Our battalion front was a typical patch of ground in the Ypres Salient. Throughout the Great War, the Ypres Salient was one of the most fiercely contested patches of ground. It was a large bend in the Allied line that jutted into Belgium; and for most of the war, it was the only piece of that unfortunate little country that remained in the hands of the Allies. The PPCLI held eight hundred yards of it. Depending where you were, we looked out at three to five hundred yards of rolling shell-pocked territory that separated us from the German army.
Over this barren scene, a few stunted shrubs valiantly attempted to grow and a half-dozen shattered tree stumps served as reference points. As if this once tranquil bit of farmland wasn’t sufficiently desecrated, the whole area was liberally strewn with the rotting corpses of English and German infantrymen. The backdrop on either side of all this was a fifty-yard belt of barbed wire entanglements. This obstacle belt was made up of densely massed wire coils and complex webs of barbed wire windlassed to wooden stakes. Behind this, on the German side, armed with machine-guns, was a battalion of some of the best soldiers in the world. The landscape was utterly evil and I was expected to lead men through its most impenetrable zone, shoot up their trenches, and return triumphantly with a prisoner.
That night I found myself with five men standing on the fire step of our forward trench. With me I had Private Rivers, a Canadian-born militiaman from southern Ontario, Lance Corporal O’Neil from Calgary, privates Jenkins and Grey, both originals from the East End of London, and Lance Corporal Mullin, a quick and aggressively intelligent young man from Winnipeg.
The sky was partially concealed by high-level scattered clouds and the moon was to rise at ten. A gusting breeze stirred the coils of wire, making a slight chinking sound. Last light was at around nine. It could have been worse. I would have liked it to be much darker, but I was grateful I hadn’t been tasked, as some men had, to go out on a clear night with a full moon. At 9:15, as I’d arranged, artillery began to fall across the entire front of the trenches opposite me. At the same time, two machine-guns on our flanks began firing rapidly back and forth across the German trench tops.
“This is it, follow me,” I whispered in a way I hoped wouldn’t convey my fear.
We slipped over the top and wended our way delicately through the wire to our front. The path through our own wire was innocuously marked with bits of sand bag. If we kept to the left of the sand bag strips we found a narrow path that threaded its way through our wire. The path wasn’t easy to see and barbs caught at our tunics and trousers. Close to the enemy side of our wire we had to lift two coils and crawl under it. The shelling stopped a minute before we crawled into no man’s land. We crawled forward twenty or thirty yards and I made an exaggerated pointing motion to Private Rivers. He gave me a thumbs-up and mouthed, “Good luck.” Quietly, he lay down and cradled his rifle, scanning the darkness before him. Rivers’ task was to wait just outside our wire and keep his eyes peeled for our return. If we were lost, or heading in the wrong direction, Rivers was to catch our attention and guide us back through our own wire. Rivers would have a long wait lying on cold damp ground, but we all knew that amongst the six of us, he was the one with the most certain odds of surviving to see morning.
I pulled out my compass and took a bearing. We were going to go forward at a crouch for a hundred yards, and at the lip of a series of prominent shell craters on a patch of higher ground, we would push forward on all fours to the enemy wire. The four men behind me were supposed to keep an interval of five or six yards between each of them to prevent themselves from all being killed in a single burst of machine-gun fire. But in the dark, when men are tense, the urge to bunch up is almost irresistible. We’d never really trained for this kind of operation and I’m afraid at times we all followed our instincts and moved huddled together as a small crowd.
We reached the cratered area without incident, went to ground and watched and listened for a long while. The five of us peered into the dark, perched on the lip of one of the largest craters. I scanned the way ahead with my field glasses. The light was getting brighter and the moon was rising behind the clouds. I remember thinking that for some strange reason moonrise was early, and I found it amusing that one of the results of my patrol when I returned, if I hadn’t brought a prisoner back, would be to submit corrections to the astronomical tables.
We waited and watched the German lines for an hour. It was just after eleven that I heard muffled sounds from the area of the German trenches. A few minutes later we could hear the whistle of German artillery rounds passing close overhead and almost instantly artillery impacted three hundred yards to our rear. It was exactly what I’d hoped for.
I motioned for the men to get down into the craters and whispered, “Stay here, I’m going forward. For God’s sake, don’t shoot me when I return. Be prepared to move out as soon as I get back.” One of the men, I think it was Grey, made to question me. I silenced him with a wave of my hand. “If I’m not back by three o’clock, go back without me. I’ll get back on my own. Nobody’s to be caught out here in daylight.” I was gone into the night.
I crawled forward as fast as I could without making too much noise. I was moving towards the sounds near the German trenches. Sporadic artillery continued to fall behind me, and somewhere, a long way over to my right, a German machine-gun began shooting at our trench lines.
After crawling for about ten minutes, I stopped and carefully pulled my field glasses out from inside my tunic. Scanning the trench line I could see nothing but the forest of wire and some regular shapes that I presumed to be sand bags piled on the forward edge of the parapet. Near me, probably within a hundred yards of me, were at least a hundred heavily armed enemy soldiers. Despite this, the battlefield seemed as empty and as desolate as the moon. My speculations were interrupted by a dull red glow. Someone was lighting a pipe or a cigarette in one of the forward trenches. I watched intently for several more minutes, totally absorbed in my study of the ground. As my senses adjusted to the surroundings, a few seconds later, directly to my front a man coughed softly. Later I could very faintly hear stifled laughter. Whoever was in front of me was obviously in good spirits. I continued to watch the area before me. Suddenly, very close to me, a footfall and someone grunting almost made me swallow my heart. A German wiring party had come out of nowhere and was moving quietly and steadily across my front.
Two dark shapes in round field caps were struggling with a large coil of barbed wire concertina. A few yards behind them was another figure with a heavy-duty pair of wire cutters and what I guessed was probably a much smaller coil of fastening wire. They stopped in front of me and quietly began to bounce the wire out along the edge of the obstacle belt. After a few seconds the wire became entangled in itself and one of the men began tugging at it frantically. It made a loud metallic scratching noise and the man with wire cutters cursed and hissed in a South German accent. “Hoffart, you stupid oaf! Do you want to get us all killed? Make another noise like that and you will be out here every night this week.”
I didn’t know whether to be euphoric or terrified. It was exactly what I had hoped for. Despite having put a brave face on it, I knew I could never find a way to sneak through that thicket of wire and I had imagined us going forward, throwing a few Mills bombs, and then withdrawing empty handed and ignominiously. My best possible opportunity would be to find a wiring party – and truthfully, I didn’t expect to do that. Now I had one and they were literally within spitting distance. I watched.
Hoffart slowly untangled the wire and then turned his back to me while he attempted to fasten the end to one of the other concertina rolls. The other two men quietly moved off twenty or thirty yards back to the right and were absorbed in their task of stringing their end of the wire. They must have been standing in a shell hole for I couldn’t see them well. I only sensed that their backs were to me. Without giving it any further thought, I immediately stood up, drew my trench knife, and crept up behind Hoffart.
I placed the tip of my knife firmly against his neck, just under his right ear. He startled and made a sharp gasp. I whispered softly and slowly in German with a menace that surprised me. “Don’t make a sound, Hoffart, or you die!” I waited a second. The leader made some kind of hissing remark again and shuffled away with the wire