June 6, 19 I 8 
Land & Water 
19 
Another wondered how Jong it was since he liad tasted 
almonds. 
As the coKimn emerged from that sep\ilchral hollow and 
breastecl the rise, they breathed more freely. 
They neared the cross-roads at B , and shells began to 
whistle over their heads. The night air was full of strange 
and sibilant voices. They crossed the canal, and at that 
moment a shell fell in the middle of the column. The men 
in the immediate vicinity stopped dead, while the men in 
the rear continued to march until, as they trod on the heels of 
the men in front of them, the whole column was pulled up 
like a horse that i§ suddenly thrown on its haunches. Con- 
fused voices were heard, and the groans of wounded men. 
The M.O. was down on his knees beside the prostrate forms, 
flashing an electric-torch upon them, while he masked its 
light with his Burberry. The shell had wiped out a machine- 
gun team. The M.G. officer lay dead where he had fallen. 
The wounded were picked up and placed on the wheeled 
transport, and the battalion resumed its march. No one knew 
whose turn would come next. But they continued to march 
steadily, each man's eves fi.xed on the pack of the man in 
front of him 
At midnight they halted by the side of the road, due 
north of St. J — — , and waited for dawn. Thoy found some 
deserted gun-emplacements, and- established their battalion 
headquarters therein. Having put out outposts and dug 
themselves in, the men snatched an hour or two of 
fitful and uneasy sleep under the stars. 
The morning broke cold and clear, and with the first flush 
of dawn the men were on their feet, stamping to keep them- 
selves warm. In front of them was a dark wood, and in the 
middle distance a farm and its outhouses. It was a: small 
wood, and if you look for that wood to-day you will never 
find it, but its name will go down to history. From this 
moment the battalion was spUt up ; "C" and "D" Companies 
were ordered to march off in the direction, of the wood, where 
they were to join up with the Third Brigade? As they 
marched off by platoons in file they wa\^ed their hands in 
salutation to their comrades ; it was the last the latter ever 
saw of them. 
As the sun caqie out, the air grew warm ; but not a lark 
climbed the heavens. Of the two companies that remained, one 
was ordered to move straight on its trenches in open order by 
platoons, the other was to advance by s«*ctions towards the 
farm. ^' They raced forwards, and as thej' approached their 
objective the German guns got the range, and opened on them 
with shrapnel and high explosive. A dark grey mass of men 
was clustered round a farm about 900 yards away, on their 
left front, and, as they drew nearer, this mass opened on them 
with rifle-fire. Bullets licked the earth all around them, throw- 
ing up spurts of dust ; but the shooting was poor, and they 
advanced steadily. The captain, who was signalling-officer and 
was in the rear, watched the waves of two other battalions 
advancing on the left to attack the ridge, and as the German 
machine-guns got to work on them he noticed that the first 
wave grew thinner and thinner. It struck him that it was 
• extraordinarily like a cinema film ; he was looking all the 
while at the same picture, and yet it was never quite the 
same. There was the wave, always there, but from moment 
to moment gaps appeared in it ; flickers of flame came and 
went above it ; little white clouds appeared from nowhere 
over it, hung about, and disappeared as though they had 
never been. But with each cloud another gap appeared in 
the line. Now and again it was wholly obscured by great 
patches of coal-black smoke like enormous ink-stains, and 
the earth shook. As the smoke cleared away, he was almost 
astonished to see that the men — some of them — were still 
upright, and still advancing, without haste and without rest. 
" This is going to be sOme hell, to-day ; eh, what, Dickie ? " 
he said to the M.O., who was on his way to a farm to get it 
going as a regimental aid-post. 
"That's so," said the M.O., cheerful at the prospect of 
having something more professionally exciting to do than 
look at men's tongues in billets. "I guess I'm going to do 
quite a lot in the general practitioner line to-day. Say, old 
man, if you come my way I'U patch you up beautifully. 
I've quite a good bedside manner." "> ' , 
The M.O. had a disconcerting habit of envisaging every- 
body else as a possible casualty. Which was rather premature 
when you came to think of it. 
"Get along, Dickie, you old body-snatcher. I'd sooner 
die a natural death," retorted the other. "The Bochc has 
slain his thousands, but you M.O.s your tens of thousands." 
"I'll never be slain by the jawbone of an ass," retorted 
the M.O. pugnaciously. 
"Now, Dickie," laughed the signalling-officer, good- 
naturedly, " you're getting riled. You're better at giving chaff 
than taking it. .You just hike away to your consulting -room." 
