Hill 70, Saint Sauveur

Lest We Forget

“We were soaked through with rain and perspiration from the efforts we had been making to get through the clinging mud […] we huddled down in the nearest shell hole and covered ourselves with a groundsheet, hoping for some sort of comfort out of the rain, and partly believed the sheet would also protect us from the rain of shells. … [R]eloading ourselves we pushed through the mud again and amid the din of the bursting shells I called to Stephens, but got no response and just assumed he hadn’t heard me. He was never seen or heard from again. He had not deserted. He had not been captured. One of those shells that fell behind me had burst and Stephens was no more.” – Private John Pritchard, Sudbury, Ontario.

The quote, taken from Norman Leach’s summary of Passchendaele on the forces.gc.ca website, makes no mention of the first name of Stephens, nor where he came from. Shell holes could be ten feet deep and filled with water. The sheer number of craters left muddy ridges between them, making it impossible to use horses or mules. Duckboards – horizontal ladders – were laid across the gaps, allowing the young men to each carry 24 kilograms of equipment with the firm orders that, if a soldier fell, his companions were not to attempt a rescue – to reduce the risk of additional drownings.

You can find a memorial in many Laurentian towns where a list of the local boys and men commemorates their loss in the war that was to end all wars. What you won’t easily find is the names of the survivors, nor of those whose hearts were in the Laurentians, such as Guy Drummond, killed at Ypres in 1915 – names commemorated in Montreal, but whose survival would have added much to the growth of the Laurentians and its history. Nor will you find the names of those men who survived atrocities and injuries, such as Paul d’Allmen, who became a part of the Laurentians in the years after the war. At the time, the Laurentians boasted foresters, farmers and nascent vacation communities, the most prominent of these last being around Ste. Agathe. Skiing had barely begun in the Laurentians before the war with the arrival of Émile Cochand from Switzerland and the opening of places like the Manitou Club.

Even though historians are hard-pressed to answer the question of what the Great War was about, Canada is said to have come into its own with the taking of Vimy Ridge in April 1917. Lieutenant-General Sir Julian Byng, commander of the Canadian forces, and Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian First Division, were the masterminds. Casualties included 3500 Canadians dead and twice that number wounded, with no statistics for the German side. Afterwards, Byng was appointed to the command of the British Third Army and Arthur Currie, a one-time teacher and real estate developer from B.C. who was later knighted for his role, assumed command of the Canadian Corps.

A week after Vimy Ridge, the French army attempted to push through German lines on the Western Front, but the advance had not anticipated a new lightweight German machinegun’s effectiveness, and the French army, suffering from almost 200,000 casualties including 29,000 deaths, became temporarily neutralized by mutinies. The French field hospitals collapsed under the weight of the injured, and news of the Russian revolution undermined morale. If the Russians pulled out of the war, one million German troops would be freed up to move west.

Cochand, the first professional hired to teach skiing in Canada, was effectively evicted from the Laurentide Inn in Ste. Agathe when the building was seconded to the war effort in 1915 and began to fill with poison gas victims. A vulnerable seed cast to the winds of fate, Cochand and his young wife, Cordon Bleu chef Léa Berger, established themselves in a summer cottage in Ste. Marguerite where they struggled to keep skiing alive in the Laurentian hills during the war years. Thomas Drummond, president of the Montreal Ski Club, sent guests, allowing the fledgling ski centre to survive, but it is hard to imagine patronizing such an establishment today. The cottage had neither electricity nor running water in a winter when the thermometer dipped to forty below - where Fahrenheit and Celsius meet. Émile would carry water in from a stream to be heated and supplied to the guests, allowing them to wash up in the mornings.

As 1917 began, they faced rationing and shortages while the conscription debate tore the country apart. Conservative Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden, elected in 1911, faced re-election as the law worked its way through Parliament that summer. Seeing the real risk of a loss, he tried to form a wartime coalition, but the conscription bill split the Liberal party in two. In September, he passed a bill enfranchising women for the first time, but only if they were involved in the war effort, serving in the military or as nurses, or were the sisters, wives or mothers of servicemen. Men serving overseas were also enfranchised, giving Borden the power to distribute overseas votes into the ridings as he chose. The election in December gave his wartime Unionist coalition a majority, and across the country, including in the Laurentians, conscripts went into hiding, often with their hunting rifles. It was hardly an atmosphere to entice skiers seeking a vacation getaway.

