On the Fringe of the Great Fight

by George Gallie Nasmith

On May 5th the Canadian transport was strung along the roads leading from Ypres and we knew that the division was out for a rest. We hunted out some of our friends in Bailleul,—some of the few that were left. There were 7 of the 25 officers in the 3rd (Toronto) battalion and 6 out of the 25 in the 48th Highlanders of Toronto, though the missing ones had not all been killed. They were greatly changed in appearance, were very tired, and could tell little of their experiences in any connected way; at that time they had simply a succession of blurred impressions; they could recall a terrible excitement but had little idea of the sequence of events. The men, sitting around the streets of Bailleul in the sun, looked as if they had seen and experienced more than they could ever tell.

One of my officer comrades had gone insane, and another had been so shell shocked that he was of no further use and had been sent to England,—the latter was one of those officers whom I had seen in the little club house at Winnezeele. Two of my friends had been buried out in the front one night with two other officers—all in the one shell hole.

The medical officer, Captain Haywood, conducted the burial without candle or book. The green white light from the German flares and the red flashes of the guns was the only light to show the sad little party where their erstwhile comrades rested. The lay parson, exhausted with seventy hours' continuous work, and unable to recall a single word of the burial service, broke huskily into this rugged commendation, "Well, boys, they were four damn good fellows; let us repeat the Lord's prayer," but they couldn't manage to say even the Lord's prayer among them.

What a setting for a soldier funeral! The black night, the roar and flash of the guns and the green flare of the German star shells silhouetting those bowed heads above the soldiers' grave. What a fitting tribute to a soldier! The broken voice with the rough and ready words of praise: "They were four damn good fellows." What more could be said? What more would any soldier desire?

One chap had seen General Mercer, with his aide-de-camp by his side, crossing a fire-swept field deliberately stop in the middle of it to light his pipe. Everybody agreed that the General was the coolest man in sight that day. The Aide himself assured me that it took several matches to light the General's pipe and that the matches were the slow-burning variety; he said that it seemed to him to have taken about an hour to light that pipe, and all the time he was wishing himself safe in the shelter of a ditch. It had not been mere bravado on the General's part but a deliberately planned act to steady his men.

Some of the Canadian soldiers came into the dressing stations during the battle, accoutred in wonderful equipment that had taken their fancies. One wounded chap wore an Indian's turban, a French officer's spurs and a British officer's pistol.

Major W.D. Allan had seven bullet holes in his clothing, two of them through his hat; and yet his skin was not broken. The nearest approach to a wound was a big triangular bruise on his shoulder, made by a piece of spent high explosive. One of the bullets had gone through his hat and tipped it over his eyes as his unit was falling back from one trench to another; he said that he was positive he had broken the world's record for a hundred yards in the next few seconds.

The First Battalion, at whose mess I dined one night, had lost 400 out of a total of 800 men during a 600-yard advance into the breach made by the German gas in the face of a terrific fire.

Meanwhile preparations were in progress for a battle in our area evidently for the purpose of relieving the pressure on the line elsewhere, and on the 9th of May we were wakened at 4.30 a.m. by the final bombardment. I had been invited to witness the battle by a general on the staff but I was unable to go.

The first wounded came in about noon and by four o'clock the hospital where we took our meals was filled. From the windows above we could see scores of wounded lying in rows on stretchers in that sunny courtyard, some conscious and others unconscious. Every conscious wounded soldier held a cigarette between his lips and I even saw them going in to the operating table smoking. The wounded were a depressed lot that day; the men themselves realized that they had been badly cut up for little purpose, for the wire had not been destroyed and they had been unable to make any progress. The authorities in England had not yet realized that high explosives were necessary to cut wire in spite of the fact that everybody in the field knew it. It required a newspaper agitation to convert some of the authorities as to the need of high explosives.