by Will R Bird
I often thought of Peter afterwards. There was something that stirred one in his intensity of speech. That old derelict really had more of “the spirit of the trenches” than those specialists in safe places could possibly ferment, than any of the red tabs who ordered life and death as fancy moved them. There was something he could not express otherwise in his wish to fall, if he must, out in that Garden of Sleep between the wires, that Valhalla of the bravest of the brave, Nature’s cemetery of the vanguard. And there was more than complaining in what he said about the winning of medals. Was it not true that many decorations were won by conspicuous lads fresh from training camps, without a year of hard days of trench routine, and shell fire and Death’s flutter about them? Who knows how strong their courage would have been then? And every man who fought at the front knew that for every high honour awarded, hundreds were deserved, that those given were the lucky ones seen by authority. Valiant men in desperate battles performed prodigious feats of valour and endurance, were killed and forgotten; others survived, with only a few comrades knowing just what they had accomplished. Few men gained Victoria Crosses without exhibiting extraordinary courage, but their equals fought, unadorned, in every company on the western front.
A group of entertainers came to Bourecq and nearly everyone went to see the show. It was some offering that included a cave scene, wherein an imp gambolled about. We were to go to see it but Tommy’s leave came through and he was excited. “Me for a Piccadilly fairy instead of your show,” he chortled. “A nymph of ‘de pave’ is better than an imp in a cave. Away with him.”
Giger’s leave came at the same time, and at a fitting time. It relieved considerable anxiety on “Old Bill’s” part. He had discovered Giger roaming around an isolated farm of the poorer type. A melancholy female had apparently attracted him. She was the attendant of two bony porkers and a consumptive-looking cow, wore her frowsy hair in a loose knot, had sores on her skin and was dressed mostly in soldiers’ discards. Giger tried to talk to her by sign language.
We told Tommy that he was responsible for his comrade and advised Giger to stay by him. Giger grinned. Leave was going to be a red-letter event in his life. “I kin talk German,” he boasted. “One of them Yankees learnt me.”
We had seen him often in conversation with one of the MacLean Kilties, Coleman, a fair-haired boy from Montreal. “Let’s hear you,” we chorused, and Giger gave us his complete repertoire. “Donnerwetter,” he growled. “Herr O burst, Gutten tag. How’s that?” We applauded.
The battalion moved to Bellacourt. It gave me queer feelings to be moving back to the front again. All of us had realized that we had not been taken back and fed so well and trained for manoeuvres if there were not some big attack in prospect. The company was in fine fettle, every man bronzed and in perfect health – at least looking that way. But I knew that there were many in the platoons who carried war-shattered nerves, nerve disabilities that were not suspected.
The weather had continued fine and the boys made fun and sang in their billets. One of the “originals,” however, pulled a poor joke. He was in the pioneer section and he exhibited a wooden cross and said that orders had come to have the top bar lengthened, as the “umpty-umps” were coming now with box-car numbers. They had dubbed the MacLeans as “millionaires” because their battalion number had been “1030.”
In the morning as we ate breakfast we had difficulty in getting our food without swallowing wasps. At any time in the summer that one opened a tin of jam or marmalade those black and yellow pests came circling around, but at Bellacourt they came in swarms. Russell fought them till he got stung. He and little Ted were enemies quite often, as they were jealous of each other. Rees, though not much bigger, would not have anything to do with them. He was a good-mannered lad and slightly reticent. Honor had entertained us in the night. He had been visiting friends and when he reached our billet it was midnight. He made his bed and lay down and there in the dark sang in the finest voice a hymn that brought thoughts that kept us all quiet. Not a man spoke or disturbed him, and when he had finished he slept.
O Love that will not let me go
I rest my weary soul on Thee,
Often afterward did I think of that strong tenor in the night in a French barn, swinging, swaying us, holding back every interruption.
… I yield my flickering torch to Thee,
How many would before the summer was gone?
