further losses in men.
However, we spent a month more or less in getting all this mess cleaned up and trenches that would again shelter us, and just about the end of it an incident occurred which changed my ideas regarding the war. Up until this time I had taken the war as a more or less impersonal affair and had not gone out of my way to look for trouble or for someone to kill. But on November 14th, a German sniper killed Charlie Wendt, one of my own boys. This put me on the warpath right.
During October the only casualties amongst the machine gunners had been three wounded; MacNab, Redpath and Lee all being hit on the same day and all three being invalided back to Blighty. At that stage of the game it was not considered the sporting thing to be carried out if one could by any means “carry on,” and all three of these chaps put up a great howl when they found they would have to leave the outfit. Later on, this attitude changed and a “Blighty” was just about the very finest thing a man could imagine or want, and the loss of a hand or a foot was not considered a bit too much to pay to get out of the hell one was going through. None of us thought very much about our casualties up to this time.
The weather was setting in bad and during the worse spells of it very little sniping went on, so we often went in and out of the lines by the “overland” route in broad daylight. This November 14th came on Sunday and it was just such an occasion for overland travel. The rain delayed the Twentieth Battalion from relieving us until about noon time. The trenches were crowded with troops and the going so bad that I talked it over with my crowd and we decided to save several hours time by going out down the open road. All hands voted for it, so I started first and had the others follow at fifty-yard intervals. Our route was in plain sight of the German lines, and we got well out under cover of a small hill without a single shot being fired at us. From here on out, we were practically safe, as the ground was partially screened with bushes and trees, so the bulk of the party went right on out across this covered ground. But Charlie Wendt and I stopped at this small hill to arrange about the relief of a gun crew I had stationed there. Charlie stayed with me a few minutes and then went on by himself, saying he would meet me at the redoubt farther out. I continued my talk with Endersby, the man in charge of the gun, and all at once heard Charlie calling “Oh, Mac,” and looked out to see him lying on the ground about a hundred yards off, shot through the abdomen.
Endersby and I both ran to him and while he ran back and telephoned for stretcher bearers, I bandaged the wound. Charlie Wendt was a very strong, clean living young man, and I really thought that despite the serious nature of the wound he would pull through. He did not think so, but did not make the slightest outcry, merely kept saying that “everything is all right.” Finally he asked me to get about ten of them for him and I told him that I would do it.
Meanwhile, this sniper kept up a continuous fire at us, hitting everything in the neighborhood but what he was shooting at. It was a miserable exhibition of shooting, too; the range was only about 500 yards and in clear daylight, and I told Charlie I would be ashamed to have such a rotten shot in our outfit. The shot which had hit Charlie was undoubtedly just a lucky one. At last I tried to drag him into a depression and out of sight, but it hurt him so I gave up and waited for the stretcher bearers. As they came up I made them crawl to us and we managed to get Charlie where they could change him to a long litter and carry him out right. The last thing he said to me was that everything was all right and not to worry. And on the way out that German kept slamming away at me as long as I was in sight, and missing by twenty or thirty feet most of the time.
Next day we learned that Charlie had died and was buried down at Bailleul. He was the first one we had killed out of the Machine Gun Section and was one of the most popular men we had. All hands felt very much depressed at his death and I got a permit and went down to Bailleul to see that he had been properly buried. Within five minutes the Graves Registration Commission had me alongside his grave.
I want to add a little more to this personal history of Charlie Wendt. His name would seem to indicate that either himself or his forbears came from some place over the Rhine. That may be true. His next of kin lived, at that time, at Niagara Falls, Ontario. For Charlie, himself, I can only say that no man ever showed more sincere loyalty to King and Country than he. He inscribed a large Maple Leaf in our quarters at Captain’s Post. He must have been an artist or, at least, a stone mason with artistic tendencies. He chiseled that token in the stone and bricks of that wall — and I wish I could have it now, in my own house: for, of all the names inscribed thereon, mine is the only one of a living person.
I came back from the visit to Charlie’s grave and began to plan ways and means of “getting” those ten Germans I had promised him. Up to that time I had been taking the war as a sort of a lark. Keenly interested as I was in every phase of warfare, I was really enjoying the experience. Now, the matter had become personal. My particular gun crew was made up entirely of youngsters; some of them had enlisted at sixteen and not one of them was of voting age. And now they had killed one of them. It was fair enough, this shooting of Charlie. We had elected to go out overland, rather than take a long, roundabout course where we would have had the protection of trenches, and he had been hit. Fair enough. But that did not prevent me from going out to collect a few scalps to, as the Indians say, “cover his grave.” So, although we were going back to the reserve line for a week, I had no difficulty in getting permission to stay up there and go to work on them. As a matter of fact, I was allowed to do just about as I liked in those days.
And just about that time, actually it happened on the 27th of the month, this same sniper — at any rate I took it to be the same — shot down several of our unarmed stretcher bearers. At this time, our ration parties had been going out before daylight, as we could not use the communication trench and they had to cross the open and exposed ground behind our line. This morning, the two men who comprised the ration party, Dupuis and Lanning, were a bit late, so it was light when they got started. About fifty yards to our rear was a bend in the road called Devil’s Elbow and from this point on they were in plain sight of the Germans. As soon as they reached this bend, the sniper fired and shot Lanning through the lungs. Dupuis got down to assist him and was then shot through the head, being instantly killed. So far, all right, these fellows had taken their chance and lost.
But some stretcher bearers from our pipe band were only a few yards away and as the second man went down one of these Scotties rushed out to carry them in. He was instantly shot down, as were the next three who promptly went out to do their duty. Then an officer got there and stopped anyone else from going out; he finally, by crawling down a shallow ditch managed to pull the bodies under cover. Four were dead and two wounded, one of the latter dying a few hours later. Six hits at a range of about one hundred yards, from which distance it was easy to see the broad white brassard of the Red Cross conspicuously displayed on the sleeves of those four bandsmen- stretcher-bearers.
Then and there I made a solemn vow that Charlie Wendt and these men:
“should go to their God in State:
With fifty file of Germans,
to open them Heaven’s gate.”
Chapter 6. Record Scores
DURING the time we had been in training in Canada and England I had never seen a telescope sight or known of any definite attempt to train men in its use. Nor had I known of any school for deliberate sniping. But one day in September I was scouting around in back of our lines opposite Messines Ridge looking for suitable places to install strafing posts for our machine guns, and I ran into a sniping post, manned by an officer and two snipers from the Buffs. This was the first I had known of any attempt on our part at sniping, and being highly interested in anything of that sort I naturally stuck around. I stayed there for a couple of hours, but what I saw being done did not get me any too highly excited over that type of sniping.
These fellows from the Buffs were using the ordinary, short Lee-Enfield rifles, upon which they had mounted telescopes made by “Stanley-London.” These scopes were short, brass tubes, about ten inches long and three- quarters inch diameter; they had a device for changing elevation, but no method of making lateral corrections, and for windage you simply had to hold off. I do not happen to remember the power, but recollect that the field was very limited although visibility was excellent. As they were so far behind our lines, it had not been necessary for them to construct any elaborate shelter nor to exercise any particular care to avoid observation. All they had done was to dig a chamber out of one of the sides of an old disused communication trench and throw a few boughs over the top.
