A Rifleman Went to War

incredible symphony, beginning in a tedious, endless and uncertain overture, mounting through countless variations, and ending, for many of us, not in a final, crashing crescendo, but in nothing. We were picked up and thrown out and we can’t even recall what it was like. I should like to hear a barrage again, a real decent barrage.

I might well have been considered an old soldier (on the range and parade-ground) when I began. I was equipped to act and shoot, and I was eager for the fray. After the long preliminaries, I soon got into it, and I found no trouble in being of service. But I didn’t have time — or capacity — to see what was happening. (The High Command didn’t either.) We were all enthusiastic and purposeful. We went in with our rifles and machine guns and fought, and had a great time. Then suddenly, we didn’t know just what we were doing. The war was a good deal bigger than any one of us. Well, I know when this reaction struck me. It was during one of the periods of inaction in London. Prior to that time, I had never given a serious thought to the matter of surviving — or of dying. I didn’t then. But I was not keen as I had been. The war was not staged for my entertainment. But I had had, largely, entertainment out of it. There was something else — a great deal more. I didn’t analyze it, but just sort of collapsed under it.

Now, I find the same sort of lethargy assailing me when it comes time to relate the incidents leading up to my final months of war.

Coming back from England and walking right into that Somme fight, I tried to, and think that I did, do some of the best and most useful work that was permitted me during the whole period of my service. The fight at Combles, alone, was just about the best. Just a scratch crew; made up of volunteers of the Ox and Bucks — and some few of the Warwicks — with me, a rank outsider — a Colonial — well: the French appreciated it, anyway, and several of our crowd received individual medals for it, whether or not our own people ever made it a matter of record. The Frenchmen, with their 37 mm guns, shooting right into the port-holes of the German M.G. emplacements, while, at the same time, we were working around the left flank and pouring bullets into the back door. That’s what took Combles and don’t you ever let anyone try to tell you differently.

But, I found that I was weakening. Not that I allowed anyone else to see it but, right down in my heart, I felt that the game was over, so far as I was concerned. And, right here, before I forget it, I want to rise up and propose three rousing cheers for those who stuck it out and played the game all through the full four years. They are better men than I am and I take off my hat to them.

During those last few months, the whole world took on, for me, a grotesque and bizarre appearance. Nothing was normal: we were all just living in some peculiar place, outside the pale of the commonly-accepted conventions. What we did, when back of the lines, was probably contrary to all the generally-accepted rules and regulations of ordinary human intercourse. I make no apologies — not for myself or any of the others — for I feel that none is needed. Men and women were either uplifted to a higher plane of thought or dragged down to a lower — you may take your choice — but the result was just exactly the same, in either case. We were just human beings, endeavoring to enjoy the pleasures and passions of the human race for the short time allotted us before we, too, were cut down by the scythe of the gaunt old spectre — Death.

As a rifleman, I did exactly nothing during the months in between the end of the Somme battle and the time when I was finally discarded as “no longer fit for duty,” in 1917, but I hope that, as an officer, I did manage to do a little good.

For more than a year I had managed to keep out of hospitals. Though several times hit, sustaining injuries which would have been considered good “Blightys,” I just had a notion that I could hang on until the one came along that would finish the whole business for me. Please do not mistake me. This was not any particular bravery on my part — I went back to war to get killed, if you want to know the low-down on it — never had the slightest idea that I would not “go West.” But the joke was on me. It didn’t happen that way and, after taking seven clips on the jaw, I finally found myself in the custody of the R.A.M.C. No, that does not mean “Rob All My Comrades,” as some would have you believe: it is just the “Royal Army Medical Corps” — God bless ’em.

I got to know the hospitals pretty well. From the North Chimneys (dressing station), in Albert, through the Field Hospital at Brickfields, thence through Warloy, Frevent, St. Pol, on to Le Treport and, eventually, to England — Queen Alexandra’s Hospital, Miss Pollack’s — yes: I was quite a well known case. Seemed like, when you got the first one, you were bound to get some more. However, I got back in time to do my little bit in getting the boys ready for the Vimy Ridge affair. On the day they won that fight, I was aboard a ship, sailing for New York. All I did after that time was to mess around a lot of camps — Ft. Benjamin Harrison, Camp Shelby and Camp Perry most of the time — trying to do some good but still laboring under the curse of infelicity that did not leave me for several years after peace had been declared.

