First came St. Nazaire; then Hazebrouck, and a twelve-mile hike to Fletre, a village in the north. We had a two-days' rest, and marched twenty-four miles to Armentières. At Armentières I first entered a trench. We trained there with English troops. And we lay shivering in the rain for forty-eight hours, and then gladly left for Richebourg, three miles away.
At Richebourg we entered trenches of our own. There Charles Lapointe of Montreal, the first of our company to die, looked over the edge of the trench. That is death. Machine guns all day sweep the trench edges. If you raise your hand, your fingers will be cut off as by a knife. And once I saw a poor wretch, weary almost to death of the trench, raise his right arm at full length. He was sent home, maimed and in agony, as he had wished. And who can say that his act was cowardly? He who has lived in the trenches for weeks and months knows. The soldier had courage to raise his hand. Perhaps some who clung to the mud at the trench bottom were greater cowards than he.
Well, Lapointe looked over the trench edge; and nobody knows what he saw. His brother was there to lay him down. He buried him (as we ever must the dead at the front) in a shallow pit in our trench. And the brother had for a time the agony of having to fight and feel the earth give over Charley's breast.
Two miles from there, at Laventie, we fought in the first line again. A German shell exploded over a pile of brush in a field near where I was shooting toward the German line. And we, weary of the monotony of the fighting, were overjoyed to see the ground covered far and wide with potatoes, which some farmer had hidden under hay. Potatoes! We blessed our periscope for the toothsome vision. And, marvelous to relate, we noted that the German fire slackened. Our officers could not restrain the French Canadians. On our bellies, over the death line we crawled unscathed, and, flat on the ground, wriggled to the potatoes, braving death for what we deem so common in America.
I got my share. Nor did the flaming sky pour upon us the leaden hail we feared, for the Germans held their fire while we gathered the crop we did not plant.
Toward night, in the dusk, we discovered by our spectroscope that the German boys, who were cold in their trenches, were demolishing a house for firewood, an old cottage, the property, perhaps, of that very peasant who had hidden our potatoes under the hay. We had their lives in our hands. We remembered our Irish feast—and word went down the line to hold our fire. Nor did one German die.
That was the Golden Rule of the battle front.
III—"MY FIRST NIGHT UNDER FIRE"
I slept in my blanket, my first night under fire, with a lump of cheese at my feet, as a bribe to the rats to spare my face. Not that I slept much. The night rocked with sound. The night is the true time for fighting, and the wire-cutters were creeping about on their dangerous errands between the trenches. The rockets now and then hissed skyward, throwing their powerful flares of light over the darkened world. Wounded men groaned. And rats, like flies in Summer, scuttled about, making queer noises, which we could hear in momentary lulls. I had not lain there long before an officer called for volunteers to examine the land between our trench and the enemy's and repair our broken barbed wire entanglements. The wires are destroyed every day by the bombardment, and must be repaired every night. It is a most dangerous duty. Yet, I gladly volunteer, with Aurele, Auguste, and other friends.
While we were at work upon the wires the Germans threw up some flares and turned our protecting darkness into the glare of midday. They poured upon us a deadly fire. We dropped among the dead bodies which littered the ground. And long I lay, sprawled across the corpse of some brave German lad killed there many days before—constrained to feign death to save my life. But we did not all escape. Martin of Montreal was killed and many of our little party were wounded. But, as usual, I came back at last, moving painfully on my stomach, uninjured. I reported to Captain Desserre and told him all that I had heard and seen. And then I went back to sleep upon empty sandbags; and a cold, cold night it was.