A Rifleman Went to War

by Herbert W. McBride

  That we had some spies in our own ranks is undeniable. One such, whom I knew, was a sergeant in charge of a line of trucks which brought supplies up from the base at St. Omer. I say he was a spy. Well, he was in the pay of the enemy, anyway, but his principal job was to carry messages from the real spies back at Headquarters and transmit them to other operatives at the end of his route, which was, at that time, the village of LaClytte, where our Battalion had billets when not in the lines. He was a fine looking, upstanding chap and very popular with all ranks. I will not mention his name, as he was detected, long after, down in France and I suppose they did the usual thing to him although I never heard anything definite about the matter after he was arrested and taken away. The worst of it was that he was really a native born Canadian, which makes it all the harder to understand how he happened to “get that way.” Thank God, he was not a member of our Battalion.

  We had good, first-hand evidence that the enemy was well informed as to our movements, as they greeted us, by the number of our battalions, the very first time we went into the line – and quite frequently afterward. I doubt if our side ever did equal them in this respect. It was almost a hopeless case, where most of the population was against us and for the other fellow. Perhaps that is one reason why they did not attempt the trench raids – for prisoners – as we did. That was the only way we could find out what troops were opposing us. They (the Germans) did take up the trench raiding business in earnest down in France and it may be that it was because they did not have such a good native espionage system down there.

  However, back to our story about the doings at Captain’s Post. One morning, soon after we took over the position there, I was up in the hay loft with Bouchard, looking over the country, when we heard a shot, evidently fired from nearby, and then heard an outcry from a trench a short distance to our right (it was a communication trench called Poppy Lane) and saw several men carrying another out into the roadway. Bou grabbed me by the arm and said, “There he is, Mac, that’s the fellow that shot him, get the son of a –– something or other.” I looked where he was pointing and, sure enough, a slinking figure was coming down along a hedge which concealed him from the men over at Poppy Lane but exposed him to plain view from our position. I took my glasses and could see that he was not in uniform, but he had a rifle and certainly was trying to escape notice. He kept looking over to where the group was gathered around the trench entrance, and, while I was watching him, stuck the rifle under a bunch of litter and bushes which grew alongside the hedge and then started to crawl away toward the woods – Maple Copse, I think it was called. I did not have time to do much thinking but simply acted on impulse. Taking deliberate aim, I shot him through the middle and he dropped.

  Then I commenced to feel a little bit shaky. Down in my heart, I knew that I was right but the whole thing came up so quickly and was so queer all round that, for a few moments, I was at loss as to what to do. The result was that I swore Bouchard to secrecy and we went down and joined the rest of the bunch at breakfast. Later in the day, Norton-Taylor came around. He was a sergeant at that time, but he was a good soldier and my personal friend, so I told him all about it and, as soon as it began to get dark, we went out to have a look. We found the fellow dead, of course. He was dressed in the usual costume of the farmers thereabouts and had not a single thing on his person but his clothing. I soon found the rifle which he had cached and it was a regulation French Lebel. He had never even ejected the empty cartridge case, and the magazine contained three other cartridges. Hughie, that is, Norton-Taylor, agreed with me that the less said about the matter the better, so we just rolled the body over under the hedge and left it there, together with the rifle. From that day to this I have never mentioned that affair to anyone. During the succeeding days there were numerous instances of such murderous sniping behind our lines, and several of the culprits were caught and executed, toute de suite.

  On the fifteenth of October, the entire Battalion moved on up into the front line (I remember that date, because it was my birthday), and next day I was delegated to pick out a good strafing position from whence we could harass the enemy with machine-gun fire. This phase of machine-gun work was new then, having been developed by the Canadians within the last few months. It soon became the regular procedure and every machine-gun section maintained one or two strafing guns wherever they happened to be located, if within range of the enemy.

  I had located a good sniping nest in the ruins of an old farm building which was known as Sniper’s Barn. I suppose the name was given it because when we first went there we found the body of a French soldier lying with the muzzle of his rifle poked through a small hole in the brick wall and eight dead Germans lying out in front. They finally got him but he certainly had a good balance to his credit before they did it. This place, like all the farm buildings in that part of the country, was a substantially built brick house or, rather, group of buildings, consisting of the dwelling house, stables, bams and everything else, all connected and built around a sort of court-yard – the open space or court being the depository for the manure. From the frequent shellings it had endured it was apparent that the Germans believed that it was and had been continuously used by our troops, while as a matter of fact, for nearly a year it had not been occupied at all. So when they told me to select a good position from which to operate a strafing gun, I decided that Sniper’s Barn was a pretty good place. It was only about four hundred yards behind our front line and less than five hundred from Germany, but across a narrow valley, which put it on a level with and, in some places, a few meters above the enemy line. It was an ideal observation post, as from there we could see at least a mile of the terrain behind the other fellow’s line, while, from our front line, we could see nothing beyond the narrow strip of no-man’s-land between the two trenches.

