Over there and back in three uniforms, being the experiences of an American boy in the Canadian, British and American armies at the front and through No man's land

Front matter

Class Ua4 Book_

Copyright^*-

COPi'RlGHT DEPOSIT.

II

We were in France! No one could deny it, especially when we tried to buy anything in the shops. Yet, marching along the roads, rows of tall, straight poplars on either side and a wonderful blue sky overhead, it seemed hard to realize we were in the heart of grim, hideous WAR. We were too far behind the lines yet to see anything of the war as it was, but that night we heard the guns for the first time. It was a dull and far-distant booming that caught a keen ear or two in the ranks and then in a few minutes we all were hearing it. If we hadn't been in France we might have put it down as the low rumbling of thunder as we hear it in the States during a late summer's shower.

But we were in France, and we knew! And strange to relate, it made us happy. I don't think there was a man among us whose heart didn't beat a little faster and his breath come a little quicker at the nearness of that which we had come over seas to find. So we cheered, and sang ourselves to sleep, and wakened often in the night anxious for the morning and movement.

Daylight found us on our way again and soon we ran into all the activity of behind the lines — that army that keeps the fighting army fit for the fight: horses, wagons, motor trucks, automobiles, ambulances, puffing engines with their queer little trains alongside piles of coal, piles of shells, hay, grain, ammunition, meat — everything one could think of, and all in what seemed to be a hopeless confusion.

All these things disentangled themselves regularly every day and were sent away up the line so the troops in the trenches could carry on. But as we went along we were smothered in the dust of motor trucks speeding by with every conceivable thing a great army needs and others coming back empty for more. Always it was more, more, more! Just as though some insatiable monster was up there in front.

Sandwiched between the motor trucks were the horse transports, with the great, soft-eyed horses plodding stolidly along looking at us as we passed and wondering what it was all about. They were passed on the road by the lighter and more frisky artillery teams drawing their little guns. White with dust and driven by cocky youngsters full of pride in themselves, horses and drivers seemed to sense their superiority over the less agile transport service.

Swinging in and out through all the line went the ambulances — going ''up" for those who had ''copped" it during the night. All traffic gave way to them. On the "up" trip they were out to shatter all the speed laws, but on the trip "down," curtains fastened taut at the back, they were driven with a skill that would make an ex-taxi chauffeur turn in his grave; driven v^ith a skill born of the knowledge of the suffering caused inside by needless bumps and jolts. We sent many glances after them, for we knew that those men, hidden away from our sight, a few hours before had been where we would be in a few hours more.

We marched that day round-eyed with wonder at all the things we saw. The very magnitude of it appalled us. Dimly we began to realize what a very small part of it we were, after all. And the realization did us a great deal of good.

Late that evening we arrived at a camp about seven miles behind the line. We were fearfully tired, but we were gloriously happy. Then the next day it rained, and our spirits drooped. At five o'clock that afternoon we were ordered to fall in outsde our huts. We fell in and there, standing on an old ration box in the pouring rain was the general who at that time commanded the Canadian Expeditionary Force. With no great coat or protection of any kind, he stood there and talked to us. There were no heroics; just a plain statement in the simplest of terms. We were to take over trenches that night, he said, and he told us what to expect and what we were to do. It made a great impression on all of us and we cheered like mad as the general left with our colonel by his side. He took with him our hearts and our allegiance as he had done with the first division.

In a few minutes the huts housed a mass of chattering, swearing, sweating humanity. Every man was trying vainly to shove into corners where there was no room, things that never should have been brought along — and we were to march off in an hour. It certainly was an active hour, but at its end we were on our way to the trenches, five rounds in the magazine of our rifles, not for target practice this time. Wc were going out to kill !

As I remember, I was not excited, but I was expectant and eager to be in a first line trench and see for myself all those things we had been hearing about during our months of training.

Silently we marched through a pitchblack night. Two ruined villages loomed up in our path like ghosts in a graveyard. At last we were in a trench; a communication trench leading to the front line. We walked and walked, winding in and out, with now and then a flare shooting up from the Boches or from our lines. Sometimes they seemed right over us, but they were not, for we caught not even a trace of their glow. Then they would appear off in the distance until we had to look twice to be sure they were not shooting stars.

