As for the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, all old soldiers of the South African campaign almost without exception, knowing and hardened, their veteran experience gave them an earlier opportunity in the trenches than the first Canadian division. Brigaded with British regulars, the Princess Pats were a sort of corps d’élite. Colonel Francis Farquhar, known as “Fanny,” was their colonel, and he knew his men. After he was killed his spirit remained with them. Asked if they could stick, they said, “Yes, sir!” cheerily, as he would have wanted them to say it.
I am going to tell you about the work of the Princess Pats on May 8th, not to single them out from any other regiment, but because it is typical of the kind of fighting which many another regiment has known and I have it in illustrative detail. Losses, day by day losses, characteristic of trench warfare, they had previously suffered in holding a difficult salient at St. Eloi—losses that added up into the hundreds. Heretofore as one of them said, they had been holding down the lid of hell, but on May 8th they were to hold on to the edge of the opening by the skin of their teeth and look down into the bowels of hell after the Germans had blown off the lid with high explosives.
It was in a big château that I first heard the story and felt the thrill of it told by the tongues of its participants. There were twenty bedrooms in that château. If I wished to stay all night I might occupy three or four—and as for that bathroom, paradise to men who have been buried in filthy mud by high explosives, the Frenchman who planned it had the most spacious ideas in immersions. A tub or a shower or a hose as you pleased. Some bathroom, that!
For nothing in the British army was too good for the Princess Pats before May 8th; and since May 8th nothing was quite good enough. Five of us sat down to dinner in a banquet hall looking out on a private park, big enough to hold fifty. The talk ran fast.
“Too bad Gault is not here. He’s in England recovering from his wound. Gault is six feet tall and five feet of him legs. All day in that trench with a shell wound in his thigh and arm. God! How he was suffering! But not a moan—his face twitching and trying to make the twitch into a smile—and telling us to stick.”
“Buller away, too. He was the second in command. Gault succeeded him. Buller was hit on May 5th—and missed the big show—piece of shell in the eye.”
“And Charlie Stewart, who was shot through the stomach. How we miss him. If ever there were a ‘live-wire’ it’s Charlie. Up or down, he’s smiling and ready for the next adventure. Once he made thirty thousand dollars in the Yukon—and spent it on the way to Vancouver. The first job he could get was washing dishes—but he wasn’t washing them long. Again he started out in the Northwest on an expedition with four hundred traps to cut into the fur business of the Hudson’s Bay Company. His Indians got sick; he wouldn’t desert them—and before he was through he had a time which beat anything yet opened up for us by the Germans in Flanders—but you have heard such stories from the Northwest before. Being shot through the stomach the way he was all the doctors agreed that Charlie would die. It was like Charlie to disagree with them. He always has his own point of view. So he is getting well. Charlie came out to the war with the packing-case which had been used by his grandfather, who was an officer in the Crimean War. He said that it would bring him luck.”
The 4th of May was bad enough—a ghastly forerunner for the 8th. On the 4th the P. P’s, after having been under shell-fire throughout the second battle of Ypres—the “gas battle”—were ordered forward to a new line to the southeast of Ypres. To the north of Ypres the British line had been driven back by the concentration of shell-fire and the rolling, deadly march of the clouds of asphyxiating gas.
The Germans were still determined to take the town which they had showered with four million dollars’ worth of shells. It would be big news—the fall of Ypres as a prelude to the fall of Przemysl and of Lemberg. A wicked salient was produced in the British line to the southeast by the cave-in to the north. It seems to be the lot of the P. P’s to get into salients. On the 4th they lost 28 men killed and 98 wounded from a gruelling all-day shell-fire and stone-walling. That night they got relief and were out for two days, when they were back in the front trenches again. The 5th and the 6th were fairly quiet; that is, what the P. P’s or Mr. Thomas Atkins would call quiet. Average mortals wouldn’t. They would try to appear unconcerned and say they had been under pretty heavy fire—which means shells all over the place and machine guns combing the parapet. Very dull, indeed. Only three men killed and seventeen wounded.
On the night of May 7th the P. P’s had a muster of 635 men. This was a good deal less than half of the original total in the battalion, including recruits who had come out to fill the gaps caused by death, wounds and sickness. Bear in mind that before this war a force was supposed to prepare for retreat with a loss of ten per cent. and get under way to the rear with the loss of fifteen per cent., and that with the loss of thirty per cent. it was supposed to have borne all that can be expected of the best trained soldiers.