The Red Vineyard

by B. J. Murdoch

On Sunday I could not have a church parade, but I said Mass in a bell tent near the Canal du Nord. That morning I joined the First Field Ambulance in a little village not very far from Cambrai. I think the name of the village was Raillencourt. As I approached its outskirts, I saw that it was under fire. Shell after shell was whistling over from the enemy lines, bursting in black clouds of smoke and yellow clouds of gas that mingled with red clouds of dust rising from the ruined brick buildings. No traffic was coming along the road. I must walk alone into the village. My will said, Go! yet every nerve in my body seemed to rebel; my feet were heavy as lead and it seemed an effort for me to lift them from the ground. I was now very tired from the work of the past week. Almost sick with fear, I continued to advance. It was a strange experience; my feet kept going heavily forwards while the rest of me seemed to be trying to hold them back. I felt that that hurt dazed look which I had seen so often in the eyes of the men was in my own eyes.

I remember going down the little street of the village bewildered and almost stupefied while shells crashed into buildings and the sickening fumes of gas poisoned the air. Then, suddenly, I saw what I was in search of—a little red cross on a white background, floating from a window of a small house.

I entered the yard; a ruined field-kitchen lay in a lake of porridge, and nearby, where they had carried him to die, was the cook.

I found the cellar filled with wounded men with whom the doctors were very busy. My old friend Captain O’Shea was here and two other Catholic doctors. I stayed in the cellar two days. Those were horrible hours. I could not be relieved, as Father O’Reilly of the Second Brigade had been wounded a day or two before I came to the cellar. It was his troops who were now in action. My own were back in reserve. While I worked, Canon Scott, an Anglican chaplain who had been in the war since the beginning, was brought in wounded.

It was a miracle that we were not struck. At different times during the day the Germans shelled the little house heavily; many shells dropped in the garden just outside the windows of the cellar. The nauseating fumes from the gas shells penetrated into the cellar and often we worked with our gas masks on.

At two o’clock Tuesday morning word came that my brigade was going over the top near Haynecourt. As soon as it was daylight, I left to join my troops. I found the Second or Third Field Ambulance, which was clearing that day at a cross-road near Cambrai. I could see the city from where we worked. I was very busy all day. At times the German airplanes swooped low over us and swept our wounded with their machine-guns. One poor fellow near me was riddled with bullets and I had just time enough to prepare him for death.

Towards three o’clock I felt something was wrong. Wounded from the Fourteenth and Sixteenth were no longer coming in. The men of the Fifteenth were in reserve just behind where I worked. Seeing this, I started forward. The shell-fire was intense, but I prayed the Blessed Virgin to see me through. I met a soldier from the Sixteenth who showed me where the soldiers were, but he advised me not to go any farther. I’m afraid I was too worried about my men at the moment to heed advice of this kind.

I found a number of them in a cutting of a railway, together with a lot of other troops. The battle was not going well; many members of the Fourteenth, cut off, had been taken prisoners. The young officer did not know where the rest were. I stayed with them, crouching in little holes in the side of the sunken road, and read my Breviary while the clay scattered by bursting shells fell on its open pages.

Presently, I joined a party of stretcher-bearers going out upon the field. The shelling was terrible as we passed down the cutting of the railroad. I was now getting among machine-gunners of the Third Division who had their guns set up in the side of the cutting.

The stretcher-bearers had no sooner reached the field, than the Germans, seeing them, commenced firing with small shells at point-blank range over open sights.