Читать книгу Three to a Loaf - Michael J. Goodspeed - Страница 10
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THE ROYAL FLYING CORPS confirmed Private Hoffart’s information the next day. Years later I learned it was corroborated by a sophisticated network of Belgian train watchers who at great peril to themselves reported on the movements of enemy trains. True to the estimate provided to me by Major Gault, the German army was fully engaged repelling a disastrous French offensive to the south of us, which meant, for a time, we were safely out of the major action.
Shortly after my patrol, we found ourselves moved back to decent rest billets. We rotated in and out of a very quiet area of the line and during one of those spells in the rear I was promoted to full lieutenant. I’m sure my German friend, Private Hoffart, had a lot to do with it. The battalion officers were put up in a good-sized farmhouse a mile west of Armentieres, and for once I managed to find a nice dry spot for myself on the dining room floor. It was strange how things had changed. For a few days I actually thought of that patch of farmhouse floor as home.
Our actions during those weeks were minor. Like everybody else in the British Twenty-seventh Division, the Patricia’s were employed on quiet stretches of the front. The entire division was still recuperating from its near fatal mauling at the Second Battle of Ypres four months prior to my arrival. Other fresher divisions weren’t so lucky. To relieve pressure on the Russians and draw German troops from the east, the French and British armies chose to attack in the areas of Champagne and Artois, as well as around a small village called Loos. We were glad to be out of that one too. What we heard from our own rear-area troops was disturbing. British casualties at Loos were staggering and we were thankful at having been spared the horrors of that bloody campaign. Our stretch of the front was no more comfortable and it was often dangerous, but we felt immensely lucky that it was our turn to be tasked with relatively safe reserve and flank guard roles.
One morning in February stands out clearly during one of those stretches in the trenches. I was on a tour of my platoon area talking to the men, conducting routine inspections of weapons and sanitary arrangements. It was a grey, cold, foggy day and wet enough that we were thoroughly miserable. My boots were sodden and my trousers were caked with wet mud. I was chatting to one of my corporals about nothing in particular when we heard the whistle of incoming trench mortar fire a little further down the line. We threw ourselves against the parapet wall. Several rounds landed in the space of a few seconds and no sooner had they stopped than I heard men cheering and catcalling. The shouting was a good sign; it seemed all the mortar fire landed either in front of or behind our trench lines.
I hurried to the sound of the cheering, but as I rounded one of the bends in the traverse between Two and Three Sections, I was electrified. Private Reid, the young man who acted as my guide on my first night at the battalion, was on his stomach clawing at the duckboard. His face was drained of colour; his mouth twisted in a horrible grimace. Reid lay in a grotesque smear of blood and dirt, his legs shredded into trailing ribbons of mangled flesh and ragged bits of uniform. He died in my arms seconds later.
That morning was the first feeling of genuine hatred I had for the enemy. I wanted Reid to survive the war. He’d been kind to me. He was cheerful, resourceful, and I knew he would have made a difference to those whose lives he touched. For him to die so suddenly, so capriciously and in such agony and filth filled me with loathing and rage.
After Reid’s death I continued to be shocked by the closeness of death – but that morning something inside me went numb. I suppose it was what psychologists now call a survival mechanism. Whatever it was, it was another watershed moment in my life, one that fifty-five years later I recall in vivid detail. When the Loos offensive finally came to a shuddering stop over seventy thousand young men like Private Reid were dead. When the war was over, twenty million Private Reids had been slaughtered on both sides.
A week later, the entire British army went onto the defensive and the Patricia’s were at last transferred to join the rest of our fellow countrymen in the Canadian army.
When we joined the Canadian army, the battalion was tasked to man the line around the town of Hooges. At Hooges, we received another reinforcement draft from Canada; and for the first time in my experience, the Patricia’s were at full fighting strength. Like me, most of the new men were recruited from universities in Quebec and Ontario. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of potential officers in this new draft and, as I was to learn later, senior army planners were angry that the upstart PPCLI had again creamed off more than its share of the available talent. Elitist recruiting didn’t help us escape the destruction lying in wait for the Canadian army. Like the rest of the university men, I was soon involved on a section of the line with the deceptively tranquil sounding name, Sanctuary Wood. It was to be horrific and was my last pitched battle. Sanctuary Wood was another link in a chain inexorably dragging me into a new life.
Our arrival in the new sector of the line was ominous. To go forward we had to pass through a patch of ground near Hooges that had once been the intersection of two country lanes. Because the crossroads was directly observable to German troops on the high ground to the north of us, several months earlier British troops nicknamed it Hellfire Corner. Anything that moved by day on Hellfire Corner was shelled mercilessly, and at night, the Germans regularly blasted it with speculative shrapnel and high explosive bombardments. To get to our new positions we had to pass through Hellfire Corner. On our first tour in the sector, despite moving through the crossroads at night, we lost seven men just getting to the trenches. That month we crossed and re-crossed Hellfire Corner three times.
Our new position was an utterly godforsaken piece of ground. The battalion’s trenches meandered across a waterlogged bottomland and the Germans looked down on us. Because the Salient was Belgian ground, the Allies refused to surrender an inch, and we found ourselves defending a low-lying salient jammed like a provocatively scolding finger into the German lines.
Behind our trenches, the ground was deeply cratered. Over the winter those craters filled with black water, turning the larger shell holes into small evil-looking lakes. On dark nights, men from my platoon frequently crawled back there, cracked the ice, and washed away as much of their filth as they could. We stopped that soon enough.
When the warm weather came, the ice disappeared and the mud at the bottom of the crater gave up the bloated corpse of a long-dead French soldier. Our poor Frenchman wasn’t the only unburied veteran in the area. At several points along our trench walls men repairing collapsed sand bag revetments came across the decomposing bodies of French and British soldiers who died there months before. God knows what terror and agony those men died in, but their rotting arms and legs routinely fell into our trenches. There was nothing else we could do – we dug through those remains and sealed off the dead with sand bags. The memories of those corpses were less easy to lock up.
On June 1, Number Two Company was manning the “Loop,” a semi-circular section of trench that sat like a wart on the very tip of the Salient. The Loop’s trenches were deeper and in better repair than those occupied by the companies on either side of us. But although our trenches may have been deep, their approaches were exposed on both sides and we could only get safely into the area in daylight by crawling on all fours for several hundred yards.
