"Crumps", The Plain Story Of A Canadian Who Went Part 6

I am writing this in an old Flemish farmhouse, and the room I'm sitting in has a carved rafter ceiling, red brick floor and nasty purple cabbage wallpaper. All the men of the house with the exception of the old man are at the war; one son has already died. The Germans have been through here.

They tied the mayor of the town to a tree and shot him. The trenches have been filled in, all the wreckage cleared, and they have a new mayor.

It is not yet 7 A.M. I am an orderly officer and have to take the men out for a run at six. I came back and bought a London "Daily Mail" of yesterday from a country-woman. We are at least three miles from the town, but they are enterprising enough to bring papers to us at this time in the morning. A "Daily Mail" costs four cents.

Since I last wrote I have been up to the front line. Everything is different from what you imagine. The German trenches are easily distinguished through gla.s.ses; their sand-bags are multi-colored. Shrapnel was bursting over ruins of an old town in their lines. When you look through a periscope at the wilderness, it is difficult to imagine that thousands of soldiers on both sides have burrowed themselves into the earth. The evidence of their alertness is shown by their snipers, who are always busy whenever the target is up.

A battery of eight-inch howitzers was opening fire. Our battery commander, hearing this, sent us up. The guns, big fellows, were well concealed. They were painted in protective colors and covered with screens of branches to prevent aerial observation. In the grounds all over the place were dug-outs, deep rabbit burrows, ten or twelve feet down, into which everybody went immediately. The Germans started their "hate." The firing is done by hand cord; other big guns are fired electrically. An enormous flash, an ear-splitting crash, a great sheet of flame from the muzzle, and two hundred pounds of steel is sent tearing through the air to the "Kultur" exponents. The whole gun lifts off the ground and runs back on its oil-compression springs. These guns are moved by their own caterpillar tractors which are kept somewhere close by. In three quarters of an hour they can get them started on the road. The ground for these emplacements was the orchard of a chateau. While we were there a whistle blew three times, an order shouted; immediately the guns were covered up and the men took cover. The enemy had sent an aeroplane to locate them. If they could once find them, hundreds of sh.e.l.ls would rain on this spot in a few minutes. At a few yards' distance I couldn't see the guns myself. The "Hows" were firing at a house in the German lines which had been giving trouble. In three rounds they got it and then started in to "dust" the neighborhood. Of course, the firing is indirect. The officers and men who are with the guns don't see the effects. Apparently they fire straight away in the air. The observation is done by the forward observing officer in the fire trenches who corrects them by 'phone.

After the appointed number of rounds had been fired, we adjourned to the chateau, a fine house, marble mantelpiece, plaster ceilings, gilt mirror panels, etc. It has still a few pieces of furniture left, no carpets, most of the windows are smashed; sh.e.l.ls have visited it, but chiefly in splinters. I saw one picture on the wall with a hole drilled in by a shrapnel bullet which had gone clean through as though it had been drilled. It hadn't smashed the gla.s.s otherwise. From a window of the room, which the officers use as a mess, a neat row of graves is to be seen.

Outside there are great sh.e.l.l holes, most of them big enough to bury a horse. Suddenly a shriek and a deafening explosion occurred in the garden.

"Sixty-pound shrapnel! Evening hate," said an artillery sub. We left! We had been sent up to see the guns fire and not to be fired at.

To go home we had to pa.s.s a village completely deserted, a village that was once prosperous, where people lived and traded and only wanted to be left alone. Now gra.s.s is growing in the streets. Shops have their merchandise strewn and rotting in all directions. On one fragment of a wall a family portrait was still hanging, and a woman's undergarments. A grand piano, and a perambulator tied in a knot were trying to get down through a coal chute. To wander through a village like this one that has been smashed up, and with the knowledge that the smas.h.i.+ng up may be continued any time, is thrilling. Churches are always hateful to the Germans. They sh.e.l.l them all; bits of the organs are wrapped around the tombstones, and coffins, bones and skulls are churned up into a great stew. In some of the villages a few of the inhabitants had stayed and traded with the soldiers. They lived in cellars usually and suffered terribly. British military police direct the traffic when there is any, and are stationed at crossroads with regular beats like a city policeman.

