By the time I was twenty I was able to run both the engine and the separator of a threshing-machine outfit, and started going west every summer to the Dakotas and Montana to get the benefit of the high harvest pay. My winters I spent in a big factory in Racine, learning to repair and build threshers and tractors. Partly to save the money that I would have had to pay for a ticket, but more for the lark of it, I started beating my way back and forth between the east and the west on the trains. Sometimes I stowed away with a week’s food in an empty furniture car, sometimes I rode the “blind baggage,” but mostly it was the old stand-by of the “bindle-stiff” called “riding the rods.” My nerve was good and my arms strong, and it wasn’t long before I could swing up and disappear inside the “bumpers” of a train doing thirty miles an hour as easily as the conductor swung on to the tail of the caboose by his hand-rail. It was little idea I had that the tricks I learned in those days were going to make all the difference between my starving in a German prison camp and (what is happening now) being fed on chocolates and pink teas in London by way of training for another go at the Huns.
In 1913 I went to South America to set up and run threshing outfits that had been sold to the ranchers by the Racine company I had been working for winters. I had a two years’ contract, and was supposed to go to Uruguay or the Argentine. If I had done that, probably things would have been all right. But at the last moment, as a result of some one else dropping out, I was sent to Rio Grande do Sul, in the southern “pan-handle” of Brazil. But don’t believe that because it was Brazil there were any Brazilians there, or leastways any that counted for anything. The Germans have been swarming into Rio Grande and Santa Catharina for thirty years, and to-day southern Brazil is as “Dutch” as—southern Wisconsin. Probably, in fact, it is more so, for there are over half a million Germans there, and hardly a third that many Brazilians.
I had been avoiding German farms for the last two or three years, but in Rio Grande all the ranchers were Germans, and I had to go wherever an outfit had been sold anyhow. The notches multiplied pretty fast on my old monkey-wrench for about three weeks, but at the end of that time I found myself in jail for knocking out the front teeth of a fat German farmer after I had ducked a prod from his pitchfork. Our agent at Santa Catharina and the American Consul at Santos got me clear, but the former took the occasion to cancel my contract and ship me home before, as he put it, I had ruined the company’s trade in that end of Brazil.
I was breaking prairie with a big gasoline tractor outfit in northern Manitoba when the European War started, and so sure I was that my country was going to take some kind of a stand against the invasion of Belgium that I got ready at once to go home and enlist in case we had to back up the protest with force. I waited, with my grip packed, until it was plain that there was no chance of any move from our brave statesmen at Washington—it must have been three or four weeks before I gave up hope—and then threw up my job, did sixty miles on horseback in nine hours to the railway station, and went to the nearest recruiting office. They would probably have taken me as an American, but I was taking no chances on being rejected. I told them I was an Irish-Canadian, and the next day was being put through the paces by the drill-sergeant. I could have got much more pay and a better billet generally by going into the transport service and driving a motor truck, but I had suddenly become aware that I had been nursing a sort of slumbering desire to kill Germans for the last decade, and I wasn’t going to miss the chance to let that desire wake up. I sewed an extra loop on my belt so that I could have my good old monkey-wrench always handy, and began looking anxiously forward to the time when I should be able to complete my “register” of bashed-up Dutchmen on the handle. I might have to use my rifle for long-range work, I told myself, but for the close-in action in the trenches I was going to do with my wrench what the other fellows did with their bayonets. Lucky it was for my peace of mind in those days that I couldn’t look forward and see what the end of the next eight or ten months had in pickle for me.
The call was pretty persistent for men in those first months of the war and, in spite of the shortage of all kinds of equipment, our training was rushed from the very beginning. Most of the boys in my regiment had seen service or had training—some had been in the South African War, and others had been members of the English Territorials or the Canadian Militia—already, and we made much better progress than the rawer contingents that came later. We had about three months in Canada, a little longer in England (where I had a touch of typhoid on Salisbury Plain), and by the early spring of 1915 we were in reserve in Flanders. By the time the Germans made their second attempt to drive through Ypres to Calais we had been pushed up into the first line. Until the big attack came, however, we had had no real fighting. The Germans—I had begun to call them Huns by this time instead of Dutchmen—made scattering raids on our trenches and we made scattering raids on theirs, but I never figured in any of this to the extent of mixing in hand-to-hand work. I had no chances to add any notches to the handle of my old monkey-wrench, but from my always carrying it around with me the English “Tommies” (who call a wrench a spanner) had dubbed me “Spanner Mike.” They pretended to believe I was a little “cracked” about my trusty old friend, but I found that they were never above borrowing it for everything, from opening boxes from home to tinkering the gear of broken-down automobile trucks—“motor lorries,” they call them. It’s really remarkable what a lot of things a man can use a monkey-wrench for if only he happens to have it handy when he needs it.
