by Will R Bird
The sergeant looked at me oddly as I told him I had had my fill of such butcher work, and he said he would see about it when I went out. He said that probably it was too big a kill for my first time, and that if I had just gotten one man in a day I would never have minded. Then he informed me that there was to be a raid the next day, April 1st, between Durrand and Duffield and that I would be with snipers who were to get on top and shoot any Germans who fled overland.
The raid was in the morning and a box barrage was laid down. We climbed out of the trench as soon as the raiding party went over. I had been hot and tired the day before and had not slept much that night. I could not eat and as I got out of the trench I was almost dizzy. The Stokes battery put over their part of the barrage and several of their shells fell short, dropping very near us. An officer shouted to me to watch out, but I did not care what happened. I could not understand my condition and knew I must be sick. Two Germans were captured, one a little short man, and they came hustling back our way. The rest of the enemy had gone into their dugouts as the barrage opened and our men threw bombs and Stokes down the stairways and killed them in their hiding places. The short German got excited as he ran. He had his hands up and was slipping and falling all the time. Getting out of one hole he changed direction and ran to our right. A new man was on post there and when he saw the German appear he shot him.
The other man got over all right and the raiders withdrew without a casualty. I was last man down from our position and an officer, the one who shouted at me, came and smelled my breath. “That man acted as if he were drunk,” he said.
I did not say anything to him, but sat on the firestep resting before I could follow the other snipers to the dugout. Several sentries were grouped near me and they were much excited over the raid, and the fact that the Germans had appeared so easily subdued. Martin got up at one post and said he would pot the first squarehead to show himself.
Crack! Martin slumped back, dead. A sniper had got him in the temple.
I watched them put a blanket over him and carry him away and then saw our medical officer going along the trench. As he passed me he stopped and stared, then felt under my ears. “Why don’t you report when you’re sick?” he bellowed. “Do you want to spread that stuff all around?”
I was dazed. “You’ve got the mumps, man,” he roared. “Come along.”
He took my rifle and laid it on the firestep, yanked off my equipment and slung it there, then took me by the arm and started me out to the Quarry Line. When I reached his post I was all in. The medical sergeant got me a hot drink and was very kind. He put me on a trolley that ran back to Mount St. Eloi and away I went. An ambulance took me to some clearing station and there, as soon as my tag was read, I was hustled to an outbuilding. It had been a stable or pen and had a strong door and foot-square windows. As I reeled into it the orderly snapped the door into place and fastened it securely. I was locked in.
For the moment I hardly knew where I was and then I found that I had company. A man with several day’s growth of beard on his face, and red-shot eyes, was on his hands and knees, going around and around in circles on the stone floor. He ignored me entirely and kept muttering to himself. In a split second I forgot my weakness. I got to the door, which had an open grating and yelled to a soldier who was by a cook wagon. He came over and I was cunning enough to tell him that I was very hungry. I showed him a five-franc note and told him he could have it for a mess-tin full of mulligan. When he brought it he released the door and extended his offering. I kicked as hard as I could, sending the hot food into his face, blinding him. He yelled and pawed at his eyes and I ran from the place without looking back. In the front an ambulance was just starting away. I piled into it and discovered it only had one man on board, and he seemed unconscious.
We swayed and rocked along the road and a snowstorm began. When the ambulance stopped I climbed out and walked to a tent where an orderly confronted me. He read my ticket and asked me who had sent me there. I made no definite answer and he said that Canadians were for some other hospital, but he led me to a marquee that served as a mumps ward. A dozen men were there, some of them huddled around a brazier. I was shown my “bed,” a stretcher resting on two high benches. Under it was at least an inch of water and drifting snow that had come in the tent door.
The blankets were made up so that one could only get into bed near the pillow and thrust feet first down into it. As the benches were easily tipped over this required careful work, and I was glad to get in safely. One of the men told me that an orderly would come for my khaki and put it through the “mill.” That meant a steaming plant, and that my tunic and trues would come back to me in a wrinkled mass that could never be straightened. So I folded them and thrust them under my blankets, next to the stretcher.
Shortly afterwards the orderly came, and I told him another man had taken my uniform. He went away and I went to sleep. I woke next morning, and snow had blown in on my bed and melted so that one shoulder was damp. Not a doctor or nurse had come near, and none did till nearly noon. Then the medical officer came and asked a few questions, said something to the nurse with him, and passed on. After he had gone the other patients told me that he would not likely be back for two days, and that I was in the most slip-shod hospital in France, an Imperial outfit at St. Pol.
Three of the men got up and dressed and brought us something to eat. These three had been well for over two weeks and had simply stayed in the marquee, slipping out whenever the doctor was making his rounds. No one bothered them and they had a good time. An orderly, an Englishman they called “Spike,” came and told me that I had better move into the next ward. He was a fine young fellow, had been two years at college, and was very bitter against all those in authority at the hospital.
