VI—"WHAT I SAW AT YPRES"
Ypres is the graveyard of the old Sixty-fifth. We were carried to within six miles of the place in London buses, twenty-five men in a bus. Ypres was forty miles away. We met there the Canadian Scottish Third Brigade of 5,000 men. From the end of the bus line we tramped six miles and encamped outside the village of St. Julien, one mile away. Two battalions were in reserve at St. Jean and two were in the front line, mine being one of the two at the front.
It was at Ypres that we first met the gallant French troops. My company was on the left of the English line, so that we acted as interpreters between the French and the English. A roadway ten yards wide separated the two lines and a tunnel ran from the English to the French lines.
We found the trenches here to be forty yards from the German line and in bad condition. Firing was continuous, by day and by night. The communication trenches were in bad shape, too, and the Germans, who were on a height, raked us terribly with their machine-guns. I looked through my periscope and saw between 400 and 500 unburied German dead lying between the lines. I counted 25 dead Frenchmen among them. Three months before, I was told, the Germans had tried to carry the line and neither side had given the other a chance to bury its dead.
Our French neighbors were Zouaves, between 19 and 30 years of age, and the gayest soldiers I have ever fought beside. They sang gay ditties and called us French Canadians "Frères." We spent our nights in throwing grenades at the Boches and our days in the slow monotony of every-day trench life.
I rose at noon, the day after our arrival, and took the time to shave, a rare event. At 4 o'clock in the afternoon, at one mile from us, we saw yellow smoke rising from the ground. This smoke was the deadly gas being thrown upon the French and upon the Scotch regiment that had taken our places while we were resting, for, of course, we were resting when I shaved. We formed at once in light marching order and went to help the Scotch.
We entered the reserve trench, and at midnight the first-line trench. The Scotch had lost half of their effectives and were returning with the French, the blood streaming from their mouths and noses, and their faces all yellow-green. The French had lost nearly all their regiment. The Germans within five minutes had occupied our first and second lines.
In half an hour the Boches began a great bombardment. At 7 o'clock they tried to take our line, repeating their attacks all the night, but we rolled them back. They came even to within ten yards of us, a flood of human waves. But our machine-guns, our "coffee grinders," as we called them, mowed them down like hay, and we lost not many men.
Our artillery had plenty of ammunition. Our light guns were placed at 400 yards from the front line and the heavy artillery at one and a half miles, and some pieces as far as four miles away. The famous French Africans, called Senegalese, were fighting here with us. The Boches set fire to the City of Ypres in the night, and I watched its sullen glare against the sky. The civilian populace went running by, in dreadful condition. That night, of my friends, died Vaillant, Poitras, and Bond, all of Montreal, and two others. Poirer and Lefebre of Montreal and O. Wiseman, also my friends, had been killed during the day. Yet I lived!
Ypres was a famous battle, one of the greatest of the war, I think, till this terrible onslaught at Verdun. Our division (Canadian) reached from Ypres (Belgium) to Poelcappelle Road. At 2 P.M., before the gas overtook me, I was sent out between the lines with another man to examine the wire entanglements. We heard a sound as of some one handling pipes, but discovered nothing more. Then the Boches sent up their flares (skyrockets whose bursting bombs turned night into daylight) and we lay on the ground motionless. In the darkness which followed, we crept back over the heaps of dead toward our line. When I had almost reached the trench, another great flare burst right over us, and I had to lie still for several moments until the welcome darkness gave me an opportunity to drop into the trench again.