Alexander McClintock

“ The British drill sergeant is an institution which can be understood only through personal and close contact. If he thinks a major-general is wrong, he’ll tell him so on the spot in the most emphatic way, but without ever violating a single sacred tradition of the service. The sergeants, who took us in charge to put the real polish on our training, had all seen from twenty to twenty-five years of service. ”

“ We had an officer, also, who was a man of the greatest courage, so far as sticking where he belonged and keeping his men going ahead might be concerned, but every time he heard a big shell coming over he was seized with a violent fit of vomiting. I don’t know what makes men brave or cowardly in action, and I wouldn’t undertake to say which quality a man might show until I saw him in action, but I do know this: If a man isn’t frightened when he goes under fire, it’s because he lacks intelligence. He simply must be frightened if he has the ordinary human attributes. ”

“ They can’t do that with a Mills grenade nor with any of the improved factory-made bombs, because the men know just how they are timed and are trained to know just how to throw them. The Germans used to work another little bomb trick of their own. They learned that our scouts and raiders were all anxious to get a German helmet as a souvenir. They’d put helmets on the ground in “No Man’s Land,” or in an advanced trench with bombs under them. In several cases, men looking for souvenirs suddenly became mere memories, themselves. ”

“ I’m not trying to make myself out a hero. I’m just trying to tell you how an ordinary man’s mind works under the stress of fighting and the danger of sudden death. There are some queer things in the psychology of battle. For instance, when we had got into the German trench and were holding it against the most vigorous counter attacks, the thought which was persistently uppermost in my mind was that I had lost the address of a girl in London along with some papers which I had thrown away, just before we started over, and which I should certainly never be able to find again. ”

“ But if he has what we call physical courage he goes on with the rest of them. Then if he has extraordinary courage he may go on where the rest of them won’t go. I should say that the greatest fear the ordinary man has in going into action is the fear that he will show that he is afraid—not to his officers, or to the Germans, or to the folks back home, but to his mates; to the men with [Pg 22] whom he has laughed and scoffed at danger.
It’s the elbow-to-elbow influence that carries men up to face machine guns and gas. A heroic battalion may be made up of units of potential cowards. ”

“ Right here, I would like to tell a little story about a hospital train leaving Contay for Rouen—not the one we were on, but one which had left a few days before. The train, when it was just ready to depart with a full quota of wounded men, was attacked by German aeroplanes from which bombs were dropped upon it. There is nothing, apparently, that makes the Germans so fearless and ferocious as the Red Cross emblem. On the top of each of the cars in this train there was a Red Cross big enough to be seen from miles in the air. The German aviators accepted them merely as excellent targets. ”

“ The one thing of which we constantly lived in fear was a gas attack. I used to awaken in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, dreaming that I heard the clatter and whistle-blowing all along the line which meant that the gas was coming. And, finally, I really did hear the terrifying sound, just at a moment when it couldn’t have sounded worse. I was in charge of the nightly ration detail, sent back about ten miles to the point of nearest approach of the transport lorries, to carry in rations, ammunition and sand bags to the front trenches. ”

“ From a cheerful, happy lad he was transformed into an old man, silent, gloomy and absent-minded except for momentary flashes of his old spirit which became less and less frequent as the time for his own end drew nearer. ”

“ During the first gas attack, the Canadians, choking to death and falling over each other in a fight against a new and unheard-of terror in warfare, found a way—the Lord only knows who first discovered it and how he happened to do it—to stay through a gas cloud and come out alive. ”

“ Bombing, sniping, scouting, machine-gun fighting, signalling, trench mortar operation, bayonet fighting, and stretcher-bearing. I was selected for special training in bombing, probably because I was supposed, as an American and a baseball player, to be expert in throwing. With the other men picked for training in the same specialty, I was sent to Aldershott, and there, for three weeks, twelve hours a day, I threw bombs, studied bombs, read about bombs, took bombs to pieces and put them together again, and did practically everything else that you would do with a bomb, except eat it. ”

“ One is that the snap of the wrist with which a baseball is sent on its way would be likely to cause the premature discharge of a percussion grenade, and the second is that the grenades weigh so much—from a pound and a half to ten pounds—that the best arm in the world couldn’t stand the strain of whipping them off as a baseball is thrown. ”

