by Will R Bird
We heard the usual wranglings in the muddy lanes below us and heard the sergeants shouting and haranguing, and then, through our tent flap, we saw the column march away. We looked at each other, and grinned. It was worth the risk. Four lay back in their blankets and slept the morning away. Freddy, one of us, sat writing letters. He was a changed man. He was more kind and considerate than he had been before, and he would not mention his dream unless we asked him about it. Never once did he alter his opinion. He himself, and the six others, were “for it.”
I sat in my corner of the tent, there was plenty of room now, and began my diary, the first of four little books that were to carry all the impressions that I could place in words. As I wrote I looked around and thought of all that had happened in a few short months.
In August, 1914, I had enlisted, or tried to enlist, with the 17th Battalion. Their officer had turned me down with caustic comment. “We can get enough good men,” he said, “without taking them we’ve got to repair.” My defect was bad teeth, broken while playing hockey, and never properly attended. Later in the fall I tried to join the 25th, in which my youngest brother was a sergeant, but without avail. There was no mention of my molars, I was simply told that I could not join, and that the main reason was that my brother was with them and that it would not be fair to our widowed mother. I know now that Steve, my brother, had requested that I be turned down.
Disheartened by my failures I went to western Canada and worked there on different ranches. Steve and I had been more like David and Jonathan than brothers. We had fads in common, our likes and dislikes were so mutual that we could read each other’s mind. We followed baseball and hockey in the big leagues and were such red-hot fans that we knew the batting averages of every leading player both in the American and National League. His favourite was Nap Lajoie and my hero was Ty Cobb. It was the same in hockey, he boosting Cyclone Taylor and I favouring Art Ross.
They would not let him come home on leave before the battalion sailed and so he stole out of barracks, avoided all the military police and rode blind baggage to a safety zone. The famous “Van Doos” were training in Amherst, our home town, and their police were checking all soldiers from the 25th. Two of them intercepted Steve. He talked frankly with them and gave them fair warning, but they were zealous M.P.’s and so he left them in the snow with sore heads as souvenirs. He was only eighteen years old but he weighed one hundred and eighty pounds and had the strength of two men.
He kept in hiding while in town but each day came to the little grocery where I worked, and there we talked long hours over the more serious things of life and when he left he said, “Bill, if there is anything I can do for you, just let me know, and if I don’t come back maybe I’ll find a way to come sometime and whisper in your ear.”
He said it in his jocular manner, but knowing him as I did, I shivered at the time, and never forgot.
He went to France in September, 1915, and the next month was in a trench on Hill 60 that was mined by the Germans. Only fragments were found of him and a dozen of his comrades. I was working in a harvest field in Saskatchewan, pitching sheaves on a wagon, when Steve walked around the cart and confronted me. He said not a word but I knew all as if he had spoken, for he had on his equipment and was carrying his rifle. I let the fork fall to the ground and the nearest man came running to me, thinking I had taken ill. I did not tell him what I had seen, but I left the field, and never pitched another sheaf of grain.
All that day, and the next, and the next, I wandered by myself around the prairie, and then the message came, a wire, “Steve has been killed. Come home.” I went back home, and could not rest. Three times I had been rejected, for I had tried to go with a Western battalion, and there did not seem a chance. But I went again to enlist as the Nova Scotia Highland Brigade was forming – and was passed without a question.
Fourteen years have not removed the rancor that bit my whole being. Why did they not let me go before? Now I had to go with men who had never wanted to join, to be a late-goer, and it was rank injustice. I went to camp in that mood and it was small condolence to find that there were hundreds of others in like position, big, fit men who had been more than once rejected by mosquito-brained recruiting officers.
It was a long summer, that of ’16. In my soured frame of mind I was often in trouble with officers and non-coms, and I refused to take promotion. One stripe was forced on me at last and led to my being imprisoned in the “fox farm,” a wired enclosure on a hill back of the camp. There I served a sentence that lasted till just before we sailed. On Friday, the 13th of October, on the 13th trip of the “Olympic,” we left Halifax. A dozen idle onlookers watched our battalion march on board at dusk, and we left the harbour as if by stealth.
