When I came to, I was at the bottom of a trench that was in deep shadow. Lying on the trench floor beside me was a dead soldier from Four Platoon. He was a freckled, red-haired lad with a prominent gap in his front teeth. He was on his back against the trench wall and looked to all the world like he was in a deep sleep. The firing had stopped and I could hear the sounds of digging and someone moaning softly in terrible pain a few feet from me. At first I felt nothing apart from a burning thirst and dizziness.
From the sounds around me, I realized I was lying in a bay with the wounded. There were several men in this section of the bay; at least two of them were already dead. Moving to prop myself up I was surprised to see that my left hand was bandaged halfway up to the elbow and that someone had tied a field dressing that covered my forehead and left eye. My head throbbed with every pulse. The crystal on my new watch was shattered and its hands were motionless at 2:30. I reckoned from the shadows we probably had only an hour or two before last light. Without thinking, I tried to use my left hand to steady me, and immediately a stabbing pain ran through my arm. Struggling to my knees, I was assailed with the sickly sweet smell of blood and vomit. I retched violently. As I did so, a sleek, heavy rat scurried in front of me from around behind the dead man with the gap in his teeth. It regarded me coolly for several seconds with its sharp little eyes. It looked me up and down, baring its yellow teeth and twitching its nose and whiskers, savouring its good fortune. The loathsome creature was weighing up how long it would be until I was dead and what kind of a feast it could make of me. At that moment, anger and the will to live surged through me. I was determined not to let myself die and allow those evil beasts to devour me.
Rising to my feet, I lurched into the bay beside me and staggered into Lance Corporal Mullin, who was checking the sighting of a Lewis gun. Mullin grabbed me gently by the elbow and had me sit on what had been the fire step. “Jesus, sir, you’re one hell of a mess. I didn’t expect to see you on your feet again. What are you doin’ out here?”
“What happened?”
“We held them off again, sir.” Mullin said. “They got into our lines twice and there’s only ten of us left to hold the platoon position. It’s the same left and right of us. You and Mr. Molson are the only officers left alive in the company and Mr. Molson is shot through the face. He’s in the next bay as well. Lance Corporal O’Neill and I are the only NCOs left in the platoon. To tell the truth, sir, I thought you were going to die.”
Mullin gave me a drink from a two-gallon tin container with water sloshing about the bottom. It tasted faintly of gasoline. I slurped it greedily and vomited most of it up soon after. I later found out that foul-tasting water was the last reserve in the platoon. Mullin didn’t blink or even ask me to go sparingly with it. He looked out into no man’s land. “If they come again before we get re-supplied, we can’t hold ’em, sir. The Vickers gun is gone and we have less than a hundred rounds for the remaining Lewis gun. We’ve only twenty rounds left per man. We’re out of Mills bombs.” He looked around him licking his lips in nervous frustration. “I sent a runner back to company headquarters over an hour ago. I don’t think he got through. The Huns started shelling the communication trenches just after he left.”
We spent the rest of the daylight hours waiting for a final push but nothing happened. German stretcher-bearers worked openly in no man’s land hauling and lugging their wounded. At first they moved around cautiously but when it became apparent we weren’t going to shoot them, more of them appeared and they worked steadily. All the while Fritz’s stretcher-bearers worked, there was no sniping or artillery fire. Stretcher-bearers on both sides were a plucky group. We had all heard stories of German atrocities committed under the guise of collecting their wounded. Those of us who spent any time in the front didn’t believe them. I would be lying to say that we never entertained the idea of shooting these men. We all did. In the last twelve hours, the enemy had killed over half of our comrades in the most violent manner imaginable. You can’t go from that kind of intensity and anger to being even-tempered and genial in a matter of minutes. Sporting rules didn’t apply. There was nothing noble about holding our fire; it was entirely practical. Tempting as it might have been to shoot down enemy stretcher-bearers, we left them undisturbed. It could easily have been our own men looking for us out there.
I slept on the trench floor beside Mullin’s position for several hours after our meeting. I didn’t want to go back to the bay that held the wounded. Something inside told me if I did, I’d die, and so I chose to stay with the living. Before I slept again, curiosity got the better of me and I picked at my bandaged hand and saw that the dressing was binding my two smallest fingers by thins strands of flesh and skin. I didn’t try to discover what the dressing around my forehead and eye hid.
Shortly after dark, the company was reinforced by a group of cooks, batmen, and clerks from battalion headquarters, and a few grooms from the unit horse lines. These men crawled forward through the communication trenches leading to the Loop with bulging sandbags tied to makeshift pack boards. A further eight men reinforced our platoon. They hauled up ammunition, water, food, and field dressings, and then, once seeing the state of our defences, went back to bring forward coils of wire.
One of the clerks, Private Hendricks, from the University of Toronto, a serious-faced divinity student with thick steel glasses and a raspy voice, confirmed to me that not only was the colonel dead, but that there were only three officers in the battalion who were not casualties. Major Gault had come forward and reorganized things the night before, but he’d also been badly wounded and was awaiting evacuation over in Number One Company’s area.
Before he was hit, Gault ensured that cigarettes and a generous rum ration were sent forward with the new men, along with the ammunition, water, food, and field dressings. In the absence of being relieved, the shot of rum did a lot to cheer those still fit to fight. I didn’t take any as the thought of it set me to retching. Instead, at Lance Corporal Mullin’s urging, I drank some cold tea and ate hard tack biscuits and swallowed a few mouthfuls of greasy tinned Machanochie stew. I don’t remember drifting off to sleep on my perch on the fire step.
The sounds of firing and shouting wakened me. My good eye was blurred and gummy but I could see orange light drifting in and out of strange shadows. The enemy fired several flares suspended from tiny swinging parachutes over our position. I struggled to get up. During the night some kind soul had covered me with a rubber ground sheet and sand bags. Even in my groggy state, I could see that we were under attack again. Fritz was trying to bump us out of our most forward position by rushing us in a silent night assault.
Suddenly, on both sides of us, in Number One and Number Three Company areas, the sound and blast of heavy shelling rocked the night air as “coal boxes,” the heaviest of German artillery, crumped and blasted the summer night. Dragging myself to my feet, I could see German troops much less than two hundred yards away running forward into the drifting pools of light created by their own flares. They were regularly spaced and held their rifles at the ready.
I reacted instinctively croaking out, “Three Platoon, one hundred yards. Enemy to your front. Rapid fire!”
My head throbbed and sweat seeped from every pore. I was too wracked by pain to be frightened. The response from our line was ragged as the crack and thump of rifle fire gradually increased to be joined by the higher-pitched hammering of the Lewis gun. I was of no use to anyone where I was and set about dragging grenade boxes to the fire step with my good hand. I tired quickly. My pulse raced and I lost my breath. I was hot, clammy, and nauseous.
The light from the flares gradually subsided and men stopped firing, conserving their ammunition for targets they could see. Hitting anything in that light was more a matter of luck than skill and each man knew he would receive no re-supply for at