On the Fringe of the Great Fight

by George Gallie Nasmith

Many sad and depressing sights were witnessed, and one received many vivid impressions of what war means to an invaded country,—impressions which can only be attained by actual experience.

Accompanied by the sanitary officer of the 19th division one morning I saw a very sad example of what ignorance of the essentials of hygiene can bring about. Down in a swampy spot on a branch of the canal was a little hamlet, and one of the tiny houses was occupied by a family of refugees from La Bassee.

When we entered the house swarms of flies flew up from the table and buzzed about while we did our best to prevent them from settling upon us. The father of the family was in bed unconscious, with typhoid fever. The mother, dead from the disease, had been buried the day before.

During the funeral the eldest daughter, a pretty girl of sixteen, sat up in a chair trying to look after the visitors. When we called she also was in bed delirious with the disease in the same room as her father.

The baby in the carriage had had typhoid. A little two year old boy was just recovering, and was thought to have been the original case. Two other boys of seven and nine years of age were getting some bread and milk for their dinner, one of them being probably a mild case; and a girl of eleven, evidently coming down with the disease, was going about looking after the household.

With that swarm of disease-carrying flies in the house there was no possibility of any of the children escaping the infection. It was with the greatest difficulty that the sanitary officer of the division succeeded in getting the French civilian authorities to move in the matter and remove the cases to the French civilian hospital. The father died a week later, and the sanitary officer himself was subsequently killed during the battle of the Somme.

The French refugees do not complain; they are not that kind. They told their stories simply and invariably finished with a shrug of the shoulders and the phrase "c'est la guerre n'est ce pas?" (That is war, is it not?) But if the French army ever gets on German soil I would hate to be a German.

One night we found that our first Canadian brigade was going into the trenches at Festubert without the chemical necessary to saturate their gas masks, which had just been issued to the soldiers; we succeeded in borrowing 500 pounds from a wide-awake army corps and took it down in the car to an advanced dressing station which the brigade would have to pass. The Germans were particularly jumpy that night as we felt our way along that very rough road with no light to guide us except the electric green light of the numerous German flares, the occasional flashes of a powerful German search light sweeping the sky and ground, and the angry red spurts from the guns which lit up the sky like summer lightning.

Once we had occasion to make a trip from one shelled village to another, the driver had been given the direction and no further attention was paid to him until we came across a reserve trench manned by Ghurkas. This drew our attention to the fact that the country was quite unfamiliar. However, the next French sign post showed us that we were on a road leading to the desired village and we kept on.

The day was very quiet and hazy and it was impossible to see very far. We suddenly came upon the remains of a little village which had been literally levelled to the ground; not two feet of brick wall could be seen anywhere. At the cross roads in the centre of the village two military policemen seemed to be surprised at our appearance with a large motor car but said nothing, evidently thinking that we knew our own business best, and we made the correct turn according to the sign board and kept on. About two hundred yards farther on we ran into a veritable maze of trenches, barbed wire entanglements and dug-outs, without doubt part of the front line trench system. Needless to say we made a rapid right-about face and speedily retraced our steps by the road we had come.