A Rifleman Went to War

by Herbert W. McBride

  The paper which I had affixed just below the port-hole of the machine gun emplacement enabled us to definitely locate it on the map, and, a few days later, our artillery put it out of business.

  Next morning, when Fritz discovered that his flag was gone, he proceeded to give us a shelling. We then thought it severe as we had a few men killed and several wounded. A few months later, we would have called it a mild shelling.

  That evening, as I was standing in the bay directly behind my dugout, with several others, including Sam Comigoe, they sent over a lot of rifle grenades. Did you ever hear one of those birds in flight? They make a noise just like a little dog that has received a swift kick. I cannot translate it into words, but if you have ever heard a little tyke, running down the street and yelping at every step – well, that’s it. This applies, of course, only to the old form of grenade, with its ramrod tail. The later forms have entirely different voices. In daylight it was no trouble to dodge the yelpers; they announced themselves well in advance and were plainly visible, but at night you had to take your chances. By ill luck, one of them dropped right into our bay. Now, those devilish things shoot from the ground up; that is, they burst on impact and, as that is usually on the ground level, the splinters that do the damage are always ranging upward. Sam was at the right end of the bay and that was where the missile fell. Some of the others received inconsequential scratches on the legs (those wrap puttees are a great protection), but Sam was evidently hard hit. He grasped his belly – he was a big, fat fellow – and grunted: “guess they got me;” sat down on an ammunition box and died almost instantly. Just one of the small fragments had entered his abdomen and ranged upward to the heart. He and his brother and another pair of brothers, the Paudashes, in our Battalion, were of the Chippewa Tribe – full-blooded Indians – and among the best soldiers in the outfit. He was buried in our little cemetery at Ridgewood – right alongside Lieutenant Wilgress, the first of our officers to make the supreme sacrifice.

  At the time I felt pretty badly about the matter. I knew that all this strafing was due to the flag-stealing, but then what would you? War is War. Many times I have been unmercifully cursed by the infantry for using a machine gun on a likely-looking target. “No; no,” they would shout; “don’t do that. They will retaliate.” That was the word: “they will retaliate.” Well; hells-bells; let ’em. What the devil are we here for? A summer picnic? While I do not think that I had a personal enemy in the battalion – in fact I was glad and proud to call them all my friends – still, there is no getting around the fact they all, individually and collectively, did hate me at those times when I thought it worth while to hand Fritz a dose of poison. If I had been allowed my way, Heinie would have been kept “retaliating” along every foot of the Front.

  To me it was a game; the greatest game in the world. Whenever they came back with their retaliation I was just as much pleased as a school-boy who has received the highest possible grade. It was proof positive that I had stung them. I well remember one night. Just before dark we had seen, from our Sniper’s Barn position, a German battery pulling into position at a place called Hiele Farm – not more than eight hundred yards back of the enemy front line. They always kept a whiz-bang battery there and were, evidently, changing over; that is, a new battery was coming in to relieve the one that had been there for some time. We knew all about that battery – we machine gunners – and so did our artillery; but there seemed to be some sort of “gentleman’s agreement” between the artillery on both sides; to leave one another alone and see how much fun they could have with the infantry. However, as Emma Gees, we were not bound by any such covenant.

  So, when I saw that bunch moving in, I immediately got word to our reserve guns in the redoubts in the Bois Carré and gave them the target number. (We had every inch of “Germany” within range, plotted and all I had to do was to give them the number and when to commence firing.) I figured that, as soon as it commenced to get dark, all hands Would be out in the open, carrying on with the work of getting the one lot of guns out and the others into the pits. Just after dusk, we opened on them with four guns. The orders were to fire a full belt and then, after letting the guns cool down a bit, to keep up an intermittent fire, all through the night.

  Having attended to all this and remaining until the first belt was started, I went down to the front line where we had other guns in good emplacements, for defensive purposes. I had a notion that we would stir up something and waited to see that the boys up there were ready for business. I made the rounds and explained matters to them and was standing at the left end of our line, where the last gun was located; talking to Major Jones when, all of a sudden; here came the shells. Now, Heinie was not much given to night shooting – in fact seldom did it unless as the preliminary to an attack – and when the shells commenced to come in, all hands were called to stand to.

  They crowded into the bays, ready to hop up onto the firing step whenever the barrage lifted. The shells ripped the top of the parapet and burst all round. The Major and I were standing in an open space and some distance behind the parapet when a H.E. whiz-bang shell zipped between our heads – we were not more than two feet apart – and burst in a cook’s dugout, which was, fortunately, unoccupied at the time. Oh – sure; we moved.

