Shot at Dawn

by John Wilson

  Chapter 5

  The Sound of the Guns

  Ypres, November 4, 1917

  The recent rain made the rounded tops of the cobblestones so slick that the metal studs on my boots kept slipping to the side, making it difficult to keep in step with the rest of my platoon. Everyone was having difficulty and the rhythmic sound of marching feet was punctuated by the occasional curse. We had been singing for much of the 20 miles from Cassel, but that had stopped as soon as we reached the outskirts of what was left of Ypres.

  Years of shelling had reduced the town to rubble. Piles of grey bricks were often all that marked the site of a large building. Here and there, solitary, shell-pitted walls stood, their glassless windows like blank, staring eyes. In some places the building had been destroyed so long ago that grass and weeds grew thickly over the rubble.

  The dull thud of distant artillery sounded from so many directions that it seemed as if we were walking into the mouth of some vast cannon. Dark, heavy clouds, hanging so low that I felt I could almost reach up and touch them, weighed down on us and perfectly matched our mood as we slogged through the rubble. Ypres was my first glimpse of the world of war.

  Through the latter half of September and the beginning of October, while the Canadian divisions had been gathering and training around Cassel, the British, Australians and New Zealanders had been fighting in the mud and rain at Polygon Wood, Poelcappelle, along the Menin Road and outside the village of Passchendaele. Casualties had been high and I wondered how many of them had been men that I had seen rioting at Etaples.

  Despite the rain, the mud and the casualties, the Front had been edging nearer to Passchendaele. At the end of October, the 3rd and 4th Canadian Divisions pushed even closer. Now it was our turn to relieve them and secure the village before winter set in properly. I was excited and terrified in equal measure.

  “Chance of a lifetime,” Bob said, looking at two scarred walls — all that was left of what must once have been a large house. “Desirable open-plan property with uninterrupted views in all directions. Owner motivated to sell.”

  I laughed. It never ceased to amaze me how, regardless of what misery we were experiencing, Bob always managed to retain his sense of humour.

  “Needs a little work,” I said.

  “Nothing a young man with a good strong back couldn’t handle. Besides, you want it open so you can hear the shells coming.”

  I laughed again. Bob and I had grown close since my meeting with Ken. It seemed that his cheerful outlook and ready smile were the things I remembered from my childhood with Ken, and which were missing from him now. I saw Ken a lot during our training and we had even talked a few times, but there was a distance between us that was more than that between a company commander and a private. At least he had honoured my request and not put my name forward for a transfer.

  “Did you see the Old Bill cartoon in the army paper the other day?” Bob asked.

  “No.”

  “It showed two old men with white beards sitting in a trench with hundreds of shells whistling overhead. One of them’s reading a paper. The caption says, A.D. Nineteen Fifty, ‘I see the War Babies Battalion is coming out.’”

  “That’s not funny,” I said. “Some people have been saying that the war might last that long.”

  “Nonsense,” Bob shot back. “The Americans are in it now. As soon as enough of them get over here we’ll end this thing.”

  “But the Russians look like they’re finished,” I pointed out, “so it all balances. I heard a couple of men talking the other day about this new tactic of ‘bite and hold’ that the generals have come up with.”

  “It makes sense to me,” Bob said. “The big break-through wasn’t happening, so why not aim for smaller objectives? Besides, it’s working. We’ve pushed the German lines back quite a bit in the past few weeks.”

  “That’s what those men were talking about,” I said. “One of them had worked out that, at the rate we’re advancing now with this ‘bite and hold’ plan, we’ll get to Berlin in three hundred years.”

  That silenced Bob and, as the first drops of rain fell, we plodded on.

  We struggled forward in the rain all through the night of November 4, sometimes stopping to rest or allow other parties past, but always moving closer to the thunder and bright flashes of the guns. Once we sat for a few minutes close to one of our guns, a squat ugly thing with gunners moving around it like black ghosts. When the gun fired, it was like being in the centre of a thunderstorm. The noise was like a physical blow, battering my head and dulling my senses, and leaving my ears ringing for a full hour afterwards. The flash lit up the stark, devastated landscape with an unnatural brightness, making the splintered tree look like the broken fingers of ancient buried giants.

