BEST O’ LUCK
  BY ALEXANDER McCLINTOCK, D. C. M.


“The Distinguished Conduct Medal has been awarded to Sergeant Alexander
McClintock of the Canadian Overseas Forces for conspicuous gallantry
in action. He displayed great courage and determination during a raid
against the enemy’s trenches. Later he rescued several wounded men at
great personal risk.”

  _Extract from official communication
  from the Canadian War Office to the
  British Consul General in New York._




  BEST O’ LUCK

  HOW A FIGHTING KENTUCKIAN
  WON THE THANKS OF BRITAIN’S KING

  BY
  ALEXANDER McCLINTOCK, D. C. M.

  Late Sergeant, 87th Battalion, Canadian Grenadier Guards
  Now member of U. S. A. Reserve Corps


  NEW YORK
  GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY




  COPYRIGHT, 1917,
  BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY


  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




  TO MY MOTHER
  MAUDE JOHNSON McCLINTOCK




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                PAGE

    I TRAINING FOR THE WAR                11
   II THE BOMBING RAID                    43
  III “OVER THE TOP AND GIVE ’EM HELL”    75
   IV SHIFTED TO THE SOMME               101
    V WOUNDED IN ACTION                  121
   VI A VISIT FROM THE KING              151




BEST O’ LUCK


CHAPTER I

TRAINING FOR THE WAR


I don’t lay claim to being much of a writer, and up ’till now I never
felt the call to write anything about my experiences with the Canadian
troops in Belgium and France, because I realized that a great many
other men had seen quite as much as I, and could beat me telling about
it. Of course, I believed that my experience was worth relating, and
I thought that the matter published in the newspapers by professional
writers sort of missed the essentials and lacked the spirit of the
“ditches” in a good many ways despite its excellent literary style, but
I didn’t see any reason why it was up to me to make an effort as a war
historian, until now.

Now, there is a reason, as I look at it.

I believe I can show the two or three millions of my fellow countrymen
who will be “out there” before this war is over what they are going
to be up against, and what they ought to prepare for, personally and
individually.

That is as far as I am going to go in the way of excuse, explanation,
or comment. The rest of my story is a simple relation of facts and
occurrences in the order in which they came to my notice and happened
to me. It may start off a little slowly and jerkily, just as we
did--not knowing what was coming to us. I’d like to add that it got
quite hot enough to suit me later--several times. Therefore, as my
effort is going to be to carry you right along with me in this account
of my experiences, don’t be impatient if nothing very important seems
to happen at first. I felt a little ennui myself at the beginning. But
that was certainly one thing that didn’t annoy me later.

In the latter part of October, 1915, I decided that the United States
ought to be fighting along with England and France on account of
the way Belgium had been treated, if for no other reason. As there
seemed to be a considerable division of opinion on this point among
the people at home, I came to the conclusion that any man who was
free, white, and twenty-one and felt as I did, ought to go over and
get into it single-handed on the side where his convictions led him,
if there wasn’t some particular reason why he couldn’t. Therefore, I
said good-by to my parents and friends in Lexington, and started for
New York with the idea of sailing for France, and joining the Foreign
Legion of the French Army.

A couple of nights after I got to New York I fell into conversation in
the Knickerbocker bar with a chap who was in the reinforcement company
of Princess Pat’s regiment of the Canadian forces. After my talk with
him, I decided to go up to Canada and look things over. I arrived
at the Windsor Hotel, in Montreal, at eight o’clock in the morning,
a couple of days later, and at ten o’clock the same morning I was
sworn in as a private in the Canadian Grenadier Guards, Eighty-seventh
Overseas Battalion, Lieut.-Col. F. S. Meighen, Commanding.

They were just getting under way making soldiers out of the troops I
enlisted with, and discipline was quite lax. They at once gave me a
week’s leave to come down to New York, and settle up some personal
affairs, and I overstayed it five days. All that my company commander
said to me when I got back was that I seemed to have picked up Canadian
habits very quickly. At a review one day in our training camp, I heard
a Major say:

“Boys, for God’s sake don’t call me Harry or spit in the ranks. Here
comes the General!”

We found out eventually that there was a reason for the slackness of
discipline. The trouble was that men would enlist to get $1.10 a day
without working for it, and would desert as soon as any one made it
unpleasant for them. Our officers knew what they were about. Conditions
changed instantly we went on ship-board. Discipline tightened up on us
like a tie-rope on a colt.

We trained in a sort of casual, easy way in Canada from November 4th
to the following April. We had a good deal of trouble keeping our
battalion up to strength, and I was sent out several times with other
“non-coms” on a recruiting detail.

Aside from desertions, there were reasons why we couldn’t keep our
quota. The weeding out of the physically unfit brought surprising and
extensive results. Men who appeared at first amply able to stand “the
game” were unable to keep up when the screw was turned. Then, also,
our regiment stuck to a high physical standard. Every man must be five
feet ten, or over. Many of our candidates failed on the perpendicular
requirement only. However, we were not confined to the ordinary rule
in Canada, that recruits must come from the home military district of
the battalion. We were permitted to recruit throughout the Dominion,
and thus we gathered quite a cosmopolitan crowd. The only other unit
given this privilege of Dominion-wide recruiting was the P. P. C. L.
I. (Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry), the first regiment
to go overseas from Canada, composed largely of veterans of the South
African and other colonial wars. We felt a certain emulation about this
veteran business and voiced it in our recruiting appeals. We assured
our prospective “rookies” that we were just as first-class as any of
them. On most of our recruiting trips we took a certain corporal with
us who had seen service in France with a Montreal regiment and had
been invalided home. He was our star speaker. He would mount a box or
other improvised stand and describe in his simple, soldierly way the
splendid achievements of the comrades who had gone over ahead of us,
and the opportunities for glory and distinction awaiting any brave
man who joined with us. When he described his experiences there was a
note of compelling eloquence and patriotic fervor in his remarks which
sometimes aroused the greatest enthusiasm. Often he was cheered as
a hero and carried on men’s shoulders from the stand, while recruits
came forward in flocks and women weepingly bade them go on and do their
duty. I learned, afterwards that this corporal had been a cook, had
never been within twenty miles of the frontline, and had been invalided
home for varicocele veins. He served us well; but there was a man
who was misplaced, in vocation and geography. He should have been in
politics in Kentucky.

While we were in the training camp at St. Johns, I made the
acquaintance of a young Canadian who became my “pal.” He was Campbell
Macfarlane, nephew of George Macfarlane, the actor who is so well known
on the American musical stage. He was a sergeant. When I first knew
him, he was one of the most delightful and amusing young fellows you
could imagine.

The war changed him entirely, He became extremely quiet and seemed to
be borne down with the sense of the terrible things which he saw. He
never lost the good-fellowship which was inherent in him, and was
always ready to do anything to oblige one, but he formed the habit of
sitting alone and silent, for hours at a time, just thinking. It seemed
as if he had a premonition about himself, though he never showed fear
and never spoke of the dangers we were going into, as the other fellows
did. He was killed in the Somme action in which I was wounded.

I’m not much on metaphysics and it is difficult for me to express the
thought I would convey here. I can just say, as I would if I were
talking to a pal, that I have often wondered what the intangible mental
or moral quality is that makes men think and act so differently to
one another when confronted by the imminent prospect of sudden death.
Is it a question of will power--of imagination, or the lack of it--of
something that you can call merely physical courage--or what? Take the
case of Macfarlane: In action he was as brave as they make them, but,
as I have said before, the prospect of sudden death and the presence of
death and suffering around him changed him utterly. From a cheerful,
happy lad he was transformed into an old man, silent, gloomy and
absent-minded except for momentary flashes of his old spirit which
became less and less frequent as the time for his own end drew nearer.

There was another chap with us from a little town in Northern Ontario.
While in Canada and England he was utterly worthless; always in trouble
for being absent without leave, drunk, late on parade, or something
else. I think he must, at one time or another, have been charged with
every offense possible under the K. R. & O. (King’s Regulations and
Orders). On route marches he was constantly “falling out.” I told him,
one day when I was in command of a platoon, that he ought to join the
Royal Flying Corps. Then he would only have to fall out once. He said
that he considered this a very good joke and asked me if I could think
of anything funny in connection with being absent without leave--which
he was, that night. In France, this chap was worth ten ordinary men.
He was always cheerful, always willing and prompt in obeying orders,
ready to tackle unhesitatingly the most unpleasant or the most risky
duty, and the hotter it was the better he liked it. He came out
laughing and unscathed from a dozen tight places where it didn’t seem
possible for him to escape. To use a much-worn phrase, he seemed to
bear a charmed life. I’ll wager my last cent that he never gets an
“R. I. P.”--which they put on the cross above a soldier’s grave, and
which the Tommies call “Rise If Possible.” Then there was a certain
sergeant who was the best instructor in physical training and bayonet
fighting in our brigade and who was as fine and dashing a soldier in
physique and carriage as you ever could see. When he got under fire
he simply went to pieces. On our first bombing raid he turned and ran
back into our own barbed wire, and when he was caught there acted like
a madman. He was given another chance but flunked worse than ever. I
don’t think he was a plain coward. There was merely something wrong
with his nervous system. He just didn’t have the “viscera.” Now he is
back of the lines, instructing, and will never be sent to the trenches
again. We had an officer, also, who was a man of the greatest courage,
so far as sticking where he belonged and keeping his men going ahead
might be concerned, but every time he heard a big shell coming over
he was seized with a violent fit of vomiting. I don’t know what makes
men brave or cowardly in action, and I wouldn’t undertake to say which
quality a man might show until I saw him in action, but I do know this:
If a man isn’t frightened when he goes under fire, it’s because he
lacks intelligence. He simply must be frightened if he has the ordinary
human attributes. But if he has what we call physical courage he goes
on with the rest of them. Then if he has extraordinary courage he may
go on where the rest of them won’t go. I should say that the greatest
fear the ordinary man has in going into action is the fear that he will
show that he is afraid--not to his officers, or to the Germans, or to
the folks back home, but to his mates; to the men with whom he has
laughed and scoffed at danger.

It’s the elbow-to-elbow influence that carries men up to face machine
guns and gas. A heroic battalion may be made up of units of potential
cowards.

At the time when Macfarlane was given his stripes, I also was made
a sergeant on account of the fact that I had been at school in the
Virginia Military Institute. That is, I was an acting sergeant. It
was explained to me that my appointment would have to be confirmed in
England, and then reconfirmed after three months’ service in France.
Under the regulations of the Canadian forces, a non-commissioned
officer, after final confirmation in his grade, can be reduced to
the ranks only by a general court-martial, though he can escape a
court-martial, when confronted with charges, by reverting to the ranks
at his own request.

Forty-two hundred of us sailed for England on the _Empress of
Britain_, sister ship to the _Empress of Ireland_, which was sunk in
the St. Lawrence River. The steamer was, of course, very crowded and
uncomfortable, and the eight-day trip across was most unpleasant. We
had tripe to eat until we were sick of the sight of it. A sergeant
reported one morning, “eight men and twenty-two breakfasts, absent.”
There were two other troop ships in our convoy, the _Baltic_ and the
_Metagama_. A British cruiser escorted us until we were four hundred
miles off the coast of Ireland; then each ship picked up a destroyer
which had come out to meet her. At that time, a notice was posted in
the purser’s office informing us that we were in the war zone, and that
the ship would not stop for anything, even for a man overboard. That
day a soldier fell off the _Metagama_ with seven hundred dollars in his
pocket, and the ship never even hesitated. They left him where he had
no chance in the world to spend his money.

Through my training in the V. M. I., I was able to read semaphore
signals, and I caught the message from the destroyer which escorted us.
It read:

“Each ship for herself now. Make a break!”

We beat the other steamers of our convoy eight hours in getting to the
dock in Liverpool, and, according to what seemed to be the regular
system of our operations at that time, we were the last to disembark.

The majority of our fellows had never been in England before, and they
looked on our travels at that time as a fine lark. Everybody cheered
and laughed when they dusted off one of those little toy trains and
brought it up to take us away in it. After we were aboard of it, we
proceeded at the dizzy rate of about four miles an hour, and our
regular company humorist--no company is complete without one--suggested
that they were afraid, if they went any faster, they might run off of
the island before they could stop. We were taken to Bramshott camp, in
Hampshire, twelve miles from the Aldershott School of Command. The next
day we were given “King’s leave”--eight days with free transportation
anywhere in the British Isles. It is the invariable custom to give this
sort of leave to all colonial troops immediately upon their arrival in
England. However, in our case, Ireland was barred. Just at that time,
Ireland was no place for a newly arrived Canadian looking for sport.

Our men followed the ordinary rule of soldiers on leave. About
seventy-five per cent. of them wired in for extensions and more money.
About seventy-four per cent. received peremptorily unfavorable replies.
The excuses and explanations which came in kept our officers interested
and amused for some days. One man--who got leave--sent in a telegram
which is now framed and hung on the wall of a certain battalion
orderley’s room. He telegraphed:

“No one dead. No one ill. Got plenty of money. Just having a good time.
Please grant extension.”

After our leave, they really began to make soldiers of us. We thought
our training in Canada had amounted to something. We found out that we
might as well have been playing croquet. We learned more the first week
of our actual training in England than we did from November to April in
Canada. I make this statement without fear that any officer or man of
the Canadian forces alive to-day will disagree with me, and I submit it
for the thoughtful consideration of the gentlemen who believe that our
own armies can be prepared for service here at home.

The sort of thing that the President is up against at Washington is
fairly exemplified in what the press despatches mention as “objections
on technical grounds” of the “younger officers of the war college,”
to the recommendations which General Pershing has made as to the
reorganization of the units of our army for service in Europe.

The extent of the reorganization which must be made in pursuance of
General Pershing’s recommendations is not apparent to most people.
Even our best informed militia officers do not know how fundamentally
different the organization of European armies is to that which has
existed in our own army since the days when it was established to suit
conditions of the Civil War. But the officers of our regular army
realize what the reorganization would mean and some of them rise to
oppose it for fear it may jeopardize their seniority or promotion or
importance. But they’ll have to come to it. The Unites States army can
not operate successfully in France unless its units are convenient and
similar multiples to those in the French and British armies. It would
lead to endless confusion and difficulty if we kept the regiment as our
field unit while our allies have the battalion as their field unit.