  Of course I knew what it was all about and was very well pleased with myself and those accurate-shooting boys behind the guns; but the others; the infantry, knowing nothing about the strafing we had given those batteries, were in blissful ignorance. All they knew was that, when the enemy put on a show like that at night, it usually meant business. So far as I could learn, we did not have a man hurt that night and I always figured that it was well worth while. We surely did some damage to the Germans and the matter of being called to the alert was good training for our troops.

  Thus the early winter months passed. I was sniping most of the time but made the rounds of the guns every day, just to see how things were going. There was the usual shelling and we were losing men every day from that and the various forms of trench-mortar projectiles and rifle grenades. Rifle and machine gun fire accounted for a man now and then, especially among the signallers who had to go out and repair breaks in the line. Our situation in the salient was such that it was possible for long range bullets to get us in flank, and even from the rear, and more than one man was hit in that manner.

  In constructing our trenches we had to take into account this enfilading fire and build overhead traverses at frequent intervals. These were planned on the theoretical trajectory of the German bullets at the ranges from which we might expect to be fired upon. They did not take into consideration the fact that a bullet might come from some two miles away – which they occasionally did. I was standing right under one of these arch-like traverses, talking with Corporal Johnson, one day, apparently in just about the safest position one could find, when a bullet struck him in the cheek and went on through his neck. It must have scraped the jugular vein (or the carotid artery), but he soon recovered. The enemy had the same kind of protective traverses and I often wished that I had some low velocity, short-range ammunition – something like our guard cartridges or the reduced loads used for gallery firing – so I could drop a few shots down into his trench. In fact, I made an effort to have our armourer load up some of that kind of stuff but never got any action on it. I also made the suggestion that we be given a few shotguns – sawed-off – and buckshot loads, but the proposal was rejected with horror by the British higher-ups. It was not sporting, or something to that effect. Can you imagine that – against an enemy who had violated all the rules of civilized warfare, both on land and sea?

  I was not made a sergeant until along about Christmastime, but, for some reason or another, was allowed all the latitude I wanted – to go where I pleased and do as I liked. All I particularly wanted to do at that time was to stay on top long enough to clean up on about a hundred Germans.

  The only time I was away from the line, (that is, outside the zone of active shelling),
was on November 25, 1915, when I took a flying trip to Bailleul, to visit Charlie Wendt’s grave and then I left just before daybreak and was back in the front line soon after dark the same day. While in Bailleul I had the first meal I had eaten in a house for several months. At the Hotel Faucon, I had a good dinner, and, happening to remember that it was the last Thursday in November, and therefore Thanksgiving-day at home, I made the best of it by persuading the Chef (bribed with a bottle of their best wine) to procure and cook for me the best poulet available in the market. Turkey was out of the question but I made that old hen serve as a substitute – and not at all bad, at that. A couple of boys from the Fifth Battalion came along just then and helped me out with it – otherwise I might not have been able to get “home” that night.

  Mud: mud: MUD. That is the one thing, above all others, that I shall remember always – the memory of that mud in Flanders. We wallowed in it in daytime and slept in it at night. There was one period of forty-two days during which I never had my clothes off. I could have done so on one of the irregular occasions when the outfit was permitted to go back to billets, but it came at a time when I was more interested in sniping than a bath, so I chose to remain up there where I could keep up on my rifle practice.

  Chapter 8. Trench Raiding

  PATROLS were a natural prelude to trench raiding. They provided much of the necessary information, and they afforded the best sort of training for this work. Combat patrols, in fact, were, essentially, raiding parties which confined their activities to no-man’s-land. It only remained to scale the parapet, raise hell, take a couple of prisoners and come back. I do not intend to be drawn into any argument regarding this subject. Perhaps I am wrong, but, from the best information at hand, I think that the systematic raiding of the enemy trenches was first conceived and carried out by Canadian troops at Ploegsteert. My recollection is that it was members of the Fifth Battalion, of the First Canadian Division, who pulled off the first ‘show’. These affairs were always referred to as “shows”.

  The technique is quite simple. Just wait until the enemy is quiet, slip over, bomb ’em a little, hop into their trench, grab off a few prisoners and any machine guns you happen to see and beat it back home. Sounds easy enough and, strange to say, it is easy – provided no unexpected thing happens to disrupt the scheduled performance.

  Many raids were made just as easy as I am now writing about them. The sheer audacity of the thing was what carried them through. The slow, methodical Teutonic mind could not at once grasp the idea that some dozen or so of men would ever dare to invade the sacred precincts of their trenches. As one result of which, we had considerable numbers of very efficient workers on our roads, behind the lines.

  During the time, from 1915, when the first stunt of this kind was demonstrated, up to early in 1917, when the writer left the front, these raids grew from merely small, local (I almost said personal) affairs, to operations of such magnitude that, at the latter date, whole brigades were taking part in them.

