CHAPTER SIX
We had very little rest after the fight I have just described. We were getting down to the real business of war. It was fighting, and not the incessant retreating, which had been sapping the life out of us for weeks. You must remember, also, the weight that each man carried during all those long wearisome retreats. Each of us had his heavily plaited kilt; his pack containing great coat, flannel shirt, two pairs of socks, waterproof sheet, extra shoes, and towel; his canteen, rifle, entrenching tool, bayonet, and ammunition—the whole totalling ninety pounds weight.
Immediately after the fight, in shallow, narrow trenches, we began to bury our dead. Before the work was finished, a detachment of Uhlans fired on us, but one of our companies drove them across a rivulet and over the crest of the next ridge.
One of our pipers—Dougall McLeod was his name—had lost his chum in the fight. McLeod was a sentimental sort of chap, with little heart for the work of killing. He was sitting on the ground fastening together a couple of strips of wood to make a little cross for his chum’s grave—or rather his chum’s share of the one long grave. The tears were trickling down his grimy, bloody cheeks, and he wasn’t ashamed of them, nor of the furrows they cut in the caked dirt. It was just before he finished his work that the Uhlans opened fire. McLeod threw the loose pieces of the cross to the ground, and sprang to his place in the firing line. I had never seen the passion of hate in his eyes before. All that the Germans had made him suffer had never aroused him, but now that they interrupted him in the work of making a homely mark for his friend’s grave, he was fired by the will to kill. I was only a few paces from him in the firing line, and, with the tears still streaming down his face, I could hear him mutter every time his rifle crashed:
“Damn you! You will, will you?”
We again took to the road. All that day we marched under occasional shell fire. Along the sides of the roads, we passed the wrecks of scores of German combat wagons and supply trains. Sometimes there was a field piece amid the débris. Toward evening we heard terrific firing on our right, but we were not called to enter the engagement. Later we learned that a French division had been pretty badly cut up in running the boches out of a strong position.
Their wounded passed us on the road. You cannot imagine a more pitiful or a more noble sight. Limping along, supported by their comrades, came scores of men, whose every step was costing them agony but who smiled at us as we cheered them. Straggling down the road, as we swung along, came groups of wounded, each supporting the other as best he could. In one case in particular, a man who had been badly maimed and was using his rifle as a crutch, was also supported by a comrade who had been blinded. If there had ever been doubt in our minds as to the mettle of our allies, it was dispelled now, as the lame and the blind hour after hour filed past us.
We billeted that night at a place, the name of which sounded like Villers. I remember that a detachment of French were there before us, and a peasant pointed out to me a row of trees where they had hung fifteen Germans captured there, because, when the Uhlans had taken the town fifteen of them had brutally assaulted and outraged a farmer’s wife and his daughter, twelve years of age. The ropes were still dangling from the trees.
Volunteers were asked for, to go down and get the mail. Practically every one offered his services. To get mail from home gave the same sensation as scoring a victory, and we were all eager to do our bit. This was about 10.30 P.M. and the rain was coming down in torrents. About two miles behind us lay the mail strewn around the road. The ambulance carrying it had been struck by a shell. Our volunteer mail carriers gathered the letters up, and, needless to say, there was much excitement among us on their arrival. Nothing else was thought of for the moment except the news from home.
The next few days were uneventful. Toward evening on the thirteenth of September, I was scouting on our left flank. The German heavy guns had been keeping up a steady searching fire all day, but little damage had been done.
I had got so accustomed to the roar of the explosions that they did not bother me very much. After a while a man gets so used to the sound of a shrieking shell in the air that he can tell by instinct when one is coming his way in time to throw himself flat on the ground. I had not yet reached this stage of proficiency. A shell did come my way. How close it came I will never know, because all of a sudden I felt as though my head were bursting. I seemed to be tumbling end over end and being torn to pieces. My ear drums rang and pained excruciatingly. I thought to myself “I am dying,” and I wondered how I kept feeling a sort of consciousness although I must be already torn to bits.
Then I found myself sitting up on the ground with a man from my patrol supporting my head.
Now, this is the strange thing. I was instantly and absolutely oblivious when the shell exploded. All the sensations I have described came when I was recovering consciousness. Surgeons have told me since then that they were exactly what the shell caused when it exploded, but that my brain did not register them until my senses returned. My clothes were scorched and even my hair was singed. I do not know why I was not killed, but in a few hours I was ready for duty once more. The man who picked me up said that the shell had burst some little distance overhead. If it had struck the ground close to me, it would doubtless have sent me “west.”
The game had now been turned about. We were the pursuers. Most of the fighting was between the enemy’s rear guard and our contact patrols—until we reached the Aisne. The Huns crossed the river, but they blew up the bridges behind them. The last of the retreating troops were scarcely across before the detonators were set off.
We were held up for a while on the Aisne while our engineers constructed pontoon bridges. The Germans had the range, and they almost wiped out our entire battalion of engineers before our troops could cross.
