CHAPTER XXII
HERE THEY COME
Sergeant Campbell, one of the finest soldiers I ever met in my life, called me and asked me to run to the dressing station and tell them there that none of our boys, who had gone down with the wounded, were to attempt to return to the trenches till after dark. Away I started, never expecting to get to my destination, but doing something dispelled my "yellow streak" and I arrived there intact.
What a sight met my eyes! Row after row of brawny Canadian Highlanders lay raving and gasping with the effects of the horrible gas, and those nearing their end were almost as black as coal. It was too awful--and my nerves went snap!
However, a lull came at night, except for the steady fighting on our left, where the Seventh and Eighth were making history, and I managed to get back all right, and repairing trenches was again the order of the moment.
A fine, handsome Scotch lad, Jim Muirhead, one of my best chums, was working with me repairing a section of trench. At this place we hadn't any sandbags, but simply had to pile up the loose earth in front of us. Deep down in the ground we had made two sloping holes, propping up the top by odd timbers we found lying about. We did this to save ourselves from a big shell Fritz would occasionally lob over in our immediate vicinity. Now Jim is about six feet high and his hole was a big one, mine a small one. We could hear this shell coming and if we moved quickly, we gained the shelter of our holes before it burst. Once, we heard the faint pop in the distance and then a gradually increasing shriek; it was coming--to my excited fancy--straight for our heads. In my panic to escape the crack of doom I hurled myself into Jim's hole, beating him by about the fiftieth of a second.
"Get to hell into your own hole."
"Go to the devil."
Our colloquy was barely ended when the shell burst, but this time it was too far off to do any damage. I was thoroughly ashamed of my selfishness, which was due to the first instinct of nature, but good old Jim saw nothing in it but a good joke on himself.
All night long to left and right the scrap went on, just one steady crackle of rifle and machine gun fire, while from every angle they shelled the Seventh Battalion. Their trenches were simply one huge shamble, but they held. Morning came, and still the bombardment raged.
At about three in the afternoon we saw a figure approaching our trenches and by his style we knew it to be our dear old major. On he came in spite of the fire.
By this time Fritz was spraying our parapet top with machine guns and we knew he was at last going to try us. Still, on came the old soldier. He was well over sixty, but a hero's heart belonged to him. Orders had come through from headquarters for the Fifth to retire and all the staff at headquarters had been either killed or wounded with the exception of the major and Captain Hillion, our adjutant, a soldier from his feet up. These two decided, after vainly trying the field telephone, to give us our orders by word of mouth and they set out on foot.
Captain Hillion was hit before he had gone fifty yards and the old major was left to make it alone. He managed to get within fifty yards of us and then received two bullets in his body. And then the wonder of it--the sheer, dogged spirit of that old warrior! Above everything we heard his yell of pain, yet instead of giving up, he gathered himself together and with a staggering run reached the trench and collapsed. Not till he had delivered his message did he give way and swoon.
Things now were stirring with a vengeance. We knew by the cessation of the shell fire over our trenches that they were coming. I looked through a loophole and my heart seemed to choke in my throat. If it had not been more dangerous to run than to stay where I was, I would have been running yet. To my magnified imagination I never believed the earth held so many people. They came swarming over their parapet in huge waves, the flash of their bayonets making my spine crawl. Singing, cheering, cursing and shouting, they came on, but we never fired a shot.
"Not till they are near our barbed wire," was the order.
"Oh, if I could only fire!" I groaned mentally.
On they came with trumpets continually playing their charge. At last the order came. "Fire!" and when I saw them falling in heaps, every drop of blood in my body surged with a desire to kill and I blazed away into the mass of shrieking humanity as fast as my fingers could click the shells in and out of my rifle. I could not miss them if I tried, so thick were they.
We checked them momentarily, but suddenly bullets began to come at us from our rear and we knew they had broken through somewhere and were behind us. The mob in front having quit for awhile, we waited for the next move. The bullets from behind kept us wondering where they had made a gap in our lines.
"Get ready to retire," came the order, so we slipped off all but our ammunition and water; few of us had any of the precious liquid left.
Little Hilliard, who was next to me, said, "Well, Bub, we'll have a cigarette anyway before we cash in." "All right," I replied and we rolled a cigarette apiece, thinking we were having our last smoke. We did not know for sure, but guessed that we were surrounded. Our lack of knowledge of our own situation may seem curious, but a modern battle field is on such a vast scale that only in your immediate neighborhood do you know what is happening. In these (for me) dull piping times of peace, when I look back and scan my memory over the individual behavior of my chums, the nerve they displayed surpasses my power of description. As we were lying there smoking what I thought was to be our last fag, I was utterly amazed at the next words of Hilliard:
"Say, Bub, that must be Picric acid that makes our eyes smart so; those shells I bet haven't come more than fourteen hundred yards. Did you see the burst of that last one?" he asked, pointing to the place where a "coal box" had landed. I made no reply; I was too frightened to bother my head about what the shells contained. But Hilliard persisted in getting my opinion about the matter and made me think he was far more interested in that detail than in the fact that it was the most probable thing on earth that he would be dead within a few minutes. However, this situation did not seem to worry him at all; he kept on smoking till the end. I am glad to be able to say, that so far as I know, he came through with only the loss of an arm.
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[Illustration: The break on both sides of the Fifth's trenches shows how perilously close they came to being cut off by the enveloping Huns. _See page 174_]
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As the ground sloped away toward Ypres we could see for some distance down that way and our hearts bounded as two thin lines of men came toward us in skirmishing order.
"Can it be reinforcements?" asked Milliard.
"It can be nothing else," said I, and then we witnessed a sight that made us want to cheer with all our might. The coolness of those men was wonderful; steady as a rock they came. They were British regulars, and now you will know why all of us who have been at the front have such an admiration for the British soldier. They trotted steadily in two long lines for about a hundred yards, then down for a brief rest, then up and on again, all done by the arm signals. Officers dropped on every hand, but others instantly took up their duties and like a finely regulated machine on they came--all done under a murderous fire, but never a flinch. It was a marvel of coolness and iron discipline.
After witnessing that advance of the Northumberland Fusileers and the Cheshires I have ceased to marvel at the Great Retirement of Mons; those wonderful feats of fighting seem to me now to be the entirely natural thing for the British soldier to do.
Suddenly on our left a bedlam of German cheers cleared all doubts of their being through, and the order came for us to retire. Back we went to save ourselves from being flanked. So close a call was it that the last man was only fifty yards from Fritz. Our old major asked our boys to leave him, and of course they refused; but it was by the skin of their teeth they got him out.
Thank God the old major is still living and back again with his boys. He refused a comfortable staff billet in England on his recovery. "My place is with the boys," he said, and he is with them today. God bless him!
By some marvel we fell back safely till we met the Northumberlands, but how we did it is more than I can tell. One thing I shall always remember. As we filed out of the trench Sergeant Campbell stood in full view of the oncoming Germans till the last sound man was out, quietly seeing to it that we did not get unsteady. After we were all out, with the exception of some of the wounded--alas, some of them had to be left, and I leave the reader to guess their fate--we joined up with the Northumberlands, and as we came past these Tommies they let out a terrific cheer for us. More to us than all the eulogies of generals or newspapers was that cheer from our brother soldiers. And when one remembers that it was given while a hail of bullets was being poured upon them, and they were dropping down, killed and wounded, some idea may be had of the unconquerable spirit of those men and the sporting blood that courses through their veins. And if you have never known it before, you now know why they are able to "play the game" as the Germans never can.
That cheer was an acknowledgment to the men from Canada for the work we had done.