Читать книгу Three to a Loaf - Michael J. Goodspeed - Страница 9
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WE DETRAINED at a temporary railway siding in the middle of a field with the ugly name of “British Expeditionary Force Picardy Staging Area 3.” Shortly thereafter, we were met by a military motor truck that bounced us several miles along a dirt road to the divisional rear area. The lorry lurched to a halt in a motor vehicle compound two hundred yards beyond a cluster of farm buildings. A pair of dirt-encrusted motorcycle despatch riders lounged on their vehicles.
After struggling to gather my kit, I approached the motorcyclists for directions and was mildly surprised when, as I approached, they both stood up and came to attention and the soldier nearest me saluted smartly. I’d been saluted before and I felt no sense of pride in this, but for a brief instant I was startled by the realization that from that point on I really was going to be making life or death decisions on behalf of dozens of men I had never met before. Probably like everyone else in those circumstances, I felt terribly inadequate.
The despatch rider directed us to one of the barns, where a much cleaner but tired-looking staff officer with red tabs on his collar met us and told us we would be joining our units in due course. After a spate of checking and re-checking various lists, we were pointed in the direction of what had once been a small orchard and told to get some sleep because as soon as arrangements could be made, we would be sent forward to our units. We slept under our ground sheets that night but before I finally fell asleep I spent a long time listening to the distant rumble of artillery fire and imagining what lay before me.
Around noon the next day, the staff officer ambled over to the orchard and advised several of us that before nightfall we’d be leaving to join our units. At around three that afternoon, a ruddy-cheeked soldier with a Patricia’s cap badge and a thick northern England accent arrived and told me he was there to escort me to battalion headquarters. I said my goodbyes to my fellow trainee officers and as the PPCLI was then still serving with the British Twenty-seventh Division, I was headed north.
The Patricia soldier indicated a waiting lorry and when I made to climb aboard the back of it with him he laughed and said, “No, sir, officers ride in the front. The driver knows where to go.”
I asked him, “Is the driver from the battalion?”
The young Patricia smiled and shook his head. “No, sir, these lads never go forward of the battalion rest areas.”
“In that case, I want to ride in the back. I want you to tell me about life in the battalion.”
The soldier’s name was Private Reid. He was originally from a village outside Newcastle. Prior to emigrating to Canada, Reid had served for four years in the Coldstream Guards. He had joined the Princess Patricia’s when they were raised in Ottawa and had fought with the regiment since its arrival in the line nine months before. He was a cheerful sort and readily answered my questions. To my great relief, he showed no concern that I was to be in a position of authority. Like every other young officer, I secretly harboured the fear that veteran troops would somehow refuse to accept me because I was so obviously inexperienced.
The trip from the divisional rear headquarters to the rest billets was a stop-and-start affair. More than once we pulled off the dirt road to allow higher-priority traffic carrying wounded to the rear to pass and we waited for almost a half-hour on one occasion to allow a long mule-train laden with artillery ammunition to go forward.
Reid cheerfully answered my questions and, sensing my anxiety, ended his explanations with comments such as, “Don’t worry, sir; you’ll be fine once you get into the swing of things.” Reid told me that the Patricia’s had been out of the line for twenty-four hours and that he expected them to be in a rest area for another two or three days.
Reid was proud of his unit and I didn’t interrupt him. Men like him were probably in the minority now, as more than two hundred Canadian reinforcements had joined the unit and more were arriving each day. When the lorry lurched to a halt at a shattered hamlet called Loenhoek, Reid showed me the way to battalion headquarters and said, “You’ve got to report directly to the adjutant, sir. I’ll wait and take you up to see the company commander after.”
Like Reid, the adjutant was also a British regular soldier. He was a friendly fellow: disarmingly polite and quietly deferential. He greeted me as if I was a long-lost relative. It was obvious he’d been sleeping, but despite the interruption, he was accommodating and helpful. He apologized that the colonel was off at a conference at Brigade, gave me a well-boiled cup of tea, and briefed me on a map of the area, explaining that the battalion was going back into the line again in two nights time. The unit was short of officers and I was to become a platoon commander in Number Two Company. With business over, he nodded and said, “Right then, Reid can take you to see Captain Adamson.” He shook my hand and I was hustled off to a barn a quarter of a mile distant.
