’s vc citation is from London Gazette, no. 30372, 8 November 1917. Pages 234 to 235 Robert Hill Hanna was born in Kilkeel, Ireland, on 6 August 1886 and came to Canada in 1905. By 1917 he was a company sergeant-major (csm) serving with the Notes to graphic pages 226–35

29th Battalion (Vancouver). The unit was preparing an attack on the Germanheld Cinnabar and Nun’s Alley trenches as part of the advance on Lens when a frenzied close-quarters battle ensued. Hanna distinguished himself and survived the battle. He lived until 1967. Hanna’s vc citation is from London Gazette, no. 30372, 8 November 1917. Pages 236 to 237 Filip Konowal was born in Kutkivtsi, Ukraine, in what was then Imperial Russia, on 25 March 1887 and immigrated to Canada in 1913. He had previously been a soldier and bayonet instructor in the Russian Army. Because his family had been born on the Russian side of the Zburch River, which constituted the border between Russia and Austria-Hungary, Konowal was never deemed an “enemy alien”; therefore, unlike many other Ukrainians he was able to join the cef in 1915. He was badly wounded at Lens but survived the war. Konowal’s “journey” as a casualty from the front to hospital care is tracked as an example in Engen, “Force Preservation,” 175–6. Upon his return he murdered a man but was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Following his release from institutionalization he worked as a caretaker in the House of Commons and lived until 1959. For a deeper study, see Sorobey, “Filip Konowal.” Konowal’s vc citation is from London Gazette, no. 30400, 26 November 1917.

Chapter Six: Killing, Death, and Burial at Hill 70 Pages 242 to 245 Private Arthur-Joseph Lapointe served in the 22nd Battalion (Canadien-français), the Canadian infantry unit into which most francophone soldiers were assigned. Born in 1895, he was a railway station agent in civilian life and educated at a seminary in Rimouski. He survived the war and went into politics. He was a Liberal member of Parliament from 1935 to 1945. His first-hand account of the war is one of the best-known French-Canadian memoirs of the First World War. Lapointe’s quotes on pages 242, 243, and 244 are from Soldier of Quebec, 57–8. Quotes on page 245 are from House of Commons Debates, 18th Parl., 4th Sess., vol. 3 (31 March 1939), 2499–500. In this context, Lapointe recounted his moral dilemma of killing another human as a warning on the eve of another world war. Pages 246 to 248 Letter from Captain A.F. Bennett to the family of Lieutenant Frederick John Gooch was reprinted in “Lieut. ‘Jack’ Gooch Was Carrying On,” Toronto Globe, 12 September 1917, 11. Born on 4 January 1892 in Toronto, Gooch was a noted athlete Notes to graphic pages 236–48

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and hockey player before enlisting with the cef. He served with the Canadian Field Artillery and had distinguished himself at Vimy Ridge. His Circumstances of Death card read, “Whilst acting as Forward Observation Officer at Hill 70, Loos, and when just about to leave the front line to go forward, he was struck in the neck and instantly killed by an enemy machine gun bullet.” rg 150, 1992-93/314, vol. 184, lac.

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Pages 249 to 252 The condolence letters from Lieutenant Lancelot Bertrand were reprinted in “Our Local Heroes,” Fife Free Press, 5 May 1917, 5; “W.H. Phillips of Hardy Learns of Son’s Death on the Battlefield,” Arkansas Democrat, 12 June 1917, 5. Bertrand was born in St George, British West Indies, on 18 December 1892. He had served for two years with the Grenada Volunteers before relocating to Saskatchewan, where he worked as a clerk. Although his Circumstances of Death card does not specify how Bertrand was killed at Hill 70, the 7th Battalion war diary notes at the time that the unit came under heavy machine gun fire. His body was not recovered, and his name is commemorated on the Vimy Memorial. In 1921, the governor of the Windward Islands presented Bertrand’s next of kin with his Military Cross and unveiled a portrait of the lieutenant in the St George Public Library. The Grenada Handbook, Directory and Almanac (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1921), 15. More recently he has been remembered in Canada as the only Black combat officer in the cef. While the racist barriers to recruitment and the discrimination that many Black Canadian soldiers faced in the war are well documented (see Walker, “Race and Recruitment”), we know very little about Bertrand’s experiences in a junior command role. These two letters are among the few direct sources we have found. Pages 253 to 256 Born on 1 November 1887, Mike Mountain Horse (Miistatisomitai) enlisted in the cef in 1916 after the death of his brother at Second Ypres. He fought with the 50th Battalion (Calgary) during the advance into northern Lens. His quotes on page 253 are from My People, the Bloods, 142; quote on page 256 is from Mike Mountain Horse, “Interesting Letter from Indian,” MacLeod News, 21 February 1918, 1. After the war, Ambrose Two Chiefs created a warrior’s calfskin story robe to document Mountain Horse’s experiences in pictorial form. For a deeper history on the cultural significance of this form of Niisitapiikwan (Blackfoot) visual storytelling, see Dempsey, “Warrior’s Robe.” One of the events depicted on the robe, and reimagined here, involved Mountain Horse capturing a cellar full of Germans before being buried alive under Allied shelling. After recovering from his wounds in hospital, he returned to the field. See his cef service file, rg 150, acc. 1992-93/166, Notes to graphic pages 249–56

