by John Wilson
We sat in silence for a while as I scanned no man’s land through the periscope. I was getting better at recognizing features and could make out the ruined concrete pillboxes where MacTaggart had said a sniper was hiding. They looked completely deserted to me.
“Fishing in the Valley was a long time ago. A different world.”
The strangely wistful tone in Ken’s voice made me take my eye from the periscope. He was sitting with his back against the sap wall, staring up at the grey sky.
“The sky there was so blue. Sometimes I wonder if such a place even exists anymore, or if the entire world is grey mud and death.”
“Of course it exists,” I said. “You saw it yourself last Christmas and I left it only a few months ago. We’ll go back to it when this is all over.”
Ken lowered his gaze and looked at me. “If you say so,” he whispered. Then he closed his eyes briefly, took a deep breath and added, “But there’s work to do before then.”
At that moment, my relief came round the corner in the sap. He was a new recruit, awkward, nervous and, if anything, even younger than me. I think his name was Peter, but everyone called him Lofty because he was so tall and skinny. At the sight of an officer, he automatically straightened up and saluted.
The sniper’s bullet caught him in the left temple and blew a ragged hole in the back of his helmet. Lofty looked surprised and sat down. By the time I reached him, he was blinking stupidly. As I undid his helmet strap, I heard Ken say softly, “No.”
The helmet came away and with it a large piece of the boy’s skull, large gouts of blood and some pieces of grey matter. Lofty sighed almost gratefully and his eyes closed. I retched onto the sap floor.
When I was done, I looked over at Ken. He was staring wide-eyed and unblinking at the body.
“Ken, what should we do?” I asked, but got no response.
I leaned over and shook Ken’s shoulder. “Sir,” I said more formally. “What are your orders?”
Ken seemed to drag himself back from some faraway place. He blinked and turned to look at me.
“Orders. Yes, of course,” he said. “Stay here on guard. I’ll get another relief and someone to remove the body.”
“Yes, sir,” I said as Ken worked his way past Lofty and down the sap. I concentrated on searching no man’s land through the periscope until Bob and Sergeant MacTaggart arrived to relieve me. Bob and I exchanged places without a word and the sergeant and I dragged the body through the front-line trench and into the communications trench, where we laid it out in a funk-hole to await transport to the rear.
“You all right?” MacTaggart asked when we were done.
“I think so,” I said.
“Good. Keep yerself busy and try not to think. It was his own fault.”
I tried to take MacTaggart’s advice and kept busy at trench repairs and bringing up supplies. Mostly it worked, but when I lay down for a rest that afternoon the dream of the deer returned, only now Lofty’s surprised face was there as well. I woke up soaked in sweat more than rain.
Chapter 6
Attack
Passchendaele, November 6, 1917
There was no sleep for anyone that night. Patrols were sent out into no man’s land to lay strips of tape over the mud for us to follow in the attack the next morning. Climbing ladders were brought up so that we could get out of the trench rapidly, and reinforcements piled in until there was barely room to move in the front line.
At 0530 hours our guns opened up. It was still night but the streaks of shells above us and the constant flares lit everything up as bright as day. It was like some hellish fireworks celebration.
The roar of the explosions, combined with the whine of the heavy shells passing overhead, was deafening. The ground shook and pieces of the trench wall kept falling in. But it was comforting to know that the Germans were having a much worse time of it than we were. Of course the German guns, those that were left, replied, but it was mostly counter-battery fire aimed at silencing our artillery. It didn’t work.
The plan was for a short, very intense bombardment of the German trenches. While this was going on, we would advance as close as we could over no man’s land so that when the barrage stopped we could rush in before the Germans could get organized. The barrage would then move on to the German second line and the process would be repeated. For the plan to work, we had to stay close to the falling shells and keep up with the creeping barrage. Timing was everything.
Just before 0600 hours we clambered out of the trenches and edged forward. Sergeant MacTaggart led our section, screaming to be heard above the noise. I couldn’t see Ken, but then I couldn’t see much through the smoke of the exploding shells.