The singing of the soldiers was something to ponder. Contrary to civilian ideas, they did not join lustily in the hymns of church parades. That part of his existence was woefully mis-managed. Something in every man, no matter what his record as a church-goer, resented the idea of having his religion forced on him. There was no greater stupidity shown, no more blind disregard of the soldier’s intelligence and right to individualistic feeling, than compulsory church parades. They went because they had to go, and carried with them an instinctive defiance that no fine words of the padre could overcome. They would not and did not join in the singing. The padre himself and a few of his officers would usually struggle through “O God our help in ages past” and “Fight the good fight with all thy might.” It seemed as if they did not think the soldier could possibly know any other hymns. But in the evenings, when there was opportunity, those same dumb-lipped men would go, voluntarily, to a Y.M.C.A. hut, and there fairly bring down the roof with singing that throbbed with fervour. Given their own freedom in the matter and religious services would have been enjoyed by the soldiers. As it was they went as the led horse to water.
In their billets when in the humour they would sing rollicking songs, sentimental ditties. “K-k-k-katy,” “My Little Gray Home in the West,” “When You Come Home, Dear,” and “Hello My Dearie, I’m Lonesome for You.” And “Mademoiselle from Armentieres,” was always remembered, and the regimental march pasts were encores. “Oh, Jock, are ye glad ye enlisted; Oh, Jock is your belly full?” When near the “shino” boys the “forty-twas” would gently chant that rather vulgar old number about the R.C.R.’s sailing away and leaving things not as they ought to be, “… and when they get home there’ll be … to pay in the good old R.C.R.’s.”
Yet those same singers, many a night in a cold, draughty billet, joined in hymns and sang then with all the feeling of any church choir. Padres, as a rule, were scorned, for only sincerity could live with the “other ranks,” and they knew, whatever the showing, that he was not one of them. Our own padre was not disliked. Sometimes on the crater line he came at night with cigarettes and warm drinks and talked with a private, but he was apart from the men, and usually with, perhaps through circumstance, an officer whom the majority cordially hated.
We went from Bellacourt to support trenches at Neuville Vitasse, relieving the 27th Battalion. It was a quiet sector, and the weather continued warm. We lay in our bivvies and slept during the daytime. At night we went on working parties that were not hardships and of short duration. Then we sat on firesteps or on the grass outside the trench and watched the flares up ahead. I visited other companies and saw Siddall and Jimmy. Jimmy had a hard time at Passchendale and was very thin and nervous. He told me that Hill had been badly wounded and that the scouts never recognized him at all, with the exception of Brown who was as genial as ever. I saw the old chap myself and was introduced to Nauftts, a jolly, energetic fellow.
The MacLean men thought our trip a “Jake” war. Several of them had not come to the battalion until May, and among them were Batten, a nineteen-year-old boy from New York, and Johnny, another youngster. More new men joined us and one chap, Morris, took the bivvy next to mine that I had saved for Tommy. He was a tall, copper-haired chap with queer, dreamy eyes. At first I thought him very quiet but he came and sat with me in the morning and asked me countless questions, questions the ordinary men would never think of. “What did I think it felt like to be killed?” “Were we issued any dope that would ease pain in case we were hit?” He did not seem exactly right in his mind.
Tommy returned and was
forced to share the bivvy. He roused me the last morning we were in the trench and I went out to see Morris lying in the shelter, rather badly battered, and to hear a strange story. Morris had asked Tommy endless questions as he had me, and Tommy had strung him a little about the Germans, saying they were not such bad heads and would use a man very kindly when he was taken prisoner. Morris had finally quieted and gone to sleep. Tommy said he had not slept an hour before he was awakened by a terrible grip on his throat. He could not cry out and was pinned so that he could not struggle very much. Morris was straddling him and seemed to have the strength of two men. He had a revolver which he pressed against Tommy’s head and he hissed that if Tommy did not come with him he would shoot him. As the man seemed insane and as there was every chance of being rescued outside, Tommy readily agreed, but when they got into the trench there was not a man near. There were sentries by the gas alarms, but the night was dark and there were none near enough to summon. Morris kept the muzzle of the revolver against Tommy’s spine and grated that he would kill him if he did not get over the trench parapet and go to the German lines.