box 6448-13, lac. For more on Indigenous contributions to the war, see Winegard, For King and Kanata. Pages 257 to 259 Letters by Corporal Amos William (Will) Mayse and Elizabeth (Betty) Mayse are from the Canadian Letters and Images Project. Will was a Boer War veteran and Baptist clergyman from Emerson, Manitoba. After he enlisted in 1916, his wife, Betty, and two children, Billy and Shirley, moved to Winnipeg. While serving with the 1st Canadian Mounted Rifles in July 1917, Will suffered serious shrapnel wounds that forced his evacuation to England. Meanwhile, Betty struggled to support their family at home through food shortages, illness, and worry. Will survived and the Mayse family reunited after the war. They moved to British Columbia in the 1930s. For further detail and context of the experiences of soldiers’ wives, see Hanna, Anxious Days. The casualty lists are from the Winnipeg Tribune, 27 and 28 August 1917. As depicted at the end of chapter 2, the 44th Battalion (Manitoba) suffered heavy losses attempting to take the Green Crassier at Lens. Pages 260 to 263 Lieutenant H.B. Grant’s quotes are from a letter to his mother, dated 21 May 1917, in his militia personnel file, rg 24, reel T-17685, file 649-G-8669, lac. Grant was originally from Halifax and volunteered for the cef in August 1915, though illness prevented his posting to a fighting unit for almost two years. He joined the 27th Battalion (City of Winnipeg) in May 1917. The attack on Lens in August 1917 would have been his first and last major action. Grant’s cef personnel file, rg 150, acc. 1992-93/166, box 3730-31, lac. His Circumstances of Death card states he was struck by a sniper’s bullet through the heart. rg 150, 1992-93/314, vol. 185, lac. His body was never recovered and he is commemorated on the Vimy Memorial. The kit items pictured in this story were collected after Grant’s death to be forwarded to his widowed mother, Isabel Ellen Grant. Pages 264 to 266 The photo is General Currie presenting ribbons to Officers, N.C.O.’s and Men of 10th Bn. September, 1917, pa-001873, lac. Colourization by Matthew Barrett. For the 10th Battalion’s action at Hill 70, see Dancocks, Gallant Canadians, 132–8. The sergeant charged with cowardice, Edward Spencer, was found not guilty on that charge but was convicted of disobedience. The panicked officer, Lieutenant Alexander James Gleam, was convicted of expressing fear and communicating operation details over unsecured telephone lines. At least four officers were sentenced to dismissal for misconduct during the Battle of Hill 70; see Barrett, Notes to graphic pages 257–66

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Scandalous Conduct, 60–1, 71. Company Quartermaster Sergeant William Alexander was the only non-commissioned officer executed in the cef. Rather than leading his platoon as ordered, he disappeared in the early morning hours of 15 August 1917. He was apprehended several days later in a town behind the lines. Given his previously spotless disciplinary record and meritorious service at Vimy Ridge, he was probably suffering from some form of mental trauma and intense anxiety, but court martial members were unsympathetic. The account here is drawn from Canon Frederick George Scott, a chaplain who witnessed the execution, though he did not mention the condemned man by name. He noted that one member of the firing squad “utterly broke down.” Scott, Great War, 210–15. The court martial transcripts of the twenty-five Canadians executed in the First World War were later destroyed. Details of Alexander’s execution are contained in rg 24, reel C-5053, file 649-649-A-6909, lac. For context about capital punishment in the Canadian Corps, see Godefroy, For Freedom and Honour; Iacobelli, Death or Deliverance, 57–8. Page 268 This page is a graphic representation of the Canadians who were killed between 15 and 25 August 1917 with no known graves and are therefore commemorated on the Vimy Memorial. The size of each name reflects the number of soldiers with that surname, hence the largest, Smith, signifies twenty-seven individuals. The records are based on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database and the work done by the Hill 70 Project.

