REMEMBERING GREENOCK VETERANS

Edgar S. Garland

On the afternoon of June 7th, 1917 at 4:30 p.m., the men of the 49th Edmonton Battalion moved out of their camp at Villers au Bois, France and started marching toward the front lines. They were moving into the trenches facing Avion, in front of the newly won position on Vimy Ridge.

By 1:45 a.m. that night, they had arrived in the line and relieved the units there. Even reaching the front lines was a very dangerous task; enemy shelling during the relief killed two men and wounded five others.

There was nothing routine about this particular rotation into the front line trenches. In fact, the 49th was moving into position to participate in a major trench raid the following night. One of the men who belonged to that battalion was Private Edgar Sproule Garland.

Edgar Garland was born in Pinkerton, Ontario on June 22, 1896. As a young man, Edgar Garland had moved from Ontario to western Canada. According to the Saskatchewan Virtual War Memorial, he spent some time homesteading south of the town of Morse, Saskatchewan before moving to the town of Success and taking a job as a salesman. In February of 1916, Edgar Garland travelled to Swift Current to enlist. He was assigned to the 209th Battalion of the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force and given serial number 252078.

The 209th trained at Camp Hughes in Manitoba where full scale replicas of trenches and dugouts had been built. The training trenches were large enough to accommodate an entire battalion (about a thousand men) at a time. Men were issued ammunition and rations and were trained in everything related to trench warfare, including mock attacks on enemy trenches. Marching drill, bayonet drill and rifle handling (clinging to tradition, the military still referred to this as “musketry”) were also key parts of a soldier’s training. The 209th Battalion was ready to proceed overseas to England by late 1916. They left Canada aboard the SS Caronia and arrived in England on the 11th of November. The 209th was only in England for a short while when the battalion was broken up to provide reinforcements to front line units. In the interim, Edgar Garland was transferred to the 9th Reserve Battalion for even more training and eventual placement in another unit.

In early 1917, while still in England, Garland was hospitalized with mumps. The cold, damp winter weather in England combined with tight living quarters provided the perfect breeding ground for infectious diseases. Mumps and measles were especially prevalent in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Edgar’s stay in hospital, which included an extended stint in isolation, lasted from February 13th to March 20th.

On the 13th day of April in 1917, less than a month after being discharged from hospital, Edgar Garland arrived in France as a reinforcement for the 49th (Edmonton) Battalion which was a part of the 7th Brigade and the 3rd Canadian Division. A few days after his transfer to the 49th, he was transferred to the 3rd Entrenching Battalion. Vimy Ridge had been captured just days earlier and there was much work to be done. Guns needed to be brought up to the new forward areas. Roads that had existed before the war had been obliterated by shellfire and needed to be rebuilt. The light gauge railway, used to bring ammunition to the guns, would need to be extended and new pipelines supplying fresh water to the front lines needed to be laid.

Each day several hundred men of the Entrenching Battalion worked to complete all of these tasks. A brief description of their efforts was contained in the unit diary from the end of April: “Long hours and arduous work was performed by the troops during this month owing to the large programme of work necessitated by the capture of Vimy Ridge.”

By the time Garland had rejoined the 49th in mid-May, plans were already being developed for another attack on the German lines. Preparations were elaborate, and the 49th was withdrawn from the front lines to prepare for the attack.

Mornings of each day were spent practising new platoon tactics and included training and rehearsing with live hand grenades and practising rifle grenade attacks on strong points. Enemy trenches had been accurately mapped and exact replicas had been laid out with tape. Enemy strong points were identified and tactics were developed to neutralize them. Men carrying flags were used to simulate the planned progress of the creeping artillery barrage.

Afternoons were spent engaging in sporting activities, which were considered to be good for morale. Competition at the Battalion level would determine who would represent the 49th at the Brigade level games. The final results of the 7th Brigade Field Day were meticulously recorded in the war diary of the 49th. Members of the battalion placed first in the Relay Race, High Jump, Tug-Of-War and captured the three top spots in the One Mile Race. They also placed well in some lesser known and imaginative sports such as the 4 Legged Race, the Smoking Race, the Pillow Fight and Wrestling on Horseback. Evenings were occupied with concerts and entertainment for the troops.

As the date for the planned attack grew nearer, it became apparent that a change in strategy was necessary. Concentrated enemy artillery fire and counter attacks were making it extremely difficult to hold the newly captured trenches, and so it was decided that instead of attempting to hold these trenches, the troops would cause as much destruction as possible in enemy territory and then withdraw.

And so, just days before the attack was to occur, what was to have been a planned attack became a trench raid.

The planned raid was a large scale effort and involved a Brigade from each of the 3rd and 4th Canadian Divisions (totalling six battalions) on a frontage of two miles. Some British troops in an adjoining area would also join in the attack. Three platoons of each company of the 49th were to take part in the raid and were assembled in the forward area, known as the jumping off trenches, a hundred and fifty yards beyond the Canadian front line, while the remaining platoons of the 49th would occupy the Canadian lines during the raid. Before the raid had even begun, six soldiers became casualties when their trenches were bombarded by German guns.

The raid was launched at 11:45 p.m. on the night of June 8th. It was misty and a light rain was falling. The post-raid report stated that “the men went over the top like clockwork”. It went on to say: “Having reached the objective in twenty-one minutes and having met with little opposition, the evacuation of casualties was commenced, the few prisoners taken being very useful as stretcher bearers.”

Ninety minutes after the raid started, the signal was given for the advanced troops to withdraw. Luminous tapes had been laid to help guide the troops back to their lines and parties were assigned to cover the withdrawal of the raiders. Both groups went to great lengths to search the terrain for any wounded and by 2:30 a.m. all attacking troops were back in the Canadian lines.

Was the raid a success? The leadership of the 7th Brigade certainly thought it was. They had inflicted much damage on the enemy trenches and, by their estimation, caused many more German casualties than they had suffered themselves. Attacking along a thousand yard frontage, the Brigade reported that “78 German dugouts by actual count are known to have been bombed and treated with Stokes Mortar shells”. German stretcher bearing parties were observed gathering wounded for two days after the raid. The grim tally cited in the 7th Brigade report, based on estimates after the raid, suggested that the opposing German forces had suffered over seven hundred casualties. The attacking 7th Brigade forces, including the 49th Battalion, had suffered three hundred and thirty-five casualties and “of the above only 38 were killed “.

The 49th Battalion, which suffered over half of the 7th Brigade casualties (20 killed, 5 died of wounds, 121 wounded, 26 missing), had a slightly different view. According to the report written by the Edmonton Battalion after the raid, problems were noted with the supporting artillery barrage. “The rear of the Barrage was very difficult to follow and a considerable number of shells consistently fell short .... We suffered many casualties from our own barrage”. The raid was also described in the history of the 49th Edmonton Regiment: “During the spring and summer of 1917, the 49th spent a relatively uneventful period in the Lens sector. The only exception to the quiet was an ill-conceived trench raid on 8 June. The raid, which was conducted by no fewer than six battalions, cost the 49th twice as many casualties as Vimy Ridge.”

Edgar Garland was one of the men of the 49th wounded that night. The Circumstance of Casualty report for him contains the following information: “Died of Wounds. During operations on the night of June 8th, 1917, he was wounded by shrapnel. His wounds were attended to and he was removed to No. 6 Casualty Clearing Station, where he succumbed the following day.”

Edgar Garland is buried in the Barlin Communal Cemetery Extension, two and a half miles southwest of Noeux-les-Mines, France. He is commemorated on the Greenock Township Memorial plaque in the Bradley Community Centre.

He was just a few weeks short of his twenty-first birthday.