In curious contrast to my constitutional dread of the danger abounding on every hand was a man who happened to have possessed himself of a fairly dried dugout. With that torrent of shell hurtling everywhere, he calmly read chapter after chapter of a magazine, apparently as deeply interested as if he were sitting in his own room at home. How I envied him his nerves—or, rather, the absolute lack of them.
CHAPTER XXI
HANGING ON
About fifty yards to the rear of us was a huge pile of bricks, fully a hundred yards long by thirty feet high. The ground we were occupying had originally been a brick yard and these bricks had been put out to dry, but the war coming on they had been left and had gradually settled down into a solid mass.
Someone was rash enough to show himself for a second near the brick pile, and it was his last second. It had become a joke that they would snipe at you with a fifteen-pound shell at Ypres, and the Boches evidently imagined there were men near the brick pile, for they took one shot as a sighter and then turned their heaviest field guns on it. The huge pile looked strong enough to last for a week, yet by night it was a crumbling powder.
This added a very disagreeable fury to the bombardment. The huge shells would burst with a crumbling crash, a great sheet of flame would flicker for an instant, then from out the pall of acrid smoke, flying bricks would hurtle for yards. Dozens of them flew back into our trench and I still bear the marks on my back and hands where flying pieces of brick caught me.
Several men were killed by these curious missiles, while all of us were bleeding from cuts and scratches caused by the wounds.
On went the bombardment and nothing seemed to exist but a riot of noise, flying shrapnel, flashes, and the steady drizzle of the rain. Twice during the day we stood to retire, but each time the major sent word that, "We are holding on and we can hold them 'till the cows come home."
Luckily, owing to the heroism of our signalers, the line to headquarters remained intact. These fine boys repaired the line time and again under shell and machine gun fire of the fiercest nature. One fellow earned the V.C. a dozen times during the day; he exposed himself recklessly, working with all his might in the very heart of the German barrage. He is still living, but was badly hurt later on at Festubert.
Toward evening we managed to get the wounded out and were I to tell the entire story of the self-sacrifice of the boys, it alone would fill a larger volume than this. They were obliged to carry the wounded along an old communication trench about six feet deep, with mud two feet deep at the bottom, then emerge into the shell-swept open for a distance of two or three hundred yards. Curiously enough, very few of the wounded were again hit traveling this road, and "Long" Mitchell, a boy from Michigan, and another boy, Manville, from Prince Albert, walked time and again down that highway of hell with their wounded comrades. Apparently they did not know the sheer heroism of their tasks, and probably don't know to this day.