face p. 213
On one run toward Ypres I passed the "Princess Pat's" (Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry), fresh from the 27th Division trenches, and on their way to a rest in billets. They were indeed a sturdy lot. All forenoon the Huns shelled our front line from the Menin Road to the north as it passed the Hooge Château and circled the Bellewaarde Lake. Wounded men poured back through Ypres from the Front, marvelling that they had escaped death in the trenches, and wondering still more that they had not been blown to atoms as they trudged back along the deadly Menin Road.
A wounded trooper of the 11th Hussars reported his regiment unpleasantly situated in bad dug-outs in a wood, between the Ypres-Roulers Railway and the Bellewaarde Lake. The dug-outs were not of sufficient size to accommodate the whole of the 11th, and when a detachment of Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders claimed shelter therein as well, the congestion became dangerous. The Hun shells burst immediately over the dug-outs, and some casualties had occurred before morning dawned. So little accommodation seemed available that one squadron of the 11th had been sent back to the G.H.Q. line, where it had been badly hammered by howitzer fire for hour after hour as the morning passed.
Romer Williams and I walked from our château to a "Mother" gun, concealed under a screen of dry branches in a near-by farmyard. The big 9·2 howitzer was throwing its 290-pound projectiles, filled with lyddite, into the Hun trenches in front of Hooge, nearly 9,000 yards distant. The five-mile journey was accomplished by each shell in 35 seconds, a rate of more than 500 miles per hour. Dodging a shell which was coming at such speed would be something of a feat.
Yet, standing directly behind the breech, we could distinctly see the 9·2 shell as it left the muzzle and started on its sinister errand.
For so huge an engine of war its paraphernalia was simple. The howitzer stood on a platform built into the farmyard. Rows of shells, each a load for four men, lay in a ditch behind it. On a log, under a tall tree, sat the captain gunner, by his side a non-com. busy figuring out mathematical equations, and another poring over a large-scale map. With his back to the tree crouched a Royal Flying Corps man, his receiver to his ear, and an elaborate box of wireless telegraphic tricks beside him. Across the road a slender pole, a score of feet in height, completed his wireless installation.
"Fire!" said the captain, sharply.
Flash! bang! "Mother" recoiled with a shock and returned leisurely. Not a big noise or a very trying one on the ears of those near by, unless in front of the "business end." The crew stood close at hand as each round was fired.
Before an unsophisticated onlooker would imagine the great shell had reached its destination, the wireless man, listening attentively to the message from an aeroplane observer high over the Huns, and out of our sight, sang out "150 yards over."
A cabalistic sequence of numbers was shouted in staccato tones by one of the non-coms, repeated by a man at the breech, and flash! bang! went "Mother" again.