  While I was first inspecting the place, the Germans gave it what we afterward came to know as their “daily hate.” That is, they put some fifteen or twenty shells into the place. Well, that did not look so good, but, after a little scouting around I noticed that, while the buildings bore the signs of frequent and severe shelling, the ground in front of them was almost entirely innocent of shell-holes. Carefully crawling down to a line of hedge which surrounded a garden patch in front of the house, I quickly decided that that was the place for the gun. Prior to this, at Messines, I had noticed that when we had a strafing post out in front of a group of buildings, the enemy had persistently shelled the buildings but never, excepting in case of a “short” did a shell burst near us.

  There was at least a hundred yards between this hedge and the nearest of the buildings and the way those Dutchmen were shooting, those days, that was a-plenty. They could come pretty near to placing every shell into a five foot trench if they wanted to.

  We dug in a little and built up a little, just behind the hedge and made a nice little nest, big enough for two men and the gun. (No use putting a half dozen in one spot where one shell might clean out the whole bunch.)

  Beside the machine gun, I always had a rifle at hand, and spent a lot of time checking up on ranges to various points behind the enemy line. I did this with the machine gun too. There were innumerable shell holes filled with water, and it was a simple matter to shoot until the splash showed a hit. One had to be careful, though, and pick his time. Early morning was no good, for two reasons; we were shooting toward the east and the light was very bad and, as a general thing, the air was cool enough to cause a puff of vapor to appear at the muzzle – just like light smoke. As the enemy undoubtedly had good observers, it would have resulted in their blowing us out of there. But, during the afternoons, with the light in our favor and moderate temperature, we did very well.

  From the start of this tour of duty we could see plenty of individuals and now and then a group of men. Sometimes, in the latter case, we would give them a burst from the gun, and, perhaps two or three times a day, would take a crack at a single man, with the rifle but we made no attempt to start a regular
campaign of sniping at that time for the reason that our front line was in a sad state of disrepair and our men, necessarily had to expose themselves in moving up or down the line and, as the enemy appeared to take it easy, we did the same. At night however, we regularly shot up the cross-roads, main line trenches and dumps which our daily observation showed were regularly used. As our position was in plain sight from the enemy line, it was necessary to devise some means to conceal the flash of the gun. At first, we simply hung up a sand-bag screen about two feet in front of the muzzle but this was not very satisfactory as the bullets soon cut a hole large enough for some sparks to go through. Then our ordnance people had a lot of contrivances made which looked (and were) very much like the ordinary mufflers used on gas engines. They stopped the flash, all right, but were so heavy that, mounted on the muzzle of the gun, they not only changed all our elevations but rendered the guns very inaccurate. I had some ideas of my own and found time to slip back, now and then, to our armourer’s shop and do some experimenting and, eventually, turned out a gadget that worked perfectly. It was a crude bit of work but it did the business.

  I made it from a French 75 case. I first cut a strip some two inches wide out of one side – extending from the base to the mouth – then riveted a narrow strip of sheet steel along the opposite side, this strip extending out over the mouth of the case and being formed into a regular bayonet-lock, such as used on the Civil War muskets. I cut a hole, about one inch in diameter in the base of the shell, directly in line with the muzzle of the gun. I then riveted three flanges inside the case, curved from the top toward the front and downward, these projected about one-half inch. That was all there was to it at first. No flash showed from the front but we found that occasionally one of the sparks, which were deflected downward and out the open bottom of the thing, would give a faint twinkle. I then added two small hooks, riveted onto the front (base) of the shell case and hung a strip of wet sand bag on them, drawing the comers back and attaching them to the legs of the tripod. With this device, I have sat up on top of our parapet within seventy-five yards of Heinie’s line and fired to my heart’s content. It was not heavy enough to impair accuracy and had but a slight effect on elevations and we very soon checked up on that. I do not know whether or not any more were ever made. Our Colonel came up one night with a party of officers to see it work and they gave it their approval.

  For about a month after we occupied the front lines about Captain’s Post things went along in their usual way. At one time there was a sort of general attack along our front to give the higher command a chance to try out some new smoke bombs and smoke shells. This, I believe, was about the first time the smoke screen was used. Our battalion got into the lines and stood by in case a counter attack should be made, while we gunners took the machine guns and set them up to cover our infantry’s advance if necessary. It turned out that we were not needed so we sat there and watched as pretty a show as has ever been seen. At the proper signal, every gun back of our lines commenced dropping these new smoke shells in a continuous row along the top of the German parapet; as each shell struck it burst and sent out a dense cloud of smoke which soon became a dense wall through which no one could see at all. Our bombers then advanced and threw some hand grenades over into the enemy trenches and then retired, no attempt being made to take any part of the line or prisoners.

  Everything seemed to go fine with our side, but the Germans naturally expected a general attack to commence, so they socked shells all over our trenches and tore things apart in general. It was about as bad a bombardment as we had encountered and it sure busted up those trenches, which had been none too good in the first place. The rain had set in for keeps just about this time and there was nothing but mud – mud – mud everywhere. Those trenches just oozed away like melting butter and it was a continual job to barricade them up with sand bags. Then to top it off, the Germans held the higher ground and there were places where they could dam up the water, holding it until an unusually hard rain would come, whereupon they would open the gates and give us the full benefit of the whole dose. I have seen them turn six or seven feet of water into our trenches in less than an hour and at places in our communication trenches it would be over a man’s head, a man being drowned in it one night.

