The wise ones are calmly considering the practical aspects; they have already noted the nature of the enemy barrage. Picking out the gaps in it, they point them out to others as favorable places to go over. If conditions favor it, all of them have already been taken out to an advanced position, where they lie low, awaiting the final word. This does not, then, offer a particularly fertile field for psychological analysis. It is largely a simple matter of a feeling of fitness amongst the men, of their being up to scratch. And although this is a simple matter to state, it is a difficult condition to achieve and maintain.
And just that is the burden of my song about riflemen. When you have a good rifleman you have a man who is confident of his ability to take care of himself; the quality pertains not to the rifle, but to himself; so you have a man who can quickly be turned to doing anything. No one can say what another war will be like, what conditions will develop and what weapons will be devised to meet them; but it is certain that men will be required, and it will be more important than ever that these men be highly trained. The rifle, of course, is the primary arm. It belongs peculiarly to the individual soldier; it goes wherever he goes; it is not spent, put out of action, or impossible to get into action in time. The man who most thoroughly understands its use and appreciates its possibilities will be the first to recognize its limitations and adapt himself to something else when needed. He is not trained to win the war with the rifle, but to win the war. He is a hunter and fighter; not a specialist who is at a loss when his specialty fails him.
Such a man was about as well prepared for the developments of trench-warfare as was the keenest strategist and student of military affairs; for these were not at all prepared for it, though, in two nations at least, they had been forty years tuning up for the conflict. The legions of Germany were shot forward smoothly, according to plan, and swung out along the arc which in six weeks was to bring them victory. The French armies were set in motion. Britain sent out her handful. Belgium defended her forts gallantly and fell back. Presently somewhere northeast of Paris an entire British army passed between two German armies without either of the three knowing what was happening. Then they sorted themselves out and we had a battlefield five hundred miles long, siege warfare of a novel sort. And while the proper siege guns were being devised and supplied the rifleman was on the job. When he couldn’t use his rifle, he was making grenades out of bean-tins to meet the emergency.
He had played a main part in preventing that retreat from Mons from being a disaster. And he remained on the job. It is always impossible to know what would have happened if something else hadn’t happened, but it is none the less interesting to speculate upon the number of times that a simple emergency promptly met forestalled an emergency that might have been far from simple. These little things may develop suddenly, in the advanced stages of a battle, on the third gray morning, before sunrise, communications bad, observation zero. A thin line of men has just got into a trench, not yet in possession of it, when some alert eye discovers the enemy debouching in mass for a strong counter attack, pouring through an ample communication trench or along a sheltered defile. Nobody knows it but the man who sees it and the half-dozen whom he can quickly command. It is not only the expert marksman who is needed, but the hunter, whose instinct, or soundly instilled training, is to outwit and overcome, to take care of himself. He fights with sandbags, wire, enemy machine-guns, enemy grenades, and a quiet summons for help; but most of all with resourcefulness and confidence. This is what justifies the insistence upon rifle training, for the rifle is the individual arm and the emphasis is upon the man; in other things the emphasis is upon the specialty and the proper time and manner of its use.
I wish it understood that this is not to be regarded as the viewpoint with which I went into the war. It is that, and a good deal more. I was a rifleman, but I had not thought much about the larger and practical implications of what sound and thorough training as a rifleman means. Now, when I try to assort and set down some of my experiences and observations I find that the significant thing which emerges is the demonstration of the value of this sort of training. If these remarks have any interest at all, it is intended to be a practical one. I have not been concerned with shadows, but with the objects which cast them. I have not been concerned with patterns, but with the forces which make them. I have not been concerned with theories, but with experiences which test them or dispense with them.
I was, most of the time, a machine-gunner. Whatever excellence I may have had with this arm was due largely to my previous training and experience as a rifleman. No amount of special instructions could have taken the place of this training. The same thing holds true in my observation of others. This chapter began with a vague intention of saying something about the reactions of the soldiers to the conditions of the modern battlefield. This is a field for the dramatist, and a fine one it is, too. The net result of my observations, for practical purposes, may be reduced to a single remark: That men behaved well in proportion as they felt themselves equal to the occasion – again, the rifleman. The man who knows he can shoot and hit will get himself out of a bad hole. And if he can’t get out he can die fighting. There is not that final despairing consciousness that his death is futile; for I know that men died uncomplainingly and splendidly in proportion as they had failed to discover that their death might have been avoided by more adequate training and preparation. If you think this is attributing too much to the last-minute insight of the average, not over-intelligent soldier, you are wrong. Under critical circumstances there was a revelation in every dying face. It didn’t require a mystic to read it.