Notes to graphic page 268

Chapter 1

Notes

introduction 1 Vimy Foundation, They Fought in Colour. 2 McPherson, “Gallipoli.” 3 “The End of the War: A Graphic Record,” 11 November 1918, photograph of a Sound Ranging, 11 November 1918, Q47886, American Embassy Collection, Imperial War Museum, https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205281906. 4 Kilcullen, Dragons and the Snakes, 7–8. 5 McFate, New Rules of War, 25–42. 6 Canada, Department of National Defence, “Pan-Domain Force,” 11–12. 7 Gregory, “Everywhere War.” 8 Stubblefield, Drone Art, 17, 22. 9 Porter, “McChrystal and Petraeus”; Weber, “Keep Adding.” 10 The Commonwealth War Graves Commission lists 2,189 soldiers in Canadian service as having died between 15 and 25 August 1917, though not all of these died at Hill 70 or Lens. A project to empirically determine the origins of these fatal casualties was sponsored by the Battle of Hill 70 Project in 2015. See Government of Canada, “Canadian Armed Forces Casualty Statistics (Afghanistan),” news release, 10 June 2013, https://www.canada.ca/en/news/archive/2013/06/canadian-armed-forces-casualtystatistics-afghanistan.html. Also see Barrett and English, “Fallen on the Field”; Rolland-Harris, 2019 Report. 11 Goldstone, foreword to Crimes of War, ed. Gutman and Rieff, 15. 12 McFate, New Rules of War, 206–8. 13 English, “Whatever Happened,” 73–5. 14 Canada, Department of National Defence, Leadership, 131. 15 Hull, Absolute Destruction, 110–30. 16 Vandergriff, Adopting Mission Command; Muth, Command Culture; Shamir, Transforming Command. 17 Barrett, “Historical Thinking.”

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18 Frey and Noys, “Editorial,” 255–60. 19 Cromer and Clark, “Getting Graphic,” 579–80. 20 Spiegelman, Maus; Sacco, Safe Area; Palestine; Great War; Paying the Land; Sousanis, Unflattening. 21 Cromer and Clark, “Getting Graphic,” 589. 22 Some examples of Canadian graphic histories include Wyatt and Kerry, Canada at War; Lang, Lone Hawk; Graphic History Collective and Lester, 1919; Akiwenzie-Damm et al., This Place. 23 Brown, Louis Riel. 24 Titles in the Oxford Graphic History series include Getz and Clark, Abina; Caputo and Clarke, Debating Truth; Schechter and Clarke, Mendoza the Jew; Rea and Clarke, Perpetua’s Journey; Vann and Clarke, Great Hanoi Rat Hunt. 25 Getz, “Getting Serious,” 1597. 26 Historical graphic novels about the First World War include Lowry and Ekedal, Soldiers Unknown; McKean, Black Dog; Brooks and White, Harlem Hellfighters; Tardi, Goddamn This War!; War of the Trenches. 27 Chantler, Two Generals; Luciuk and Burton, Enemy Alien. 28 Getz, “The Challenges of Representing History in Comic Book Form,” Oxford University Press Blog, 29 January 2019, https://blog.oup.com/2019/01/the-challenges-ofrepresenting-history-in-comic-book-form/. 29 For an example of a combined academic article and comic book, see Barrett, “He Would Be Expected.” 30 Stubblefield, Drone Art, 12. 31 McCloud, Understanding Comics, 30. 32 Barrett, “Historical Thinking,” 11. 33 On the necessary incompleteness of sequential art, see King, “Cartooning History,” 201; Carleton, “Drawn to Change,” 162–3. 34 Delaney and Durflinger, Capturing Hill 70. 35 Edmonds, Military Operations, 392–3. 36 Gardner, “Higher Command,” 44. 37 Durflinger, “Battle Forgotten,” 227. 38 Wise, Canadian Airmen, 423. 39 Cook, Vimy, 24. 40 For more detail on this concept of de-picturing as historical deconstruction, see Barrett, “De-picturing John A. Macdonald.” 41 Delaney, “Introduction,” 22–3. 42 Jackson, “Anything but Lovely.”

