The hardest battle the Canadian Corps and the Arras Campaign 1918
Bibliographic record
Abstract
"The Canadian Corps’ Second Arras campaign was its most significant operational assignment of the war. More pivotal than Vimy, Passchendaele or Amiens, its task was to smash through a 15-kilometre zone of five fortified positions including the formidable Drocourt–Quéant Line and then cross the Canal du Nord. In doing so, it would rupture the German defences on the Western Front. The commander of the Canadian Corps, Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Currie, considered the Corps’ actions in the campaign as 'the hardest battle in its history’. In his diary, he remarked it was a greater victory than Amiens. The German high command, well aware of the sector’s vital importance, defended it with all they had. The German formations that fought there deemed it momentous. Multiple elite divisional histories regarded it as one of the high points of their service in the First World War. Three German commanders received the rare Pour le Mérite, the highest German military order, for their performance at Arras 1918. As Corporal Albert West of the 43rd Battalion wrote, 'If Germany cannot hold us here she cannot hold us at all.' It represented the German’s best opportunity to stop the Canadians during the Hundred Days. Unlike Amiens, the enemy expected an attack, defended a deep and heavily fortified zone, had ample reserves, and was fighting over terrain scarred by years of intense combat. Depleted in numbers, tired and with lowered morale, German infantry – Landsers – still fought staunchly when they had the advantage. Their machine gunners continued to battle with skill and died hard. Hostile artillery was not the formidable force of 1916-17, but it was difficult to fully suppress it. It remained a factor despite the best Canadian efforts. Unlike Amiens, the famous tank battle, the Corps did not benefit from surprise, masses of tanks, or an elite corps on its flank [...]."
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".