I was not long in England. There was leave, a six-day affair, a course in wiring, learning futile “apron” stunts that I never saw again, a few days fatigue at Witley, and we were away to France, a draft of men for the Black Watch. I had had more trouble to incite my bitterness. The medical inspector turned me from the draft on account of my teeth, and when I asked that they be put in order, he had replied that there was not time. Across the road a draft of the 134th Battalion was on dental parade. Going to one chap who was my build I offered to take his place. He assented gladly and I put on his tunic and balmoral. The dental officer looked at me grimly and told me I needed eight teeth pulling and filling. I asked him if he could not pull them all, and he seized his pliers. A few minutes later I was before our company commander requesting to be replaced on draft. He looked at my mouth, and agreed. I went that last evening to Godalming and had a decent meal, a good bath and an hour’s enjoyment of fine music, then was seized at camp for being out of bounds. I went to France under open arrest.
Tommy was a queer chap. None had better intentions, and yet he was always doing the wrong thing; he was too impulsive. He yawned and stretched and sat up. “I can hear them canaries up in the Bull Ring,” he said. “That Welsh sergeant is yapping like a fox terrier. Over at the bags the bayonet lad is spitting blood and telling the boys that the only good German is a dead one. He said yesterday that if he had fifty Germans in a row he could go along and cut the throats of every one of them. Did you ever hear such rot?”
The others awoke and sat up, and grinned. We had all had our fill of this “killing” stuff and we hated the whole game of Le Havre, from the French women and kids that ran alongside as we marched trying to sell “Apoo, choc’lay, orange,” to the hollow backed, hoarse-voiced, yellow-banded non-coms who stood at the entrance to the Bull Ring and barked “Press on your butts! Correct your slopes!” We went down to the “dining hall” and got our dinners.
One waded through slimy, filthy mud to the door of the long dirty hut. Inside, at the entrance, men broke up loaves of bread and the size of your hunk depended on your luck. Another poured you a tin of cold, greasy tea and perhaps you got a piece of stringy, odious meat in your mess-tin top. You went to long tables and ate your food from your fingers. Everything was dirty, and the food was nauseating, and the place hardly fit for a stable. Presently an officer and sergeant would enter the front of the hut, walking very rapidly. They would not look to right or left but hurry to the rear door. By it they would pause just long enough to shout. “Any complaints, men?” and then they vanished before anyone could reply.
No one found us in our retreat. The boys came back at night, cursing anew the “canaries” who chased them about the muddy Bull Ring. Everyone thought we had been detained for camp fatigues, and the look of the camp decided them that their lot had been better. A week more we stayed in our tent and then went up the line. We were to go to the 42nd Royal Highlanders, a sergeant told us, in the famous Seventh Brigade. “How famous?” we asked, and he told us that it contained the Princess Pats, the Royal Canadians, the Forty-Niners, who were a very fine battalion, and that the Brigade had done great work at the Somme. It had come to the Vimy area and we were to fill gaps in the Black Watch battalion.
The night
before we were to go up the line I thought a long while of Steve, and of Phyllis. I had not mentioned her to anyone, not even to my half-brother, Hubert, who was in England. He had come with the Highlanders but had not been able to get on the draft.
We had had two days in London, seeing the Tower, the Zoo, Crystal Palace, St. Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, and all the other major features of that great city. The evening before we had gone to see “Choo Chin Chow.” I was walking along the Strand wondering what next to see or where to go, when an officer spoke to me. As a rule I avoided all those who wore Sam Brownes, but one always obeyed a summons. He asked me about my Highlander’s feather, and where I had lived in Canada, and what I was doing in London. I tried to tell him the part I wished most to see, and how I liked the “Old Curiosity Shop,” and my visit to Stratford-on-Avon, and he invited me to come with him on a motor ride. I got a few necessities for an over-night stop, and went.