Notes to pages 6–10

chapter one 1 Wellington, Exhibiting War, 91; Stokes, “Beyond,” 181–4. 2 Cook, “Over the Top,” 37. 3 Usually applied to computer animation and robotics, the uncanny valley is a hypothetical concept that an object’s close yet imperfect resemblance to a human provokes a negative emotional response. On a spectrum from a simple line drawing to a cartoon to a semi-realistic illustration to an actual human, the empathetic connection of the viewer rises as the image takes on more humanlike features but sharply falls when an increasingly realistic image produces an uncanny quality. The influential, though not uncontested, hypothesis of the uncanny valley was first articulated by roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. Rina Diane Caballar, “What Is the Uncanny Valley?,” 6 November 2019, https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/what-isthe-uncanny-valley. 4 For the uncanny valley applied to cartooning, see McCloud, Understanding Comics, 30. 5 Fox, British Art, 64. 6 Ibid., 44. 7 Vance, Death So Noble, 105–6. 8 Wellington, Exhibiting War, 72. 9 Currie testified to the authenticity of Rider-Rider’s photos, stating that “none had acted more gallantly than the official photographic representative, Lieut. Rider-Rider, who often crossed with the front wave.” Quoted in Robertson, “Canadian Photojournalism,” 50. 10 Michel, “General Portrayed,” 94. chapter two 1 Delaney, “Corps Nervous System,” 51–9. 2 On the background of Arthur Currie, see Humphries, Selected Papers; Cook, Madman and the Butcher; Dancocks, Sir Arthur Currie; Urquhart, Arthur Currie; Sharpe, Last Day. 3 Brown and Morton, “Embarrassing Apotheosis.” 4 Davidson, “Acts of Remembrance.” 5 Smuts, foreword to Urquhart, Arthur Currie, xiii. 6 Urquhart, Arthur Currie, 116. 7 Quoted in Freeman and Nielsen, Far from Home, 202. 8 England, “Victoria Real Estate Man.” 9 Humphries, Selected Papers, 51

Notes to pages 34–48

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10 Currie, “Operations – Somme (1916) – Vol. 1, notes on experiences gained and lessons learned, 1st Canadian Division headquarters,” 15 August 1916, rg 9-III-C-3, vol. 4017, file part 34.13, lac. 11 Currie, “Notes on French Attacks North-East of Verdun in October and December, 1916,” n.d., mg30 E100, vol. 35, file 160, lac. 12 Currie, “Operations – Somme (1916).” 13 “Report on Capture of Hill 70 & Puits 14 Bis by 1st Canadian Division,” 4 September 1917, rg 9-III-B-2, vol. 3850, lac. 14 Delaney, “Higher Command,” 54–6. 15 Ibid., 54–6. 16 Granatstein, Greatest Victory. 17 Reprinted in Canada in the Great World War, 191. 18 Humphries, “Best Laid Plans,” 97. 19 Urquhart, Arthur Currie, 171. chapter three 1 Charles Edward Bent cef personnel file, rg 150, acc. 1992-93/166, box 663–40, lac; War Diary, 15th Canadian Infantry Battalion, August 1917, rg 9-III-D-3, vol. 4924, lac. 2 Farley, Brock Chisholm, 30. 3 George Brock Chisholm cef personnel file, rg 150, acc. 1992-93/166, box 1685-22, lac. 4 Engen and English, “Leading Change,” 87–90. 5 Mills and Colquhoun, Charley’s War. chapter four 1 Stubblefield, Drone Art, 31. 2 On anti-Chinese sentiment in British Columbia, see Roy, White Man’s Province; Ward, White Canada Forever. 3 An Act Respecting Immigration, 1910, sc 9–10 Edward VII, c 27. 4 Ng, “‘Natural Warriors.’” 5 Walker, “Race and Recruitment”; Lake and Reynolds, Global Colour Line. Nine Japanese Canadians, all of whom were first-generation immigrants, were killed at Hill 70. 6 Li, Chinese in Canada, 45. 7 Lee, “Road to Enfranchisement.” 8 Ng, “Natural Warriors.” 9 Delaney and Durflinger, Capturing Hill 70, 22. 10 War Diary, 10th Canadian Infantry Brigade, August 1917, rg 9-III-D-3, vol. 4902, lac.

