My Year of the Great War

by Frederick Palmer

Now another headquarters and another general, also isolated in a dugout, holding the reins of his wires over a section of line adjoining that of the one we had just left. Before we proceeded we must look over his shelter from shell-storms. The only time that these British generals become boastful is over their dugouts. They take all the pride in them of the man who has bought a plot of land and built himself a home; and like him, they keep on making improvements and calling attention to them.

I must say that this was one of the best shelters I have seen anywhere in the tornado belt; and whatever I am not, I am certainly an expert in dugouts. Of course, this general, too, said, “At your own risk!” He was good enough to send a young officer with us up to the trenches; then we should not make any mistakes about direction if we wanted to reach the neighbourhood of the two hundred yards which we had taken from the Germans. When we thanked him and said “Good-bye!” he remarked:

“We never say good-bye up here. It does not sound pleasant. Make it au revoir” And he, too, had a twinkle in his eye.

By this time one leg ought to have been so much longer than the other that one would have walked in a circle if he had not had a guide.

That battery which had been near the dugout kept on with its regular firing, its shells sweeping overhead. We had not gone far before we came to a board nailed to a tree with the caution, “Keep to the right!” If you went to the left you might be seen by the enemy, though we were seeing nothing of him, nor of our own trenches yet. Every square yard of this ground had been tried out by actual experience, at the cost of dead and wounded men, till safe lanes of approach had been found.

Next was a clearing station, where the wounded are brought in from the trenches for transfer to ambulances. A glance at the burden on a stretcher just arriving automatically framed the word, “shell-fire!” The stains overrunning on tanned skin beyond the edges of the white bandage were a bright red in the sunlight. A khaki blouse torn open, or a trousers leg, or a sleeve cut down the seam, revealing the white of the first aid and a splash of red, means one man wounded; and by the ones the thousands come.

Fifty wounded men on the floor of a clearing station and the individual is lost in the crowd. When you see the one borne past, if there is nothing else to distract attention you always ask two questions: Will he die? Has he been maimed for life? If the answers to both are No, you feel a sense of triumph, as if you had seen a human play, built skilfully around a life to arouse your emotions, turn out happily.

The man has fought in an honourable cause; he has felt the very touch of death’s fingers. How happy he is when he knows that he will get well! In prospect, as his wound heals into the scar which will be the lasting decoration of his courage, is home and all that it means and those in it mean to him. What kind of a home has he, this private soldier? In the slums, with a slattern wife? Or in a cottage with a flower garden in front, only a few minutes’ walk from the green fields of the English countryside?—but we set out to tell you about the kind of inferno in which this man got his splash of red.

We come to the banks of a canal which has carried the traffic of the Low Countries for many centuries; the canal where the British and French had fought many a Thermopylæ in the last eight months. Along its banks run rows of fine trees narrowing in perspective before the eye. Some have been cut in two by the direct hit of a heavy shell and others splintered down, bit by bit. Others still standing have been hit many times. There are cuts as fresh as if the chip had just flown from the axeman’s blow, and there are scars from cuts made last autumn which nature’s sap, rising as it does in the veins of wounded men, has healed while it sent forth leaves in answer to the call of spring from the remaining branches.

In this neighbourhood the earth is many-mouthed with caves and cut with passages running from cave to cave, so that the inhabitants may go and come hidden from sight. Jawbone and Hairyman and Lowbrow, of the stone age, would be at home here, squatting on their hunkers and tearing at their raw kill with their long incisors. It does not seem a place for men who walk erect, wear woven fabrics, enjoy a written language, and use soap and safety razors. One would not be surprised to see some figure swing down by a long, hairy arm from a branch of a tree and leap on all fours into one of the caves, where he would receive a gibbering welcome to the bosom of his family.