On that final stint in the Loop, Number Two Company was stronger than we had been on our previous tour. In addition to our new reinforcements, in our last period in rest billets we’d received two Lewis guns on an experimental basis. The Lewis gun looked like an oversize rifle with a large, circular, pan-shaped magazine on top. I had been introduced to it in England on training and knew it would become a fearsome addition to our weaponry because it increased our firepower several-fold. We needed it.
A year and a half into the war the majority of troops on both sides were only a few months away from civilian life. Few of us were good marksmen. By June 1916, two-thirds of the soldiers in the PPCLI were Canadian; and despite whatever personal strengths we Canadian-born members of the regiment may have had, we had only been in uniform for a few months and couldn’t shoot anything like as well as the British originals who’d spent their peacetime years on the British army’s rifle ranges. We took great delight in getting this new weapon, little realizing that the automation of war was reducing all our chances for survival.
In late May, there were indications the Germans were going to attack but we’d no idea when their offensive was to begin, or how fierce and determined it would be. The morning it all started was gloriously sunny; larks were singing somewhere behind us. I was in a philosophic mood thinking about home and watching a starling sitting on the trench lip. I’d become superstitious in a half-believing take-no-chances sort of way and I was puzzled whether this was a good or a bad sign. Not that I believed in omens or charms, but some things became a habit. Was the bird a symbol of a more natural life, or did it mean our violent way of life had become natural? A year before I would have scoffed at any kind of superstition. Now, unconsciously, in a world that arbitrarily snuffed out life, I suppose I searched for meaning anywhere I could find it. I wasn’t alone. Even the most religious or analytical of us in one way or another saw the course of their lives influenced by good and bad luck. I think we all had some kind of superstitious practice or belief.
On that first day in the Loop I was very tired. My eyes burned. I smoked a cigarette, and sat enjoying the early summer sunshine on my face. The small patch of sky visible from the bottom of our trench was cloudless. When you were in the trenches your horizon was limited to the stretch of sky above you and the sandbagged walls in front of you. It was a strange perspective on the world. In front of me, a sentry peered through his lookout hole scanning the German trenches opposite. In the adjacent firing bay, four of my men prepared lunch. They were laughing and taunting each other. Morale was high. We were well fed and our clothes were dry. Although we were aware of being in one of the worst places on earth, that morning we were happy. Everything’s relative. That morning we were warm and dry.
One of the voices called out, “Don’t worry too much if you don’t get enough to eat today, Hargreaves. Once Fritzie’s done with us this time, there’s only gonna be three to a loaf anyway.” They laughed enthusiastically, as if it was the first time they heard the joke.
Beside me, Sergeant Ferguson, my platoon sergeant, sat quietly cleaning his rifle. Ferguson was a man of remarkably few words. During my first few days with the platoon, I found his silences a little intimidating and irksome; but the longer I knew him, the more I grew to understand him; and in that halting and formal way peculiar to soldiers constrained by rank, age, and discipline, we became good friends. We sat together in silence on the firestep of our forward trench enjoying the sunshine.
Like most of my platoon, I’d by then taken to smoking cigarettes and used tobacco as a self-rationed reward and a comfort. That morning I was smoking contentedly, reading through a packet of letters that had come up with us the night before.
The letter that my mind kept coming back to was from Jeanine Dupuis. Jeanine was getting married, and as I was one of her “dearest and most trusted friends,” she wanted me to be one of the first to know. She was marrying a French-Canadian lawyer at the end of the summer and would go off to live in Quebec City. They were going to honeymoon at a cottage on a lake in the Laurentians. She was deliriously happy.
In those days of constant exhaustion, filth, bad food, and violent death, soft, warm, feminine companionship was something I dreamt and fantasized about constantly. I had often thought of Jeanine – her eyes, the softness of her skin, her figure, her delicate and fragrant scent, and her soft, husky voice. I’d only known these at a distance. I had never slept with a woman and that morning I was convinced I never would. Now my life was unnaturally masculine, brutish, and harsh, and I only half-expected to survive the war. Just as I’d become superstitious, I’d gradually come to accept that I might die. And women were so far removed from my existence that dreaming about them was like wishing on a star. But as I said, I wasn’t unhappy. For the time being, I was philosophic about these things, and little things, like dry clothes and sunny skies, lifted my spirits.
It wasn’t just violence and hard living that had changed me; although those two things probably had a profound and irreversible effect on me. I was now twenty-two, but I felt at least a decade older. Perhaps my unnatural ageing was in part due to my new position as an officer and a leader. In this, I recognized I had some advantages: I was much taller than all my British-born soldiers and had the benefit of an expensive education. As unfair as it was, those things gave you an edge. Reflecting back on it, I was ideally raised for this kind of transformation. I was young, strong, athletic, reasonably quick to learn things, and temperamentally willing to accept a challenge.
My sense of inadequacy regarding my position as a leader had by then all but disappeared. This was probably not entirely a good thing. My new-found confidence had come at the cost of boiling my values down to only those personal qualities and skills I needed to survive. In my months at the front, I placed enormous importance on trust, physical courage, endurance, cunning, determination, and good humour. Not a lot else mattered. My outlook on life necessarily became simplistic; but my life was no less complicated. I had other practical worries that day-to-day living and leadership imposed upon me. When the Canadian university men arrived, those who came to my platoon looked on me as a veteran. Some of them were several years older than I. They were innocent and treated me with deference and formal military courtesy. I suppose my Military Cross gave me credibility, credibility that I probably didn’t deserve, but it helped my confidence and my stature.
There may have been more than a tinge of fatalism and self-pity in all this mellow speculation. That June morning I was curiously detached, as if I was watching things from afar. Jeanine was the only woman I had ever truly been passionate about and I had let her slip entirely away without even telling her of my feelings. Although I’ve known a number of women since, my love for Jeanine was entirely different from the rest. Now I appreciate that the Jeanine I loved never really existed. She was, however, one of the few women I had ever really known at that point. High school had been a rigidly male and Jesuitical regime of Latin, Greek, French, English, history, mathematics, science, and sports. My three years at McGill University weren’t much different; a brief introduction to the army – and now I was at the front sitting in a foul-smelling trench surrounded by a group of men who I was to lead and was prepared to die with. It was all very alien, and at the same time so normal. These trench walls, mud, fatigue, cold, and wet had become my life. The sun made me drowsy and I wanted to crush out my cigarette and sleep.
