Personal bravery is not the monopoly of any one nation. The airmen of our brave French, Belgian, Italian, or Russian allies require no praise from my feeble pen; and those of us who have been out there have seen too many incidents of the courage of our enemies to belittle them, and we have no desire to do so. They have often been barbarous in their uncalled-for cruelties and outrageous in their acts, but they have been sometimes brave, careless of death, and chivalrous.
On one occasion I saw a German airman fly so low over our lines from the front to the rear that we could see him leaning out over the side and looking down at us in the trenches. Some companies of infantry in the front lines raised their rifles and peppered away at him. But he carelessly flew on toward the rear where a company of pioneers were digging trenches; and so struck were they at this reckless trick that they pulled off their helmets, and swinging them in the air, they cheered him. Another instance of British—Canadian in this case—love of any brave act!
The annals of our British air service are so crowded with tales of heroic deeds that they seem almost to dwarf the heroism shown in the infantry, artillery, or naval branches of our forces. Many stories worthy of the classic heroes are yet untold of boys twenty-one or twenty-two years old who grappled with their enemies in the clouds with the same undaunted fearlessness displayed by Horatius at the bridge in the brave days of old.
CHAPTER XV
STAFF OFFICERS
Now, the ordinary combatant officer who perhaps will read these lines may expect a diatribe against what the boys call, "the brass-hats," but, if so, he will be grievously disappointed. Outside the fact that Staff Officers, like Medical Officers, are a necessary evil, the writer has the vivid recollection of one occasion on which he might have been court-martialed, and perhaps shot, for lèse majesté, or something akin to it, but for the good humor of a well-known Brigadier General. So there will be no scathing denunciation of Staff Officers here.
At noon I was sitting in a dugout in the lines when I received an order to immediately relieve Captain ——, of the —steenth Canadian Battalion. The order gave no information as to the whereabouts of this Battalion, and as it turned out the order had been wrongly transmitted, and I had been directed to go to a Battalion which was not on our front. However, I did not know this at the time, and so, I quickly got my things together, hung my steel hat, my cap, haversack, pack, overcoat, stick, and other odds and ends on various parts of my person,—for an officer, like a private, seems to be made to hang things upon.
To get out of the lines to where I was to be met by an ambulance was a long, hard trudge. The ambulance was over one hour late, and hours followed in which we searched everywhere to find a trace of the Battalion. Night came on and we were still searching, and as no food had accompanied us, and a mixture of snow and rain was falling, I was cold, wet, hungry and pugnacious, when I entered a Headquarters in order to try to get some information. Forgetting I was only a Captain, and stalking angrily in, I demanded:—
"Where the hell is the —steenth Battalion?" An officer rose, came forward and smilingly asked me what the trouble was.
"I have been hunting for hours," I replied hotly, not even looking for his rank, "searching for this bally Battalion, and I'm fed up to the neck with being pushed around like a basket of fruit," for I had had many moves recently.