Poor fellow, it was not only the big show, but the last performance for him. Within sight of the spot where he sat, wondering, he later fell in action and died. The scene, which so impressed him, gave us all a feeling of awe. Great shells from a thousand guns were streaking and criss-crossing the sky. Without glasses I counted thirty-nine of our observation balloons. Away off in the distance I saw one German captive balloon. The other air-craft were uncountable. They were everywhere, apparently in hundreds. There could have been no more wonderful panoramic picture of war in its new aspect.
Our battalion was in and out of the town of Albert several days waiting for orders. The battle of Courcelette was then in progress, and the First, Second and Third Canadian divisions were holding front positions at terrible cost. In the first part of October, 1916, we “went in” opposite the famous Regina trench. The battle-ground was just miles and miles of debris and shell-holes. Before we went to our position, the officers and non-coms. were taken in by scouts to get the lay of the land. These trips were called “Cook’s Tours.” On one of them I went through the town of Poziers twice and didn’t know it. It had a population of 12,000 before the war. On the spot where it had stood not even a whole brick was left, it seemed. Its demolition was complete. That was an example of the condition of the whole country over which our forces had blasted their way for ten miles, since the previous July. There were not even landmarks left.
The town of Albert will always remain in my memory, and, especially, I shall always have the mental picture of the cathedral, with the statue of the Virgin Mary with the Babe in her arms, apparently about to topple from the roof. German shells had carried away so much of the base of the statue that it inclined at an angle of 45 degrees. The Germans—for some reason which only they can explain—expended much ammunition in trying to complete the destruction of the cathedral, but they did not succeed and they’ll never do it now. The superstitious French say that when the statue falls the war will end. I have a due regard for sacred things, but if the omen were to be depended upon I should not regret to see the fall occur.
An unfortunate and tragic mishap occurred just outside of Albert when the Somme offensive started on July 1. The signal for the first advance was to be the touching off of a big mine. Some fifteen minutes before the mine exploded the Germans set off one of their own. Two regiments mistook this for the signal and started over. They ran simultaneously into their own barrage and a German fire, and were simply cut to pieces in as little time, almost, as it takes to say it.
The Germans are methodical to such an extent that at times this usually excellent quality acts to defeat their own ends. An illustration of this was presented during the bombardment of Albert. Every evening at about six o’clock they would drop thirty high-explosive shells into the town. When we heard the first one coming we would dive for the cellars. Everyone would remain counting the explosions until the number had reached thirty. Then everyone would come up from the cellars and go about his business. There were never thirty-one shells and never twenty-nine shells. The number was always exactly thirty, and then the high-explosive bombardment was over. Knowing this, none of us ever got hurt. Their methodical “evening hate” was wasted, except for the damage it did to buildings in the town.
On the night when we went in to occupy the positions we were to hold, our scouts, leading us through the flat desert of destruction, got completely turned ’round, and took us back through a trench composed of shell-holes, connected up, until we ran into a battalion of another brigade. The place was dreadful beyond words. The stench of the dead was sickening. In many places arms and legs of dead men stuck out of the trench walls.
We made a fresh start, after our blunder, moving in single file and keeping in touch each with the man ahead of him. We stumbled along in the darkness through this awful labyrinth until we ran into some of our own scouts at 2 A.M., and found that we were half-way across “No Man’s Land,” several hundred yards beyond our front line and likely to be utterly wiped out in twenty seconds should the Germans sight us. At last we reached the proper position, and fifteen minutes after we got there a whiz-bang buried me completely. They had to dig me out. A few minutes later another high-explosive shell fell in a trench section where three of our men were stationed. All we could find after it exploded were one arm and one leg which we buried. The trenches were without trench mats, and the mud was from six inches to three feet deep all through them. There were no dug-outs; only miserable “funk holes,” dug where it was possible to dig them without uncovering dead men. We remained in this position four days, from the 17th to the 21st of October, 1916.
There were reasons, of course, for the difference between conditions in Belgium and on the Somme. On the Somme, we were constantly preparing for a new advance, and we were only temporarily established on ground which we had but recently taken, after long drumming with big guns. The trenches were merely shell-holes connected by ditches. Our old and ubiquitous and useful friend, the sand bag, was not present in any capacity, and, therefore, we had no parapets or dug-outs. The communication trenches were all blown in and everything had to come to us overland, with the result that we never were quite sure when we should get ammunition, rations, or relief forces. The most awful thing was that the soil all about us was filled with freshly-buried men. If we undertook to cut a trench or enlarge a funk hole, our spades struck into human flesh, and the explosion of a big shell along our line sent decomposed and dismembered and sickening mementoes of an earlier fight showering amongst us. We lived in the muck and stench of “glorious” war; those of us who lived.
Here and there, along this line, were the abandoned dug-outs of the Germans, and we made what use of them we could, but that was little. I had orders one day to locate a dug-out and prepare it for use as battalion headquarters. When I led a squad in to clean it up the odor was so overpowering that we had to wear our gas masks. On entering, with our flashlights, we first saw two dead nurses, one standing with her arm ’round a post, just as she had stood when gas or concussion killed her. Seated at a table in the middle of the place was the body of an old general of the German medical corps, his head fallen between his hands. The task of cleaning up was too dreadful for us. We just tossed in four or five fumite bombs and beat it out of there. A few hours later we went into the seared and empty cavern, made the roof safe with new timbers, and notified battalion headquarters that the place could be occupied.
During this time I witnessed a scene which—with some others—I shall never forget. An old chaplain of the Canadian forces came to our trench section seeking the grave of his son, which had been marked for him on a rude map by an officer who had seen the young man’s burial. We managed to find the spot, and, at the old chaplain’s request, we exhumed the body. Some of us suggested to him that he give us the identification marks and retire out of range of the shells which were bursting all around us. We argued that it was unwise for him to remain unnecessarily in danger, but what we really intended was that he should be saved the horror of seeing the pitiful thing which our spades were about to uncover.