The only instance that came under my personal observation, where opposing troops actually used the bayonet,
Glorious? Yes, it was all that,
It was on the Somme that the Canadians first came into contact with the Australians. Of course we had often seen individuals, here and there, on leave in London and elsewhere, but had never seen them as an organized force, at the front.
Now, there is something I have never been able to understand about that ANZAC bunch (Australia-New Zealand Army Corps). While they all came from “down under” and were incorporated in the same corps, there was a vast difference between the men from the two countries. With the New Zealanders, as with the South Africans, the Canadians were always on the best of terms, but Canadians and Australians always seemed to antagonize one another. Many a bitter and bloody fight has been staged back of the lines between detachments of the two factions when they happened to meet — at some
Before coming to France, as the world knows, the ANZACS had taken a tough dose of punishment at the Dardanelles, where so far as I know, they did a very good job. The task set them there was simply impossible but they acquitted themselves admirably. After being withdrawn from the Eastern theatre and having had a long period of needed rest, they were sent to France, where they were assigned to the Vimy Ridge sector, which the French, after months of desperate fighting, had finally succeeded in wresting from the Germans, but their unlucky star seemed to follow them, as they very quickly lost the position, which remained in the enemy’s hands until retaken and definitely held by the Canadians in April, 1917.
Their next assignment was in the big Somme Battle and they had been hammering at the Germans in the vicinity of Pozieres for several weeks, making some small gains but unable to accomplish anything that could be called a real advance. Their losses were very heavy — as they were everywhere. Their failure to get anywhere was certainly not because they did not try, but the fact remains that when they turned the position over, the Canadians, within two hours, had pushed the enemy back farther than the Aussies had been able to do in a month. It is all a matter of history and I do not need to dwell upon it.
So far, I have spoken of it as “The Somme.” Perhaps I should explain that, while this whole great battle has been so described, the particular region in which we (the Canadians) operated was really not on or along the Somme River, proper, but on one of its tributaries — the Ancre. But that is the way of battles on the grand scale. They are usually designated by some feature of the terrain, a city or a river or a mountain, but, due to the extensive character of the operation, probably spread out for many miles on either side. Just compare some of the “major engagements” of the World War with other, previous, great battles of history. Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Antietam, Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain combined, supposing that entirely different troops, on both sides, participated in them, did not have as many men engaged as this Somme Battle, and it, in turn, was dwarfed by many of the later battles. And when it comes to artillery fire — well, you might as well throw up your hands. In many of the big battles more weight in shells was thrown within a period of twenty-four hours than during the whole Civil War or by Napoleon’s aggregated armies during all the years he was running wild over Europe. If my memory serves me right, the Japanese, at the Yalu, had a front of some thirty miles and something like two hundred thousand men engaged. That was probably the record up to the time of the later unpleasantness, but it looks small as compared with the later figures.
I have no authentic records of the numbers engaged nor the mileage of the fronts during the last year of the war, but, even in 1916, at the time of which I am writing, Rawlinson’s Fourth Army had four hundred thousand combat troops and I suppose the French, who were also in it, on our right, had as many more, and the
Chapter 14. My Final Score
I WAS in neither at the beginning nor at the end of the fighting on the Somme. During the early part of it I was “down the line,” involved in the hazards that frequently beset a man once he has been detached from his unit. I had been detached after we had come out of the line in the vicinity of Hill 60. It was not a bad time to leave, in a way: The war was picking up; I had had the satisfaction of hearing a real barrage, coming from the right side; and we had been introduced into a real trench-system, which was a welcome novelty after the muskrat holes of St. Eloi. On the second attempt, after going back to the relief of the Twenty-seventh, we succeeded in getting out, and I was advised that I had been commissioned. I was ordered back to England and was there attached to the staff of our training-camp at Sandling.
I soon began wriggling out of this instructor’s job. It required a lot of wriggling. First, I was side-tracked into a job conducting troops to France. Then they let me stay on the right side of the Channel, but put me on despatch work between various headquarters. From this, I graduated to court-martial and other duties at Le Havre and Rouen. Finally, the big battle well under way, room was made up front, and I was ordered to report again to the Fourth Brigade. I missed my train and found myself too far southward, as elsewhere recorded. But it was the front; so I joined the Gloucestershires for a scrap before proceeding northward to find the Second Division. Here I learned of the work of the Twenty-first Battalion about Courcelette. And I learned also that during this fighting, Bouchard and several others of my old section had been killed. In my new capacity, I was no longer with the section and was, moreover, decidedly busy, for the fight was still going on. But I got what information I could and on several nights went over the scene of the fighting in which my old comrades had been killed. On the last of these night-excursions, having previously located the remains of my old friends as best I could, I set out to mark their graves. I awoke some days later in a hospital at St. Pol, fifty miles away.
So I was again out of it, off on the circuit of hospitals, convalescent homes and medical boards, in France and England, which led at last to my being marked fit for duty.
Duty this time took the form of commanding a pack-train. This sounds familiar enough to many a Westerner. But it was not at all like pushing into the wilderness or jogging contentedly and leisurely — however laboriously — up hill and down on a mountain-trail, stopping at nightfall, enjoying the view and a good breakfast in the morning. We began work at nightfall — and had to be finished by daylight — and we had such pack-animals as we could get, mostly horses.
This work had been started while I was away. It had become necessary during the latter stages of the battle — which lasted from early July to late October — because the front lines were far advanced, separated from the furthest reach of motor-transport by a trackless morass of shell-holes and barbed wire, cut by battered trenches, old gun-pits and dugouts, and strewn with the usual debris of battle. By day it was a desolate waste, inhabited, if at all, by dwellers underground or under other cover when this was available; or small detachments of engineers, artillerymen, pioneers — all about their various business of maintaining communications, establishing lines of transportation, new battery emplacements, etc. They moved cautiously by day, looking over the ground, and at night they directed the work of various labor details. Sometimes, for hundreds of yards in these areas, there was no sign of life, save perhaps a solitary signaller sitting at the top of a battered dugout, like a prairie-dog on its mound.
At night the place stirred with life; but it was isolated, detached, like men adrift on an uncharted sea. No one
