Читать книгу In The Trenches 1914-1918 - Glenn Ph.D. Iriam - Страница 17

The breast’work on our battalion frontage was not continuous but was built in sections with spaces in between that were innocent of any defense. In going from one section to another you hurried across the open. On our right there was a gap in the line 500 yards wide very low, and wet with a small stream in the centre. This stream had a fringe of polled willow stumps and small scrub along its course. On our left the line swung back a bit and formed a sort of re-entrant. There was a battalion of Canadian Kilties holding this sector. I think it was the 5th Battalion on our right at the far side of the 500 yard gap. The breast’works here were in better shape and there were some support trenches of a sort close behind. There was a low almost imperceptible ridge on our front, and from our centre to the right, the ground also rose ever so slightly for about 400 yards ahead. There you could see the enemy’s earthworks that appeared to be on slightly drier ground as usual. There was a slight salient there in the German line along this swelling of the ground. This part of their line appeared to be strongly trenched and it was from here that they let loose their first great gas attack on us. It was discharged from reservoirs or cylinders and wafted across on a slow sluggish breeze.

Col. Lipsett was a very energetic sort of commander wanting to be very thoroughly informed about every thing on his part of the front. Sgt. Knobel was a twin brother of his as far as energy went. They certainly kept us scouts on the jump day and night. Every foot of a new frontage had to be gone over, right up and into the enemy’s wire and in some cases into his trench.

We were out practically all night every night here and then on sniping and observation work during the daylight. There was a small cottage still standing on the crest of the low ridge opposite our right flank, close up against the enemy parapet and well inside his wire. Lipsett ordered that we investigate this building. We made a preliminary patrol or two to size things up getting the lay of the land. The nights had turned still and rather cold with a white blanket of mist verging on frost lying in a shroud in all the low sags and along the water courses. About the first night in we stripped off all unnecessary clothing to make crawling easier. We went up a long drainage ditch that angled off straight as an arrow from the close vicinity of the cottage mentioned above. This was touchy work for an enemy could look down the whole length of that ditch and shoot down it very nicely with a machine gun. It had been dug through the wet clay and the sides sloped up at about 45 degrees on both sides. There was a stream in the bottom about three feet wide. We went up this bit by bit flattening into the mud when a flare rose or when a chunk of mud or a rock dislodged and went splashing into the water. Getting up within a few yards of the cottage we saw and heard a great deal of activity going on. There appeared to be scores of men working at something. They were sawing, hammering pounding and digging all the time talking like 300 Quebec Frenchmen.

We gathered one bit of information from watching and listening to the forward part of the gang. They were making movable sally ports to put through their wire entanglements. They were making an arrangement something like a saw horse in form, only much higher and longer, to be strung with a network of barbed wire. Then a zigzag road is cut through the main mass of wire entanglements, and these horses are set in these opening to let their troops pass out through the wire to the attack. They were installed in a zigzag fashion so they would not be readily detected.

On returning from the drainage ditch I was detailed to go on a listening post with another victim for the balance of the night. The post was at the creek at the centre of the 500 yard gap on our right flank. I was unable to go to get any heavier clothing, so I spent a very cold, and exceedingly miserable time trying to shiver myself warm till daylight, watching and listening in the blanket of mist along the water course. It is a penetrating sort of cold in that country on an early spring morning before dawn which gets into the very marrow of your bones in a very different way than the dry crisp cold of Canada.

I could hear railway trains pulling in from the north and east behind the enemy lines all that night. Bands were playing with their drums beating as the troops detrained and marched away. We heard this same thing every night right up to the day of the big attack and reported same to our officers. We were supposed to be in this sector four days and then be relieved by some other unit. The four days came and went with no sign of the relief troops. The enemy shell fire gradually got heavier as the days went on. We who had seen the sally-ports being made, heard the troop trains pouring in day and night for a week or so knew that we were in for it hot and heavy. Every thing pointed that way. Our battalion transport had been shelled and broken up on the St. Julien road. For the last four days of that battle we had very little, if any, food or water. We got a dose of combined tear- gas and chlorine gas on very empty stomachs which no doubt contributed to the number of deaths from gas. With food in our stomachs it would not have gotten such a quick and deadly hold and we would have vomited some of it out. The enemy artillery fire got very heavy during the last two days and we were well tied down to hugging what little shelter was left us. This was mostly the sections of breast’work that were braced or supported at a traverse. Most of the unsupported parts were all gone or nearly so. Shrapnel and high explosive shells were well mixed with mustard or tear gas shells especially through the night proceeding the attack by chlorine gas. This tear gas inflamed the lungs, throat, nostrils, and eyes until we were nearly blind even before the chlorine came over at all. Towards midday of the day before the assault I began to see by evidence all around me that I would have to strengthen the shelter at that place if I hoped to live much longer in the storm of shells. I worked all that afternoon and by piling up bags etc. made an embankment that was still more or less intact when we left that place later on. I know I would not have survived in that spot without the extra bit of shelter that instinct told me to build at that time. The Germans started to enfilade our section of the trench with a gun battery somewhere to the north and were doing great damage with this fire.

