[CAPTAIN FRANCIS ALEXANDER CARON SCRIMGER, C.A.M.C.]
During the terrible days from April 22nd till April 25th, 1915, the Canadian troops had their mettle tested to a supreme degree. In those four days the second battle of Ypres was fought and the German drive held up where its authors had thought it irresistible. Even the deluge of gas—the first used in the war—gained them less benefit than they expected. That battle of Ypres was decidedly a Canadian victory.
Captain F. A. C. Scrimger, of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, was attached at the time to the 14th (Royal Montreal) Battalion. On April 22nd he was in charge of an advanced dressing station situated in an old farm building near the battered city of Ypres. The house was surrounded by a moat over which there was only one road; and that afternoon, during the heavy fighting, the German artillery found the lonely house and began to shell it.
For three days and nights Scrimger worked among the wounded, heedless of the pandemonium of the battle, in a situation which was perilous in the extreme. The Germans, in their forward rush, brought the farm within rifle range, but still Scrimger and his staff went about their work.
On the afternoon of the 25th the German artillery sent over incendiary shells, and one of these, landing on the farm, set the place alight. The staff were at last forced to move.
The single road was almost impassable owing to a heavy German shrapnel barrage, but the wounded were nevertheless taken back to places of comparative safety. Some of the staff, and some of the less badly wounded patients, swam the moat. They were all removed except one badly injured officer; for him swimming was out of the question.
Scrimger took upon himself the task of saving this patient, but, as he was preparing to move, several direct hits were made on the house by the German artillery. Shrapnel burst through the rafters. Scrimger bent over his patient, protecting him with his body as the splinters fell around them, and finally, during a lull, carried him out of the blazing house on his back.
But in the open there was not even the protection of the shaky walls of the farm, and Scrimger had not gone far with his burden when he saw that the officer was too severely wounded to bear this kind of journeying. There was no shelter in sight, nothing but the shrapnel-swept wastes and the torn, shuddering earth.
Laying his patient down, Scrimger remained beside him, shielding him again with his own body, till help arrived later in the day.
