Canada in Flanders, Volume I

by Baron Max Aitken Beaverbrook

At first the small towns, the villages, and the many farmhouses and cottages within easy reach of the firing line provided all the rest billets. A great many men are billeted in this way still. I found, for instance, a company of Territorials snugly resting in a huge farm, the officers having quarters in the farmhouse on the other side of the yard; but recently a large number of wooden huts have been put up in various places across the countryside, and here the men come back from the trenches to rest. They are tired when they come "home," but a sound sleep, a wash, a hearty breakfast, and a stroll in the fresh air—out of range of the insistent bullets—have a magical effect. In the afternoon you find them playing football as blithely as boys, and those who are not playing stand round and chaff and applaud. I saw as many games of football one day, in the course of a motor run behind the lines, as one would see on a Saturday afternoon in England.

Every day brings its letters and newspapers—every rail-head has its little travelling letter office shunted into a siding. Here the letters of a division are sorted. They average more than one letter a day for every man in the field. That is another reason why the Army is in good spirits. No army in the world before ever got so much news from home, so regularly and so quickly. Besides this, drafts of men are constantly being sent home—across the Channel—for five or seven days' leave.

The firing line is not much further from the base than London is from the sea. One passes on through the region of rest billets and headquarters of sections of troops, and arrives behind the firing line. When the Canadians first landed, the British forces held a front between twenty and thirty miles long, running from Ypres, on the north, where the Seventh Division made its heroic stand against the Prussian Guards, to Givenchy, on the south, near the scene of the battle of Neuve Chapelle.

This stretch had been held ever since the British troops made their swift dart from the Aisne to Flanders, hoping (how strange it seems now) to outflank the Germans, and in fact, by immense exertions, defeating a far more formidable outflanking movement by the enemy. Here they have maintained their ground. They lived and fought in seas of mud all through the winter. The water was pumped out of the trenches with hand-pumps, only to ooze back again through the sodden soil. Plank platforms were put down, and straw was piled in. Yet the mud smothered everything. The men stood in mud, sat in mud, and lay in mud. Often it was as much as they could do to prevent the mud from clogging their rifles. They crawled through mud to the trenches when it was their time to relieve those in the firing line. They had to hide in the mud of the trenches to escape the German bullets. It was a choice of mud or death. With the arrival of spring, conditions were improved. There was less rain, and the winds had begun to dry the ground. On fine days there was even dust on the paved roads, although the quagmire of mud, each side of the centre strip of granite, still remained. The trench mud was becoming firmer.

The line of trenches runs nearly everywhere through low-lying ground, intersected with watery ditches and small streams; the land is so level, and the atmosphere so heavy, that, as a rule, the eye ranges little further than a rifle bullet will carry. The nearer the firing line the more difficult you find it to set eyes on men. Thousands of men are almost within hailing distance, but none are to be seen. Friend and foe alike are hidden in the trenches.

Some of the most famous trenches are in a wood that is known to all the army as "Plug Street," although, as I have already made clear, it is spelled a little differently on the maps. To reach the trenches you have, of course, to come within rifle-shot of the enemy, for in most places the German and British trenches are not more than 250 yards from each other, and here and there they are only 40 or 50 yards apart. One creeps and crawls at dusk along paths which months of experience has told the soldiers are the best means of approach; and one eventually scrambles into a communication trench which, in a number of zig-zags, leads you to the firing trench, where the men are waiting, rifle in hand, in case of attack, or now and again taking a snap-shot through a loophole in the trench parapet.

The trenches in "Plug Street" are like all the other trenches—very exciting to think about before you reach them, but, unless you happen to arrive when shells are bursting overhead, comparatively dull and matter-of-fact when you are actually there. It is only the chance of death that gives them their peculiar interest over other holes excavated by men in clammy earth. The bee-like buzz of an occasional bullet overhead reminds you that death is searching for its prey. "Plug Street" has a fame which will endure. All through the first winter, the men squashed about in its awful mud, making quite a number of slimy, ankle-deep, or knee-deep lanes from point to point among the trees. In course of time each of the muddy woodland alleys received its nickname from the men in the ranks.

Such was the appearance and atmosphere of things at the front when the Canadians first arrived. After a few days of special instruction they were billeted in the area of the First Army under Sir Douglas Haig. The Divisional Headquarters were located near Estaires, with the Brigade Headquarters in advanced positions, and the "Front" is clearly indicated by the sketch on page 37.

I have described, as fully as is permissible, the general disposition and the general organisation of the British Army in the field as it was when the Canadians first set foot in France. It now becomes necessary to deal in detail with the "Front"—that almost endless succession of warren-like lines where scores of thousands of men stand to arms by night and day, and where the Canadian troops have already fought with a gallantry and a dash, and yet a tenacity, which have seldom, if ever, been equalled in military history.

None can examine what, for want of a better name, is called the "Front" of this amazing war, without realising the truth of what has been so often said—that it is a war almost without a "Front."