Number Two Company was, like the rest of the battalion, still in a state of near exhaustion. There was little movement and men were wrapped in their blankets and stacked like grey cocoons across the barn floor and hayloft. As I was soon to learn, the company was at about two-thirds of its strength. Although they had been in a quiet sector of the line, in the last three days they had had four men killed and three seriously wounded due to shelling. One of the first things I noticed about these sleeping men was their continual coughing and rasping, even as they slept. Colds and flu-like symptoms were chronic, but as I was to see for myself, few men reported on sick parade until they were nearly incapacitated by the onset of pneumonia.
A soldier on fire piquet who was awake and fully dressed showed me the company officers. The officers were only distinguishable from the other sleeping cocoons by the fact that they were off in a corner by themselves and had a field telephone beside them sitting on a web pack. I told the fire piquet not to wake anyone and sat down waiting for my introductions.
Several hours later the company gradually stirred into life, and dirty khaki-clad men could be seen cooking outside, writing letters, or just relaxing, sitting or smoking by themselves deep within their own private thoughts. When my company commander awakened, he too offered me bitterly strong tea that had been brewed some time ago by the battalion’s batmen.
My company commander was a bespectacled Montreal businessman and was at least two decades my senior. He had the peculiar name of Agar Adamson. Adamson blearily welcomed me to his company and said he knew my father well. He matter-of-factly advised me, “Rory, you’ll be going up the line tomorrow night. I need to send an advance party for our next tour in the trenches. The entire battalion will follow you in twenty-four hours time. We’ll be replacing the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, and this’ll be a good chance for you to get a feel for things, see how another unit operates, and learn how things are done before your own men arrive.”
Later, when I thought about this, I was grateful to Adamson. He knew I didn’t want to appear the new boy and was positioning me to put me in the strongest possible light before my troops, men who would take a more than passing interest in my abilities and character.
I spent the remainder of that day meeting my platoon, wrote letters home, and, to my surprise, received a cheerful and gossipy letter from Jeanine who disappointingly signed herself “As ever, your true friend.” I was still very naïve. Late the next morning, I played a game of pick-up baseball with the newer Canadian-born members of the platoon. For the most part, the British veterans amongst them watched the game and provided high-spirited but unprintable comments about the level of play. By five that afternoon, I was off with the advance party for my first experience at the front.
Going up the line for the first time was an experience I think few men ever forget. In my case, I did it after dark. The night was cloudy and warm but despite the weight of my kit and the fact that I was sweating, I was shivering and my throat was sore. I must have caught a cold during my short stay with the battalion. Three lance corporals and I were to act as guides for the incoming Patricia’s. We met up with a British re-supply column consisting of two dozen men heavily laden with sand bags tied around their necks or wearing pack boards with boxes of machine-gun ammunition or several gallon tins of water. The sand bags contained rifle ammunition and rations broken down into section allotments. I was slotted into the column with a guide and men from Number 3 Company of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, the organization we were to replace. Once the column was organized and checked by a young officer, we were on our way.
The approaches to our new position were in low ground and could be observed by day by the Germans sitting on the higher ground to the north of us. As it was, the German artillery had long since ranged in on sections of the road and periodically fired in the dark in the hopes of hitting something. They tried that night, but fortunately no one from our column was hit. I was more than a little alarmed by my first experiences of artillery exploding in the dark. As it turned out, the rounds landed two hundred yards behind me. But to my overactive imagination it was much closer. The sudden blinding flashes and the violence of those first rounds exploding in the darkness were unforgettable.
In front of me, a short, heavily laden Tommy with an unlit pipe clenched in his teeth grumbled to no one in particular something that sounded like “Let’s fucking keep moving then, shall we?” We did. And in what seemed like a short time we were met by a second group of guides and began to break into separate groups; we were then led into the rear-area communication trenches.
These were trenches only in name. In some areas they were just shallow scrapings with mud-puddle bottoms. We splashed on as quietly as we could and eventually arrived at a series of deeper scrapings with occasional dugouts tunnelled into the wet earth beside them. Men were occupying some of these tiny reserve dugouts. We could tell they were there because they swore at us when we stumbled over their muddy legs sticking out into the trench. The smell of those trenches and the next line farther forward was unlike anything I’ve ever encountered since the war. The area around the Ypres Salient was littered with thousands of unburied French, British, and German corpses in varying stages of decay. I didn’t know it that night, but there were also enormous rats in their tens of thousands teeming in the fields and trenches surrounding us.
Those churned-up fields had been fertilized for centuries with human and animal waste, and in the trenches latrines were little more than open sewage pits. The effect of those reeking fields was stomach churning. The stench caused me to heave several times as we plodded forward. You never really became used to it; but somehow we managed to carry on with that overpowering and disgusting smell relegated to our sub-conscious. It is the only smell that has invaded my dreams. Dante may have tried to describe the depths of hell and mediaeval artists have tried to paint it. But for me, that murderous odour was the most vivid evocation of hell I can think of. Thankfully, I have never encountered anything like it since leaving those ghastly fields.
The frontline trenches in our sector were deeper, but they were so soggy and shell blasted they were more like an intermittent creek bed than a military defensive works. When standing, our heads were just below ground; but even in the darkness of that first night, there was none of the snug sense of security that I had once imagined trenches would have. I spent the next night and day crawling around what looked to me like a badly maintained ditch. I learned every nook and cranny and peered into no-man’s land with a homemade periscope given to me by a British officer. I drew a detailed sketch of the area, marking each dugout, each communication trench, each machine-gun position, each known enemy sniper position, and the routes through our own wire.
That first tour in the trenches was like many others I was to experience. Fatigue and discomfort blurred and overrode the constant strain of being so near to violent death. The overall effect was to create a weary numbness. We coped by developing a crude sense of humour that my family and friends in Montreal would never understand. I still marvel more of us didn’t die from sickness. The food was appalling; it invariably consisted of tins of gristly Machanochie stew or fat-encrusted bully beef; it was invariably eaten cold and sprinkled with sand and mud. While in the line, we drank inadequate quantities of sweet tea, which came forward in one-gallon water cans, a good number of which had at some time seen service carrying gasoline.
We didn’t really sleep; we were wet and cold for long periods of time and our personal hygiene was as primitive as it could be. All of us were infected with lice. We had lice in every seam of our clothing and in our hair; we itched constantly. Not just soft scratching, but violent clawing at a painful never-ending irritation. Rats overran our dugouts and were forever slithering about the trenches. Great fat corpse-fed rats would come out even by day trying to steal our rations and every night they scuttled across our legs as we tried to sleep hunched against a trench wall. Shooting rats was a hazard to everyone and so the only authorized weapon for rat control was a sharpened spade. Necessity turned ratting into a sport; and with our misshapen sense of humour, we kept our spirits up hunting the wretched animals, turning it into a contest between companies.
The trench’s dirt quickly got into everything. We ate dirt. We breathed it constantly. It