  Now, that is literally true. The first enterprise of this character, in my experience, was my little solo affair, related in the last chapter, which netted no prisoners nor information, but a flag; and the last was when the entire Fourth Brigade staged a show opposite Bully-Grenay and brought back 101 German prisoners. The first episode was in November, 1915, and the last January 17,1917.

  The purpose of these raids is, ostensibly, to secure information – that is, to grab off a few prisoners, so as to know just what troops are opposite that particular position. As a matter of fact, from our view-point, it was to “put the fear of God” into those poor sons of something or other and make them behave.

  During our initial experiments in this line we had varied luck. I remember the first time our outfit made an attempt to go over and get a prisoner. I had no share in it other than to mount a machine gun up on top of the parapet and maintain a continuous fire along the top of the enemy parapet (which was less than one hundred yards away) just to make them keep their heads down until our raiding party got through their wire. That one was not much of a success. Our party never succeeded in getting through the German wire. They did get close enough to throw a few bombs into the enemy trenches and fondly hoped that they had done some damage. Anyway, they came back – all of them – mad as hornets and resolved that the next time they would do better.

  And they did. The next venture was away down at the other end of our line, where the opposing trenches were nearly two hundred yards apart. As previously, I am simply an observer, operating a machine gun from the top of the parapet and sort of acting as protection for the raiding party by running a burst here and there along the top of the enemy parapet. As I had been over to the enemy parapet several times previously, in search of machine gun emplacements and sniper holes, I had been able to assist a little in the preliminary work but the officer in charge of the raiding party, Lieutenant Miller, a cool and resourceful officer, had taken the precaution to send out parties several nights in advance to cut paths through the German wire. This show was well staged and undoubtedly the enemy suffered severe damage. Our party did not bring back any live prisoners, as they were forced to retire because of the unexpected arrival of large numbers of German reinforcements; but every man of our contingent came back, a few slightly wounded, but nothing serious, while it was evident that, with their well-placed bombs, they had inflicted considerable damage to the enemy.

  The next time was still better – in fact, a complete success. After a carefully planned scheme of operations, we staged what might be called a twin bill. Two parties went out, one merely as a feint and the other the real raiding party. The first one followed the same tactics as the two previous ones; that is, the machine guns swept the enemy parapet and the raiders made their way through the previously cut wire and proceeded to heave bombs into the enemy trench. This resulted in quite a little battle between the bombers on both sides and, as we had hoped and expected, in bringing all the German reserves down to the point of attack. But, in the meantime, our real raiding party, of whom I was fortunate enough to be a member (although I was supposed to be back there directing the machine guns) had quietly slipped through and were ready to hop over. When we were satisfied from the sounds that the time was ripe, this party rushed up and over the parapet and dropped down upon the few and unsuspecting sentries and very quickly escorted them back over the top and to our own lines. There were some very good, hand-to-hand fights and one German had to be shot before he would give up. The others, taken altogether by surprise, offered no resistance. Our party got home with several live prisoners and with no serious casualties. The other crowd, who had staged the feint, had several slightly wounded from bomb splinters but none killed. A pretty good night’s work, we thought.

  The success or failure of any trench raid depends to a great extent upon the thoroughness of the preparation for it. To be sure, the officer in command of the venture must be competent, but really most of his work will be in planning the operation, instructing his men and supervising the preliminary preparation. When it comes to the actual invasion of the enemy lines, he is just one man and can do no more, individually, than any other.

  The first requisite is to be thoroughly familiar with all the physical characteristics of the section of line to be invaded. This information must be compiled from reports of observers and snipers, from airplane maps and, finally, by the work of patrols, which establish first-hand practical knowledge of conditions as they will be encountered – in the dark – even to visiting the enemy parapet and making a study of the actual battlefield.

  Next comes the selection of the men – and that is the hardest part of all. These shows are usually taken over in turn by all the young and enterprising subalterns in the outfit and each will have to make his own selection from the available men at his command. He would hate to go outside his own platoon for help as these things are matters of pride to all the members of whatever unit is engaged. If he has plenty of seasoned soldiers his task will be easy
but if, as is often the case, he is overstocked with new replacements, he will have to do a lot of guessing – and trust the Lord. One false move, on the part of a single man, may ruin the whole enterprise.

  Having selected his objective and organized his party, he gets them together and goes over the whole program with them, sketching the layout of the enemy line and the ground to be covered in reaching that point. For the usual, small, raid, for the purpose of bringing in a prisoner, he may have anywhere from twelve to sixteen men, or sometimes as few as eight, depending on local conditions.