Canada in Flanders, Volume I

by Baron Max Aitken Beaverbrook

Private McDonald, of Port Arthur, displays no unseemly elation over his score of twenty-six.

Private Patrick Riel makes a strong appeal to the imagination, though his tally is less than McDonald's by two or three. He is a descendant of the late Louis Riel, and when he enlisted in the 90th Winnipeg Rifles at the outbreak of the war, and was told by one of his officers that his regiment had done battle against his cousin Louis at Fish Creek and Batoche, he showed only a mild interest in this trick of Time. Riel, like McDonald, comes from Port Arthur way. Before the war he earned his daily bacon and tobacco as a foreman of lumber-jacks on the Kaministiquia River.

The weapons used by these four snipers are Ross rifles, remodelled to suit their peculiar and particular needs. Each is mounted with a telescopic sight, and from beneath the barrel of each much of the wood of the casing has been cut away. The men do their work by day, as the telescopic sight is not good for shooting in a poor light. They are excused all fatigues while in the trenches and go about their grim tasks without hint or hindrance from their superiors. They choose their own positions from which to observe the enemy and to fire upon him—sometimes in leafy covers behind our front-line trench, sometimes behind our parapet. Very little of their work is done in the "No Man's Land" between the hostile lines, for there danger from the enemy is augmented by the chance of a shot from some zealous but mistaken comrade. The mention of "No Man's Land" reminds me that, on the Canadian front, this desolate and perilous strip of land is now called "Canada." The idea is that our patrols have the upper hand here, night and day—that we govern the region, though we have not stationed any Governor or Resident Magistrate there as yet.

Our bombers, too, are an interesting and peculiar body of men, evolved by the needs of this warfare from all classes. Sergeant William Tabernacle is a bomber. He has lived for so long in an environment of cramped quarters, alternating five days and five nights of narrow trenches and low dug-outs, with five days and five nights of circumscribed huts in the reserve lines, week after week, month after month, that he sometimes wonders if the pictures in the back of his mind—pictures of dry-floored houses, wide beds, and secure streets—are memories or only dreams. At first, for a little while, he fretted after the soft things of the old, soft life in far-away Canada; but now he is content to shape his life and live it only from day to day, to question the future as little as to review the past. The things that matter to William now are the things of the moment—the trench mortars behind the opposite parapet, the guns screened in the wood behind our own lines, food, and his ration of rum.

William loves bombs, though he had never heard of such things before the war and had never believed in them until two exploded near him, in the first trench of his experience—long ago, before the Second Battle of Ypres. It seems that he brought to France with him, all unknown to himself or his comrades, an instinctive understanding of and affection for every variety of explosive missile. He grasped the idea and intention of this phase of warfare in a flash—in the flash of his first hostile grenade. He was told to be a bomber; so he became a bomber, and everything he threw exploded with precision. His Colonel made a Corporal of him. As Corporal he added to his duties of throwing bombs the work of overhauling the bombs of others and of manufacturing a few on his own account. He became a Sergeant—and now he is an accepted authority on bombs. He makes them, repairs them, assembles them, takes care of them, issues them to his men, and sometimes heaves a few himself, just to show the youngsters how the trick is done.

Nothing comes amiss to William. Bombs and grenades that enter his trench and fail to explode are quickly investigated, and, sooner or later, are returned to their original owners in working order. Rifle grenades that explode in William's vicinity never fail to attract his attention, and while others attend to the wounded he looks for the stick. Finding the stick, he immediately welds it to the base of a small, cone-shaped bomb from his own stores—and, behold, a rifle grenade of superior quality all ready to be fired against the enemy's loopholes.

William is considered by some to have grown peculiar in his habits. His dug-out is hung and cluttered with the materials and tools and weapons of his trade. He fondles specimens of British, French, and German bombs, even as old ladies back in Canada fondle their grandchildren. He expatiates on their good points and their defects. He has his favourites, of course, and should anyone venture to belittle the fuse, the detonating charge, or the explosive quality of one of his favourites, he becomes arrogant, ill-mannered, and quarrelsome.

William lives to-day for the explosion of to-morrow. If he were Lord Kitchener doubtless this war would end very suddenly, some fine day, in a rending crash that would split and rip these fair lands from the sea to the high hills.

William is a Canadian. Before the war his fellow-countrymen believed that he lacked ambition and smoked too many cigarettes. But here he is doing his queer work, in his own queer way, in a trench in the Low Countries—one of the hardest rivets to break or bend in that long barrier which the fighting legions of Germany can neither bend nor break.

One cannot help wondering what William will do for excitement when he returns to that little town in Ontario—if ever he does return. Perhaps, an Uncle Toby of the New World, he will tell, "with remembrances," the story of how he "fought in Flanders" on the old soil and with the old weapons.