I saw a working raft swing out into the river with about twelve men on it. A single burst of shrapnel exploded in their midst and there wasn’t a man left standing. One of them crawled to the stern and began pushing the raft toward shore with a pole but he was so weak that the current kept swinging him down a stream. A sniper got him.
The raft was drifting away. Nobody expected to see the men on it again, but, in the face of shrapnel and a nasty fire from snipers, three men, stark naked, jumped into the stream and struck out for the raft. The water around them was whipped by bullets, but our boys located the snipers and got the range and quieted them. The first man reached the raft. His hands were over the edge. He had just pushed his head and shoulders over the side when a rifle snapped and he slipped back into the water; then I saw the German who had fired at him topple out of a tree. A dozen shots must have struck him. The two other swimmers were alongside the raft now and climbed upon it. I could see that one was bleeding at the shoulder. Our men pulled the wounded man upon the raft, and brought it to shore. Their heroism saved the lives of five men who otherwise would have drifted away and probably died.
Soon our own artillery began to locate the German guns, whose fire diminished. Then our infantry began to cross the river at a dozen points. On the opposite bank was a village by the name of Bourg. Up and down hills we worked our way, forcing the enemy off the ridges. The details of the operations would not be of interest. We wanted to close with the bayonets, but the boches weren’t ready for that, and they dropped back foot by foot, keeping up a hot fire.
On this side of the river were numerous stone quarries, and in these we found tons and tons of ammunition for the heavy German guns. The type and manufacturers’ marks showed that some of it was made as far back as the Franco-Prussian war. It had been lying in caches in the quarries for years, the Prussians having bought titles to some of the land through spies who posed as Frenchmen. They had been making use of this ammunition against us. It shows how long ago the war was planned and by whom. In some of the quarries we uncovered re-enforced concrete fortification and emplacements for cannon.
Our commander, Colonel Grant Duff, was in the thickest of the fighting. I saw him distributing bandoliers of ammunition along the firing line. His men tried to make him go to the rear, but we were having a tough time to keep fire superiority, and we needed every man in the line. Suddenly Colonel Duff staggered and slouched forward on his hands and knees. The bandoliers he was carrying, scattered. Several men rushed to him but he got to his feet himself and ordered them back to their posts. An ugly red stain was spreading over his tartan riding breeches and leggings, but he staggered onward with the ammunition. He had not gone a dozen steps when both his arms flew up into the air and he fell backward. This time he did not move. He had been shot straight through the heart, and another commander of the Black Watch had gone to join the long line of heroes who had so often led this regiment to victory.
Many of our company commanders were picked off by the enemy because of their distinctive dress, their celluloid map cases affording excellent targets.
My memory of this fight is somewhat fragmentary. There are phases which are all but blanks to me. Others stand out with startling clarity.
We were advancing in skirmishing order through a wood. A pal of my old athletic days, Ned McD——, fighting a few yards from me in our scattered line, fell with a bullet through both thighs. I made him as comfortable as I could in a nook about twenty paces back from where our men, lying on their stomachs, were keeping up a steady rifle fire through the underbrush. I had hardly returned to the line when the whistle of our platoon commander sounded shrilly, and we were ordered to retire to the farther edge of the plateau, where our men could have better protection from the enemy fire. I hurriedly placed McD—— under the edge of a bank, where, at least, he would not be trampled on by men or horses.
“Don’t attempt to leave the spot, Ned,” I said. “I’ll get back to you to-night if there’s an opportunity.” The chance did come, but when I reached the spot he had disappeared. Our subsequent meeting—the story of which I shall tell—is one of my few agreeable recollections in the train of the tragedy of our campaign.
But to go back to the fight.
Soon after leaving the spot where McD—— lay, I joined in a charge on a line of hidden trenches. We were upon them, and it was steel and teeth again. I saw an officer run in under a bayonet thrust, and jab his thumbs into a German’s eyes. The boche rolled upon the ground, screaming. How long we fought, I do not know. When it was over we began to pick up the wounded. It was night. The Prussian guns were still hammering at us, and some of the shells set fire to a number of haystacks in the field where we had crossed the open. It was Hell. In the red glare of the fire the stretcher bearers hurried here and there with the dying, while others who had been placed behind the hay-stacks for shelter burned to death when the stalks caught fire. The few who could, crawled away from the fire. Those of us who were able to do so, pulled others to safety, and many a man had his hands and face badly burned, rescuing a helpless comrade.
The next morning we went at them again. In the first rush, I felt a sudden slap against my thigh. It did not feel like anything more than a blow from an open palm. I thought nothing more of it until after the fight, when some one told me I was bleeding. A bullet had struck the flesh of my thigh. The slight wound was dressed at the regimental station, and I was ready for duty again.
That night I was assigned to outpost duty between the lines. The German artillery had so covered the roads and the bridge, that for two days the supply wagons had been unable to come up. I was almost starved. My stomach ached incessantly from sheer hunger and I was weak from the bleeding of my wound. It seems terrible, looking back at it, but, during the night, while my partner watched, I crawled out and searched the dead for rations. I found none. Fifty paces from our post lay a dead artillery horse. We had to eat—or drop. What could we do? Wriggling on my belly like a snake, I drew myself toward the smelling carcass, cut off enough with my jackknife to do the section, brought it back, and we ate it.
