Canadian army.
When we joined the Canadian army, the battalion was tasked to man the line around the town of Hooges. At Hooges, we received another reinforcement draft from Canada; and for the first time in my experience, the Patricia’s were at full fighting strength. Like me, most of the new men were recruited from universities in Quebec and Ontario. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of potential officers in this new draft and, as I was to learn later, senior army planners were angry that the upstart PPCLI had again creamed off more than its share of the available talent. Elitist recruiting didn’t help us escape the destruction lying in wait for the Canadian army. Like the rest of the university men, I was soon involved on a section of the line with the deceptively tranquil sounding name, Sanctuary Wood. It was to be horrific and was my last pitched battle. Sanctuary Wood was another link in a chain inexorably dragging me into a new life.
Our arrival in the new sector of the line was ominous. To go forward we had to pass through a patch of ground near Hooges that had once been the intersection of two country lanes. Because the crossroads was directly observable to German troops on the high ground to the north of us, several months earlier British troops nicknamed it Hellfire Corner. Anything that moved by day on Hellfire Corner was shelled mercilessly, and at night, the Germans regularly blasted it with speculative shrapnel and high explosive bombardments. To get to our new positions we had to pass through Hellfire Corner. On our first tour in the sector, despite moving through the crossroads at night, we lost seven men just getting to the trenches. That month we crossed and re-crossed Hellfire Corner three times.
Our new position was an utterly godforsaken piece of ground. The battalion’s trenches meandered across a waterlogged bottomland and the Germans looked down on us. Because the Salient was Belgian ground, the Allies refused to surrender an inch, and we found ourselves defending a low-lying salient jammed like a provocatively scolding finger into the German lines.
Behind our trenches, the ground was deeply cratered. Over the winter those craters filled with black water, turning the larger shell holes into small evil-looking lakes. On dark nights, men from my platoon frequently crawled back there, cracked the ice, and washed away as much of their filth as they could. We stopped that soon enough.
When the warm weather came, the ice disappeared and the mud at the bottom of the crater gave up the bloated corpse of a long-dead French soldier. Our poor Frenchman wasn’t the only unburied veteran in the area. At several points along our trench walls men repairing collapsed sand bag revetments came across the decomposing bodies of French and British soldiers who died there months before. God knows what terror and agony those men died in, but their rotting arms and legs routinely fell into our trenches. There was nothing else we could do – we dug through those remains and sealed off the dead with sand bags. The memories of those corpses were less easy to lock up.
On June 1, Number Two Company was manning the “Loop,” a semi-circular section of trench that sat like a wart on the very tip of the Salient. The Loop’s trenches were deeper and in better repair than those occupied by the companies on either side of us. But although our trenches may have been deep, their approaches were exposed on both sides and we could only get safely into the area in daylight by crawling on all fours for several hundred yards.
On that final stint in the Loop, Number Two Company was stronger than we had been on our previous tour. In addition to our new reinforcements, in our last period in rest billets we’d received two Lewis guns on an experimental basis. The Lewis gun looked like an oversize rifle with a large, circular, pan-shaped magazine on top. I had been introduced to it in England on training and knew it would become a fearsome addition to our weaponry because it increased our firepower several-fold. We needed it.
A year and a half into the war the majority of troops on both sides were only a few months away from civilian life. Few of us were good marksmen. By June 1916, two-thirds of the soldiers in the PPCLI were Canadian; and despite whatever personal strengths we Canadian-born members of the regiment may have had, we had only been in uniform for a few months and couldn’t shoot anything like as well as the British originals who’d spent their peacetime years on the British army’s rifle ranges. We took great delight in getting this new weapon, little realizing that the automation of war was reducing all our chances for survival.
In late May, there were indications the Germans were going to attack but we’d no idea when their offensive was to begin, or how fierce and determined it would be. The morning it all started was gloriously sunny; larks were singing somewhere behind us. I was in a philosophic mood thinking about home and watching a starling sitting on the trench lip. I’d become superstitious in a half-believing take-no-chances sort of way and I was puzzled whether this was a good or a bad sign. Not that I believed in omens or charms, but some things became a habit. Was the bird a symbol of a more natural life, or did it mean our violent way of life had become natural? A year before I would have scoffed at any kind of superstition. Now, unconsciously, in a world that arbitrarily snuffed out life, I suppose I searched for meaning anywhere I could find it. I wasn’t alone. Even the most religious or analytical of us in one way or another saw the course of their lives influenced by good and bad luck. I think we all had some kind of superstitious practice or belief.
On that first day in the Loop I was very tired. My eyes burned. I smoked a cigarette, and sat enjoying the early summer sunshine on my face. The small patch of sky visible from the bottom of our trench was cloudless. When you were in the trenches your horizon was limited to the stretch of sky above you and the sandbagged walls in front of you. It was a strange perspective on the world. In front of me, a sentry peered through his lookout hole scanning the German trenches opposite. In the adjacent firing bay, four of my men prepared lunch. They were laughing and taunting each other. Morale was high. We were well fed and our clothes were dry. Although we were aware of being in one of the worst places on earth, that morning we were happy. Everything’s relative. That morning we were warm and dry.
One of the voices called out, “Don’t worry too much if you don’t get enough to eat today, Hargreaves. Once Fritzie’s done with us this time, there’s only gonna be three to a loaf anyway.” They laughed enthusiastically, as if it was the first time they heard the joke.
Beside me, Sergeant Ferguson, my platoon sergeant, sat quietly cleaning his rifle. Ferguson was a man of remarkably few words. During my first few days with the platoon, I found his silences a little intimidating and irksome; but the longer I knew him, the more I grew to understand him; and in that halting and formal way peculiar to soldiers constrained by rank, age, and discipline, we became good friends. We sat together in silence on the firestep of our forward trench enjoying the sunshine.
Like most of my platoon, I’d by then taken to smoking cigarettes and used tobacco as a self-rationed reward and a comfort. That morning I was smoking contentedly, reading through a packet of letters that had come up with us the night before.
The letter that my mind kept coming back to was from Jeanine Dupuis. Jeanine was getting married, and as I was one of her “dearest and most trusted friends,” she wanted me to be one of the first to know. She was marrying a French-Canadian lawyer at the end of the summer and would go off to live in Quebec City. They were going to honeymoon at a cottage on a lake in the Laurentians. She was deliriously happy.
In those days of constant exhaustion, filth, bad food, and violent death, soft, warm, feminine companionship was something I dreamt and fantasized about constantly. I had often thought of Jeanine – her eyes, the softness of her skin, her figure, her delicate and fragrant scent, and her soft, husky voice. I’d only known these at a distance. I had never slept with a woman and that morning I was convinced I never would. Now my life was unnaturally masculine, brutish, and harsh, and I only half-expected to survive the war. Just as I’d become superstitious, I’d gradually come to accept that I might die. And women were so far removed from my existence that dreaming about
