Canada in Flanders, Volume I

by Baron Max Aitken Beaverbrook

It is difficult, where all men were brave, to select individual cases of extreme courage, but it would be wrong to close this record without mentioning Lance-Corporal F. Williams, of the 3rd Canadian Battalion, and Private J. K. Young, of the 2nd Battalion. On April 25th, near St. Julien, Williams volunteered to go out with Captain J. H. Lyne-Evans from the shelter of a farm and bring in Captain Gerrard Muntz, who lay wounded in a small hollow several hundred yards away. The rescue, which was carried out in broad daylight and in the midst of a heavy rifle and machine gun fire, was successful, though Captain Muntz died of his wounds five days later. Again, at Festubert, just a month later, Williams displayed great courage and resourcefulness in keeping good the wires for communication between the signal station and other centres. The area was under continuous enemy rifle and shell fire, and the repairs had to be made under other adverse conditions.

Indeed, the Canadian non-commissioned officers have proved beyond all doubt their capacity to take the places of commissioned officers who have been shot down.

Private Young was "mentioned" for handling his machine gun so well that it was mainly through his efforts the German attack on the 2nd Battalion was repulsed on April 24th. Later, at Givenchy, on June 15th, he refused to leave his guns even when he was wounded, and pluckily remained until the action was over.

These are but a few of a hundred other deeds, done on the spur of the moment, of which there will never be any memorial except the moment's cheer or the moment's laughter from those who had time to observe. A man can be both heroic and absurd in the same act, and human nature under strain always leans to the comic. What follows is not at all comic, although it made men laugh at the time. In one of the many isolated bits of night work which had to be undertaken, it happened that a German detachment was cut off by one of ours and its situation became hopeless. There was something like a gasp as the enemy realised this, and then a silence broken by a voice crying, in unmistakable German-American accents, "Have a heart!" The detachment had just recovered a dressing station which had been abandoned a few hours before, and there they had found the bodies of their comrades with their wounds dressed—dead of fresh wounds by the bayonet! It is unfortunate that the Canadians' first serious experience of the enemy should have included asphyxiation by gas and the murder of wounded and unconscious men, because Canadians, more even than the British, have been accustomed to Germans in their midst, and till lately have looked upon them as good citizens. Now they will tell their children that they were mistaken, and the end of that war may well be generations distant.

The supply of ammunition and medical attendance continued unbroken and unconcerned through all the phases of the Ypres engagement. The ammunition columns waited for hour after hour at their stated points, ready to distribute supplies as needed. Their business was to stay where they could be found, and if the shrapnel caught them when lined up by the roadside, that was part of the business too. They stuck it out the livelong days and nights, coming up full and going away empty with no more fuss than is made by delivery wagons on Drummond Street. The doctors had the distraction of incessant work, and it was curious to see how they took their professional manner into the field. Half the cities and towns in the Dominion might have identified their own doctors under the official uniforms as far as they could have seen them. Though they were working at high pressure, they were unmistakably the same men. Some were as polite as though each poor, mangled case represented (which it might well have done) the love and hopes of wealthy and well-known families. Others employed the same little phrases of encouragement, and the same tricks of tone and gesture, at the beginning and end of their operations, as their hospitals have known for years.

Others, again, switched off from English to French-Canadian patois as the cases changed under their hands; but not one of them had a thought to waste on anything outside the cases. Their professional habit seemed to enwrap them like an armoured belt, to protect them from all consciousness of the hurricanes of death all round. This is difficult to explain to anybody who has not seen a doctor's face pucker with a slight impatience when one side of his temporary field ambulance dressing station is knocked out by the blast of a shell, and he must wait until someone finds an electric torch to show him where his patient lies. It would be inadequate to call such men heroic.

Each soul of those engaged—and Canada threw in all she had on the ground—will take away in his mind pictures that time can never wipe out. For some the memory of that struggle in the wood where the guns were will stand out clearest in the raw primitiveness of its fighting. Others will recall only struggles among rubbish heaps that once were villages; some wall-end or market square, inestimably valuable for a few red hours, and then a useless and disregarded charnel-house. Very many will think most of the profiles of bare fields over which men moved in silence from piles of stacked overcoats and equipment towards the trench where they knew the fire was waiting that would sweep them away. There was one such attack in which six thousand troops, of whom not more than a third were Canadians, made a charge. Each little company in the space felt itself alone in the world. It is so with all bodies and all individuals in war. Only when night fell did the same picture reveal itself to all. Then it was war as the prints and pictures in our houses at home show it—the horizon lighted all round by the flame of burning villages, and the German flares pitching and curving like the comets which are supposed to attend the death of kings. Morning light broke up all the connections, and we were each alone once more—horribly visible or hidden.

During the bombardment refugees fled back from the villages while shrapnel fell along the roads they took. Amidst all the horrors of this war there was nothing more heartrending than the misery of these helpless victims. They met our supports and reserves coming up, and pressed aside from the pavés to give them room. They had packed what they could carry on their own backs and the backs of their horses and cows, while prudent men hired out dog teams; for one noticed the same busied dogs passing and repassing up and down the line, tugging hard in front of the low-wheeled little carts. Invalids, palsied old men and women swathed in pillows and bolstered up by the affectionate care of their middle-aged children, struggled in the procession. Their fear had overcome their infirmities, and they had been dragged away swiftly as might be from that death which Time itself would have dealt them in a little while.

Then, as you know, we buried our dead; the records began to be made, and the terrible cables started to work on the list of names for home. There is in London a colony of Canadians who have come across to be a little nearer to their nearest. They suffer the common lot, and live from hour to hour in the hotels and lodging-houses, where every guest and servant is as concerned as they. Life is harder for them than for the English, because they are not among their own surroundings, and France is very far off.

The colony is divided now, as the English have been since war began, into three classes—those who know the worst, those who fear it, and those who for the time being have escaped any blow, and are therefore at liberty to help the others. The cables from the west are alive with appeals, and as information is gathered it is flashed back to Canada. A voice calls out of a remote township, asking for news of a certain name. It has no claim on the receiver, who may have been, perhaps, his deadly rival in the little old days. But it calls, and must be answered. Who has had news of this name? Add it to your list that you carry about and consult with your friends; and when you have made sure of your own beloved, in your grief or your joy, remember to mention this name. Somebody identifies it as having come from his own town—son of the minister or the lawyer. He was probably with comrades from the same neighbourhood, and that at least will be a clue. Meantime a soothing cable must carry the message that inquiries are being pursued. There are men in hospitals back from the trenches who may perhaps recall or remember him, or be able to refer one to other wounded men. The unofficial inquiry spreads and ramifies through all sorts of unofficial channels, till at last some sure word can be sent of the place of his death, or the nature of his wound, or the date on which he was missing, or the moment when he was last seen going forward. The voice ceases. Others take its place—clear, curt, businesslike, or, as the broken words tell, distracted with grief. The Canadian colony does its best to deal with them all, and their inquiries cut across those of the English, and sorrows and griefs are exchanged. It is all one family now, so closely knit by blood that sympathy and service are taken for granted. "Your case may be mine to-morrow," people say to each other. "My time, and what inquiries I can make, are at your disposal if you will only tell me your need and your name."