While traveling to another part of the line we had an opportunity of seeing the "Archies" (anti-aircraft guns) working. They were mounted on lorries and fire quite good-sized sh.e.l.ls. They fired about fifty shots at one Taube, but didn't register a bull. Later in the evening from a trench we had the satisfaction of seeing another aeroplane set on fire, burn, and drop into the German lines like a shot partridge. Aeroplanes are as common as birds. Yesterday a "Pfeil" (arrow) biplane came right over our lines and was chased off by our own machines. The enemy's aeroplanes have their iron cross painted on the underside of their wings and are more hawkish-looking than ours. They are more often used for reconnoitering and taking photographs than for dropping bombs.

We are being moved up closer to the firing line. I have been made billeting officer. I went to headquarters; a staff colonel showed me a subdivision on a map. "Go there and select a place for your unit." The place was a wretched village of about six houses, all of which are more or less smashed about, windows repaired with sacking and pieces of wood. All of the inhabitants have moved except those who are too poor. Every square inch is utilized. I managed to get a cow-shed for the officers. It looks comfortable. On the door I could just decipher, written in chalk, by some previous billeting officer,-

2 Staff Officers 6 Officers 2 Horses

Billeting chalk marks are on almost all the shops and houses up from the coast to the front.

The field which we are expecting to put the men into belonged to a miller who lived in a different area. We went to see him. He couldn't speak English or French, so I tried him with German. While we were talking, I noticed some non-coms watching us very intently and was not surprised to find one following us back down the road. When he saw our car he came up and apologized for having taken us for spies. They are looking for two Germans in our lines wearing British uniforms, who have given several gun positions away. Two days ago the enemy sh.e.l.led the road systematically on both sides for half a mile when an ammunition column was due. It was quite dark before we left; the sky was continually lit up by the star sh.e.l.ls, very pretty white rockets, which light up No Man's Land. The enemy has a very good kind which remains alight for several minutes.

Our days of comfortable billets are over, I am afraid. Unless you are working hard, it is miserable here,-wrecked towns, bad roads, sh.e.l.l holes, smells, dirt, soldiers, horses, trenches. The inhabitants are a poor, wretched lot. Many of them are thieves and spies. We are right in Belgium, where flies and smells are as varied as in the Orient.

Wherever we travel by day or night we are constantly challenged by sentries and have to produce our pa.s.ses. We stopped in one darkened sh.e.l.l-riddled town and knocked up an _estaminet_; we got a much finer meal than you can get at many places farther back. We talked to the woman who kept it and asked her if she slept in the cellar. "Oh, no! I sleep upstairs, they never bombard except at three in the morning or nine at night. Then I go into the cellar." This woman was a very pleasant, intelligent person, most probably a spy. Intelligent people generally leave the danger zone.

Marching through the sloughed-up mud, through sh.e.l.l holes filled with putrid water, amongst most depressing conditions, I saw a working party returning to their billets. They were wet through and wrapped up with scarves, wool helmets, and gloves. Over their clothes was a veneer of plastered mud. They marched along at a slow swing and in a mournful way sang-

"Left-Left-Left We-are-the tough Guys!"

Apparently there are no more words to this song because after a pause of a few beats they commenced again-

"Left-Left-Left-"

They looked exactly what they said they were.

Windmills, of which there are a good many, are only allowed to work under observation. It was found that they were often giving the enemy information, using the position of the sails to spell out codes in the same way as in semaph.o.r.e; clock-hands on church towers are also used in the same way.

I saw a pathetic sight to-day. A stretcher came by with a man painfully wounded; he was inclined to whimper; one of the stretcher-bearers said quietly to him, "Be British." He immediately straightened himself out and asked for a "f.a.g." He died that night.

We had a terrific bombardment last night; the ground shook all night and the sky was lit up for miles. The Boches used liquid fire on some new troops and we lost ground.