Number Two Company should have been 170 men strong. That day, it was much less than that. The company was divided into four platoons and a headquarters. Each platoon was divided into four sections with a small platoon headquarters group. There were four such company organizations in the battalion. Theoretically, the regiment could have had any number of battalions. The Princess Patricia’s had only one, so the regiment and the battalion were for all purposes one and the same.
Number Two Company was, like the rest of the battalion, still in a state of near exhaustion. There was little movement and men were wrapped in their blankets and stacked like grey cocoons across the barn floor and hayloft. As I was soon to learn, the company was at about two-thirds of its strength. Although they had been in a quiet sector of the line, in the last three days they had had four men killed and three seriously wounded due to shelling. One of the first things I noticed about these sleeping men was their continual coughing and rasping, even as they slept. Colds and flu-like symptoms were chronic, but as I was to see for myself, few men reported on sick parade until they were nearly incapacitated by the onset of pneumonia.
A soldier on fire piquet who was awake and fully dressed showed me the company officers. The officers were only distinguishable from the other sleeping cocoons by the fact that they were off in a corner by themselves and had a field telephone beside them sitting on a web pack. I told the fire piquet not to wake anyone and sat down waiting for my introductions.
Several hours later the company gradually stirred into life, and dirty khaki-clad men could be seen cooking outside, writing letters, or just relaxing, sitting or smoking by themselves deep within their own private thoughts. When my company commander awakened, he too offered me bitterly strong tea that had been brewed some time ago by the battalion’s batmen.
My company commander was a bespectacled Montreal businessman and was at least two decades my senior. He had the peculiar name of Agar Adamson. Adamson blearily welcomed me to his company and said he knew my father well. He matter-of-factly advised me, “Rory, you’ll be going up the line tomorrow night. I need to send an advance party for our next tour in the trenches. The entire battalion will follow you in twenty-four hours time. We’ll be replacing the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, and this’ll be a good chance for you to get a feel for things, see how another unit operates, and learn how things are done before your own men arrive.”
Later, when I thought about this, I was grateful to Adamson. He knew I didn’t want to appear the new boy and was positioning me to put me in the strongest possible light before my troops, men who would take a more than passing interest in my abilities and character.
I spent the remainder of that day meeting my platoon, wrote letters home, and, to my surprise, received a cheerful and gossipy letter from Jeanine who disappointingly signed herself “As ever, your true friend.” I was still very naïve. Late the next morning, I played a game of pick-up baseball with the newer Canadian-born members of the platoon. For the most part, the British veterans amongst them watched the game and provided high-spirited but unprintable comments about the level of play. By five that afternoon, I was off with the advance party for my first experience at the front.
Going up the line for the first time was an experience I think few men ever forget. In my case, I did it after dark. The night was cloudy and warm but despite the weight of my kit and the fact that I was sweating, I was shivering and my throat was sore. I must have caught a cold during my short stay with the battalion. Three lance corporals and I were to act as guides for the incoming Patricia’s. We met up with a British re-supply column consisting of two dozen men heavily laden with sand bags tied around their necks or wearing pack boards with boxes of machine-gun ammunition or several gallon tins of water. The sand bags contained rifle ammunition and rations broken down into section allotments. I was slotted into the column with a guide and men from Number 3 Company of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, the organization we were to replace. Once the column was organized and checked by a young officer, we were on our way.
The approaches to our new position were in low ground and could be observed by day by the Germans sitting on the higher ground to the north of us. As it was, the German artillery had long since ranged in on sections of the road and periodically fired in the dark in the hopes of hitting something. They tried that night, but fortunately no one from our column was hit. I was more than a little alarmed by my first experiences of artillery exploding in the dark. As it turned out, the rounds landed two hundred yards behind me. But to my overactive imagination it was much closer. The sudden blinding flashes and the violence of those first rounds exploding in the darkness were unforgettable.
In front of me, a short, heavily laden Tommy with an unlit pipe clenched in his teeth grumbled to no one in particular something that sounded like “Let’s fucking keep moving then, shall we?” We did. And in what seemed like a short time we were met by a second group of guides and began to break into separate groups; we were then led into the rear-area communication trenches.
These were trenches only in name. In some areas they were just shallow scrapings with mud-puddle bottoms. We splashed on as quietly as we could and eventually arrived at a series of deeper scrapings with occasional dugouts tunnelled into the wet earth beside them. Men were occupying some of these tiny reserve dugouts. We could tell they were there because they swore at us when we stumbled over their muddy legs sticking out into the trench. The smell of those trenches and the next line farther forward was unlike anything I’ve ever encountered since the war. The area around the Ypres Salient was littered with thousands of unburied French, British, and German corpses in varying stages of decay. I didn’t know it that night, but there were also enormous rats in their tens of thousands teeming in the fields and trenches surrounding us.
Those churned-up fields had been fertilized for centuries with human and animal waste, and in the trenches latrines were little more than open sewage pits. The effect of those reeking fields was stomach churning. The stench caused me to heave several times as we plodded forward. You never really became used to it; but somehow we managed to carry on with that overpowering and disgusting smell relegated to our sub-conscious. It is the only smell that has invaded my dreams. Dante may have tried to describe the depths of hell and mediaeval artists have tried to paint it. But for me, that murderous odour was the most vivid evocation of hell I can think of. Thankfully, I have never encountered anything like it since leaving those ghastly fields.
The frontline trenches in our sector were deeper, but they were so soggy and shell blasted they were more like an intermittent creek bed than a military defensive works. When standing, our heads were just below ground; but even in the darkness of that first night, there was none of the snug sense of security that I had once imagined trenches would have. I spent the next night and day crawling around what looked to me like a badly maintained ditch. I learned every nook and cranny and peered into no-man’s land with a homemade periscope given to me by a British officer. I drew a detailed sketch of the area, marking each dugout, each communication trench, each machine-gun position, each known enemy sniper position, and the routes through our own wire.
That first tour in the trenches was like many others I was to experience. Fatigue and discomfort blurred and overrode the constant strain of being so near to violent death. The overall effect was to create a weary numbness. We coped by developing a crude sense of humour that my family and friends in Montreal would never understand. I still marvel more of us didn’t die from sickness. The food was appalling; it invariably consisted of tins of gristly Machanochie stew or fat-encrusted bully beef; it was invariably eaten cold and sprinkled with sand and mud. While in the line, we drank inadequate quantities of sweet tea, which came forward in one-gallon water cans, a good number of which had at some time seen service carrying gasoline.
We didn’t really sleep; we were wet and cold for long periods of time and our personal hygiene was as primitive as it could be. All of us were infected with lice. We had lice in every seam of our clothing and in our hair; we itched constantly. Not just soft scratching, but violent clawing at a painful never-ending irritation. Rats overran our dugouts and were forever slithering about the trenches. Great fat corpse-fed rats would come out even by day trying to steal our rations and every night they scuttled across our legs as we tried to sleep hunched against a trench wall. Shooting rats was a hazard to everyone and so the only authorized weapon for rat control was a sharpened spade. Necessity turned ratting into a sport; and with our misshapen sense of humour, we kept our spirits up hunting the wretched animals, turning it into a contest between companies.
The trench’s dirt quickly got into everything. We ate dirt. We breathed it constantly. It was in our mouths, hair, and ears. It turned our socks and puttees into sand paper and trickled down our necks whenever we sat down.
I found sleep to be near impossible under those circumstances, although during the days, for an hour or two, I could go back to the company officers’ bunker and manage to drift into a periodic kind of half-wakefulness. Nights were, more often than not, frequently times of feverish digging, filling sand bags, and standing to on what passed as a fire step to watch the exhibition of flares and rockets illuminate the sky whenever a suspicious sentry raised the alarm.
We were occasionally attacked by German patrols, frequently shot at by snipers, harassed by machine-gun, artillery, and mortar fire, and on one occasion low-flying German aeroplanes strafed us. Our casualty rate wasn’t high, but it was steady. During one of these “quiet tours” the battalion usually lost three or four men killed and many more wounded.
It was for my actions on a patrol during one such “period of inactivity” that I was awarded the Military Cross. Although I will never willingly part with my “MC,” I am the first to admit that for everyone who was awarded such a gallantry decoration, there were many more who could have just as readily qualified for one.