The first rounds of the German barrage hit us with shattering intensity. It’s a challenge describing the effect of a single artillery round exploding nearby. Fifty unexpected large-calibre rounds detonating in the space of five seconds is truly cataclysmic. The German barrage hit us like an eruption from hell. As best I can make out, in that first salvo only two rounds actually landed within the company trench lines, but they killed half a dozen of our men outright. Our position was well registered and the rounds that didn’t land inside our trenches were very near misses. They collapsed trench walls, blew down parapets, buckled dugouts, and the shrapnel from them inflicted horrific jagged wounds.
Sergeant Ferguson, with more presence of mind than I, swept up the pieces of his rifle and shouted rather unnecessarily “Take Cover! Take Cover.”
He scrambled along the bottom of the trench and scuttled into his scrape carved out of the side of the forward wall. I was momentarily at a loss – the company officers’ dugout was fifty yards along the trench line and a further twenty yards to the rear. I had no place to go. Ferguson looked up at me and began to shout something. “Sir …” He didn’t finish his sentence. I threw myself into that tiny space, landed on top of him, and dug my fingers into the dirt floor, pulling myself downward as if willing to be swallowed by the earth. The first few seconds of that bombardment are imprinted in my mind as if etched in stone. My remaining two days in the Loop lasted a lifetime.
The initial bombardment on our forward trench line was the most intense part of the shelling and it went on continuously for over an hour. I’d been under artillery fire several times before, but nothing matched the concentration and length of this unforgiving pounding. With each explosion the ground shook. My brain and every bone in my body felt like it was being pounded by a mallet. My head ached with a piercing pain and my nose bled from any one of a hundred close concussions that smashed me into the trench floor and walls. Despite lying alongside Sergeant Ferguson, I was completely isolated. The two of us swore and screamed obscenities until we were hoarse, but still those horrifying explosions smashed and rattled us around the bottom of that scrape like we were insects caught in a jar of fire crackers. One of the early rounds hit the lip of our trench and the blast forced fine sand straight through my tunic. Almost sixty years later my wrinkled right shoulder is still the consistency of sandpaper from the grit embedded in it. The pounding went on for well over two hours. I was frightened the whole way through it but after an hour and a half of that merciless hammering, something changed in me physically. I became cold and very tired, as if my body couldn’t keep up with the physical and emotional intensity of the bombardment.
The barrage ended as abruptly as it had begun. One moment we were writhing in terror at the bottom of our trench, and the next the explosions and concussions stopped. It was like turning off an electric light. For almost a minute Sergeant Ferguson and I lay dazed and mistrustful, trying to get our senses back, waiting and watching to see if this was really the end of the barrage or simply a feint to lure us from our trenches so we could be cut down by a sudden secondary salvo.
After what seemed like an eternity’s silence, Ferguson and I crawled out. I sniffed the air. There was no indication of gas. The trench line that had been the Loop was a mess. In some places, walls that had been a full seven feet deep were reduced to four-foot ditches. Across no man’s land I could hear indistinct shouting and whistles blowing. The barrage started once again well to our rear.
I peeped over what had been our parapet and saw a long line of grey-clad figures scrambling through gaps in the German wire. I shouted to Ferguson, “They’re coming! Get them up and out at your end of the trench, I’ll do this half.” Ferguson nodded agreement and we were both off. I was screaming, “Get out, get out! They’re coming. For God’s sake get up, they’ll be on top of us in a few seconds!”
I was terrified, but it was a different kind of fear from the one that gripped me lying on the bottom of a trench when there was nothing to do but hope you didn’t take a direct hit. I was shrieking at the top of my lungs and running along the platoon line. Men groggily climbed from their dugouts. The roof from one of the platoon dugouts had been collapsed by a direct hit. Ominously from this hole there was no movement whatsoever. Men hauled weapons and ammunition cases up from hollowed sections of the trench wall. We frequently practised this drill during quiet spells in the line and that monotonous repetition was now paying off. Much to my relief, behind me came the rapid mechanical staccato chatter of the Vickers gun as it came into action.
In front of me, Lance Corporal Mullin’s gruff voice was calling out, “Jesus, Mary, Joseph! Hargreaves, you get that fucking Lewis gun up here! Move man, move!”
The sound of rifle fire crackled along our line as men found themselves a bit of cover on what was left of our trench parapet. With the Germans a hundred yards away I shouted the order: “Vickers and Lewis guns go on! Riflemen, prepare grenades! Use grenades only when they reach the wire.”
The order was passed up and down the line. While the two Lewis guns in my platoon and the Vickers heavy machine-gun continued to do their grisly work, men feverishly primed and prepared Mills bombs. When the assault closed to within thirty yards I shouted, “Grenades!” Three seconds later, a dozen Mills bombs sailed through the air and exploded on the far side of the wire. I could hear the shrieks of Germans shot and blasted in our wire and I could see men’s contorted faces as they went down in front of us.
Perhaps I had missed it earlier, but just as the Jerries were on the wire I heard for the very first time the whooshing and crackling sound of a flamethrower. It was the first I’d ever seen or heard of these weapons and it belched a dripping, greasy, terrifying blast of liquid fire out to a distance of forty yards. This new flame device scorched across a part of Number Two Section’s trench before its operator was riddled by a long stream of bullets from one of our Lewis guns. The German soldier fell and his weapon shot a huge oily black tongue of smoke and liquid fire along the front of our wire, horribly burning several of his own men. My throat was dry and my heart furiously pumped blood through every fibre of my body.
Impossibly, the Germans in succeeding ranks continued to charge toward us. My men threw a second volley of Mills bombs into the screaming desperate men clawing at our wire. The blast from our grenades was so close it seared our faces and black dirt showered on top of us. In a last desperate effort to kill us, Germans who had gone to ground threw their potato masher hand grenades at us, but in most cases they hit the wire and bounced back at them. I remember seeing Mullin picking one potato masher grenade up and throwing it back when it landed near us. No sooner had one German soldier been shot down before us than another grey figure in a spiked pickelhaube helmet loomed behind him.
