Personally, I buried several cart loads of junk in various parts of West Flanders, in the hope that I might, sometime, get back to dig it up.
As we continued, the signs of war increased. More houses and outbuildings wrecked by shell fire, more graves alongside the road, each surmounted by a cross. Airplanes were continually in sight – both ours and those of the enemy. When we first watched the bursts of the “Archie” shells around an enemy plane, we were sure that it had been hit. A dozen – yes, a hundred shells might be exploded around it, but, so far as we knew, never a plane was brought down in this manner. To the observer on the ground it might appear that all the shell-bursts were very close to the plane, while, as a matter of fact, they might have been – and usually were – hundreds of feet away.
Dranoutre, which was our last stopping place before going into the line, was a small village of possibly five hundred inhabitants before the war. Now it had more than twice that population, due to the refugees who had come in from the East in advance of the German occupation. For some reason or other, this town had escaped any shelling, although every town, city and hamlet in the vicinity had been literally rased to the ground. The reason, of course, was that the Germans had some good spies domiciled in the place. I do not know whether or not our Intelligence ever found them out but I have been told that, later in the war – in 1918 – the Boche did shoot up the town.
We bivouacked in a field adjacent to the village and were allowed to ramble about and visit in the town itself. Very few of us had money enough to do much in the way of celebrating, however, so it was a very tame proceeding. About the only real excitement I saw there was when some of the boys, taking a bath in the town fish pond, stumbled on to a pike about two feet long. After a mad scramble, in which at least a hundred engaged, the fish was caught – and I suppose someone ate it.
We only spent one day and night at Dranoutre: that is, the Machine Gun Section. Next day, September 19,1915, the “Number ones” of each gun crew went in to locate the positions of the guns of the Surreys and the East Kents (The Buffs), whom we were relieving. The remainder of the gun crews came in that night and the infantry next day.
As we made our way, that Sunday morning, by a roundabout route through Locre and way stations, the signs of war became more and more evident until, at last, we came to the village of Wulvergheim. I say “village.” It had been that and probably a prosperous one; but now it was nothing but a ruin. No person lived there, every building having been utterly destroyed by German shells. Even the church had been destroyed, only one side of the clock tower remaining. The hands of the clock on this side were hanging limply in the position of about six-thirty. As though angered that even this small remnant should survive, the enemy persisted in shelling the ruined edifice every day while we were there. Thousands of shells were wasted on that little place. We never had a man in it, and when we left, the clock was still there.
Now, our little crowd was just an average bit of the long fringe of British soldiers who were at that time holding back the flower of the German Army. No better, no worse than the rest of them, and what I have to tell of them is going to be the truth, in spite of all the objurgations of the thousand and one people who insist that I should put a little more of the “sob-stuff” or, as some of them call it, the “human-interest” element into it.
Why; damn you and God bless you; there was nothing of the kind in evidence. We probably had our inner feelings – I know I was particularly interested in a strange bird which I could not identify – but, so far as all this business of showing your emotions by facial contortions is concerned; well, there was no such thing. All that “blah” was invented in the movie studios of Hollywood and thereabouts. I recently spent a very uncomfortable hour and more, watching and listening to what was advertised as the Best War Picture. As it is so well known, I can see no reason for not naming it – “All Quiet on the Western Front.” The parts which dealt with actual battle were excellent. The properties – uniforms, and all that – were accurately portrayed and the depiction of shell-bursts the best I have ever seen. It was only in the portrayal of the individual men that I had any reason to find fault – but that was quite enough to sicken me of the whole show. Why; confound it, man; men do not act like that whether in war or in peace. One can almost hear some Director shouting to this one or that one: “Register HORROR” or something like that. Damn it; they just don’t do it. Of course, I do not know anything about the young German soldiers, but I am giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they were just as good in that respect as the soldiers of other nations.
I have seen a brother bringing his twin out of the line, ripped from shoulder to buttocks by a steel shard from a “wooly bear” shell. Did he look like anything I have seen in the pictures? He did not. He bore the uncertain but hopeful expression which any of us would probably show if one of our blood brethren should be knocked down by a “hit and run” driver. “Got to get Bob out; he’s hit pretty bad,” was all he said.
“Here, son; a jolt of rum won’t do either one of you any harm right now,” says I. Both of these boys were teetotalers and the star athletic performers of our Battalion. The blonde one, he was doing the carrying, spoke to his brother. What they said, I do not know. The other was very seriously hurt and was losing blood at an alarming rate.
“All right,” he said: “let us have it.”
I poured each of them a generous slug of rum and made them swallow it at one gulp. “Medicine,” I said, “take it all at once.”
And they did. And I am glad to say that both of them are now living although they have two blesse stripes apiece.
If any of us felt any particular emotion on that day when we first went into the line, it was very successfully concealed under the usual “grousing” and joshing. “Bet I get the first shot,” was George Paudash’s last word to me. “Like hell, you will,” says I. That’s about all the sentiment or “heart-throb” stuff you could find in that outfit.