On my fifth tour in the trenches, Captain Adamson sent a runner for me asking that I forego conducting a foot inspection of the soldiers in my platoon and come see him.
“Rory,” he said in a grave voice. “It’s our turn to visit the enemy on his side of the wire. We’ve been tasked to provide a patrol by Brigade headquarters. I think you should be the man to lead it. How do you feel about that?” I was surprised; I’d never been asked to agree or disagree with an order before. I was also acutely aware that I was the only junior officer in Number Two Company who hadn’t yet led a fighting patrol into no man’s land. I did my utmost to appear indifferent. “No, that should be no problem, sir. When’s the patrol scheduled to take place?”
“Tonight. I want you to get back to battalion HQ now. They’re waiting to brief you now.”
The battalion headquarters’s dugout was centrally located in low ground about a hundred yards to the rear of our company’s reserve trenches. Although we called it the battalion “rear area,” it was scarcely out of grenade-throwing distance of the most forward sub-units. I sloshed my way through the communication trenches and was briefed on the particulars of this specific operation in a dingy candle-lit hole with a corrugated tin ceiling.
Since arriving in the battalion I’d been “over the top” a half-dozen times with wiring parties. These were nasty night-time jobs that entailed stringing barbed wire and marking routes through our wire so that our own patrols could get in and out. When we were ordered to put out wiring parties, we watched carefully for signs of the enemy doing the same thing. Our reasoning was that the Germans were unlikely to fire on us if they had one of their own patrols out in front of them as well. We timed our work on our wire obstacles to coincide with that of the enemy. It was a kind of truce tacitly arranged between the two sides and in its own perverse way it worked well.
At the back of the battalion headquarters’s dugout, Colonel Buller was trying to get some sleep on a cot made of sticks and telephone wire. His second-in-command, Major Hamilton Gault, briefed me on the general plan. Gault was an imposing-looking man with penetrating eyes and a substantial but carefully trimmed moustache. For me, he was still much larger than life, as he was the wealthy businessman who had provided the money to raise the regiment and then refused to accept being named its colonel. Until that day, I’d never had a real conversation with him. Gault smiled when I entered and in a low voice beckoned me over to the map board. He wasted no words.
“Rory, as part of the overall plan to maintain an aggressive posture in this area we’ve been tasked by Brigade to conduct a raid with a view to bringing back a prisoner and inflicting casualties on the enemy. The enemy to our front is believed to be a Württemberg Reserve Division, but aerial reconnaissance indicates major supply and troop activity in the enemy’s rear.” He looked at me inquisitively to see if I was taking all this in. I nodded and he went on.
“Division is anxious to confirm as to whether or not the Württemberg troops have been replaced. If they have, it’s probably an indication of unusual activity and could possibly indicate a major offensive in our area. On the other hand, if the Württemberg Division is still hanging on here, it probably means Fritz is keeping them in the line so he can concentrate all his resources to resist the French push to the south of us at Artois. Rory, you are to take a patrol out tonight and bring back a prisoner. We need this information. If we’re going to be attacked, Division will allocate us more artillery ammunition, and likely more machine-guns. That would make all the difference for our survival. If we are not going to be attacked, I for one want to be the first to know it.”
He shifted uncomfortably and tapped a pencil against the board that served as his table. “Anyway I’ll leave the details to you.” Gault raised his bushy eyebrows and looked at me knowingly. “Oh. Apart from the prisoner, the staff really does want you to inflict maximum damage on the Hun as well.” His voice trailed off as he said this. “I’ll also leave that aspect to your good judgment.” He took a deep breath through his nose and rubbed the back of his neck. “Any questions?”
Once again I nodded. “No, sir. If I could go back and look at the ground and select a route, then I’ll come back this afternoon. I’ll probably have a lot to ask you once I’ve thought about how I’m going to do this.”
Gault rose. “Very wise, Rory. That’s exactly what I’d do if I were you.” He looked at me in an avuncular sort of way. “You’ll be fine once you get going. These things aren’t as daunting as they seem.”
I should have resented this kind of talk because with five tours up the line, I was beginning to fancy myself as something of a veteran, but I knew Gault wasn’t being patronizing. He’d led numerous patrols himself and patrolling wasn’t something normally required of majors.
