CHAPTER IITHE BOMBING RAID
When we took our position in the front line trenches in Belgium, we relieved the Twenty-sixth Canadian Battalion. The Twenty-sixth belonged to the Second division, and had seen real service during the battle of Hooge and in what is now termed the third battle of Ypres, which occurred in June, 1916. The organization was made up almost exclusively of French Canadians from Quebec, and it was as fine a fighting force as we had shown the Fritzes, despite the fact that men of their race, as developments have proved, are not strongly loyal to Canada and Britain. Individually, the men of this French Canadian battalion were splendid soldiers and the organization could be criticized on one score only. In the heat of action it could not be kept in control. Onone occasion when it went in, in broad daylight, to relieve another battalion, the men didn’t stop at the fire trench. They went right on “over the top,” without orders, and, as a result, were badly cut up. Time and again the men of this battalion crossed “No Man’s Land” at night, without orders and without even asking consent, just to have a scrimmage with “the beloved enemy.” Once, when ordered to take two lines of trenches, they did so in the most soldierly fashion, but, seeing red, kept on going as if their orders were to continue to Berlin. On this occasion they charged right into their barrage fire and lost scores of their men, struck down by British shells. It has been said often of all the Canadians that they go the limit, without hesitation. There was a time when the “Bing Boys”—the Canadians were so called because this title of a London musical comedy was suggested by the fact that their commander was General Byng—were ordered to take no prisoners, this order being issued after two of their men were found crucified. A Canadian private,having penetrated a German trench with an attacking party, encountered a German who threw up his hands and said: “Mercy, Kamerade. I have a wife and five children at home.”
“You’re mistaken,” replied the Canadian. “You have a widow and five orphans at home.”
And, very shortly, he had.
Scouts from the Twenty-sixth battalion had come back to the villages of Dinkiebusch and Renninghelst to tell us how glad they were to see us and to show us the way in. As we proceeded overland, before reaching the communication trenches at the front, these scouts paid us the hospitable attentions due strangers. That is, one of them leading a platoon would say:
“Next two hundred yards in machine gun range. Keep quiet, don’t run, and be ready to drop quick if you are warned.”
There was one scout to each platoon, and we followed him, single file, most of the time along roads or well-worn paths, but sometimes through thickets and raggedfields. Every now and then the scout would yell at us to drop, and down we’d go on our stomachs while, away off in the distance we could hear the “put-put” of machine guns—the first sound of hostile firing that had ever reached our ears.
“It’s all right,” said the scout. “They haven’t seen us or got track of us. They’re just firing on suspicion.”
Nevertheless, when our various platoons had all got into the front reserve trenches, at about two hours after midnight, we learned that the first blood of our battalion had been spilled. Two men had been wounded, though neither fatally. Our own stretcher-bearers took our wounded back to the field hospital at Dinkiebusch. The men of the Twenty-sixth battalion spent the rest of the night instructing us and then left us to hold the position. We were as nervous as a lot of cats, and it seemed to me that the Germans must certainly know that they could come over and walk right through us, but, outside of a few casualties from sniping, such as the one that befell the Fourteenthplatoon man, which I have told about, nothing very alarming happened the first day and night, and by that time we had got steady on our job. We held the position for twenty-six days, which was the longest period that any Canadian or British organization had ever remained in a front-line trench.
In none of the stories I’ve read, have I ever seen trench fighting, as it was then carried on in Belgium, adequately described. You see, you can’t get much of an idea about a thing like that, making a quick tour of the trenches under official direction and escort, as the newspaper and magazine writers do. I couldn’t undertake to tell anything worth while about the big issues of the war, but I can describe how soldiers have to learn to fight in the trenches—and I think a good many of our young fellows have that to learn, now. “Over there,” they don’t talk of peace or even of to-morrow. They just sit back and take it.
