FRENCH SOLDIERS ADVANCING UNDER COVER OF LIQUID FIRE.[ToList]
For a time during the battles of Givenchey, one of our field ambulances had been located in the spacious shady grounds of the chateau. A little graveyard near the main gateway, on the roadside, is the last sleeping place of a number of Canadians who died in this ambulance. To-day a neat fence surrounds this little area of Canadian soil and the graves are kept trim and covered with flowers. Even before the authorities took any action I saw the French country people themselves decorating the little mounds beneath which lay "Les Canadiens" who had come so far "to fight for France" in this struggle for the freedom of the world.
It is a beautiful little sleeping-place, and somehow it never seemed to me so sad a spot as some of the other graveyards in France where our Canadians lie. As the roar of the British guns increase as the months go by, and the number of shells carrying death and destruction to the Germans, multiplies—one can imagine that the spirits of those who lie below are watching the enemy lines being pressed back towards Berlin, and that they will understand that their sacrifice has not been in vain.
And, one night as I passed the spot, during the battle of Loos, when the sky flickered red as from summer lightning with the flash of myriads of shells, and the horizon was defined in electric green from the flares of the Germans, I fancied that I could see the shadowy spirits of the departed ones hovering over this spot before their final departure, and I felt that they must realize that the work of our army in its struggle for the freedom of the world was being carried on with increasing efficiency.
Indissoluble ties now bind France to Canada: her soil has been watered with our very best blood and the bond of a common suffering in a righteous cause has united us forever.
A Hot Day in the Field.
One hot day in early June I made a tour of the —— divisional area with the sanitary officer. We had been asked to go over this area, and make suggestions for the improvement of its sanitary condition. It was the only time during two summers spent in France that I felt I was really in the "sunny France" of my imagination. The sun beat down on the floor of our open car so that when one stopped for a minute it became a veritable little red hot radiator. So long as we kept moving, the breeze created made it bearable; but when we left the car for a minute the seats become too hot to sit on, and the perspiration fairly streamed down our faces.
The air rising from the fields and roads vibrated like that over a hot stove; the dust raised by motors hung suspended for long minutes in the motionless air, and filled one's nose and mouth. The chickens in the farmyards stood with beaks wide open gasping for air.
Even military form was relaxed on account of the heat, and lorry drivers, men on transports, and troops marched and worked with their coats off. All the water ditches near the front were filled with soldiers bathing themselves. It is extraordinary how war conditions will break down conventions. Many times that day I saw absolutely nude men bathing in a roadside ditch, and women passing only a few yards away, neither of them being at all concerned about the others. Sections of the Aire-La-Bassee canal looked like the "old swimming pool" in midsummer. Hundreds of soldiers dived, swam, and rolled about in the dirty waters. Finely built, rosy-skinned chaps they were too, playing about like care-free boys, with aeroplanes buzzing by overhead, and shells exploding in a village to the rear.
After a busy morning making our inspection and taking water samples for examination, we dined at the divisional Mess B and set out again to complete our tour. We visited the various filling points of water carts and gradually drew nearer the front line trenches. Turning down one arm of "the tuning fork"—a forked road near Festubert, we came upon an advanced dressing-station. A little to our left was a grey pile of bricks and rubble, all that remained of the village of Festubert.