“Agar tells me you’re doing a fine job and you’ve settled in like an old hand. Keep it up. You’ll be fine,” he said as I turned away and gathered myself to leave.
I was pleased to hear this and thanked him as I crawled out the muddy doorway of the bunker. My father had written to me a week before this incident and told me he’d received a letter from Gault assuring him that I was in good health and getting on well. Neither of us ever mentioned the connection.
I spent the afternoon squinting through a telescopic periscope and prepared my plan. My sergeant, a sandy-haired Scot named Ferguson, selected the men for the patrol for me. He was extremely disappointed I didn’t include him in the upcoming operation.
“I want to try something different on this patrol,” I told him. “It should be kept smaller than what we’ve been used to. It seems to me having too many men out there increases our risk of drawing fire.”
Sergeant Ferguson looked down and stirred at the mud between his feet. He didn’t ask how it was going to be different and I didn’t tell him. Apart from the size of the patrol, I hadn’t thought through the details. Even at that stage of the war, we seriously mistrusted much of what came down from the staff. I’m sure in this respect the Patricia’s were no different than anyone else. Staff bumbling in the Great War has become a cliché, but in late 1915, as throughout the war, we did our best to accommodate the staff’s wishes. But for our own survival, we always interpreted their demands. The pattern had by then become all too apparent; utterly ridiculous orders regularly came down from otherwise sensible men who were out of touch with the reality of life in the forward trenches. I suspected the situation I faced with my patrol was no different. I was going to do my best to get a prisoner, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to draw attention to my patrol and draw fire by inflicting meaningless casualties on the enemy for the sake of appearing to be aggressive.
The problem confronting me was the same one that confronted every infantry officer in that war. The Germans had been industriously adding to their barbed wire obstacles in front of their positions. I spent several hours squinting through a periscope but I could see no way to get through their wire. If the staff wanted me to get a prisoner, and at the same time they wanted me to do damage to the enemy, I had to get through the wire. Scores of thousands of men on both sides had already died vainly trying to solve precisely that problem. In their directions to us, the staff typically stated their demands quite explicitly. Get us a prisoner and inflict damage upon the enemy. We were left entirely to our own devices in determining how we were to accomplish these tasks.
Our battalion front was a typical patch of ground in the Ypres Salient. Throughout the Great War, the Ypres Salient was one of the most fiercely contested patches of ground. It was a large bend in the Allied line that jutted into Belgium; and for most of the war, it was the only piece of that unfortunate little country that remained in the hands of the Allies. The PPCLI held eight hundred yards of it. Depending where you were, we looked out at three to five hundred yards of rolling shell-pocked territory that separated us from the German army.
Over this barren scene, a few stunted shrubs valiantly attempted to grow and a half-dozen shattered tree stumps served as reference points. As if this once tranquil bit of farmland wasn’t sufficiently desecrated, the whole area was liberally strewn with the rotting corpses of English and German infantrymen. The backdrop on either side of all this was a fifty-yard belt of barbed wire entanglements. This obstacle belt was made up of densely massed wire coils and complex webs of barbed wire windlassed to wooden stakes. Behind this, on the German side, armed with machine-guns, was a battalion of some of the best soldiers in the world. The landscape was utterly evil and I was expected to lead men through its most impenetrable zone, shoot up their trenches, and return triumphantly with a prisoner.
That night I found myself with five men standing on the fire step of our forward trench. With me I had Private Rivers, a Canadian-born militiaman from southern Ontario, Lance Corporal O’Neil from Calgary, privates Jenkins and Grey, both originals from the East End of London, and Lance Corporal Mullin, a quick and aggressively intelligent young man from Winnipeg.
The sky was partially concealed by high-level scattered clouds and the moon was to rise at ten. A gusting breeze stirred the coils of wire, making a slight chinking sound. Last light was at around nine. It could have been worse. I would have liked it to be much darker, but I was grateful I hadn’t been tasked, as some men had, to go out on a clear night with a full moon. At 9:15, as I’d arranged, artillery began to fall across the entire front of the trenches opposite me. At the same time, two machine-guns on our flanks began firing rapidly back and forth across the German trench tops.
“This is it, follow me,” I whispered in a way I hoped wouldn’t convey my fear.
