THE B.C. BANTAMS
The little men in
khaki seemed impossibly short to be Canadian soldiers. Barely over
five feet in height, they marched proudly, four abreast, to tunes of
their brass band, smiling at the cheering crowds that lined Humboldt
Street, Victoria, that bright morning of February 10, 1917.
These tiny soldiers
of the 143rd Overseas Battalion (B.C. Bantams), were being given a
civic send-off by fellow townspeople with mixed emotions. After
three years of what was known as the Great War, the notably
patriotic city of Victoria had previously bade 'adieu' to seven
other army units. -- including splendid soldiers of the Canadian
Scottish Regiment, strapping Naval reservists, and picked men of the
Victoria Rifles. But never had they expressed such a fond farewell
or send off a more improbable unit than these almost Lilliputian
warriors.
Boots polished to a
black sheen, buttons bright and puttees tight, soft peaked caps
square on heads, bearing heavy back-packs, the men were like
miniature Guardsmen in their smart military turnout, singing
lustily:.
"Good-bye-ee,
Don't cry-ee,
Wipe that tear from
your eye,
Good-bye-eeee..."
The British
Columbia Bantams were volunteers all, and keen to be getting a
chance to fight at last. Almost half of them would never see Canada
again.
More thoughtful
observers that morning might have wondered about the departing
soldiers for other reasons than their novelty. Here were perhaps
living symbols of the extreme scarcity of British Empire manpower
reserves, that now such undersized recruits were needed to make up
for the carnage of trench warfare on the bloody Western Front.
Slaughtered,
ignored, their survivors even dismissed as failures, the Bantams
formed one of the most unusual and little-known chapters in the
annals of military history. Theirs is a neglected story, which
involved over 50,000 British and Canadian soldiers who never quite
made it into the war books. They volunteered to serve when they
could have stayed safely at home, suffered physical hardship often
beyond their capacities, and sometimes endured with good humor the
ridicule of less-courageous men, all for the privilege of fighting
for their country in some of the fiercest battles of the First World
War. Among them were almost a 1,000 men who served in a little-known
unit dubbed proudly, "The B.C. Bantams".
It was modeled on
20 other Bantam battalions raised by the British Army, to mobilize
the many volunteers who were below the regulation minimum height.
Revised medical standards to allow for bantam-size troops specified
acceptable heights between 4ft.l0ins, and 5ft.3ins. "with a
proportionately good chest expansion."
Mobilization was
authorized for the 143rd Overseas Battalion (B.C. Bantams) and
recruiting begin in Victoria on February 20, 1916. Driving force
behind this unique formation was Lieutenant Colonel A. Bruce Powley,
a front-line veteran, who had been wounded twice in battle before
being invalided home to Victoria. Eager to get back into the fray,
he managed to gain command of the 143rd, and engaged a talented
group of local officers to assist with recruiting.
There was a steady
stream of volunteers towards the hoped-for total of 1,000 men, but
LCol. Powley soon found it difficult to find accommodation for the
thousand men he hoped to sign up. The situation was solved by a
grant of $9,000 by the city of Victoria, to secure building
materials for a new camp at Beacon Hill Park parade-ground. The
recruits themselves built wooden structures for sleeping barracks,
cook-house, and headquarters, far more comfortable than the usual
canvas tents.
At this stage of
the war, Canada had 200,000 men under arms, all volunteers. The
nation had been quick to supply fighting-men after the outbreak of
war, and many Victorians were among the First Contingent that sailed
in October, 1914. By early 1916, Canada had sent three divisions to
the Western Front, forming the Canadian Corps. They had fought in
many major battles, always in the thick of things, and suffered
heavy casualties. (The 1914-1918 war cost Canada a total of 65,000
war dead.)
Sparsely-settled
British Columbia had responded wholeheartedly early in the war.
Intensely loyal, with a high proportion of British immigrant stock
quick to volunteer, BC had virtually shot its bolt by early 1916 in
its capacity to supply manpower.
With recruits at a
premium, the coal-mining communities up-Island promised the
likeliest source of strongly-built bantam-sized men. One of them was
Benjamin Barnes,
a redheaded Cornishman who volunteered from his well-paid job as
fire-boss of Coal Creek Mine. Another was
Peter Campbell, an office
worker from Sidney, who joined "B" Company in camp just down the
road from his home. Allan Bell came over from Vancouver on the same
ferry that brought Humbert Campbell back from his job on an Alberta
ranch.
"It seemed the
greatest adventure in the world", said Bell. "The sun shone on the
water and the mountains stood out against the sky as we sailed
across that day, and I felt my chest swell as if we were all setting
out on a great crusade. My comrades proved to be such happy chaps,
forever telling jokes, with never a cross word, and I never felt so
happy in all my eighteen years."
Despite such
enthusiastic recruits, LCol. Powley could not enlist enough suitable
men at the pace needed. He regretfully reported to Ottawa on Oct.
15, 1916. "We were finally forced to take in some larger men as
well, with a view to exchanging them later for smaller men from
other units. But exchanges are not easy, and the result is I have a
battalion of over half bantam, and the balance of larger men, though
the average height is still below 5ft. 4ins."