I found this piece of poetry on the wall of a smashed-up chateau, and I have copied it exactly as I found it. The writing was on a darkened wall, and while I copied it my guide held a torchlight up to it. The place pa.s.ses as "Dead Cow Farm" on all official maps.

I've traveled many journeys in my one score years and ten,"

And oft enjoyed the company of jovial fellow men, But of all the happy journeys none can compare to me With the Red-Cross special night express from the trenches to the sea.

"It's Bailleul, Boulogne, Blighty, that's the burden of the song, Oh, speed the train along.

If you've only half a stomach and you haven't got a knee, You'll choke your groans and try to shout the chorus after me.

Bailleul, Boulogne, and Blighty, dear old Blighty "cross the sea."

"Now some of us are mighty bad and some are wounded slight, And some will see their threescore years and some won't last the night, But the Red Cross train takes up the strain all in a minor key And sings Boulogne and Blighty as she rumbles to the sea.

"Oh, it's better than the trenches and it's better than the rain, It's better than the mud and stink; we're going home again, Though most of us have left some of us on the wrong side of the sea.

We are a lot of blooming cripples, but-downhearted? No, siree.

"There's a holy speed about this train for each of us can see That we will cross the s.h.i.+ning channel that lies 'twixt her and me To the one and only Blighty, our Blighty, 'cross the sea,'

Where the blooming Huns can never come, 'twixt her and home and me."

"Blighty" is the wound which sends a man home to England; it's a war word which came originally from the Indians, but now universally adopted in the new trench language.

I was walking along a trench when a man, who was sitting on a firestep looking up into a little trench mirror (which is used by putting the end of the bayonet between the gla.s.s and the frame), just crumpled up, shot through the heart. He didn't say a word. The trench had thinned out and the bullet had come through, nearly four feet down from the top of the parapet.

Bad sh.e.l.l fire this afternoon. Saw sh.e.l.ls churning things up seventy-five yards away; many pa.s.sed overhead; had a ride on my motor cycle with the other officers to reconnoiter the roads leading down to the part of the trenches we have taken over; road was sh.e.l.led as we came along. Two "coal boxes" hit the road and smashed up a cottage in front of us; we picked up pieces of the sh.e.l.l too hot to hold.

Our billet now is another large farm, with the pump in the center of the manure heap as usual; our machines are parked all round a field close to the hedges to make a smaller target and also to prevent aerial observation.

I went through a town this morning which has been on everybody's lips for months-I have never seen such devastation in my life; it baffles description. The San Francisco earthquake was a joke to this. Thousands and thousands of sh.e.l.ls have pummeled and smashed until very little remains besides wreckage. Most of the sh.e.l.ling has been done to deliberately destroy the objects of architectural value.

My quarters are in a loft amongst rags, old agricultural implements, sacks, and the acc.u.mulation of years of dirt; flies wake me up at daylight.

This morning I went for a drink in the _estaminet_ I have mentioned already. Two sh.e.l.ls have been through the sides of the house since we were last there, but they both came through at the usual scheduled time.

This poor country is pockmarked with sh.e.l.l craters like a great country with a skin disease. Trees have been splintered worse than any storm could do. Nothing has been spared. The mineral rights of this territory should be very valuable some day. When we have all finished salting the earth with nickel, lead, steel, copper, and aluminum, old-metal dealers will probably set up offices in No Man's Land.

Belgium will have to be rebuilt entirely, or left as it is, a monument to "Kultur."

My section has been ordered up to a divisional area on the south of the salient. In accordance with instructions I went up to Ypres this morning to find a place to park the machines.

Contrary to the popular belief, we do not fight our guns from the motor cycles themselves. We use our machines to get about on, and the guns are taken up as near as possible to the position we are to occupy, which is usually behind Brigade Headquarters. Brigadiers have a great aversion to any kind of motor vehicle being driven past their headquarters, owing to the movement and noise, which they believe attracts attention to themselves, and as a rule the sentries posted outside will see that no machines go by. We get up as far as we can, because after we part from our machines, everything must be carried up through the trenches by hand.