By that time, I no longer tried to control the fight. It didn’t matter anyway, no one was listening, each of us was consumed in our own private struggle for survival. I seized a rifle from one of the grenadiers. I don’t know how long I fired and reloaded and fired again into those grey shapes. Some time after, it seemed that what was left of the German line in front of us began to melt into the ground. One second they were within a few feet of us and the next, scattered grey figures were fleeing across no man’s land. Our machine-guns continued to fire upon them.
For an instant, I was filled with a strange sense of admiration for these men who seconds before had tried so spiritedly to kill us. I remember it vividly, I was seized by the noble sentiment that it was a shame to kill such men and in my innocence I shouted, “Cease fire! Stop!” Again the order was passed down the line and our trench went quiet.
It was then that Sergeant Ferguson gently grabbed me by the elbow and spoke quietly in his Highland burr. “No sir. The ones we don’t get now – they’ll be back to finish us in an hour.” My scruples melted. My decision was instant. “Vickers and Lewis guns go on, rapid fire!”
I’ve often considered that moment. God forbid, that I should ever have to relive that time, but I’d make the same choice again. The second push that day was upon us in a matter of hours.
When the shooting stopped, I expected a kind of tranquillity to come over the line, but as things died down across no man’s land, our trenches were a flurry of activity. Our field telephone had ceased working soon after the barrage started and I sent a runner to report our situation and establish contact with company headquarters. I sent two others to establish contact with the platoons on either side of us. We were taught that when the firing stops, officers should begin redistributing ammunition, repair defences, and oversee the care of the wounded. In our field service training pamphlets, this description sounded so efficient, so neat and rational. It wasn’t. I remember the lull in the fighting as an exhausting and difficult time, punctuated with decisions I was not psychologically prepared to make.
I wasn’t overcome by conscience, grief, or even revulsion with the slaughter that I had just participated in – that was all to come later – but I was assailed by conflicting emotions. The soldier in me told me to ready ourselves for the next phase of the battle. What was left of Rory Ferrall within me wanted to devote his energy to helping the wounded. As the firing died down, the cries of the wounded increased in intensity and it took an unnatural act of the will to ignore them. The soldier in me prevailed.
In accordance with my training, I knew that if we couldn’t repel the next assault, none of us, wounded or fit, would live. I posted sentries on the Lewis and Vickers guns and supervised the redistribution of ammunition. Much as I wanted to tend to the wounded, my most pressing concern was the redistribution of our remaining ammunition as quickly as possible. If we were attacked in the state we were in, we would have been easily overrun. The ammunition for both Lewis gun teams was exhausted and my right-hand section had thrown all their Mills bombs. It was clear to me that despite inflicting fantastic casualties on the enemy, our situation was a great deal worse now than it had been an hour before. There was little ammunition and no hope of immediate re-supply. The Loop was such an exposed position that no one was going to be able to get anything up to us before dark. I made a quick calculation and concluded that if the Germans attacked again before nightfall, we would be able to fire at a rapid rate for no more than four minutes. I kept that conclusion to myself. It wasn’t information anyone else could use and it would spook the platoon. When what was left of our ammunition was redistributed, I turned my attentions to the wounded.
In the few minutes available to me, I scrambled up and down our sector of the Loop and counted seven dead and eleven wounded. Half the casualties came from Three Section on the right flank. I re-shuffled men from both One and Two sections. Four Section, I left intact. Men were on their knees applying tourniquets and field dressings to our casualties.
It was then I realized I had to make another unpleasant life-or-death decision. I had six vials of morphine entrusted to my care and there were eleven men with serious wounds. Everyone in the platoon knew I had the morphine. Within an hour, once the initial localized shock wore off, every one of those eleven men would be in agony and each of them would desperately need one of those vials. Instead of making a decision on the spot, I chose to wait. I had no idea how long we would be isolated out on the Loop and never having administered the drug before, I wasn’t certain how long the effects of a single shot of morphine would last on a man. What I knew for sure was I didn’t have enough to go around. I trusted to my instincts, hoping the decision would become self-evident.
Perhaps I should have explained my reasoning to the troops; but that morning, I didn’t think I had time. I’m sure that to the men I must have seemed bloody-minded and pig-headed when I said rather bluntly that morphine would be distributed to the most needy in an hour. To have issued the morphine then would have relieved some of the suffering instantly. To my thinking, waiting until the first effects of shock wore off would ensure the least amount of suffering. From the resentful looks of some of my soldiers, I knew the decision wasn’t well received or well understood.
With the casualties put under cover, I called the NCOs to my sector of the trench and explained the situation as best I could. With seven of them standing in the trench, I thought they were a representative cross-section of how the regiment had grown. Half of them were British-born originals, half were Canadians. All of them were tired and apprehensive. They stood nonchalantly, smoking cigarettes and pipes, rifles slung over their soldiers almost as if we were on an exercise. I imitated the kind of thing I heard on training. “The entire platoon has done bloody well and you should be proud of yourselves. The leadership in the sections is first rate and we wouldn’t have lasted out there without your efforts. Well done.”
I looked around at their faces and was surprised to see looks of satisfaction. I continued. “I’ve no new intelligence, but I can tell you that we’re going to stay put here for a while yet. With the approaches to the company position being so exposed, don’t let anyone get any false hopes about being relieved, re-supplied, or our casualties evacuated before dark. Our only way out of here is to hang on and drive Fritz back the next time he tries to push us off this ground. To that end, I want to see really tight fire control. Make every round count. I don’t think I have time to speak to each of the men individually, but I want you to go back and explain how things stand to them. If I can, I’ll be around this afternoon.”
It was then I tried to fix things with the morphine. My voice went to a stage whisper. “Tell the men – and when you do this, make sure you’re out of earshot of the wounded – there are only six vials of morphine and there won’t be any more. I’ll personally tell the wounded that we’ll do everything possible to get them out tonight. I’m going to go around now and give morphine to the six I think need it the most and have the best chance of surviving. If any of the fit men are bitter about me withholding it, explain my reasoning to them. For God’s sake don’t let morale sag now. We’re going to need all the grit we can muster to get through to tonight. I’m counting on you.”
I looked around and half-expected them to roll their eyes. Corporal Yeats, a short, patient little Irishman with a monstrous moustache and unfailing humour, inhaled deeply on his cigarette and then blew smoke upwards. He pushed his forage cap back and chuckled, “Ah don’ think the lads’ll have much choice, sar. An’ besides, there’s still a lot more fight in ’em yet. If Fritzie comes callin’ back, he’ll get the same again.”
