"Crumps", The Plain Story Of A Canadian Who Went Part 8

July 28th and 29th. Still on exemption. Nothing to do but sleep and think of home and of my dear wife and daughter. But dreaming does not bring peace any sooner. How I would love an hour or two back home.

July 31st. In rest. Baths going. Duke of Wurttemberg pa.s.sed through our camp.

August 1st. Up to the trenches. Shrapnel flying like flies. A heavy bombardment; bombardment of Hooge. Second Battalion, 132d Regiment, sent up to reinforce 126th Regiment, which has already lost half its men.

August 4th. Heavy artillery fire the whole night. The English are concentrating 50,000 Indians on our front to attack Hooge and Hill 60.

Just let them come, we shall stand firm. At three marched off to the front. Watch beginning again. Five o'clock marched off to the Witches'

Cauldron, Hooge. A terrible night again. H.E. and shrapnel without number.

Oh, thrice-cursed Hooge! In one hour eleven killed and twenty-three wounded and the fire unceasing. It is enough to drive one mad, and we have to spend three days and three nights more. It is worse than an earthquake, and any one who has not experienced it can have no idea what it is like.

The English fired a mine, a hole fifteen metres deep and fifty to sixty broad, and this "cauldron" has to be occupied at night. At present it isn't too badly sh.e.l.led. At every shot the dug-outs sway to and fro like a weather-c.o.c.k. This life we have to stick to for months. One needs nerves of steel and iron. Now I must crawl into our hole, as trunks and branches of trees fly in our trench like spray.

August 6th. To-night moved to the crater again, half running and half crawling. At seven a sudden burst of fire from the whole of the artillery.

From about eleven yesterday fires as if possessed. This morning at four we fall back. We find the 126th have no communication with the rear, as the communication trenches have been completely blown in. The smoke and thirst are enough to drive one mad. Our cooker doesn't come up. The 126th gives us bread and coffee from the little they have. If only it would stop! We get direct hits one after another and lie in a sort of dead end, cut off from all communication. If only it were night. What a feeling to be thinking every second when I shall get it! ---- has just fallen, the third man in our platoon. Since eight the fire has been unceasing; the earth shakes and we with it. Will G.o.d ever bring us out of this fire? I have said the Lord's Prayer and am resigned.

To-day I saw the "Mound of Death" at Saint-Eloi; it has been mined a number of times, and thousands of sh.e.l.ls have beaten it into a disorderly heap of earth; the trenches are twenty-five yards apart; all the gra.s.s and vegetation has been blown away and never has had time to grow up again.

It's all arranged for you, if there's a bit of sh.e.l.l or a bullet with your name on it you'll get it, so you've nothing to worry about. You are a soldier-then be one. This is the philosophy of the trenches.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

What's The Use?

War is a great ager. Young men grow old quickly here. It can be seen in their faces; they have lost all the irresponsibility of youth. I have met many men who have been here since Mons; they all look weary and worn out by the strain. Now new troops are coming forward and it is hoped that they will be able to send some back for a rest.

Several days ago the adjutant of the Tenth Battalion Sherwood Foresters came to me with this message which was sent through our lines:-

Arrest Officer Royal Engineers with orderly. Former, six feet, black moustache, web equipment, revolver. Latter, short, carries rifle, canvas bandolier. Please warn transports and all concerned.

Everybody kept a good lookout for these spies. One sentry surprised a real R.E. officer named Perkins who was working out a drainage scheme. Seeming to answer the above description, he stalked him,-"Come 'ere, you ---- ----, you're the ---- I've been looking for." The officer, nonplussed, commenced to stutter. "Sergeant, I've got 'im and he can't speak a word of English." The sergeant collected him in and guarded him until another engineer officer, known to the guard, came along. As soon as Perkins saw him, he said, "F-r-r-ed, t-t-tell this d-d-d.a.m.n fool wh-ho I am." "Who the h.e.l.l are you calling Fred? I don't know him; hold him, sergeant, he's a desperate one." Scarcely able to contain his joy, Fred went back to the Engineers' Camp to tell the great news and Perkins spent three hours in the sandbag dugout listening to a description of what the sergeant and his guard would do to him if they only had their way.