Chapter 4. Flanders
OUR Battalion Headquarters was in an old cabaret along the road leading from Neuve Eglise to Ploegsteert (corrupted to “Plugstreet” by the soldiers) and the way from there up to the front line was through a communication trench known as “Surrey Lane,” as it had been constructed by the Surrey Regiment whom we were relieving. The entrance to the trench was in a little orchard, just behind the cabaret. Just as we were about to start into the trench, a man from the “Buffs” came over and was talking to one of our men when sput – he looked around in a vague, questioning sort of manner and dropped to the ground, groped around with his hands, then straightened out – and died. A stray bullet had hit him, right through the heart. Another of the Buffs, who were being relieved the same day, ran over and dragged the body back to the shelter of the building. “There goes Will,” he said, “out since Mons and never did learn to take cover; w’y ’e was arskin’ for it, I s’y.”
That was our first experience in seeing a man actually killed in war but, curiously enough, it did not seem to affect our men very much. We had seen so many wounded men in England and listened to their stories of how things were going at the front that this was about what we expected.
So, we went in. It was a long way to the front line but nothing else happened to disturb us excepting the faint whisper of big shells, coming from miles behind our lines and consigned to points equally distant in “Germany.” Only the machine guns went in this day (it was a Sunday) and the infantry “took over” the next day. This was common practice and for very good reasons. The enemy was, at all times, very well informed as to our movements as the people of that part of Flanders were largely German sympathizers and had many and devious methods of conveying information across the lines. The machine guns, wherever we had anything like permanent trenches, were so situated as to cover all the ground in no-man’s-land and, as long as the guns were in position, they offered a pretty stiff obstacle to any attempted raid. If the infantry and Emma Gees were changing at the sam
e time, it might offer an opening for an attack, but by first changing the guns, while the infantry stood watch, and then changing the infantry, after the new guns were in position, this menace was averted.
When we arrived at the front line, we were welcomed by the M.G. crews of the Surreys and, glory be – they had tea and biscuits and jam ready for us. Bless those boys. They were of the Old Contemptibles – the original Surreys, who had been right in the thick of things for more than a year and they knew we would be hungry after our long march. We had been moving so fast since leaving England that we had not had much time for eating and we were very thankful, indeed.
While sipping a can of tea, I was curiously watching a man who was standing against the parapet, looking through a large periscope which was built up against the wall, with the top cleverly concealed in the ragged edges of the sandbags. After a while he moved over a few feet and took hold of a queer contraption which looked like a rifle stock, and a moment later I heard a shot. I then saw that the thing he was holding was, in reality, a skeleton rifle to which was attached a real rifle which was laid across the top of the parapet, the muzzle wrapped in a piece of sandbag and concealed, as was the periscope, by the irregular arrangement of the sandbags. Going over to him, I soon learned all about it. These things were common thereafter but that was the first time I had ever seen one. It was simply a device by which one could aim and fire over the parapet without exposing anything but the rifle itself. The sighting was done through a miniature periscope, the upper end of which was directly behind the bolt of the rifle and aligned with the sights, and the lower end in the position that would ordinarily be occupied by the rear sight. Connecting rods hooked up the dummy trigger on the skeleton frame with the trigger of the real rifle and a sort of crank arrangement was connected with the bolt.
The rifleman, seeing that I was interested, invited me to take a shot, first taking me over to the large periscope which he used for observation purposes and explaining to me that, “Them Wurtembergers over there are trying to fix up their parapet which our artillery knocked down this morning, and if you watch carefully you can get sight of a head now and then.” Taking out my binoculars, I applied them to the periscope. This was evidently a new one to the Surrey man, and when I turned the glasses over to him he was wildly enthusiastic and called to several of his companions to come and take a look. Field glasses or telescopes are just as useful when used in connection with a periscope as anywhere else but it had evidently never occurred to those fellows. With the glasses, we could see every movement over the top of the enemy trench, some three hundred yards across the way. For the most part, all we could see was the sand-bag coming up on top of the half rebuilt wall, but every now and then a head would be visible for an instant. At the others’ invitation, I took the rifle and, holding a careful aim on the point where we expected the next sand-bag to come up, I awaited his word. He was at the big periscope, with the binoculars and when he called out, “Now,” I shot. He said I hit the sand-bag. I don’t know about that but I am very sure that that was the first shot actually fired at an enemy by any member of the Twenty-first Battalion.
That was the start of our “rifleman in war.”
The first casualty in the Battalion occurred that night, when a scout named Boyer was killed on his initial trip out into no-man’s-land. Then the next day one Starkey decided that he could not see well enough with a periscope, so he took a look-see over the parapet. We buried the two of them in a garden back of the lines, where many others from the best and most famous British Line Regiments also lay.
