I shall never forget those Germans. When our guns suddenly spoke their front line melted; their second crumpled before this destruction; but on, on, on they came, unflinching, marching with even steps into certain death. We were like lions at bay. It was our lives or the Germans'. Then, as fourteen of us fought together, a bomb dropped amid us, and killed eleven. I came to consciousness, lying in the bottom of a trench, with Roy leaning over me.
"Are you living, Roméo!" he exclaimed in amazement. I rose dizzily. He and I and one other stood alone among our eleven dead friends.
Then Roy told me that I had been blown clear of the trench, twenty feet from where I stood, and that he had braved death to secure, as he supposed, my dead body. A careful examination showed that my only injury was a terrible bruise on the calf of my leg, where the round surface of a flying shard had struck me, but without breaking the skin. Miracles are but small matters when you fight in the presence of death.
"I'm not afraid now," I told Roy. And from then on I and all my soldier friends believed my life was charmed and that the Germans could not kill me.
We were driven back before their heavy guns to the fourth line, and were almost immediately told in haste to leave it as quickly as we could. Our engineers had mined the place, and as we fled the Germans poured down a gray horde of men. So we blew them up.
Have you ever seen a thousand men hurled to atoms by a giant blast? I cannot forget that awful sight. The whole earth seemed to leap skyward, and through and through the black mountain of earth and stones shot heads and arms and legs, torn fragments of what were once heroic men. Next to the gas which they gave us, I think our blowing them up like this was surely the worst thing men could do to men.
Perhaps you have heard of the friendship which often springs up between the Allies and their foes. I know something about it. It was at Laventie that the Germans began to amuse themselves by putting a bullseye on a biscuit box and letting us use it for a target. We then returned the compliment and set up a similar bullseye for the Teuton boys. For between Germans and Allies as individuals, there is no hate, though I must except the treacherous German prisoner I had to kill to save my life.
Every time the Germans made a bullseye, I would raise a shovel. If they missed, I put up a handkerchief. They did the same for us. And so we who sought each other's lives played together, and death spoke sharply all around.
Sergeant Pichette was a wag. He put an old derby on a stick and ran along the trench as if it were a man, and the Germans fired at it. He would pull the hat down occasionally to make the enemy believe that the man under it had been shot, but soon afterward he would raise it again, thereby causing much amusement.
We used to talk back and forth—those German boys and we Canadians. They were the 157th and most friendly. "Hi! Where do you come from?" a voice in French once called over to us.