The real spies, who did a great deal of damage, were finally rounded up and shot in a listening post trying to regain their own lines.

Enemy snipers give us a great deal of trouble. It is very difficult to locate them. One of our men tried out an original scheme. He put an empty biscuit tin on the parapet. Immediately the sniper put a bullet through it. Now thought the Genius, "If I look through the two holes it will give me my direction,"-so getting up on the firestep he looked through, only to roll over with the top of his head smashed off by a bullet. The sniper was shooting his initials on the tin.

We are all used to dead bodies or pieces of men, so much so that we are not troubled by the sight of them. There was a right hand sticking out of the trench in the position of a man trying to shake hands with you, and as the men filed out they would often grip it and say, "So long, old top, we'll be back again soon." One man had the misfortune to be buried in such a way that the bald part of the head showed. It had been there a long time and was sun-dried. Tommy used him to strike his matches on. A corpse in a trench is quite a feature, and is looked for when the men come back again to the same trench.

We live mostly on bully beef and hard tack. The first is corned beef and the second is a kind of dog biscuit. We always wondered why they were so particular about a man's teeth in the army. Now I know. It's on account of these biscuits. The chief ingredient is, I think, cement, and they taste that way too. To break them it is necessary to use the handle of your entrenching tool or a stone. We have fried, baked, mashed, boiled, toasted, roasted, poached, hashed, devilled them alone and together with bully beef, and we have still to find a way of making them into interesting food.

However, the Boche likes our beef. He prefers the brand canned in Chicago to his own, and will almost sit up and beg if we throw some over to him.

The method is as follows: Throw one over ... sounds of shuffling and getting out of the way are heard in the enemy trench. Fritz thinks it's going to go off. Pause, and throw another. Fritz not so suspicious this time. Keep on throwing until happy voices from enemy trenches shout, "More! Give us more!" Then lob over as many hand grenades as you can pile into that part of the trench and tell them to share those too.

It takes some time to distinguish whether sh.e.l.ls are arrivals or departures, but after a while you get into the way of telling their direction and size by sound. Roads are constantly sh.e.l.led, searching for troops or supply columns. I was coming home to-day, up a road which ran approximately at right angles to main fire trenches. At one place the road was exposed for a matter of thirty or forty feet, and again farther up it was necessary to go over the brow of a small hill. This was about three hundred yards farther on and was exposed to the enemy's view. Thinking they wouldn't bother about a single rider on a motor cycle, I went up past the first exposed position. My carburetor was giving me some trouble and I thought I would see if any rain had got into it, so I turned off the road down a cross-road and dismounted when _crash_! a sh.e.l.l landed right in the middle of the road as far up the exposed place as I was round the corner.

Then five more followed the first sh.e.l.l. Had I gone on I could not possibly have missed collecting most of the fragments. The German gunners had spotted me in the first position and decided that a lone man on a motor cycle must be either an officer or despatch rider. So they tried to get him. The sh.e.l.ls were shrapnel and the time was calculated splendidly.

They had taken into consideration the speed of my motor cycle. Cross-roads are particularly attended to, for there is a double chance of hitting something, and in consequence it is always unhealthy to linger on a crossroad.

Dugouts are often made very comfortable with windows, tiled floors and furniture taken from neighboring shattered chateaux. I have even seen them with flowers growing in window-boxes over the entrance. They all have names. Some I saw yesterday were called "Anti-Krupp Cottage," "Pleasant View," and "Little Grey Home in the West." There was one very homey site, well equipped and fitted, which had been dubbed the "Nut,"-the colonel lived there.

My old corps brought an aeroplane down with a machine gun last night. They were in a sh.e.l.l hole between the main and support trenches.

For the last few days I have been "up" looking for gun positions.