Retrospect
FIFTEEN years. It is a long time; yet it seems but yesterday. How readily they come back to mind the old faces, the old voices, the old distinguishing characteristics – so readily that one does not at once realize that most of them come back from beyond the beyond. This one lives, perhaps, somewheres, a middle-aged man; and that one, now almost old; but for each one of them a half-dozen are gone where they will grow no older.
Where did they go, and how? Casualties of war.
Of a few we know – all the details, the last words. Of others we remember first-hand accounts – a bullet, a whining fragment of steel, a trench-mortar projectile falling unnoticed in the general uproar. But the great majority – merely casualties, attested by figures.
How gaily they marched and sang over the snow-covered roads of Canada! And in England they marched some more, with enthusiasm unsubdued, but rebelliously impatient to get into action. Then – ah then! Parade hours were behind; it was night in the trenches; some were dead. The transition from the training-ground to the battlefield was so readily made that suddenly the interminable delay seemed a thing of the far past and war was an old game. The first shell-torn house was a tragic curiosity; but shortly they moved among them as quite natural phenomena. The first dead left a strange gap; but the others simply faded away. The Battalion went in – and some did not come out. And again.
One did not realize the total effect unless, by some chance, one happened to be at the transport lines when the battalion got together again. It was “closed up.” One had perhaps planned a dinner of “eggs and chips” with a bottle of vin ordinaire to celebrate this brief return to civilization. One of the proposed party was missing.
But not until one returned from leave was there anxious scanning of the ranks for familiar faces. With this perspective, they seemed changed. Then, one understood that they were changed, that there were many new faces. One waited uncertainly for this platoon or that, to pick out one or another to share talk of the visit to London: “He’s out of it, Mac.” “Dead” “No; Blighty; but good for the duration, and then some – leg gone.”
A score or so of others, also just returned, were having similar experiences: “where’s Red?” “Gone West.” “Say, Signaller, your long friend’s off on the long trek.” “Aye; I can tell you all about it if you want to write his wife.”
It was quite s
imple. In a day or two the ranks were filled up. And now and then an old face would reappear, a trifle white and awkwardly fresh in a new uniform. It was the slow business of war. In the end, perhaps two hundred of the “originals” returned to Canada. Something more than a thousand had gone out.
But at no time was there sign of concern, or even awareness, as to the ultimate end of this gradual decimation. They carried on with the work in hand. The Battalion was but one – and not the first. These men would never have to endure what the First Division had endured, unprotected and without warning.
* * *
Readers of history are familiar with the stories of human fortitude as exemplified by the Greeks at Thermopalye and we all have read of “Horatius at the Bridge” and other similar legendary tales of stark courage.
Far be it from me to dispute or to endeavor to disparage the exploits of those ancient heroes, but I most humbly submit the opinion that the stand of the Canadians at Ypres, when subjected to the ordeal of poison gas – the hellish concoction, conceived by that utterly unfathomable thing, the German mind – must take first rank as an epic of human courage and devotion to duty.
There, outnumbered more than four to one, with weak artillery support and but few machine guns, they met and stopped the advance of the enemy horde.
And they did it with rifle fire.
There, during those momentous days from April 23 to May 8, 1915, died many of the flower of Canadian chivalry, among them that gallant gentleman; that sterling rifleman, Lieutenant Colonel Hart McHarg; who had come over with the invading Canadian rifle team to Camp Perry in 1913, and captured the Individual Palma Trophy from the best shots we could pit against him.
To the men who fought under the Maple Leaf of Canada, the story of the achievements of those immortals of the first Division is as sacred as the Gospels. During the succeeding years of the war, each Division, as it came to the front, tried to emulate the exploits of the First.
Ypres: The Somme: Vimy Ridge: Passchendaele: Amiens: Arras: Cambrai: Valenciennes: Mons: – all are emblazoned in letters of gold on the Canadian escutcheon – but the greatest of these is YPRES.
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A Rifleman Went to War Page 40