We slipped over the top and wended our way delicately through the wire to our front. The path through our own wire was innocuously marked with bits of sand bag. If we kept to the left of the sand bag strips we found a narrow path that threaded its way through our wire. The path wasn’t easy to see and barbs caught at our tunics and trousers. Close to the enemy side of our wire we had to lift two coils and crawl under it. The shelling stopped a minute before we crawled into no man’s land. We crawled forward twenty or thirty yards and I made an exaggerated pointing motion to Private Rivers. He gave me a thumbs-up and mouthed, “Good luck.” Quietly, he lay down and cradled his rifle, scanning the darkness before him. Rivers’ task was to wait just outside our wire and keep his eyes peeled for our return. If we were lost, or heading in the wrong direction, Rivers was to catch our attention and guide us back through our own wire. Rivers would have a long wait lying on cold damp ground, but we all knew that amongst the six of us, he was the one with the most certain odds of surviving to see morning.
I pulled out my compass and took a bearing. We were going to go forward at a crouch for a hundred yards, and at the lip of a series of prominent shell craters on a patch of higher ground, we would push forward on all fours to the enemy wire. The four men behind me were supposed to keep an interval of five or six yards between each of them to prevent themselves from all being killed in a single burst of machine-gun fire. But in the dark, when men are tense, the urge to bunch up is almost irresistible. We’d never really trained for this kind of operation and I’m afraid at times we all followed our instincts and moved huddled together as a small crowd.
We reached the cratered area without incident, went to ground and watched and listened for a long while. The five of us peered into the dark, perched on the lip of one of the largest craters. I scanned the way ahead with my field glasses. The light was getting brighter and the moon was rising behind the clouds. I remember thinking that for some strange reason moonrise was early, and I found it amusing that one of the results of my patrol when I returned, if I hadn’t brought a prisoner back, would be to submit corrections to the astronomical tables.
We waited and watched the German lines for an hour. It was just after eleven that I heard muffled sounds from the area of the German trenches. A few minutes later we could hear the whistle of German artillery rounds passing close overhead and almost instantly artillery impacted three hundred yards to our rear. It was exactly what I’d hoped for.
I motioned for the men to get down into the craters and whispered, “Stay here, I’m going forward. For God’s sake, don’t shoot me when I return. Be prepared to move out as soon as I get back.” One of the men, I think it was Grey, made to question me. I silenced him with a wave of my hand. “If I’m not back by three o’clock, go back without me. I’ll get back on my own. Nobody’s to be caught out here in daylight.” I was gone into the night.
I crawled forward as fast as I could without making too much noise. I was moving towards the sounds near the German trenches. Sporadic artillery continued to fall behind me, and somewhere, a long way over to my right, a German machine-gun began shooting at our trench lines.
After crawling for about ten minutes, I stopped and carefully pulled my field glasses out from inside my tunic. Scanning the trench line I could see nothing but the forest of wire and some regular shapes that I presumed to be sand bags piled on the forward edge of the parapet. Near me, probably within a hundred yards of me, were at least a hundred heavily armed enemy soldiers. Despite this, the battlefield seemed as empty and as desolate as the moon. My speculations were interrupted by a dull red glow. Someone was lighting a pipe or a cigarette in one of the forward trenches. I watched intently for several more minutes, totally absorbed in my study of the ground. As my senses adjusted to the surroundings, a few seconds later, directly to my front a man coughed softly. Later I could very faintly hear stifled laughter. Whoever was in front of me was obviously in good spirits. I continued to watch the area before me. Suddenly, very close to me, a footfall and someone grunting almost made me swallow my heart. A German wiring party had come out of nowhere and was moving quietly and steadily across my front.
Two dark shapes in round field caps were struggling with a large coil of barbed wire concertina. A few yards behind them was another figure with a heavy-duty pair of wire cutters and what I guessed was probably a much smaller coil of fastening wire. They stopped in front of me and quietly began to bounce the wire out along the edge of the obstacle belt. After a few seconds the wire became entangled in itself and one of the men began tugging at it frantically. It made a loud metallic scratching noise and the man with wire cutters cursed and hissed in a South German accent. “Hoffart, you stupid oaf! Do you want to get us all killed? Make another noise like that and you will be out here every night this week.”
