At least twice during his service with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France, Charles Keeler witnessed things he never would have believed possible. To start with, he almost didn't make it into the army at all, because his older brother caught him in the enlistment line in Edmonton and told the recruiter that Charles was only 17. Ten weeks later, however, he turned 18 and got in. By 1915 he was in France with the 49th (Alberta) Battalion and managed to make it through Ypres, the Somme to Vimy in December 1916.

The first real eye-opener for Keeler, by now a sergeant in "C" Company of the 49th, occurred that Christmas. It so happened his platoon - consisting of about fourteen men - was assigned the job of guarding the front line at the end of Ross Street, a communications trench in the 3rd Division sector. The watch seemed uneventful that December 25, until one of his corporals approached him on the run.

"Come up here, Sergeant," the man said as he motioned with his hand.

"What's wrong?" Keeler asked.

But the young corporal just turned and quickly led Keeler to the parapet overlooking a nearby crater in No Man's Land. "You've got to see this," he continued.

Having survived two years in France and Belgium, Keeler wasn't about to leap over the top of the parapet. He cautiously peered over the lip of the communications trench. About 50 yards out, at the bottom of the crater, he saw six soldiers - three Canadian and three German seated, in some sort of conversation and exchanging German cigars for Canadian cigarettes. Though fraternization was forbidden, it appeared one of the men had carried a white flag of truce out of the trenches, which had undoubtedly precipitated the Yuletide exchange. Keeler quickly ordered the corporal to break up the confab and retrieve the men. He did as ordered and nothing more was said. Although Keeler never reported the incident, it stayed with him.

Equally amazing to the young sergeant, in March of 1917 he and his battalion received orders to pull back from their positions in front of La Folie wood for some special training. When they reached their bivouac in a wooded area near what was left of the town Mont St. Eloi, they first got their requisite baths and clean set of underwear. While this was rare, that's not what surprised him. Next day, the 49th Battalion received notes, maps, models and battle plans for the planned Easter assault on Vimy Ridge. Then they were taken to a farm field nearby.

"They had marked with tapes (a replica of) all of the German trenches in front of us and all points of interest," Keeler said. "We were shown all our objectives, (even) the trenches we were to capture. And it was laid out right down to company objectives and platoon objectives. Everything."

For the next six weeks, five days a week, six hours a day the Albertas repeatedly walked over the replica craters, wire and trenches they would encounter between the Canadian front line and the German front line. The instructors emphasized that they should "walk" because this would not be a raid. It would be a timed, synchronized and precision attack protected by artillery and machine guns like never before. But what amazed Keeler most was the openness with which the information of the attack was shared by the officers. All tactics were offered. For the first time he could remember, nothing was hidden from rank and file soldiers.

"You could brief the lowest soldier, any private," Keeler went on, "and from memory he could say just where he was going. He could point to the map and he could tell you where he was going and what he was supposed to do."

As simple and basic as it seemed, this free flow of strategic information turned out to be the turnkey to the coming operation. In the first two years of the Great War, Allied army commanders had staunchly held onto orders like peerage, passing them along on the eve of battle and then only to the next level of the officer hierarchy. During the rehearsals for the Vimy attack, however, Lt.-Gen. Julian Byng invited brigade commanders into the same briefing rooms as platoon sergeants. As much as possible, Byng wanted every member of his fighting team to have access to topographical maps, Plasticine models, and battle plans. What's more, he demanded that every officer and NCO do his homework and know every man in his command - from snipers to Lewis gunners to rifle grenadiers and scouts - so that the same dissemination of information would happen in the dugouts and trenches long before troops marched to the front lines. In effect, Byng was undoing generations of British army protocol - sharing the tactical plan. That, the corps commander deduced, would be the difference between defeat and victory.

This new approach to combat preparation had come from the French experience at the battle of Verdun in 1916. Following that campaign, Julian Byng had dispatched Arthur Currie to retrieve positive battle strategies. Currie learned that French Gen. Robert-Georges Nivelle had allowed every French soldier in the campaign to be acquainted with: the battlefield he was expected to cross, where there might be resistance and who would be on either side of him. Currie also deduced that each division, each battalion, each company, but especially each platoon, had to be selected according to the job each was to carry out. To ensure greater success at the grassroots level of the corps, Currie made platoons more self-sufficient - each now consisting of an officer, several sergeants, fifteen riflemen, eleven bombers, an equal number of grenadiers, a Lewis machine-gun crew of six, a couple of scouts and stretcher bearers. Each member of the new, fifty-man platoon knew how to perform his job and the jobs of nearly every other man in the unit. The reorganized platoon not only improved its military efficiency, but by its very structure it engendered a natural esprit de corps.

Copyright © 2007 by Ted Barris. Reprinted by permission of Thomas Allen Publishers.