I am just a plain, ordinary Hoosier. I do not recall that I had any particularly intense inner feelings while under fire. I was always busy and managed to keep my mind concentrated on the work in hand. There were numerous occasions, however, when the actions of others did awaken within me a feeling — well, I can’t describe it but it is just the same feeling I now experience when I hear a fife and drum corps and see the old flag coming down the street, followed by the straggling remnant of the real “old soldiers”: the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic. One such occasion was when the Gordons came in with their pipers; another, during the battle of Sanctuary Wood, when our artillery drivers were thundering down the road past our trenches, in plain sight and under direct fire of the German guns. Oh, man! that was a sight to do your heart good. It was just like the pictures of artillery going into action in the old days and, I suppose, very much like many of the things that really happened during the retreat from Mons.

We were right in front of an old chateau — Chateau Segard it was called — just a little way from the road crossing at Kruisstraathoeck, and the Germans had the range perfectly. They would make a hit now and then, and horses, men and limbers went into the ditch, but that never made any difference with the rest. They continued to “carry on.” Hell bent for ’lection, they went: shells bursting all around them; drivers, standing in the stirrups and lashing the horses and the limbers bouncing up and down over the shell-torn road. We forgot everything else and jumped up out of the trenches and cheered and cheered as they went by. All day that Sunday they kept it up, taking ammunition to the guns that were now far advanced beyond the usual artillery positions due to the fact that the enemy had forced our front line back some seven hundred yards and we were backed up against our G.H.Q. line. (We took it all back a week or so later.)

For my friends, as they fell, I sincerely did grieve but I am afraid that it was mostly a selfish feeling. I grieved at my own loss, not for them. Many times, since the war, have I been sorry that I did not “get mine,” so I could rest peacefully with them under the poppies. This was the old feeling — of being spent. I begin to see, now, what it was about: When the excitement was over, there remained the serious business of winning the war; we had had our fun and I began to see what we were paying for it. How much of the business was bungling — and how many lives sacrificed to it?

Well, this is post mortem. To get back to our feelings at the time: I have said enough of mine. There were some millions of others. They fall, of course, more or less into types: from the naturally nervous member who was probably considerately dropped as “shell-shocked” or, as they had it in the Canadian service, “on compassionate grounds,” to the stolid, phlegmatic individual who never bats an eye or shows any visible evidence that he “cares a damn” what happens to him. Between these two extremes are the great number who, in one manner or another, for one complex reason or another, “carry on” with the work in hand.

Recently there has been published a story in Adventure, written by a member of the Mounted Rifles, which I consider the very best and most vividly realistic war story I have read. However, I must emphatically disagree with the writer regarding one matter. He dwells considerably upon his mental anguish and all that and takes the ground that those who do not feel — and who do not show, by visible signs that they feel — the same way, are more or less dullards, devoid of the finer instincts that sway him. If his story is a true one and he was only sixteen when he enlisted, we can set it down to youthful inexperience.

I have known many men of the very highest mental calibre and fine sensibilities who have gone through the hell-fire of many battles without showing, by word or act, the slightest sign of mental perturbation. In memory of a good friend and a gallant officer, I mention one by name: Lieutenant-Colonel Elmer Watson Jones, D.S.O., killed in action, August 8, 1918, in the Battle of Amiens, after having been previously wounded during the attack on Vimy Ridge, in April, 1917.

To understand anything of the individual reactions of the soldier it is necessary to have lived with him, to have drunk and talked with him in barracks and billets, to have known him in the mass; and then to have experienced the conditions under which he lives — and dies — as he moves toward the front — and takes the front with him. It would be fine to stay in billets for a week, but let us hurry on toward the sound of shells, observing him