After only a few yards, I was almost deaf and nearly exhausted. My clothes were soaked through and heavy. Every step sank me deeper into clinging mud, but the mindless thrill of the moment kept me going. Eventually MacTaggart signalled for us to lie down.
The barrage was forming a wall of flame and black smoke terrifyingly near. The ground shook beneath us and clumps of mud landed all around. Then it stopped and an eerie, unbelievable silence descended.
MacTaggart stood up. “Come on, you lazy sods. You can’t let the artillery do all the work.”
Almost in slow motion we struggled to our feet and trudged forward. I noticed a cluster of twisted bodies to my right where one of our own shells had fallen short.
Our artillery opened up again, but now the wall of explosions was farther away.
“Come on!” MacTaggart shouted.
We crossed the German front-line trenches with ease. They were even less continuous than ours and were little more than a line of shell holes marked by half-buried bodies. If anyone had survived that barrage, they had now fled.
Some of the bodies were torn into pieces and horribly mutilated, but the sight didn’t bother me. I felt no emotion whatever. In contrast, I was unnaturally aware of what was going on around me, but in a detached way. I saw men nearby drop and realized that they had been shot, but I felt no fear or sense of danger. Bob was in the same state as me.
“That was easy,” he shouted after we crossed the German line. Then the machine gun opened up.
My first thought was that the loud clacking noise was a sewing machine, but then men began to fall all round.
“Get down,” MacTaggart yelled before his legs buckled and he fell into a shell hole. Bob and I dove in after him.
The hole was big enough that we could lie along the side with our heads below the rim and still not be in the pool of foul water in the bottom. MacTaggart was on the far side, clutching his right thigh and swearing profusely.
“Are you hit?” I shouted across.
“Don’t be bloody stupid,” he replied. “Of course I’m hit.”
I crawled around to have a look. The bullet had torn his trousers open midway between his hip and his knee. There was a lot of blood but I couldn’t see any bone.
“I think it missed the bone,” I said.
“Aye,” MacTaggart agreed, “but I’ll no be running any races for a while.”
“Or chasing any women,” Bob muttered.
I cleaned the wound as best I could and put a field dressing on to stop the bleeding.
“What’s going on out there?” MacTaggart asked.
Bob crawled over, edged up the side of the hole and peered cautiously over the lip. The sun still wasn’t up yet, but the exploding shells and flares bathed the battlefield in an eerie light. “Looks like everybody’s taken cover,” he said. “The machine gun’s got us pinned down. I think I see it, though.”
I crawled round to join Bob. The barrage was still going on, but it was farther off now. I felt lonely without it. I could hear other machine guns clatter farther away. It looked as if our whole force was pinned down.
Here and there, helmets popped up from shell holes. If the German gunners spotted them, a spray of bullets made the heads disappear quickly.
“The machine gun’s over in that rui
ned pillbox.” Bob pointed at a filthy block of concrete. “Keep looking in that dark hole.”
I did as I was told and soon spotted a suggestion of movement.
“I think you’re right. I’ll take a shot at it.”
I worked the bolt on my rifle, steadied it on the lip of the shell hole and aimed for the centre of the dark area. A puff of dust above the hole told me I was too high.
I was busy aiming again when Bob grabbed my jacket and dragged me down just as a line of bullets kicked up clods of dirt all along the lip.
“They’ve spotted you now,” he said. “We’ll need to try something else. Look, go over to that side of the hole, as far as you can, and when I give the word, keep down but push your helmet and rifle over the lip.”
Again I did as I was told, assuming that Bob was going to take a shot.
“Okay,” Bob said.
Cautiously, I took off my helmet and pushed the front edge up. At the same time, I raised the rifle. A burst of machine-gun fire knocked my helmet into the bottom of the shell hole and sent a cascade of dirt over me.
