72nd Seaforth Highlanders of Canada - Electric Scotland

SEAFORTH HIGHLANDERS OF CANADA
hour and ten minutes to elapse before the attack was to
be launched.
The night was quiet. Along the front the Verey lights
soared as usual.
Yet, concealed by the rain-swept darkness,
a mighty army had gathered itself for its spring against
a foe who this time had no recourse except to hold, as the
statements of prisoners afterwards verified. They had had
their orders there was to be no retreat
It came to 5 :20 a.m. From somewhere in the grey ap
proach to dawn a Vickers machine gun chattered madly
its staccato hammering splitting the death-like stillness as
no bombardment could have done.
For perhaps three seconds
it continued this opening solo. Then the tension snapped
and the full-throated roar of the barrage swept along the
front. The bitterest and hardest-fought action in which the
Canadian Corps was ever to be engaged was on!
Promptly on schedule .time thirty minutes after zero
the 72nd quitted their assembly place and moved in lines
of sections in file over the crest of the slope to the west
of Inchy, heading for Bourlon Wood. As the dawn broke,
the strangest feature of all was the apparent absence of
that wood and its high ground from view. The day before,
the wood, and the hill rising some 300 feet above sea-level,
had dominated our positions for miles in every direction.
Now, not a sign of it was to be seen. The reason was that
it was swallowed up in a vast, slow-drifting bank of phos
phorous smoke emitted from the special smoke shells of
our artillery. The wind, blowing gently from the west,
wafted the pungent screen eastwards into the eyes of the
enemy, blinding his artillery, confusing his troops, and con
cealing the real progress of the attack from his observa
tion posts around the Wood itself. Some slight shelling
was experienced by the 72nd as, skirting Inchy to the
south, they headed for the Canal du Nord. The impetuous
attack of the troops engaged in the initial assault had flung
the enemy from his hold on the Canal, and the battle now
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