As I have already told you, the transports were scarce, and we had little to eat, and absolutely nothing in the way of new equipment. It was all we could do to get ammunition. After shivering all day, I determined to have some clothes. Right in front of our position, about twenty-five yards from the trench, lay a dead member of H company whose name was Jock Drummond. Under cover of darkness, I sneaked out, and was almost beside the body, when a flare rocket went up. All of No Man’s Land was lit up like day and I had to lie among the dead as if I had been one of them. It almost turned my stomach, but I did not dare to move. The Germans were searching the muddy ground and the least motion on my part would have brought a dozen or so bullets my way.
Presently the light from the flare bombs died away, and I wriggled closer to what had been Drummond. I got my arm under the shoulders of the body, and started to crawl back to the trench. Twice a rocket went up, and I had to lie still for minutes with my ghastly companion. The second time, a German must have seen us move. Three bullets spattered against the ground a few inches from me, and one struck Drummond. I suppose I was twelve or fifteen minutes crawling back to the trench. It seemed fifteen years—an interminable time. I was not yet thoroughly hardened to war, and it went against my whole nature; but—I had to have clothes. We took the kilt from Drummond’s body, and I wore it for weeks. Drummond, at least, got a decent burial, and a letter we found in his pocket we mailed to his mother, to whom it was addressed; so perhaps the deed done with a selfish purpose bore some good fruits after all. I may add that the stench of the dead lingered with me for a good many days.
The night after I got Drummond’s kilt, the Germans attacked us. We had erected barbed-wire entanglements in front of our position. We had empty jam and bully-beef tins, also empty shell cases from field guns, strung on the wire in such a way that the least touch would attract attention.
In this manner we were notified that the Germans were in the act of striking at us. Now they were coming—hundreds of them. There was a thin edge of humanity first, like the sheeting of water which precedes a breaker up a gently sloping beach. Behind it came units—more closely bunched, and, still farther back, was a mass of soldiery almost like a battalion on parade.
It was murder to fire into that wall of misty grey—but the men who made it were bent on murdering us. I was firing as fast as I could. On my right was a lad of nineteen, who was one of the 3rd battalion militia of the Black Watch—a detachment sent to replace our losses.
“Pray God they may not pass the wire,” he half sobbed with every breath. He was afraid, but he would not run. Every man is afraid in his first battle. The recruit’s face was drawn and white—his lips a thin, pressed line—but he fired calmly. He did not mind the bullets, but he had not yet the “spirit of the bayonet,” and he dreaded that they should pass the wire.
The first of the thin line was at the entanglement. Most of them dropped before they touched a wire, but others cut a single strand before a bullet found its berth. They died; but they had succeeded in their mission. A thread of life cut to sever a strand of wire!
The wave had risen and was breaking over the entanglement. They were beginning to get through. Here and there a man lumbered up the gentle slope toward our trenches only to fall before he reached them. The mass of them was worming through the wire now.
A shrill whistle blew. From our trenches came a sound like the beating of a hundred pneumatic hammers. It was the music of Hell. The machine guns and artillery were making it, and they were spitting out death in streams to the accompaniment of their devilish music. God was answering the prayer of the little lad. The Germans were dropping at the wire; they would not pass.
The wee death engines were playing just a foot or so above the bottom of the wire, and they were literally cutting the legs from under the mass of grey-clad men. The back wash from the wave which broke against the wire was thinner than the wash that had preceded it.