We always held the fire trench as lightly as possible, because it is a demonstrated fact that the front ditch cannot be successfullydefended in a determined attack. The thing to do is to be ready to jump onto the enemy as soon as he has got into your front trench and is fighting on ground that you know and he doesn’t and knock so many kinds of tar out of him that he’ll have to pull his freight for a spot that isn’t so warm. That system worked first rate for us.
During the day, we had only a very few men in the fire trench. If an attack is coming in daylight, there’s always plenty of time to get ready for it. At night, we kept prepared for trouble all the time. We had a night sentry on each firing step and a man sitting at his feet to watch him and know if he was secretly sniped. Then we had a sentry in each “bay” of the trench to take messages.
Orders didn’t permit the man on the firing step or the man watching him to leave post on any excuse whatever, during their two-hour “spell” of duty. Hanging on a string, at the elbow of each sentry on the fire-step was a siren whistle or an empty shell case and bit of iron with which to hammer on it.This—siren or improvised gong—was for the purpose of spreading the alarm in case of a gas attack. Also we had sentries in “listening posts,” at various points from twenty to fifty yards out in “No Man’s Land.” These men blackened their faces before they went “over the top,” and then lay in shell holes or natural hollows. There were always two of them, a bayonet man and a bomber. From the listening post a wire ran back to the fire trench to be used in signaling. In the trench, a man sat with this wire wrapped around his hand. One pull meant “All O. K.,” two pulls, “I’m coming in,” three pulls, “Enemy in sight,” and four pulls, “Sound gas alarm.” The fire step in a trench is a shelf on which soldiers stand so that they may aim their rifles between the sand bags which form the parapet.
In addition to these men, we had patrols and scouts out in “No Man’s Land” the greater part of the night, with orders to gain any information possible which might be of value to battalion, brigade, division or general headquarters. They reported on theconditions of the Germans’ barbed wire, the location of machine guns and other little things like that which might be of interest to some commanding officer, twenty miles back. Also, they were ordered to make every effort to capture any of the enemy’s scouts or patrols, so that we could get information from them. One of the interesting moments in this work came when a star shell caught you out in an open spot. If you moved you were gone. I’ve seen men stand on one foot for the thirty seconds during which a star shell will burn. Then, when scouts or patrols met in “No Man’s Land” they always had to fight it out with bayonets. One single shot would be the signal for artillery fire and would mean the almost instant annihilation of the men on both sides of the fight. Under the necessities of this war, many of our men have been killed by our own shell fire.
At a little before daybreak came “stand-to,” when everybody got buttoned up and ready for business, because, at that hour, most attacks begin and also that was one ofthe two regular times for a dose of “morning and evening hate,” otherwise a good lively fifteen minutes of shell fire. We had some casualties every morning and evening, and the stretcher-bearers used to get ready for them as a matter of course. For fifteen minutes at dawn and dusk, the Germans used to send over “whiz-bangs,” “coal-boxes” and “minniewurfers” (shells from trench mortars) in such a generous way that it looked as if they liked to shoot ’em off, whether they hit anything or not. You could always hear the “heavy stuff” coming, and we paid little attention to it as it was used in efforts to reach the batteries, back of our lines. The poor old town of Dinkiebusch got the full benefit of it. When a shell would shriek its way over, some one would say: “There goes the express for Dinkiebusch,” and a couple of seconds later, when some prominent landmark of Dinkiebusch would disintegrate to the accompaniment of a loud detonation, some one else would remark:
“Train’s arrived!”
