A Rifleman Went to War

“Register HORROR” or something like that. Damn it; they just don’t do it. Of course, I do not know anything about the young German soldiers, but I am giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they were just as good in that respect as the soldiers of other nations.

I have seen a brother bringing his twin out of the line, ripped from shoulder to buttocks by a steel shard from a “wooly bear” shell. Did he look like anything I have seen in the pictures? He did not. He bore the uncertain but hopeful expression which any of us would probably show if one of our blood brethren should be knocked down by a “hit and run” driver. “Got to get Bob out; he’s hit pretty bad,” was all he said.

“Here, son; a jolt of rum won’t do either one of you any harm right now,” says I. Both of these boys were teetotalers and the star athletic performers of our Battalion. The blonde one, he was doing the carrying, spoke to his brother. What they said, I do not know. The other was very seriously hurt and was losing blood at an alarming rate.

“All right,” he said: “let us have it.”

I poured each of them a generous slug of rum and made them swallow it at one gulp. “Medicine,” I said, “take it all at once.”

And they did. And I am glad to say that both of them are now living although they have two blesse stripes apiece.

If any of us felt any particular emotion on that day when we first went into the line, it was very successfully concealed under the usual “grousing” and joshing. “Bet I get the first shot,” was George Paudash’s last word to me. “Like hell, you will,” says I. That’s about all the sentiment or “heart-throb” stuff you could find in that outfit.

Chapter 4. Flanders

OUR Battalion Headquarters was in an old cabaret along the road leading from Neuve Eglise to Ploegsteert (corrupted to “Plugstreet” by the soldiers) and the way from there up to the front line was through a communication trench known as “Surrey Lane,” as it had been constructed by the Surrey Regiment whom we were relieving. The entrance to the trench was in a little orchard, just behind the cabaret. Just as we were about to start into the trench, a man from the “Buffs” came over and was talking to one of our men when sput — he looked around in a vague, questioning sort of manner and dropped to the ground, groped around with his hands, then straightened out — and died. A stray bullet had hit him, right through the heart. Another of the Buffs, who were being relieved the same day, ran over and dragged the body back to the shelter of the building. “There goes Will,” he said, “out since Mons and never did learn to take cover; w’y ’e was arskin’ for it, I s’y.”

That was our first experience in seeing a man actually killed in war but, curiously enough, it did not seem to affect our men very much. We had seen so many wounded men in England and listened to their stories of how things were going at the front that this was about what we expected.

So, we went in. It was a long way to the front line but nothing else happened to disturb us excepting the faint whisper of big shells, coming from miles behind our lines and consigned to points equally distant in “Germany.” Only the machine guns went in this day (it was a Sunday) and the infantry “took over” the next day. This was common practice and for very good reasons. The enemy was, at all times, very well informed as to our movements as the people of that part of Flanders were largely German sympathizers and had many and devious methods of conveying information across the lines. The machine guns, wherever we had anything like permanent trenches, were so situated as to cover all the ground in no-man’s-land and, as long as the guns were in position, they offered a pretty stiff obstacle to any attempted raid. If the infantry and Emma Gees were changing at the same time, it might offer an opening for an attack, but by first changing the guns, while the infantry stood watch, and then changing the infantry, after the new guns were in position, this menace was averted.

When we arrived at the front line, we were welcomed by the M.G. crews of the Surreys and, glory be — they had tea and biscuits and jam ready for us. Bless those boys. They were of the Old Contemptibles — the original Surreys, who had been right in the thick of things for more than a year and they knew we would be hungry after our long march. We had been moving so fast since leaving England that we had not had much time for eating and we were very thankful, indeed.

While sipping a can of tea, I was curiously watching a man who was standing against the parapet, looking through a large periscope which was built up against the wall, with the top cleverly concealed in the ragged edges of the sandbags. After a while he moved over a few feet and took hold of a queer contraption which looked like a rifle stock, and a moment later I heard a shot. I then saw that the thing he was holding was, in reality, a skeleton rifle to which was attached a real rifle which was laid across the top of the parapet, the muzzle wrapped in a piece of sandbag and concealed, as was the periscope, by the irregular arrangement of the sandbags. Going over to him, I soon learned all about it. These things were common thereafter but that was the first time I had ever seen one. It was simply a device by which one could aim and fire over the parapet without exposing anything but the rifle itself. The sighting was done through a miniature periscope, the upper end of which was directly behind the bolt of the rifle and aligned with the sights, and the lower end in the position that would ordinarily be occupied by the rear sight. Connecting rods hooked up the dummy trigger on the skeleton frame with the trigger of the real rifle and a sort of crank arrangement was connected with the bolt.

The rifleman, seeing that I was interested, invited me to take a shot, first taking me over to the large periscope which he used for observation purposes and explaining to me that, “Them Wurtembergers over there are trying to fix up their parapet which our artillery knocked down this morning, and if you watch carefully you can get sight of a head now and then.” Taking out my binoculars, I applied them to the periscope. This was evidently a new one to the Surrey man, and when I turned the glasses over to him he was wildly enthusiastic and called to several of his companions to come and take a look. Field glasses or telescopes are just as useful when used in connection with a periscope as anywhere else but it had evidently never occurred to those fellows. With the glasses, we could see every movement over the top of the enemy trench, some three hundred yards across the way. For the most part, all we could see was the sand-bag coming up on top of the half rebuilt wall, but every now and then a head would be visible for an instant. At the others’ invitation, I took the rifle and, holding a careful aim on the point where we expected the next sand-bag to come up, I awaited his word. He was at the big periscope, with the binoculars and when he called out, “Now,” I shot. He said I hit the sand-bag. I don’t know about that but I am very sure that that was the first shot actually fired at an enemy by any member of the Twenty-first Battalion.

That was the start of our “rifleman in war.”

The first casualty in the Battalion occurred that night, when a scout named Boyer was killed on his initial trip out into no-man’s-land. Then the next day one Starkey decided that he could not see well enough with a periscope, so he took a look-see over the parapet. We buried the two of them in a garden back of the lines, where many others from the best and most famous British Line Regiments also lay.

Things had been very quiet in that sector before we came along, but just as soon as our infantry had taken over the position the Germans decided to give us a welcome. They knew just who we were and when we had taken positions, to an hour, as the rear was full of their spies. There had not been a bombardment at this point for several weeks, but the day after our infantry came in they put over a furious barrage of shells of both 77 m/m “whiz-bangs” and 5.9 (150 m/m) “crumps.” Considerable damage was done to our parapets and several men were seriously wounded. While this shelling was nothing compared to the bombardments they put over later on, we were deeply impressed at the time and it gave us an opportunity to make the acquaintance of the sound and effect of the various kinds of shells. But our trenches were shot up badly, necessitating much work with pick and shovel for the next few days, a thing which never went well with Canadians. I might say at this time that when we took over those trenches from the Buffs and Surreys, they were clean and dry and comfortable, as much work had been spent on them that summer. I am afraid we did not appreciate it at that time, but as I think back over the many trenches we held afterward, I must admit that this was the very finest one we ever occupied.

The Machine Gun Section came through these first few days in great shape, having but one man seriously wounded, he was an old U.S. Army man named Mangan who had served in the Philippines. After eight days of it, we were relieved by the Twentieth Battalion and we went back to Dranoutre for our first “rest.” We soon learned to dread these rests and would have much preferred to stay in the trenches, as it was then customary to move out everything, including one’s ammunition supplies. A month’s stay in the trench would have been preferable to having to lug all that stuff in and out so often.