Shock Troops:
Shock Troops follows the Canadian fighting forces during the titanic battles of Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, Passchendaele, and the Hundred Days campaign. Through the eyes of the soldiers who fought and died in the trenches on the Western Front, and based on newly-uncovered Canadian, British, and German archival sources, Cook builds on volume I of his national best-seller, At the Sharp End. The Canadian fighting forces never lost a battle during the final two years of the war, and although they paid a terrible price in the killing fields of the Great War, they were indeed, as British Prime Minister David Lloyd George exclaimed, the shock troops of the Empire.
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At the Sharp End:
The first comprehensive history of Canadians in the Great War in more than forty years, At the Sharp End is a landmark work of military scholarship and gripping narrative. Featuring never-before-published photographs, letters, diaries, and maps, the book recounts the devastation and hard-won triumphs of the Great War through the soldiers’ moving eyewitness accounts. Volume One focuses on the harrowing early battles of Second Ypres, St. Eloi, Mount Sorrel, and the Somme -- before the generals and soldiers found ways to break the terrible stalemate on the Western Front. It is both an intimate look at how the Canadians endured the maelstrom, and an authoritative account of the slow evolution in tactics and weapons.
During the Great War, the Canadian Corps—the nation’s 100,000-strong fighting formation—came to be regarded as elite troops within the British Expeditionary Force, under whose umbrella it fought. From the brilliant victory at Vimy Ridge in April 1917 to the end of the war, the Canadians never lost a battle. But they had not yet earned that elite reputation at the start of the war: the Canadian forces would pass through the cauldron of battle in 1915-1916 before emerging as one of the most respected and feared formations on the Western Front.
The focus here is on the infantry at the sharp end: those men in the trenches who faced the enemy and bore the heaviest brunt of the fighting. The “poor bloody infantry,” wrote one Canadian soldier, “did all the fighting, most of the dying and in addition had to dig ditches, build emplacements, carry tons of material and then go on short rations’ – all the while living in wet, rat-infested trenches amid deafening noise. And with the infantry suffering nearly eighty percent of the total battlefield casualties on the Western Front, they are deservedly at the centre of this history of Canadian combat. Exhaustively researched and written with great narrative momentum, At the Sharp End creates an unforgettable canvas of Canada’s men at war.
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BOOK EXCERPT:
Hurtling through the air, artillery shells crash down on the enemy lines in a series of explosions that sends sandbags, clods of earth, and body parts skyward in a geyser of solid eruptions. In the Entente lines several hundred metres away, the ground quivers and buckles in a continuous series of ripples. A newly arrived Canadian infantryman, nervous and sweating, stands ready in the front lines, minutes away from going "over the top" for the first, and possibly last, time. With steel helmet perched awkwardly on his head, his breath coming in quick, shallow gasps, he grips the wooden stock of his Lee-Enfield Mark III rifle like an anchor. The bayonet, seventeen inches of cold metal, rises up past his face, pointing to the sky above the muddy trench parapet wall of rotting sandbags, now frayed and oozing wet mud after too much rain.
The minutes tick down, and thousands of soldiers, spread out along the battered front-line trenches, shift in anticipation or throw themselves against the forward trench wall as the roar of incoming shellfire is picked up by ears attuned to decipher the wail of war. The Canadian infantryman turns to his more experienced sergeant standing next to him, blurting, "I suppose in a few moments, Sarge, we shall be making history." The sergeant, staring up at the fire-streaked sky with a stony face, says nothing for a few seconds before turning and eying the new man. "History be blowed," the sergeant growls. "What you have got to make is geography."
In this war of muddy metres, geography is indeed the trench soldiers' primary concern. As the front-line troops pull themselves up ladders to climb over the sandbagged trench walls, the difference between life and death, between a successful operation or one that leaves a soldiers' formation hanging on the barbed wire in bloody swaths, is their speed in crossing the several hundred metres known as No Man's Land that separate the two opposing trenches. As the experienced sergeant rightly knows, these metres of geography are the only thing that matters to the infantry in these desperate moments as they advance through enemy fire and tangled barbed wire; but it is the history of these men that continues to fascinate us to this day.