I didn’t know whether to be euphoric or terrified. It was exactly what I had hoped for. Despite having put a brave face on it, I knew I could never find a way to sneak through that thicket of wire and I had imagined us going forward, throwing a few Mills bombs, and then withdrawing empty handed and ignominiously. My best possible opportunity would be to find a wiring party – and truthfully, I didn’t expect to do that. Now I had one and they were literally within spitting distance. I watched.
Hoffart slowly untangled the wire and then turned his back to me while he attempted to fasten the end to one of the other concertina rolls. The other two men quietly moved off twenty or thirty yards back to the right and were absorbed in their task of stringing their end of the wire. They must have been standing in a shell hole for I couldn’t see them well. I only sensed that their backs were to me. Without giving it any further thought, I immediately stood up, drew my trench knife, and crept up behind Hoffart.
I placed the tip of my knife firmly against his neck, just under his right ear. He startled and made a sharp gasp. I whispered softly and slowly in German with a menace that surprised me. “Don’t make a sound, Hoffart, or you die!” I waited a second. The leader made some kind of hissing remark again and shuffled away with the wire coil. “Come with me. One sound, one move to escape and you’re dead. Move now.”
I tugged him towards the Canadian lines and he glided soundlessly through the darkness with me. We moved off about thirty yards into no man’s land and I gently pushed him down into a shell crater. He moved with a grace that I admired. Hoffart, whoever he was, understood the situation clearly. My knife was still pressing hard against his neck. “Lie down and don’t make a sound.” I increased the pressure on the knife to reinforce my point. With my left hand I pushed Hoffart’s face into the mud. I then reached around and gingerly slipped his rifle off his shoulder and placed it beside me. As I did so, my knife came away from his neck. He didn’t move and my knife went back under his ear.
A moment later I heard Hoffart’s leader hissing for him in the dark. “Hoffart … Hoffart!” There was a pause. “Hoffart, we are going! … Hoffart! Hoffart!” Then there was silence for a good minute. I was straining in the dark to see, but all I could make out was the indistinct shape of the wire before me and the line of the German parapet. “Hoffart, you fool!” The voice sounded desperate. I could hear the steps of the leader as he checked the wire Hoffart had recently been securing. He hissed again. “He has tied off the wire, but where has he gone?”
He walked confidently forward and stood not more than ten yards away from us. The leader slipped his rifle from his shoulder, dropped to one knee, and peered into the darkness. I could see he was wearing spectacles and a round field cap without any peak. He wasn’t a tall man and was probably an NCO. “Hoffart! Hoffart!” He hissed again louder than ever. At that moment he chose to leave and turned about. He whispered to the other man, “Hoffart has disappeared.”
I fully expected him at this point to scurry back to the safety of his trench line and report Hoffart’s mysterious disappearance. My plan was at that point to make best speed back to the crater, pick up my patrol, and move as fast as possible back to the safety of our own lines. This was not to be. Hoffart’s leader did something that made me forever more respectful of the calibre of the enemy we faced. The little man with spectacles moved off, beckoned for the other man to come near, and they both sat down not a dozen yards away and waited. I could see the muzzles of their Mauser rifles pointing steadily into the darkness. After a minute I breathed ever so faintly into Hoffart’s ear, “No sound.” My knife was back pressing at his neck. Hoffart wasn’t moving.
I probably waited an hour for the German NCO and his subordinate to leave. The German NCO reminded me of an old Indian hunter I once met at a friend’s cottage in Quebec. I was told the hunter could sit stone-still for an entire day waiting in one spot for his prey, but then the hunter wasn’t waiting for something that shot back.
I was inexpressibly relieved when they got up. The NCO wasted no time and moved off quickly in the direction he had originally come. I waited a further ten minutes, for I didn’t want them to go off a short distance and wait for me to surface. There was no sound. I whispered to Hoffart, “Now, come with me. Try to escape, I will kill you. Co-operate, you will be comfortable and safe, a prisoner. Do you understand?” Hoffart bobbed his head. “Let’s go.” We moved off slowly and quietly.