The lice are getting to be a torment. You have no idea how bad they are.

Everybody up here is infested with them. I have tried smearing myself with kerosene, but that does not seem to trouble them at all. Silk underwear is supposed to keep them down. I suppose their feet slip on the s.h.i.+ny surface.

The food lately has taken on a wonderful flavor and I now know how dissolved German tastes. The cook, instead of sending back two miles for water to cook with, has been using water from the moat in which a Boche had been slowly disintegrating.

To-day I was able to see what a German seventeen-inch sh.e.l.l could do; one had made a crater fifty feet across and twenty feet deep in the middle of the road. The top of the road was paved-think it over-and pieces kill at a thousand yards. Thirty horses were buried in another hole.

I have been given a special job by the general to enfilade a wood over the Mound. I have my section now in the second-line trenches waiting till it is dark before making a move. We have to make a machine-gun emplacement in a piece of ground which is decidedly unhealthy to visit during daylight. I have been there in daylight, but I had to creep out of it. On the map it is called a farm, but the highest wall is only three feet six inches high.

Arrived home about two o'clock this morning. We crawled to the place we have to take up, and I put some men filling sandbags in the ruins and others even digging a dugout. The enemy had "the wind up" and were using a great number of star sh.e.l.ls. When one goes up we all "freeze," remain motionless, or lie still. They send them up to see across their front, and if they locate a working party, then they start playing a tune with their machine guns. Bullets and sh.e.l.ls whistled through the trees all the time.

They seemed to come from all directions. The men didn't like it at all. I wasn't altogether comfortable myself, but an officer must keep going. I walked about and joked and laughed with them. The range-taker said, "Some of us are getting the didley-i-dums, Sir." I don't know what that is, but I had a feeling that I had them too.

Of course, to start with, everybody thinks every single sh.e.l.l and bullet is coming straight for him. Then you find out how much s.p.a.ce there is around you. One man came to tell me that two men were firing at him with his own rifle from the ruins of the alleged farmhouse, ten yards away from the dugout we are making. Just then a field mouse squeaked, and he jumped up in the air and said, "There's another." I told the men to fill sandbags from the ruins; they all crowded behind this three-foot-six wall for protection; they dug up a French needle bayonet-that was all right, but they afterwards dug up a rifle and I noticed a suspicious smell, so I moved them.

We came home very tired. We are attacking Hooge, a counter-attack, to take back trenches lost in the liquid fire attack-you will hear what we did from the papers, probably in three months' time.

I'm writing this in a new home, this time a splinter-proof dugout. The Huns are again strafing us-last sh.e.l.l burst fifty yards away a few minutes ago. Several times since I started writing I have had to shake off the dust and debris thrown by sh.e.l.l bursts on to these pages. I was again sniped at with shrapnel this morning on my machine while reconnoitering the roads-they all missed, but they're not nice. I'm filthy, alive, and covered with huge mosquito bites; you get sort of used to the incessant din in time. Even the forty-two centimeter sh.e.l.ls, which make a row like freight trains with loose couplings going through the air, are not so terrible now.

Through a hole in my dugout I can see the Huns' sh.e.l.ls Kulturing a chateau. It was once a very beautiful place with a moat, bridges, and splendid gardens. Now it's useless except that the timber and the furniture come in useful for our dugouts and the making of "duck walks,"

the grated walks which line the bottom of the trenches.

Last night I was sitting in the Medical Officer's dugout when a man I knew came in. He was an officer in the Second Gordons. "I feel pretty bad, doc." He explained his symptoms. "Trench fever; you go down the line."

"No, fix me up for tonight and maybe I won't need anything else." He didn't! All that is left of him is being buried now, less than a hundred yards from where I write this.

Before I came here I had to go to another part of the line, in which the "Princess Pats" distinguished themselves. We have been hanging on ever since, and a mighty stiff proposition it is. The O.C. to-day told me that he had not slept for fifty-six hours. The Germans in one place are only twenty-five yards away-so close that conversation is carried on in a whisper.