For some days the shell-fire against us had been getting heavier—at least they called it heavy then; it would be nothing now—and we knew that the Huns were getting ready for some kind of an attack. What kind it was going to be we little dreamed, for even our officers seem to have known nothing about the gas they had been experimenting with over in Germany. When it came—it rolled toward us in heavy clouds like the morning mists in the Dakota “Bad Lands”—the word went round that the Huns’ munitions had got afire, and we were telling each other that we ought to be sent across to take advantage of the confusion. It was only when we began to notice that it was bubbling up at fairly regular intervals—thick greasy yellow clouds of it—that it seemed they might be putting up a game on us, and by that time one of the advanced tongues of the stuff lapped over into our trench.
I shall never forget the horrible agony and surprise in the eyes of the men who got that first dose. It was the look of a dog being suddenly beaten for something it hadn’t done. They looked at each other with questioning eyes—I only recall hearing one man start cursing—then they began gulping and coughing, and then fell down with their faces in their hands. All the time the shrapnel was popping overhead and raining bullets about, and, just as the gas began to pour over my parapet, a bullet knocked my rifle out of my hand, and I slipped in the mud as I jumped back and went down in a heap. It must have been all of six weeks before I stood on my feet again.
My first sensation was of a smarting way up inside of my nose. This quickly extended to my throat, and then, as my lungs suddenly seemed filled with red-hot needles, I was seized with a spasm of coughing. Coughing up red-hot needles is not exactly a pleasant operation, and the pain was intense. Mercifully, it was only a few minutes before a sort of stupor seemed to come on, but even as I passed into half-consciousness I was aware of my outraged lungs revolting, in heaves that shook my frame, against the poison that had swamped the trench. With some of my comrades the fighting instinct was the last thing that died, and I have a sort of a recollection of two or three of them clutching at the parapet and firing from cough-shaken shoulders off into the depths of the rolling yellow gas clouds. One lad toppled over beside me and still kept pumping shots from the bottom of the trench. I remember hazily trying to kick his rifle out of his hand as he discharged it over my ear, and, failing to locate it with my foot, recall groping instinctively for my old wrench and trying to disarm him with that. My last recollection of this stage of things was the shock of feeling the wrench-handle swing backward harmlessly for lack of my two shrapnel-smashed fingers to steady it.
I had rolled and writhed, in the agony of the pain of the gas in my lungs, in a pool of slush in the bottom of the trench, and it must have been the lying with my face buried in the shoulder of my wet woollen tunic that saved my life. Most of my comrades were quite unconscious when the Huns, with their heads protected by baggy “snoots,” came pouring into the trench, but I had enough of my senses left unparalysed to be able to watch them in a hazy sort of way. The horrible quietness of the thing was positively uncanny. Always before the enemy had charged with yells (it is directed in their manual that they do so, though, of course, a man “gives tongue” naturally on such occasions from sheer excitement), but now they were hardly making a sound. Probably this was by orders, so that no more air than was necessary should be taken into the lungs, but even when some of them did try to speak the words were so muffled that it must have been very hard to make them out.
The Huns were pretty excited at first, and started right down the trench bayoneting one body after another. But before they got to me an officer stopped them for a minute and evidently gave them to understand that they were to confine their butchery only to those that tried to resist. Two or three of our boys, who had not gone under entirely but had not sense enough to understand the uselessness of putting up a fight, made a few groggy passes at the Huns and paid the penalty. I lay quiet and played “possum,” but got a nasty prod in the groin when one of them turned me over with his bayonet to see where I was wounded. There was still a good deal of gas in the bottom of the trench, and between that and loss of blood I must have lost consciousness entirely about this time.