Notes to pages 88–174

11 Nathaniel Hartman, ASM_frag, 2015, pla 3-D printed object, http://nathaniel hartman.com/portfolio/asm_frag/. chapter five 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Dooley, “Our Mickey.” Cork, David Bomberg, 22. Taylor, Dazzle. For a unique illustrated treatment, see Barton and Ngai, Dazzle Ships. Vance, Death So Noble, 106. Hammerton, The War Illustrated, vols. 1–10. Grund, “Rubbish,” 119. Mackenzie, Otto Dix. chapter six

1 Kenneth Walter Foster Memoir, Canadian Letters and Images Project, accessed 1 September 2021, https://www.canadianletters.ca/content/document-4021. 2 Cook, Secret History of Soldiers, 61. 3 Ware, Immortal Heritage; Crane, Empires of the Dead. Despite its promised commitment to equal treatment, the War Graves Commission did not extend the same respect and individual commemoration for non-white soldiers and labourers who died, particularly in theatres beyond Europe. Burke and Hay, Report of the Special Committee; Barrett, “‘White Graves’ and Natives.” 4 The epitaph “known unto God” was selected by British poet Rudyard Kipling, who had lost his own son at the Battle of Loos, near Hill 70, in September 1915. 5 The seven Canadian soldiers killed at Hill 70 whose remains have been rediscovered are Pte William Del Donegan, Pte Reginald Joseph Winfield Johnston, Pte George Alfred Newburn, Pte Henry Edmonds Priddle, Sgt Harold Wilfred Shaughnessy, Pte John Henry Thomas, and Sgt Archibald Wilson. 6 Government of Canada, “Casualty Identification Program,” last modified 6 October 2020, https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/militaryhistory/history-heritage/casualty-identification-military/casualty-identificationprogram.html. epilogue 1 Newspaper headline and quote on page 271 are from the Toronto Globe, 24 August 1917, 1, 4. 2 Iriam, In the Trenches, 217.

Notes to pages 174–273

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3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Humphries, “Best Laid Plans,” 96. Gardner, “Higher Command,” 44–5. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 327. Ibid., 366. McInnis, Lonely Soldier’s Grave, 33. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 338. Ibid., 338. Ibid., 366. Ibid., 339. Barrett, “Contagion versus Commemoration,” 117–20. Pte Niels Christensen, cef personnel file, rg 150, acc. 1992-93/166, box 1698-31, lac. Pte Joseph Annesley, cef personnel file, rg 150, acc. 1992-93/166, box 192-21, lac. Pte Montague Andrews, cef personnel file, rg 150, acc. 1992-93/166, box 182-47, lac; Engen, “caf Health Protection.” Cowan, “Hill 70 and Canadian Independence.” Granatstein, “To Win at Any Cost.” The image on page 280 is based on Alfred Leete’s famous British recruitment poster featuring Field Marshal Kitchener. Currie’s quote is from “Reputation of Dominion Troops Will Be Maintained,” Daily Colonist, 13 September 1917, 5. On Currie’s views about conscription to maintain full cef strength, see Hyatt, “Sir Arthur Currie.” The quote on the illustrated Currie recruitment poster is taken from Hyatt, “Sir Arthur Currie.” Sharpe, Last Days. Delaney, “Higher Command.” Boff, Haig’s Enemy, 175–7. Sheldon, German Army at Passchendaele, 313–7. Boff, Haig’s Enemy, 168–9. Foley, “Other Side.”

