Clockwise from top left: A visit to Canal du Nord; cadet Guillaume Grenier-Lachance at Notre Dame de Lorette and cadet Alex Duncan on the remains of Arromanche’s artificial harbour.

Sometimes there is no perfect solution; sometimes the only choice is to narrow your eyes and go hard. When Lieutenant G.M. Flowerdew crested the rise and saw two ranks of Germans arrayed across the open field, machine-guns ready, he knew the meaning of imperfect. But if he hesitated, seeing his doom, history didn’t record it.

Flowerdew turned and shouted “It’s a charge, boys, it’s a charge,” then raised his sword and led his cavalry hard against the guns. The trumpeter lifted his horn to blow the call but was shot down before the first note.

It was one of the strange moments of WW I, where glory and futility met on the downside of an ugly dilemma. Flowerdew couldn’t call a retreat without serious losses; but charging across open ground under heavy fire was hardly inviting. He couldn’t go on, but he did. Perhaps that’s as good a definition of courage as any.

The squadron of Lord Strathcona’s Horse was badly mauled as it galloped into the German guns at Moreuil wood. It was a short and savage fight—an ancient technique of combat, men on horse led by a man with a big knife, against the most modern weapons in the German army.

Strange it may have been, but there are lessons at Moreuil wood worth learning and 19 Royal Military College officer cadets went there to figure out what they are. This was the second annual RMC battlefield study tour, where the top cadets from Canada’s only military college spent a week travelling across northern France during the coldest moments of the coldest winter in memory, touring the legendary battlefields of Canadian history—Beaumont Hamel, Vimy Ridge, Amiens, Dieppe, Juno—studying the tactics, sacrifices and heroism of the leaders who sounded the charge.

The cadets were led by three charismatic and generally remarkable instructors—Major Michael Boire, Major Doug Delaney and Dr. Michael Hennessy—who taught the cadets about the importance of terrain, logistics, sound planning and about what’s expected of a leader and what history expects from a Canadian soldier.

More than 70 per cent of the charging Strathconas were killed or wounded that day in 1918, including Flowerdew, who died from his wounds. He was later awarded the Victoria Cross. Despite the heavy losses, the Canadians won the larger battle and Flowerdew’s sacrifice played its part in stopping the German advance and preparing the way for the victory of Amiens later that summer.

“If you listen to the cavalry, they’ll say this battle won the war and saved Christendom,” said Maj. Boire, looking out over the fields surrounding Moreuil wood. “If you listen to the cavalry, they’ll say it saved the world and stabilized the Milky Way. That’s not true. But it was a gutsy thing to do.”

At Beaumont Hamel, where the Royal Newfoundland Regt. was destroyed on a July morning in 1916, it wasn’t just a single man with the guts to take a chance, it was an entire regiment.

On the first morning of the Somme offensive the Newfoundlanders marched in formation straight into an absolute wall of German bullets. They plodded directly into a shredder. Every officer that went forward was killed or wounded and out of the original 801 soldiers only 68 made roll call the next morning.

On the first day of the study tour Boire led the officer cadets down the length of the battlefield, explaining Beaumont Hamel’s importance in the larger offensive and describing the action that day in great detail. The preparatory shell fire was too scattered and light to be effective against the deep German defences. The attack’s scheduling was inflexible. Communication was minimal. The result was tragic.

“The Royal Newfoundland Regiment pops out of the reserve trenches and came down the hill there to the danger tree and then they were,” Boire pauses, “shot.”

The danger tree is still there, alone and looking forlorn on the grassy, shell-holed slope.

If Boire’s speech at Beaumont Hamel was a little short on tactical information, it’s probably because a straight march into undiminished defences doesn’t make a great deal of tactical sense. But Boire, besides being a character of the first order, is a consummate tactician and Beaumont Hamel was his first lesson in the necessity of innovation. In battle, it’s the tactical, technological and logistical innovations that are often the key to victory. Beaumont Hamel was a searing lesson and those who followed learned from the mistakes. At Vimy Ridge, less than a year later, the Canadian Corps would get things right.

