A Rifleman Went to War

by Herbert W. McBride

  This fighting came about as near to being “open warfare” as any during the war and, probably, as near it as will ever be experienced in any future wars, for wherever an enemy stops, if only for a night, he will dig in and construct some sort of entrenchments. With present-day artillery and the lavish expenditure of ammunition for which the last war has prepared us, there will be no possibility of any considerable force remaining in the open and at rest for more than an hour or two. They would be shelled out of existence if they tried it.

  By this time all the Canadians were armed with the Lee-Enfield rifle and most of the time spent in training before joining the Fourth Army was utilized in becoming familiar with it. There was some target practice, on an improvised range, but most of this was at the newly-conceived “marching fire” in which the men were required to fire at a strip target, about three feet high, while advancing from two hundred yards to twenty yards. This firing was done from the hip and was, primarily, designed to keep the enemy down behind his parapet until the advance came within bombing range. Later, as the automatic rifle (Lewis guns) were increased in number, this style of firing was largely discontinued. It never was much good, anyway. In practice, on a comparatively level field, it appeared to be quite effective but, like a lot of other things, when it came to the real business of fighting, marching, stumbling and crawling over the shell-torn and barbed-wire-encumbered battle-field, it proved to be altogether different. This is a point that cannot be mentioned too often, and every officer – yes, every soldier – should understand that, after all the training he can possibly get in peaceful surroundings, he still has a great deal more to learn and that it can be learned only in actual combat.

  While the Enfield was some six inches shorter in the barrel than the Ross, the bayonet was correspondingly longer, so that the over-all length, with bayonet fixed, was about the same. Bayonet instruction was gone over again – to get the feel and balance of the new arm – and it was found that the Enfield, with more of the weight right in the hands, was much easier to handle than the Ross with its long barrel and correspondingly heavy muzzle.

  Bayonets may be a necessary evil. I am not sure that I would throw them away entirely, but, if I were running things they never would be fixed until within a few yards of the enemy. They are a serious handicap when it comes to accurate firing and are certainly of no use when a hundred yards or more away from the enemy, yet it was (and still is, so far as I know) the usual practice to have them fixed from the beginning of an attack, no matter how far back it started. If every man had a pistol, I would unhesitatingly say that the bayonet could be discarded as an unnecessary encumbrance. On the rifle they are practically useless in a trench. There, the bayonet alone, used as a sword, is much more effective, and in the open you will seldom come to grips with an enemy as long as you have a good shooting iron and know how to use it.

  Now, while I am quite willing to agree that some sort of an edged weapon is a very useful part of the soldier’s equipment, I do not believe that the proper place for it is on the muzzle of the rifle. For the fast and accurate work which is necessary during the short-range stages of a fight, the rifle should be as short, light and handy as it can be made without otherwise impairing its efficiency. To hang a pound or more of metal on the end of the barrel is the surest way I know to handicap the rifleman in the use of his weapon as a firearm. Where the difference between life and death is dependent upon one’s ability to fire an accurately aimed shot in one second or thereabouts – anyway, before the other fellow can shoot – this handicap may well prove the deciding factor.

  A machete or bolo makes an excellent weapon for actual hand-to-hand fighting; or, if you like, the regulation bayonet, well sharpened, can be used in the same way – as a short sword. The point I am trying to emphasize is that it should not be attached to the rifle unless, as may happen in some cases, the rifle has become disabled or ammunition exhausted. I have often watched men going into action with rifles slung over the shoulder – but always with the bayonet fixed, even if it was a mile to the nearest enemy position, and, a few times, have seen the bayonet actually used – to intimidate prisoners – seldom for any other purpose. One of the rare occasions was when one of our men, crazed with blood-lust assaulted a small group who had their hands up in the air in token of surrender. He stuck two or three before being overpowered by his friends. Now it did not make a bit of difference to that fellow whether he had a bayonet or a club. In similar circumstances, one of our men brained a German with a pick. Among the few souvenirs which I brought home is an ordinary table knife, well sharpened, with which a wounded German killed a wounded Canadian, whereupon a second Canadian, also wounded, took the knife and finished off the German. All three were lying in the same shell-hole when this occurred, with the battle raging all around them. As I was in need of a knife – having lost mine – I took that one and used it, for other purposes, during the remainder of the war.

  The only instance that came under my personal observation, where opposing troops actually used the bayonet, en masse, was when a company of Highlanders engaged a strong force of Prussian Guards. It was a terrible struggle for the few minutes it lasted; and as I sat and watched, powerless to help, although I had a machine gun, my memory carried me back to the stories I had read of Bannockburn and other bloody battles of Scottish history. Those brawny Scots were simply invincible and soon there was not an enemy man on his feet – and not a prisoner was taken.

  Glorious? Yes, it was all that, but there I sat, ready with a good machine gun, within less than one hundred yards, and had those “Ladies from Hell” simply remained in their trench I could have wiped out the entire enemy contingent, without any loss whatever.