Notes to pages 273–84

Epilogue

Bibliography

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Epilogue

Index

Page numbers in italics indicate references to illustrations Afghanistan War, 4, 277 Alexander, Sgt William, 239, 284–6, 315–16 Allied armies: American Expeditionary Force, 78; Australian Imperial Force, 74, 89, 296; British First Army, 70–1; French Army, 74, 78, 80, 295–6; Italian Army, 78; Romanian Army, 78; Russian Army, 78 Andrews, Pte Montague Alexander, 278 Annesley, Pte Joseph, 277 Atkins, Max, 58, 60, 62, 293 Auftragstaktik, 5, 74, 88, 304 Bairnsfather, Capt. Bruce, 309 baseball, 211, 310 battalions, Canadian: 2nd, 232–3, 312; 5th, 115; 7th, 116, 226–7, 249–52, 302, 312; 8th, 116; 10th, 114, 228–9, 264–5, 312; 13th, 114; 15th, 10–11, 114, 126, 129–31, 133–7, 141–71, 277, 302, 304; 16th, 114; 18th, 117; 20th, 117, 230–1, 312; 21st, 117, 277, 291; 22nd, 115, 242–5, 313; 24th, 116; 25th, 115; 26th, 116; 27th, 260–3, 315; 29th, 234–5, 313; 44th, 120, 258, 301, 315; 47th, 173–4, 188–90, 197– 205, 207, 209–20, 222, 236–7, 308–11; 50th, 253–6, 314; 102nd, 18; 116th, 84, 297; 172nd, 173, 177–84, 186, 278, 306, 307, 309 Bent, Charles, 11, 128, 129, 145, 161, 304; narrative of Hill 70 attack, 145–50, 155–6, 158, 161–2, 164 Bertrand, Lancelot Joseph, 239, 249–52, 314 Blackadder (tv series), 88 Bomberg, David, 223, 224 Borden, Robert, 60, 62, 294 box barrage, 199 Brown, Chester, 6 Brown, Harry, 223–4, 228–9, 312 Burton, Nicole Marie, 6 Byng, Julian, 47, 56, 63, 65, 295

Canadian Armed Forces (caf), 5, 277 Capturing Hill 70 (book), 8 Castle, Ivor, 14–16, 34, 289 Casualty Identification Program, 239 Chantler, Scott, 6 Charley’s War (comic series), 130 Château Camblain-L’Abbé, 94, 105, 122, 199 Chinese Labour Corps, 207, 310 Chisholm, George Brock, 284; letter to father, 133–43; Military Cross of, 169; as “Nemo,” 130, 144, 154, 167, 304; postwar career, 170, 305 Christensen, Pte Niels, 277 Cité Jeanne D’Arc, Hill 70 (painting), 25 Clark, Penney, 6 Colquhoun, Joe, 130 Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 238–9, 277, 316, 317n9, 321n3 conscription, 278, 280, 281 Cook, Tim, 34, 238 Cowan, John Scott, 278 Crerar, Harry, 43, 292 Cromer, Michael, 6 Currie, Arthur: on Allied strategy, 80–5, 273, 275; on Battle of Hill 70, 75, 88–9, 94–6, 103, 114–17, 300; bombing of headquarters, 50–3; car of, 97, 101, 122; on casualties, 89, 127; decorating 10th Battalion, 264; embezzlement by, 47, 60, 62, 294; family of, 57, 104; on Haig and leadership, 90–6; how to draw, 41, 44–5; inspecting 47th Battalion, 210; knighthood of, 54, 65–6; painting of, 38; physical appearance of, 42–3; promotion to Canadian Corps commander, 54, 56–7, 63; on reinforcement situation, 66–7, 278; on war art, 35, 36–9 dazzle camouflage, 223–4, 307 Delaney, Douglas, 8, 173 Dix, Otto, 29, 224 Durflinger, Serge, 8, 9

Lewis, Wyndham, 29, 35, 224 Lewis gun, 180, 218–19, 307, 310 Loos, Battle of, 9, 73, 75, 86, 275, 278, 295

Elouges, Action of, 73, 295 field punishment No. 1, 209, 212, 310 Firth, Gen. Gilbert, 41 Frontiers, Battle of, 72, 295