Knobel, our scout sergeant, had established an observation post in an old building close behind our front lines. He had us scouts hunting the country-side the night before for a ladder to put up behind the wall of this old building so he could get up to a shell hole he wanted to look from. We could not find a ladder but ripped a set of stairs out of a house about half a mile back carrying it bodily down there and putting it up for his O. P. He knew what he was driving at too. He was after the observer that was directing that enfilading enemy battery and he located him, watching him in the act of using a field telephone to the battery. After having gauged the map location correctly, our lone 18 pounder put a shell directly on him and then the enfilading stopped for awhile.

Just before daylight on the night we carried the stair-case we went to another old farm close behind our supports and lit a bonfire that would smoke, and smudge, and smolder for hours. The Germans took it for a cooking fire of troops in support plunking shells into that spot all day, and that was so many shells that never killed anyone.

The morning that we did all this I got very hungry from doing much hustling around the country, and seeing a fairly good looking tin of bully- beef sticking out of the mud, I nailed it, opened it, and ate part of it getting poisoned and was so sick I rolled on the ground with the pain. I don’t know if ptomaine poisoning is an antidote for chlorine or not but I had my full share of both and am still able to tell about it.

There was a corporal by the name of Harris who was armourer in our company and did any small repairs on rifles etc. He was a fine fellow and the afternoon before the gas attack he and I lay together behind the strengthened spot in the breast’work while a hundred kinds of scientific death smashed down, shrieking, roaring, crashing and rattling about our ears. He had a premonition that his hour was at hand and talked quietly about it. He showed me a picture of his wife and their two little children, a sweet looking trio they were too. It must have been a hard thing for him looking at them there and then. I saw him dying of gas poisoning the next day.

There was a peculiar thing happened to us as we sheltered behind that pile of heaped sand bags. A string of enemy shells pumped one after another into the front and base of that double traverse, until we counted 12 that drove in, repeatedly we could feel the heave and bulge of the earth in front of us and below, without a live shell in the whole lot. The fuse setter must have been a casualty on that gun for awhile, or our Guardian Angel was on the job, and we were not to be blown up that day. Every little while fritz would sweep the breaches and torn spots in our defense with savage bursts of machine gun fire. We of course on our side were not able to make much comeback to all this for we had practically no artillery at all and we were trying to save as many men and scanty machine guns as we could for the hour of assault that we knew was not far away. The day wore on with the night shell fire never ceasing although there were more mustard gas shells and less H. E. during the night. I remember we got so exhausted mentally and physically that we felt as though we were suspended with some sort of wire. There were pauses two or three times in the tornado of fire, that came suddenly, with every gun pausing at once. In those moments of sudden stillness we would drop and slump down into sleep in a second of time, and our heads would fall on our breasts as one man. It was as though we were strung on a taut wire and somebody had cut that wire. Gray light of another morning with the shell fire dribbling off gradually to a desultory fire lessening as though they had exhausted themselves with a long drawn out excess of hate and fury. We must have stolen a few odd winks of sleep during this gray hour just before dawn, for we were awake now and peering toward the enemy line through the misty light for this is the favorite hour for an assault when the light is too poor for the defense to shoot accurately, but not too dark for the attackers to make their way over the ground fairly well. We strained our eyes through the swollen up puffed slits that served us for eye lids. The tear gas had not left us with much in the way of clear vision by now.

