Montreal at War, 19141918 by Terry Copp;Alexander Maavara;

Author:Terry Copp;Alexander Maavara;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Atlantic Provinces – Antiquities, Atlantic Coast (Canada) – Antiquities, Québec (Province) – Antiquities, Maine – Antiquities, Atlantic Provinces – History, Atlantic Coast (Canada) – History, North Atlantic Region – History, Québec (Province) – History, Maine – History
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

How the nations and politicians happened to enter such an abyss is impossible to imagine. It is not the dying that is difficult for the men – it is the enduring – the ground work back of it all. The long interminable lines of haggard men coming out of the trenches, unshaven, covered with mud, staring dully in front of them, plodding through the mud and driving rain – telling the men, only a little less weary, who are trudging in the opposite direction to take their places – that is not so bad.93

During their three months on the Somme the Canadians suffered 24,000 casualties, a small part of the 420,000 killed, wounded, and missing under British command. Additional tens of thousands were lost, at least temporally, when evacuated for respiratory and other diseases, including shell shock, which had again reached epidemic proportions.94 Haig and his supporters justified the costs of the campaign, claiming that they had achieved three important goals in 1916: relieving the pressure on the French army at Verdun, preventing the transfer of enemy divisions to the Russian front, and inflicting “well over 600,000 casualties” on the German army.95 Any one of those three, he believed, justified the continuation of the Somme campaign.

Haig’s critics challenge each of these assertions. Australian historians Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, Haig’s severest critics, note that the Somme was not planned with Verdun in mind, fifteen German divisions were transferred to the Eastern front, and British Empire casualties far exceeded those suffered by the Germans in the British sector. “Every casualty inflicted on the Germans by the British cost them almost two casualties of their own,” they conclude. “Haig was wearing out his own armies at a much higher rate than he was wearing down his opponents.”96

This loss rate might be explained by the fact that it was British Empire troops who were attacking, but heavy losses such as those suffered on the first day of the Somme were also due to Haig’s rejection of bite-and-hold tactics in search of a breakthrough. The same criticism can surely be offered of the repeated attacks on Regina Trench, ordered in circumstances that made success unlikely. Even the British official history, generally supportive of the decisions of the high command, commented on this:

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