By noon, the sun was warm and had we been anywhere else, I would have said it was developing into a glorious day. I received word that the platoons to the right and left of us were in as bad shape as we were. Our new company commander, the sergeant major, and two other platoon commanders were dead. Lieutenant Molson, from the platoon on my right, was the next senior officer and had assumed command. There was no telephone communication to anyone as all our cables had been cut. My plan was simply to hang on.
My men dug furiously, hollowing out their protected shelters and rebuilding as much of the trench line as possible. At just before two I was inside a dugout talking to one of the wounded, Private Turner, a dark-haired university man from Toronto. Turner had been hit by grenade fragments and most of his left shoulder was badly mangled. He’d lost a lot of blood and had no morphine. His face was turning pale and waxy; his breathing was raspy. He squeezed my hand with astonishing strength, an indication of his intense pain. I did my best to sound confident. “You’re going to be okay.”
I looked at his dressing. It was completely inadequate, the best someone could do in a bad situation. “It probably feels a lot worse than it is. You’ll be out of here just after dark. In fact, you’re probably going to be back at university this fall. You’ll be finished your degree long before the rest of us are out of here.” It was the closest I could come to a joke.
At that moment the shelling began again. Like the first salvo, this one came upon us without any ranging rounds to give warning. One moment it was quiet and the next we were being hammered. Because I was in another man’s dugout I tried to back out. As I did so, I collided with the occupant who was scrambling in. The man trying to crawl into his own dugout actually backed out and apologized for running into me. Once out in the trench, I pushed him into his own hole and went running off to find the hole I had taken to sharing with Sergeant Ferguson.
The barrage we endured that afternoon was even longer and more intense than the one in the morning. It was no comfort to us that we had already survived a heavy shelling that day. This second round was more wearing on our nerves. We were tired and strung out by then. In the morning, we screamed and cursed at the barrage; in the afternoon, we sat on the dirt floor clutching our knees.
I was terrified and more than any other time wanted to be away from this nightmare forever. Beside me, Sergeant Ferguson shook like a leaf throughout the last thirty minutes of the bombardment. Ferguson was a man I had come to rely upon and to trust implicitly. Witnessing his terrors only increased mine. It was clear to me then the truth of something I had been observing for some time. All men are given only a limited amount of courage; and each man expends that courage at a different rate. Ferguson was as brave as any man but he’d been through every one of the regiment’s actions, and for the first time I could see the physical effects that this constant psychological grinding was having on him.
I not only respected Ferguson, I truly liked him and enjoyed his company. He was quiet, genuinely a pious Methodist and only spoke when he had something to say. He was fair and intelligent and lived by simple values. Ferguson had been a rock for me in helping me to adjust as a new officer. He had come into the regiment as a lance corporal and was steadily promoted. He’d served around the world for seventeen years with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers and emigrated to Canada at the ripe old age of thirty-five. Four years of life as a building construction supervisor in Halifax and enlistment in the Patricia’s on the outbreak of war brought him to this trench.
Now he was trembling like a leaf in a hailstorm. Despite the heat of the day, his hands shook and his teeth chattered violently. Just as it seemed the bombardment was letting up, he began to shout. “That’s fucking long enough, that’s fucking long enough,” and he bolted from the dugout. The bombardment wasn’t over. As soon as he stood up a shrapnel round exploded behind our trench. I knew it was fatal because I could see Ferguson’s legs from where I sat. One moment they were two muddy columns wrapped in putties and the next it was as if someone poured a horse bucket of blood down them. My friend and mentor was hit by multiple fragments in the head and torso and died instantly.
I crawled out of the dugout to help him, but from the volume of blood I knew what I’d see. I was numb and for several minutes lost sensation in my lips and hands. Ferguson’s shoulders and head were gone and what was left of him just collapsed onto the duckboard trench floor like a sack of wet grain.
The barrage died down and once again we could hear the cheering and shouting of German soldiers as they got up from their trenches. This time we were much slower to react. It seemed like a long time before I remember hearing our machine-guns go into action. Once again I rushed up and down the line hoarsely shouting at men to get up and fight. Our trench was chaos. Whatever repairs had been made to it were long since obliterated. The trench was no longer a protective fortification. It had become an open sewer that carried the remains of our troops along to some godforsaken cesspit.
As the Germans closed to the wire, we repeated the same bloody choreography. This time when we crawled from our bunkers we could see the shelling had cut several gaping holes in our wire. Minutes after the barrage, my first indication that the Germans had made it into our trench lines was when a young baby-faced Württemberger poked his rifle around from the adjacent firing bay. He looked more curious than dangerous. I shot him instantly in the face with my revolver and then threw a Mills bomb over the trench wall. I rallied two men and we charged in to clear up once the bomb detonated. There was no time to think and all of us reacted on instinct. The trench was a shattered mess with upended duckboards torn and smashed like matches. Between the wooden slats were the contorted bodies of German and Canadian soldiers. From that point on, for several hours, I have no memory of anything that happened.
When I came to, I was at the bottom of a trench that was in deep shadow. Lying on the trench floor beside me was a dead soldier from Four Platoon. He was a freckled, red-haired lad with a prominent gap in his front teeth. He was on his back against the trench wall and looked to all the world like he was in a deep sleep. The firing had stopped and I could hear the sounds of digging and someone moaning softly in terrible pain a few feet from me. At first I felt nothing apart from a burning thirst and dizziness.
From the sounds around me, I realized I was lying in a bay with the wounded. There were several men in this section of the bay; at least two of them were already dead. Moving to prop myself up I was surprised to see that my left hand was bandaged halfway up to the elbow and that someone had tied a field dressing that covered my forehead and left eye. My head throbbed with every pulse. The crystal on my new watch was shattered and its hands were motionless at 2:30. I reckoned from the shadows we probably had only an hour or two before last light. Without thinking, I tried to use my left hand to steady me, and immediately a stabbing pain ran through my arm. Struggling to my knees, I was assailed with the sickly sweet smell of blood and vomit. I retched violently. As I did so, a sleek, heavy rat scurried in front of me from around behind the dead man with the gap in his teeth. It regarded me coolly for several seconds with its sharp little eyes. It looked me up and down, baring its yellow teeth and twitching its nose and whiskers, savouring its good fortune. The loathsome creature was weighing up how long it would be until I was dead and what kind of a feast it could make of me. At that moment, anger and the will to live surged through me. I was determined not to let myself die and allow those evil beasts to devour me.