Sometimes we were squeezed tightly against the mud walls.

Here and there we found spaces with room for four men to pass abreast, and still we walked, and cursed, because we were dead tired. It was midnight and the routine of man's normal life said we should be in bed. We had not yet taught nature she was wrong.

With whispered injunctions to keep quiet and stoop low, which we did to the amusement of the fellows we were relieving, we arrived in the front line.

Of course my sergeant friend took me! As soon as we were in the fire trench I was told off to stand sentry. The man I was to relieve whispered what I was to do and climbed up on the firing step with me. I fixed my bayonet, released the safety catch on my rifle, and I was helping to guard the world from the mad puppies on the other side of the wire.

Here and there a gun boomed; big, little and medium sized, but none sounded near us, and I began to think it was a pretty good game. Then I looked out over the parapet. Something was moving out there! Maybe the Germans had heard us making the relief and were going to come out and throw bombs at us. I had heard they did that to new troops and it seemed to me they could not have avoided knowing we were new 'uns.

I looked again, and I was sure there were hundreds of them. I blazed away into the center of them. I emptied the magazine and then ducked behind the parapet to reload. Visions of a V. C. for repelling an attack single handed came suddenly before me.

They were still there, but they seemed to have hesitated right in the middle of No Man's Land. That was to be their fatal mistake. I unloaded my next five rounds, rapid, and once more dropped back to throw in more cartridges.

Then such a bang! Something hit the parapet in front of me with a crack and a Boche flare went up. So did my head. I was going to empty my last five rounds into Fritz if it was the last thing I did in my life. I put two rounds by the flare of that light into the stakes supporting our wire and then I quit. I was attracting too much unfavorable notice from the other side of the wire. When my relief came along I told him of my mistake and advised him to let the wire stakes stand as they were.

Daybreak brought us "stand to" and a full picture of the mud and glory into which we had come. Our stomachs being empty, though, with rations in our haversacks, we ate and for a few minutes, forgot.

A little sun, struggling through dirty gray Flanders clouds, cheered us a bit and we sat squat and hunched in various shapes wondering what the day would bring.

The day sentry, standing on the firing platform, slipped and slid into our midst at the bottom of the trench. We laughed, thinking he had missed his footing on the slimy platform. But even as we laughed the sound froze on our lips and the mirth in our hearts. No man dropped his rifle and fell huddled like that on his neck, just for fun. His face lay up to the sun he had seen for the last time. In the center of his forehead was a little round hole.

We all jumped from him. I can confess it — we were frightened. It was death staring at us and we all were strangers to him. It was the first of our thousand men who came over seas to fight God's battles, to reach the end of all journeys, and it brought us to with a shock.

Since that day more than fourteen thousand have passed through the old battalion to keep it up to its strength and we who are left have seen Death in all his hideous forms. We are not calloused, we are not unmindful, but no longer are we afraid. We have discovered there are worse things in life than Death and many a one of us has had abundant cause to envy our first pal to "go west."

One of the boys, bolder than the rest, straightened the body on the floor of the trench. Another mounted sentry and a third went to report to our officer.

We had been "blooded!" A second's curiosity, he had taken one peep over the top in daylight, and he had paid. Curiosity is paid for dearly in all that vast region known as "the front," and the first lesson of fresh troops is to curb it.

Our officer came. Paybook and personal belongings were taken from the pockets to send to the folks at home. His ammunition, rifle and equipment went to the rear, to the dump, for someone else to use. It was war, and he was finished. We covered the face and body with a blanket and my mind flew back, across the Channel, England, the great Atlantic and Canada to the Pacific coast; a little town on the Fraser river, where a mother would soon be bowed with grief.

I had known the boy and his mother. I had eaten and slept in their home. I knew the grief that would be hers and the pride there would be in her heart, too. Her John! Her boy, that she had raised and loved, had died fighting for his country!

While it would be a bitter blow, what more could a real mother ask than to be the mother of a real man? She had told him when she said good-bye: ^Tou are all my heart, Johnny. If you come back, I will be proud and happy. If you don't come back, well — I will be proud."

Thus did this mother of Canada give her son to the empire.