We went from Paddington through a sunlit country, past the turreted mass of Windsor Castle, over the shimmering Thames, in and out of Maidenhead and through an English part of England. There were green, shadowy valleys, sharp little hills, a countryside soft in the glow of evening sun, woods, trickling brooks, wide pastures, a long street of quaint, low red-tiled houses, an old tavern with an ancient sign, “The Black Boar.” Something gripped me, held me. I turned to the officer. “If you’ll let me out here, please,” I said, “I’d like to stay over night.”
He acceded quietly. “I hope you like it,” he said. “I’ll be going back tomorrow and I’ll pick you up.” Something had urged me to stop there. I had intended going with the officer to his home, but it was as if some person had pulled me from my seat. I went into the Inn and after some difficulty in getting myself understood, arranged for a bed and meals. Then, outside again, I strolled on through the village. A rambling, ivy-covered rectory, nestling in a rose garden and embowered in great sheltering trees, was within easy reach of a little, gray, weather-beaten church. A soft wind, an evening wind, almost imperceptible, brought to me the sound of running water, a humming droning music that fitted the harmony of the evening.
The street was very quiet with only a few children playing in a field and an old man smoking his pipe on the bench outside the Inn. I passed down a narrow lane and found the little droning waterfall. It was by the ruins of an old water mill, and as I stood there drinking in the scene I suddenly shivered. It was dusk, and a strange chill blew towards me as if an unseen door had opened.
I turned swiftly, and there stood a girl. She had appeared like a phantom, but she was very warm and real, for she took my hand and welcomed me to the village. “I am so glad,” she said, “that you have come.”
We talked about England, and her past, and a little about Canada, then she began to listen in a curious way, as if she could hear things a long way off. I asked her the reason, and her answer chilled me as the cold breath had done. “I am comparing voices,” she said. “Yours and his.”
“His?” I exclaimed. “Who’s?”
She glanced at me impatiently. “Your brother’s, of course,” she said. “Steve’s.”
I did not start or cry questions, though she had not asked my name. It seemed, all at once, as if I had entered a different sphere of existence, that such a coincidence were natural and that it was not mine to either doubt or query. We talked long there together and when we parted she told me that Steve had told her that I would come. I believed her.
The next day the officer came and took me back to London. I had not asked a question at the Inn, and I knew nothing about Phyllis, except that she lived with her uncle in a cottage next to the rectory, and that she had met Steve in London. The officer chatted a little as he drove, but we were each preoccupied with our thoughts. He was a tolerant, easygoing fellow with Cambridge manners and that peculiar English drawl so often affected. I never saw him again.
We were glad when the train pulled out of Le Havre. In mud and slush and a snowstorm we had been paraded through an open hut, stripped naked save for boots that the muck tugged from our feet, and examined by a doctor who sat in the gloom beside a table and checked off names. He did not even look up as I passed by and went, growling and fuming, to dress again. Tommy was especially excited. “We’re away from all that blasted outfit down there,” he said, “and I’m sure they make it so rotten purposely, and then a chap’s glad to go to the trenches.”
A little party of us had stuck together, Tommy and I, the group I had mentally dubbed the “Fatal Six,” Earle, a big-shouldered farm lad, Baxter another, and Laurie, my cousin. The train moved slowly and as it went we heaved from the window the body belts that had been issued, odd tins of bully, and enough ammunition to reduce our loads to a reasonable weight. That track from Le Havre must have been surrounded by such material, as each soldier dumped at least one quarter of his belongings.
We arrived at Rouen, and Tommy grew eager. “This place is noted for something, isn’t it?” he asked. I reminded him of Joan of Arc, and we found the place where she was burned, and where William the Conqueror had died, and walked about admiring many buildings. When we got back to the train we were threatened for being away so long.
All the time we had been at Le Havre we had had no mail, and now as we came in sight of Mount St. Eloi a sergeant brought us a cartload of parcels. There were no letters, but all our Christmas parcels had arrived at one time, earlier than we expected, and while we were at a miserable overnight stand.