  It was on the Somme that the Canadians first came into contact with the Australians. Of course we had often seen individuals, here and there, on leave in London and elsewhere, but had never seen them as an organized force, at the front.

  Now, there is something I have never been able to understand about that ANZAC bunch (Australia-New Zealand Army Corps). While they all came from “down under” and were incorporated in the same corps, there was a vast difference between the men from the two countries. With the New Zealanders, as with the South Africans, the Canadians were always on the best of terms, but Canadians and Australians always seemed to antagonize one another. Many a bitter and bloody fight has been staged back of the lines between detachments of the two factions when they happened to meet – at some estaminet or other place of recreation. If there ever was any real reason for this, I never learned what it was, but it was an indisputable fact. They just did not mix, that’s all.

  Before coming to France, as the world knows, the ANZACS had taken a tough dose of punishment at the Dardanelles, where so far as I know, they did a very good job. The task set them there was simply impossible but they acquitted themselves admirably. After being withdrawn from the Eastern theatre and having had a long period of needed rest, they were sent to France, where they were assigned to the Vimy Ridge sector, which the French, after months of desperate fighting, had finally succeeded in wresting from the Germans, but their unlucky star seemed to follow them, as they very quickly lost the position, which remained in the enemy’s hands until retaken and definitely held by the Canadians in April, 1917.

  Their next assignment was in the big Somme Battle and they had been hammering at the Germans in the vicinity of Pozières for several weeks, making some small gains but unable to accomplish anything that could be called a real advance. Their losses were very heavy – as they were everywhere. Their failure to get anywhere was certainly not because they did not try, but the fact remains that when they turned the position over, the Canadians, within two hours, had pushed the enemy back farther than the Aussies had been able to do in a month. It is all a matter of history and I do not need to dwell upon it.

  So far, I have spoken of it as “The Somme.” Perhaps I should explain that, while this whole great battle has been so described, the particular region in wh
ich we (the Canadians) operated was really not on or along the Somme River, proper, but on one of its tributaries – the Ancre. But that is the way of battles on the grand scale. They are usually designated by some feature of the terrain, a city or a river or a mountain, but, due to the extensive character of the operation, probably spread out for many miles on either side. Just compare some of the “major engagements” of the World War with other, previous, great battles of history. Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Antietam, Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain combined, supposing that entirely different troops, on both sides, participated in them, did not have as many men engaged as this Somme Battle, and it, in turn, was dwarfed by many of the later battles. And when it comes to artillery fire – well, you might as well throw up your hands. In many of the big battles more weight in shells was thrown within a period of twenty-four hours than during the whole Civil War or by Napoleon’s aggregated armies during all the years he was running wild over Europe. If my memory serves me right, the Japanese, at the Yalu, had a front of some thirty miles and something like two hundred thousand men engaged. That was probably the record up to the time of the later unpleasantness, but it looks small as compared with the later figures.

  I have no authentic records of the numbers engaged nor the mileage of the fronts during the last year of the war, but, even in 1916, at the time of which I am writing, Rawlinson’s Fourth Army had four hundred thousand combat troops and I suppose the French, who were also in it, on our right, had as many more, and the active front extended for at least fifty miles, with probably an equal distance on either flank more or less engaged in order to keep the enemy from detaching troops from those positions and sending them into the real battle sector. On the Russian front the figures are simply staggering. The captured, alone, sometimes ran up into the hundreds of thousands. With this to contemplate, what do you think the next war will be like? Can we expect to get along with the four or five hundred thousand men which our present establishment provides? Ich glaube nicht.

  Chapter 14. My Final Score

  I WAS in neither at the beginning nor at the end of the fighting on the Somme. During the early part of it I was “down the line,” involved in the hazards that frequently beset a man once he has been detached from his unit. I had been detached after we had come out of the line in the vicinity of Hill 60. It was not a bad time to leave, in a way: The war was picking up; I had had the satisfaction of hearing a real barrage, coming from the right side; and we had been introduced into a real trench-system, which was a welcome novelty after the muskrat holes of St. Eloi. On the second attempt, after going back to the relief of the Twenty-seventh, we succeeded in getting out, and I was advised that I had been commissioned. I was ordered back to England and was there attached to the staff of our training-camp at Sandling.

  I soon began wriggling out of this instructor’s job. It required a lot of wriggling. First, I was side-tracked into a job conducting troops to France. Then they let me stay on the right side of the Channel, but put me on despatch work between various headquarters. From this, I graduated to court-martial and other duties at Le Havre and Rouen. Finally, the big battle well under way, room was made up front, and I was ordered to report again to the Fourth Brigade. I missed my train and found myself too far southward, as elsewhere recorded. But it was the front; so I joined the Gloucestershires for a scrap before proceeding northward to find the Second Division. Here I learned of the work of the Twenty-first Battalion about Courcelette. And I learned also that during this fighting, Bouchard and several others of my old section had been killed. In my new capacity, I was no longer with the section and was, moreover, decidedly busy, for the fight was still going on. But I got what information I could and on several nights went over the scene of the fighting in which my old comrades had been killed. On the last of these night-excursions, having previously located the remains of my old friends as best I could, I set out to mark their graves. I awoke some days later in a hospital at St. Pol, fifty miles away.