We kept the body by us to bury when darkness should hide us from the enemy and I went on sentry with it lying just below me. The feet stuck out from under the blanket and they fascinated me. I could not keep my eyes away. I tried to think and couldn't. Twelve hours before he had been alive! A month before I had met him on leave in London. A year before he had been at home, never dreaming of war. Now he was dead ! He knew what I wanted to know; what everyone, sometime, wants to know.

Two hours watching those feet made me a fatalist.

Night came, and with it the padre to bury the first of his charges. We had sewed the body in the blanket as well as we could and we carried it about five hundred yards behind the line and dug a shallow grave. At nine o'clock a few of us who were not working quietly filed down the trench and there, with a dozen men kneeling round the grave, the flares going up and down, the rattle of the machine guns and the deeptoned roar and hiss of the big guns singing a requiem, we left him.

It was well it was dark. My eyes were wet and I knew the others' were, as our old padre read the burial service from memory in a soft, low voice, and six of us pushed the dirt back into the hole wijh our intrenching tools.

Moving slowly away our minds inevitably framed the question: "Who will be the next?" And for a time we wondered, and maybe worried. The days were coming soon, although we didn't know it then, when there would be plenty of casualties — hundreds and thousands of them — but no such burial as our first had received. Hell fire was to come, blasting us with its fury, turning over ground, killing and maiming, burying and digging up again, stifling us with putrid fumes and giving us no rest. It was to make boys of twenty into men of forty in less than that number of hours, but it was to purify and sanctify them in the process. It was to make heroism a commonplace.

But we didn't know what was to come, and with the resiliency of youth, we once more were smiling and happy.

Ill

"Battalion is warned for relief."

So shouts the company sergeant major, and we groan. It means we are going into the trenches for another tour of duty while the other fellows come out and rest. It also means no one can move further than a couple of hundred yards from billets until it is time for the march up and that will be within twenty-four hours.

More than that, it starts some terribly heated arguments among the men as to who will be in the firing line and who in supports. There are caustic comments concerning the political influences of some platoons that speak for the support line and they, in turn, chide the bloodthirsty tendencies of the other platoons.

There is no end to the argument until one of three things happens : a meal arrives, a parade is called, or the estaminet opena.

Then the warring factions call it off and concentrate their attention, if so be, on the meal or the estaminet. Parades? Well, they've got to be done so they are done, but not, I am afraid, with the concentration devoted to the other two.

The last night before going in every man Jack tries to spend all his cash, if by any chance there is any left after a week in billets. But if there is none in some pockets there is sure to be plenty in others, and the boys who are broke are perfectly willing to help their more affluent comrades reduce their surplus.

It is so foolish to go into the trenches with money in your pocket. In fact, it isn't done. It is such an absurd waste. A fellow might get blown up, then no one could spend it. If you're killed with a bullet, somebody else will spend it. If worst comes to the worst and the Boches grab you, they could spend it.

So take no chances. Spend it yourself and go in with empty pockets. That is the philosophy of the front.

"Crown and Anchor" is in progress in the huts for the benefit of the draft men just out. Poor chaps ! They think they can buck the bank and they chuck their coins on "the lucky old mud hook" or something equally good. The banker tries to "bust" them before the estaminet closes, while three or four of the old hands look on with disgust — and with parched throats. Needless to say both these conditions are due to pockets already swept clean. And who can blame them for being disgusted? Why can't the draft men take them to the estaminet instead of throwing their francs away on a banker's game" ?

Down the road in the estaminet the fun is in full swing. The last half hour before closing time has come and money is slipping out quickly and easily, for the mild Belgian and French beers have very slight intoxicating effect. Here and there a serious-faced group may be sitting, talking in low tones, earnestly thumping with fists to emphasize some telling point. Madame glares at them. They are "na poo"; all the time talk, no drink. But madame has no suspicion that they are the great generals of the army, hidden behind private's tunics, discussing what should have been done at Neuve Chapelle or Loos, and that even now they may be planning some stupidly easy way to end the war.

But not even the serious thinkers can resist the last fifteen minutes of grace and the place becomes a roaring, pounding mass of humanity, watched by madame with a motherly smile on her face. These are her boys, her "soldats," and she likes them. They are careless in manner and full of animal spirits, but this is their last night "out" for awhile — maybe for always. And she looks on with an "I knew it" expression in her kindly, shrewd eyes as a few glasses smash to the tune of her boys' farewell.