The scouts who inhabited “No Man’s Land” by night became snipers by day. Different units had different systems of utilizing these specialists. The British and the French usually left their scouts and snipers in one locality so that they might come to know every hummock and hollow and tree-stump of the limited landscape which absorbed their unending attention. The Canadians, up to the time when I left France, invariably took their scouts and snipers along when they moved from one section of the line to another. This system was criticized as having the disadvantage of compelling the men to learn new territory while opposing enemy scouts familiar with every inch of the ground. As to the contention on this point, I could not undertake to decide, but it seemed to me that our system had, at least, the advantage of keeping the men more alert and less likely to grow careless. Some of our snipers acquired reputations for a high degree of skill and there was always a fascination for me in watching them work. We always hadtwo snipers to each trench section. They would stand almost motionless on the fire steps for hours at a time, searching every inch of the German front trench and the surrounding territory with telescopes. They always swathed their heads with sand bags, looking like huge, grotesque turbans, as this made the finest kind of an “assimilation covering.” It would take a most alert German to pick out a man’s head, so covered, among all the tens of thousands of sand bags which lined our parapet. The snipers always used special rifles with telescopic sights, and they made most extraordinary shots. Some of them who had been huntsmen in the Canadian big woods were marvellous marksmen. Frequently one of them would continue for several days giving special attention to a spot where a German had shown the top of his head for a moment. If the German ever showed again, at that particular spot, he was usually done for. A yell or some little commotion in the German trenches, following the sniper’s quick shot would tell the story to us. Then the sniper would receivegeneral congratulations. There is a first warning to every man going into the trenches. It is: “Fear God and keep your head down.”
Our rations in the trenches were, on the whole, excellent. There were no delicacies and the food was not over plentiful, but it was good. The system appeared to have the purpose of keeping us like bulldogs before a fight—with enough to live on but hungry all the time. Our food consisted principally of bacon, beans, beef, bully-beef, hard tack, jam and tea. Occasionally we had a few potatoes, and, when we were taken back for a few days’ rest, we got a good many things which difficulty of transport excluded from the front trenches. It was possible, sometimes, to beg, borrow or even steal eggs and fresh bread and coffee.
All of our provisions came up to the front line in sand bags, a fact easily recognizable when you tasted them. There is supposed to be an intention to segregate the various foods, in transport, but it must be admitted that they taste more or less of each other,and that the characteristic sand-bag flavor distinguishes all of them from mere, ordinary foods which have not made a venturesome journey. As many of the sand bags have been originally used for containing brown sugar, the flavor is more easily recognized than actually unpleasant. When we got down to the Somme, the food supply was much less satisfactory—principally because of transport difficulties. At times, even in the rear, we could get fresh meat only twice a week, and were compelled to live the rest of the time on bully-beef stew, which resembles terrapin to the extent that it is a liquid with mysterious lumps in it. In the front trenches, on the Somme, all we had were the “iron rations” which we were able to carry in with us. These consisted of bully-beef, hard tack, jam and tea. The supply of these foods which each man carries is termed “emergency rations,” and the ordinary rule is that the emergency ration must not be touched until the man has been forty-eight hours without food, and then only by permission of an officer.
One of the great discoveries of this war is that hard tack makes an excellent fuel, burning like coke and giving off no smoke. We usually saved enough hard tack to form a modest escort, stomachward, for our jam, and used the rest to boil our tea. Until one has been in the trenches he cannot realize what a useful article of diet jam is. It is undoubtedly nutritious and one doesn’t tire of it, even though there seem to be but two varieties now existing in any considerable quantities—plum and apple. Once upon a time a hero of the “ditches” discovered that his tin contained strawberry jam, but there was such a rush when he announced it that he didn’t get any of it.
There was, of course, a very good reason for the shortness and uncertainty of the food supply on the Somme. All communication with the front line was practically overland, the communication trenches having been blown in. Ration parties, bringing in food, frequently suffered heavy casualties. Yet they kept tenaciously and courageously doing their best for us. Occasionally they evenbrought up hot soup in huge, improvised thermos bottles made from petrol tins wrapped in straw and sand bags, but this was very rarely attempted, and not with much success. You could sum up the food situation briefly. It was good—when you got it.