The man meant every word he said, but he evidently had not taken in that we were only in support trenches. Tommy knew that his chance lay in not letting the fellow think differently until he could get to the front line. They got over the bags and went over the shell-pitted ground until back of the first trench. There Morris changed. He muttered to himself and peered at Tommy. They could hear men talking not far from where they stood, but his captor sensed that all was not as it should be, and he swung around, taking for an instant, the hard menace from Tommy’s spine. It was enough. Tommy whipped over a beautiful right-hander that caught his man flush on the chin, sending him down like a log. Tommy disarmed him, and found the revolver empty!
It enraged him so to think that a brand-new man with an empty gun had so put the wind up him and run him around that he suppressed his first impulse to call for help and waited until Morris revived. Then, when he started to get up, he poked him another hard smash. Morris started to whimper and beg and Tommy yanked him up, though the other was the bigger man, and rushed him back the way they had come. He booted him into the trench and then gave him two more reminders of the reversed circumstances. Morris was entirely cowed. He crept into the bivvy like a whipped dog, but Tommy did not get in with him; he dare not go to sleep again beside him.
I talked to Morris and found that he had not known what he was doing. He even seemed different than when he had first talked to me. I questioned him further but could not get any assurance that he was all right. We did not report him, however, as Tommy did not want the story around the company, and we took turns in sleeping in my bivvy and watching our newcomer. I asked Batten about him, and he told me that on their way into the trenches a big shell had dropped beside Morris, knocking him off his feet and stunning him for several minutes. He had seemed queer when he recovered but in the excitement of new things to see Batten had forgotten him. We did not, however, but the man was more normal in daylight and seemed so contrite that we left him alone.
After a brief spell at Bellacourt again we returned and relieved the C.M.R.’s at Mercatel Switch. It was a very dark night when we took over and the relieved battalion moved out without giving us any definite information about our company front. I had hardly got established before a call came for me to report to the sergeant-major. No one knew how far away the Hun was, what the front was like, the wire, and I was to go out with the sergeant of fifteen platoon and explore.
We went slowly and carefully. Not a flare was going up and there was very little shooting. The second division had been on that front and had raided the Hun almost daily, and we figured that probably some unusual surprises were in store for us. We crept on and on. The ground was easy to travel, being mostly grass and weed patches, with only occasional shell craters. After a long time the sergeant grew impatient, and suggested that we go and get some of our own flares in order to see where we were. I agreed, but asked him to go just a few yards further before we turned. We got upright and walked, but I had not taken three steps before I descended through space – I had simply stepped off solid ground into a deep trench.
In daylight I scanned that part of the line and saw that that particular opening in the Hun wire through which I had gone was not four feet wide, and that all along the stretch in front of us there was not another gap. Pure chance had guided me. One loose wire was lying across the trench, seemingly left there as the barricade was finished; it was all new work. As I fell I struck the wire with my head and it rasped along my helmet, only one barb catching me just below the brow on the upper part of the eyelid. I struck heavily on the trench floor.
For an instant there was silence, then I heard a startled gutteral query. I groped for my tin hat, found it and my rifle, and reached up to the sergeant. He had crouched on the parapet and he grasped my arm and yanked me up to him. We plunged back into no man’s land for about twenty or thirty yards and into a deep shell hole. Phut! A streak of sparks and a flare sizzled aloft and shed its glow over everything. We huddled as low as possible. More flares went up. A machine gun opened fire and swept back and forth, its bullets snapping over our heads. Then stick bombs came looping through the air and exploded very near to us. There were several craters around that part and the Hun could only guess that one of them sheltered would-be raiders. Presently he quieted and we stole in. We had found where the German trench ran.