336

George, David Lloyd, 81, 297 George V, 65–8 Getz, Trevor, 7 Gleam, Lt Alexander James, 264, 315 Gooch, Lt Jack., 239, 246–8, 313–14 Granatstein, J.L., 278 Grant, Lt Horace Belford, 239, 260–3, 315 graphic history, 5–8, 40, 174, 272–3, 284, 286 Green Crassier (painting), 25 Gregory, Derek, 4 Haig, Douglas, 42, 82, 89, 90–6, 119, 278, 297, 300; war strategy of, 79, 281 Hanna, Robert Hill, 224, 234–5, 312–13 Hartman, Nathaniel, 174 Hill 70: casualties at, 9, 238, 268, 277, 300; as forgotten battle, 8; physical features of, 8–9, 10; planning of assault, 75, 88–9, 94–6; significance of battle, 4, 9, 88, 281, 284 Hill 70 Memorial Project, 8, 172, 302, 305, 307, 317n10 Hilliam, Brig.-Gen. Edward, 99, 120 Hobson, Frederick, 224, 230–1, 312 Horne, Henry, 68–9, 71, 119, 295, 298 Hughes, Garnet, 58, 59, 60–2, 293, 294 Hughes, Sam, 58, 60–2, 293 Imperial War Graves Commission. See Commonwealth War Graves Commission

Macgowan, Lt Keith, 199, 309 maps: of Europe, 76–7; of Hill 70, 113; of the Western Front, 79, 80, 95 Matthews, Lt Oliver, 200–2, 309, 310 Mayse, Betty and William, 239, 257–9, 315 McCay, Winsor, 130, 303 McCloud, Scott, 7 McFate, Sean, 4 Mills, Pat, 130 Military Cross, 10, 130, 169, 309, 314 Ministry of the Overseas Military Forces of Canada, 48, 57–9, 293 Morgenthau, Henry, 122–3, 301 Mountain Horse, Mike, 239, 253–6, 314 Nevinson, C.R.W., 29, 35 Ng, Melanie, 172 Nicholson, G.W.L., 275, 277 O’Rourke, Michael, 223, 226–7, 312 Orpen, William, 36–7, 291–2; Currie painting by, 38 Overseas Ministry. See Ministry of the Overseas Military Forces of Canada Passchendaele, Battle of, 8, 79, 82, 275, 277, 282, 284, 297 Perley, George, 58–60, 62, 293–4 raids: of 21 March 1918, 277, 279; of 31 March 1917, 197–204, 308–9, 310; of 23 July 1917, 83–4, 297 Rider-Rider, William, 14–16, 34, 67, 121, 289–90, 319n9; at Hill 70, 18, 20–1; on war photography, 5

Jack, Richard, 28, 29, 35, 224, 272 Jackson, A.Y., 24–5, 35, 291; on war art, 26–8 Jackson, Peter, 3 Kilcullen, David, 3 Kipling, 2nd Lt John, 73, 295, 321n4 Konowal, Filip, 224, 236–7, 313 Krupp Gun Works, 175, 187 Lapointe, Arthur-Joseph, 239, 242–5, 313 Learmonth, Okill, 224, 232–3, 312 Lee, Frederick: death of, 174, 222; enlistment of, 173, 176–8; joins 47th Battalion, 188–9; at Lens, 213–20; service file of, 190 Leete, Alfred, 322n18 Lens: attack on, 10, 173–4, 311; city of, 8–9, 119; failure to capture, 273, 275

Sacco, Joe, 6 Scott, Frederick George, 264–6, 316 Sharpe, Lt-Col. Sam, 84, 297 Somme, Battle of, 74, 81, 88–9, 282, 296 Smuts, Jan, 47 Spiegelman, Art, 6 Steele, Maj.-Gen. Sam, 60–1, 293 Stubblefield, Thomas, 172 Toronto Globe, 271 Turner, Lt-Gen. Richard, 58–9, 61, 281, 293, 294 uncanny valley, 22, 33, 34, 319n3 Urquhart, Hugh, 48

Index

Varley, Frederick, 29, 35 Vernon, Camp, 179–80 Vicars, Lt-Col. John, 177–8, 182, 186, 306, 308 Victoria Cross, 11, 130, 223, 225 Vimy Foundation, 3 Vimy Memorial, 5, 174, 239, 268, 311, 314–16 Vimy Ridge, Battle of, 8, 10, 55, 56, 205, 279, 283, 308 von Richthofen, Manfred (Red Baron), 193–5, 308

war artists, 26–9, 34–5, 48, 224, 272 War Illustrated (periodical), 224, 239, 291 Watson, Maj.-Gen. David, 42, 99, 120, 294, 301 Western Front, 4, 9, 71–4, 79, 273, 281, 285 Winterbottom, Sydney, 310 Wise, Sydney, 9 Worthington, F.F., 48 Ypres, Second Battle of, 8, 55, 59, 61, 63, 272, 282; painting of, 28

337

Index