“ If you can out-throw the enemy, or if you can make most of the bombs land with accuracy, you have a wonderful advantage in an attack. But throwing wild or throwing short you simply give confidence to the enemy in his own offensive. One very good thrower may win an objective for his squad, while one man who is faint-hearted or unskilled or “rattled” may cause the entire squad to be annihilated. ”

“ Sand bags are never filled with sand, because there is never any sand to put into them. Anything that you can put in with a shovel will do.
About the only amusement we had during our long stay in the front trenches in Belgium, was to sit with our backs against the rear wall and shoot at the rats running along the parapet. Poor Macfarlane, with a flash of the old humor which he had before the war, told a “rookie” that the trench rats were so big that he saw one of them trying on his great-coat. ”

“ When we took our position in the front line trenches in Belgium, we relieved the Twenty-sixth Canadian Battalion. The Twenty-sixth belonged to the Second division, and had seen real service during the battle of Hooge and in what is now termed the third battle of Ypres, which occurred in June, 1916. The organization was made up almost exclusively of French Canadians from Quebec, and it was as fine a fighting force as we had shown the Fritzes, despite the fact that men of their race, as developments have proved, are not strongly loyal to Canada and Britain. ”

“ Whenever you fool a man with a bomb, you’re playing a practical joke on him that he’ll never forget. Even, probably, he’ll never get a chance to remember it.
[Pg 95]
When the Canadians first introduced bombing, the bombs were improvised out of jam tins, the fuses were cut according to the taste and judgment of the individual bomber, and, just when the bomb would explode, was more or less problematical. Frequently, the Germans have tossed our bombs back into our trenches before they went off. ”

“ In the trench, a man sat with this wire wrapped around his hand. One pull meant “All O. K.,” two pulls, “I’m coming in,” three pulls, “Enemy in sight,” and four pulls, “Sound gas alarm.” The fire step in a trench is a shelf on which soldiers stand so that they may aim their rifles between the sand bags which form the parapet.
In addition to these men, we had patrols and scouts out in “No Man’s Land” the greater part of the night, with orders to gain any information possible which might be of value to battalion, brigade, division or general headquarters. ”

“ While I belong to the Canadian army and believe the Canadian overseas forces the [Pg 103] finest troops ever led to war, I must say that I have never seen a body of men so magnificent in average physique as the Australians. And some of them were even above the high average. The man that punched me in the eye in an “estaminet” in Poperinghe made up entirely in his own person for the absence of Les Darcy from the Australian ranks. I don’t know just how the fight started between the Australians and us, in Poperinghe, but I know that it took three regiments of Imperial troops to stop it. ”

“ Women rush out and throw flowers to the wounded men. Sometimes there is a cheer, but usually only silence and words of sympathy.
The King George Hospital was built to be a government printing office, and was nearing completion when the war broke out. It has been made a Paradise for convalescent men. The bareness and the sick suggestion and characteristic smell of the average hospital are unknown here. There are soft lights and comfortable beds and pretty women going about as visitors. The stage beauties and comedians come and entertain us. ”

“ The British and the French usually left their scouts and snipers in one locality so that they might come to know every hummock and hollow and tree-stump of the limited landscape which absorbed their unending attention. The Canadians, up to the time when I left France, invariably took their scouts and snipers along when they moved from one section of the line to another. This system was criticized as having the disadvantage of compelling the men to learn new territory while opposing enemy scouts familiar with every inch of the ground. ”

“ A wave, I might explain, is a line of men in extended order, or about three paces apart. Our officers were instructed to maintain their places in the line and to wear no distinguishing marks which might enable sharpshooters to pick them off. Invariably, however, they led the men out of our trenches. “Come on, boys, let’s go,” [Pg 123] they would say, climbing out in advance. It was bred in them to do that.
Experience had taught us that it took the German barrage about a minute and a half to get going after ours started, and that they always opened up on our front line trench. ”

“ We always held the fire trench as lightly as possible, because it is a demonstrated fact that the front ditch cannot be successfully [Pg 48] defended in a determined attack. The thing to do is to be ready to jump onto the enemy as soon as he has got into your front trench and is fighting on ground that you know and he doesn’t and knock so many kinds of tar out of him that he’ll have to pull his freight for a spot that isn’t so warm. ”