  As we approached the front lines, the mud became worse and we stumbled and slipped along wooden duckboards. When we slipped off, our boots sank up to our ankles and it was the devil’s own job to pull our feet out. The mud seemed to be an evil, living presence, determined to draw us down into the depths. I was reminded of Sommerfield’s story of some men being sucked down and drowning in mud holes because their comrades didn’t have the strength to pull them free.

  It got even worse when Ken and Sergeant Fairley ordered us into the communications trench that led to the front line. Whenever we slipped here, we fell against the trench walls and were soon completely covered in a layer of heavy, disgusting, slimy clay. We were frozen, filthy, wet and exhausted by the time we reached our goal and Ken quietly told us to stand easy. He moved a heavy gas curtain aside from the door of a half-buried machine-gun pillbox and disappeared inside to confer with the officer of the Company we were relieving.

  Despite my tiredness, my excitement remained. This was the front line, the battle zone. The enemy that my country had been fighting for more than three years was standing in a similar hole in the ground only a couple of hundred yards away. I looked around, trying to take in as much as possible by the dim light of a few small cooking fires and the occasional harsh brightness of the flares that burst overhead.

  My first impression was of being in a dump. Pieces of equipment, torn sandbags and garbage were everywhere. The smell was overpowering — the sharp odour of gunpowder, a pervasive outhouse stink, and the lingering smell of gas that I recognized from training. Beneath it all was another smell that I couldn’t identify — unpleasant, but strangely sweet.

  All around I could hear the distant crump of artillery, ours and the Germans’, but none of the shells was landing close. Clusters of rifle shots popped now and then and the rhythmic clack of machine guns burst out from time to time. The flares that lit up the scene added a soft hissing sound to the music of war.

  The trench was little more than a deep winding ditch. The floor was covered with duckboards like the ones we had been struggling over for hours. The walls were mud, supported here and there by sandbags, which in places had slumped down. The trench was mostly about 6 feet deep, but in some places was less than 4. In spots it was so narrow that two men could barely pass. In others it spread a good 10 feet wide where a shell had exploded. By the light of the flares I could see about 20 feet in either direction before the trench bent away. It was nothing like the neat trenches we had trained in. There everything had been regular and the trench walls — parapet to the front, parados to the back — were solid and secure. From above, the training trenches looked like the battlements of a medieval castle laid out on the ground. Ours must have looked like a twisted line of knotted yarn.

  Two men stood, 10 feet apart, on overturned ammunition boxes, peering out into the night. Others moved back and forth along the trench carrying mortars, ammunition, sandbags and shovels. A corporal and three men to my right were busy repairing a place where the trench wall had partially collapsed. While I watched, the corporal stepped back with a curse as a section of the wall slumped down in front of him. I stared as the mudslide revealed a decomposed human body. What was left of the torso was held together
by the rags of a uniform, but the head — little more than a grinning skull — detached and bounced into the bottom of the trench. A strong stench of the same sweet smell I had noticed earlier made me cover my mouth and nose.

  “Dammit,” the corporal said, “that’s why the wall collapsed. Bodies don’t hold together once they start to rot.”

  He bent and picked up the skull and tossed it over the edge of the trench. Then he looked up at me and laughed.

  “New boy, eh?” he asked. “You’ll get used to it. Besides — ” he turned and drove his shovel into the body’s chest “ — it’s only a Gerry.

  “Come on, you lot,” he shouted at the other three men who had stopped work when the body appeared, “We ain’t got all night. Put your backs into it. The sooner we get this brave young man of the kaiser’s army out of the trench, the sooner the smell’ll improve and the sooner we can get the parapet built up proper.”