It was a song we had picked up from no one knew where. It pleased us and we took it as our own. To privileged persons whom we esteemed — persons such as madame — it was both our salute and our good-bye, and as the military police came in to turn us out we stood on chairs and on tables and sang to madame. The song ran something like this:

Oh, we come from the East And we come from the West, To fight for what we love the best; Jolly Canucks are we!

Some of us are rich,

Some of us are bums;

But no one gives a damn

For the Kaiser and all his Huns;

Jolly Canucks are we!

No one can call it poetry. Probably it is nothing at all, but we were very careful and very particular where we sang it and to whom. When we did sing it to any person they might well consider it the highest of compliments. To madame, as long as we stayed in the district, we sang our farewell every last night before we went into the trenches.

Our song over this night, we went to our hut, which was an improvement over the estaminet only in that its capacity was limited to twenty-two men. Sleep we could, and did, however, and with no thought of the morrow.

It never failed to rain when we made a relief, and sure enough, next day it poured. It came down in sheets ! But you can't postpone your relief on account of rain like you can a ball game, so we packed up; not a wardrobe trunk and handbag, but just what we could carry on our backs in a clever but fiendish device which seems to get heavier and heavier with every step as you go along. It only takes about five minutes to pack, but when you get it all on your back you look like a Christmas tree at a Sunday-school festival.

It is a peculiar thing to pack up like this to move into the trenches. Will you come back? Will your pal? If you look around and study the faces you probably will not find a single fleeting expression to show what these men think and feel. Reinforcement men may display a keen curiosity and ask innumerable questions, but these questions are quickly shut off by the most flippant and absurd answers.

The old hand may indicate his feelings by a fervent and more or less sulphurous hope that he will get a "blighty" this "time in," but beyond that, war, to all outward appearances, is the least of any one's thoughts. At times like this, and just before an attack, you always believe — in fact you are absolutely sure — it is someone else who will "get it."

All packed up and with the midday meal over we lay around waiting for two o'clock. It comes all too quickly and the sergeant calls through the door: "Fall in on the road, No. i platoon." We heave our kits into place and move out into the driving rain. We fall in on a wet, slippery cobblestone road. There is a lot of pushing and shoving as we get into place and then there is dead silence.

The roll is called, the C. O. appears from nowhere, takes the sergeant's report of "all present," gives the command "Right turn, quick march," and we start off.

What luck we are in for now no one knows or cares. Our immediate problem is wrestling with fifty pounds on the back and a wet, slippery, slimy road, and if you will believe me, it is some wrestling match ! We skate more than we march, with every now and then someone going "crash!" rifle one way, body another, much to the amusement of his pals and the detriment of his own morals.

Then comes a shout from up ahead, *^Keep to the right," and we ease off to the side of the road while a big motor truck lumbers by, splashing mud aplenty over all of us. Then the whole platoon breaks out in language that would put a Washington logger to shame. Another goes by filling our eyes and mouths with liquid mud, and our rage sends us into shrieks, but still another and another chug past, each driven by some self-satisfied young chauffeur whose greatest delight is to annoy us and start our flow of profanity. By his side sits his fat helper. Both have broad grins on their faces and they seem to say: "Fools, why didn't you join our branch of the service, and you'd never have to walk?"

They disappear to the rear and our cursings die away in mutterings, as we must save our breath to help us over the roads. So, silently we trudge along in the rain and the gathering gloom. For a moment we envy those men on the lorries and frankly confess

6^ it to ourselves, yet in the next moment we are fiercely proud that we are the infantry, the foot sloggers that live in the mud and muck of the trenches.

Dirty we may be, and full of ^'cooties," but we are the boys who clinch the argument and we are fighting proud of our three year traditions and the hundreds of years' old traditions of the French and British infantry by whose side we man the parapets. Our American doughboys will learn that feeling too. They will recognize that other branches of the service are important, yet they will tolerate them, and that's all.

