The following day "Old Pop" was no more. His jolly laugh and his voice with its pleasant burr were to be heard no longer in our ranks. He had met death while bravely leading his men across No Man's Land like the gallant Scotch gentleman that he was.
Something which struck me then, and which still impresses me as extraordinary in looking back at it, was the buoyant, cheerful, optimistic spirit in which our army of citizen-soldiers looked forward to the day when we were to take part in one of the greatest battles in history. We knew it was to be a fearful and magnificent trial of strength out of which many of us would never return to the people and the lands we loved. And yet all awaited it with a gay, hopeful, undaunted optimism, asking naught but the opportunity, anticipating nothing but victory. It is unbelievable that the blind obedience of a militaristic kaiserism can ever subdue a soldiery who so freely offer their all on the altar of liberty.
CHAPTER III
OVERLAND
The normal position of man on the earth is on its surface.
Generally speaking, when he is under the surface he is in his wine cellar, or he is dead. But at the front all this is altered. Both the enemy and ourselves have reverted to the cave age, for if we wish safety in the lines—comparative safety, that is—we pass our time in caves or cellars, dugouts or trenches.
Not that living underground would be taken as a matter of choice in the piping times of peace. For the mud and dirt of the trenches and dugouts cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be said to be comfortable or pleasant.
The fact that your only chance against a hidden enemy is also to hide makes your desires subservient to necessity. In fact, both the enemy and ourselves are continually burrowing deeper and deeper in each other's direction. At the end of the burrow or tunnel we place charges of dynamite to blow each other out into the open. The fear that your enemy may succeed in doing it to you first, and that some fine day you may awaken to find yourself sailing about in the heavens with no support but the explosion which sent you there, makes many a man on a dark night hear imaginary tappings, causing him to report that he fears the enemy are mining underneath us. More than once out of the pitch darkness has come into my dugout some lonely sentry to tell me that he has heard mysterious hammering underfoot, and only when we had located the real cause as something other than he thought, did his—and perhaps our—nervousness disappear.
On one occasion a non-commissioned officer came hurrying into the H.Q. dugout of a certain Canadian battalion. With hair standing on end he reported that an augur had actually come through the bottom of the trench in which he had been standing. The colonel insisted on investigating this himself, and found that a mole had bored his way through the ground.
These fears may have an unconscious effect in making everyone wish to get out of the semi-darkness of the trenches into the bright sunlight which dispels clammy feelings and fears as if they were mists of the morning. But the real reason for traveling overland is that at all ages and in every clime the forbidden or dangerous has its attractions. Thus it is that out there both officers and men, contrary to orders and upon the flimsiest of pretexts, climb out of the trenches and in more or less plain view of enemy snipers or observation posts walk again like ordinary human beings on the face of the earth.