Our shift in the trenches was supposed to be four days and four nights in. It never was shorter, sometimes much longer. Once we spent eleven days and nights in the trenches without a shift, because our reinforcing battalion was called away to another sector of the front. I know of a Highland Battalion that was in twenty-eight days and nights without a change.
We were unequipped as to uniform. We were in the regulation khaki of other days. We had no waterproof overcoats. We had puttees, but the greater number of us had no rubber boots. A very few of the men had boots of rubber that reached to the knees. At first we envied the possessors of these, but not for long. The water and mud, and shortly the blood, rose above the top and ran down inside the leg of the boot. The wearers could not remove the mud, and trench feet, frost bite, gangrene, was their immediate portion. We lost as many men, that first winter of the war, by these terrible afflictions as we did by actual bullets and shell fire.
To us who had come from the Far Northwest the weather was a terrible trial. Our winters were possibly more severe, but we could stand them so much better, with their sharp dry cold in contrast to the damp, misty, soaking chill of this non-zero country. Possibly, at night, the thermometer would register some two or three degrees below freezing. A thin shell of ice would form on the ditch which we called a trench. This would crackle round our legs and the cold would eat into the very bone. At dawn the ice would begin to break up and a steady sleet begin to fall. Later the sleet would turn to rain, and so the day would pass till we were soaked through to the skin. At night the frost would come again and stiffen our clothes to our tortured bodies, next day another thaw and rain, and so to the end of our turn, or to the time when an enemy bullet would finish our physical suffering.
We could have borne all this without a murmur, and did bear it in a silence that was grim, but we had a greater strain, a mental one, with which to contend. We knew—we knew without a doubt that we were out there alone. We had not a reserve behind us. We had not a tithe of the gun power which we should have had. Our artillery was not appreciable in quantity. What there was of it was effective, but as compared to the enemy gun power we were nowhere. They had possibly ten to our one. They were very considerably stronger than they are to-day. We, to-day, can say with truth that we are where they were in 1914-15. We, with our two years of hurried and almost frenzied work, and they, with their forty years of crafty preparation!
And they knew how to use those guns, too. Our engineering and pioneer corps at that time were non-existent. We had practically none. The Germans would put over a few shells during the day. They would level our sandbag breastworks and blow our frail shelters to smithereens. We had no dugouts and no communication trenches. With a shell of tremendous power they would rip up yards of our makeshift defenses and kill half a dozen of our boys. Sometimes we would groan aloud and pray to see a few German legs and arms fly to the four winds as compensation. But no. We would wire back to artillery headquarters: "For God's sake, send over a few shells, even one shell, to silence this hell!" And day after day the same answer would come back: "Heaven knows we are sorry, but you've had your allotment of shells for to-day."
Perhaps one shell, or it may have been three, would have been the ammunition ration of our particular front for the day.
It was nobody's fault at the moment of fighting. It lay perhaps between those who had anticipated and prepared for war for forty years and those who had neglected to foresee the possibility of such an enterprise. The fact remained, we had no shells.
Every day our defenses were leveled. Every night we would crawl out, after long hours spent flat on our stomachs, covered to the neck in mud and blood, and endeavor to repair the damage. Every night we lost a few men; every day we lost a few men, and still we held our ground.
The day casualties were the worst. The wounded men had to lie in the damp and dirt until night came to shelter them; then some one would help, or if that were not possible, the wounded would have to make his own pain-strewn way back to a dressing station. During the day some one might discover that he had developed a frozen toe. He could get no relief; he dare not attempt to leave his partial shelter. The slightest movement, and the enemy would have closed his career. By night his foot would be a fiery torture, and by the time a doctor was near enough to help it would be a rotting mass of gangrene, and one man more would be added to the list of permanent cripples.
I am asked, "How did you live? How did you 'carry on'?"