"Our outfit from old —— engineers, and believe me there's none better, have been working up in the Somme country for the last two months. We were billeted at Brie and most of our work had been throwing bridges across the Canal du Nord about three miles south of Peronne. I'm telling you the Somme ain't a river. It's a swamp, and they just hardly squeeze enough water outer it to make a canal which takes the place of a river.
"We was working under the British. Their old bridges over the canal were wooden affairs and most of them had signs on them reading, 'This bridge won't hold a tank,' and that bridge wouldn't bear trotting horses, and so on. Some of 'em we tore down must have been put in for scenery purposes only. We were slamming up some husky looking steel structures like you see in the States, and believe me it makes me sick to think that we had to blow 'em all up again before the Boches got to 'em.
"I see by the papers that the battle began on the 21st, but I've got no more idea about the date of it than the King of Honolulu. They say it's been on only about ten days, but I couldn't swear it hadn't been on since New Year's Eve. It sure seemed a long time. As I told you, we were working just south of Peronne on the main road between St. Quentin and Amiens. She started on a foggy morning and for two days the music kept getting closer. On the first day, all traffic was frontward, men, guns, and camions going up towards the lines, and then the tide began to flow back.
"Ambulances and camions, full of poor wounded devils, filled the road, and then came labour battalions of chattering Chinks, Egyptians, and Fiji Islanders and God knows what. None of these birds were lingering, because the enemy was sprinkling the roads with shells and sorter keeping their marching spirits up. Orders came for us to ditch our packs and equipment all except spades, rifles, belts and canteens, and we set off toward the rear.
"Do you mind your map of the Somme? Well, we pulls up at Chaulnes for a breath. It was a big depot and dump town—aeroplanes and everything piled up in it. We were ordered onto demolition work, being as we was still classed as non-combatants. I don't know how many billions of dollars' worth of stuff we blew up and destroyed, but it seemed to me there was no end of it. Fritz kept coming all the time and they hiked us on to Aubercourt and then to Dormant, and each place we stopped and dug trenches, and then they shoots us into camions and rushes us north to a town not far out of Amiens.
"With about forty men, we marched down the road, this time as non-combatants no longer. We stopped just east of the village of Marcelcave and dug a line of trenches across the road. We had twenty machine guns and almost as many different kinds of ammunition as there was different nationalities in our trench. Our position was the fifth line of defence, we was told, but the guns kept getting closer and a lot of that long range stuff was giving us hell. Near me there was a squad of my men, one Chink, three Canadians, and we two Dublin fusileers.
"Then we begin to see our own guns, that is, British guns, beginning to blow hell out of this here village of Marcelcave right in front of us. It made me wild to see the artillery making a mistake like that, so I says to one of these here Dublin fusileers:
"'Whatinell's 'matter wid dose guns firing on our own men up there in the village? If this is the fifth line, then that must be our fourth line in the village?'
"'Lad,' says the Dublin fusileer to me, 'I don't want to discourage you for the life of me, but this only used to be the fifth line. We are in the first line now and it's up to you and me and the Chink and the rest of us to keep the Fritzes out of Amiens. At this moment we are all that's between.'
"We started to the machine guns and began pouring it in on 'em. The minute some of 'em would start out of the town we would wither them. Holy mother, but what a beautiful murder it was!