It may be fitting, at this time, to pay a tribute to the soldier’s most invaluable friend, the sand bag. The sand bag, like the rest of us, did not start life in a military capacity, but since joining the army it has fulfilled its duty nobly. Primarily, sand bags are used in making a parapet for a trench or a roof for a dug-out, but there are a hundred other uses to which they have been adapted, without hesitation and possibly without sufficient gratitude for their ready adaptability. Some of these uses may surprise you. Soldiers strain their tea through them, wrap them around their legs for protection against cold and mud, swab their rifles with them to keep them clean, use them for bed sacks, kit bags and ration bags. The first thing a man does when he enters a trench or reaches a new positionwhich is to be held is to feel in his belt, if he is a private, or to yell for some one else to feel in his belt, if he is an officer, for a sand bag. Each soldier is supposed to have five tucked beneath his belt whenever he starts to do anything out of the ordinary. When you’ve got hold of the first one, in a new position, under fire, you commence filling it as fast as the Germans and your own ineptitude will permit, and the sooner that bag is filled and placed, the more likely you are to continue in a state of health and good spirits. Sand bags are never filled with sand, because there is never any sand to put into them. Anything that you can put in with a shovel will do.
About the only amusement we had during our long stay in the front trenches in Belgium, was to sit with our backs against the rear wall and shoot at the rats running along the parapet. Poor Macfarlane, with a flash of the old humor which he had before the war, told a “rookie” that the trench rats were so big that he saw one of them trying on his great-coat. They used to run overour faces when we were sleeping in our dug-outs, and I’ve seen them in ravenous swarms, burrowing into the shallow graves of the dead. Many soldiers’ legs are scarred to the knees with bites.
The one thing of which we constantly lived in fear was a gas attack. I used to awaken in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, dreaming that I heard the clatter and whistle-blowing all along the line which meant that the gas was coming. And, finally, I really did hear the terrifying sound, just at a moment when it couldn’t have sounded worse. I was in charge of the nightly ration detail, sent back about ten miles to the point of nearest approach of the transport lorries, to carry in rations, ammunition and sand bags to the front trenches. We had a lot of trouble, returning with our loads. Passing a point which was called “Shrapnel Corner” because the Germans had precise range on it, we were caught in machine-gun fire and had to lie on our stomachs for twenty minutes, during which we lost one man, wounded. I sent him backand went on with my party only to run into another machine-gun shower a half-mile further on. While we were lying down to escape this, a concealed British battery of five-inch guns, about which we knew nothing, opened up right over our heads. It shook us up and scared us so that some of our party were now worse off than the man who had been hit and carried to the rear. We finally got together and went on. When we were about a mile behind the reserve trench, stumbling in the dark through the last and most dangerous path overland, we heard a lone siren whistle followed by a wave of metallic hammering and wild tooting which seemed to spread over all of Belgium a mile ahead of us. All any of us could say was:
“Gas!”
All you could see in the dark was a collection of white and frightened faces. Every trembling finger seemed awkward as a thumb as we got out our gas masks and helmets and put them on, following directions as nearly as we could. I ordered themen to sit still and sent two forward to notify me from headquarters when the gas alarm was over. They lost their way and were not found for two days. We sat there for an hour, and then I ventured to take my mask off. As nothing happened, I ordered the men to do the same. When we got into the trenches with our packs, we found that the gas alarm had been one of Fritz’s jokes. The first sirens had been sounded in the German lines, and there hadn’t been any gas.
Our men evened things up with the Germans, however, the next night. Some of our scouts crawled clear up to the German barbed wire, ten yards in front of the enemy fire trench, tied empty jam-tins to the barricade and then, after attaching light telephone wires to the barbed strands, crawled back to our trenches. When they started pulling the telephone wires the empty tins made a clatter right under Fritz’s nose. Immediately the Germans opened up with all their machine-gun and rifle fire, began bombing the spot from which the noise came and sent up “S. O. S.” signals for artilleryfire along a mile of their line. They fired a ten-thousand-dollar salute and lost a night’s sleep over the noise made by the discarded containers of five shillings’ worth of jam. It was a good tonic for the Tommies.
