Paths of Glory (31 page)

Later that night I went out for a visit to the latrine. Young had slipped down. In the flicker of the star shells I came upon this figure, wrapped in a blanket, headless, standing in the trench.

 

February 23. Still on trail of German spy and bottle of Scotch. Found neither. Goddamn the luck. Postponed going to the school till tomorrow.

The spy, I remember, was a toothless individual with a strange accent, possibly due to his toothlessness, who hung around the estaminet connected with our billet for a while. He was in a British uniform but wore no insignia whatever. In general he acted queerly. And the idea was not as absurd as it may sound, for we were right in the middle of a mining area of France and the galleries stretched for miles underground, some of them clear over into the German lines. I never did find out what happened to my spy, but I felt pretty pleased with myself for being on the job.

 

March 29. Up 3:00 a.m. March to Arras 12 kilometers. Into cave. Flopped again and slept. Good feed. Found blankets, bacon, green envelopes. Left in a hurry. On post 7:309:30. Slept.

I shall never forget that march into Arras, nor the days that followed it. It was a nightmare all right. The Germans had made a stab at Arras. The caves, chalk ones, were in the outskirts of the town on the German side and the troops that had been there—Imperials—had beat it, leaving us the above-listed luxuries. The civilians had hurried out of the town, leaving everything wide open. There had evidently been a panic. Our fellows came in there and found complete chaos. Soon other divisions and artillery came pouring in, the artillery merely wheeling their guns into position and starting firing without waiting to dig emplacements. But for two or three days I am sure Fritz could have walked right through the place. For the first day we were too dead beat to put up a fight; for the next couple of days we were too drunk from the civilian wine stores left knocking about. And besides, there was a good-sized gap in the line. And every day at dawn we expected the avalanche of men and steel, and we had no defense works behind which to meet it. Let me go over the top any day rather than stand and let the enemy give it to me in the teeth, when and where he goddamn pleases.

 

March 31. Easter Sunday. Whizbangs 3 feet over my head. Knocked down and buried. Damn close and good shake-up.

One of these shells was a dud, so it interested me to dope out just how close it had been. What actually happened I shall never know. I was standing in a piece of sawed-off trench, looking away from the line, my rifle leaning against the earth beside me. The next thing I knew I was about 10 feet from my rifle, buried up to the armpits. My rifle looked as if lightning had struck it. Dead silence. Ten minutes later the fellow who was with me came sneaking around a hillock as if he were stalking deer. We hunted out a better hole and we went to it.

 

April 5. Up for bombs. Shell 15 yards away. Damn good scare and bit the dust hard. Going up the line tonight. Everybody's wind up. Lost on way in the dark. Shells damn close. Floundering in mud. Wet and plastered with mud and all in. Gas sentry. Letter from Mother.

That night I really did give up. We wandered around in circles for several hours, through wire, shell holes, and slimy, slippery mud. Time and again I fell into shell holes full of water. I was caked with mud, exhausted by rage and exasperated to the point of quitting. For about the fifteenth time—literally—I tumbled, sprawling into a shell hole. “Get out of there and come on!” bawled Sergeant MacDonald against the uproar of the night bombardment. I've forgotten what I said. This is the substance of it: “To hell with it. Fuck everything. You don't know where you're going, and I don't care. I'm done for. I'm not going another step. Here I am, and here I stay. Let the Heinies come. I don't give a damn. I'm absolutely all in and I'm not going to move another step. I'll wait till daylight and find you then, if I'm still alive.”

 

April 27. Raid pulled off 1:00 a.m. 22 prisoners. Dixon killed and Jones. Great success. Aven of 188th Regiment, I Battalion. Letters from Mother and Arthur.

The Scouts' job in this and other raids was to reconnoiter No Man's Land and the German wire. The points of entry were chosen and the artillery registered on the wire as inconspicuously as possible. On the night of the raid, the raiding parties from the companies blackened their faces, removed all identification marks, and assembled at the places fixed in the frontline. The Scouts then led the raiding parties out into No Man's Land opposite the places in the wire through which they were to go. At Zero Hour a box barrage was put down on the sector to be raided, theoretically cutting it off from its support line, while other guns fired on the wire and blew holes through it. Not much of this could be done beforehand because it would have given the raid away. After a certain number of minutes the wire barrage lifted and changed to harassing fire. The box barrage continued with intensity. It was then that the raiding parties went through the wire and into the German trench. There were, I think, four parties in this raid, each having its own territory to clean up. All this had been practiced back of the line on ground marked out to scale with tapes in exact reproduction of the German positions. The raid was all over in about half an hour. On the right everything went according to plan. On the left, however, Lt. McKean ran into some unexpected trouble and it was there that Dixon was killed. McKean had to subdue two machine gun posts—and he did it practically singlehanded. Later he got the Victoria Cross for this exploit. McKean was the Scout officer and a decent egg. He was a slight, pale-faced, boyish-looking fellow who had been a schoolteacher. A more frail, less warlike person was hard to imagine—but he had guts and proved it many a time. He had risen from the ranks where he had got the Military Medal. After his V.C. he chalked up a Military Cross and Bar and then got what he probably was the most pleased with—a nice “blighty” through the leg. Losing only two of our men in a raid like that showed damned good work all round, and Jones blew himself up by sticking an ammonal tube into a funk hole instead of a dugout, and waiting to make sure that it went off. No decorations were given to the Scouts on whom the whole responsibility for the raid rested—except McKean. 2 Military Crosses, 2 Distinguished Conduct Medals, and 5 Military Medals were dished out to the others.

 

August 7. The day of “If.” Shelled on assembling. Slept out in open in cornfield. In p.m. operations discussion. Shells again. Up the line at night ready for Zero Hour.