  The men began swinging their shovels and cutting the body up. I heard the sound of someone retching, but my attention was pulled away by Ken coming out of the pillbox. He conferred briefly with the lieutenants who commanded the four platoons and the information was passed on to the sergeants and corporals who commanded each section. My section of twelve men under Sergeant MacTaggart was assigned to the stretch of trench I was standing in.

  For the next hour there was a lot of back and forth as we settled in and the previous occupants departed. My new home was a typical funk-hole — 4 feet long, 2 feet high, scooped out from the wall of the trench and just deep enough for me to curl into. I could never stretch out and it was always wet, but it kept the worst of the rain off.

  Bob had the funk-hole next to mine. He called his the Savoy Hotel, but we had no chance to use them.

  “Stand to,” Sergeant MacTaggart ordered as dawn began to lighten the sky above the German trenches. We hurriedly unwrapped the canvas covers that had kept the mud out of our rifles, and mounted the fire-step. I got my first glimpse of no man’s land.

  Of course none of the enemy was in sight. One of the extraordinary things about the battlefields around Ypres was that you could look over a landscape containing thousands of soldiers and not see a single one. To stand up in the open here was to invite a sniper’s bullet or a burst of machine-gun fire.

  The view as the sun rose was like nothing I could have imagined. It was like the surface of some alien planet. The dead trunks of trees, stripped of every leaf and branch by shellfire, were the only things standing above the tortured ground. Here and there, twisted piles of barbed wire and rusting sheets of torn corrugated iron lay like toys discarded by huge, petulant children.

  So many explosions had happened here that it was not even possible to distinguish individual shell holes. Scattered paler patches showed the sites of ruined pillboxes, and redder piles of rubble where farmhouses used to be. How could this ever have been a scene of cows grazing on green fields? We gazed in silence at the devastation. Even Bob didn’t have a humorous comment.

  “See yon patch of reddish ground right in front of us?” MacTaggart said in his broad Scottish accent. “That’s the village of Passchendaele.”

  I had known that any village this close to the front lines would be severely damaged, and I had seen what shelling had done to Ypres, but Passchendaele had literally ceased to exist. Barely one brick sat atop another.

  “See, yon building?” MacTaggart asked.

  I stared hard at where he was pointing and could just make out a pile of rubble about the height of a man.

  “I admit there’s not much left of it,” MacTaggart went on, “but it used to be a church. Take a good look. That’s the centre of Passchendaele and that’s where we’ll be headed tomorrow morning.”

  I tried to imagine how it would be possible to get from where I was now over to the ruined church, even without the German army trying to stop me. I couldn’t do it.

  Over to my right a machine gun clattered. In response, I heard our guns firing behind me. Small, almost beautiful, puffs of black and white smoke blossomed above the wasteland.

  “The morning hate,” MacTaggart informed us. “Best get yer heads down now. Gerry knows that something’s up so he’ll be sending a few of his own over afore long. Not to mention that I also heard that there’s a Gerry sniper working from the ruined pillboxes in no man’s land.”

  We ducked down into the trench and, sure enough, almost immediately we heard the whistle of shells arriving, followed by the crump of explosions. None came particularly close to us, and MacTaggart told us newcomers what each sound meant and what to do.

  “That long drawn-out whine, yon’s a big gun, high explosive. If the whine keeps getting louder, get yerself down, hug the dirt and pray. Nothing else to be done.

  “That higher pitch, yon’s a shrapnel shell. Explodes above the ground and no problem if yer in the trench unless it explodes directly overhead. The real bad ones are the trench mortars — Minnies, we call them. They make a sort of coughing sound when they’re fired and they’re the very devil to hear coming. But we won’t have to worry about them here. Gerry trenches are too far away.

  “Now, get yer rifles cleaned and brew up tea. We’ve got a lot of housekeeping to do. Those boys from the 4th Division have left this place a pigsty, but they’re mostly from Manitoba, so what can ye expect.