To my amazement, Bob leaped out of the shell hole and disappeared. The line of bullets followed him.
“Are you okay?” I yelled when the firing stopped.
“Yeah,” he replied. “I think I can work my way close enough to lob a grenade into the pillbox. I’ll just have to wait until they spot someone else before I make a move.”
“Be careful,” I yelled, before I realized how stupid that sounded.
“Good lad,” Sergeant MacTaggart shouted.
I retrieved my helmet. There was an angry score along one side of it. I put it back on and carefully looked around. Heads were popping up all over and the machine gun was soon occupied with them. Every time it opened up on a target far enough away, Bob would leap up like a demented gopher and hurl himself into the next shell hole. I held my breath every time he moved, but he always made it. In a few more runs he was just 10 feet from the pillbox.
The next time the gun opened up, Bob scuttled forward and tossed two small objects into the black space. A double explosion sounded and I saw a body thrown to one side. Instantly Bob was on the edge of the pillbox firing his rifle down into the nest.
I glanced over at MacTaggart.
“Go on, laddy,” he said. “Sounds like yer pal got the job done. Keep the attack going, I’ll be fine.”
I nodded and scrambled into the open.
Others were doing the same all around. Bob had hauled the German machine gun around and was firing on another machine-gun nest to my left. He was slightly behind it so could fire at the unprotected gunners. The crew soon made a break for the rear, but none of them got very far.
When I reached the pillbox, Bob had stopped firing and was standing there, grinning like an idiot. “It ran out of bullets and I don’t know how to load it,” he said.
“I think you’ve done enough. Let’s keep going.” I slapped Bob on the back. I was ridiculously happy and proud of my friend.
“Jeez,” Bob said with a mock stagger. “Don’t hit so hard. I don’t want to survive the German bullets just to have you break my ribs.”
I suppose it was just the wild excitement of still being alive, but I don’t ever remember being as happy as I was in that moment. We were actually laughing as we left the ruined pillbox and continued the advance.
That was the pattern for the morning, struggling to keep up with the barrage, being held up by machine guns and continuing once they were cleared. It was slow going, but by 0900 hours we were standing by what was left of Passchendaele church. We had achieved our objectives in only three hours.
We dug in on the far side of the village and waited for counter attacks that never came. It was a rare clear day. A weak sun illuminated a landscape very different from the one we had fought through.
Passchendaele stood on the crest of a low ridge and from it we could look over an almost pastoral view. Nearby, the ground was churned up, but farther away there were almost untouched fields, trees, farm buildings and the distant spires of village churches. I hadn’t been in the trenches long, but already I was amazed at the sight of a different world.
“I wonder how MacTaggart is,” Bob said as we rested in a shell hole that we had enlarged but not extended far enough to join with manned positions to left and right.
“He’ll be fine. The stretcher bearers will have got him back to a field dressing station by now. I don’t think it was a really bad wound. Just enough to get him a few weeks in a comfortable hospital bed.”
“And some pretty nurses,” Bob added.
We both laughed. We still felt stupidly euphoric. We’d just been through a battle in which many, probably hundreds, of our comrades had died or been mutilated, and we were still in far greater danger than we ever would be in civilian life, but we were happy. I felt like a kid at a birthday party. We laughed at the least thing and made silly jokes. One man in our section had found a German helmet with a neat bullet hole right through it. The inside was a mess, but he put it on anyway and made stupid faces and pretended to be the kaiser. We thought it was the funniest thing we had ever seen, better than Charlie Chaplin.
It was partly the release of tension as we realized we had survived, but it was also pride that we Canadians had once more done something special that no one else had. Now the name Passchendaele could be added to that of Vimy Ridge. I felt lucky to be a part of it and wondered how Ken could have been so negative when he talked to me about Vimy.
“They’ll probably give you a medal,” I said to Bob.
“What for?”
“Taking out that machine-gun nest. It was holding us all up.”
“What was I going to do, sit in a muddy shell hole all day listening to you complain? Besides, it wasn’t the only nest. Other men must have done just as much in other places. They can’t give us all medals.”
“We’ll see. I reckon you’ll get a Military Medal or a Distinguished Conduct Medal. Maybe even a Victoria Cross.”
Bob laughed. “I can just see me now, an old man in 1977 in the bar in Moose Jaw, wearing my medal and boring all the young fellas with the same old story of how I took out a German pillbox all those years before.” He nudged me in the ribs. “It’s a lovely idea, but I plan to be remembered for all the things I do when this war is over.”
“What do you plan to do?”
“I don’t plan to stay in Saskatchewan, that’s for sure. Oh, I’ll go home and let Mom fuss over me for a while, but I’ve seen more of the world than I ever imagined, so I can’t see me being happy on a quarter section of prairie. Maybe I’ll come back and live in Paris, find a beautiful mam’zelle and write a book. I’ve always enjoyed telling stories and now I’ll have something to tell. Funny, eh?” Bob’s smile faded and was replaced by a thoughtful expression. “This war’s killed millions of boys and young men and caused horrible suffering, yet I can’t help feeling that it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
I was trying to think of a response to this when the whistle of an incoming shell made us both duck. It exploded some distance behind us and was followed by others, but the closest only showered us with clods of dirt. Our artillery was just beginning its response when a figure dove into the trench beside us.
“We have to withdraw right now. There’s a massive counter attack coming.”
It was Ken. I was horrified to see the state he was in. As usual, he was dressed in a private’s uniform so as not to be an obvious target for a German sniper, but his tunic was ragged and torn all down one side and he was without his helmet or rifle. His face beneath his tangled hair was pale and his eyes wide and constantly moving from side to side. He held his left arm across his chest and his hand jerked spasmodically.
“Ken,” I said, forgetting for a moment that I was addressing my commanding officer, “Are you all right? Have you been wounded?”
Ken didn’t reply but simply repeated his panicked warning. “The barrage signals an attack coming. We can’t ho
ld out here. We have to withdraw. Pass the order along the line!”
“It’s all quiet out there, sir,” Bob said, peering over the lip of the shell hole. “I don’t see any signs of an attack. The German guns have all but stopped firing and ours are giving them quite a pasting, by the sound of it.”
“An attack’s coming,” Ken repeated in a high-pitched whine, ignoring what Bob had said. “We’ll all be killed unless we withdraw. I have to tell the others.”
He lunged to the side and tried to climb out. Without thinking, I grabbed him and pulled him back in. I was confused, but I knew I couldn’t let anyone else see him like this.
“Calm down, Ken. It’s all right.” My words had no effect and he continued to struggle, kicking me in the shins and trying to wrench himself away. Forgetting that I could be court martialled, even shot, for assaulting an officer, I hauled back and hit Ken as hard as I could. It was an awkward half-slap, half-punch, and it didn’t land cleanly, but it seemed enough to shock him into some kind of awareness. He stopped struggling and looked around as if he had just woken up and wasn’t sure where he was. Then he sagged into a heap, as if all his bones had suddenly melted, and began sobbing helplessly.
I looked up at Bob, who was watching, wide-eyed. “Is it still quiet out there?”
Bob peered over the edge of the shell hole and took a quick look around. “It is,” he said. “I don’t think there’s an attack coming.”
I crouched down beside Ken and put my arm around his shoulders. “It’s all right,” I said, as calmly as I could manage. “There’s no attack coming. We’ve taken the village. It’s a great victory. Everything’ll be fine.”
Ken looked up, his filthy face streaked with tears. He was blinking rapidly and his hand was shaking violently. “Fine?” he asked.
“Yes, everything’s going to be fine. Even if there is an attack later, we can hold them off. We’ve won. The Canadians have got the high ground now and no one’s going to take it from us.”
Ken screwed his eyes tight shut and took a deep breath. He seemed to be searching for strength deep within himself.