I found the shell hole. In fact, I almost walked by it but Lance Corporal Mullin called to me gently and stood up to relieve me of my prisoner. “Lord Jesus, sir, where the hell did you find him?” he exclaimed in a whisper. It was the same admiring tone I’d heard people use when someone brought a good-sized trout home at the lake.
“I’ll tell you later,” I said. I was suddenly terribly shaky. We frisked Hoffart but he didn’t appear to have any other weapons. We tied his hands behind his back and set off stumbling towards our own lines. Thirty seconds after we got to our feet a pair of German machine-guns opened up and began traversing our battalion frontage right to left and left to right. We threw ourselves to the ground and stayed put while rounds cracked closely above our heads and ricocheted around in the thickets of barbed wire.
When the firing stopped, we got under way again and seconds later I could hear Rivers shouting “Over here, over here!” Once inside the maze of our own wire, our machine-guns began to fire rapidly to cover the final torturous and dangerously exposed leg of this short journey. We were back with a prisoner. I was as weak as a baby and trembling like a leaf. I remember leaning against the trench wall feeling very wobbly and thirsty. Within a few minutes, Major Gault and the colonel were up to greet us, and Hoffart and I were hastily escorted off to the battalion headquarters’s dugout.
At the battalion headquarters’s dugout, we sat Hoffart on an ammunition crate and gave him a hot drink. He cupped it in both grubby hands, sipping it in the light of a flickering candle and looked around at us suspiciously. I spoke to him in German.
“Hoffart, you’re a lucky man. Luckier than we are, you’re going to spend the rest of the war in comfort. You’ll be dry, have good food and a clean place to sleep every night, and most importantly, you’re going to get home at the end of this – alive and in one piece. That’s a helluva lot more than the rest of us can say. But I want you to answer some simple questions first. Do you understand?”
Hoffart nodded his head doubtfully. He was sceptical as well as frightened. Prisoners of war were protected by international law in those days, but the expectations restricting information to name, rank, and regimental number were not nearly as severe as they were twenty-five years later.
Hoffart looked at me with exhausted innocence. “You speak very good German for an Englishman.”
“Thank you, but we’re not English. We’re Canadians.” I tried to be as pleasant as possible. “My mother’s German. I spent a lot of time near Hanover as a child. Where are you from?”
At that moment, I turned and asked Major Gault in English if Hoffart might have a drink and perhaps a cigarette. He rustled about in his pack and produced a bottle of brandy. I offered Hoffart a healthy shot in a mess tin. It was only then, in the warmth of the dugout, that I smelled Hoffart’s rank odour. The poor man must have fouled himself out in no man’s land. I didn’t find it funny. Braver men than me casually admitted to losing control of their bowels in the regiment’s earlier battles at Frezenburg and Belawaerde Ridge. Gault lit a cigarette and handed it to him. Hoffart began to weep. It wasn’t gratitude; it was relief from the terrible strain he’d been through.
I spoke as gently as I could without sounding patronizing. “It’s all right, you’re safe.” The other officers discreetly left the bunker and Hoffart and I chatted for fifteen minutes.
Hoffart was grey-faced and had a pinched and anxious look about him. He was in his mid-twenties and was a reservist from Allensbach. Before the war, he had worked as a carpenter’s assistant in a small furniture factory. He was married but had no children. He was called up in August of 1914; and, with the exception of four days leave in April, had been in a frontline division continuously.
Hoffart was in the Twenty-sixth Württemberg Division, not the Twenty-seventh. “The Twenty-seventh,” he said, “had been withdrawn a week ago and were now sitting on their asses doing who knows what.” The Twenty-sixth had been in the line for four days and were slated to rotate into a rest position the next night. Hoffart was certain they were going to be replaced by Bavarians. Just this morning he’d seen their officers doing their reconnaissance. After a day’s rest, his sergeant told him they were going to be employed re-loading artillery ammunition onto train cars in support of a major effort against the French.
I poured Private Hoffart another healthy measure and gave him another of the major’s cigarettes. He was a good man and I liked him. I didn’t feel that I’d used him. At the time, I took satisfaction knowing I probably saved his life. Hoffart was going to miss the next big offensive – and whatever came after that. I called for one of the headquarters runners to watch over him and ducked out under the hanging sandbag door to use the field phone. The brigade staff needed this information.