All day we had had little but tea and bully and we gorged on fruit cake and fudge and other good things.
In the morning a dull thudding, thumping noise woke us, and it continued. We sat up and looked at each other. It was very cold and we were shivering and shaking as we got dressed, while deep inside us there was a queer tightening, a funny feeling. Part of it was caused by too much fruit cake, but the rest was caused by the thunder of the guns. We wondered and wondered, and our parcels lost their importance. We drank the tea a surly army cook served us, and then went to the French house – we had slept in a barn – with all the things left over, chocolate and cakes and candy. Three skinny women and a swarm of kids almost fought over us as we gave them the lot.
As we passed Mount St. Eloi and its twin towers I dug up a little more history for Tommy. “The hill itself is over 400 feet above the sea level,” I said, “and that is a seventh-century church occupying the site of an abbey built ages ago by the bishop of Noyon, whose name was St. Eloi.”
He looked at me. “Where did you get all that dope?” he asked.
“In a little French guide book I bought in London,” I said. “I’ve got it with me. What’s the use of coming over here on a trip if you don’t know what you’re looking at?”
He grinned. “Tell that to Howard,” he advised. Howard was a big-boned man who had been a sergeant in the brigade, and had reverted to ranks to come to France. He was one of the few men that the Bull Ring had not changed; he seethed with the fervor of platform patriots.
At Le Havre he had heard Tommy raving about the methods of those in authority, and how he intended dodging everything he could. “Be British,” roared Howard. “What did you come over here for?”
Tommy looked at him in an odd way. “Damned if I know,” he said. “Adventure, mostly. How did your ticket read?”
“Adventure!” blared old Howard. “I come to fight for my country, for the flag, and for the right.”
“Good boy,” soothed Tommy, “but how in heck do you know you’re in the right?”
We had to get between them then, for Howard was ready to represent the British bulldog in realistic manner. He went to the trenches, and shortly after made close acquaintance with a five-nine shell. He was not seriously damaged, but his patriotism received a blow. He got back to England and held forth there on the glorious crusade on which we were embarked. It was much safer across the Channel.
At the transport lines we were lined up for an inspection. We had marched and trudged through mud and water, in a driz
zle, until we were ready to collapse, and we all felt that it was well that there were no more Christmas parcels. A brick-hued, bulging officer inspected us. He looked as if he had been bred in the purple hielands o’ bonnie Scotland, and he talked as if he considered himself the repository of the regimental honour. He told us that we must realize what great privilege was ours to come and fight in the ranks of such a company as the Royal Highlanders. He hoped, he said, that we would always do our best – and his tone implied that he thought our best would be pitiful enough – and that implicit obedience to all orders would be very much to our advantage. Then, before he dismissed us, he looked sternly at Tommy and said that he trusted that none of us would become a bar sinister on the famed Black Watch escutcheon, or words to that effect. Tommy had moved impatiently and said things under his breath. Inspections roused him, enraged him. They were, to men of spirit, a degrading thing. You were herded like cattle into fields or yards and there stood to await the pleasure of some be-ribboned personage who gazed at one as if he were really lower in worth than a good horse. You look straight in front and the steps come closer and closer as the mighty one and his retinue goes down the line, and then a cold, supercilious face is before yours, and with creaking, shining leather and immaculate khaki they pass as you try to thrust back at them a gaze of impenetrable indifference.
That night we went to Neuville St. Vaast and joined the battalion. Arthur, and big Herman, and Earle, and Laurie, and boy-faced Mickey, and Freddy, and Sam, and Ira, and Melville, and Baxter, and myself were shunted into a cellar in which were timbers holding shreds of wire that had once been bunks. Rats ran into holes as we lit candles and then came boldly back and stared at us. It was a cold and wet-smelling place. We sat on our packs and stared around. Not an order had been given us, we knew nothing about the lines, where we drew food, or what platoons we were supposed to be with. Some of the men were restless, and nervous. Tommy answered them sharply. “Let these Royal gents do the worrying,” he said. “They know where to find us.”