There are but unimportant differences in the unit organization of the
French, British and Canadian forces. The British plan of organization
is an examplar of all, and it is what we must have in our army. There
is no such thing in the British army as an established regimental
strength. A battalion numbers 1,500 men, but there is no limit to
the number of battalions which a regiment may have. The battalion
is the field unit. There are regiments in the British army which
have seven battalions in the field. Each battalion is commanded by
a lieutenant-colonel. All full colonels either do staff duty or act
as brigaders. There are five companies of 250 men each in every
battalion. That is, there are four regular companies of 250 men each,
and a headquarters company of approximately that strength. Each company
is commanded by a major, with a captain as second in command, and four
lieutenants as platoon commanders. There are no second lieutenants in
the Canadian forces, though there are in the British and French. The
senior major of the battalion commands the headquarters company, which
includes the transport, quartermaster’s staff, paymaster’s department
(a paymaster and four clerks), and the headquarters staff (a captain
adjutant and his non-commissioned staff). Each battalion has, in
addition to its full company strength, the following “sections” of
from 30 to 75 men each, and each commanded by a lieutenant: bombers,
scouts and snipers, machine gunners and signallers. There is also a
section of stretcher-bearers, under the direct command of the battalion
surgeon, who ranks as a major. In the United States army a battalion is
commanded by a major. It consists merely of four companies of 112 men
each, with a captain and two lieutenants to each company.

As I have said, a British or French battalion has four ordinary
companies of 250 men each and the headquarters company of special
forces approximating that number of men. Instead of one major it
has six, including the surgeon. It has seven captains, including
the paymaster, the adjutant and the quartermaster. It has twenty
lieutenants, including the commanders of special “sections.” You
can imagine what confusion would be likely to occur in substituting
a United States force for a French or English force, with these
differences of organization existing.

In this war, every man has got to be a specialist. He’s got to
know one thing better than anybody else except those who have had
intensive instruction in the same branch. And besides that, he’s got
to have effective general knowledge of all the specialties in which
his fellow soldiers have been particularly trained. I can illustrate
this. Immediately upon our return from first leave in England, we
were divided into sections for training in eight specialties. They
were: Bombing, sniping, scouting, machine-gun fighting, signalling,
trench mortar operation, bayonet fighting, and stretcher-bearing.
I was selected for special training in bombing, probably because I
was supposed, as an American and a baseball player, to be expert in
throwing. With the other men picked for training in the same specialty,
I was sent to Aldershott, and there, for three weeks, twelve hours a
day, I threw bombs, studied bombs, read about bombs, took bombs to
pieces and put them together again, and did practically everything else
that you would do with a bomb, except eat it.

Then I was ordered back along with the other men who had gained this
intimate acquaintance with the bomb family, and we were put to work
teaching the entire battalion all that we had learned. When we were not
teaching, we were under instruction ourselves by the men who had taken
special training in other branches. Also, at certain periods of the
day, we had physical training and rifle practice. Up to the time of our
arrival in England, intensive training had been merely a fine phrase
with us. During our stay there, it was a definite and overpowering
fact. Day and night we trained and day and night it rained. At nine
o’clock, we would fall into our bunks in huts which held from a half
to a whole platoon--from thirty to sixty men--and drop into exhausted
sleep, only to turn out at 5 A.M. to give a sudden imitation of what we
would do to the Germans if they sneaked up on us before breakfast in
six inches of mud. Toward the last, when we thought we had been driven
to the limit, they told us that we were to have a period of real,
intensive training to harden us for actual fighting. They sent us four
imperial drill sergeants from the British Grenadier Guards, the senior
foot regiment of the British army, and the one with which we were
affiliated.

It would be quite unavailing for me to attempt to describe these drill
sergeants. The British drill sergeant is an institution which can
be understood only through personal and close contact. If he thinks
a major-general is wrong, he’ll tell him so on the spot in the most
emphatic way, but without ever violating a single sacred tradition
of the service. The sergeants, who took us in charge to put the real
polish on our training, had all seen from twenty to twenty-five years
of service. They had all been through the battles of Mons and the
Marne, and they had all been wounded. They were perfect examples of a
type. One of them ordered all of our commissioned officers, from the
colonel down, to turn out for rifle drill one day, and put them through
the manual of arms while the soldiers of the battalion stood around,
looking on.

“Gentlemen,” said he, in the midst of the drill, “when I see you handle
your rifles I feel like falling on my knees and thanking God that we’ve
got a navy.”

On June 2d, after the third battle of Ypres, while Macfarlane and I
were sitting wearily on our bunks during an odd hour in the afternoon
when nobody had thought of anything for us to do, a soldier came
in with a message from headquarters which put a sudden stop to the
discussion we were having about the possibility of getting leave to
go up to London. The message was that the First, Second and Third
divisions of the Canadians had lost forty per cent. of their men in the
third fight at Ypres and that three hundred volunteers were wanted from
each of our battalions to fill up the gaps.

“Forty per cent.,” said Macfarlane, getting up quickly. “My God, think
of it! Well, I’m off to tell ’em I’ll go.”

I told him I was with him, and we started for headquarters, expecting
to be received with applause and pointed out as heroic examples. We
couldn’t even get up to give in our names. The whole battalion had gone
ahead of us. They heard about it first. That was the spirit of the
Canadians. It was about this time that a story went ’round concerning
an English colonel who had been called upon to furnish volunteers from
his outfit to replace casualties. He backed his regiment up against a
barrack wall and said:

“Now, all who don’t want to volunteer, step three paces to the rear.”

In our battalion, sergeants and even officers offered to go as
privates. Our volunteers went at once, and we were re-enforced up to
strength by drafts from the Fifth Canadian division, which was then
forming in England.

In July, when we were being kept on the rifle ranges most of the
time, all leave was stopped, and we were ordered to hold ourselves in
readiness to go overseas. In the latter part of the month, we started.
We sailed from Southampton to Havre on a big transport, escorted all
the way by destroyers. As we landed, we got our first sight of the
harvest of war. A big hospital on the quay was filled with wounded men.
We had twenty-four hours in what they called a “rest camp.” We slept
on cobble stones in shacks which were so utterly comfortless that it
would be an insult to a Kentucky thoroughbred to call them stables.
Then we were on the way to the Belgian town of Poperinghe, which is one
hundred and fifty miles from Havre and was, at that time, the rail head
of the Ypres salient. We made the trip in box cars which were marked
in French: “Eight horses or forty men,” and we had to draw straws to
decide who should lie down.

We got into Poperinghe at 7 A.M., and the scouts had led us into the
front trenches at two the next morning. Our position was to the left
of St. Eloi and was known as “The Island,” because it had no support
on either side. On the left, were the Yser Canal and the bluff which
forms its bank. On the right were three hundred yards of battered-down
trenches which had been rebuilt twice and blown in again each time by
the German guns. For some reason, which I never quite understood, the
Germans were able to drop what seemed a tolerably large proportion of
the output of the Krupp works on this particular spot whenever they
wanted to. Our high command had concluded that it was untenable,
and so we, on one side of it, and the British on the other, had to
just keep it scouted and protect our separate flanks. Another name
they had for that position was the “Bird Cage.” That was because the
first fellows who moved into it made themselves nice and comfy and put
up wire nettings to prevent any one from tossing bombs in on them.
Thus, when the Germans stirred up the spot with an accurate shower
of “whiz-bangs” and “coal-boxes,” the same being thirteen-pounders
and six-inch shells, that wire netting presented a spectacle of utter
inadequacy which hasn’t been equalled in this war.

They called the position which we were assigned to defend “The
Graveyard of Canada.” That was because of the fearful losses of the
Canadians here in the second battle of Ypres, from April 21, to June 1,
1915, when the first gas attack in the world’s history was launched by
the Germans, and, although the French, on the left, and the British, on
the right, fell back, the Canadians stayed where they were put.

Right here I can mention something which will give you an idea why
descriptions of this war don’t describe it. During the first gas
attack, the Canadians, choking to death and falling over each other
in a fight against a new and unheard-of terror in warfare, found a
way--the Lord only knows who first discovered it and how he happened to
do it--to stay through a gas cloud and come out alive. It isn’t pretty
to think of, and it’s like many other things in this war which you
can’t even tell of in print, because simple description would violate
the nice ethics about reading matter for the public eye, which have
grown up in long years of peace and traditional decency. But this thing
which you can’t describe meant just the difference between life and
death to many of the Canadians, that first day of the gas. Official
orders: now, tell every soldier what he is to do with his handkerchief
or a piece of his shirt if he is caught in a gas attack without his
mask.

The nearest I can come, in print, to telling you what a soldier
is ordered to do in this emergency is to remind you that ammonia
fumes oppose chlorine gas as a neutralizing agent, and that certain
emanations of the body throw off ammonia fumes.

Now that I’ve told you how we got from the Knickerbocker bar and other
places to a situation which was just one hundred and fifty yards from
the entrenched front of the German army in Belgium, I might as well add
a couple of details about things which straightway put the fear of God
in our hearts. At daybreak, one of our Fourteenth platoon men, standing
on the firing step, pushed back his trench helmet and remarked that
he thought it was about time for coffee. He didn’t get any. A German
sharpshooter, firing the first time that day, got him under the rim
of his helmet, and his career with the Canadian forces was over right
there. And then, as the dawn broke, we made out a big painted sign
raised above the German front trench. It read:

                               WELCOME,
                       EIGHTY-SEVENTH CANADIANS

We were a new battalion, we had been less than seventy-two hours on the
continent of Europe and the Germans were not supposed to know anything
that was going on behind our lines!

We learned, afterward, that concealed telephones in the houses of the
Belgian burgomasters of the villages of Dinkiebusch and Renninghelst,
near our position, gave communication with the German headquarters
opposite us. One of the duties of a detail of our men, soon after that,
was to stand these two burgomasters up against a wall and shoot them.




CHAPTER II

THE BOMBING RAID


When we took our position in the front line trenches in Belgium, we
relieved the Twenty-sixth Canadian Battalion. The Twenty-sixth belonged
to the Second division, and had seen real service during the battle
of Hooge and in what is now termed the third battle of Ypres, which
occurred in June, 1916. The organization was made up almost exclusively
of French Canadians from Quebec, and it was as fine a fighting force as
we had shown the Fritzes, despite the fact that men of their race, as
developments have proved, are not strongly loyal to Canada and Britain.
Individually, the men of this French Canadian battalion were splendid
soldiers and the organization could be criticized on one score only. In
the heat of action it could not be kept in control. On one occasion
when it went in, in broad daylight, to relieve another battalion, the
men didn’t stop at the fire trench. They went right on “over the top,”
without orders, and, as a result, were badly cut up. Time and again
the men of this battalion crossed “No Man’s Land” at night, without
orders and without even asking consent, just to have a scrimmage with
“the beloved enemy.” Once, when ordered to take two lines of trenches,
they did so in the most soldierly fashion, but, seeing red, kept on
going as if their orders were to continue to Berlin. On this occasion
they charged right into their barrage fire and lost scores of their
men, struck down by British shells. It has been said often of all the
Canadians that they go the limit, without hesitation. There was a
time when the “Bing Boys”--the Canadians were so called because this
title of a London musical comedy was suggested by the fact that their
commander was General Byng--were ordered to take no prisoners, this
order being issued after two of their men were found crucified. A
Canadian private, having penetrated a German trench with an attacking
party, encountered a German who threw up his hands and said: “Mercy,
Kamerade. I have a wife and five children at home.”

“You’re mistaken,” replied the Canadian. “You have a widow and five
orphans at home.”

And, very shortly, he had.

Scouts from the Twenty-sixth battalion had come back to the villages of
Dinkiebusch and Renninghelst to tell us how glad they were to see us
and to show us the way in. As we proceeded overland, before reaching
the communication trenches at the front, these scouts paid us the
hospitable attentions due strangers. That is, one of them leading a
platoon would say:

“Next two hundred yards in machine gun range. Keep quiet, don’t run,
and be ready to drop quick if you are warned.”

There was one scout to each platoon, and we followed him, single file,
most of the time along roads or well-worn paths, but sometimes through
thickets and ragged fields. Every now and then the scout would yell
at us to drop, and down we’d go on our stomachs while, away off in the
distance we could hear the “put-put” of machine guns--the first sound
of hostile firing that had ever reached our ears.

“It’s all right,” said the scout. “They haven’t seen us or got track of
us. They’re just firing on suspicion.”

Nevertheless, when our various platoons had all got into the front
reserve trenches, at about two hours after midnight, we learned that
the first blood of our battalion had been spilled. Two men had been
wounded, though neither fatally. Our own stretcher-bearers took our
wounded back to the field hospital at Dinkiebusch. The men of the
Twenty-sixth battalion spent the rest of the night instructing us and
then left us to hold the position. We were as nervous as a lot of
cats, and it seemed to me that the Germans must certainly know that
they could come over and walk right through us, but, outside of a few
casualties from sniping, such as the one that befell the Fourteenth
platoon man, which I have told about, nothing very alarming happened
the first day and night, and by that time we had got steady on our
job. We held the position for twenty-six days, which was the longest
period that any Canadian or British organization had ever remained in a
front-line trench.

In none of the stories I’ve read, have I ever seen trench fighting, as
it was then carried on in Belgium, adequately described. You see, you
can’t get much of an idea about a thing like that, making a quick tour
of the trenches under official direction and escort, as the newspaper
and magazine writers do. I couldn’t undertake to tell anything worth
while about the big issues of the war, but I can describe how soldiers
have to learn to fight in the trenches--and I think a good many of our
young fellows have that to learn, now. “Over there,” they don’t talk of
peace or even of to-morrow. They just sit back and take it.

We always held the fire trench as lightly as possible, because it is a
demonstrated fact that the front ditch cannot be successfully defended
in a determined attack. The thing to do is to be ready to jump onto the
enemy as soon as he has got into your front trench and is fighting on
ground that you know and he doesn’t and knock so many kinds of tar out
of him that he’ll have to pull his freight for a spot that isn’t so
warm. That system worked first rate for us.

During the day, we had only a very few men in the fire trench. If an
attack is coming in daylight, there’s always plenty of time to get
ready for it. At night, we kept prepared for trouble all the time. We
had a night sentry on each firing step and a man sitting at his feet to
watch him and know if he was secretly sniped. Then we had a sentry in
each “bay” of the trench to take messages.

Orders didn’t permit the man on the firing step or the man watching him
to leave post on any excuse whatever, during their two-hour “spell” of
duty. Hanging on a string, at the elbow of each sentry on the fire-step
was a siren whistle or an empty shell case and bit of iron with which
to hammer on it. This--siren or improvised gong--was for the purpose
of spreading the alarm in case of a gas attack. Also we had sentries
in “listening posts,” at various points from twenty to fifty yards out
in “No Man’s Land.” These men blackened their faces before they went
“over the top,” and then lay in shell holes or natural hollows. There
were always two of them, a bayonet man and a bomber. From the listening
post a wire ran back to the fire trench to be used in signaling. In
the trench, a man sat with this wire wrapped around his hand. One pull
meant “All O. K.,” two pulls, “I’m coming in,” three pulls, “Enemy in
sight,” and four pulls, “Sound gas alarm.” The fire step in a trench
is a shelf on which soldiers stand so that they may aim their rifles
between the sand bags which form the parapet.