When the unit
returned from a summer of hard training at Sidney Camp, its members
were so outspokenly impatient to be sent to France, they were known
as "The Fire-eaters". Their attitude was all the more remarkable,
considering the high proportion of family men in the ranks. Oldest
of whom was Joseph Daniel, a
43-year-old Sidney resident who managed to wangle his way to combat
in France.
Among those chafing
to get overseas, was
Ben Barnes, who as an accomplished cornet-player, found himself
in the battalion band. In January, 1917, he wrote to his brother in
immaculate penmanship from the Dominion Hotel. "We are all classed
as soldiers, and though bandsmen do not put in as much time now with
a rifle, we are all well prepared for the firing-line. Each of us in
the band has learned machine-gun drill, signaling, first-aid, and
stretcher-bearing."
He wrote again,
soon after, excited by news of embarkation, but depressed by
feelings of foreboding. "I get a little down-hearted when I dwell
too much on my home, but shake it off as best I can, and will be
content when I get a little more excitement at the front. If I get a
bullet to put me to sleep, I will only be among my comrades, so I
should not worry."
With men so keen,
there was some disappointment when Ottawa announced the 143rd would
be sent to France as a Railway Construction battalion, instead of as
infantry. However, they were mollified by learning that trench
railway duty was as vital as it was dangerous, a prime target of
German artillery.
News of their
departure brought out a tremendous wave of affection from Victoria
residents, who cheered the little men all along their march from
Beacon Hill, past flag-draped balconies of St. Joseph's Hospital
where patients and nurses gave rousing cheers. Banners proclaiming
"Good Luck - God Speed" hung from buildings at the mouth of Courtney
Street, and people leaned through open windows, adding their
applause to those packing the sidewalks.
By the time the
soldiers reached the wharf on Bellville Street, they had to break
ranks and march in single file through the press of dense crowds. It
gave opportunity for many emotional scenes; last-minute kisses from
families, friends and sweethearts, Quickly, the 32 officers and 667
other ranks boarded two CPR ferries, ‘Princess Victoria’ and
‘Princess Mary.’ where many climbed the rigging for better views as
the vessels pulled away. Cheers, cries, and shouted well-wishes
mingled with a cacophony of horn-blowing from other ships in the
harbor, while the Bantams' band played a last refrain of "Old Lang
Syne" as they sailed off to war.
Three weeks later,
the British Columbians were in England, at the Canadian Holding
Depot, Shorncliff. "We felt like cattle, the way they treated us
there," said Allan Bell. The Canadian Corps needed more men in
France in a hurry, and made no secret that we were viewed as
cannon-fodder. One could not help but notice that while ordinary
soldiers were getting this treatment, there were over five hundred
lieutenants lounging around camp, many of whom had stayed there in
safety since the previous summer." But that was the least of
our irritations, because it didn't take long to figure out that the
BC Bantams as a unit were about to be broken up forthwith!"
Peter Campbell
recalled how it was for the crestfallen Victoria battalion. "After a
brief landing-leave in London, we were called before a medical board
at Shorncliff. The 143rd was broken up so suddenly that LtCol.
Powley and his officers were not even given time to say farewell to
us."
About a third of
the unit became railway troops, while the rest were sent to the
trenches as infantry after all. Ben Barnes was among a draft of 667
men from the B.C. Bantams who went to the 24th Canadian Reserve
Battalion in France on May 11, 1917. They joined the new formations
thrown immediately into the hideous meat-grinder known as the Battle
of Lens.
This affair was yet
another brain-wave of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, British
commander in chief. He decided to increase pressure on the Flanders
front, and as part of some grand strategy, flung the Canadian Corps
against Lens as the first objective.
The Canadians
surveyed the black slag-heaps, the shellchurned graveyard of so
many troops before them, and were not inspired. "If we have to fight
there at all", said General Sir Arthur Currie, the one-time Victoria
school-teacher who was now corps commander, "Let us fight for
something worth having.". Why not try to sidestep Lens, he asked,
and burst out into open mobile warfare? But Haig was adamant. Lens
was to be taken by direct assault.
On August 15th, the
Canadians took Hill 70; little more than a low mound, really, but
riddled with concrete pillboxes, machine-gun nests, and concealed
artillery. In a single morning, they captured the hill which had
repulsed the British Guards Division in 1915, and pushed on through
smoke and poison gas and shrapnel into the mining hamlets on the
outskirts of lens itself. The ruined suburbs -- St. Emilie, St.
Pierre, Calonne -- were made up of clumps of miners' cottages and
pithead workings, and had been fortified in an interlocking maze of
strong German defences over the past two years.
All Lens was like
that; street after street of rubbled buildings hiding blockhouses
and m.g. posts inter-connected by miles of passage-ways knocked
through cellar walls. Alex Batchelor recalled an officer telling
him, "Fix your bayonet, soldier. We have to winkle the Huns out."