We saw what looked like a whitish wall of smoke about 15 feet high all across the enemy front. The word snapped along the line. We thought they were going to come over behind a smoke screen. We watched it coming slowly across, and when it was about half way we opened rifle fire into it for we figured the enemy would be forming for the attack behind the smoke screen. We wanted to get the lead flying into them as soon as they were out of their trenches. That smoky wall moved nearer and when it got close you could see it was not white at all but a dirty yellow toward the top, shading from that to green down next to the ground. It seemed to hug the earth running and flowing thickly into every low place and follow depressions in the ground. It was thick near the earth and progressively thinner towards its crest. We manned what was left of our defenses pouring lead into that smoky wall, then it was over our trench, and among us, and we knew it was no smoke screen. We began to choke and strangle with it, asking one another what in Hell this could be, when a tornado of machine gun, rifle, and shell fire swept down on us again to hold us close to the ground so we would get the full benefit of the gas treatment. The poison did not take immediate effect except in a couple of cases and these two men had been old dope addicts. During their travels in France, they had secured some more of the cocaine or (snow) or what ever it was that they used to light up on and had started playing with it again. When the chlorine hit them they only lasted a very short time, then snuffed out like candles. I am rather hazy about some of the details but it must have been nearly an hour before some of the men started to show yellowish foam from the mouth and nostrils, then beginning to double up in the throws of strangulation exactly as one drowning. All through that day and on into the next they kept dropping off. It was not so bad if one could keep still and quiet and not go in for any exertion, or movement or deep breathing. As soon as one moved about the foam, boiled up through your throat and nostrils choking you off. We would lie flat on our faces holding onto grass or anything to steady us till the spasms passed and we could get our breath again. Excitement under these kind of conditions accounted for a lot of deaths by strangulation.

When fritz thought that his medical treatment had sufficient time to work he made one final shower of machine gun fire and shrapnel, then they started to come over to what he evidently thought was a place of the dead. I could see them popping up over their trench in hundreds and then down into a slight sag close in front. The old Mark 3 Ross had a sight on the bridge that folded down, and when down a course notch in the top of it giving a point blank range of 600 yards. The adjustable peep sight was useless to us now owing to the condition of our eyes as a result of mustard or tear gas. We used the old open battle-sight aiming a bit low and there were a good many Germans that fell back into the trench instead of jumping down in front for the start across. The first attack got most of the way across. You could see the officers pointing directions to this and that and machine gun crews trying to set up tripod guns so they could return our fire. In that first advance some stragglers got within about 30 yards of us, and there, were drilled full of holes.

Our rifles were coated with a thick furry coat of red rust from the action of the gas. All metal parts first turned a sort of pink or lavender, then changed from that to green, then black, and finally to red rust in a thick coat over all the working parts. They become stiff and hard to work and no small wonder. We would drop the butt to the ground and kick the bolt open with a foot. The straight pull action made this possible. As long as the bolt handle held out you could still do business at the old stand and did. I had four rifles I had collected. There were plenty of spares now. I used these four alternately all that day and some times they were all pretty warm. In addition to the three advances that fritz made against our battalion front there was a long unbroken string of enemy troops passing through the valley to our left at about 600 yards distance. From the apex of A Company’s position I could bring fire on that procession and did not waste any time, but kept at it with all the cartridges I could rustle. There were a lot of discarded cloth bandoliers full of shells lying about in the mud and in odd corners. These we dug out cleaning them off enough to get them through the rifle. They were perfectly good shells too, not a misfire in the lot.

Lieutenant Durand was in command of the position on the left. Wounded in four places he kept at it keeping his platoon right up to scratch. I could tell by the volume of their fire that they were making hay on that endless line of Bavarians that trailed past through the valley to our left like a caribou herd around the east end of Lake Athabaska. Some of those heinies walked as though they were drunk or doped with something. If you ever saw a drunk they too break into a run, and noted the hard bumpy way that his heels strike the ground, as though they could not gauge the distance to earth. That is the way they ran, and at the same time they kept up a sort of monotonous chant while blowing intermittently on some sort of hoarse sounding horn that reminded me of the old conch shells they used in Nova Scotia to call the workmen for dinner. I was told that this horn was a national relic of Bavaria handed down through generations of warriors way back to the time of Attila The Hun and had sounded over many a field of slaughter.

Durand began to worry about his supply of ammunition and sent corp. Pozer a native of Quebec over to our section of trench to see if there was anybody with lungs still working good enough to pack ammunition across to his platoon. Pozer came to me and asked if I would go. I went along with somebody else, I don’t remember who, and being too weak to handle a case we ripped the cases open taking as many bandoliers as we could drag, crossing the open stretch three or four times. Between strangling periodically and flopping in the mud to dodge sweeps of machine gun fire, I was all in at the end of the second trip and sat down to rest and get some breath at the right of Durand’s breast’work. Here I had my last view of Duncan Robertson, my chum who had enlisted with me at Kenora. He was in charge of one of the colt machine guns attached to Durand’s sector. His gun had broken down and he was returning from a trip over to the right of the battalion with some spare parts under his arm. We exchanged grins and he hurried on his way. I heard his gun start to chatter about 10 minutes later but it did not last long. There was a German aero plane swooping up and down, up and down over our lines, spotting for machine guns. As soon as Duncan got well started again, there came over a salvo of shells from the enemy batteries that buried Duncan’s gun in a volcano of death. He was killed instantly, his head and shoulders blown off. He came from Fernlea, Pern Hill, and Isle of Aran. It must be a good place.