In addition to these men, we had patrols and scouts out in “No
Man’s Land” the greater part of the night, with orders to gain any
information possible which might be of value to battalion, brigade,
division or general headquarters. They reported on the conditions of
the Germans’ barbed wire, the location of machine guns and other little
things like that which might be of interest to some commanding officer,
twenty miles back. Also, they were ordered to make every effort to
capture any of the enemy’s scouts or patrols, so that we could get
information from them. One of the interesting moments in this work came
when a star shell caught you out in an open spot. If you moved you were
gone. I’ve seen men stand on one foot for the thirty seconds during
which a star shell will burn. Then, when scouts or patrols met in “No
Man’s Land” they always had to fight it out with bayonets. One single
shot would be the signal for artillery fire and would mean the almost
instant annihilation of the men on both sides of the fight. Under the
necessities of this war, many of our men have been killed by our own
shell fire.

At a little before daybreak came “stand-to,” when everybody got
buttoned up and ready for business, because, at that hour, most attacks
begin and also that was one of the two regular times for a dose of
“morning and evening hate,” otherwise a good lively fifteen minutes of
shell fire. We had some casualties every morning and evening, and the
stretcher-bearers used to get ready for them as a matter of course.
For fifteen minutes at dawn and dusk, the Germans used to send over
“whiz-bangs,” “coal-boxes” and “minniewurfers” (shells from trench
mortars) in such a generous way that it looked as if they liked to
shoot ’em off, whether they hit anything or not. You could always
hear the “heavy stuff” coming, and we paid little attention to it as
it was used in efforts to reach the batteries, back of our lines. The
poor old town of Dinkiebusch got the full benefit of it. When a shell
would shriek its way over, some one would say: “There goes the express
for Dinkiebusch,” and a couple of seconds later, when some prominent
landmark of Dinkiebusch would disintegrate to the accompaniment of a
loud detonation, some one else would remark:

“Train’s arrived!”

The scouts who inhabited “No Man’s Land” by night became snipers
by day. Different units had different systems of utilizing these
specialists. The British and the French usually left their scouts and
snipers in one locality so that they might come to know every hummock
and hollow and tree-stump of the limited landscape which absorbed
their unending attention. The Canadians, up to the time when I left
France, invariably took their scouts and snipers along when they moved
from one section of the line to another. This system was criticized as
having the disadvantage of compelling the men to learn new territory
while opposing enemy scouts familiar with every inch of the ground.
As to the contention on this point, I could not undertake to decide,
but it seemed to me that our system had, at least, the advantage of
keeping the men more alert and less likely to grow careless. Some of
our snipers acquired reputations for a high degree of skill and there
was always a fascination for me in watching them work. We always had
two snipers to each trench section. They would stand almost motionless
on the fire steps for hours at a time, searching every inch of the
German front trench and the surrounding territory with telescopes. They
always swathed their heads with sand bags, looking like huge, grotesque
turbans, as this made the finest kind of an “assimilation covering.” It
would take a most alert German to pick out a man’s head, so covered,
among all the tens of thousands of sand bags which lined our parapet.
The snipers always used special rifles with telescopic sights, and
they made most extraordinary shots. Some of them who had been huntsmen
in the Canadian big woods were marvellous marksmen. Frequently one of
them would continue for several days giving special attention to a
spot where a German had shown the top of his head for a moment. If the
German ever showed again, at that particular spot, he was usually done
for. A yell or some little commotion in the German trenches, following
the sniper’s quick shot would tell the story to us. Then the sniper
would receive general congratulations. There is a first warning to
every man going into the trenches. It is: “Fear God and keep your head
down.”

Our rations in the trenches were, on the whole, excellent. There were
no delicacies and the food was not over plentiful, but it was good. The
system appeared to have the purpose of keeping us like bulldogs before
a fight--with enough to live on but hungry all the time. Our food
consisted principally of bacon, beans, beef, bully-beef, hard tack, jam
and tea. Occasionally we had a few potatoes, and, when we were taken
back for a few days’ rest, we got a good many things which difficulty
of transport excluded from the front trenches. It was possible,
sometimes, to beg, borrow or even steal eggs and fresh bread and coffee.

All of our provisions came up to the front line in sand bags, a fact
easily recognizable when you tasted them. There is supposed to be
an intention to segregate the various foods, in transport, but it
must be admitted that they taste more or less of each other, and
that the characteristic sand-bag flavor distinguishes all of them
from mere, ordinary foods which have not made a venturesome journey.
As many of the sand bags have been originally used for containing
brown sugar, the flavor is more easily recognized than actually
unpleasant. When we got down to the Somme, the food supply was much
less satisfactory--principally because of transport difficulties. At
times, even in the rear, we could get fresh meat only twice a week, and
were compelled to live the rest of the time on bully-beef stew, which
resembles terrapin to the extent that it is a liquid with mysterious
lumps in it. In the front trenches, on the Somme, all we had were the
“iron rations” which we were able to carry in with us. These consisted
of bully-beef, hard tack, jam and tea. The supply of these foods which
each man carries is termed “emergency rations,” and the ordinary rule
is that the emergency ration must not be touched until the man has
been forty-eight hours without food, and then only by permission of an
officer.

One of the great discoveries of this war is that hard tack makes an
excellent fuel, burning like coke and giving off no smoke. We usually
saved enough hard tack to form a modest escort, stomachward, for our
jam, and used the rest to boil our tea. Until one has been in the
trenches he cannot realize what a useful article of diet jam is. It
is undoubtedly nutritious and one doesn’t tire of it, even though
there seem to be but two varieties now existing in any considerable
quantities--plum and apple. Once upon a time a hero of the “ditches”
discovered that his tin contained strawberry jam, but there was such a
rush when he announced it that he didn’t get any of it.

There was, of course, a very good reason for the shortness and
uncertainty of the food supply on the Somme. All communication with
the front line was practically overland, the communication trenches
having been blown in. Ration parties, bringing in food, frequently
suffered heavy casualties. Yet they kept tenaciously and courageously
doing their best for us. Occasionally they even brought up hot soup in
huge, improvised thermos bottles made from petrol tins wrapped in straw
and sand bags, but this was very rarely attempted, and not with much
success. You could sum up the food situation briefly. It was good--when
you got it.

It may be fitting, at this time, to pay a tribute to the soldier’s
most invaluable friend, the sand bag. The sand bag, like the rest of
us, did not start life in a military capacity, but since joining the
army it has fulfilled its duty nobly. Primarily, sand bags are used in
making a parapet for a trench or a roof for a dug-out, but there are a
hundred other uses to which they have been adapted, without hesitation
and possibly without sufficient gratitude for their ready adaptability.
Some of these uses may surprise you. Soldiers strain their tea through
them, wrap them around their legs for protection against cold and mud,
swab their rifles with them to keep them clean, use them for bed sacks,
kit bags and ration bags. The first thing a man does when he enters a
trench or reaches a new position which is to be held is to feel in his
belt, if he is a private, or to yell for some one else to feel in his
belt, if he is an officer, for a sand bag. Each soldier is supposed to
have five tucked beneath his belt whenever he starts to do anything
out of the ordinary. When you’ve got hold of the first one, in a new
position, under fire, you commence filling it as fast as the Germans
and your own ineptitude will permit, and the sooner that bag is filled
and placed, the more likely you are to continue in a state of health
and good spirits. Sand bags are never filled with sand, because there
is never any sand to put into them. Anything that you can put in with a
shovel will do.

About the only amusement we had during our long stay in the front
trenches in Belgium, was to sit with our backs against the rear wall
and shoot at the rats running along the parapet. Poor Macfarlane, with
a flash of the old humor which he had before the war, told a “rookie”
that the trench rats were so big that he saw one of them trying on his
great-coat. They used to run over our faces when we were sleeping in
our dug-outs, and I’ve seen them in ravenous swarms, burrowing into
the shallow graves of the dead. Many soldiers’ legs are scarred to the
knees with bites.

The one thing of which we constantly lived in fear was a gas attack. I
used to awaken in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, dreaming
that I heard the clatter and whistle-blowing all along the line which
meant that the gas was coming. And, finally, I really did hear the
terrifying sound, just at a moment when it couldn’t have sounded worse.
I was in charge of the nightly ration detail, sent back about ten
miles to the point of nearest approach of the transport lorries, to
carry in rations, ammunition and sand bags to the front trenches. We
had a lot of trouble, returning with our loads. Passing a point which
was called “Shrapnel Corner” because the Germans had precise range on
it, we were caught in machine-gun fire and had to lie on our stomachs
for twenty minutes, during which we lost one man, wounded. I sent him
back and went on with my party only to run into another machine-gun
shower a half-mile further on. While we were lying down to escape this,
a concealed British battery of five-inch guns, about which we knew
nothing, opened up right over our heads. It shook us up and scared us
so that some of our party were now worse off than the man who had been
hit and carried to the rear. We finally got together and went on. When
we were about a mile behind the reserve trench, stumbling in the dark
through the last and most dangerous path overland, we heard a lone
siren whistle followed by a wave of metallic hammering and wild tooting
which seemed to spread over all of Belgium a mile ahead of us. All any
of us could say was:

“Gas!”

All you could see in the dark was a collection of white and frightened
faces. Every trembling finger seemed awkward as a thumb as we got
out our gas masks and helmets and put them on, following directions
as nearly as we could. I ordered the men to sit still and sent two
forward to notify me from headquarters when the gas alarm was over.
They lost their way and were not found for two days. We sat there for
an hour, and then I ventured to take my mask off. As nothing happened,
I ordered the men to do the same. When we got into the trenches with
our packs, we found that the gas alarm had been one of Fritz’s jokes.
The first sirens had been sounded in the German lines, and there hadn’t
been any gas.

Our men evened things up with the Germans, however, the next night.
Some of our scouts crawled clear up to the German barbed wire, ten
yards in front of the enemy fire trench, tied empty jam-tins to the
barricade and then, after attaching light telephone wires to the barbed
strands, crawled back to our trenches. When they started pulling the
telephone wires the empty tins made a clatter right under Fritz’s nose.
Immediately the Germans opened up with all their machine-gun and rifle
fire, began bombing the spot from which the noise came and sent up “S.
O. S.” signals for artillery fire along a mile of their line. They
fired a ten-thousand-dollar salute and lost a night’s sleep over the
noise made by the discarded containers of five shillings’ worth of jam.
It was a good tonic for the Tommies.

A few days after this, a very young officer passed me in a trench while
I was sitting on a fire-step, writing a letter. I noticed that he had
the red tabs of a staff officer on his uniform, but I paid no more
attention to him than that. No compliments such as salutes to officers
are paid in the trenches. After he had passed, one of the men asked me
if I didn’t know who he was. I said I didn’t.

“Why you d----d fool,” he said, “that’s the Prince of Wales.”

When the little prince came back, I stood to salute him. He returned
the salute with a grave smile and passed on. He was quite alone, and I
was told afterward, that he made these trips through the trenches just
to show the men that he did not consider himself better than any other
soldier. The heir of England was certainly taking nearly the same
chance of losing his inheritance that we were.

After we had been on the front line fifteen days, we received orders
to make a bombing raid. Sixty volunteers were asked for, and the whole
battalion offered. I was lucky--or unlucky--enough to be among the
sixty who were chosen. I want to tell you in detail about this bombing
raid, so that you can understand what a thing may really amount to
that gets only three lines, or perhaps nothing at all, in the official
dispatches. And, besides that, it may help some of the young men who
read this, to know something, a little later, about bombing.

The sixty of us chosen to execute the raid were taken twenty miles to
the rear for a week’s instruction practice. Having only a slight idea
of what we were going to try to do, we felt very jolly about the whole
enterprise, starting off. We were camped in an old barn, with several
special instruction officers in charge. We had oral instruction, the
first day, while sappers dug and built an exact duplicate of the
section of the German trenches which we were to raid. That is, it
was exact except for a few details. Certain “skeleton trenches,” in
the practice section, were dug simply to fool the German aviators. If
a photograph, taken back to German headquarters, had shown an exact
duplicate of a German trench section, suspicion might have been aroused
and our plans revealed. We were constantly warned about the skeleton
trenches and told to remember that they did not exist in the German
section where we were to operate. Meanwhile, our practice section was
changed a little, several times, because aerial photographs showed
that the Germans had been renovating and making some additions to the
trenches in which we were to have our frolic with them.

We had oral instruction, mostly, during the day, because we didn’t dare
let the German aviators see us practicing a bomb raid. All night long,
sometimes until two or three o’clock in the morning, we rehearsed that
raid, just as carefully as a company of star actors would rehearse a
play. At first there was a disposition to have sport out of it.

“Well,” some chap would say, rolling into the hay all tired out, “I got
killed six times to-night. S’pose it’ll be several times more to-morrow
night.”

One man insisted that he had discovered, in one of our aerial
photographs, a German burying money, and he carefully examined each new
picture so that he could be sure to find the dough and dig it up. The
grave and serious manner of our officers, however; the exhaustive care
with which we were drilled and, more than all, the approach of the time
when we were “to go over the top,” soon drove sport out of our minds,
and I can say for myself that the very thought of the undertaking, as
the fatal night drew near, sent shivers up and down my spine.

A bombing raid--something originated in warfare by the Canadians--is
not intended for the purpose of holding ground, but to gain
information, to do as much damage as possible, and to keep the enemy in
a state of nervousness. In this particular raid, the chief object was
to gain information. Our high command wanted to know what troops were
opposite us and what troops had been there. We were expected to get
this information from prisoners and from buttons and papers off of the
Germans we might kill. It was believed that troops were being relieved
from the big tent show, up at the Somme, and sent to our side show
in Belgium for rest. Also, it was suspected that artillery was being
withdrawn for the Somme. Especially, we were anxious to bring back
prisoners.

In civilized war, a prisoner can be compelled to tell only his name,
rank and religion. But this is not a civilized war, and there are
ways of making prisoners talk. One of the most effective ways--quite
humane--is to tie a prisoner fast, head and foot, and then tickle his
bare feet with a feather. More severe measures have frequently been
used--the water cure, for instance--but I’m bound to say that nearly
all the German prisoners I saw were quite loquacious and willing to
talk, and the accuracy of their information, when later confirmed
by raids, was surprising. The iron discipline, which turns them into
mere children in the presence of their officers seemed to make them
subservient and obedient to the officers who commanded us. In this way,
the system worked against the Fatherland. I mean, of course, in the
cases of privates. Captured German officers, especially Prussians, were
a nasty lot. We never tried to get information from them for we knew
they would lie, happily and intelligently.

At last came the night when we were to go “over the top,” across “No
Man’s Land,” and have a frolic with Fritz in his own bailiwick. I am
endeavoring to be as accurate and truthful as possible in these stories
of my soldiering, and I am therefore compelled to say that there
wasn’t a man in the sixty who didn’t show the strain in his pallor
and nervousness. Under orders, we discarded our trench helmets and
substituted knitted skull caps or mess tin covers. Then we blackened
our hands and faces with ashes from a camp fire. After this they
loaded us into motor trucks and took us up to “Shrapnel Corner,” from
which point we went in on foot. Just before we left, a staff officer
came along and gave us a little talk.