  Under such conditions it was an impossibility for us to dig and the best we could do was to construct sand-bag barricades or parapets. These gave some protection from bullets and small fragments but were no use against direct hits of any kind of shells, even a little whiz-bang would tear right through or blow them apart. At one time, for more than two weeks, more than two hundred yards of our front line parapet was down and we could not get it built up again. The result was, that when a man had to move about he had to do it exposed to full view of the German snipers and even at night we were continually having men hit by stray bullets. In the day time it was a sure bet someone was going to get hit, as the Germans had some good snipers who watched for just such opportunities.

  Despite all this hard luck, our men managed to finally get up some sort of screen, and behind it, assisted by the engineers, they constructed a new line of trenches slightly in the rear of the old one, which was then abandoned except for a listening post and two or three machine-gun positions. We also got some pretty good barbed wire strung out in front. The German also had his share of hard luck about this time and at nights did not bother us so much, which allowed all this construction to be finished. But we always got a few shells and rifle grenades in the daytime, and some high-angle bombs, but with these the mud was actually our friend as it blanketed the effect of the shell bursts and unless one fell right on top of you it did no harm.

  The most trying thing about all this digging was that the entire trench system here was nothing more or less than one continuous grave, and it was difficult to dig anywhere without uncovering bodies. Many of these graves had been marked by crosses put up by comrades to give name, date of death and organization, but hundreds had merely an uninscribed cross or were unmarked. One of our sergeants discovered the grave of his brother, who had served in the King’s Royal Rifles, and I ran across a grave marked with the name of Meyers, Indianapolis, Indiana, who was with the Princess Pats and said to have been the first man killed in action. There was a string of old English and French trenches, both in front and behind our lines, and all more or less filled with bodies that had never been properly buried. Also there were plenty of Germans mixed up amongst them. Whenever possible, we gave these bodies a proper burial, but with many of them nothing could be done without incurring unnecessary further losses in men.

  However, we spent a month more or less in getting all this mess cleaned up and trenches that would again shelter us, and just about the end of it an incident occurred which changed my ideas regarding the war. Up until this time I had taken the war as a more or less impersonal affair and had not gone out of my way to look for trouble or for someone to kill. But on November 14th, a German sniper killed Charlie Wendt, one of my own boys. This put me on the warpath right.

  During October the only casualties amongst the machine gunners had been three wounded; MacNab, Redpath and Lee all being hit on the same day and all three being invalided back to Blighty. At that stage of the game it was not considered the sporting thing to be carried out if one could by any means “carry on,” and all three of these chaps put up a great howl when they found they would have to leave the outfit. Later on, this attitude changed and a “Blighty” was just about the very finest thing a man could imagine or want, and the loss of a hand or a foot was not considered a bit too much to pay to get out of the hell one was going through. None of us thought very much about our casualties up to this time.

  The weather was setting in bad and during the worse spells of it very little sniping went on, so we often went in and out of the lines by the “overland” route in broad daylight. This November 14th came on Sunday and it was just such an occasion for overland travel. The rain delayed the Twentieth Battalion from relieving us until abo
ut noon time. The trenches were crowded with troops and the going so bad that I talked it over with my crowd and we decided to save several hours time by going out down the open road. All hands voted for it, so I started first and had the others follow at fifty-yard intervals. Our route was in plain sight of the German lines, and we got well out under cover of a small hill without a single shot being fired at us. From here on out, we were practically safe, as the ground was partially screened with bushes and trees, so the bulk of the party went right on out across this covered ground. But Charlie Wendt and I stopped at this small hill to arrange about the relief of a gun crew I had stationed there. Charlie stayed with me a few minutes and then went on by himself, saying he would meet me at the redoubt farther out. I continued my talk with Endersby, the man in charge of the gun, and all at once heard Charlie calling “Oh, Mac,” and looked out to see him lying on the ground about a hundred yards off, shot through the abdomen.

  Endersby and I both ran to him and while he ran back and telephoned for stretcher bearers, I bandaged the wound. Charlie Wendt was a very strong, clean living young man, and I really thought that despite the serious nature of the wound he would pull through. He did not think so, but did not make the slightest outcry, merely kept saying that “everything is all right.” Finally he asked me to get about ten of them for him and I told him that I would do it.

  Meanwhile, this sniper kept up a continuous fire at us, hitting everything in the neighborhood but what he was shooting at. It was a miserable exhibition of shooting, too; the range was only about 500 yards and in clear daylight, and I told Charlie I would be ashamed to have such a rotten shot in our outfit. The shot which had hit Charlie was undoubtedly just a lucky one. At last I tried to drag him into a depression and out of sight, but it hurt him so I gave up and waited for the stretcher bearers. As they came up I made them crawl to us and we managed to get Charlie where they could change him to a long litter and carry him out right. The last thing he said to me was that everything was all right and not to worry. And on the way out that German kept slamming away at me as long as I was in sight, and missing by twenty or thirty feet most of the time.