“Train’s arrived!”
The scouts who inhabited “No Man’s Land” by night became snipers by day. Different units had different systems of utilizing these specialists. The British and the French usually left their scouts and snipers in one locality so that they might come to know every hummock and hollow and tree-stump of the limited landscape which absorbed their unending attention. The Canadians, up to the time when I left France, invariably took their scouts and snipers along when they moved from one section of the line to another. This system was criticized as having the disadvantage of compelling the men to learn new territory while opposing enemy scouts familiar with every inch of the ground. As to the contention on this point, I could not undertake to decide, but it seemed to me that our system had, at least, the advantage of keeping the men more alert and less likely to grow careless. Some of our snipers acquired reputations for a high degree of skill and there was always a fascination for me in watching them work. We always had two snipers to each trench section. They would stand almost motionless on the fire steps for hours at a time, searching every inch of the German front trench and the surrounding territory with telescopes. They always swathed their heads with sand bags, looking like huge, grotesque turbans, as this made the finest kind of an “assimilation covering.” It would take a most alert German to pick out a man’s head, so covered, among all the tens of thousands of sand bags which lined our parapet. The snipers always used special rifles with telescopic sights, and they made most extraordinary shots. Some of them who had been huntsmen in the Canadian big woods were marvellous marksmen. Frequently one of them would continue for several days giving special attention to a spot where a German had shown the top of his head for a moment. If the German ever showed again, at that particular spot, he was usually done for. A yell or some little commotion in the German trenches, following the sniper’s quick shot would tell the story to us. Then the sniper would receive general congratulations. There is a first warning to every man going into the trenches. It is: “Fear God and keep your head down.”
Our rations in the trenches were, on the whole, excellent. There were no delicacies and the food was not over plentiful, but it was good. The system appeared to have the purpose of keeping us like bulldogs before a fight—with enough to live on but hungry all the time. Our food consisted principally of bacon, beans, beef, bully-beef, hard tack, jam and tea. Occasionally we had a few potatoes, and, when we were taken back for a few days’ rest, we got a good many things which difficulty of transport excluded from the front trenches. It was possible, sometimes, to beg, borrow or even steal eggs and fresh bread and coffee.
All of our provisions came up to the front line in sand bags, a fact easily recognizable when you tasted them. There is supposed to be an intention to segregate the various foods, in transport, but it must be admitted that they taste more or less of each other, and that the characteristic sand-bag flavor distinguishes all of them from mere, ordinary foods which have not made a venturesome journey. As many of the sand bags have been originally used for containing brown sugar, the flavor is more easily recognized than actually unpleasant. When we got down to the Somme, the food supply was much less satisfactory—principally because of transport difficulties. At times, even in the rear, we could get fresh meat only twice a week, and were compelled to live the rest of the time on bully-beef stew, which resembles terrapin to the extent that it is a liquid with mysterious lumps in it. In the front trenches, on the Somme, all we had were the “iron rations” which we were able to carry in with us. These consisted of bully-beef, hard tack, jam and tea. The supply of these foods which each man carries is termed “emergency rations,” and the ordinary rule is that the emergency ration must not be touched until the man has been forty-eight hours without food, and then only by permission of an officer.
One of the great discoveries of this war is that hard tack makes an excellent fuel, burning like coke and giving off no smoke. We usually saved enough hard tack to form a modest escort, stomachward, for our jam, and used the rest to boil our tea. Until one has been in the trenches he cannot realize what a useful article of diet jam is. It is undoubtedly nutritious and one doesn’t tire of it, even though there seem to be but two varieties now existing in any considerable quantities—plum and apple. Once upon a time a hero of the “ditches” discovered that his tin contained strawberry jam, but there was such a rush when he announced it that he didn’t get any of it.
There was, of course, a very good reason for the shortness and uncertainty of the food supply on the Somme. All communication with the front line was practically overland, the communication trenches having been blown in. Ration parties, bringing in food, frequently suffered heavy casualties. Yet they kept tenaciously and courageously doing their best for us. Occasionally they even brought up hot soup in huge, improvised thermos bottles made from petrol tins wrapped in straw and sand bags, but this was very rarely attempted, and not with much success. You could sum up the food situation briefly. It was good—when you got it.
It may be fitting, at this time, to pay a tribute to the soldier’s most invaluable friend, the sand bag. The sand bag, like the rest of us, did not start life in a military capacity, but since joining the army it has fulfilled its duty nobly. Primarily, sand bags are used in making a parapet for a trench or a roof for a dug-out, but there are a hundred other uses to which they have been adapted, without hesitation and possibly without sufficient gratitude for their ready adaptability. Some of these uses may surprise you. Soldiers strain their tea through them, wrap them around their legs for protection against cold and mud, swab their rifles with them to keep them clean, use them for bed sacks, kit bags and ration bags. The first thing a man does when he enters a trench or reaches a new position which is to be held is to feel in his belt, if he is a private, or to yell for some one else to feel in his belt, if he is an officer, for a sand bag. Each soldier is supposed to have five tucked beneath his belt whenever he starts to do anything out of the ordinary. When you’ve got hold of the first one, in a new position, under fire, you commence filling it as fast as the Germans and your own ineptitude will permit, and the sooner that bag is filled and placed, the more likely you are to continue in a state of health and good spirits. Sand bags are never filled with sand, because there is never any sand to put into them. Anything that you can put in with a shovel will do.
About the only amusement we had during our long stay in the front trenches in Belgium, was to sit with our backs against the rear wall and shoot at the rats running along the parapet. Poor Macfarlane, with a flash of the old humor which he had before the war, told a “rookie” that the trench rats were so big that he saw one of them trying on his great-coat. They used to run over our faces when we were sleeping in our dug-outs, and I’ve seen them in ravenous swarms, burrowing into the shallow graves of the dead. Many soldiers’ legs are scarred to the knees with bites.
The one thing of which we constantly lived in fear was a gas attack. I used to awaken in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, dreaming that I heard the clatter and whistle-blowing all along the line which meant that the gas was coming. And, finally, I really did hear the terrifying sound, just at a moment when it couldn’t have sounded worse. I was in charge of the nightly ration detail, sent back about ten miles to the point of nearest approach of the transport lorries, to carry in rations, ammunition and sand bags to the front trenches. We had a lot of trouble, returning with our loads. Passing a point which was called “Shrapnel Corner” because the Germans had precise range on it, we were caught in machine-gun fire and had to lie on our stomachs for twenty minutes, during which we lost one man, wounded. I sent him back and went on with my party only to run into another machine-gun shower a half-mile further on. While we were lying down to escape this, a concealed British battery of five-inch guns, about which we knew nothing, opened up right over our heads. It shook us up and scared us so that some of our party were now worse off than the man who had been hit and carried to the rear. We finally got together and went on. When we were about a mile behind the reserve trench, stumbling in the dark through the last and most dangerous path overland, we heard a lone siren whistle followed by a wave of metallic hammering and wild tooting which seemed to spread over all of Belgium a mile ahead of us. All any of us could say was:
“Gas!”