“This is the first time you men have been tested,” he said. “You’re
Canadians. I needn’t say anything more to you. They’re going to be
popping them off at a great rate while you’re on your way across.
Remember that you’d better not stand up straight because our shells
will be going over just six and a half feet from the ground--where it’s
level. If you stand up straight you’re likely to be hit in the head,
but don’t let that worry you because if you do get hit in the head you
won’t know it. So why in hell worry about it?” That was his farewell.
He jumped on his horse and rode off.

The point we were to attack had been selected long before by our
scouts. It was not, as you might suppose, the weakest point in
the German line. It was on the contrary, the strongest. It was
considered that the moral effect of cleaning up a weak point would be
comparatively small, whereas to break in at the strongest point would
be something really worth while. And, if we were to take chances, it
really wouldn’t pay to hesitate about degrees. The section we were
to raid had a frontage of one hundred and fifty yards and a depth of
two hundred yards. It had been explained to us that we were to be
supported by a “box barrage,” or curtain fire from our artillery, to
last exactly twenty-six minutes. That is, for twenty-six minutes from
the time when we started “over the top,” our artillery, several miles
back, would drop a “curtain” of shells all around the edges of that one
hundred and fifty yard by two hundred yard section. We were to have
fifteen minutes in which to do our work. Any man not out at the end of
the fifteen minutes would necessarily be caught in our own fire as our
artillery would then change from a “box” to pour a straight curtain
fire, covering all of the spot of our operations.

Our officers set their watches very carefully with those of the
artillery officers, before we went forward to the front trenches.
We reached the front at 11 P.M., and not until our arrival there
were we informed of the “zero hour”--the time when the attack was to
be made. The hour of twelve-ten had been selected. The waiting from
eleven o’clock until that time was simply an agony. Some of our men
sat stupid and inert. Others kept talking constantly about the most
inconsequential matters. One man undertook to tell a funny story. No
one listened to it, and the laugh at the end was emaciated and ghastly.
The inaction was driving us all into a state of funk. I could actually
feel my nerve oozing out at my finger tips, and, if we had had to wait
fifteen minutes longer, I shouldn’t have been able to climb out of the
trench.

About half an hour before we were to go over, every man had his eye up
the trench for we knew “the rummies” were coming that way. The rum gang
serves out a stiff shot of Jamaica just before an attack, and it would
be a real exhibition of temperance to see a man refuse. There were no
prohibitionists in our set. Whether or not we got our full ration
depended on whether the sergeant in charge was drunk or sober. After
the shot began to work, one man next to me pounded my leg and hollered
in my ear:

“I say. Why all this red tape? Let’s go over now.”

That noggin’ of rum is a life saver.

When the hour approached for us to start, the artillery fire was so
heavy that orders had to be shouted into ears, from man to man. The
bombardment was, of course, along a couple of miles of front, so that
the Germans would not know where to expect us. At twelve o’clock
exactly they began pulling down a section of the parapet so that we
wouldn’t have to climb over it, and we were off.




CHAPTER III

“OVER THE TOP AND GIVE ’EM HELL”


As we climbed out of the shelter of our trenches for my first--and,
perhaps, my last, I thought--adventure in “No Man’s Land,” the word was
passed:

“Over the top and give ’em hell!”

That is the British Tommies’ battle cry as they charge the enemy and it
has often sounded up and down those long lines in western France as the
British, Canadian, and Australian soldiers go out to the fight and the
death.

We were divided into six parties of ten men, each party having separate
duties to perform. We crouched forward, moving slowly in single file,
stumbling into shell holes and over dead men--some very long dead--and
managing to keep in touch with each other though the machine-gun
bullets began to drop men almost immediately. Once we were started, we
were neither fearful, nor rattled. We had been drilled so long and so
carefully that each man knew just what he was to do and he kept right
on doing it unless he got hit. To me, it seemed the ground was moving
back under me. The first ten yards were the toughest. The thing was
perfectly organized. Our last party of ten was composed of signallers.
They were paying out wires and carrying telephones to be used during
the fifteen minutes of our stay in the German trenches in communicating
with our battalion headquarters. A telephone code had been arranged,
using the names of our commanding officers as symbols. “Rexford 1”
meant, “First prisoners being sent back”; “Rexford 2” meant, “Our first
wounded being sent over”; “Rexford 3” meant, “We have entered German
trench.” The code was very complete and the signallers had been drilled
in it for a week. In case the telephone wires were cut, the signallers
were to send messages back by the use of rifle grenades. These are
rifle projectiles which carry little metal cylinders to contain written
messages, and which burst into flame when they strike the earth, so
that they can be easily found at night. The officer in charge of the
signallers was to remain at the point of entrance, with his eyes on his
watch. It was his duty to sound a warning signal five minutes before
the end of our time in the German trenches.

The leader of every party of ten also had a whistle with which to
repeat the warning blast and then the final blast, when each man was
to drop everything and get back of our artillery fire. We were not
to leave any dead or wounded in the German trench, on account of the
information which the Germans might thus obtain. Before starting on
the raid, we had removed all marks from our persons, including even
our identification discs. Except for the signallers, each party of
ten was similarly organized. First, there were two bayonet men, each
with an electric flash light attached to his rifle so as to give light
for the direction of a bayonet thrust and controlled by a button at
the left-hand grasp of the rifle. Besides his rifle, each of these
men carried six or eight Mills No. 5 hand grenades, weighing from a
pound and five ounces to a pound and seven ounces each. These grenades
are shaped like turkey eggs, but slightly larger. Upon withdrawing
the firing pin, a lever sets a four-second fuse going. One of these
grenades will clean out anything living in a ten-foot trench section.
It will also kill the man throwing it, if he holds it more than four
seconds, after he has pulled the pin. The third man of each ten was
an expert bomb thrower, equipped as lightly as possible to give him
freedom of action. He carried a few bombs, himself, but the main
supply was carried by a fourth man who was not to throw any unless the
third man became a casualty, in which case number four was to take
his place. The third man also carried a knob-kerrie--a heavy bludgeon
to be used in whacking an enemy over the head. The kind we used was
made by fastening a heavy steel nut on a stout stick of wood--a very
business-like contrivance. The fourth man, or bomb carrier, besides
having a large supply of Mills grenades, had smoke bombs, to be used
in smoking the Germans out of dug-outs and, later, if necessary, in
covering our retreat, and also fumite bombs. The latter are very
dangerous to handle. They contain a mixture of petrol and phosphorous,
and weigh three pounds each. On exploding they release a liquid fire
which will burn through steel.

The fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth in line, were called utility men.
They were to take the places of any of the first four who might become
casualties. In addition, they carried two Stokes-gun bombs, each.
These weigh nine pounds apiece, have six-second fuses, and can be used
in wrecking dug-outs. The ninth and tenth men were sappers, carrying
slabs of gun-cotton and several hundred yards of instantaneous fuse.
This explosive is used in demolishing machine-gun emplacements and mine
saps. The sappers were to lay their charges while we were at work in
the trenches, and explode them as soon as our party was far enough out
on the return journey to be safe from this danger. In addition to these
parties of ten, there were three of us who carried bombs and had orders
to keep near the three officers, to take the place of any one of them
that might go down, and meanwhile to use our own judgment about helping
the jolly old party along. I was one of the three.

In addition to the raiding party, proper, there was a relay all across
“No Man’s Land,” at ten paces interval, making a human chain to show
us our way back, to assist the wounded and, in case of opportunity
or necessity, to re-enforce us. They were ordered not to leave their
positions when we began to come back, until the last man of our party
had been accounted for. The final section of our entourage was composed
of twelve stretcher-bearers, who had been specially trained with us, so
that they would be familiar with the trench section which we were to
raid.

There were two things which made it possible for our raiding party to
get started across “No Man’s Land.” One was the momentary quickening
of the blood which follows a big and unaccustomed dose of rum, and
the other was a sort of subconscious, mechanical confidence in our
undertaking, which was a result of the scores of times we had gone
through every pre-arranged movement in the duplicate German trenches
behind our lines. Without either of those influences, we simply could
not have left shelter and faced what was before us.

An intensified bombardment from our guns began just as soon as we had
climbed “over the top” and were lining up for the journey across.
“Lining up” is not just a suitable term. We were crawling about on all
fours, just far enough out in “No Man’s Land” to be under the edge of
the German shell-fire, and taking what shelter we could in shell-holes
while our leaders picked the way to start across. The extra heavy
bombardment had warned the Germans that something was about to happen.
They sent up star shells and “S. O. S.” signals, until there was a
glare over the torn earth like that which you see at the grand finish
of a Pain’s fire-works display, and meanwhile they sprayed “No Man’s
Land” with streams of machine-gun fire. In the face of that, we started.

It would be absurd to say that we were not frightened. Thinking men
could not help but be afraid. If we were pallid--which undoubtedly we
were--the black upon our faces hid it, but our fear-struck voices were
not disguised. They trembled and our teeth chattered.

We sneaked out, single file, making our way from shell-hole to
shell-hole, nearly all the time on all fours, crawling quickly over
the flat places between holes. The Germans had not sighted us, but
they were squirting machine-gun bullets all over the place like a man
watering a lawn with a garden hose, and they were bound to get some
of us. Behind me, I heard cries of pain, and groans, but this made
little impression on my benumbed intelligence. From the mere fact that
whatever had happened had happened to one of the other sections of
ten and not to my own, it seemed, some way or another, no affair to
concern me. Then a man in front of me doubled up suddenly and rolled
into a shell-hole. That simply made me remember very clearly that I was
not to stop on account of it. It was some one else’s business to pick
that man up. Next, according to the queer psychology of battle, I began
to lose my sensation of fear and nervousness. After I saw a second
man go down, I gave my attention principally to a consideration of
the irregularities of the German parapet ahead of us, picking out the
spot where we were to enter the trench. It seems silly to say it, but
I seemed to get some sort of satisfaction out of the realization that
we had lost the percentage which we might be expected to lose, going
over. Now, it seemed, the rest of us were safe until we should reach
the next phase of our undertaking. I heard directions given and I gave
some myself. My voice was firm, and I felt almost calm. Our artillery
had so torn up the German barbed wire that it gave us no trouble at
all. We walked through it with only a few scratches. When we reached
the low, sand-bag parapet of the enemy trench, we tossed in a few bombs
and followed them right over as soon as they had exploded. There wasn’t
a German in sight. They were all in their dug-outs. But we knew pretty
well where every dug-out was located, and we rushed for the entrances
with our bombs. Everything seemed to be going just as we had expected
it to go. Two Germans ran plump into me as I round a ditch angle, with
a bomb in my hand. They had their hands up and each of them yelled:

“Mercy, Kamarad!”

I passed them back to be sent to the rear, and the man who received
them from me chuckled and told them to step lively. The German trenches
were practically just as we had expected to find them, according to our
sample. They were so nearly similar to the duplicate section in which
we had practiced that we had no trouble finding our way in them. I was
just thinking that really the only tough part of the job remaining
would be getting back across “No Man’s Land,” when it seemed that the
whole earth behind me, rose in the air. For a moment I was stunned,
and half blinded by dirt blown into my face. When I was able to see, I
discovered that all that lay back of me was a mass of upturned earth
and rock, with here and there a man shaking himself or scrambling out
of it or lying still.

Just two minutes after we went into their trench, the Germans had
exploded a mine under their parapet. I have always believed that in
some way or another they had learned which spot we were to raid, and
had prepared for us. Whether that’s true or not, one thing is certain.
That mine blew our organization, as we would say in Kentucky, “plumb to
Hell.” And it killed or disabled more than half of our party.

There was much confusion among those of us who remained on our feet.
Some one gave an order to retire and some one countermanded it. More
Germans came out of their dug-outs, but, instead of surrendering as per
our original schedule, they threw bombs amongst us. It became apparent
that we should be killed or captured if we stuck there and that we
shouldn’t get any more prisoners. I looked at my wrist watch and saw
that there remained but five minutes more of the time which had been
allotted for our stay in the trench, so I blew my whistle and started
back. I had seen Private Green (No. 177,250) knocked down by a bomb in
the next trench section, and I picked him up and carried him out over
the wrecked parapet. I took shelter with him in the first shell-hole
but found that he was dead and left him there. A few yards further back
toward our line I found Lance Corporal Glass in a shell-hole, with
part of his hip shot away. He said he thought he could get back if I
helped him, and I started with him. Private Hunter, who had been in a
neighboring shell-hole came to our assistance, and between us, Hunter
and I got Glass to our front trench.

We found them lining up the survivors of our party for a roll call.
That showed so many missing that Major John Lewis, our company
commander, formerly managing-editor of the _Montreal Star_, called for
volunteers to go out in “No Man’s Land” and try to find some of our
men. Corporal Charleson, Private Saunders and I went out. We brought
in two wounded, and we saw a number of dead, but, on account of their
blackened faces, were unable to identify them. The scouts, later,
brought in several bodies.

Of the sixty odd men who had started in our party, forty-three were
found to be casualties--killed, wounded, or missing. The missing
list was the longest. The names of these men were marked, “M. B. K.”
(missing, believed killed) on our rolls. I have learned since that some
few of them have been reported through Switzerland as prisoners of war
in Germany, but most of them are now officially listed as dead.

All of the survivors of the raiding party were sent twenty miles to
the rear at seven o’clock, and the non-commissioned officers were
ordered to make reports in writing concerning the entire operation.
We recorded, each in his own way, the ghastly failure of our first
aggressive effort against the Germans, before we rolled into the hay
in the same old barn where we had been quartered during the days of
preparation for the raid. I was so dead tired that I soon fell asleep,
but not for long. I never slept more than an hour at a time for several
days and nights. I would doze off from sheer exhaustion, and then
suddenly find myself sitting straight up, scared half to death, all
over again.

There may be soldiers who don’t get scared when they know they are in
danger or even when people are being killed right around them, but I’m
not one of them. And I’ve never met any of them yet. I know a boy who
won the Military Medal, in the battle of the Somme, and I saw him on
his knees before his platoon commander, shamelessly crying that he was
a coward and begging to be left behind, just when the order to advance
was given.

Soldiers of our army who read this story will probably observe one
thing in particular, and that is the importance of bombing operations
in the present style of warfare. You might say that a feature of
this war has been the renaissance of the grenadier. Only British
reverence for tradition kept the name of the Grenadiers alive, through
a considerable number of wars. Now, in every offensive, big or small,
the man who has been trained to throw a bomb thirty yards is busier
and more important than the fellow with the modern rifle which will
shoot a mile and a half and make a hole through a house. In a good many
surprising ways this war has carried us back to first principles. I
remember a Crusader’s mace which I once saw in the British museum that
would make a bang-up knob-kerrie, much better than the kind with which
they arm our Number 4 men in a raiding party section. It had a round,
iron head with spikes all over it. I wonder that they haven’t started a
factory to turn them out.

