The Hardest Battle

The capture of Vimy Ridge in April 1917 is the defining battle of Canada’s Great War. The erection of the country’s national memorial on those shell-cratered heights, unveiled in 1936 before thousands of veterans, contributed to the legend of Vimy as a critical moment in the country’s history.

But military historians have often argued that the series of battles that ended the war in 1918, known as the Hundred Days campaign, were more important than Vimy in the war effort against the German forces. And for the Canadian Corps, the country’s primary fighting formation of one hundred thousand soldiers commanded by Canadian-born Lieutenant- General Sir Arthur Currie, this was the time when the Dominion made its greatest impact.

In the Hundred Days campaign, the most difficult clash occurred at Arras, ironically near to Vimy Ridge. From late August into early September, Currie’s soldiers faced one of the German Army’s most fortified trench systems, a fifteen-kilometre zone of machine guns, barbed wire, and hardened positions.

This is the subject of William Stewart’s fine book, The Hardest Battle. Stewart is one of Canada’s leading experts on the Great War, having previously written a biography of General Sir Richard Turner and a book on the 1916 Battle of the Somme.

His new offering, based on intense research in British and Canadian archives, along with German sources, is a model battle study. Operational orders, war diaries, and other official reports are used to dissect the frontal assault that went through several phases over a brutal week of combat. The infantry at the sharp end, aided by the gunners, finally broke the enemy position; but with more than fourteen thousand Canadian casualties it was indeed, as Currie said regarding the Canadian Corps, “the hardest battle in its history.”