I moved to a bigger tent and stayed there six days. The doctor never looked at me again; was only in the tent once in that time. The nurses came seldom, except one, a Canadian girl, from Ontario, who, when she found I was Canadian, used to come and talk with me. She was on night duty and would come with her flashlight, making the rounds. She told me that things were worse than I could realize and that her only hope was to get away from the place. I had had the worst of my sickness in the dugout and no complications set in. Easter morning we were surprised to see an officer and orderlies come into the ward and start laying oranges and cigarettes on the tables. The officer gave us strict orders not to touch them. “There is to be an inspection first,” he said. “After it is all over we will come and tell you and you can help yourselves.”
None of us had had enough to eat in the place, the food was very scarce, and no smokes could be obtained, so that we lay and feasted our eyes on the good things. Presently a retinue of red tape and bombasity passed through the ward, glancing at the exhibit. No sooner had they gone than in came the officer and orderlies again, with their same baskets, and before more than two or three of us had gotten our cigarettes and oranges they had seized our supposed treat and taken it, never giving a word of explanation. Spike came in and told us that they had pulled the same stunt in nearly every ward, and that the doctors and head nurses would have a big blow-out in their own quarters.
That evening I moved to a third tent. They were making ready for the casualties of the 9th, and were putting more patients in one ward. There were eight of us in a much smaller tent and I found myself next a man from the 7th battalion. He was a middle-aged fellow and well-educated, and we talked for hours at a time. The sniping business preyed on my mind so that some nights I could not sleep yet I could not mention it to him. I was much better, and as darkness came on we thought of the boys in the trenches up in the crater lines, waiting for the morrow.
I thought of Freddy, and wondered what he was doing; I felt that if he did not get sent back on some job or get wounded he would lose his reason, for he rarely spoke to any one. Big Herman tried to humour him, but the rest left him alone. I thought of Charley, and his premonitions, of little Mickey and his boyish face, of Earle and Ma
cMillan and McDonald. How lucky I had been to get clear of the attack, and yet I wished with all my heart and soul that I was there. In spite of all the bitterness I had brought to France with me I had got to like the battalion, to be proud that I belonged to it, and I liked our sergeant, Smaillie, the sergeant-major and our company commander. They were all “white” men.
At midnight the ambulance brought in a soldier whose face was so swollen that he could not speak. He had crawled in mud from a listening post, unable to walk, and his hands were raw discoloured hooks. Spike put the man to bed and he lay very quiet after getting a hot drink. In the morning he was dead. He had died without making a sound, absolutely worn out with crawling in the mud, back and forth from post to trench, without enough to eat, and suffering all kinds of exposure. He seemed to be quietly resting when we looked at him, and one felt rather glad that the poor chap was through with all the mud, and rain, and snow, and rats, and lice, and discipline, and discomfort; he could rest a long, long time.
Towards morning I lay awake and listened for the barrage. I could picture the boys in the trench, tense waiting, staring over the parapet. Mud would be everywhere, plastering their clothing, gripping their feet. Our last trip in had been a nightmare journey and the deep trench in the dusk looked like the bed of some dirty river, suddenly gone dry. The barrage was like rolling thunder. Even where we were we could hear it so plainly that it awed us, kept us quiet. As it grew light I saw men go by the tent carrying something wrapped in a ground sheet, with muddy boots sticking stiffly out, eloquent of an ended journey. Spike came in and said the man had been brought down in the night, a scurvy case, and that they had not tried to put him in a bed.
No one brought us any breakfast and so I got up and dressed – I had managed to keep my khaki with me – and went among the tents until I found the kitchen. I gave the number of our ward. “How many?” barked the cook. “Twelve,” I said, and was given hot cocoa and bread and jam and margarine. scant enough rations for our eight, but the best meal we had had. Then I got in bed again and talked with the 7th battalion man, while out on the roads motor lorries droned and rattled without ceasing.
We talked of patriotism. He said it was not a password in his company, that loyalty was a word they sneered at; discipline, with the death penalty behind it, a canker we could not cure. Then he derided the caste of the nation and cursed the propaganda passed out by preachers, editors, staff officers and platform patriots of both sexes. He seemed emotional and told me that he was an original member of his battalion, and so I humoured him, though not condoning all his violence. We agreed that the war was, in some indefinable way, our duty, but that those “patriots” were to be detested as our handicaps. We were sure that had they been as sacrificial and sincere as the soldier the war would have been over, or would never have been begun.
I thought of the way some of those platform shouters had ranted about the Germans, and their “hate,” and how different it was in the battalion. All uttered hate was at the “higher-ups,” and outside of a certain derisive jesting at old “Heinie” the German was seldom mentioned in billets. Given a dirty night at the crossroads or an undue strafing in the trenches and there would be bitter vows of vengeance and Fritz and his methods would be luridly described. Twenty-four hours later the orator would give a prisoner a cigarette and grin at him.
We talked about discipline, the cruelty of cartwheel crucifixion, which I had seen on the parade grounds of the R.C.R.’s below Mount St. Eloi. Men, volunteers, spread-eagled to cart-wheels, tied there for hours in a biting, bone-chilling wind, all because the fellow had not shined a button or given some snobby officer a proper deference. I had seen men laden with their packs and rifles, overcoats and all, marched back and forth, twenty feet each way, to the barking of a bristled non-com, a sheer process of fatiguing the man until he was almost a wreck; and these men who had left good jobs and homes and had come, as the orators said, to fight for right and loved ones.