As I learned during my special training in England, the use of hand
grenades was first introduced in warfare by the French, in 1667. The
British did not use them until ten years later. After the battle of
Waterloo the hand grenade was counted an obsolete weapon until the
Japanese revived its use in the war with Russia. The rude grenades
first used by the British in the present war weighed about eight
pounds. To-day, in the British army, the men who have been trained to
throw grenades--now of lighter construction and much more efficient
and certain action--are officially known as “bombers” for this reason:
When grenade fighting came back to its own in this war, each battalion
trained a certain number of men in the use of grenades, and, naturally,
called them “grenadiers.” The British Grenadier Guards, the senior foot
regiment in the British Army, made formal complaint against the use of
their time-honored name in this connection, and British reverence for
tradition did the rest. The Grenadiers were no longer grenadiers, but
they were undoubtedly the Grenadiers. The war office issued a formal
order that battalion grenade throwers should be known as “bombers” and
not as “grenadiers.”

Up to the time when I left France we had some twenty-seven varieties of
grenades, but most of them were obsolete or ineffective, and we only
made use of seven or eight sorts. The grenades were divided into two
principal classes, rifle grenades and hand grenades. The rifle grenades
are discharged from a rifle barrel by means of a blank cartridge. Each
grenade is attached to a slender rod which is inserted into the bore of
the rifle, and the longer the rod the greater the range of the grenade.
The three principal rifle grenades are the Mills, the Hales, and the
Newton, the former having a maximum range of 120 yards, and the latter
of 400 yards. A rifle discharging a Mills grenade may be fired from
the shoulder, as there is no very extraordinary recoil, but in using
the others it is necessary to fasten the rifle in a stand or plant the
butt on the ground. Practice teaches the soldier how much elevation
to give the rifle for different ranges. The hand grenades are divided
also into two classes, those which are discharged by percussion, and
those which have time fuses, with detonators of fulminate of mercury.
The high explosives used are ammonal, abliste and sabulite, but ammonal
is the much more commonly employed. There are also smoke bombs, the
Mexican or tonite bomb, the Hales hand grenade, the No. 19 grenade and
the fumite bomb, which contains white phosphorous, wax and petrol,
and discharges a stream of liquid fire which will quickly burn out a
dug-out and everything it contains. Hand grenades are always thrown
with a stiff arm, as a bowler delivers a cricket ball toward the
wicket. They cannot be thrown in the same manner as a baseball for
two reasons. One is that the snap of the wrist with which a baseball
is sent on its way would be likely to cause the premature discharge
of a percussion grenade, and the second is that the grenades weigh so
much--from a pound and a half to ten pounds--that the best arm in the
world couldn’t stand the strain of whipping them off as a baseball is
thrown. I’m talking by the book about this, because I’ve been a bomber
and a baseball player.

A bomber, besides knowing all about the grenades in use in his own
army, must have practical working knowledge concerning the grenades in
use by the enemy. After we took the Regina trench, on the Somme, we
ran out of grenades at a moment when a supply was vitally necessary.
We found a lot of the German “egg” bombs, and through our knowledge of
their workings and our consequent ability to use them against their
original owners we were able to hold the position.

An officer or non-commissioned officer in charge of a bombing detail
must know intimately every man in his command, and have such discipline
that every order will be carried out with scrupulous exactitude when
the time comes. The leader will have no time, in action, to prompt his
men or even to see if they are doing what they have been told to do.
When a platoon of infantry is in action one rifleman more or less makes
little difference, but in bombing operations each man has certain
particular work to do and he must do it, just as it has been planned,
in order to protect himself and his comrades from disaster. If you can
out-throw the enemy, or if you can make most of the bombs land with
accuracy, you have a wonderful advantage in an attack. But throwing
wild or throwing short you simply give confidence to the enemy in his
own offensive. One very good thrower may win an objective for his
squad, while one man who is faint-hearted or unskilled or “rattled” may
cause the entire squad to be annihilated.

In the revival of bombing, some tricks have developed which would
be humorous if the denouements were not festooned with crepe and
accompanied by obituary notations on muster rolls. There may be
something which might be termed funny on one end of a bombing-ruse--but
not on both ends of it. Whenever you fool a man with a bomb, you’re
playing a practical joke on him that he’ll never forget. Even,
probably, he’ll never get a chance to remember it.

When the Canadians first introduced bombing, the bombs were improvised
out of jam tins, the fuses were cut according to the taste and judgment
of the individual bomber, and, just when the bomb would explode, was
more or less problematical. Frequently, the Germans have tossed our
bombs back into our trenches before they went off. That was injurious
and irritating. They can’t do that with a Mills grenade nor with any
of the improved factory-made bombs, because the men know just how they
are timed and are trained to know just how to throw them. The Germans
used to work another little bomb trick of their own. They learned
that our scouts and raiders were all anxious to get a German helmet
as a souvenir. They’d put helmets on the ground in “No Man’s Land,”
or in an advanced trench with bombs under them. In several cases, men
looking for souvenirs suddenly became mere memories, themselves. In
several raids, when bombing was new, the Canadians worked a trick on
the Germans with extensively fatal effect. They tossed bombs into
the German trenches with six-inch fuses attached. To the Germans they
looked just like the other bombs we had been using, and, in fact
they were--all but the fuses. Instead of having failed to continue
burning, as the Germans thought, those fuses had never been lighted.
They were instantaneous fuses. The ignition spark will travel through
instantaneous fuse at the rate of about thirty yards a second. A German
would pick up one of these bombs, select the spot where he intended
to blow up a few of us with our own ammonal, and then light the fuse.
After that there had to be a new man in his place. The bomb would
explode instantly the long fuse was ignited.

The next day when I got up after this disastrous raid, I said to my
bunkie:

“Got a fag?” (Fag is the Tommy’s name for a cigarette.)

It’s never, “will you have a fag?” but always, “have you got a fag?”

They are the inseparable companions of the men at the front, and you’ll
see the soldiers go over the top with an unlit fag in their lips.
Frequently, it is still there when their work is done.

As we sat there smoking, my friend said:

“Something sure raised hell with our calculations.”

“Like those automatic self-cocking revolvers did with a Kentucky
wedding when some one made a remark reflecting on the bride,” I replied.

       *       *       *       *       *

It may be interesting to note that Corpl. Glass, Corpl. Charleson and
Private (later Corpl.) Saunders have all since been “Killed in Action.”
Charleson and Saunders the same morning I was wounded on the Somme,
and Glass, Easter morning at Vimy Ridge, when the Canadians made their
wonderful attack.




CHAPTER IV

SHIFTED TO THE SOMME


A few days after the bombing raid, which ended so disastrously for us,
our battalion was relieved from duty on the front line, and the tip
we got was that we were to go down to the big show then taking place
on the Somme. Our relief was a division of Australians. You see, the
sector which we had held in Belgium was a sort of preparatory school
for the regular fighting over in France.

It wasn’t long before we got into what you might call the Big League
contest but, in the meanwhile, we had a little rest from battling
Fritz and the opportunity to observe some things which seem to me to
be worth telling about. Those of you who are exclusively fond of the
stirring detail of war, such as shooting and being shot at and bombing
and bayoneting, need only skip a little of this. We had an entirely
satisfactory amount of smoke and excitement later.

As soon as our relief battalion had got in, we moved back to
Renninghelst for a couple of days rest. We were a pretty contented and
jovial lot--our platoon, especially. We were all glad to get away from
the strain of holding a front trench, and there were other advantages.
For instance, the alterations of our muster roll due to casualties, had
not come through battalion headquarters and, therefore, we had, in our
platoon, sixty-three rum rations, night and morning, and only sixteen
men. There was a Canadian Scot in our crowd who said that the word
which described the situation was “g-r-r-r-a-nd!”

There was a good deal of jealousy at that time between the Canadians
and the Australians. Each had the same force in the field--four
divisions. Either force was bigger than any other army composed
exclusively of volunteers ever before assembled. While I belong to the
Canadian army and believe the Canadian overseas forces the finest
troops ever led to war, I must say that I have never seen a body of men
so magnificent in average physique as the Australians. And some of them
were even above the high average. The man that punched me in the eye
in an “estaminet” in Poperinghe made up entirely in his own person for
the absence of Les Darcy from the Australian ranks. I don’t know just
how the fight started between the Australians and us, in Poperinghe,
but I know that it took three regiments of Imperial troops to stop it.
The most convincing story I heard of the origin of the battle was told
me by one of our men who said he was there when it began. He said one
of the Australians had carelessly remarked that the British generals
had decided it was time to get through with the side-show in Belgium
and this was the reason why they had sent in regular troops like the
Australians to relieve the Canadians.

Then some sensitive Canadian wished the Australians luck and hoped
they’d finish it up as well as they had the affair in the Dardanelles.
After that, our two days’ rest was made up principally of beating it
out of “estaminets” when strategic requirements suggested a new base,
or beating it into “estaminets” where it looked as if we could act as
efficient re-inforcements. The fight never stopped for forty-eight
hours, and the only places it didn’t extend to were the church and
the hospitals. I’ll bet, to this day, that the Belgians who run the
“estaminets” in Poperinghe will duck behind the bars if you just
mention Canada and Australia in the same breath.

But I’m bound to say that it was good, clean fighting. Nobody fired
a shot, nobody pulled a bayonet, and nobody got the wrong idea about
anything. The Australian heavy-weight champion who landed on me went
right out in the street and saluted one of our lieutenants. We had just
one satisfying reflection after the fight was over. The Australian
battalion that relieved us fell heir to the counter attack which the
Germans sent across to even up on our bombing raid.

We began our march to the Somme by a hike to St. Ohmer, one of the
early British headquarters in Europe. Then we stopped for a week about
twenty miles from Calais, where we underwent a course of intensified
training for open fighting. The infantry tactics, in which we were
drilled, were very similar to those of the United States army--those
which, in fact, were originated by the United States troops in the
days of Indian fighting. We covered most of the ground around Calais
on our stomachs in open order. While it may seem impertinent for me, a
mere non-com., to express an opinion about the larger affairs of the
campaign, I think I may be excused for saying that the war didn’t at
all take the course which was expected and hoped for after the fight on
the Somme. Undoubtedly, the Allies expected to break through the German
line. That is well known now. While we were being trained near Calais
for open warfare, a very large force of cavalry was being assembled and
prepared for the same purpose. It was never used.

That was last August, and the Allies haven’t broken through yet.
Eventually I believe they will break through, but, in my opinion, men
who are waiting now to learn if they are to be drawn for service in
our new American army will be veterans in Europe before the big break
comes, which will wreck the Prussian hope of success in this war. And
if we of the U. S. A. don’t throw in the weight to beat the Prussians
now, they will not be beaten, and, in that case, the day will not be
very far distant when we will have to beat them to save our homes and
our nation. War is a dreadful and inglorious and ill-smelling and cruel
thing. But if we hold back now, we will be in the logical position of a
man hesitating to go to grips with a savage, shrieking, spewing maniac
who has all but whipped his proper keepers, and is going after the
on-looker next.

We got drafts of recruits before we went on to the Somme, and some
of our wounded men were sent back to England, where we had left our
“Safety-first Battalion.” That was really the Fifty-first battalion, of
the Fourth Division of the Canadian forces, composed of the physically
rejected, men recovering from wounds, and men injured in training. The
Tommies, however, called it the “Safety-first,” or “Major Gilday’s
Light Infantry.” Major Gilday was our battalion surgeon. He was
immensely popular, and he achieved a great name for himself. He made
one realize what a great personal force a doctor can be and what an
unnecessary and overwrought elaboration there is in the civil practice
of medicine.

Under Major Gilday’s administration, no man in our battalion was sick
if he could walk, and, if he couldn’t walk, there was a reasonable
suspicion that he was drunk. The Major simplified the practice of
medicine to an exact science involving just two forms of treatment
and two remedies--“Number Nines” and whale oil. Number Nines were
pale, oval pills, which, if they had been eggs, would have run about
eight to an omelette. They had an internal effect which could only be
defined as dynamic. After our men had become acquainted with them
through personal experience they stopped calling them “Number Nines”
and called them “whiz-bangs.” There were only two possibilities of
error under Major Gilday’s system of simplified medicine. One was
to take a whiz-bang for trench feet, and the other to use whale oil
externally for some form of digestional hesitancy. And, in either
case, no permanent harm could result, while the error was as simple of
correction as the command “about face.”

There was a story among our fellows that an ambulance had to be called
for Major Gilday, in London, one day, on account of shock following a
remark made to him by a bobby. The Major asked the policeman how he
could get to the Cavoy Hotel. The bobby, with the proper bus line in
mind, replied: “Take a number nine, sir.”

Two weeks and a half after we left Belgium we arrived at Albert, having
marched all the way. The sight which met our eyes as we rounded the
rock-quarry hill, outside of Albert, was wonderful beyond description.
I remember how tremendously it impressed my pal, Macfarlane. He sat
by the roadside and looked ’round over the landscape as if he were
fascinated.

“Boy,” said he, “we’re at the big show at last.”

Poor fellow, it was not only the big show, but the last performance for
him. Within sight of the spot where he sat, wondering, he later fell
in action and died. The scene, which so impressed him, gave us all a
feeling of awe. Great shells from a thousand guns were streaking and
criss-crossing the sky. Without glasses I counted thirty-nine of our
observation balloons. Away off in the distance I saw one German captive
balloon. The other air-craft were uncountable. They were everywhere,
apparently in hundreds. There could have been no more wonderful
panoramic picture of war in its new aspect.

Our battalion was in and out of the town of Albert several days waiting
for orders. The battle of Courcelette was then in progress, and the
First, Second and Third Canadian divisions were holding front positions
at terrible cost. In the first part of October, 1916, we “went in”
opposite the famous Regina trench. The battle-ground was just miles
and miles of debris and shell-holes. Before we went to our position,
the officers and non-coms. were taken in by scouts to get the lay of
the land. These trips were called “Cook’s Tours.” On one of them I
went through the town of Poziers twice and didn’t know it. It had a
population of 12,000 before the war. On the spot where it had stood not
even a whole brick was left, it seemed. Its demolition was complete.
That was an example of the condition of the whole country over which
our forces had blasted their way for ten miles, since the previous
July. There were not even landmarks left.

The town of Albert will always remain in my memory, and, especially,
I shall always have the mental picture of the cathedral, with the
statue of the Virgin Mary with the Babe in her arms, apparently about
to topple from the roof. German shells had carried away so much of the
base of the statue that it inclined at an angle of 45 degrees. The
Germans--for some reason which only they can explain--expended much
ammunition in trying to complete the destruction of the cathedral, but
they did not succeed and they’ll never do it now. The superstitious
French say that when the statue falls the war will end. I have a due
regard for sacred things, but if the omen were to be depended upon I
should not regret to see the fall occur.