The M.O. "hiked." .And for no apparent reason they 
shook haS^s. 
They were busy after that. The captain ordered field- 
telephones to be laid out from the farm, which was to serve 
the double purpose of aid-post and battalion headquarters. 
They were laid out. to the lines of unfinished trenches which 
had now been occupied by the waves of infantr}'. It was 
neither open warfare nor trench warfare, but a curious 
combination of the two — a contest of positions which were 
only half-entrenched^while the German infantry hung about 
in clusters, like loafers at a street corner, apparently uncertain 
whether to advance or not. The truth was they were 
puzzled. They felt that by all the rules of the game the 
Canadians had no business to be there. The latter had one 
gun and no aeroplanes ; they were being drenched with 
Shrapnel and submerged with high explosive ; their left was 
"in the air," and their allies had bolted the day before in a 
wild sauve qui petit before a new and sinister weapon which 
the Boche knew to be his own' peculiar and nasty secret. 
And yet here were these "verdammte" Canadians coming 
right up to them and making themselves extremely unpleas- 
ant with nothing better than two or three machine-guns 
and tlieir rifles, though, to be sure, the rapid and accurate 
fire of those rifles was something to reckon with. The 
Boche, \ who had had things all his own way the day 
before, when he bayoneted inanimate men half-suffocated 
by his poisonous gas, did not seem to approve of this 
at all. 
During tlie vvhole of that day a storm of iron beat upon the 
farm and the position in front of it. Shells ploughed up 
the trenches, bur3^ing men where they stood, and leaving not 
a trace behind. Some men were blown to dust, others were 
killed without a scratch ; it seemed as if not the engines of 
war but some mysterious force of natur'e were blasting them 
out of existence. The survivors fired again and again at their 
fitf\il targets, until their rifle-barrels grew hot, their nostrils 
were filled with the reek of blood and burnt cordite, their 
ears stunned with concussion, their eyes half-blinded w;ith 
showers of black dust, and their faces running with sweat. 
Shells formed huge craters round and about the farm, shaking 
it to its foundations and bespattering its walls with the 
filth of the midden-heap. The signalling-officer found him- 
self wondering how long it would be before the battalion 
headquarters would be wiped out. As he sat there, with the 
CO., receiving and transmitting messages, he felt as though 
he were dwelling in a haunted house. Soot fell in showers 
down the cliimney on to the hearthstone, windows rattled, 
doors opened and shut, pictures fell from the walls, and 
plaster pattered on to the floor. Voices shrieked and whim- 
pered overhead. And all the while he was conscious of 
waiting for something to happen^something was surely 
bound to happen. Would it be the next or the next but 
one ? No ! that was a " dud." Short ! Over ! . . . He 
got up and went out. There was a lull. Tljen the storm 
burst forth again. He began to count the shells falling in 
or near the farm and the trenches occupied by "A" and 
"B" Companies. After counting for fifteen minutes by his 
watch, he had reckoned ninety high-explosive shells. 
Night brought little or no respite from shell-fire ; but the 
enemy's machine-gun fire died down, and they were able to 
get stretcher-bearers and ration-parties with water up to the 
trenches. The M.O. worked all night in his overalls, dressing 
the wounded, injecting morphia and anti-tetanic serum, and 
evacuating them on empty limbers and supply waggons. 
When dawn broke, the signalling-officer was ordered to 
occupy a disused trench near a private road on the right, 
- facing the wood. He had not been there many hours before 
it stnick him that something was happening in that wood. 
Shells were raining on it at intervals, and in the pauses he 
heard the rifle-fire of "C" and "D" Companies, who were 
holding it. But each time the rifle-fire diminished in volume, 
and grew more and more fitful ; dying down like a fire of 
twigs that crackle and consume. Meanwhile, he was busy 
collecting "details" and organising the supports. At inter- 
vals an order would come in to supply "two N.C.O.s and 
forty men" to some hard-pressed position, and he had to 
start reorganising all over again. Cooks, batmen, signallers 
— all were impounded. A miUtary policeman passed on to 
him every straggler. Derehcts of every regiment in the 
divisions^Scottish, English, Canadian— came drifting in ; 
and in that curious medley, drifting together like fallen 
leaves under a breeze after the storm has momentarily spent 
its fury, he saw only too clearly the evidence of what had 
happened the day before. There was no need to ask any 
questions. A morose Highlander, a company sergeant-major 
who had lost his battalion, volunteered the information that 
he was "fed up." He seemed dazed, and was argumentative 
in a dull^ slow way like a drunken man. 
