Man’s Folly (Read Lyman At War Part 1 here)

When is a tragedy inspirational?  When it teaches man the hard lessons of life by example.  When it shows man his mistakes.  We learn from our mistakes.  Or at least we hope to.

Lyman Link, my father, volunteered for service at the outbreak of the First World War.  At the tender age of 14 he joined the Canadian Army and his regiment was mobilized and began its training in England.  In 1915, that very regiment, Lord Strathcona’s Horse served as infantry in the trenches in France.

My dad rarely talked about his war experiences.  He only told me of two of those experiences and one story, the story of Part 1 of this post, he told me only once.  With curious urging I actually got him to tell me the following story twice.

For good reason he did not want to talk about it.  He just wanted to forget that part of his life, but the past was burned into his brain and hearing the story only twice, it became burned into mine.

I shall re-tell this story as he told me and then back it up with some research that I’ve been doing lately for those interested.

Dad told a bit of a different story as the historical account referenced below in Wikipedia.  Unfortunately, war experiences are often made grand and noble in the re-telling.  In my father’s case, I experienced just the opposite.

In the Battle of Moreuil Wood, my father explained, the Canadian army had made no progress advancing on the Germans.  Though the regiment he was with was a cavalry regiment, his experience had only been as a poor foot soldier.  The use of horses had long been forgotten as archaic and passé in what was then, the modern warfare of 1915.

But the Canadians were getting nowhere and some “idiot general somewhere had an idiot idea that they could get to the Germans across No Man’s Land quicker in an old-fashioned cavalry charge.”

So one night they transported 20,000 horses up to the trenches where Lyman lived.  Ramps were built by the foot soldiers themselves so that the horses would be able to mount the walls of the trenches.

That morning, the morning of March 13, 1918, an unlimited serving of rum was served.  The horses had to face their own fate without the addition of ‘courage in a bottle’.

Lyman was the bugler of his division.  He mounted his horse at the bottom of those trenches, bugle in one hand, reins in the other, carrying nothing else but a sword and a pistol and led the charge up the ramp and out on to the ankle-deep mud and slush of No Man’s Land.

I’ve tried to imagine over the years how anyone could possibly blow the tune, “Charge”, an intricate trumpet piece to begin with, riding a horse up a ramp, scared to death, half drunk, into the face of the German army.

An impossible task.

In my father’s words, “I didn’t get but twenty yards before the Germans opened up on us with their machine guns.  They knew we were coming.  They had heard the preparations.  They had heard the chaos of the horses.  They simply open fired aiming, not for the men, but for the bigger targets, the horses.”

“My horse, who I had named ‘Brownie’, (Dad named all his horses ‘Brownie’) was immediately shot out from under me.  As he fell to his knees, I went over the top and landed in the muck of No Man’s Land.  As I stood up and looked at the holocaust around me and watched the men and horses being mowed down before me, I became so disgusted with the ridiculousness of the situation that, forgetting my own dangerous predicament, I pulled off my helmet and threw it down in the mud.

I then turned to care for my horse only to see him flailing through the mud dragging his insides behind him.”

At that point Lyman simply walked back the 20 yards gained into his trench.   No man or horse got more than 50 yards.  The battle was a slaughter.  Literally thousands of horses were killed.  The last cavalry charge of the war was an utter failure and put an explanation point at the end of cavalry charges in machine gun warfare.

That night it rained.  The horses that were wounded but still alive lay screaming in the muck of No Man’s Land.  The sound was the sound of Hell on earth.  The men were so demoralized by the screaming horses that sharpshooters from both the Canadian side as well as the German side started picking off the wounded, putting an end to their misery.

It continued to rain the next day and for the next week.  The dead horses began to rot in the rain and more than just the sound of Hell came to earth.

Finally, both armies agreed to stop the fighting, declared a temporary truce,  and got out and cleaned up the mess, carting the rotting corpses away.  Then they went back to their respective trenches and resumed the travesty.

I apologize for the images I’ve left you with.  But I believe these stories must be told and war no longer fantasized and glorified as noble or in any way some form of glorious achievement.