  “McBride, you get yerself down the sap yonder and keep yer ears open and yer eyes peeled. You’ll be relieved in two hours. And don’t forget the sniper. Keep yer head down.”

  “Yes, Sergeant.” I grabbed my rifle and headed down the sap.

  The sap was in an even worse state than the trench, little more than a ditch running out into no man’s land and ending in a shallow hole not even deep enough to stand upright in. I settled in as best I could and peered through the wooden periscope that stuck up above the lip of the sap and gave me a narrow view of no man’s land. I tried not to think how lonely and exposed I was out in front of the lines, but at least it was daylight and I had a chance of seeing any attack coming. At night, every shadow is an approaching enemy and every sound the pin being pulled from a grenade.

  During my two hours of shivering duty, I forced myself to remember that I was the eyes and ears of the army and that I could be shot for falling asleep. Nevertheless, my eyes were drooping when I heard someone working their way along the sap towards me, I assumed it was my replacement, but I was wrong.

  “Well, you’ve got your wish,” Ken said as he squeezed in beside me. “We go into battle tomorrow.”

  “I know,” I replied.

  “I don’t suppose it’ll do any good, but I have to designate ten per cent of the Company to stay behind. Will you let me put your name on the list?”

  “No,” I said, although after looking at where we had to go, there was a part of me that wanted to say yes.

  “I thought not. All I can do then is wish you good luck.”

  “Thanks, and you. Why do you have to select ten per cent of the Company?”

  Ken shrugged. “So there will be a core of the old Company to build around if none of us come back tomorrow.”

  A chill ran down my spine. Was that really possible?

  “What the men usually do,” Ken went on, “is write a letter and give it to one of those left behind to be mailed if they don’t come back.” Ken looked hard at me. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Back in September,” he went on eventually, “you said you had been in Etaples during the riots.”

  I nodded.

  “What exactly happened?”

  Ken listened intently as I gave him a brief description of what I had seen.

  “Who was the man who gave the political speeches?” he asked when I had finished.

  “He said his name was Harry Sommerfield. Why, do you know him?”

  “Not personally, but there are stories about him — little more than rumours, really. Apparently he was a coal miner and union activist on Vancouver Island. He led strikes and made a lot of enemies among t
he mine owners. God alone knows why a man like that would join the army, but he did. Served on the Somme, but disappeared late in 1916. Story is that he leads a mixed band of deserters north of here in the woods by the Yser River. The army’s sent patrols on sweeps through the area but never caught anyone but a few stragglers.”

  “He’s a powerful man,” I said, remembering Sommerfield’s eyes and how they held me.

  “So I’ve heard,” Ken agreed. “He seems to have no trouble convincing men that his ideas are right. Some of the wilder elements in the army look on him as a sort of folk hero, a man who would stop the war if he had the power.”

  “A hero? Sommerfield?” I asked.

  “Not everyone is as keen to go into battle as you, Allan. This war wears men down, even when they’re not fighting. There’s a story going around that the end of the war will be announced by the firing of a black flare at midnight, but of course no one will see it. There are soldiers here who have been in this war almost their entire adult lives. They can barely imagine anything else, let alone see the war ever end. Not even the generals talk of breakthroughs any more. It’s just a war of attrition, a slogging match that will go on until every soldier is dead or crippled or insane.

  “Add to that the revolutions in Russia and the mutinies in the French army, and the news that the Italians have collapsed at Caporetto and may soon be out of the war, and it’s not difficult to see how pessimism can grow and how a man like Sommerfield can become powerful.”

  I groaned at more of Ken’s misery and cynicism, but something he said intrigued me. “Will there be a revolution here?”

  “No,” Ken said, “although I sometimes wish there would be. Something has to change. But from what you told me about Etaples, despite Harry Sommerfield, the men who were rioting were simply fed up with the harsh conditions. In the short term, they just wanted to get drunk and find some excitement in town, and in the long term they just wanted better treatment. As far as I know, not a single man from Etaples refused to go to the Front when he was called.”