The Montreal Ski Club came to the Laurentians before the First World War, based at Chalet Cochand’s in Ste. Marguerite. With the help of a converted bicycle wheel, Tom Drummond and his cousin Huntly pushed their contraption ahead of their skies, measuring and charting the trails. By 1914, the McGill Ski Club had begun, but within 2 years Émile Cochand had to find work in the city – all of the younger men, his skiers, were serving in the war. Building the sport of skiing in Montreal and the Laurentians fell to the high schools, where students too young to serve began to fill the competitions and use the Côte des Neiges ski jump that the Montreal club had set up in 1910. Boys like Bill Thompson, Paul Thornton, Len Lehan and later, when he could get his hands on some skies, Bill Ball, would become foundational to skiing after the war.

On the Dutch and Belgian front, from late May to early June 1917, the Allies bombarded Messines Ridge, but early in the morning of June 7, the attack stopped. While the Germans awaited an infantry assault, the British ignited 450,000 kg of explosives that they had stuffed into 19 mineshafts right under the ridge. Ten thousand young Germans were killed. The Allies took the ridge, but by the end of July were bogged down at the next ridge while the German defenders controlled the no-man’s land between. The goal was Passchendaele and the commander of the allied forces, Field Marshall General Douglas Haig, needed a diversion in August to draw German attention away from his proposed advance. It was decided to mount an attack on Lens in northern France. Canadian Arthur Currie, knighted for his role as one of the masterminds of the victory at Vimy Ridge, was assigned the task. His Canadian troops were seasoned – tough farm boys from wood-heated homes in the Canadian hills and plains, used to bad weather and the sight of blood. Some had grown up with homespun clothes and received their first real boots only when they joined the army. Currie was a master tactician with a gruff demeanour who was known for his aggressive language. His troops respected him. Challenging direct orders, he argued that an attack on Lens would lead to heavy casualties and failure. He proposed instead to take the German base above the city. Allied maps described it as Hill 70, and the Germans there protected Lens. Field Marshall Haig had to step in to deal with the insubordination, but he accepted Currie’s proposal, partly because the attack on Lens was considered diversionary and of little strategic importance. He also predicted Currie’s alternative would fail. Hill 70 was impregnable.

Passchendaele 1917 Image source: Wikipedia

Currie prepared a mock-up of the battlefield and had his men rehearse the distances and the procedure. Having joined the army as a private himself, he believed that every soldier had to be ready to take over leadership. The bombardment began on the evening of August 14 and as the sun rose the next morning, troops advanced under the curtain of their own artillery barrage, leading to ‘friendly fire’ casualties. Both sides depended on flesh-burning mustard gas, which sank into the Germans’ deep protective shafts while the Canadians dumped flaming oil into the trenches. German defences were breached within 20 minutes and within hours the Canadians held the hill, fending off 21 counter-attacks over the next four days. Their ammunition and rations were exhausted by the time the Germans gave it up and the clean-up of the dead could be completed.

Hill 70, after the battle, watching for planes Image source: Wikipedia

After the war, a traumatized society seeking escape and meaning looked to sports. The homefront still faced other challenges as the Spanish flu rampaged through the Laurentians in 1918, striking the Cochands and others in their neighbourhood, but, thanks to help from the Sœurs de la Charité de la Providence at Lac Masson, the Cochands and skiing survived.

Once they recovered, as though waiting to fill the need, Cochand found other like-minded entrepreneurs and established the Laurentian Resorts Association, assuring a network of ski destinations in the Laurentians. By 1927, they had convinced CP Rail to offer a ski train service on weekends. The flood of skiers began. As many as ten thousand people came up and names like Cochand’s, Nymark’s and Mrs. Marshall’s became code words for a weekend of fresh air. The idea was to get off the train, ski until the end of the day, stop at one of these places for the night, ski the next day and finally get on the train and go back to Montreal.

General Sir Arthur Currie was named principal of McGill University and veterans such as Colonel Wilfred Bovey and Colonel D. Stuart Forbes found positions on the teaching staff. These men saw star students graduate and leave the McGill Ski Club. Seeing the growing importance of sports and knowing that these younger men were the only ones who could teach skiing, they hatched a plan to keep the grads’ skills associated with the school. Inviting Bill Thompson, Harry Pangman and Maxwell Stirling to a meeting in the spring of 1928, they formed the McGill Red Birds, a ski club for McGill graduates. In keeping with military tradition, it was a male-only club. They lost no time looking for a clubhouse location and by the autumn had found the perfect place, a farmhouse on the main street in Saint Sauveur at the base of a mountain, allowing them to climb and also to follow the early trails up to Cochand’s and beyond.

Four of the first ten members of the Red Birds were veteran officers. Not only was General Currie the principal of McGill, the war was still very present in people’s lives and, acknowledging that in a ceremony on March 4, 1934, the Redbird Ski Club changed the name of the main hill at Saint Sauveur to Hill 70 to honour the memory of the battle and of General Currie, who had passed away the previous November.