There followed days of lying in the trenches. Every time one of us showed a head above the surface of the earth a single shot would ring out, and more than once it accomplished its mission. Two or three times I almost caught it myself. At last I made up my mind that the sniper must be in a sugar factory building which showed clearly above a ridge on the right front of our position. Jock Hunter and I volunteered to go there and investigate. Working our way under cover of a wooded patch, we reached the factory yard where we encountered an old Frenchman who seemed to be the owner of the place.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
“Have you seen a sniper anywhere about here?” I asked.
“No,” he answered in a surly manner, “and you get out of here.”
“We’ll get out,” I retorted, “and you’ll get with us.”
I searched the factory building from cellar to roof but wasn’t able to discover anything incriminating. I didn’t know much about sugar factories, but there was a lot of machinery in the place that didn’t look to me as if it had anything to do with sugar.
Back to our lines we went, with the supposed Frenchman making a lot of noise, but walking about two inches in front of the points of our bayonets. When he was searched we found notes to the value of fifteen thousand francs sewed in his clothes, but most important of all, there were papers upon his person which showed that he was a German spy left there by the Prussians in 1871. He held title to many acres of land, including some of the quarries where shells had been hidden.
I told the company officer of the suspicious-looking machinery in the factory. He sent us back there with a subaltern of the engineers. The three of us approached the building by different routes. Suddenly, from a narrow window in the tower of the structure, a rifle cracked, and I saw the subaltern duck behind a bush. Hunter and I each began to run toward the factory. Zip! A bullet whistled past my ear, and a few seconds later Hunter was fired at.
We all reached the place together. As the firing had been from the tower, we hurried to the upper storeys, but the subaltern saw at a glance that the machinery I had noticed was a wireless plant. Afterward we found that the numerous “lightning rods” on the factory were in reality wireless antennæ. We went to the top of the tower without finding a single soul, but in a little room in the cupola, there were a few bread crumbs scattered over the floor. A corner of the linoleum covering on the floor of this room looked a little uneven. The subaltern posted each of us in a different corner with orders to fire three rapid rounds from our rifles into different points of the floor. He himself was to discharge his revolver in a like manner. At his signal we all opened fire, splintering the floor in several places. Then we heard a groan.
“Come up here!” called the subaltern, in English. There was no answer. He repeated the command in German. Very slowly the linoleum in the corner of the room where it was uneven began to hump up. We all stood ready to fire. A trap door was lifting. Presently the corner of the floor covering was pushed back completely and a man’s face appeared. It was a very white, drawn face, and, as the shoulders rose above the floor level, we saw that the man had been struck by at least one of our bullets. His left arm hung limp by his side. We patched him up.
The officer told Hunter and myself to cut all wires, which, after some search, we found had been laid at the bottom of the walls and cunningly concealed by the grass. Then we took our prisoner back to our lines. An hour later our howitzers had demolished the factory. Up to this time, the boche artillery had been planting one shell after another on our positions, no matter how often we shifted. After the factory was destroyed we made one more move and no shells found us.
We dug ourselves into the ground, and the almost continual rain made mud holes out of the trenches. Our force was not large enough in those days to allow of the elaborate system of supports and reserves that exists to-day. The men in the firing trenches had to stay there, and there was no going back into bomb-proofs for a rest. At night we lay down all in our muddy clothes with a waterproof sheet beneath us and our greatcoats around us. The sheet didn’t do much good, because after lying in it for a while, it got pressed down into the mud and slime, which came all over the edges. Every one had a cold, and many of the men suffered from rheumatism, but no complaints were heard. It is only when things are going smoothly and “fags” are lacking that the British Tommy kicks.
Owing to the lack of supplies, the issues of cigarettes were so few and far between that the dry tea that was sent up as part rations was used to make “fags.” Tommies would roll the tea in paper in the form of cigarettes and smoke it. As much as five francs would be offered for one “Woodbine” when our supplies were exhausted. A “fag” was a most precious thing, and guarded jealously. A fellow would get into a corner, take a couple of puffs, “nip” it, then hide it away in a safe place on his person for fear of thieves in the night! In one instance, I watched a scene that would have brought forth laughter as well as pity from a civilian. One Tommy was observed in a corner finishing a half-inch butt, holding it by a pin which was stuck through it. Three others immediately pounced upon him and his treasure. After a short argument they formed a truce in the following manner: each man in rotation was to take one puff. A cockney with a Walrus moustache was last on the line, and with great sadness on his face and a sob in his voice said: “Bli’ me! w’ere the ’ell do I come in?”
Out in front of our trenches the mud was full of the bodies of the dead—mostly Germans, but a few of our men. At night, we went out to bury them, but the enemy fired on us, so we had to leave them there. The wind was blowing our way, and they knew the odours of the battlefield were as hard for us to bear as was their artillery or rifle fire. This scheme they had learned from the Russians, who practised it during their war with Japan.