An unfortunate and tragic mishap occurred just outside of Albert when
the Somme offensive started on July 1. The signal for the first advance
was to be the touching off of a big mine. Some fifteen minutes before
the mine exploded the Germans set off one of their own. Two regiments
mistook this for the signal and started over. They ran simultaneously
into their own barrage and a German fire, and were simply cut to pieces
in as little time, almost, as it takes to say it.

The Germans are methodical to such an extent that at times this usually
excellent quality acts to defeat their own ends. An illustration of
this was presented during the bombardment of Albert. Every evening at
about six o’clock they would drop thirty high-explosive shells into
the town. When we heard the first one coming we would dive for the
cellars. Everyone would remain counting the explosions until the number
had reached thirty. Then everyone would come up from the cellars and
go about his business. There were never thirty-one shells and never
twenty-nine shells. The number was always exactly thirty, and then the
high-explosive bombardment was over. Knowing this, none of us ever got
hurt. Their methodical “evening hate” was wasted, except for the damage
it did to buildings in the town.

On the night when we went in to occupy the positions we were to hold,
our scouts, leading us through the flat desert of destruction, got
completely turned ’round, and took us back through a trench composed
of shell-holes, connected up, until we ran into a battalion of another
brigade. The place was dreadful beyond words. The stench of the dead
was sickening. In many places arms and legs of dead men stuck out of
the trench walls.

We made a fresh start, after our blunder, moving in single file and
keeping in touch each with the man ahead of him. We stumbled along in
the darkness through this awful labyrinth until we ran into some of
our own scouts at 2 A.M., and found that we were half-way across “No
Man’s Land,” several hundred yards beyond our front line and likely to
be utterly wiped out in twenty seconds should the Germans sight us. At
last we reached the proper position, and fifteen minutes after we got
there a whiz-bang buried me completely. They had to dig me out. A few
minutes later another high-explosive shell fell in a trench section
where three of our men were stationed. All we could find after it
exploded were one arm and one leg which we buried. The trenches were
without trench mats, and the mud was from six inches to three feet deep
all through them. There were no dug-outs; only miserable “funk holes,”
dug where it was possible to dig them without uncovering dead men.
We remained in this position four days, from the 17th to the 21st of
October, 1916.

There were reasons, of course, for the difference between conditions in
Belgium and on the Somme. On the Somme, we were constantly preparing
for a new advance, and we were only temporarily established on ground
which we had but recently taken, after long drumming with big guns.
The trenches were merely shell-holes connected by ditches. Our old
and ubiquitous and useful friend, the sand bag, was not present in
any capacity, and, therefore, we had no parapets or dug-outs. The
communication trenches were all blown in and everything had to come
to us overland, with the result that we never were quite sure when we
should get ammunition, rations, or relief forces. The most awful thing
was that the soil all about us was filled with freshly-buried men. If
we undertook to cut a trench or enlarge a funk hole, our spades struck
into human flesh, and the explosion of a big shell along our line sent
decomposed and dismembered and sickening mementoes of an earlier fight
showering amongst us. We lived in the muck and stench of “glorious”
war; those of us who lived.

Here and there, along this line, were the abandoned dug-outs of the
Germans, and we made what use of them we could, but that was little.
I had orders one day to locate a dug-out and prepare it for use as
battalion headquarters. When I led a squad in to clean it up the odor
was so overpowering that we had to wear our gas masks. On entering,
with our flashlights, we first saw two dead nurses, one standing with
her arm ’round a post, just as she had stood when gas or concussion
killed her. Seated at a table in the middle of the place was the body
of an old general of the German medical corps, his head fallen between
his hands. The task of cleaning up was too dreadful for us. We just
tossed in four or five fumite bombs and beat it out of there. A few
hours later we went into the seared and empty cavern, made the roof
safe with new timbers, and notified battalion headquarters that the
place could be occupied.

During this time I witnessed a scene which--with some others--I shall
never forget. An old chaplain of the Canadian forces came to our
trench section seeking the grave of his son, which had been marked for
him on a rude map by an officer who had seen the young man’s burial.
We managed to find the spot, and, at the old chaplain’s request, we
exhumed the body. Some of us suggested to him that he give us the
identification marks and retire out of range of the shells which were
bursting all around us. We argued that it was unwise for him to remain
unnecessarily in danger, but what we really intended was that he should
be saved the horror of seeing the pitiful thing which our spades were
about to uncover.

“I shall remain,” was all he said. “He was my boy.”

It proved that we had found the right body. One of our men tried to
clear the features with his handkerchief, but ended by spreading the
handkerchief over the face. The old chaplain stood beside the body and
removed his trench helmet, baring his gray locks to the drizzle of rain
that was falling. Then, while we stood by with bowed heads, his voice
rose amid the noise of bursting shells, repeating the burial service of
the Church of England. I have never been so impressed by anything in my
life as by that scene.

The dead man was a young captain. He had been married to a lady of
Baltimore, just before the outbreak of the war.

The philosophy of the British Tommies, and the Canadians and the
Australians on the Somme was a remarkable reflection of their fine
courage through all that hell. They go about their work, paying no
attention to the flying death about them.

“If Fritz has a shell with your name and number on it,” said a British
Tommy to me one day, “you’re going to get it whether you’re in the
front line or seven miles back. If he hasn’t, you’re all right.”

Fine fighters, all. And the Scotch kilties, lovingly called by the
Germans, “the women from hell,” have the respect of all armies. We
saw little of the Poilus, except a few on leave. All the men were
self-sacrificing to one another in that big melting pot from which so
few ever emerge whole. The only things it is legitimate to steal in
the code of the trenches are rum and “fags” (cigarettes). Every other
possession is as safe as if it were under a Yale lock.




CHAPTER V

WOUNDED IN ACTION


Our high command apparently meant to make a sure thing of the general
assault upon the Regina trench, in which we were to participate. Twice
the order to “go over the top” was countermanded. The assault was
first planned for October 19th. Then the date was changed to the 20th.
Finally, at 12:00 noon, of October 21st, we went. It was the first
general assault we had taken part in, and we were in a highly nervous
state. I’ll admit that.

It seemed almost certain death to start over in broad daylight, yet, as
it turned out, the crossing of “No Man’s Land” was accomplished rather
more easily than in our night raids. Our battalion was on the extreme
right of the line, and that added materially to our difficulties, first
by compelling us to advance through mud so deep that some of our men
sank to their hips in it and, second, by giving us the hottest little
spot in France to hold later.

I was in charge of the second “wave” or assault line. This is called
the “mopping up” wave, because the business of the men composing it
is thoroughly to bomb out a position crossed by the first wave, to
capture or kill all of the enemy remaining, and to put the trench in a
condition to be defended against a counter attack by reversing the fire
steps and throwing up parapets.

While I was with the Canadians, all attacks, or rather advances, were
launched in four waves, the waves being thirty to fifty yards apart.
A wave, I might explain, is a line of men in extended order, or about
three paces apart. Our officers were instructed to maintain their
places in the line and to wear no distinguishing marks which might
enable sharpshooters to pick them off. Invariably, however, they led
the men out of our trenches. “Come on, boys, let’s go,” they would
say, climbing out in advance. It was bred in them to do that.

Experience had taught us that it took the German barrage about a minute
and a half to get going after ours started, and that they always opened
up on our front line trench. We had a plan to take advantage of this
knowledge. We usually dug an “assembly trench” some distance in advance
of our front line, and started from it. Thus we were able to line up
between two fires, our shells bursting ahead of us, and the Germans’
behind us. All four waves started from the assembly trench at once,
the men of the second, third and fourth waves falling back to their
proper distances as the advance proceeded. The first wave worked up to
within thirty to fifty yards of our own barrage and then the men lay
down. At this stage, our barrage was playing on the enemy front line
trench. After a certain interval, carefully timed, the gunners, away
back of our lines, elevated their guns enough to carry our barrage a
certain distance back of the enemy front trench and then our men went
in at the charge, to occupy the enemy trench before the Germans in
the dug-outs could come out and organize a defense. Unless serious
opposition was met the first wave went straight through the first
trench, leaving only a few men to guard the dug-out entrances pending
the arrival of the second wave. The second wave, only a few seconds
behind the first one, proceeded to do the “mopping up.” Then this wave,
in turn, went forward, leaving only a few men behind to garrison the
captured trench.

The third and fourth waves went straight on unless assistance was
needed, and rushed up to the support of the new front line. The
men in these waves were ammunition carriers, stretcher-bearers and
general reenforcements. Some of them were set to work at once digging
a communication trench to connect our original front line with our
new support and front lines. When we established a new front line we
never used the German trench. We had found that the German artillery
always had the range of that trench down, literally speaking, to an
inch. We always dug a new trench either in advance of the German
trench or in the rear of it. Our manner of digging a trench under these
circumstances was very simple and pretty sure to succeed except in an
extremely heavy fire. Each man simply got as flat to the ground as
possible, seeking whatever cover he might avail himself of, and began
digging toward the man nearest him. Sand bags were filled with the
first dirt and placed to afford additional cover. The above system of
attack, which is now well known to the Germans, was, at the time when
I left France, the accepted plan when two lines of enemy trenches were
to be taken. It has been considerably changed, now, I am told. If the
intention was to take three, four, five or six lines, the system was
changed only in detail. When four or more lines were to be taken, two
or more battalions were assembled to operate on the same frontage. The
first battalion took two lines, the second passed through the first and
took two more lines, and so on. The Russians had been known to launch
an attack in thirty waves.

It is interesting to note how every attack, nowadays, is worked out
in advance in the smallest detail, and how everything is done on a
time schedule. Aerial photographs of the position they are expected
to capture are furnished to each battalion, and the men are given the
fullest opportunity to study them. All bombing pits, dug-outs, trench
mortar and machine-gun emplacements are marked on these photographs.
Every man is given certain work to do and is instructed and
re-instructed until there can be no doubt that he has a clear knowledge
of his orders. But, besides that, he is made to understand the scope
and purpose and plan of the whole operation, so that he will know what
to do if he finds himself with no officer to command. This is one of
the great changes brought about by this war, and it signalizes the
disappearance, probably forever, of a long-established tradition. It is
something which I think should be well impressed upon the officers of
our new army, about to enter this great struggle. The day has passed
when the man in the ranks is supposed merely to obey. He must know
what to do and how to do it. He must think for himself and “carry
on” with the general plan, if his officers and N. C. O.’s all become
casualties. Sir Douglas Haig said: “For soldiers in this war, give me
business men with business sense, who are used to taking initiative.”

While I was at the front I had opportunity to observe three distinct
types of barrage fire, the “box,” the “jumping,” and the “creeping.”
The “box,” I have already described to you, as it is used in a raid.
The “jumping” plays on a certain line for a certain interval and then
jumps to another line. The officers in command of the advance know
the intervals of time and space and keep their lines close up to the
barrage, moving with it on the very second. The “creeping” barrage
opens on a certain line and then creeps ahead at a certain fixed rate
of speed, covering every inch of the ground to be taken. The men of
the advance simply walk with it, keeping within about thirty yards
of the line on which the shells are falling. Eight-inch shrapnel,
and high-explosive shells were used exclusively by the British when
I was with them in maintaining barrage fire. The French used their
“seventy-fives,” which are approximately of eight-inch calibre. Of
late, I believe, the British and French have both added gas shells
for this use, when conditions make it possible. The Germans, in
establishing a barrage, used their “whiz-bangs,” slightly larger shells
than ours, but they never seemed to have quite the same skill and
certitude in barrage bombardment that our artillery-men had.

To attempt to picture the scene of two barrage fires, crossing, is
quite beyond me. You see two walls of flame in front of you, one where
your own barrage is playing, and one where the enemy guns are firing,
and you see two more walls of flame behind you, one where the enemy
barrage is playing, and one where your own guns are firing. And amid
it all you are deafened by titanic explosions which have merged into
one roar of thunderous sound, while acrid fumes choke and blind you.
To use a fitting, if not original phrase, it’s just “Hell with the lid
off.”

That day on the Somme, our artillery had given the Germans such a
battering and the curtain fire which our guns dropped just thirty to
forty yards ahead of us was so powerful that we lost comparatively few
men going over--only those who were knocked down by shells which the
Germans landed among us through our barrage. They never caught us with
their machine guns sweeping until we neared their trenches. Then a
good many of our men began to drop, but we were in their front trench
before they could cut us up anywhere near completely. Going over, I
was struck by shell fragments on the hand and leg, but the wounds were
not severe enough to stop me. In fact, I did not know that I had been
wounded until I felt blood running into my shoe. Then I discovered the
cut in my leg, but saw that it was quite shallow, and that no artery of
importance had been damaged. So I went on.

I had the familiar feeling of nervousness and physical shrinking and
nausea at the beginning of this fight, but, by the time we were half
way across “No Man’s Land,” I had my nerve back. After I had been hit,
I remember feeling relieved that I hadn’t been hurt enough to keep me
from going on with the men. I’m not trying to make myself out a hero.
I’m just trying to tell you how an ordinary man’s mind works under the
stress of fighting and the danger of sudden death. There are some queer
things in the psychology of battle. For instance, when we had got into
the German trench and were holding it against the most vigorous counter
attacks, the thought which was persistently uppermost in my mind was
that I had lost the address of a girl in London along with some papers
which I had thrown away, just before we started over, and which I
should certainly never be able to find again.

The Regina trench had been taken and lost three times by the British.
We took it that day and held it. We went into action with fifteen
hundred men of all ranks and came out with six hundred. The position,
which was the objective of our battalion, was opposite to and only
twelve hundred yards distant from the town of Pys, which, if you take
the English meaning of the French sound, was a highly inappropriate
name for that particular village. During a good many months, for a good
many miles ’round about that place, there wasn’t any such thing as
“Peace.” From our position, we could see a church steeple in the town
of Baupaume until the Germans found that our gunners were using it as a
“zero” mark, and blew it down with explosives.

I have said that, because we were on the extreme right of the line, we
had the hottest little spot in France to hold for a while. You see,
we had to institute a double defensive, as we had the Germans on our
front and on our flank, the whole length of the trench to the right of
us being still held by the Germans. There we had to form a “block,”
massing our bombers behind a barricade which was only fifteen yards
from the barricade behind which the Germans were fighting. Our flank
and the German flank were in contact as fiery as that of two live wire
ends. And, meanwhile, the Fritzes tried to rush us on our front with
nine separate counter attacks. Only one of them got up close to us,
and we went out and stopped that with the bayonet. Behind our block
barricade, there was the nearest approach to an actual fighting Hell
that I had seen.