A few days after this, a very young officer passed me in a trench while I was sitting on a fire-step, writing a letter. I noticed that he had the red tabs of a staff officer on his uniform, but I paid no more attention to him than that. No compliments such as salutes to officers are paid in the trenches. After he had passed, one of the men asked me if I didn’t know who he was. I said I didn’t.
“Why you d——d fool,” he said, “that’s the Prince of Wales.”
When the little prince came back, I stood to salute him. He returned the salute with a grave smile and passed on. He was quite alone, and I was told afterward, that he made these trips through the trenches just to show the men that he did not consider himself better than any other soldier. The heir of England was certainly taking nearlythe same chance of losing his inheritance that we were.
After we had been on the front line fifteen days, we received orders to make a bombing raid. Sixty volunteers were asked for, and the whole battalion offered. I was lucky—or unlucky—enough to be among the sixty who were chosen. I want to tell you in detail about this bombing raid, so that you can understand what a thing may really amount to that gets only three lines, or perhaps nothing at all, in the official dispatches. And, besides that, it may help some of the young men who read this, to know something, a little later, about bombing.
The sixty of us chosen to execute the raid were taken twenty miles to the rear for a week’s instruction practice. Having only a slight idea of what we were going to try to do, we felt very jolly about the whole enterprise, starting off. We were camped in an old barn, with several special instruction officers in charge. We had oral instruction, the first day, while sappers dug and built an exact duplicate of the section of the Germantrenches which we were to raid. That is, it was exact except for a few details. Certain “skeleton trenches,” in the practice section, were dug simply to fool the German aviators. If a photograph, taken back to German headquarters, had shown an exact duplicate of a German trench section, suspicion might have been aroused and our plans revealed. We were constantly warned about the skeleton trenches and told to remember that they did not exist in the German section where we were to operate. Meanwhile, our practice section was changed a little, several times, because aerial photographs showed that the Germans had been renovating and making some additions to the trenches in which we were to have our frolic with them.
We had oral instruction, mostly, during the day, because we didn’t dare let the German aviators see us practicing a bomb raid. All night long, sometimes until two or three o’clock in the morning, we rehearsed that raid, just as carefully as a company of star actors would rehearse a play. At first there was a disposition to have sport out of it.
“Well,” some chap would say, rolling into the hay all tired out, “I got killed six times to-night. S’pose it’ll be several times more to-morrow night.”
One man insisted that he had discovered, in one of our aerial photographs, a German burying money, and he carefully examined each new picture so that he could be sure to find the dough and dig it up. The grave and serious manner of our officers, however; the exhaustive care with which we were drilled and, more than all, the approach of the time when we were “to go over the top,” soon drove sport out of our minds, and I can say for myself that the very thought of the undertaking, as the fatal night drew near, sent shivers up and down my spine.
A bombing raid—something originated in warfare by the Canadians—is not intended for the purpose of holding ground, but to gain information, to do as much damage as possible, and to keep the enemy in a state of nervousness. In this particular raid, the chief object was to gain information. Ourhigh command wanted to know what troops were opposite us and what troops had been there. We were expected to get this information from prisoners and from buttons and papers off of the Germans we might kill. It was believed that troops were being relieved from the big tent show, up at the Somme, and sent to our side show in Belgium for rest. Also, it was suspected that artillery was being withdrawn for the Somme. Especially, we were anxious to bring back prisoners.