Things had been very quiet in that sector before we came along, but just as soon as our infantry had taken over the position the Germans decided to give us a welcome. They knew just who we were and when we had taken positions, to an hour, as the rear was full of their spies. There had not been a bombardment at this point for several weeks, but the day after our infantry came in they put over a furious barrage of shells of both 77 m/m “whiz-bangs” and 5.9 (150 m/m) “crumps.” Considerable damage was done to our parapets and several men were seriously wounded. While this shelling was nothing compared to the bombardments they put over later on, we were deeply impressed at the time and it gave us an opportunity to make the acquaintance of the sound and effect of the various kinds of shells. But our trenches were shot up badly, necessitating much work with pick and shovel for the next few days, a thing which never went well with Canadians. I might say at this time that when we took over those trenches from the Buffs and Surreys, they were clean and dry and comfortable, as much work had been spent on them that summer. I am afraid we did not appreciate it at that time, but as I think back over the many trenches we held afterward, I must admit that this was the very finest one we ever occupied.
The Machine Gun Section came through these first few days in great shape, having but one man seriously wounded, he was an old U.S. Army man named Mangan who had served in the Philippines. After eight days of it, we were relieved by the Twentieth Battalion and we went back to Dranoutre for our first “rest.” We soon learned to dread these rests and would have much preferred to stay in the trenches, as it was then customary to move out everything, including one’s ammunition supplies. A month’s stay in the trench would have been preferable to having to lug all that stuff in and out so often.
During our first month or so in the trenches there was no time or occasion to do much with the rifle on my part. We were too busy with our machine gun work and it was not until along in October when we moved up into the Ypres Salient that the opportunity came to test my skill with both rifle and machine gun.
That first month was taken up almost entirely with our becoming acquainted with “strafing” work with our two Colt guns. The Machine Gun Officer of the Surreys, whom we had relieved, had established two strafing positions, well behind the front lines, and it was my fortune to be assigned to this position. I say this position because, although there were two different emplacements for the guns, they were used alternately – one at night and the other during the daytime. This latter position – which I afterwards changed – was for aircraft strafing. At that time the enemy planes came over at an elevation of fifteen hundred feet or less and they made fine targets. We finally got one and then they kept up so high we could no longer reach them.
The other, the real, permanent gun position, was so situated that we could fire over our own front lines and harass the enemy ration parties as they came up at night. We certainly made life miserable for Heinie from that place. One morning, after one of our strafing parties, we could see, through our glasses, at least a dozen men and as many horses piled up at a place called The Barricade – the end of the road down to the German trenches across the valley. That was as far as they could come with their field kitchens which were hauled by horses. After that they only came as far as the top of the ridge, at a place right behind the Hospice. We named this place “Cookers Halt.” That was about twenty-two hundred yards from our position but, by bringing up our reserve guns and giving them the whole dose, we were able to convince them that they better stay back behind the hill. I’ll bet a lot of Fritzes cursed us aplenty when they had to pack all their stuff for a mile or two. That’s where the fun comes in – just to know that you have stung the other fellow.
One of our strafing positions was about a hundred and fifty yards to the front of a group of wrecked buildings and from this position on two occasions we caught large working parties in broad daylight and cut them up badly. Our fire coming from the line of buildings naturally led the Germans to believe we were using the buildings for cover, and they shelled those buildings steadily but never put anything close enough to our real hideout to do us any damage. This taught me a good lesson which I put into operation later on in my sniping, as will be duly told.
Up to this time, we had no instruments of our own for working up the firing data other than what we had borrowed from our artillery. Just for the edification of some of our mathematical sharks (in the United States Army, I mean �
� they are all my friends), I will tell how we sometimes found our targets without the aid of a mil scale.
We had a lot of little playthings, just like the “string and gadget with a hole in it.” Hell, yes: we had all that and the “graticules” on our binoculars – and range finders! Say, folks; I have seen more of those expensive instruments lying alongside the road than you could carry in a two-ton truck. We tried our best to make some practical use of all these things, but it was out of the question – so we ditched them and went back to the old system of figuring things by degrees and minutes of angle. We had, of course, good maps of the whole terrain over which we were fighting. The only thing necessary to know was exactly where we were located on that map. Having ascertained this, we were in position to deliver fire on any other area shown on the same map or any other which joined up with it.
Were we? Well; yes – maybe. Here we are at “B-4-6-21” – the enemy we want to straff is at “A-2-6.” “Un-ha; now how we going to catch him? Got a good compass and the map says that the magnetic deviation (or declination) is 24 degrees. Well; that’s all right, so far; what do we do from here? What to do – what to do? That’s what I thought. Here we are and there he is but how in hell am I to lay these guns so they will drop their bullets in the right spot?
At that time we had no clinometers (quadrants) for proving the angle of elevation – but we did have carpenters; in our Pioneer Section; and these carpenters had squares and levels and at least one of them knew the ratio of angles on his square. Perhaps I have not expressed this in the proper mathematical way, but neither have I put in the technical language of the textbooks that come from Ft. Sill or Benning. I’m just telling you how we worked it out. To make a short story out of what might drag out into an all-night discussion, we figured the thing out and got results.
A Rifleman Went to War Page 6