“ I knew very well the machine gun he meant. It was in a concrete emplacement, walled and roofed, and the devils in charge of it seemed to be descendants of William Tell and the prophet Isaiah. They always knew what was coming and had their gun accurately trained on it before it came.
“If you are willing,” said Major Lewis, “I wish you to select twenty-five men from the company and go after that gun the minute the order comes to advance. Use your own judgment about the men and the plan for taking the gun position. ”

“ A bomber, besides knowing all about the grenades in use in his own army, must have practical working knowledge concerning the grenades in use by the enemy. After we took the Regina trench, on the Somme, we ran out of grenades at a moment when a supply was vitally necessary. We found a lot of the German “egg” bombs, and through our knowledge of their workings and our consequent ability to use them against their original owners we were able to hold the position. ”

“ For instance, the alterations of our muster roll due to casualties, had not come through battalion headquarters and, therefore, we had, in our platoon, sixty-three rum rations, night and morning, and only sixteen men. There was a Canadian Scot in our crowd who said that the word which described the situation was “g-r-r-r-a-nd!”
There was a good deal of jealousy at that time between the Canadians and the Australians. Each had the same force in the field—four divisions. Either force was bigger than any other army composed exclusively of volunteers ever before assembled. ”

“ We always had [Pg 53] two snipers to each trench section. They would stand almost motionless on the fire steps for hours at a time, searching every inch of the German front trench and the surrounding territory with telescopes. They always swathed their heads with sand bags, looking like huge, grotesque turbans, as this made the finest kind of an “assimilation covering.” It would take a most alert German to pick out a man’s head, so covered, among all the tens of thousands of sand bags which lined our parapet. ”

“ I don’t lay claim to being much of a writer, and up ’till now I never felt the call to write anything about my experiences with the Canadian troops in Belgium and France, because I realized that a great many other men had seen quite as much as I, and could beat me telling about it. ”

“ That is the British Tommies’ battle cry as they charge the enemy and it has often sounded up and down those long lines in western France as the British, Canadian, and Australian soldiers go out to the fight and the death.
We were divided into six parties of ten men, each party having separate duties to perform. We crouched forward, moving slowly in single file, stumbling into shell holes and over dead men—some very long dead—and managing to keep in touch with each other though the machine-gun bullets [Pg 76] began to drop men almost immediately. ”

“ The day has passed when the man in the ranks is supposed [Pg 127] merely to obey. He must know what to do and how to do it. He must think for himself and “carry on” with the general plan, if his officers and N. C. O.’s all become casualties. Sir Douglas Haig said: “For soldiers in this war, give me business men with business sense, who are used to taking initiative.”
While I was at the front I had opportunity to observe three distinct types of barrage fire, the “box,” the “jumping,” and the “creeping.” The “box,” I have already described to you, as it is used in a raid. ”

“ On the night when we went in to occupy the positions we were to hold, our scouts, leading us through the flat desert of destruction, got completely turned ’round, and took us back through a trench composed of shell-holes, connected up, until we ran into a battalion of another brigade. The place [Pg 113] was dreadful beyond words. The stench of the dead was sickening. In many places arms and legs of dead men stuck out of the trench walls. ”

“ An officer or non-commissioned officer in charge of a bombing detail must know intimately every man in his command, and have such discipline that every order will be carried out with scrupulous exactitude when the time comes. ”

“ We had found that the German artillery always had the range of that trench down, literally speaking, to an [Pg 125] inch. We always dug a new trench either in advance of the German trench or in the rear of it. Our manner of digging a trench under these circumstances was very simple and pretty sure to succeed except in an extremely heavy fire. Each man simply got as flat to the ground as possible, seeking whatever cover he might avail himself of, and began digging toward the man nearest him. Sand bags were filled with the first dirt and placed to afford additional cover. ”

“ Primarily, sand bags are used in making a parapet for a trench or a roof for a dug-out, but there are a hundred other uses to which they have been adapted, without hesitation and possibly without sufficient gratitude for their ready adaptability. Some of these uses may surprise you. Soldiers strain their tea through them, wrap them around their legs for protection against cold and mud, swab their rifles with them to keep them clean, use them for bed sacks, kit bags and ration bags. ”