more machine-guns. That would make all the difference for our survival. If we are not going to be attacked, I for one want to be the first to know it.”
He shifted uncomfortably and tapped a pencil against the board that served as his table. “Anyway I’ll leave the details to you.” Gault raised his bushy eyebrows and looked at me knowingly. “Oh. Apart from the prisoner, the staff really does want you to inflict maximum damage on the Hun as well.” His voice trailed off as he said this. “I’ll also leave that aspect to your good judgment.” He took a deep breath through his nose and rubbed the back of his neck. “Any questions?”
Once again I nodded. “No, sir. If I could go back and look at the ground and select a route, then I’ll come back this afternoon. I’ll probably have a lot to ask you once I’ve thought about how I’m going to do this.”
Gault rose. “Very wise, Rory. That’s exactly what I’d do if I were you.” He looked at me in an avuncular sort of way. “You’ll be fine once you get going. These things aren’t as daunting as they seem.”
I should have resented this kind of talk because with five tours up the line, I was beginning to fancy myself as something of a veteran, but I knew Gault wasn’t being patronizing. He’d led numerous patrols himself and patrolling wasn’t something normally required of majors.
“Agar tells me you’re doing a fine job and you’ve settled in like an old hand. Keep it up. You’ll be fine,” he said as I turned away and gathered myself to leave.
I was pleased to hear this and thanked him as I crawled out the muddy doorway of the bunker. My father had written to me a week before this incident and told me he’d received a letter from Gault assuring him that I was in good health and getting on well. Neither of us ever mentioned the connection.
I spent the afternoon squinting through a telescopic periscope and prepared my plan. My sergeant, a sandy-haired Scot named Ferguson, selected the men for the patrol for me. He was extremely disappointed I didn’t include him in the upcoming operation.
“I want to try something different on this patrol,” I told him. “It should be kept smaller than what we’ve been used to. It seems to me having too many men out there increases our risk of drawing fire.”
Sergeant Ferguson looked down and stirred at the mud between his feet. He didn’t ask how it was going to be different and I didn’t tell him. Apart from the size of the patrol, I hadn’t thought through the details. Even at that stage of the war, we seriously mistrusted much of what came down from the staff. I’m sure in this respect the Patricia’s were no different than anyone else. Staff bumbling in the Great War has become a cliché, but in late 1915, as throughout the war, we did our best to accommodate the staff’s wishes. But for our own survival, we always interpreted their demands. The pattern had by then become all too apparent; utterly ridiculous orders regularly came down from otherwise sensible men who were out of touch with the reality of life in the forward trenches. I suspected the situation I faced with my patrol was no different. I was going to do my best to get a prisoner, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to draw attention to my patrol and draw fire by inflicting meaningless casualties on the enemy for the sake of appearing to be aggressive.
The problem confronting me was the same one that confronted every infantry officer in that war. The Germans had been industriously adding to their barbed wire obstacles in front of their positions. I spent several hours squinting through a periscope but I could see no way to get through their wire. If the staff wanted me to get a prisoner, and at the same time they wanted me to do damage to the enemy, I had to get through the wire. Scores of thousands of men on both sides had already died vainly trying to solve precisely that problem. In their directions to us, the staff typically stated their demands quite explicitly. Get us a prisoner and inflict damage upon the enemy. We were left entirely to our own devices in determining how we were to accomplish these tasks.
Our battalion front was a typical patch of ground in the Ypres Salient. Throughout the Great War, the Ypres Salient was one of the most fiercely contested patches of ground. It was a large bend in the Allied line that jutted into Belgium; and for most of the war, it was the only piece of that unfortunate little country that remained in the hands of the Allies. The PPCLI held eight hundred yards of it. Depending where you were, we looked out at three to five hundred yards of rolling shell-pocked territory that separated us from the German army.
Over this barren scene, a few stunted shrubs valiantly attempted to grow and a half-dozen shattered tree stumps served as reference points. As if this once tranquil bit of farmland wasn’t sufficiently desecrated, the whole area was liberally strewn with the rotting corpses of English and German infantrymen. The backdrop on either side of all this was a fifty-yard belt of barbed wire entanglements. This obstacle belt was made up of densely massed wire coils and complex webs of barbed wire windlassed to wooden stakes. Behind this, on the German side, armed with machine-guns, was a battalion of some of the best soldiers in the world. The landscape was utterly evil and I was expected to lead men through its most impenetrable zone, shoot up their trenches, and return triumphantly with a prisoner.
That night I found myself with five men standing on the fire step of our forward trench. With me I had Private Rivers, a Canadian-born militiaman from southern Ontario, Lance Corporal O’Neil from Calgary, privates Jenkins and Grey, both originals from the East End of London, and Lance Corporal Mullin, a quick and aggressively intelligent young man from Winnipeg.
The sky was partially concealed by high-level scattered clouds and the moon was to rise at ten. A gusting breeze stirred the coils of wire, making a slight chinking sound. Last light was at around nine. It could have been worse. I would have liked it to be much darker, but I was grateful I hadn’t been tasked, as some men had, to go out on a clear night with a full moon. At 9:15, as I’d arranged, artillery began to fall across the entire front of the trenches opposite me. At the same time, two machine-guns on our flanks began firing rapidly back and forth across the German trench tops.
“This is it, follow me,” I whispered in a way I hoped wouldn’t convey my fear.
We slipped over the top and wended our way delicately through the wire to our front. The path through our own wire was innocuously marked with bits of sand bag. If we kept to the left of the sand bag strips we found a narrow path that threaded its way through our wire. The path wasn’t easy to see and barbs caught at our tunics and trousers. Close to the enemy side of our wire we had to lift two coils and crawl under it. The shelling stopped a minute before we crawled into no man’s land. We crawled forward twenty or thirty yards and I made an exaggerated pointing motion to Private Rivers. He gave me a thumbs-up and mouthed, “Good luck.” Quietly, he lay down and cradled his rifle, scanning the darkness before him. Rivers’ task was to wait just outside our wire and keep his eyes peeled for our return. If we were lost, or heading in the wrong direction, Rivers was to catch our attention and guide us back through our own wire. Rivers would have a long wait lying on cold damp ground, but we all knew that amongst the six of us, he was the one with the most certain odds of surviving to see morning.
I pulled out my compass and took a bearing. We were going to go forward at a crouch for a hundred yards, and at the lip of a series of prominent shell craters on a patch of higher ground, we would push forward on all fours to the enemy wire. The four men behind me were supposed to keep an interval of five or six yards between each of them to prevent themselves from all being killed in a single burst of machine-gun fire. But in the dark, when men are tense, the urge to bunch up is almost irresistible. We’d never really trained for this kind of operation and I’m afraid at times we all followed our instincts and moved huddled together as a small crowd.
We reached the cratered area without incident, went to ground and watched and listened for a long while. The five of us peered into the dark, perched on the lip of one of the largest craters. I scanned the way ahead with my field