Batchelor and other
Bantams found their small size to be an advantage during the next
ten endless days and nights, though it singled them out them for
very hazardous duty. "We could pop through those tunnels as easy as
could be. We left our packs off, stripped down to undershirts and
went crawling around with a bagful of bombs and a revolver. Find a
Heiniehole, bung a grenade through, then nip in after it before the
dust settled." Batchelor explained, still matter-of-fact in his old
age. "After a while, I could tell if no bomb was needed in the next
cellar. My nose would tell me when the Heinies in there had been
dead for a long time."
Allan Bell fought
there, too, attaching himself to some Nova Scotian machine-gunners
to keep them supplied with ammunition. He would make repeated trips
back through the hellish streets, casually employing his Lee-Enfield
to snipe stray Prussians who tried to stop him. On one such journey,
he stopped to aid the wounded Humbert Campbell, the clergyman's son
he'd first met on a British Columbia ferry.
Street by street,
the 4th Prussian Guards were forced back, dying hard for every
cellar and crossroad. On the third day, reinforcements came in: two
more Guards Divisions, the 11th Reserve, and the Saxon Brigade,
until there were 46 German battalions battling to keep the Canadians
from capturing the battered compost-heap that used to be the town of
Lens.
Ben Barnes told a
little of this to the folks at home. "Had a busy time of it," he
penciled in flawless copperplate on YMCA stationery. "But we all
went forward and accomplished our objective. It was mostly street
fighting, and we worked hard for protection from gunfire. When we
got settled in our new ground, Fritz did not give us much rest as he
had our range down pretty fair."
The indomitable
attitude of Barnes and his comrades comes out in his final
paragraph. "The Bantams certainly made a name for themselves this
time. We are all of British stock here and fight with British
spirit, and the Canadian Bantams are not going back without a name
worthy of being set down in history for future generations to take
notice."
He was never to
know the eventual irony of those words he wrote on the battlefield.
There have been so many other cataclysms throughout this century,
that there is scant public memory now of distant heroism. Yet the
belief sustained this modest soldier, whose letters were filled with
loving memories for nephews and nieces he had met for only a few
precious days. Though he had already seen so many friends cut down
six thousand miles from homes they left in beautiful British
Columbia, he retained his generation's simple faith in posterity's
appreciation. It was a faith that sustained so many men through the
misery of the First World War..
Then the Canadians
went north to Flanders again, summoned to help break the deadlock on
a vile, mad place called Passchendaele. This dreaded region in the
Ypres Salient had already become the graveyard of hundreds of
thousands of dead, and for four months previously British,
Australian, and New Zealand regiments had lost entire battalions in
a matter of days. On October 26, 1917, it became the Canadians turn,
and they went forward through torrential rain mingled with the sleet
of lead and steel from German guns. After a week of some of the
war's most desperate fighting, four Canadian divisions managed to
capture the previouslyimpregnable Passchendaele at last, on
November 6, 1917.
The day after the
battle ended, Sir Launcelot Kiggel, Haig's chief of staff, arrived
to take his first look at the battlefield. When his Daimler
limousine began to lurch through the mud, the general stared out
unbelievingly at the endless quagmire, then burst into tears. "My
God!", he moaned. "Did we send men to fight in this ?"
One of the men who
had, was Benjamin Barnes. On October 29, during a lull, he wrote
home in despair. "Had a very busy time of it for eight straight days
and nights. I am sorry to say my pal
Alf Patterson got napooed
[killed] yesterday. I had many narrow escapes myself. One shell
burst outside the dug-out, buried three of us. One blinded, one
wounded, and all I got was shock. When I heard about Alf, it brought
tears to my eyes, and I had the painful duty of writing to his aunt
in Cumberland. Kindly excuse scribble, as I am quite upset. Au-re-voir."
As there was no
conscription in Canada, fresh volunteer replacements were getting
scarcer every month for the embattled Canadian Army. Veteran troops
were kept in the line until death, or a lucky "Blighty" wound
released them to hospital. Barnes managed to get letters home past
the indulgent censorship of his officers. "Not many of the originals
left now," he wrote on January 22, 1918. "If we did not get our rum
ration, we would be laid up more often, as we are subject to wet
feet and chills through our system. Disappointed at no leave,
anxiously awaiting a square deal, and we cannot see why we have not
had it yet."
There were only a
few more letters from Barnes that year, in which he made no further
mention of warfare, other than his address, "In the trenches." He
sent a stream of suggestions about how to make his nieces and nephew
happy, and often sent them what money he could afford.
His last letter was
devoted to them. "Whenever you feel like making up a parcel for me,
fix things fine, then let the children have a party of their own
instead, to enjoy the contents ... Not much time to write.
Continually on the alert. We Bantams are in a battle platoon, so we
are not here as ornaments."
A week later, he
heard his C.O. read out a commendation for his gallantry in rescuing
a wounded comrade. The same day, August 11, 1918, Ben Barnes' luck
finally ran out. He was killed in an obscure skirmish near Amiens --
one of the last of the B.C. Bantams to die in the Great War.
-end.
Parliament for Birkenhead
was very active in recruiting volunteers for the British Army overall and
was the leading advocate to allow under-height men who were otherwise fit,
to serve. In 1915 he wrote to the War Office requesting permission to
raise a battalion of bantams. "I wrote accordingly, but did not get a
reply direct from