The cadets approached Vimy Ridge the same way the troops did. Across the plains, from the St-Éloi Abbey, the ridge doesn’t look very imposing; it’s just a small bump on the horizon. But in WW I, it was one of the toughest defensive positions in Northern France. More than 150,000 French and British soldiers were wounded or killed trying to gain control of the ridge, which overlooks the Douai plain and the key towns of Lens and Arras.

At Vimy the Canadian Corps were fighting together for the first time and the stakes were high—a bad defeat could have meant the effective end of Canada’s army.

The Canadians, under the command of Lieutenant-General Sir Julian Byng, weren’t going to take any chances. Training was greatly increased to include a new individualized attack plan. Scale models of the battlefield were built. Railroads were put down to improve supply efficiency. Massive artillery barrages using new technology softened German defences. All of these efforts prepared the way for two other tactical innovations that proved central to the victory—cratering and tunnelling. By tunnelling forward, blowing a mine and then rushing to defend the new position before the Germans could get there, the Canadians had found a way to advance that wouldn’t require the mass casualties of a Beaumont Hamel-style frontal assault.

“You can imagine being in a tunnel much like the one you’ve been in and you’re waiting,” said Boire, standing on the edge of a crater at the top of Vimy Ridge. “Your platoon has to get to the lip of the crater first and whooom the mine goes off and it’s a long low roar and there’s this roar of hot air that goes back into the tunnel, knocks you over perhaps, certainly will scorch the first two or three guys. And then ‘right’ someone blows on a whistle and says ‘follow me!’ That normally is an RMC graduate,” the group laughs, “in case you’re wondering.”

From Vimy, the cadets toured to Amiens, where in 1918 the Canadians employed a new kind of mechanized manoeuver that drove like a fist deep into the German lines. The Germans never recovered and three months later the war was over. During the cadet’s visit to Amiens, the group made a special stop at the Crouy British Cemetery at Crouy-Sur-Somme where Craig Scott, a fourth-year cadet, wanted to visit the grave of his relative, Private Cecil Edgar Scott. Private Scott was killed on Aug. 8, 1918.

“It had a lot more meaning than the other graves, the other cemeteries. Seeing the ages and names, that meant a lot, but seeing a relative, that meant more,” said Scott.

Scott wasn’t the only cadet that felt a connection to the graves of the war dead. Cadet Shannon Brown made the gesture of bottling up some soil from RMC’s courtyard and bringing it to France to place on the graves. At the Canadian cemetery in Dieppe, Erica Speiran, a third-year engineering student, made the special effort of placing a flag at the grave of an unknown soldier.

“This guy didn’t have a name or anything. He gave his life so we could be here today and nobody knows who he was, so he’s kind of forgotten. But I remember. That’s why I laid the flag, to show that I know who he is. It’s just a way of not forgetting who he was and what he did.”

At Dieppe, Canada’s first big engagement of WW II, it seems the Canadians had to learn some costly lessons all over again. Just as at Beaumont Hamel, the unit coordination and communications were inconsistent and the preparatory fire was not heavy enough or accurate enough to diminish the German emplacements.

But it wasn’t just simple tactical oversight that led to the Canadians being routed, it was an exceedingly ambitious plan that relied overwhelmingly on the element of surprise.

“A lot of the planning is aimed at that element of surprise overcoming so much. What happens when you don’t have surprise? The defences here were on alert. What next when surprise fails?” asked Professor Hennessy, the head of RMC’s history department. “All those other bits of battle to be orchestrated have been planned away or reasoned away. So élan, courage, dedication and surprise were thought to be the strong things. Élan doesn’t stop machine-gun fire.”

“To land, under fire, clear the obstacles giving you access to the city, to penetrate the city, have the forces divide to move into the harbour and do a commando raid. To have the other forces move through and not just back to the harbour but beyond and beyond to link up with forces that landed on the other side of this headland. In eight hours. Do that and be back here in good order to withdraw. It’s very hard not to see that as an incredibly ambitious, optimistic plan and yet most of the officers consulted on it agreed ‘yeah, we could do it.’”