So we slither along and come to some batteries of artillery lining the road, the dugouts for their crews near by. It is dark now and as it is to be a quiet night the gunners are in their shelters, but their sentries spot us and call to their mates, "the infantry is going by." Then they all come tumbling out to wish us good luck. They are our friends, if friends we have. They know it and we know it. They know what we go through and we love them because they give back, shell for shell and then some for interest, every one Fritz drops onto us. We depend on them, and they on us.

With much good natured bantering we slip through the early night toward ruin and desolation, and they go back to their warm, dry blankets.

Now we branch off the road and take to the fields which will provide a short cut to the communication trenches. As we go skating over this treacherous ground we come to a little patch of turnips cultivated by the French peasants with that wonderful spirit which carries them right up to the shell zone and makes them fill in a shell hole in their garden and replant it. As we cross we stoop and pick up the turnips. Not bothering to peel them, we rub off the worst of the dirt and, still eating them, we arrive at another road and the entrance to the C.T.

Here we rest, lying on the road, our uniforms absorbing more of the sticky mud. We are tired, however, so it does not matter; not even the fact that a shell may come down and scatter bodies in all directions, souls going to their Maker even before the bodies come down like huge chunks of mud. That such a possibility exists, no one doubts, but no one is worried about it.

Mud and water soon cool one and we show signs of restlessness. Up we get and in single file enter the communication trench, which gradually gets deeper until it is above our heads and we are swallowed in an inky blackness. The journey is nearly over now, except for that turning and twisting and winding in a monotonous, endless sort of maze, with the way lighted into day one minute by a flare and the next minute blackness more intense than ever.

Now a man slips and falls, the next in file tumbling on top of him. Endless conversation about the matter follows, but on we go and gradually we come nearer to the flares and to those men who are waiting for us — those men who have been there for the last six days, answering shot for shot from the enemy, lying in their ditch full of muck and corruption, graced by the name of trench, while the artillery hourly played on and over them. For six days they have been there, suffering their casualties and standing up under punishment, while we had our rest. Now it is their turn, and we hurry on that our relief will be on time, for in six more days they will relieve us and we will want them to be on time.

Sweating and staggering under the weight of our packs we slip into our positions. With whispered bantering and. "good luck, bo," they melt into the night. We are "in."

We are nicely settled in our new quarters when dawn begins to streak the eastern sky. Suddenly the whole world is alight.

"Hey, fellows, just take a look through this periscope at No Man's Land. Of all the over-rated places in the world this has got 'em beat."

That was Tommy's opinion.

"What the did you expect to see,"

asked the grouch.

"Well, bodies hanging in the wire to start with, and there ain't a one. Then some on the ground. But just look! There ain't a thing in sight!"

We all jumped up to peep in turn and it was a terrible disillusionment. Absolute quiet reigned all over. Our trenches were situated near the top of a hill, and we could look back behind our front line. Forward we could see a hundred yards ahead to a wall of sandbags and dirt — the German parapet.

There was not a moving thing, backward or ahead, except trees and grass swaying to a North Sea wind. The air was full of strange sounds ; aeroplanes on the wing, big battle planes, the smaller and speedier scouts; the sharp crack of a rifle or the whine of its ricochet; the lazy roar of a shell that now and then came our way, increasing its roar to a scream of rage as it reached the end of its journey and exploded with a crash, throwing up dirt or man in a great shower. Not a living thing could be found on the top of the ground, though. To go on the surface meant you would be "na poo" in a second. So we sat tight in our trenches and looked at No Man's Land through a periscope.

Imagine a river running from the North Sea to Switzerland. I know rivers don't run up hill, but just imagine it anyway, twisting and turning, narrowing and widening as all rivers do. Take for the banks of your river the parapets of the opposing armies and then you have No Man's Land. As a river, narrowing, sends its waters rushing through the channel, so does the fighting increase where No Man's Land narrows, until at night there is a continual flash over these parts. From afar you can pick out the narrow strips like you can pick the swift running parts of the river by the increasing roar of the waters.

Where No Man's Land widens then there, like on a river, you find peace and quiet, after a fashion, and live your life underground as best you can, happy and content that you are alive.

At night, from the rear, you can pick out the broader reaches of No Man's Land by the regular rise and fall of the flares, making no more noise than a river slipping quietly toward the sea.