After the session of carrying ammunition I was nearly all in and beginning to get sort of dopey, and groggy with a hazy sort of feeling that seemed to be creeping, creeping right into my vitals. I had just survived a spasm of choking and lay on the ground. A man came along with a jug or crock of rum, hailed me, telling me that some of the boys had taken a shot of it and it had helped them. I laid on one elbow and took a drink of that stuff that would have jolted a horse. It was a case of kill or cure, and I was at the stage just then where I didn’t worry much about which way it went. When that slug of (fire water) hit the bottom of my tortured stomach it rebounded and came back as though it had hit a set of coil springs. I threw out about a pint or more of a bright green sort of jelly, having a rough passage for a few minutes, with the yellow foam and froth from my mouth and nostrils shutting off my wind for so long. I thought my heart and brain would burst before I got a gasp and gurgle of breath again. I lay still for awhile after this but soon started to take interest in things again, upon hearing Big Dave Halcrow raving and cursing like a berserker at the breast’work. I woke again to the fact that there was something doing and crawled to the parapet and to the rifles for they were coming over again. There were still some men left to man the rifles and say “no” to them. To the right they swept back the 5th Battalion pouring past us taking our right-hand platoon in their drive. Sergeant Aldritt, who was a sort of athletic instructor around the Y. M’ S. swimming baths etc. in Winnipeg, was manning the machine gun in that platoon that was swamped and over run in that drive by the square heads. Aldritt worked his gun right up to the time the enemy swarmed over the breast’works having done some good execution. The remainder of that platoon was captured, officers and all, spending three years in Germany.

Good old A Company was sticking out into the swamp like the bow of a ship in a hurricane with Durand’s platoon still doing business on our left flank. Lipsett figured that we were in danger of being cut off and grabbed cooks, batmen, clerks, transport men, and anyone else on two legs, sending them in to form a connecting link from our left flank back to where there were some more of our troops.

The Kilties on our left had fallen back too and were out on the point of a salient. This rabble pushed forward and got to grips in one place with the Germans with their bayonets. A lad by the name of Eddie Platt got up against a big German about twice his size and had to stick him or be stuck. Now it is a very revolting thing to some people to have to use the cold steel and Platt had to summon all his nerve to do it. He stuck fritz alright fainting with revulsion immediately after. Now there had been some troops sent up to try and relieve or to support us.. They were the 8th Durham’s and green troops of the Territorial Army who had come to someplace in France to finish their training before being sent into the line. They were grabbed and rushed in to stem the tide of the German drive. A remnant of them survived the advance that they made down that two miles of slope over exposed ground to our position. They must have been exposed to terrific fire during that advance and all credit is due them as green troops for ever getting there at all. I think some of our own men also made that advance. Part of company, or No. 3 company who had been in reserve were sent forward to join us on the spear point of the defense. Most of the officers and N. Co’s of the Durhams were killed before they got to us with the remnants of the rank and file being a bit bewildered and shaken by this sudden drop right into Hell itself without any warning or preliminaries. Finding friends that still had a stiff spine and could still curse while facing the right way they were alright and took hold with a good heart. Right here I noticed a sort of queer comedy right in the midst of all the horrors.

There was at least one officer of the Durhams that got to the front line. He was a treat to see. He must have been spawn of the Creme De La Crème for he had the airs, the monocle, spotless cream-colored pipe clay faced breeches and all the rest of it. His servant carried an air cushion which he blew up and placed on the parodos to keep the cream colored breeches spotless. Here was the meeting of the extremes if ever it was. He adjusted the monocle and chatted in the best afternoon tea manner for 15 or 20 minutes without ever saying anything that had any bearing on the doings around us. The wildest imagination could not picture any object more utterly out of place on earth or yet in Heaven. He lasted about 20 minutes when a shell swept him away into the void along with large chunks of our ragged parapet. If he wakes in some drawing room in his special Heaven, he will no doubt still have the monocle uncracked and will enquire as to what those rude fellows were doing.

Conan Doyle said St. Julien was the greatest unsupported infantry defense in military history and he had an uncanny way of getting at the truth of things. The proper relation of all these events one to the other and their proper sequence is a bit blurred to me now. I cannot place them in their exact time and place, for a person in the thick of a mess like that is not always able to see it as a whole or remember dates and statistics.

The Northumberland Fusiliers worked their way into our line. I think it must have been the night after the gas attack and now our boys who still represented what was left of the L. B. Ds. were outnumbered by the newcomers.