On that first day in the Loop I was very tired. My eyes burned. I smoked a cigarette, and sat enjoying the early summer sunshine on my face. The small patch of sky visible from the bottom of our trench was cloudless. When you were in the trenches your horizon was limited to the stretch of sky above you and the sandbagged walls in front of you. It was a strange perspective on the world. In front of me, a sentry peered through his lookout hole scanning the German trenches opposite. In the adjacent firing bay, four of my men prepared lunch. They were laughing and taunting each other. Morale was high. We were well fed and our clothes were dry. Although we were aware of being in one of the worst places on earth, that morning we were happy. Everything’s relative. That morning we were warm and dry.
One of the voices called out, “Don’t worry too much if you don’t get enough to eat today, Hargreaves. Once Fritzie’s done with us this time, there’s only gonna be three to a loaf anyway.” They laughed enthusiastically, as if it was the first time they heard the joke.
Beside me, Sergeant Ferguson, my platoon sergeant, sat quietly cleaning his rifle. Ferguson was a man of remarkably few words. During my first few days with the platoon, I found his silences a little intimidating and irksome; but the longer I knew him, the more I grew to understand him; and in that halting and formal way peculiar to soldiers constrained by rank, age, and discipline, we became good friends. We sat together in silence on the firestep of our forward trench enjoying the sunshine.
Like most of my platoon, I’d by then taken to smoking cigarettes and used tobacco as a self-rationed reward and a comfort. That morning I was smoking contentedly, reading through a packet of letters that had come up with us the night before.
The letter that my mind kept coming back to was from Jeanine Dupuis. Jeanine was getting married, and as I was one of her “dearest and most trusted friends,” she wanted me to be one of the first to know. She was marrying a French-Canadian lawyer at the end of the summer and would go off to live in Quebec City. They were going to honeymoon at a cottage on a lake in the Laurentians. She was deliriously happy.
In those days of constant exhaustion, filth, bad food, and violent death, soft, warm, feminine companionship was something I dreamt and fantasized about constantly. I had often thought of Jeanine – her eyes, the softness of her skin, her figure, her delicate and fragrant scent, and her soft, husky voice. I’d only known these at a distance. I had never slept with a woman and that morning I was convinced I never would. Now my life was unnaturally masculine, brutish, and harsh, and I only half-expected to survive the war. Just as I’d become superstitious, I’d gradually come to accept that I might die. And women were so far removed from my existence that dreaming about them was like wishing on a star. But as I said, I wasn’t unhappy. For the time being, I was philosophic about these things, and little things, like dry clothes and sunny skies, lifted my spirits.
It wasn’t just violence and hard living that had changed me; although those two things probably had a profound and irreversible effect on me. I was now twenty-two, but I felt at least a decade older. Perhaps my unnatural ageing was in part due to my new position as an officer and a leader. In this, I recognized I had some advantages: I was much taller than all my British-born soldiers and had the benefit of an expensive education. As unfair as it was, those things gave you an edge. Reflecting back on it, I was ideally raised for this kind of transformation. I was young, strong, athletic, reasonably quick to learn things, and temperamentally willing to accept a challenge.
My sense of inadequacy regarding my position as a leader had by then all but disappeared. This was probably not entirely a good thing. My new-found confidence had come at the cost of boiling my values down to only those personal qualities and skills I needed to survive. In my months at the front, I placed enormous importance on trust, physical courage, endurance, cunning, determination, and good humour. Not a lot else mattered. My outlook on life necessarily became simplistic; but my life was no less complicated. I had other practical worries that day-to-day living and leadership imposed upon me. When the Canadian university men arrived, those who came to my platoon looked on me as a veteran. Some of them were several years older than I. They were innocent and treated me with deference and formal military courtesy. I suppose my Military Cross gave me credibility, credibility that I probably didn’t deserve, but it helped my confidence and my stature.
There may have been more than a tinge of fatalism and self-pity in all this mellow speculation. That June morning I was curiously detached, as if I was watching things from afar. Jeanine was the only woman I had ever truly been passionate about and I had let her slip entirely away without even telling her of my feelings. Although I’ve known a number of women since, my love for Jeanine was entirely different from the rest. Now I appreciate that the Jeanine I loved never really existed. She was, however, one of the few women I had ever really known at that point. High school had been a rigidly male and Jesuitical regime of Latin, Greek, French, English, history, mathematics, science, and sports. My three years at McGill University weren’t much different; a brief introduction to the army – and now I was at the front sitting in a foul-smelling trench surrounded by a group of men who I was to lead and was prepared to die with. It was all very alien, and at the same time so normal. These trench walls, mud, fatigue, cold, and wet had become my life. The sun made me drowsy and I wanted to crush out my cigarette and sleep.
The first rounds of the German barrage hit us with shattering intensity. It’s a challenge describing the effect of a single artillery round exploding nearby. Fifty unexpected large-calibre rounds detonating in the space of five seconds is truly cataclysmic. The German barrage hit us like an eruption from hell. As best I can make out, in that first salvo only two rounds actually landed within the company trench lines, but they killed half a dozen of our men outright. Our position was well registered and the rounds that didn’t land inside our trenches were very near misses. They collapsed trench walls, blew down parapets, buckled dugouts, and the shrapnel from them inflicted horrific jagged wounds.
Sergeant Ferguson, with more presence of mind than I, swept up the pieces of his rifle and shouted rather unnecessarily “Take Cover! Take Cover.”
He scrambled along the bottom of the trench and scuttled into his scrape carved out of the side of the forward wall. I was momentarily at a loss – the company officers’ dugout was fifty yards along the trench line and a further twenty yards to the rear. I had no place to go. Ferguson looked up at me and began to shout something. “Sir …” He didn’t finish his sentence. I threw myself into that tiny space, landed on top of him, and dug my fingers into the dirt floor, pulling myself downward as if willing to be swallowed by the earth. The first few seconds of that bombardment are imprinted in my mind as if etched in stone. My remaining two days in the Loop lasted a lifetime.
The initial bombardment on our forward trench line was the most intense part of the shelling and it went on continuously for over an hour. I’d been under artillery fire several times before, but nothing matched the concentration and length of this unforgiving pounding. With each explosion the ground shook. My brain and every bone in my body felt like it was being pounded by a mallet. My head ached with a piercing pain and my nose bled from any one of a hundred close concussions that smashed me into the trench floor and walls. Despite lying alongside Sergeant Ferguson, I was completely isolated. The two of us swore and screamed obscenities until we were hoarse, but still those horrifying explosions smashed and rattled us around the bottom of that scrape like we were insects caught in a jar of fire crackers. One of the early rounds hit the lip of our trench and the blast forced fine sand straight through my tunic. Almost sixty years later my wrinkled right shoulder is still the consistency of sandpaper from the grit embedded in it. The pounding went on for well over two hours. I was frightened the whole way through it but after an hour and a half of that merciless hammering, something changed in me physically. I became cold and very tired, as if my body couldn’t keep up with the physical and emotional intensity of the bombardment.