  So I was again out of it, off on the circuit of hospitals, convalescent homes and medical boards, in France and England, which led at last to my being marked fit for duty.

  Duty this time took the form of commanding a pack-train. This sounds familiar enough to many a Westerner. But it was not at all like pushing into the wilderness or jogging contentedly and leisurely – however laboriously – up hill and down on a mountain-trail, stopping at nightfall, enjoying the view and a good breakfast in the morning. We began work at nightfall – and had to be finished by daylight – and we had such pack-animals as we could get, mostly horses.

  This work had been started while I was away. It had become necessary during the latter stages of the battle – which lasted from early July to late October – because the front lines were far advanced, separated from the furthest reach of motor-transport by a trackless morass of shell-holes and barbed wire, cut by battered trenches, old gun-pits and dugouts, and strewn with the usual debris of battle. By day it was a desolate waste, inhabited, if at all, by dwellers underground or under other cover when this was available; or small detachments of engineers, artillerymen, pioneers – all about their various business of maintaining communications, establishing lines of transportation, new battery emplacements, etc. They moved cautiously by day, looking over the ground, and at night they directed the work of various labor details. Sometimes, for hundreds of yards in these areas, there was no sign of life, save perhaps a solitary signaller sitting at the top of a battered dugout, like a prairie-dog on its mound.

  At night the place stirred with life; but it was isolated, detached, like men adrift on an uncharted sea. No one could tell you how to reach any particular unit, because there were few recognizable fixed points, no established trails leading anywhere. Attracted by the sound of shovels or voices, you turned aside to inquire the way to a certain farmhouse or village which the map indicated as a point of reckoning for your further progress toward your destination. You might learn that you were even then in the village; but, get down as low as you liked, nothing resembling a village could be made to show against the dark sky. Everywhere were the same grotesque, blurred shapes, at indeterminate distances, like a mad scene in a fantastic nightmare. Farther on, having caught a glimpse of a faint bar of yellow light, you stopped again, hoping to be able to orient yourself. The light showed again, as somebody moved aside a screen-blanket, defining a cellar stairs and two or three timbers at odd angles about the entrance. “Yes, sir,” a brigade-signaller would tell you, “this is the best estaminet in town. You are on the right road. It is a little difficult to follow here because they have just finished filling in the shell holes made by the heavies. There is a working party down in the valley who can put you on to the hedge you are looking for.” Resuming your way, you were almost at once at sea, guided by instinct, striving to make a crazy pattern of shadows look like a group of trees which were to be a useful landmark. You soon learned to distrust your judgment as to distances traveled.

  It was a chaotic world, but it offered some good instruction in another aspect of war. It is not always a soldier’s privilege to see much of war. And when he has the opportunity he doesn’t investigate very far. He takes things as they come, going in and out of the line on his own particular job, and soon becomes but little concerned about the other fellow’s job. He accepts the unexpected, both in surroundings and in new implements of warfare, without astonishment. Even the tanks caused little real astonishment, though they were a never-ending source of entertainment and gleeful satisfaction. The soldier, possibly had never thought of such a thing; but then he had never thought of such a grotesque place as the modern battlefield, and after a few weeks of this, taking it as it came, he was quite prepared for any monstrosity it might produce. He accepted them as quite natural developments.

  I had much opportunity to observe this and a great many other things during the next few months. I was soon recalled from the packtrain work and again found myself with the Fourth Brigade, though no longer with the
Twenty-first Battalion. We were established for the winter in the country north of Arras. Established is the word: war had become a business, not an adventure of a few months or a year; and we settled down to it in a business-like manner, rotating smoothly from Corps or Divisional reserves – in billets just back of the lines – through the reserve trenches, the supports, the front line and out again. We had good trenches, which were, as trenches go, fairly dry. This was in the mining and hill-country which begins in the vicinity of Loos, and, except in limited areas, drainage problems could be solved.

  Moreover, I had now a more comprehensive view of the business, due not only to its having become, definitely, a business, but also to my larger field of action and responsibility. I was to have become Brigade Machine-Gun officer, but going on the casualty list had interfered with that. It remained, however, my particular interest and the field to which I might naturally expect to be called. The place of the machine guns had already been pretty definitely fixed; but Lewis guns were now displacing them for use with the infantry, there finally being two of these with each platoon. All the heavy guns were thus left free to be used in their own place in the scheme of offense or defense. In this work, the battalion frontage was too small, as machine-gun fire, whether from the front line or positions further back, is nearly always cross fire, enfilading wherever possible. The machine-gun officer, therefore, was directly interested in a mile or more of front, whereas the platoon officer was restricted to two or three hundred yards.