He and I had been "mates" since Toronto days, had made good cheer together in the hot August days of mobilisation at Ottawa and had rubbed mess tins together under the starry sky at Levis before the great Armada had taken us to English camps and other scenes.
It was he who had fetched me out of danger at St. Eloi. And now it was my turn. They told me he was somewhere on a stretcher.
I searched them all. I struck matches—and was met by querulous curses; I knelt by the side of the dying; I inquired of those wounded who still could walk, but find him I could not. It appears that a new and heavy moustache had helped to hide him from me. I was in great distress, but in the fullness of time and when our small circles had run their route, I discovered him in Toronto.
The word was that we were to go to Vlamertinghe, where the Zeppelins had bombed us in our huts. It lay well below threatened Ypres.
We of Number One Company passed Belle-waarde Lake, with its old dug-outs and its smells, and struck off across the fields, the better to avoid the heavy barrage fire which made all movement of troops difficult beyond words. We reached the railroad up and down which in quieter times the battalion had been wont to march to and fro to the Polygon Wood trenches.
The fire became heavier here and the going was rough so that what with the burden of packs which seemed to weigh a ton and all other things; we moved in a mass, as sheep do. When slung rifles jostled packs, good friends cursed one another both loud and long. This was trench nerves.
Shortly, we ran into a solid wall of barrage fire. The officer commanding the company halted us. We were for pushing on to that rest each aching bone and muscle, each tight-stretched and shell-dazed nerve fairly screamed aloud for. But he was adamant. We cursed him. He pretended not to hear. This also was trench nerves.
It was growing late. The star shells became fewer. The search-lights ceased altogether. In half an hour those keen eyes in distant trees and steeples would have marked us down—and what good then the agony of this all-night march? Better to have been killed back there in Belle-waarde. We were still a good two miles from Ypres town.
