“Next two hundred yards in machine gun range. Keep quiet, don’t run, and be ready to drop quick if you are warned.”
There was one scout to each platoon, and we followed him, single file, most of the time along roads or well-worn paths, but sometimes through thickets and ragged fields. Every now and then the scout would yell at us to drop, and down we’d go on our stomachs while, away off in the distance we could hear the “put-put” of machine guns—the first sound of hostile firing that had ever reached our ears.
“It’s all right,” said the scout. “They haven’t seen us or got track of us. They’re just firing on suspicion.”
Nevertheless, when our various platoons had all got into the front reserve trenches, at about two hours after midnight, we learned that the first blood of our battalion had been spilled. Two men had been wounded, though neither fatally. Our own stretcher-bearers took our wounded back to the field hospital at Dinkiebusch. The men of the Twenty-sixth battalion spent the rest of the night instructing us and then left us to hold the position. We were as nervous as a lot of cats, and it seemed to me that the Germans must certainly know that they could come over and walk right through us, but, outside of a few casualties from sniping, such as the one that befell the Fourteenth platoon man, which I have told about, nothing very alarming happened the first day and night, and by that time we had got steady on our job. We held the position for twenty-six days, which was the longest period that any Canadian or British organization had ever remained in a front-line trench.
In none of the stories I’ve read, have I ever seen trench fighting, as it was then carried on in Belgium, adequately described. You see, you can’t get much of an idea about a thing like that, making a quick tour of the trenches under official direction and escort, as the newspaper and magazine writers do. I couldn’t undertake to tell anything worth while about the big issues of the war, but I can describe how soldiers have to learn to fight in the trenches—and I think a good many of our young fellows have that to learn, now. “Over there,” they don’t talk of peace or even of to-morrow. They just sit back and take it.
We always held the fire trench as lightly as possible, because it is a demonstrated fact that the front ditch cannot be successfully defended in a determined attack. The thing to do is to be ready to jump onto the enemy as soon as he has got into your front trench and is fighting on ground that you know and he doesn’t and knock so many kinds of tar out of him that he’ll have to pull his freight for a spot that isn’t so warm. That system worked first rate for us.
During the day, we had only a very few men in the fire trench. If an attack is coming in daylight, there’s always plenty of time to get ready for it. At night, we kept prepared for trouble all the time. We had a night sentry on each firing step and a man sitting at his feet to watch him and know if he was secretly sniped. Then we had a sentry in each “bay” of the trench to take messages.
Orders didn’t permit the man on the firing step or the man watching him to leave post on any excuse whatever, during their two-hour “spell” of duty. Hanging on a string, at the elbow of each sentry on the fire-step was a siren whistle or an empty shell case and bit of iron with which to hammer on it. This—siren or improvised gong—was for the purpose of spreading the alarm in case of a gas attack. Also we had sentries in “listening posts,” at various points from twenty to fifty yards out in “No Man’s Land.” These men blackened their faces before they went “over the top,” and then lay in shell holes or natural hollows. There were always two of them, a bayonet man and a bomber. From the listening post a wire ran back to the fire trench to be used in signaling. In the trench, a man sat with this wire wrapped around his hand. One pull meant “All O. K.,” two pulls, “I’m coming in,” three pulls, “Enemy in sight,” and four pulls, “Sound gas alarm.” The fire step in a trench is a shelf on which soldiers stand so that they may aim their rifles between the sand bags which form the parapet.
In addition to these men, we had patrols and scouts out in “No Man’s Land” the greater part of the night, with orders to gain any information possible which might be of value to battalion, brigade, division or general headquarters. They reported on the conditions of the Germans’ barbed wire, the location of machine guns and other little things like that which might be of interest to some commanding officer, twenty miles back. Also, they were ordered to make every effort to capture any of the enemy’s scouts or patrols, so that we could get information from them. One of the interesting moments in this work came when a star shell caught you out in an open spot. If you moved you were gone. I’ve seen men stand on one foot for the thirty seconds during which a star shell will burn. Then, when scouts or patrols met in “No Man’s Land” they always had to fight it out with bayonets. One single shot would be the signal for artillery fire and would mean the almost instant annihilation of the men on both sides of the fight. Under the necessities of this war, many of our men have been killed by our own shell fire.
At a little before daybreak came “stand-to,” when everybody got buttoned up and ready for business, because, at that hour, most attacks begin and also that was one of the two regular times for a dose of “morning and evening hate,” otherwise a good lively fifteen minutes of shell fire. We had some casualties every morning and evening, and the stretcher-bearers used to get ready for them as a matter of course. For fifteen minutes at dawn and dusk, the Germans used to send over “whiz-bangs,” “coal-boxes” and “minniewurfers” (shells from trench mortars) in such a generous way that it looked as if they liked to shoot ’em off, whether they hit anything or not. You could always hear the “heavy stuff” coming, and we paid little attention to it as it was used in efforts to reach the batteries, back of our lines. The poor old town of Dinkiebusch got the full benefit of it. When a shell would shriek its way over, some one would say: “There goes the express for Dinkiebusch,” and a couple of seconds later, when some prominent landmark of Dinkiebusch would disintegrate to the accompaniment of a loud detonation, some one else would remark: