anything else in literature except the Sermon on the Mount,”11 was not disappointed:
As I gave him a little Irish blarney about being able to die happy now that I had seen him, he soon dropped his mask and treated me quite humanely. His pose, icy and with a shade of the sneer about it, damages him, though he assumes it as a protection. It is as incongruous as the comic mask on the face of tragedy. I have seen no eyes which can show greater depth of feeling than do his on occasion, and for all his flippancy, I have met no one who realizes more intensely the essential horror of war and who yet so vigorously appreciates the necessity of fighting our way out of it.12
The beginning of 1915 brought disappointment when Acland was sent to Weymouth to supervise training with the 3rd Wiltshires, the depot and training battalion for the Moonrakers, as they were nicknamed, rather than being sent to France with the rest of the 15th Battalion (48th Highlanders). As a result, he was still in Weymouth when word came in April of the German gas attack at Ypres. “From this none of the junior officers of the Fifteenth Battalion (48th Highlanders) came out undamaged,” he wrote in the war’s dying days, “and very few came out at all, on our side of No Man’s Land. Nineteen officers out of twenty-one and 670 men out 1,000 represented the loss of that unit alone.”13
Acland rejoined his regiment in France at month’s end, and in mid-May saw his first action in the Battle of Festubert. He would describe the three days of combat as “an awful muddle,” while recognizing that his was “an army in the making”:
We were hard pressed, and our commanders had to do the best they knew how with the material at their disposal. I didn’t take this calmly philosophic view at first. It was only with more soldiering and more reading about other wars, that I learned that this waste is incidental to all wars, and that the good soldier has to be prepared to die cheerfully not only for his country, but for his general’s blunders.14
In the end, the battle claimed over sixteen thousand British, Canadian, and Indian casualties under the command of Douglas Haig, then a lieutenant general on his way to becoming a field marshal. The 48th Highlanders were sent to Givenchy after the fighting, then in July on to trenches in the area of Ploegsteert and Wulverghem, opposite the Messines Ridge, just kilometres south of Ypres. There Acland’s division remained for eight months occupied by shelling during the day and patrols by night. In March 1916 they were dispatched for six months to the Ypres salient.15
The Ypres Salient in April 1915, at the time of the Second Battle of Ypres.
Acland was now a captain and company commander. Responsibility weighed heavily; in one counter-attack more than half his men became casualties. Over the night of June 2, 1916, the 48th Highlanders were rushed into the line to plug a gap the Germans had opened. Early on the morning of the third, the Canadians counterattacked in front of Mont Sorrel, and, beneath an intense barrage, Acland was wounded when the force of an exploding shell knocked him semi-conscious into a shell-hole, and onto a bayonet carried by one of his men. He was fortunate; several more senior captains were killed or seriously wounded early in the engagement. Acland stepped up to take command of the line, continuing the attack by directing four companies along with attached machine gun and bombing details. Facing interlacing machine gun fire with artillery support, the men of the 48th under Acland’s direction took tremendous casualties, but the attack was ordered to proceed. In Acland’s own words, his company contributed to “sacrifice battalions, sent in with next to no artillery support (there was at the moment none that could be given us) to stop a gap and so to prevent further German inroads.”16 The further German inroads Acland mentions would have meant the fall of the city of Ypres.
Whether public or private, Acland’s writing about his service is tinged with self-criticism and reproach:
I never so wanted to run away in all my life, and only stopped myself by reflecting that certain shame and necessary self-destruction lay behind and that, while it would be better to blow out one’s brains than to yield to cowardice, it was more sensible to stay in the lines and carry on. I was so dazed with lack of sleep, over-fatigue and the … horrendous din of the shelling that I soon felt myself to be of little use as an officer, and all I can say is that I stuck it out.17
Acland counted himself lucky and considered himself unworthy of the Military Cross awarded for his part in the action. Others interpreted his actions differently: the Canadian Military Gazette of August 21, 1916, announced the award “for conspicuous bravery during an attack. He led his company, formed under very heavy fire, with great dash, and, though wounded, remained at his post and dug himself in.”
In late August Acland was promoted to major, and subsequently set out on what would be two separate deployments at the Somme.18 It was during the second engagement, on September 26, 1916, just northwest of Courcelette, that Acland’s time at the front came to an abrupt end. At approximately 1:30 in the afternoon his company, having overrun a German communication line, were advancing in the direction of the infamous Regina Trench when Acland was hit by German machine gun fire. Shot in the left chest between the seventh and eighth ribs and in the left breast two inches above his left nipple, it is miraculous he wasn’t killed instantly. Instead, Acland fell into a shell-hole, where he lay in pain, barely able to breathe. A stretcher-bearer appeared, quickly dressed his wound, and thinking his wounds were fatal, left him with morphine and water and proceeded on with the attacking line, as per battalion orders.
It was an agony to lose the rough hand of the stretcher-bearer, an agony which made me understand Nelson’s ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’ It was not Hardy that the dying sailor yearned to embrace, but the spirit of man and all human friendliness.19
In his account, Acland recalls his efforts to remain alert. The great fear was that he would be taken for dead should he lose consciousness. Revolver at his side, Acland was prepared to shoot the approaching enemy. “I had no desire to be taken prisoner in that condition,” he writes.20
The stretcher-bearers that had been sent out on his behalf failed to find the major, but as the afternoon stretched into the evening and then the morning of the following day, enough strength returned to give Acland hope that he might survive. After fourteen hours in the shell-hole, the German artillery suddenly shifted: realizing he was once again in the line of fire, he began lightening his load. Before much progress was made, an explosion split Acland’s face from forehead to chin. Still, he managed to get to his feet and with “sheer desire for life”21 started on a slow trek around shell-holes and deserted trenches, knowing the flashes of light in the distance had to be the Allied guns. Blind in one eye and severely wounded, in the hour just before dawn he stumbled upon a burial detail; they escorted him to a first aid dressing station. Acland spent the remainder of the year in Mrs. Arnold’s hospital in South Kensington; it was five months before he was again able to stand.
The December 16, 1916, edition of the Globe reported that F.A. Acland and his wife had sailed for England to visit their son in hospital; Elizabeth Acland would stay at Peregrine’s bedside in England as he battled lung haemorrhages and septic pneumonia between surgical procedures over a five-month period. On March 3, 1917, Acland was invited to an investiture at Buckingham Palace, where he was one of fifty seriously wounded soldiers to receive the Military Cross. Prime Minister Robert Borden, as well as the recently retired Governor General Prince Arthur Duke of Connaught and Princess Patricia were also in attendance.
In May of 1917, Acland was healthy enough to return to Canada; later that summer, he became involved in the University of Toronto’s military instructor program, likely after participating in rehabilitation and physiotherapy programs stationed on campus. With the United States entering the war in April 1917, Canadian officers with an academic background were sent to American colleges and universities to further military links between the two countries while also alleviating some of the burden of instruction on the U.S. officer corps.
In