Rising to my feet, I lurched into the bay beside me and staggered into Lance Corporal Mullin, who was checking the sighting of a Lewis gun. Mullin grabbed me gently by the elbow and had me sit on what had been the fire step. “Jesus, sir, you’re one hell of a mess. I didn’t expect to see you on your feet again. What are you doin’ out here?”
“What happened?”
“We held them off again, sir.” Mullin said. “They got into our lines twice and there’s only ten of us left to hold the platoon position. It’s the same left and right of us. You and Mr. Molson are the only officers left alive in the company and Mr. Molson is shot through the face. He’s in the next bay as well. Lance Corporal O’Neill and I are the only NCOs left in the platoon. To tell the truth, sir, I thought you were going to die.”
Mullin gave me a drink from a two-gallon tin container with water sloshing about the bottom. It tasted faintly of gasoline. I slurped it greedily and vomited most of it up soon after. I later found out that foul-tasting water was the last reserve in the platoon. Mullin didn’t blink or even ask me to go sparingly with it. He looked out into no man’s land. “If they come again before we get re-supplied, we can’t hold ’em, sir. The Vickers gun is gone and we have less than a hundred rounds for the remaining Lewis gun. We’ve only twenty rounds left per man. We’re out of Mills bombs.” He looked around him licking his lips in nervous frustration. “I sent a runner back to company headquarters over an hour ago. I don’t think he got through. The Huns started shelling the communication trenches just after he left.”
We spent the rest of the daylight hours waiting for a final push but nothing happened. German stretcher-bearers worked openly in no man’s land hauling and lugging their wounded. At first they moved around cautiously but when it became apparent we weren’t going to shoot them, more of them appeared and they worked steadily. All the while Fritz’s stretcher-bearers worked, there was no sniping or artillery fire. Stretcher-bearers on both sides were a plucky group. We had all heard stories of German atrocities committed under the guise of collecting their wounded. Those of us who spent any time in the front didn’t believe them. I would be lying to say that we never entertained the idea of shooting these men. We all did. In the last twelve hours, the enemy had killed over half of our comrades in the most violent manner imaginable. You can’t go from that kind of intensity and anger to being even-tempered and genial in a matter of minutes. Sporting rules didn’t apply. There was nothing noble about holding our fire; it was entirely practical. Tempting as it might have been to shoot down enemy stretcher-bearers, we left them undisturbed. It could easily have been our own men looking for us out there.
I slept on the trench floor beside Mullin’s position for several hours after our meeting. I didn’t want to go back to the bay that held the wounded. Something inside told me if I did, I’d die, and so I chose to stay with the living. Before I slept again, curiosity got the better of me and I picked at my bandaged hand and saw that the dressing was binding my two smallest fingers by thins strands of flesh and skin. I didn’t try to discover what the dressing around my forehead and eye hid.
Shortly after dark, the company was reinforced by a group of cooks, batmen, and clerks from battalion headquarters, and a few grooms from the unit horse lines. These men crawled forward through the communication trenches leading to the Loop with bulging sandbags tied to makeshift pack boards. A further eight men reinforced our platoon. They hauled up ammunition, water, food, and field dressings, and then, once seeing the state of our defences, went back to bring forward coils of wire.
One of the clerks, Private Hendricks, from the University of Toronto, a serious-faced divinity student with thick steel glasses and a raspy voice, confirmed to me that not only was the colonel dead, but that there were only three officers in the battalion who were not casualties. Major Gault had come forward and reorganized things the night before, but he’d also been badly wounded and was awaiting evacuation over in Number One Company’s area.
Before he was hit, Gault ensured that cigarettes and a generous rum ration were sent forward with the new men, along with the ammunition, water, food, and field dressings. In the absence of being relieved, the shot of rum did a lot to cheer those still fit to fight. I didn’t take any as the thought of it set me to retching. Instead, at Lance Corporal Mullin’s urging, I drank some cold tea and ate hard tack biscuits and swallowed a few mouthfuls of greasy tinned Machanochie stew. I don’t remember drifting off to sleep on my perch on the fire step.
The sounds of firing and shouting wakened me. My good eye was blurred and gummy but I could see orange light drifting in and out of strange shadows. The enemy fired several flares suspended from tiny swinging parachutes over our position. I struggled to get up. During the night some kind soul had covered me with a rubber ground sheet and sand bags. Even in my groggy state, I could see that we were under attack again. Fritz was trying to bump us out of our most forward position by rushing us in a silent night assault.
Suddenly, on both sides of us, in Number One and Number Three Company areas, the sound and blast of heavy shelling rocked the night air as “coal boxes,” the heaviest of German artillery, crumped and blasted the summer night. Dragging myself to my feet, I could see German troops much less than two hundred yards away running forward into the drifting pools of light created by their own flares. They were regularly spaced and held their rifles at the ready.
I reacted instinctively croaking out, “Three Platoon, one hundred yards. Enemy to your front. Rapid fire!”
My head throbbed and sweat seeped from every pore. I was too wracked by pain to be frightened. The response from our line was ragged as the crack and thump of rifle fire gradually increased to be joined by the higher-pitched hammering of the Lewis gun. I was of no use to anyone where I was and set about dragging grenade boxes to the fire step with my good hand. I tired quickly. My pulse raced and I lost my breath. I was hot, clammy, and nauseous.
The light from the flares gradually subsided and men stopped firing, conserving their ammunition for targets they could see. Hitting anything in that light was more a matter of luck than skill and each man knew he would receive no re-supply for at least another twelve hours.
We could hear the Germans advancing and calling out to one another as much for encouragement as to maintain some semblance of alignment. This assault felt substantially different from the others. Without being initiated by a barrage, it seemed almost half-hearted. We weren’t as frightened or as desperate as in the other two preceding assaults, and despite their fatigue, my men calmly shot the Germans down as if they were targets on a range. The fight was bleeding out from our opponents, and who was to blame them? God knows where they got those men. Twice before on that day, hundreds of them had been cut down; and to get at us they were now literally clambering over the stiffening bodies of their comrades. I was dumbstruck that they had the discipline and courage to keep coming.