We were all, the 7th man said, at the mercy of authority-crazed, overfed, routine-bound staffs, old fogies with a tragic lack of imagination and a criminal ignorance of actual warfare. Spike came in and sat a long time on our beds, talking about religion. He was a thinker, and it was his theory that we took from this world our memories and affections, and he wondered what visions of the war we would carry. His ideas held me. If, I thought, the cosmic law is based on logical principle, then memory and affection ARE indestructible and personality persists beyond that which we call death.
The 7th battalion man proved even more of a thinker than Spike. Life, he said, was an uncreated thing, co-existent with Him who is life, and Time is not, never was and never will be. Memory and affection might be indestructible, and we are much greater than we know, component parts of that Spirit that is undying. He looked at me and said solemnly, “You’ll find, Jock, that the greatest moment here on earth is when you leave it.”
Privates in a dirty, wind-blown, rain-soaked tent, unshaven, strangers to each other, with sick men on either side, discussing topics that cause any man to sober. I think of Spike and that 7th man every time I read of the “sodden cattle” of the dugouts.
All that day I wondered about Steve and what it had been like at Hill 60. It must have been another region where mine craters grew and multiplied and sprouted machine gun posts and saps, but what had those first fighters thought of the war? Had there been rats up there, those obscene creatures with their glittering eyes, had they to endure the same post duties, six hours on, six off, in all weather, under all fires, all dangers, and with the wraiths of no man’s land peeping over the parapets in the lonely hours before dawn? And the more I thought of these first comers the more I wished I had been with them.
I woke next morning and heard strange guttural voices. Dressing hurriedly, I went into the next tent and found it filled with wounded Germans. They stared at me, some of them friendly, some indifferent. One chap with a turban-sized bandage on his head was sitting up, stolidly eating bully as though it were an occupation instead of a meal. A man beside me said something, repeated it, and I gathered that he wanted a drink. I got my mug and water bottle and he drank thirstily, then thanked me. Spike came in and asked me to give him a hand in feeding them, and I enjoyed it. The stolid man with the bully was the exact replica of a New Brunswicker with us, who only asked for plenty of hard tack and his rum ration. Given those, he was content, and a double issue seemed to make a feather bed of his chicken-wire bunk.
An officer came that night to see the Germans. He was one of those eyeglass youngsters, full of “pip-pip” and “tootle-oo” stuff, which fizzed from him as he talked to the nurse accompanying him. I did not know whether she was there out of curiosity or as his bodyguard, but they went away again without doing anything to help a sufferer, leaving only a trail of “right-os” and “cheerios.” Spike came afterwards and ground his teeth. So far as we knew he was the only person to attend those wounded Germans all that night.
I was just sixteen days at St. Pol, then coolly walked away from the place and got on board a train.
No one halted me or questioned me. I never had seen a doctor again, and for five days I drew rations for our ward, washed sick men’s faces, and fed many. I had a bath at the bath house and even drew a new tunic from the quartermaster I unearthed, and a badge. As I left, a Scot – a bandy-legged chap – who had been hanging around one ward six weeks, dodging doctors, looked at my balmoral and said seriously, anxiously, “Ye’ll no disgrace the tartan wull ye lad?” I looked him up and down and walked away.
By devious ways I reached Mount St. Eloi and there to my astonishment found Melville. He had been down the line with mumps the same as I, had taken French leave from his ward and was very anxious to get back to the boys. We went over the Ridge just at dusk and found it a jungle of old wire and powdered brick and muddy burrows and remnants of trenches. We went off the main track that was being used and sat in a big crater to rest. Melville spoke sharply and I looked. Three dead men were recl
ining in the place, lolled back to the muddy wall, gazing incuriously before them, their faces turned black. We rose and climbed away from the place and almost stumbled over another dead man crouched in a shell hole, his rifle in his hands, squatted as if he were ready to spring.
In the twilight, just before darkness, we stood and looked down over the Ridge on the enemy side. The first flares rose, in scattered places, and we could not distinguish the lines. The air was damp and chilling, an unearthly feeling predominated. The dead man, the solitary flares, the captured ground, gave me a sense of ghosts about, and one realized the tragedy of the stricken hill. Many, many men had died on that tortured, cratered slope.
We found the platoon, and hardly recognized it. The sergeant was there, and MacDonald, but the rest were strangers. They told me that the 73rd, of the Fourth Division, had been so cut up that they had been withdrawn and the 85th Nova Scotia Highlanders had taken their place. The remnant of the 73rd had been divided between us and the 13th. I got MacDonald to one side and asked questions. It was far worse than I thought. The 42nd had gone straight through to their objective despite the sleety snow and mud and confusion, had driven back all opposition and seized their objective. But on their left the Fourth Division had been held up, and a flanking fire had taken heavy toll.