In civilized war, a prisoner can be compelled to tell only his name, rank and religion. But this is not a civilized war, and there are ways of making prisoners talk. One of the most effective ways—quite humane—is to tie a prisoner fast, head and foot, and then tickle his bare feet with a feather. More severe measures have frequently been used—the water cure, for instance—but I’m bound to say that nearly all the German prisoners I saw were quite loquacious and willing to talk, and the accuracy of their information, when later confirmedby raids, was surprising. The iron discipline, which turns them into mere children in the presence of their officers seemed to make them subservient and obedient to the officers who commanded us. In this way, the system worked against the Fatherland. I mean, of course, in the cases of privates. Captured German officers, especially Prussians, were a nasty lot. We never tried to get information from them for we knew they would lie, happily and intelligently.
At last came the night when we were to go “over the top,” across “No Man’s Land,” and have a frolic with Fritz in his own bailiwick. I am endeavoring to be as accurate and truthful as possible in these stories of my soldiering, and I am therefore compelled to say that there wasn’t a man in the sixty who didn’t show the strain in his pallor and nervousness. Under orders, we discarded our trench helmets and substituted knitted skull caps or mess tin covers. Then we blackened our hands and faces with ashes from a camp fire. Afterthis they loaded us into motor trucks and took us up to “Shrapnel Corner,” from which point we went in on foot. Just before we left, a staff officer came along and gave us a little talk.
“This is the first time you men have been tested,” he said. “You’re Canadians. I needn’t say anything more to you. They’re going to be popping them off at a great rate while you’re on your way across. Remember that you’d better not stand up straight because our shells will be going over just six and a half feet from the ground—where it’s level. If you stand up straight you’re likely to be hit in the head, but don’t let that worry you because if you do get hit in the head you won’t know it. So why in hell worry about it?” That was his farewell. He jumped on his horse and rode off.
The point we were to attack had been selected long before by our scouts. It was not, as you might suppose, the weakest point in the German line. It was on the contrary, the strongest. It was considered that the moral effect of cleaning up a weak pointwould be comparatively small, whereas to break in at the strongest point would be something really worth while. And, if we were to take chances, it really wouldn’t pay to hesitate about degrees. The section we were to raid had a frontage of one hundred and fifty yards and a depth of two hundred yards. It had been explained to us that we were to be supported by a “box barrage,” or curtain fire from our artillery, to last exactly twenty-six minutes. That is, for twenty-six minutes from the time when we started “over the top,” our artillery, several miles back, would drop a “curtain” of shells all around the edges of that one hundred and fifty yard by two hundred yard section. We were to have fifteen minutes in which to do our work. Any man not out at the end of the fifteen minutes would necessarily be caught in our own fire as our artillery would then change from a “box” to pour a straight curtain fire, covering all of the spot of our operations.
Our officers set their watches very carefully with those of the artillery officers, beforewe went forward to the front trenches. We reached the front at 11P.M., and not until our arrival there were we informed of the “zero hour”—the time when the attack was to be made. The hour of twelve-ten had been selected. The waiting from eleven o’clock until that time was simply an agony. Some of our men sat stupid and inert. Others kept talking constantly about the most inconsequential matters. One man undertook to tell a funny story. No one listened to it, and the laugh at the end was emaciated and ghastly. The inaction was driving us all into a state of funk. I could actually feel my nerve oozing out at my finger tips, and, if we had had to wait fifteen minutes longer, I shouldn’t have been able to climb out of the trench.
About half an hour before we were to go over, every man had his eye up the trench for we knew “the rummies” were coming that way. The rum gang serves out a stiff shot of Jamaica just before an attack, and it would be a real exhibition of temperance to see a man refuse. There were no prohibitionistsin our set. Whether or not we got our full ration depended on whether the sergeant in charge was drunk or sober. After the shot began to work, one man next to me pounded my leg and hollered in my ear:
“I say. Why all this red tape? Let’s go over now.”
That noggin’ of rum is a life saver.
When the hour approached for us to start, the artillery fire was so heavy that orders had to be shouted into ears, from man to man. The bombardment was, of course, along a couple of miles of front, so that the Germans would not know where to expect us. At twelve o’clock exactly they began pulling down a section of the parapet so that we wouldn’t have to climb over it, and we were off.