Explosions and sporadic shooting from our left flank indicated when the enemy closed up to our belt of wire. Then, for a few brief seconds under the lights of our own Veery flares, we could see shapes looming closely in front of us. A dozen Mills bombs exploded in quick succession, brilliantly illuminating our tiny patch of battle in a series of brilliant flashes. The Lewis gun raked the forward line of the barbed wire with a withering fire. Then, a few moments later, almost as if on cue, it was quiet again. Whatever was left of the enemy’s assault line fled back through the darkness to their own trenches. All of us, wounded and fit, were utterly drained, but for a brief time we were happy and relieved; the assault was over.
It was to be a long night. Just beyond our wire a German soldier was wounded. Somewhere out there, he lay in terrible pain out of sight in a shell crater. This time there was no gallows humour or crude joking. Minutes after the firing stopped, he began to moan and his moans soon turned to screams. He sounded like a young man, and he shrieked and moaned in the most pathetic manner for several hours. As the end came, he called repeatedly for his mother. His shouting became steadily weaker and his voice increasingly hoarse, but those pitiful shrieks pierced our souls. Years later, the smell of burlap and freshly turned earth drags those awful screams into my mind. He died two hours after dawn. On one side of me, Hendricks, the divinity student, sobbed, and on the other, I could hear the profane and bellicose Lance Corporal Mullin repeating snatches of prayer to himself.
Our third day under fire in the Loop was as warm and filled with sunshine as the first two. The two lance corporals left in Two Platoon organized things remarkably well. Dugouts were freshly excavated, sentries were posted, weapons were cleaned, and men were ordered to eat and get whatever rest they could in shifts. I was too weak to protest when Mullin moved me back to the firing bay that held the wounded. There were only four men in there by morning of the third day. Our dead were stacked in the communication trenches running between Two and Three platoons. I remember little of that day. Sometime around midday a German aeroplane zoomed in from nowhere and tried to drop an aerial torpedo on us. He missed by only a few feet and aside from startling all of us and moving a great deal of earth, he did no damage. He then circled back to machine-gun our trench line. He wasn’t very accurate with either attempt and only served to give us notice that Fritz was still interested in taking our miserable little patch of ground from us.
Whenever I drifted into wakefulness that day, I saw the divinity student tending to us. He sponged our heads, gave us water to drink, brushed away flies, and kept the rats at bay. It was the best medical treatment available and we were grateful for what little comfort he provided.
Two or three hours before nightfall, a runner from the Forty-ninth Battalion from Edmonton crawled into our position. He informed us that we were to be relieved after dark that night but also that aerial reconnaissance indicated the Germans were continuing to mass fresh troops all along the trench lines facing Sanctuary Wood. It wasn’t what we wanted to hear.
At around six that evening, Jerry began to shell us again. He must have anticipated that we were to be relieved as he started pounding our rear areas first. That, along with the aeroplane’s visit, was an indication of what was to come. The divinity student shepherded all the wounded into our tiny dugouts and then stoically went to his position carved into the wall of the adjacent fighting bay.
I don’t know how any of us who were wounded survived the pounding we took when the Germans shifted their guns onto our position. It is one thing to endure this endless series of bombardments when you are fit; it was quite another to live through one with your strength expended and your spirits bled into the mud. Although I was conscious for the entire barrage, I fully expected to die and cannot remember much of it. It was one of the few horrors of the war that my mind has deliberately erased from memory.
The inevitable attack that followed was different in that when the German artillery lifted, ours began to pound him. Someone must have been directing our guns from a distance or from an aeroplane. Those who have never had to fight for their lives will probably never understand this, but the sound of artillery falling on my tormentors warmed the furthest reaches of my soul and I was filled with a sense of joy knowing that the men on the other side of that field were now in their turn being horribly mutilated and killed.
As the barrage lifted, the divinity student raced back to our bay and began to attend to each of us in turn. I could hear him as he moved to the first dugout. “Oh, dear God,” was all he said and he moved on to the next man. “You’re looking chipper, Ford, it’ll be dark soon and we’ll have you back at the regimental aid post before you know it.”
When he got to me he was positively exuberant. “Mr. Ferrall, you look wonderful. You’d think you just had a nap.” I felt utterly dejected and lifeless. My hand and head throbbed with a pain I am at a loss to describe now. I was feverish, thirsty, and trembling from lack of food but Hendricks’ presence and his sense of purpose gave my spirits a lift. There was an inspiring simplicity to this man and he breathed new life into those of us who were wounded and survived the shelling in our muddy little scrapes.
Private Hendricks secured our dressings, brushed off the dirt that showered over us during the barrage, said a few kind words to each of us, and took up his post with his rifle in front of us on the firing parapet. He was an average man in dire circumstances calling upon extraordinary reserves of energy and vigour. He was about five-foot seven, and sturdily built; in his early twenties, he was fair-skinned with a ruddy complexion. His steel-framed glasses gave him a solemn scholarly look.
He kept up a regular commentary in his gravelly voice advising us on the progress of the battle. “Fritzie’s a little slow getting out of his trenches this time. He’s probably been badly hit by our artillery. Oh, Oh … Here he comes now.”
From my scrape in the trench wall, I had a good view of Hendricks. His red face was sweating profusely. He wore the collar of his tunic buttoned up as per regulations and kept his forage cap squarely on his head as if on parade. Something about him gave him the appearance of being the kind of man who viewed his life’s responsibilities as unshakeable obligations. Just the day before, our earnest divinity student had scarcely seen any of us. Now we were lying helplessly at the bottom of a collapsing trench and this stranger had willingly assumed the role of our guardian and rescuer. He possessed a sense of duty that made him the sort of man armies, and when you think about it, all other institutions, can’t survive for long without.
Apart from Hendricks, I could see nothing but the trench wall opposite me. Hendricks began firing his rifle, taking very deliberate aimed shots. He would periodically turn and shout to us, “They’re 100 yards away now … They’ve closed up to fifty yards. They’ve stopped and gone to ground … What’s left of ’em are heading back … We’re going to make it through this one boys … Now our artillery is falling on their position again. Whew, I wouldn’t want to be out there.”