Here we were on what Ludendorff called “the black day of the German army in the history of this war”—or, rather, on the eve of it. “The day of ‘If'” I called it, because the “operations discussions” were punctuated with that word: “If it rains . . . If the artillery . . . If the tanks . . . and, above all, If Fritz does or does not do so and so.”

We, the Intelligence Section of the 14th Canadian Infantry Battalion, spent the day in an orchard of the village of Cachy, east and a little south of Amiens. Around us was the Canadian Corps; on our left the Australian Corps and to our right the First French Army. Yet the lazy summer day droned on and not a soldier was in sight. Nor was there any sign of the 400 tanks and the 2,000 guns and the rest of that unbelievable congestion which had filled the roads and trails the night before. Everything was out of sight, hidden in woods, in the tall wheat or in folds in the ground. Shells dropped casually here and there. A machine gun would rattle lazily and spasmodically in the distance. Planes and bees buzzed around, making a drowsy noise. We loafed around in the high grass of that orchard. All was certainly quiet on the western front around there.

After nightfall the whole area suddenly came alive again. You realized you had been in the midst of an enormous but invisible and silent crowd. There was a good deal of rumbling going on around. Quite a few planes were up. These were to drown out the noise of the tanks. I moved off with four or five from my section to go down to the first-wave platoons to which we had been attached. We reached the frontline down the slope of the hill from our orchard, and walked along the knee-deep jumping-off trench, which was filled with men. I left Tatton and McLaren at their platoon. McLaren was spreading his rubber sheet over the parapet: “It's to keep me breeches clean when I go over,” he said to me. We wished each other luck and I went on up the trench and reported to the platoon officer. I should say it was then about 11 o'clock or midnight. I was sleepy, could hardly keep my eyes open, and found a funk hole. D.R. McClare, who had been detailed to the same platoon with me, said he would route me out when things started. It seemed that I had hardly shut my eyes when he was punching me: “Rise and Shine! The lid goes off in half an hour.” I took my place with him in the trench, looked my rifle ammunition over, or rather felt it over, as it was black as hell, and squatted down in the trench with my back to Fritz. A shell or two droned over and burst way back. A cockney voice a few feet away was chanting in a low voice: “Just before the battle, Mother, I was eating bread and cheese.” I remember thinking that I must not walk too fast or I'd bump into our own barrage. There seemed to be some rumbling around back of us, otherwise dead silence.

Suddenly a great flash of sheet lightning lit up the western horizon as far as I could see. Then, in an instant the sky was filled with a weird whistling and shrieking. There was a roar and a crash and the ground started to jump about. Then more lightning, the smell of explosives, and, almost on top of us, two or three great hulks—the tanks. One gun was firing right in our trench and the “Stretcher Bearers!” cry was heard before we had budged an inch. (To preserve secrecy no gun had registered for the barrage.) Two minutes went by in this air- and earthquake. Then whistles blew along the line. We grabbed our rifles and advanced.

 

November 6. Rain continues.

 

November 8. Revolver practice.

At nine o'clock this morning the German Armistice Commission met Marshal Foch in his special train in the Compiègne Forest.

 

November 9. Many rumors of peace.

November 11. Peace declared. Hostilities cease at 11:00 a.m. Ye gods!

 

December 27. Turn in revolvers. Cologne out of bounds. Some damned idiot been holding people up.

There had been several disturbances in Cologne among the troops themselves. The Guards Division had come in there, and their officers were very touchy about being saluted. The Colonials had decided that the war was over, and they had never been very keen about saluting anyway. Imperial picquets picked up Canadian soldiers, and the roughhouses started. There were several brawls in the pubs, ending up with a big one down in the red-light district in which a few men got killed. The Military Police acted more like sons of bitches than ever, which did not help the general spirit of restlessness that was prevailing. The result was that we were pulled out of there soon after and left the Watch on the Rhine to the Imperial Chocolate Soldiers.

The slowness in demobilization, the constant reports of the great numbers of Americans who were going home ahead of us, the lousiness of the parade-ground yellow bastards who had swarmed out to smarten us up, and the general reaction after the armistice started things humming.

 

January, 1, 1919. Paid 30 marks. Parcel from Fishers. No resolutions. Band concert in street. Civilians made to take their hats off to national anthem. An example of caddishness and pettiness that should be beneath the British. Goddamned bunch of bullying Prussian bastards there “British Officers and Gentlemen.”

What had got my goat was that one of our officers had knocked the hat off a civilian and thrown it in the mud. The victim was an inoffensive old man who probably didn't know what tune was being played. At least, it seemed so. I really felt terribly ashamed and embarrassed about the business, that sort of thing never failing to react upon the perpetrator and making him look damned foolish.

 

May 19. On draft for
Regina
. Five minutes later taken off. Profanity the order of the day, not to mention blasphemy. Promised to be put on draft tomorrow, but being
on
one draft is worth
waiting for
all the rest. Y Emmas concert party. Pretty good.

 

May 20. On draft for
Carmania
. Sailing tomorrow. Medical inspection, etc. Grave digging this a.m. for men killed in the riot. I must admit I did not kill myself working. I've set my hand to quite a few things in this army, and the last item is grave digging.

 

May 21. Left Rhyl 7 a.m. Train to Liverpool. Embarked on
SS Carmania
. Steerage, R Section. Not very bad. Cavalry Brigade onboard and several civilian passengers. Set sail finally at 7 p.m. after a lot of idiotic monkeying around.

 

May 31. Arrived Montreal 8 a.m. Discharged noon. Bath and change and down to 7:40 train to New York.