And yet a man who was in the midst of it from beginning to end, came
out without a scratch. He was a tall chap named Hunter. For twenty-four
hours, without interruption, he threw German “egg-shell” bombs from a
position at the center of our barricade. He never stopped except to
light a cigarette or yell for some one to bring him more bombs from
Fritz’s captured storehouse. He projected a regular curtain of fire
of his own. I’ve no doubt the Germans reported he was a couple of
platoons, working in alternate reliefs. He was awarded the D. C. M. for
his services in that fight, and though, as I said, he was unwounded,
half the men around him were killed, and his nerves were in such
condition at the end that he had to be sent back to England.

One of the great tragedies of the war resulted from a bit of
carelessness when, a couple of days later, the effort was made to
extend our grip beyond the spot which we took in that first fight.
Plans had been made for the Forty-fourth Battalion of the Tenth
Canadian Brigade to take by assault the trench section extending to the
right from the point where we had established the “block” on our flank.
The hour for the attack had been fixed. Then headquarters sent out
countermanding orders. Something wasn’t quite ready.

The orders were sent by runners, as all confidential orders must be.
Telephones are of little use, now, as both our people and the Germans
have an apparatus which needs only to be attached to a metal spike in
the ground to “pick up” every telephone message within a radius of
three miles. When telephones are used now, messages are ordinarily sent
in code. But, for any vitally important communication which might
cost serious losses, if misunderstood, old style runners are used,
just as they were in the days when the field telephone was unheard of.
It is the rule to dispatch two or three runners by different routes
so that one, at least, will be certain to arrive. In the case of the
countermanding of the order for the Forty-fourth Battalion to assault
the German position on our flank, some officer at headquarters thought
that one messenger to the Lieut.-Colonel commanding the Forty-fourth
would be sufficient. The messenger was killed by a chance shot and his
message was undelivered. The Forty-fourth, in ignorance of change of
plan, “went over.” There was no barrage fire to protect the force and
their valiant effort was simply a wholesale suicide. Six hundred out of
eight hundred men were on the ground in two and one-half minutes. The
battalion was simply wiped out. Several officers were court-martialed
as a result of this terrible blunder.

We had gone into the German trenches at a little after noon, on
Saturday. On Sunday night at about 10 P.M. we were relieved. The
relief force had to come in overland, and they had a good many
casualties en route. They found us as comfortable as bugs in a rug,
except for the infernal and continuous bombing at our flank barricade.
The Germans on our front had concluded that it was useless to try to
drive us out. About one-fourth of the six hundred of us, who were still
on our feet, were holding the sentry posts, and the remainder of the
six hundred were having banquets in the German dug-outs, which were
stocked up like delicatessen shops with sausages, fine canned foods,
champagne and beer. If we had only had a few ladies with us, we could
have had a real party.

I got so happily interested in the spread in our particular dug-out
that I forgot about my wound until some one reminded me that orders
required me to hunt up a dressing station, and get an anti-tetanus
injection. I went and got it, all right, but an injection was about the
only additional thing I could have taken at that moment. If I had had
to swallow anything more, it would have been a matter of difficulty.
Tommies like to take a German trench, because if the Fritzes have to
move quickly, as they usually do, we always find sausage, beer, and
champagne--a welcome change from bully beef. I could never learn to
like their bread, however.

After this fight I was sent, with other slightly wounded men, for a
week’s rest at the casualty station, at Contay. I rejoined my battalion
at the end of the week. From October 21st to November 18th we were
in and out of the front trenches several times for duty tours of
forty-eight hours each, but were in no important action. At 6:10 A.M.,
on the morning of November 18th, a bitter cold day, we “went over” to
take the Desire and also the Desire support trenches. We started from
the left of our old position, and our advance was between Thieval and
Poizers, opposite to Grandecourt.

There was the usual artillery preparation and careful organization for
the attack. I was again in charge of the “mopping up” wave, numbering
two hundred men and consisting mostly of bombers. It may seem strange
to you that a non-commissioned officer should have so important an
assignment, but, sometimes, in this war, privates have been in charge
of companies, numbering two hundred and fifty men, and I know of a
case where a lance-corporal was temporarily in command of an entire
battalion. It happened, on this day that, while I was in charge of the
second wave, I did not go over with them. At the last moment, I was
given a special duty by Major Lewis, one of the bravest soldiers I ever
knew, as well as the best beloved man in our battalion. A messenger
came to me from him just as I was overseeing a fair distribution of the
rum ration, and incidentally getting my own share. I went to him at
once.

“McClintock,” said he, “I don’t wish to send you to any special hazard,
and, so far as that goes, we’re all going to get more or less of a
dusting. But I want to put that machine gun which has been giving us
so much trouble out of action.”

I knew very well the machine gun he meant. It was in a concrete
emplacement, walled and roofed, and the devils in charge of it seemed
to be descendants of William Tell and the prophet Isaiah. They always
knew what was coming and had their gun accurately trained on it before
it came.

“If you are willing,” said Major Lewis, “I wish you to select
twenty-five men from the company and go after that gun the minute the
order comes to advance. Use your own judgment about the men and the
plan for taking the gun position. Will you go?”

“Yes, sir,” I answered. “I’ll go and pick out the men right away. I
think we can make those fellows shut up shop over there.”

“Good boy!” he said. “You’ll try, all right.”

I started away. He called me back.

“This is going to be a bit hot, McClintock,” he said, taking my hand.
“I wish you the best of luck, old fellow--you and the rest of them.” In
the trenches they always wish you the best of luck when they hand you
a particularly tough job.

I thanked him and wished him the same. I never saw him again. He was
killed in action within two hours after our conversation. Both he and
my pal, Macfarlane, were shot down dead that morning.

When they called for volunteers to go with me in discharge of Major
Lewis’ order, the entire company responded. I picked out twenty-five
men, twelve bayonet men and thirteen bombers. They agreed to my plan
which was to get within twenty-five yards of the gun emplacement
before attacking, to place no dependence on rifle fire, but to bomb
them out and take the position with the bayonet. We followed that
plan and took the emplacement quicker than we had expected to do, but
there were only two of us left when we got there--Private Godsall, No.
177,063, and myself. All the rest of the twenty-five were dead or down.
The emplacement had been held by eleven Germans. Two only were left
standing when we got in.

When we saw the gun had been silenced and the crew disabled, Godsall
and I worked round to the right about ten yards from the shell-hole
where we had sheltered ourselves while throwing bombs into the
emplacement, and scaled the German parapet. Then we rushed the gun
position. The officer who had been in charge was standing with his
back to us, firing with his revolver down the trench at our men who
were coming over at another point. I reached him before Godsall and
bayoneted him. The other German who had survived our bombing threw
up his hands and mouthed the Teutonic slogan of surrender, “Mercy,
Kamerad.” My bayonet had broken off in the encounter with the German
officer, and I remembered that I had been told always to pull the
trigger after making a bayonet thrust, as that would usually jar the
weapon loose. In this case, I had forgotten instructions. I picked up a
German rifle with bayonet fixed, and Godsall and I worked on down the
trench.

The German, who had surrendered, stood with his hands held high above
his head, waiting for us to tell him what to do. He never took his
eyes off of us even to look at his officer, lying at his feet. As we
moved down the trench, he followed us, still holding his hands up and
repeating, “Mercy, Kamerad!” At the next trench angle we took five
more prisoners, and as Godsall had been slightly wounded in the arm,
I turned the captives over to him and ordered him to take them to
the rear. Just then the men of our second wave came over the parapet
like a lot of hurdlers. In five minutes, we had taken the rest of the
Germans in the trench section prisoners, had reversed the fire steps,
and had turned their own machine guns against those of their retreating
companies that we could catch sight of.

As we could do nothing more here, I gave orders to advance and
re-enforce the front line. Our way led across a field furrowed with
shell-holes and spotted with bursting shells. Not a man hesitated.
We were winning. That was all we knew or cared to know. We wanted to
make it a certainty for our fellows who had gone ahead. As we were
proceeding toward the German reserve trench, I saw four of our men,
apparently unwounded, lying in a shell-hole. I stopped to ask them what
they were doing there. As I spoke, I held my German rifle and bayonet
at the position of “guard,” the tip of the bayonet advanced, about
shoulder high. I didn’t get their answer, for, before they could reply,
I felt a sensation as if some one had thrown a lump of hard clay and
struck me on the hip, and forthwith I tumbled in on top of the four,
almost plunging my bayonet into one of them, a private named Williams.

“Well, now you know what’s the matter with us,” said Williams. “We
didn’t fall in, but we crawled in.”

They had all been slightly wounded. I had twenty-two pieces of shrapnel
and some shell fragments imbedded in my left leg between the hip and
the knee. I followed the usual custom of the soldier who has “got
it.” The first thing I did was to light a “fag” (cigarette) and the
next thing was to investigate and determine if I was in danger of
bleeding to death. There wasn’t much doubt about that. Arterial blood
was spurting from two of the wounds, which were revealed when the other
men in the hole helped me to cut off my breeches. With their aid, I
managed to stop the hemorrhage by improvising tourniquets with rags
and bayonets. One I placed as high up as possible on the thigh and the
other just below the knee. Then we all smoked another “fag” and lay
there, listening to the big shells going over and the shrapnel bursting
near us. It was quite a concert, too. We discussed what we ought to do,
and finally I said:

“Here; you fellows can walk, and I can’t. Furthermore, you’re not able
to carry me, because you’ve got about all any of you can do to navigate
alone. It doesn’t look as if its going to be any better here very soon.
You all proceed to the rear, and, if you can get some one to come after
me, I’ll be obliged to you.”

They accepted the proposition, because it was good advice and, besides,
it was orders. I was their superior officer. And what happened right
after that confirmed me forever in my early, Kentucky-bred conviction
that there is a great deal in luck. They couldn’t have travelled
more than fifty yards from the shell-hole when the shriek of a
high-explosive seemed to come right down out of the sky into my ears,
and the detonation, which instantly followed, shook the slanting sides
of the shell-hole until dirt in dusty little rivulets came trickling
down upon me. Wounded as I was, I dragged myself up to the edge of the
hole. There was no trace, anywhere, of the four men who had just left
me. They have never been heard of since. Their bodies were never found.
The big shell must have fallen right amongst them and simply blown them
to bits.

It was about a quarter to seven in the morning when I was hit. I lay
in the shell-hole until two in the afternoon, suffering more from
thirst and cold and hunger than from pain. At two o’clock, a batch
of sixty prisoners came along under escort. They were being taken to
the rear under fire. The artillery bombardment was still practically
undiminished. I asked for four of the prisoners and made one of them
get out his rubber ground sheet, carried around his waist. They
responded willingly, and seemed most ready to help me. I had a revolver
(empty) and some bombs in my pockets, but I had no need to threaten
them. Each of the four took a corner of the ground sheet and, upon it,
they half carried and half dragged me toward the rear.

It was a trip which was not without incident. Every now and then
we would hear the shriek of an approaching “coal box,” and then my
prisoner stretcher-bearers and I would tumble in one indiscriminate
heap into the nearest shell-hole. If we did that once, we did it a half
dozen times. After each dive, the four would patiently reorganize and
arrange the improvised stretcher again, and we would proceed. Following
every tumble, however, I would have to tighten my tourniquets, and,
despite all I could do, the hemorrhage from my wound continued so
profuse that I was beginning to feel very dizzy and weak. On the way
in, I sighted our regimental dressing station and signed to my four
bearers to carry me toward it. The station was in an old German dug-out.
Major Gilday was at the door. He laughed when he saw me with my own
special ambulance detail.

“Well, what do you want?” he asked.

“Most of all,” I said, “I think I want a drink of rum.”

He produced it for me instantly.

“Now,” said he, “my advice to you is to keep on travelling. You’ve got
a fine special detail there to look after you. Make ’em carry you to
Poizers. It’s only five miles, and you’ll make it all right. I’ve got
this place loaded up full, no stretcher-bearers, no assistants, no
adequate supply of bandages and medicines, and a lot of very bad cases.
If you want to get out of here in a week, just keep right on going,
now.”

As we continued toward the rear, we were the targets for a number of
humorous remarks from men coming up to go into the fight.

“Give my regards to Blighty, you lucky beggar,” was the most frequent
saying.

“Bli’ me,” said one Cockney Tommy. “There goes one o’ th’ Canadians
with an escort from the Kaiser.”

Another man stopped and asked about my wound.

“Good work,” he said. “I’d like to have a nice clean one like that,
myself.”

I noticed one of the prisoners grinning at some remark and asked him if
he understood English. He hadn’t spoken to me, though he had shown the
greatest readiness to help me.

“Certainly I understand English,” he replied. “I used to be a waiter at
the Knickerbocker Hotel, in New York.” That sounded like a voice from
home, and I wanted to hug him. I didn’t. However, I can say for him he
must have been a good waiter. He gave me good service.

Of the last stages of my trip to Poizers I cannot tell anything for I
arrived unconscious from loss of blood. The last I remember was that
the former waiter, evidently seeing that I was going out, asked me
to direct him how to reach the field dressing station at Poizers and
whom to ask for when he got there. I came back to consciousness in an
ambulance on the way to Albert.




CHAPTER VI

A VISIT FROM THE KING


I was taken from Poizers to Albert in a Ford ambulance, or, as the
Tommies would say, a “tin Lizzie.” The man who drove this vehicle
would make a good chauffeur for an adding machine. Apparently, he was
counting the bumps in the road for he didn’t miss one of them. However,
the trip was only a matter of seven miles, and I was in fair condition
when they lifted me out and carried me to an operating table in the
field dressing station.

A chaplain came along and murmured a little prayer in my ear. I imagine
that would make a man feel very solemn if he thought there was a chance
he was about to pass out, but I knew I merely had a leg pretty badly
smashed up, and, while the chaplain was praying, I was wondering if
they would have to cut it off. I figured, if so, this would handicap my
dancing.

The first formality in a shrapnel case is the administration of an
anti-tetanus inoculation, and, when it is done, you realize that they
are sure trying to save your life. The doctor uses a horse-syringe, and
the injection leaves a lump on your chest as big as a base ball which
stays there for forty-eight hours. After the injection a nurse fills
out a diagnosis blank with a description of your wounds and a record of
your name, age, regiment, regimental number, religion, parentage, and
previous history as far as she can discover it without asking questions
which would be positively indelicate. After all of that, my wounds were
given their first real dressing.

Immediately after this was done, I was bundled into another
ambulance--this time a Cadillac--and driven to Contay where the C.
C. S. (casualty clearing station) and railhead were located. In the
ambulance with me went three other soldiers, an artillery officer and
two privates of infantry. We were all ticketed off as shrapnel cases,
and probable recoveries, which latter detail is remarkable, since the
most slightly injured in the four had twelve wounds, and there were
sixty odd shell fragments or shrapnel balls collectively imbedded in
us. The head nurse told me that I had about twenty wounds. Afterward
her count proved conservative. More accurate and later returns showed
twenty-two bullets and shell fragments in my leg.