Hendricks turned around and stared at the sky behind him. “There’s an aeroplane up there, one of ours; I’ll bet that’s who’s directing the artillery fire on the Hun.” Hendricks certainly sounded cheerful but I wondered where that bastard in the aeroplane had been two days ago when the Germans were killing us so efficiently.
By nightfall, the German artillery, in anticipation of our being relieved, began to shoot at our rear areas and communication trenches again. Sometime after dark, I was awakened by the presence of dozens of men filing quietly past me through our trench. Hendricks’ tired raspy voice cut through my fever and pain. He barked in a subdued voice, “Watch where you’re stepping! The wounded are in those scrapes.” The Forty-ninth Battalion had arrived to relieve us.
A short while later Hendricks helped me to my feet and I was vaguely aware that we were moving out in some semblance of a line. I was terribly groggy and felt worse than I’ve ever felt before or since. As we reached the communication trenches, I wanted to know what was left of my platoon. I asked Hendricks, “How many are left? How many are walking out with us?”
He replied, “Oh I couldn’t really say, sir. Now don’t worry yourself about these things. You’ve done your job; the important thing is getting you back to the regimental aid post.”
Lance Corporal Mullin’s baritone but tired-sounding voice whispered in the darkness. “Mr. Ferrall, including the eight replacements who came last night from Headquarters company, there’s seven wounded and eight fit men. We held the bastards and we’re all going to walk out of this to tell our grandchildren about it. Don’t worry about nothin’. We’ve done ourselves proud.”
At that moment our artillery began to explode in the darkness forward of us as our divisional gunners put down a barrage to cover our movement. “We can’t tarry any longer, sir. Let’s be going. Don’t you worry, sir, we’ve got all the wounded.” I remember looking into those hollow eyes. Mullin spoke again in a much more gentle voice. “What you see around us is what’s left of us who can still breathe. The Forty-ninth’ll be burying those we’ve left behind. We’ve gotta go now.”
I remember only snatches of that march to the rear. We staggered to the regimental aid post to discover it had been destroyed by a direct hit the night before. Twenty seriously wounded Patricia’s and all the medical staff were killed. All casualties had to be evacuated three and a half miles further to the rear to the town of Zillebeke. We joined a stream of shattered men and walking wounded from the other companies.
Hendricks half-carried me all the way. He kept up a constant chatter. “You’re safely out of this one then, sir. You’re doing fine. It’s not much farther.” Despite the threat of artillery fire, for ten minutes of each hour we rested. Near the end of that march, Hendricks began to sing music hall songs to me to keep my spirits up. He was imposing his will on me not to let me die and in doing so he frequently changed the tone of his encouragements. “You’re an officer, sir, and I don’t care how you feel, you’re not going to let the others down now by quitting. Ah, that’s wonderful; you’re doing marvellously … Almost there now … How about another chorus of ‘Green Grow the Rushes O’? … Ups-a-daisy, over this embankment … We’re here, sir, please sit down, I’m going to get you onto a stretcher.” Hendricks sat with me throughout that night until I was taken away by medical orderlies to see one of the divisional surgeons.
My days as a combatant officer were over and from the frying pan I was now heading unwittingly for the fire.
After several hours, my turn came. I was carried into a large tent that was lit by flickering kerosene lanterns. My stretcher was set down upon two sawhorses, beside which sat a folding wooden chair. An exhausted orderly in a blood-stained white coat with a high collar sat himself beside me and gingerly removed my field dressings. He sat back and grimaced. The kerosene light glinted on his bald head. He began swabbing at the left side of my face with a piece of linen soaked in a chlorine solution. The pain was immediate and I hissed sharply.
“Sorry about that, sir. It’s gotta be done if we’re to see what kind of wounds you’ve got.”
My good eye was tightly shut and I could hear him muttering. “Whatever it was that hit you must have given you one hell of a headache, sir. I don’t see any shrapnel lodged in the wound. It looks like you got winged by something. A fraction of an inch over and you wouldn’t be here. You’re lucky, very lucky, sir.”
He prodded and probed and examined my head wound from several angles. “The flesh around your eye is pretty chewed up and it’s too swollen and bruised to tell much just now – but I’d guess you’ve been seriously concussed as well. Where else are you hurt? Ah, someone’s tied up your hand.” He picked up my left hand and held it up the light. “Not a bad job, not a bad job at all considering where you’ve just come from.”
Less gently, he unwrapped the dressings from my hand and whistled appreciatively. He picked up my hand and sniffed it like a connoisseur sniffs a wine cork. “That’s nice, sir. You’ve been hit three days, living in a shit pit and not a whiff of infection. Someone’s looking out for you. This, sir, is what you gentlemen in the infantry refer to as a blighty, kinda like a home run in baseball, isn’t it? One good smack and you go round all the bases.”
He called out, “Corporal, this one’s for the surgeon as well. Have the bearers get him in to see the nursing sister in surgery please! Fresh dressings on the head and prepare his left hand for surgery.” He patted my arm. “Don’t worry, sir, six to ten weeks you’ll be right as rain and heading back to Canada. Good luck.” He waved for the stretcher-bearers to move me, smiled a fatigued and kindly smile, and said, “Next! Come on. Come on Bearers, these lads haven’t got all day to sit around waiting for dimwits like you. Look alive now, boys.”
I was moved to another, more brightly lit tent where a silent nursing sister, who I could make out only in silhouette, cleaned my face and swabbed my eye; she then re-applied clean dressings. She left my stretcher, going beyond our circle of light for a few moments and then came back and set about with a large pair of scissors to cut away the filth of my uniform until I was lying naked. I was long past feeling embarrassed.
Once this was done, a very tired and short-tempered-looking doctor, who looked more like Teddy Roosevelt dressed up as a butcher than a surgeon, came in and checked me over. He had large rimless spectacles, prominent yellow teeth, and a thick bushy moustache. He parted his thinning hair severely down the centre. Instead of a clean white surgical gown, he had a yellowing vulcanized apron that was smeared and stained with wet blood and he wore heavy rubber gloves. The doctor peeled off his gloves, moved around the stretcher, and examined my left hand for several minutes. Like the orderly, he sniffed it and studied it closely. “I think I can save your hand. You’re going to lose two fingers, but I’m going to try to save the rest.” He turned to the nursing sister. “Let’s do it now.”
My last recollection was overwhelming weariness and the urge to cry as a rubber face-piece was placed over my mouth and nose.