Things went so badly for the main landing party at Dieppe that it’s here the cadets learn about another kind of hero, Royal Marines Commando Colonel Joseph Phillips. Unlike Flowerdew, who revealed the far side of courage with his hell-or-high-water charge into the guns, Phillips used critical judgment to decide against joining a futile, if potentially glorious, attack.

“In the confused communications the Canadian commander orders reinforcements—the commandos—to be used to exploit,” said Hennessy. “When their craft hit the beach the commander stands up and recognizes the situation for what it is—the beach is littered with dead, he can see active fighting to his immediate front, he can see there’s a complete lack of penetration and there’s no weight to reinforce. He orders his craft to turn around and in standing up to give that order, which saves his commandos, he is shot and killed. It was obvious to him that the situation was not one of exploitation but futile annihilation of his forces.”

Like many of the cadets, Speiran found the Dieppe section of the trip to be particularly significant.

“They really weren’t thinking when they planned it. They landed on the beach and had fire coming at them from four angles. They didn’t stand a chance. The biggest thing I learned was to do a proper reconnaissance and understand what you’re going into and practice what you’re going to do, just so you’re ready for it.”

To understand what you’re going into and to get ready for it—that’s not just a good lesson to be learned from Dieppe, it also explains why studying military history is a prerequisite to becoming an officer in the Canadian Forces.

“Studying history helps them understand that the many problems they face are not new or unique. Each case will give us a unique issue and we learn how issues like that have been dealt with in the past,” said Hennessy. “Most people join the military with a sense of duty, but understanding where that duty may take them is something that studying military history can help them comprehend. They’re going to face paradoxes, challenges, leadership issues and moral questions and their duty might force them to transcend their own self interest.”

As a part of the Normandy invasion of 1944, the Canadians once again put together all the lessons of the past few years. The reconnaissance at Juno was solid, the preparatory fire was better and the whole order of battle was changed. Plus, the deception plan worked. There were still some tragic moments, such as the battle for Verrières Ridge, where the cadets learned that the fog of war can derail almost any plan. But according to Doug Delaney, a former paratrooper who’s now a lecturer at RMC, that may be the most important lesson of all.

For these cadets, who will graduate soon and go on to deployments in places like Afghanistan or Sudan, the tactical lessons of how to knock out a German beach defence or crater your way to the top of a ridge will probably be less important than the understanding they gained of the often arbitrary, brutally violent nature of military conflict and what it takes to lead soldiers into chaos.

“Lessons have changed. Tactics have changed. The nature of your adversary has changed,” said Delaney. “But what they get from this is that it gets them used to living in an environment where there are no perfect solutions. If you’re used to operating in a world where there’s no perfect answer you’re more likely just to choose a solution and execute it as hard as you can.”

After studying battles from Beaumont Hamel to the Normandy invasion, the cadets have learned about the context and scale of Canada’s history. They’ve been in the trenches and pictured themselves blowing the whistle to sound the charge. They’ve heard about dozens of heroes and seen the graves of thousands of others. They know what’s been done and what they may yet have to do.

“It’s not just the lessons from the battlefield, it’s the life lessons that are being taught, how officers are expected to conduct themselves, what their role is in the battle and how their courage, goes on to lead men,” said cadet Scott. “The stories themselves don’t give me courage, it’s knowing that people before have done it. It’s not necessarily the individual event, but it’s the fact that it’s been done and it’s been done by Canadians.”

Even if these future officers are never required to express their heroism like Flowerdew or the many leaders of Vimy, Dieppe and Juno, the challenges of command will remain the same. They’ll need the courage to put team and mission before themselves, the acuity to understand how to proceed even when there are no good options and the raw brainpower to innovate new tactical solutions. It’s an awesome responsibility. Even if they never ride on horseback against the guns, it’s one hell of a charge.