We were fairly comfortable in the ambulance, and I, especially, had
great relief from the fact that the nurse had strapped my leg in a
sling attached to the top of the vehicle. We smoked cigarettes and
chatted cheerfully, exchanging congratulations on having got “clean
ones,” that is, wounds probably not fatal. The artillery officer told
me he had been supporting our battalion, that morning, with one of
the “sacrifice batteries.” A sacrifice battery, I might explain, is
one composed of field pieces which are emplaced between the front and
support lines, and which, in case of an attack or counter attack,
are fired at pointblank range. They call them sacrifice batteries
because some of them are wiped out every day. This officer said our
battalion, that morning, had been supported by an entire division of
artillery, and that on our front of four hundred yards the eighteen
pounders, alone, in a curtain fire which lasted thirty-two minutes, had
discharged fifteen thousand rounds of high-explosive shells.

I was impressed by his statement, of course, but I told him that while
this was an astonishing lot of ammunition, it was even more surprising
to have noticed at close range, as I did, the number of Germans they
missed. Toward the end of our trip to Contay, we were much exhausted
and pretty badly shaken up. We were beginning also to realize that we
were by no means out of the woods, surgically. Our wounds had merely
been dressed. Each of us faced an extensive and serious operation. We
arrived at Contay, silent and pretty much depressed. For twenty-four
hours in the Contay casualty clearing station, they did little except
feed us and take our temperatures hourly. Then we were put into a
hospital train for Rouen.

Right here, I would like to tell a little story about a hospital train
leaving Contay for Rouen--not the one we were on, but one which had
left a few days before. The train, when it was just ready to depart
with a full quota of wounded men, was attacked by German aeroplanes
from which bombs were dropped upon it. There is nothing, apparently,
that makes the Germans so fearless and ferocious as the Red Cross
emblem. On the top of each of the cars in this train there was a Red
Cross big enough to be seen from miles in the air. The German aviators
accepted them merely as excellent targets. Their bombs quickly knocked
three or four cars from the rails and killed several of the helpless
wounded men. The rest of the patients, weak and nervous from recent
shock and injury, some of them half delirious, and nearly all of them
in pain, were thrown into near-panic. Two of the nursing sisters in
charge of the train were the coolest individuals present. They walked
calmly up and down its length, urging the patients to remain quiet,
directing the male attendants how to remove the wounded men safely
from the wrecked cars, and paying no attention whatever to the bombs
which were still exploding near the train. I did not have the privilege
of witnessing this scene myself, but I know that I have accurately
described it for the details were told in an official report when the
King decorated the two sisters with the Royal Red Cross, for valor in
the face of the enemy.

The trip from Contay to Rouen was a nightmare--twenty-six hours
travelling one hundred and fifty miles on a train, which was forever
stopping and starting, its jerky and uncertain progress meaning to us
just hours and hours of suffering. I do not know whether this part of
the system for the removal of the wounded has been improved now. Then,
its inconveniences and imperfections must have been inevitable, for, in
every way afterward, the most thoughtful and tender care was shown us.
In the long row of huts which compose the British General Hospital at
Rouen, we found ourselves in what seemed like Paradise.

In the hut, which constituted the special ward for leg wounds, I was
lifted from the stretcher on which I had travelled all the way from
Poizers into a comfortable bed with fresh, clean sheets, and instantly
I found myself surrounded with quiet, trained, efficient care. I forgot
the pain of my wounds and the dread of the coming operation when a tray
of delicious food was placed beside my bed and a nurse prepared me for
the enjoyment of it by bathing my face and hands with scented water.

On the following morning my leg was X-rayed and photographed. I told
the surgeon I thought the business of operating could very well be put
off until I had had about three more square meals, but he couldn’t
see it that way. In the afternoon, I got my first sickening dose of
ether, and they took the first lot of iron out of me. I suppose these
were just the surface deposits, for they only got five or six pieces.
However, they continued systematically. I had five more operations,
and every time I came out of the ether; the row of bullets and shell
scraps at the foot of my bed was a little longer. After the number had
reached twenty-two, they told me that perhaps there were a few more
in there, but they thought they’d better let them stay. My wounds had
become septic, and it was necessary to give all attention to drainage
and cure. It was about this time that everything, for a while, seemed
to become hazy, and my memories got all queerly mixed up and confused.
I recollect I conceived a violent dislike for a black dog that appeared
from nowhere, now and then, and began chewing at my leg, and I believe
I gave the nurse a severe talking to because she insisted on going to
look on at the ball game when she ought to be sitting by to chase that
dog away. And I was perfectly certain about her being at the ball game,
because I saw her there when I was playing third base.

It was at this time (on November 28, 1916, ten days after I had been
wounded) that my father, in Lexington, received the following cablegram
from the officer in charge of the Canadian records, in England:

  “Sincerely regret to inform you that Sergeant Alexander McClintock
  is officially reported dangerously ill in No. 5 General Hospital,
  from gunshot wound in left thigh. Further particulars supplied when
  received.”

It appears that, during the time of my adventures with the black dog
and the inattentive nurse, my temperament had ascended to the stage
when the doctors begin to admit that another method of treatment
might have been successful. But I didn’t pass out. The one thing I
most regret about my close call is that my parents, in Lexington,
were in unrelieved suspense about my condition until I myself sent
them a cable from London, on December 15th. After the first official
message, seemingly prepared almost as a preface to the announcement
of my demise, my father received no news of me whatever. And, as I
didn’t know that the official message had gone, I cabled nothing to him
until I was feeling fairly chipper again. You can’t have wars, though,
without these little misunderstandings.

If it were possible, I should say something here which would be fitting
and adequate about the English women who nursed the twenty-five hundred
wounded men in General Hospital No. 5, at Rouen. But that power isn’t
given me. All I can do is to fall back upon our most profound American
expression of respect and say that my hat is off to them. One nurse
in the ward in which I lay had been on her feet for fifty-six hours,
with hardly time even to eat. She finally fainted from exhaustion, was
carried out of the ward, and was back again in four hours, assisting
at an operation. And the doctors were doing their bit, too, in living
up to the obligations which they considered to be theirs. An operating
room was in every ward with five tables in each. After the fight on the
Somme, in which I was wounded, not a table was vacant any hour in the
twenty-four, for days at a time. Outside of each room was a long line
of stretchers containing patients next awaiting surgical attention.
And in all that stress, I did not hear one word of complaint from the
surgeons who stood, hour after hour, using their skill and training for
the petty pay of English army medical officers.

On December 5th, I was told I was well enough to be sent to England
and, on the next day, I went on a hospital train from Rouen to Havre.
Here I was placed on a hospital ship which every medical officer in
our army ought to have a chance to inspect. Nothing ingenuity could
contrive for convenience and comfort was missing. Patients were sent
below decks in elevators, and then placed in swinging cradles which
hung level no matter what the ship’s motion might be. As soon as I
had been made comfortable in my particular cradle, I was given a box
which had engraved upon it: “Presented with the compliments of the
Union Castle Line. May you have a speedy and good recovery.” The box
contained cigarettes, tobacco, and a pipe.

When the ship docked at Southampton, after a run of eight hours across
channel, each patient was asked what part of the British Isles he would
like to be taken to for the period of his convalescence. I requested
to be taken to London, where, I thought, there was the best chance of
my seeing Americans who might know me. Say, I sure made a good guess.
I didn’t know many Americans, but I didn’t need to know them. They
found me and made themselves acquainted. They brought things, and then
they went out to get more they had forgotten to bring the first trip.
The second day after I had been installed on a cot in the King George
Hospital, in London, I sent fifteen hundred cigarettes back to the boys
of our battalion in France out of my surplus stock. If I had undertaken
to eat and drink and smoke all the things that were brought to me by
Americans, just because I was an American, I’d be back in that hospital
now, only getting fairly started on the job. It’s some country when
you need it.

The wounded soldier, getting back to England, doesn’t have a chance to
imagine that his services are not appreciated. The welcome he receives
begins at the railroad station. All traffic is stopped by the Bobbies
to give the ambulances a clear way leaving the station. The people
stand in crowds, the men with their hats off, while the ambulances
pass. Women rush out and throw flowers to the wounded men. Sometimes
there is a cheer, but usually only silence and words of sympathy.

The King George Hospital was built to be a government printing office,
and was nearing completion when the war broke out. It has been made a
Paradise for convalescent men. The bareness and the sick suggestion and
characteristic smell of the average hospital are unknown here. There
are soft lights and comfortable beds and pretty women going about as
visitors. The stage beauties and comedians come and entertain us. The
food is delicious, and the chief thought of every one seems to be to
show the inmates what a comfortable and cheery thing it is to be ill
among a lot of real friends. I was there from December until February,
and my recollections of the stay are so pleasant that sometimes I wish
I was back.

On the Friday before Christmas there was a concert in our ward. Among
the artists who entertained us were Fay Compton, Gertrude Elliott
(sister of Maxine Elliott), George Robie, and other stars of the London
stage. After our protracted stay in the trenches and our long absence
from all the civilized forms of amusement, the affair seemed to us
the most wonderful show ever given. And, in some ways, it was. For
instance, in the most entertaining of dramatic exhibitions, did you
ever see the lady artists go around and reward enthusiastic applause
with kisses? Well that’s what we got. And I am proud to say that it was
Miss Compton who conferred this honor upon me.

At about three o’clock on that afternoon, when we were all having a
good time, one of the orderlies threw open the door of the ward and
announced in a loud voice that His Majesty, the King, was coming in. We
could not have been more surprised if some one had thrown in a Mills
bomb. Almost immediately the King walked in, accompanied by a number of
aides. They were all in service uniforms, the King having little in his
attire to distinguish him from the others. He walked around, presenting
each patient with a copy of “Queen Mary’s Gift Book,” an artistic
little volume with pictures and short stories by the most famous of
English artists and writers. When he neared my bed, he turned to one of
the nurses and inquired:

“Is this the one?”

The nurse nodded. He came and sat at the side of the bed and shook
hands with me. He asked as to what part of the United States I had come
from, how I got my wounds, and what the nature of them were, how I was
getting along, and what I particularly wished done for me. I answered
his questions and said that everything I could possibly wish for had
already been done for me.

“I thank you,” he said, “for myself and my people for your services.
Our gratitude cannot be great enough toward men who have served us as
you have.”

He spoke in a very low voice and with no assumption of royal dignity.
There was nothing in the least thrilling about the incident, but there
was much apparent sincerity in the few words.

After he had gone, one of the nurses asked me what he had said.

“Oh,” I said, “George asked me what I thought about the way the war was
being conducted, and I said I’d drop in and talk it over with him as
soon as I was well enough to be up.”

There happened one of the great disappointments of my life. She didn’t
see the joke. She was English. She gasped and glared at me, and I think
she went out and reported that I was delirious again.

Really, I wasn’t much impressed by the English King. He seemed a
pleasant, tired little man, with a great burden to bear, and not much
of an idea about how to bear it. He struck me as an individual who
would conscientiously do his best in any situation, but would never
do or say anything with the slightest suspicion of a punch about it.
A few days after his visit to the hospital, I saw in the _Official
London Gazette_ that I had been awarded the Distinguished Conduct
Medal. Official letters from the Canadian headquarters amplified this
information, and a notice from the British War Office informed me that
the medal awaited me there. I was told the King knew that the medal
had been awarded to me, when he spoke to me in the hospital. Despite
glowing reports in the Kentucky press, he didn’t pin it on me. Probably
he didn’t have it with him. Or, perhaps, he didn’t consider it good
form to hang a D. C. M. on a suit of striped, presentation pajamas with
a prevailing tone of baby blue.[A]

[Footnote A: EDITOR’S NOTE.--The medal was formally presented to Sergt.
McClintock by the British Consul General, in New York City, on August
15, 1917.]

While I was in the King George Hospital I witnessed one of the most
wonderful examples of courage and pluck I had ever seen. A young Scot,
only nineteen years old, McAuley by name, had had the greater part of
his face blown away. The surgeons had patched him up in some fashion,
but he was horribly disfigured. He was the brightest, merriest man
in the ward, always joking and never depressed. His own terrible
misfortune was merely the topic for humorous comment with him. He
seemed to get positive amusement out of the fact that the surgeons were
always sending for him to do something more with his face. One day he
was going into the operating room and a fellow patient asked him what
the new operation was to be.

“Oh,” he said, “I’m going to have a cabbage put on in place of a head.
It’ll grow better than the one I have now.”

Once in a fortnight he would manage to get leave to absent himself from
the hospital for an hour or two. He never came back alone. It took a
couple of men to bring him back. On the next morning, he would say:

“Well, it was my birthday. A man must have a few drinks on his
birthday.”

I was discharged from the hospital in the middle of February and
sent to a comfortable place at Hastings, Sussex, where I lived until
my furlough papers came through. I had a fine time in London at the
theatres and clubs pending my departure for home. When my furlough had
arrived, I went to Buxton, Derbyshire, where the Canadian Discharge
Depot was located and was provided with transportation to Montreal.
I came back to America on the Canadian Pacific Royal Mail steamer,
_Metagama_, and the trip was without incident of any sort. We lay for a
time in the Mersey, awaiting word that our convoy was ready to see us
out of the danger zone, and a destroyer escorted us four hundred miles
on our way.

I was informed, before my departure, that a commission as lieutenant in
the Canadian forces awaited my return from furlough, and I had every
intention of going back to accept it. But, since I got to America,
things have happened. Now, it’s the army of Uncle Sam, for mine. I’ve
written these stories to show what we are up against. It’s going to be
a tough game, and a bloody one, and a sorrowful one for many. But it’s
up to us to save the issue where it’s mostly right on one side, and
all wrong on the other--and I’m glad we’re in. I’m not willing to quit
soldiering now, but I will be when we get through with this. When we
finish up with this, there won’t be any necessity for soldiering. The
world will be free of war for a long, long time--and a God’s mercy,
that. Let me take another man’s eloquent words for my last ones:

  Oh! spacious days of glory and of grieving!
    Oh! sounding hours of lustre and of loss;
  Let us be glad we lived, you still believing
    The God who gave the Cannon gave the Cross.

  Let us doubt not, amid these seething passions,
    The lusts of blood and hate our souls abhor:
  The Power that Order out of Chaos fashions
    Smites fiercest in the wrath-red forge of War.

  Have faith! Fight on! Amid the battle-hell,
    Love triumphs, Freedom beacons, All is well.

(Robert W. Service, “Rhymes of a Red Cross Man.”)

                               THE END.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

On page 43, Dinkeibusch has been changed to Dinkiebusch.

On pages 46 and 135, casualities has been changed casualties.

On page 75, through has been changed to though.

On page 76, smybols has been changed to symbols.

On page 93, denouments has been changed to denouements.

On page 122, distinguising has been changed to distinguishing.

On pages 84, 124, 126, 135 and 146 dugout has been changed to dug-out.

On page 135, descendents has been changed to descendants.

On page 135, continous has been changed to continuous.

Minor silent changes have been made to regularize punctuation; all
other spelling, hyphenation and punctuation have been retained as
typeset.