A Rifleman Went to War

time and patience of the members of the Board and had to leave it with an unfinished run of some ten thousand rounds without a stoppage or malfunction. I was present at that last test, and that may have had something to do with my attitude toward the ugly brute.

Still, I can say that my experience in France, as well as that of others of my acquaintance, only tended towards verifying the findings and opinion of our ordnance board. Those of us who were fortunate enough to be armed with the .45 Colt Automatic found it to be a sufficient and dependable arm in every respect. Let me repeat that I have never had a failure to function properly while in action nor did I ever hear or know of any such failure occurring with any of my associates or acquaintances. After I came back from the battlefield I commenced to hear of a great many instances in which the gun supposedly gave trouble, but these were invariably told by persons not in the army or whose line of duty was such as to preclude their ever having actually participated in real fighting, or even front-line service for that matter.

Furthermore, I did not consider the automatic pistol to need any special care or attention to keep it in serviceable condition. We had trouble enough with all our firearms for that matter, and any rifle, machine gun, revolver or pistol had to be looked to daily to keep the mud and dirt out of its action and bore. If anything, our one-hand guns were a bit easier to keep in proper shape than the others, because they remained in a holster or inside pocket of a tunic and were not laid down on the ground or exposed to the elements very often. Any military firearm requires daily attention and care to keep it in proper readiness for instant use and neither pistol nor revolver is any exception to this standing rule.

For extremely accurate target shooting and for what I may call comfortable, peace-time pistol practice, there are many revolvers and single-shot target pistols — not forgetting the little .22 caliber automatics — which are more desirable than the .45 Automatic. But when you go to war, you want a regular “he-man” gun with a WALLOP.

Chapter 11. The Battle of St. Eloi

ALONG in February, 1916 business began to pick up a bit and we soon entered upon what turned out to be a continuous engagement — running along until June. The Battle of the Bluff, which started the latter part of February, carried on into March. Then began the St. Eloi scrap which, considering the small bit of line involved, was one of the nastiest and most hard-fought “minor” actions on record. From the 27th of March until late in May, it was a continuous dog fight for possession of what was known as “The Mound”, a dominating height at the extreme southern end of the Ypres salient, in what had been the village of St. Eloi. I remember that, in writing home to my father, himself a veteran of the Civil War, I quoted Kit Carson’s famous remark, “lovely fighting all along the line, go in anywhere”. That described it, exactly. Plenty of action for all. Artillery, machine guns, rifles and grenades — all had their innings, every day and night.

The ruckus started when our engineers blew a series of six great mines under the Mound — which was, at that time, occupied by the enemy — and the Northumbrian Division, consisting of the Northumberland Fusiliers, the Royal Fusiliers and the Yorkshire Regiment, swarmed over and occupied the craters and some of the ground beyond and tried to consolidate it. They were soon relieved by a Scottish Division, consisting of Royal Scots and Gordons. The Argyll and Sutherlands were also in there for a short time but the job was finally wished onto the Second Canadian Division (that was us), and we stuck around there until the finish. When the action started we were stationed adjoining and to the right of the Northumbrian Division, so all we had to do was to “side step” over to the left a little way to be right in it. We of the machine guns, however, had been in the fight from the start, but our infantry did not take over for a week or so after it commenced.

As this was our first real battle, the recollection of many of the things that happened there are much more vivid and distinct than those of many other, greater battles that came later. These latter were “just a little more of the same”, that was all; but it is a true saying that first impressions are the strongest, so I will probably have a good deal more to say about that St. Eloi affair than its real significance in the war may seem to warrant.

It was the evening of March 26, 1916. Two hundred Yorkshire men were coming down the communication trench. They were replacements for the Northumbrian Division, on the left, due to go over the top in an attack in the morning. I was standing at the mouth of the trench where they would enter the front line. The whiz-bangs were coming over from Germany and bursting all around, but we were so used to these that I paid no attention until I happened to notice that there appeared to be an unusual concentration of fire on that particular communication trench. It was only about four hundred yards long and, from my slightly elevated position, all in plain sight. It was just about dark — dusk, we call it — and the bursts of the shells were plainly visible. By this time the “fireflies” were so thick and continuous that I could not help noticing them, and mildly wondered what was going on. We had men whose duty it was to count and report the number of shells that fell on any area and it is a matter of record that more than one thousand shells burst in and over that short bit of trench in less than thirty minutes. The enemy evidently knew about that detachment coming in and tried to clean up on them. Pretty soon the head of the line came into the front line trench, lead by an old, grizzled, sergeant-major who waved them off to the left and, himself, stepped up beside me and dug up an old pipe which he proceeded to fill with shag. After getting the thing going, he straightened up and I ventured to remark: “pretty hot down there, wasn’t it?” He took a few puffs, to keep the pipe going and answered: “Aye: pretty good: gives the younguns an idea what they may expect on the morrow.”

That night we saw the Yorkshiremen sewing squares of white cloth on the backs of their tunics. It was the first time we had seen any such thing as “battle-colors.” Thereafter, they were universally used — but sewn on the sleeve, at the shoulder. The same practice was followed by the U.S. troops, when they came in — that is, the divisional insignia. With the Canadians, the system was such that you could tell, at a glance, not only the division, but the battalion to which the soldier belonged.

It seems a pity that the expression: “Over the Top” has been so cheapened — yes, desecrated — by thoughtless or ignorant civilians. To the soldier it is an event of the most tremendous meaning: the very apotheosis of war. To endure the tense hour of waiting the “zero” and then, in the gray dawn and amid the thunderbolts of steel and the sleet of bullets, to climb up and advance — well, it requires something more than the willingness to buy a Liberty bond or subscribe to a Community Chest fund.

The battle opened with the exploding of the six great mines simultaneously. It was a magnificent spectacle for those of us who were in position to view it. To the enemy it must have been something beyond any descriptive effort, as the mines were laid in a line that cut off a large comer or salient of their line and took in their first and second lines for a distance of some six hundred yards. Whatever force they had in those trenches was simply annihilated.

The Fusiliers and Yorks promptly advanced to a point beyond the craters and started vigorously to work to consolidate the position by reversing parts of the German third line trench and connecting it up with our original front line. They made a brave effort but were unable to complete the work under the overwhelming concentration of artillery. All during that day and for many succeeding days, attacks and counterattacks followed one another, continuously.

Any attempt to relate, chronologically, the progress of the battle, would be futile. It was the same thing, over and over with first one side and then the other holding the dominating positions.

I was in charge of a number of machine guns which had been brought up to support the advance. Our job was to lay a barrage which would harass and impede the progress of reinforcements which the enemy would send up, and in order to do this effectively it was necessary to mount the guns on the parapet with little or no protection, as all our regular, permanent, gun emplacements were designed for defense only, and commanded nothing beyond the no-man’s-land between the opposing front line trenches. It was all indirect fire, of course, but I had worked out the firing data the previous night, and we, later, had the testimony of prisoners to the effect that the machine gun barrage was decidedly efficient — far worse, they said, than that of our artillery.

This is not difficult to understand — that is, if one has a general knowledge of the methods of artillery fire. When a barrage starts, if it does not get you right then, you can nearly always tell just what sort of an operation they are intending. All artillery work, just the same as other tactical operations, has been very carefully figured out beforehand. A certain area of enemy territory is to be swept by each battery. The rate of fire has been calculated,