plates, but they were impervious to ordinary rifle bullets. The Germans had the same kind and it was an ordinary practice for one and the other to shoot at the things now and then — for sighting-in purposes or just for the fun of ringing the bell.
So, when a bullet pinged against the plate, no one paid any attention. Soon another one came and still another. By this time we were beginning to wonder just what it was all about. Suddenly, someone let out a shout and pointed to the plate. Say; that fellow could certainly shoot, and it is too bad he never saw that group. There were three holes through the plate and all would have been covered by a three-inch circle. Just by luck — nothing else — none of us was right in line and the bullets had gone on and over the parados, which was very low at that point. We quickly piled up some sandbags in the rear to catch the next one, but that was all for the day. Some of the men did get one or two of the bullets later on and I salvaged one from the loophole of another gun emplacement. This was one of the very few real souvenirs I brought back. It was very ably described by Captain Crossman in an article in the Scientific American. It consisted of a solid core of very hard steel, about twenty-five calibre, wrapped in a sheet of soft lead and the whole thing encased in what appeared to be the ordinary cupro- nickle jacket of the service bullet. The jacket of the one I saved was so badly broken up that I cannot be sure about this point and, although I saw one or two others that were recovered, intact, from the sand-bags, I have no distinct recollection of them. Of course, we immediately banked up plenty of sand-bags behind all those plates and that was that.
Upon reporting this business, our people started in to find some way of getting even. They perfected their own armor-piercing bullets, but I personally, never saw one or used them. Later on, when the tanks became common, they found considerable need for them, but it just happened that my Section never had any available while I was with the outfit.
But I did see a lot of “elephant rifles” brought up and issued to be used on Heinie’s loop-holes. And while I had plenty of chances to try out these heavy, double-barreled guns, for some reason or other — strange as it seems, even to myself now — I did not care enough about it at the time to even look them over carefully. Guess I was so completely immersed in my own machine-gun and sniping work that I had no room in my single-track mind for anything else at that time. Whether or not those big, double guns did any effective work, I don’t know. It was just one of the many little side-issues, like bringing dogs in to kill off the rats.
Yes, they actually did that very thing — brought in dogs to kill off the trench rats — because I was right on the spot when the first dog happened to be brought into our sector and I saw the tragic ending to what started off to be a bit of harmless excitement and fun. Might as well ramble around a bit and tell about it right here, because this story I am telling you has rambled around from beginning to end anyhow.
About three hundred yards behind our front line position was a small creek or “beek” as it is called in Flemish. This one happened to be the Ballartbeek. It was narrow, perhaps twenty feet wide, but deep, and was lined on both sides with a fringe of small bushes and the inevitable willows which are found everywhere in that part of the world, especially along the hedge-rows and water-courses — usually “polled,” that is, with the tops cut off, so they never get very high but are thick with branches down toward the base, thus offering the very best of concealment.
Now, we had picked out a well hidden spot amongst these thick willow trees and had established a little, private, ammunition dump or cache there. At the time, we had accumulated some sixty or seventy thousand rounds of “honest-to-God” machine gun ammunition, and we kept a pretty close eye on it, too.
I have to run off the track every now and then to explain these things because of the fact that a lot of the people who will read this have not had the opportunity to learn, at first hand, many of the things
This is just to mention a few of the things that make the difference between good ammunition and the other kind. There were several brands made by the old, established companies and some of the Government Arsenals that were really up to standard and could be depended upon to function properly at all times and when we came upon any of these particular brands, we made it a point to hide out all we could for use in emergency, shooting the other stuff at odd times when we had plenty of time to clear out jams and replace broken extractors and such things.
This particular dump, or as we Canadians called it, “cache,” was filled with all the good machine gun ammunition we had been able to “accumulate” during the past two months. In previous years I had often “accumulated” ammunition at Camp Perry so the practice came in good stead in those days, and I generally thought of the cases I had lugged off back there in Ohio. (Where all firing stopped at six o’clock. Here it kept up all during the night, however.) One of our communication trenches ran right close to our cache and when we could grab off a case of good ammunition we would slip right over and hide it away with the rest. The communication trench had been constructed so that the crossing of the creek was under cover. It was merely a bridge of “duck-boards” with a support or “bent” in the middle, but sufficiently strong to carry a single line of men.
Four of our men (from the Machine Gun Section) were at the ammunition cache, putting in a couple of cases which we had acquired that day. We got it when and where we could and if some of the infantry companies in the immediate vicinity found themselves short of their allotment, well — never mind — we usually managed to replace what we took with an equal amount of the other stuff, which would work all right in the rifles, and they never knew the difference.
About this time there happened to be a party of newcomers walk down the communication trench, and the odd thing about it was that one of the crowd, an officer, was carrying a dog in his arms. He was a pretty little dog and everyone stopped to look at him and wonder “how come” because we knew it must have taken especial permission to bring him in, dogs being strictly “taboo” in our lines. I have learned all about the “war-dogs” during the years since the war — just as I have learned about the phenomenal pistol shooting of my former associates on the plains — through the medium of the movies. It makes me ashamed of myself, who had ranged the West, from Mexico to Canada during the last forty years or so, that I never learned how to “fan” a gun or to shoot a man in any particular spot on the short notice that was generally given when any shooting was necessary. Well, that’s the way it goes — live and learn.
Just as the officer carrying the dog came to the bridge, a big rat scampered out from under his feet and took a nosedive into the creek. Those rats seemed to be a cross between ordinary rats and muskrats. They were as much at home in the water as on land. (Aside: we had to be the same way, so they may have learned it by the same method we did — by force of circumstances.) Anyway, just as the officer (I never did know his name or rank) had turned to pass the word to his men to keep low and string out a little while crossing, the dog saw the rat and, being the kind of dog he was, immediately started after it. Jumping from his master’s arms, he landed on the bridge and bounced from there into the water, after the rat which was making good time up stream toward the place where our men were hiding the ammunition.
I was just coming down to see how the boys were getting along and was in time to witness the “tragical farce,” if you understand what I mean. With never a thought for anything else, the officer and the men at the head of the column, started after that rat. Up along the shore they raced, right out into the open, where all Germany could see them, trying to spear that rat with bayonets. Thomas (he was in charge of our detail) shouted, “down! down you blighters!” — and more expressive names — “down! Oh, for the love of Christ, have ye no sense? You’ll have those Dutchmen shellin’ us in a minute.” He and the others of our crowd tried to stop the rush and seeing me, as I just then arrived on the scene, ran over to me. I, too, knew what it meant and took them back into the comparative shelter of the trench, then went out and tried to hammer some sense, by word of mouth, into the excited rat hunters. But it was no use; they had the hunting fever and were determined to get that rat. A few weeks later they would have been accustomed to having the vermin crawling all over them in the dugouts, at night, but they were new to the war game and did not know that.
In less than a minute, here came the whiz-bangs, bursting with terrible accuracy over the whole area. Heinie knew all about that place, so used nothing but shrapnel. Men went sprawling into the creek and beside it, while the long line in the trench took shelter as best they could. It lasted only a few minutes but at least a dozen men were
