If the armchair critic has read the above he will perhaps realize a little more vividly than he has done before how difficult advances are and why it is more easy to talk of getting the enemy on the run than to actually do it. Once he has started to retreat and you to advance, your difficulties multiply and go on increasing in direct proportion to the distance that you get from your base of supplies. Your munitions, food and water must be transported from the rear over strange roads pulverized by shell fire, while your enemy is backing into greater supplies hourly.
One of the most difficult propositions is to keep the different parts of your immense organization in communication with battalion, brigade, and divisional headquarters. Many different methods are used.
Perhaps the most reliable is by runner, or courier, on foot. The runner has an arduous, dangerous, and often thankless, task, which he performs as a rule patiently, bravely and tirelessly. The telephone, telegraph, and power buzzer—the latter being sometimes used without wires, at a distance as great as 4000 yards—are commonly employed, though they have many disadvantages. The first of these is the difficulty in installing them in the face of heavy shelling and counter attacks by the enemy. Secondly, they are likely to be put out of commission, their wires being destroyed by shells. Finally, their messages are often picked up through the earth by your opponents with some apparatus invented for the purpose.
There are the semaphore and flashlight methods of signaling, and signaling by flares, all naturally very limited in variety of use, the latter particularly so. But flares are of great service when a hurried artillery retaliation is desired, S.O.S. flares then being sent up. The wireless apparatus on aeroplanes and the throwing of flares by aviators are also used to good account. But there are times when all these different methods are found wanting. Through force of circumstance a battalion or company may be completely isolated, and then it is that the last and least employed method, that of carrier pigeons, is resorted to. In each battalion are a couple or more specially trained carrier pigeons, and to speak of the "O.C. Pigeons" is a standing joke. The pigeons are rarely employed. It may be almost forgotten that they are with a unit, as was practically the case of one battalion at the Somme of which the following story is told:
The commanding officer had waited in vain for hours for some message as to the success or failure of a show one company was putting on. He was impatiently striding up and down when a poor little carrier pigeon fluttered into his presence. He hurriedly caught it, and untied from its leg the following message: "I am bally well fed up carrying this damned bird about. You take it for a while."
After all this preparatory stage is completed, when transport, artillery preparation, communication, maps, training, dummy advances, extra rations, water, medical supplies and equipment, are in order, the next move is to get all troops taking part in the advance into the most advantageous positions, unknown to the Germans. The men are well fed, given extra water bottles, "iron rations" are in their kits—that is, bully beef and biscuit—they are equipped only in fighting dress. By night they are marched into the trenches from which they are to go over the top, and after a few hours of rest, broken by shell fire, the zero hour, or hour of attack, arrives.
Just before the great advance in which the Canadians took Vimy Ridge, that hill consecrated by the graves of thousands of French, British, and Canadian soldiers, our brigade had made all these arrangements. We were to march into the line on Easter Saturday and go over the top the following morning at daybreak. But at the last moment we were delayed by a brigade order, due to information obtained from a German deserter, information that said that the Huns knew that we were to attack on Easter Sunday.
While sitting in my tent I was visited by officers on various missions, some to get dressings to carry in their pocket, dressings that they neglected getting till the very last moment; others to tell me that such and such a man was afflicted with that grievous malady, "cold feet," and if he should visit me on pretension of illness, to bear this fact in mind; and again others with no object but a pleasant word.
Among those who always had a humorous word and a smile, and whose honest eyes always looked at one fearlessly through his gold-rimmed spectacles, was Lieutenant Henderson—"Old Pop," as the younger officers always called him. After his usual courteous and kindly greeting we joked about the possibility, or rather the probability, of some of us not coming back from the great advance. No doubt he voiced the opinion of most of us when he said with a hearty laugh—
"You know, Doc, the main objection I have to death is that it is so d—— permanent."