I thought that my eye had been damaged. I could not see and it was full of blood. Sykes looked at it and just put a loose bandage over it. The lid had dropped down and he was sure my eye was torn. Our shelters were along a sunken road and at the moment the Hun, no doubt alarmed by our visit, began shelling. It was not safe to go outside but I could not wait. I wanted to know how badly my eye was injured. Earle was there and offered to take me across to the first aid station by an overland route. It would save time but was over exposed ground. It was a most unselfish thing for him to offer; he had finished his work for the night and had no need to take any more chances, but he insisted on going.
We had not got ten yards from my dugout when a salvo of shells came into the road just ahead of us. There were cries for a stretcher bearer and as we got there they were picking up poor little Johnny who was just making his second tour to the trenches, his first in the front line. He was dead before they could bandage him. We hurried on and when out on the exposed part shells came in a hurricane outburst. They fell ahead of us, behind us, all around us and we never stopped going. There was no adequate shelter and my eye was bleeding.
At last we jumped into the trench on the other side and were soon at the doctor’s dugout. I was at once given an inoculation and then laid down on a cot while my eye was probed. It was painful but I did not mind when they discovered that the sight had not been injured at all. A few stitches put the lid back in place and then I was told to go to headquarters until morning. Outside the place I decided that I would go back with Earle. The shelling had died down and I could go around by the trench in the morning and see the doctor.
The sergeant-major humoured me. I was allowed to stay in my shelter instead of going back to transport lines until my eye healed. There was nothing I could do at either place and I liked being with the boys. Earle, Williams, Barron, “Waterbottle,” and Lockerbie went out on a patrol and explored the wide area just to the right of our company front. It was discovered that the Germans had a post at a place called “Long Alley,” and on the next night the party crept in close. “Waterbottle” and Williams got alongside and jumped into the sap, the others following. They attacked so suddenly and fiercely that not a prisoner was taken. Every sentry in reach was killed and the others fled. The patrol was not harmed at all and got back in safety. “Waterbottle” and Williams got Military Medals for their part in the attack.
A raid was planned on the usual scale. There were to be two parties, one to act as a covering crew. The “Secret Operation Orders” of that date, 17/7/18, stated
that the intention was to “cut off enemy posts from the S.W., under cover of a barrage with a demonstration to attract enemies’ attention to the N.W.”
The covering party was to go out thirty minutes before zero hour and take up a position north of the attack, and to remain there until the raiders returned or until zero plus ten minutes. The signal was to be the opening of the barrage and smoke bombs were to be released. Two red flares were also shot on the northern side of the enemy line and six No. 27 rifle grenades discharged at the Hun posts. This was supposed to fool him as to where the real assault was taking place.
Like many another affair, all did not go smoothly. The covering party had the opportunities, the raiders did not. They had hardly got into position before a German patrol calmly strolled into view a few yards from them. It was a golden chance to bag prisoners but just a moment before the barrage opened, and the raiders were in readiness. A mixup of any kind might bring disaster, so they lay quiet and the Huns went on their way.
The barrage, red flares, grenades and all went perfectly and the party rushed out and over to their objective, but the birds had flown. The Germans sent up double red and green flares and golden sprays, and retaliation fell on our lines two minutes after zero hour. One of the raiding party was killed by a rifle shot, but the Hun sentry escaped capture. The net results were a loaf of black bread that Otto and Fritz had overlooked in their departure, and a small black dog – which was probably handed to the cooks.
We had an O-pip that our doughty friends, the engineers, had constructed and it was a beauty. I sat in it two days with a telescope to my good eye and watched two Germans working in their back area. I think they were burying their dead, as they seemed to be excavating that depth. They were both elderly men and worked slowly. Once in a while they would pause and shade their eyes and peer our way.
