Stench? Did you ever breathe air foul with the gases arising from a thousand rotting corpses? Dirt? Have you ever fought half madly through days and nights and weeks unwashed, with feverish rests between long hours of agony, while the guns boom their awful symphony of death, and the bullets zip-zip-zip ceaselessly along the trench edge that is your skyline—and your deathline, too, if you stretch and stand upright?...
You wouldn't believe all I have seen, all I have left. Ah, no; you would say, "Roméo Houle, you are lying," were I to tell you some unbelievable things that I have really lived through. Men go mad over there. When you know what life in the first-line trenches is like you will wonder that I have returned, and that, having returned, I am still in my right mind. Sometimes, at night, I find myself again carrying the wounded back after the charge, and listening to dying soldiers telling me to look into blood-soaked pockets for last letters to their sweethearts or mothers back home. "Tell mother that I received the Blessed Sacrament before the battle began." I hear their breaking voices whisper, "Tell mother," while the thundering artillery pours its curtain of fire upon us, and our boys throw back from their rude, handmade sling shots their deadly "jam-pots." "Tell mother!" I think all the battle front is crying now those words. O Mother of God, hear them and end this needless butchery!
I fought at Ypres. I fought at St. Julien. I fought at Lacouture and Festubert. I fought at Cuinchy. I fought at Givenchy and La Bassée, and in the first-line trenches at Messines. And before all these I fought in the first line at Richebourg and Laventie, and I live, one of 16 alive out of 500.
II—AN AMERICAN WHO WENT "OVER THERE"
I am an American by birth and a barber by occupation. I have shaved men for my living in New Bedford, Mass., and have shaved soldiers of necessity in time to the cracking of rifles in Northern France. I chanced to be in Montreal when England declared war. That was on Aug. 4, 1914. On Aug. 10 I enlisted in the Sixty-fifth Regiment of French Canadians commanded by Major Barre of Montreal. There were two New England boys with me in the regiment—Henri Bertrand of Attleboro and a fellow named Collette from New Bedford. There were 500 French Canadians—then—between the ages of 18 and 28. I left most of them buried in unmarked graves.
We left Montreal on Aug. 25 for Valcartier, where they made out of a fair barber a good soldier, I think. The Duke and Duchess of Connaught inspected us at Valcartier, and a brave sight we were in our new uniforms and our full and gallant ranks. But the Duke and Duchess would have shuddered could they have inspected us, say at Cuinchy or Messines. Our 500 got thinner the older the war grew. Our 500 will be gone, I think, all gone but me, before the war is over. I'd be gone, too, but for Congressman Walsh and the American Government, which, after all, is mine, and the one I'd best die for, if die I must for any. It was on Sept. 25 that I sailed with my regiment for Plymouth, England, on board the Cunarder Alunia. There were 1,000 men on board, half English, half French.
Thirty-three vessels sailed together in three rows of eleven boats each, with three cruisers to left and three to right of us, and one before and one behind to guard us. So great was our dread of German torpedoes and mines, it took us twenty-one days to cross.
I was in the Seventh and Eighth Companies of this French Canadian regiment, the Sixty-fifth, but at the front my company was known as the Fourth of the Fourteenth Battalion, Third Brigade, First Canadian Division. The Alunia was the second to land at Plymouth, and the whole town turned out to give us a reception, with houses decorated and flags flying—for 484 of us a death bridal, indeed! Three days later we were reviewed by Lord Roberts on Salisbury Plain, and the King also inspected us. Thence we marched to Larkhill, where we remained until Feb. 12, 1915. Then we left for France.