Orders & Documents
The diary and the letters are Robertson's own record of the war. Kept alongside them were official papers that passed through his hands: operation orders, movement and relief schedules, signal traffic. The ones substantial enough to read on their own terms are gathered here, each transcribed in full, with the people, places, and military shorthand explained inline.
Shorter transactional paper (tickets, receipts, passes) sits in the Gallery instead.
1916–1917
Field-company paper from the static-front years: a brigade order to consolidate a mine crater, a wiring scheme in his own hand, a sector defence plan and the infantry working-party schedule that went with it, the bridging orders in the days after Vimy, and the Corps seniority list he measured his own chances against.
Through the summer of 1916 the Canadian Corps held the southern edge of the Ypres salient, a stretch of front where much of the fighting had gone underground.
On page 5 of his 1921 paper Robertson calls wiring “a most disagreeable task,” done at night, as quietly as possible, by parties of ten or twelve.
A defence scheme is a standing plan for holding a stretch of front: who garrisons what, which guns cover which ground, and exactly what each unit does the…
In January 1917 the 1st Canadian Division took over a fresh stretch of front south-west of Lens: the mining ground around Calonne and Maroc.
Robertson’s work in April 1917 was transport and bridging: the trestle and pontoon wagons that carried the material for dry-land trestle bridges and…
This is a printed seniority list of the officers of the Canadian Engineers: the staff of each division’s Commander Royal Engineers (C.R.E.), the field…
Spring 1918: the German offensive
The defensive weeks of the Lys offensive, when unarmed units drew up plans to clear the forward area at a code word.
Summer 1918: the move to Amiens
Six documents from that summer: the relief that repositioned the division and the Q-branch arrangements behind it, the secret move south by strategical train, the engineer plan for the attack of 8 August, and a situation report from the fighting that followed.
In the spring of 1918 the Canadian Engineers were rebuilt.
In the first week of July 1918 the 1st Canadian Division took over the northern Arras sector (the ground astride the Scarpe, running toward Lens) from the…
In the last days of July 1918 the Canadian Corps was pulled quietly out of the Arras front and moved south.
The Move to Amiens got the 1st Canadian Division's engineers out of the line and into billets around St-Pol under a training-area cover story.
This is the engineer plan for the Battle of Amiens, 8 August 1918: the day Ludendorff called “the black day of the German Army.” It divides the work of the…
By the second week of August 1918 the Battle of Amiens had run its course.
Autumn 1918: the Canal du Nord
The brigade engineer plan for the Canadian Corps set-piece crossing of the dry Canal du Nord and the drive on Bourlon Wood, 27 September 1918, drafted, appreciated from the air, and issued while the diary was silent.