War is Hell and Lyman’s little told story is proof positive of that.

When your boys are caught up in their boyhood fantasies of courage and valor, please lay this story on them.  Here is the reality.  Here is the heartbreak.  Here is the ludicrousness of war.  Pass this on to your boys so that they may know the truth of war.

From Wikipedia: Pertinent references to my father’s story in red.  There are clearly some differences between my father’s story here and Wikipedia’s, however, there are enough facts to substantiate both stories.  Remember, Wikipedia was probably written by someone trying to put a positive and glorious spin on the achievements of the Canadian army.  My father’s story tells quite a different tale.

On 16 February 1916, the Strathcona’s were reconstituted as a mounted force and, as an Imperial Service Regiment, served in the Canadian Cavalry Brigade attached to the 2nd Indian Cavalry Division, which in November 1916 became the 5th Cavalry Division of the British 4th Army.

In March 1917, the Regiment saw action as cavalry during the defense of the Somme front. It was during this fighting that Lieutenant Frederick Harvey won the Victoria Cross for rushing a German machine gun post and capturing the gun position.

By 1918, the regiment and the Canadian Cavalry Brigade as a whole was now attached to Sir Arthur Currie‘s Canadian Corps. During the last great German offensive, called by the Germans Operation Michael, when the Imperial and French armies were on the verge of being split, the regiment earned its third Victoria Cross.^[1]

On 31 March 1918, in what is known as “the last great cavalry charge” at the Battle of Moreuil Wood, Gordon Flowerdew was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for leading his men in a successful engagement with entrenched German forces.

At 08:30 on the 30th, General Seely and his aides travelled towards the Moreuil woods from where his forces were stationed on the other side of the River Avre, with orders to cross the river and delay the enemy advance as much as possible^[2]. At 09:30, upon reaching the wood, having received fire from German forces that were occupying it, Seely ordered The Royal Canadian Dragoons to send sections to protect the village of Moreuil, while other sections were to seize the northeast corner of the wood itself.

While this was being undertaken, Lord Strathcona’s Horse was ordered to occupy the southeast face of the wood and disperse any German units found there (both the Royal Canadian Dragoons and Lord Strathcona’s Horse were two units making up the Canadian Cavalry Brigade).

This battle quickly became a series of separate engagements due to the nature of the battlefield, with units separated and dispersed inside the German formations, and the fact that horses were ineffective in the woodland led to the pace of the battle slowing down considerably.

By this time, the remainder of the 3rd Cavalry had crossed the river and was distributed around the wood to support various Canadian forces currently engaged with German forces, many of these reinforcements were instructed to dismount before entering the battle.  At this time, units from Lord Strathcona’s Horse were formed into scouting teams of around ten men each and sent to discover details about the enemy forces and positions.

The commander of ‘C’ Squadron Lord Strathcona’s Horse, Lieutenant Gordon Flowerdew, ordered his forces to secure the northeast corner then report back to him.  Flowerdew was then ordered to cut off the German forces who were retreating to the east in the face of the Allied forces advancing through the wood.

During this time, the forces dispatched by Flowerdew to the northeast corner ambushed and killed German forces looting from a French wagon, then dismounted and entered the wood under fire. Flowerdew arrived, assessed the situation, and decided that his unit would move to cut off the German retreat while the other section would help to drive the Germans from the wood.

By this time there were six squadrons of cavalry in the wood. Planes from the Royal Flying Corps were also attacking German forces from overhead, dropping 109 bombs and firing 17,000 bullets.

Cavalry forces approached the southwest corner of the woods, coming under heavy fire and suffering heavy casualties, and they were forced to halt temporarily.  Flowerdew reached high ground at the northeast corner of the wood just in time to encounter a 300-strong German force from the 101st Grenadiers, who were withdrawing.  Flowerdew ordered, “It’s a charge boys, it’s a charge!” however, the bugle call was silenced by German fire before it was even sounded. Could this have been my father’s bugle?

During the charge, both sides were decimated, and Flowerdew was killed, with only 51 of his unit still alive. Nary a mention of the poor horses.

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please visit Watchfire Music.