time being, I was philosophic about these things, and little things, like dry clothes and sunny skies, lifted my spirits.
It wasn’t just violence and hard living that had changed me; although those two things probably had a profound and irreversible effect on me. I was now twenty-two, but I felt at least a decade older. Perhaps my unnatural ageing was in part due to my new position as an officer and a leader. In this, I recognized I had some advantages: I was much taller than all my British-born soldiers and had the benefit of an expensive education. As unfair as it was, those things gave you an edge. Reflecting back on it, I was ideally raised for this kind of transformation. I was young, strong, athletic, reasonably quick to learn things, and temperamentally willing to accept a challenge.
My sense of inadequacy regarding my position as a leader had by then all but disappeared. This was probably not entirely a good thing. My new-found confidence had come at the cost of boiling my values down to only those personal qualities and skills I needed to survive. In my months at the front, I placed enormous importance on trust, physical courage, endurance, cunning, determination, and good humour. Not a lot else mattered. My outlook on life necessarily became simplistic; but my life was no less complicated. I had other practical worries that day-to-day living and leadership imposed upon me. When the Canadian university men arrived, those who came to my platoon looked on me as a veteran. Some of them were several years older than I. They were innocent and treated me with deference and formal military courtesy. I suppose my Military Cross gave me credibility, credibility that I probably didn’t deserve, but it helped my confidence and my stature.
There may have been more than a tinge of fatalism and self-pity in all this mellow speculation. That June morning I was curiously detached, as if I was watching things from afar. Jeanine was the only woman I had ever truly been passionate about and I had let her slip entirely away without even telling her of my feelings. Although I’ve known a number of women since, my love for Jeanine was entirely different from the rest. Now I appreciate that the Jeanine I loved never really existed. She was, however, one of the few women I had ever really known at that point. High school had been a rigidly male and Jesuitical regime of Latin, Greek, French, English, history, mathematics, science, and sports. My three years at McGill University weren’t much different; a brief introduction to the army – and now I was at the front sitting in a foul-smelling trench surrounded by a group of men who I was to lead and was prepared to die with. It was all very alien, and at the same time so normal. These trench walls, mud, fatigue, cold, and wet had become my life. The sun made me drowsy and I wanted to crush out my cigarette and sleep.
The first rounds of the German barrage hit us with shattering intensity. It’s a challenge describing the effect of a single artillery round exploding nearby. Fifty unexpected large-calibre rounds detonating in the space of five seconds is truly cataclysmic. The German barrage hit us like an eruption from hell. As best I can make out, in that first salvo only two rounds actually landed within the company trench lines, but they killed half a dozen of our men outright. Our position was well registered and the rounds that didn’t land inside our trenches were very near misses. They collapsed trench walls, blew down parapets, buckled dugouts, and the shrapnel from them inflicted horrific jagged wounds.
Sergeant Ferguson, with more presence of mind than I, swept up the pieces of his rifle and shouted rather unnecessarily “Take Cover! Take Cover.”
He scrambled along the bottom of the trench and scuttled into his scrape carved out of the side of the forward wall. I was momentarily at a loss – the company officers’ dugout was fifty yards along the trench line and a further twenty yards to the rear. I had no place to go. Ferguson looked up at me and began to shout something. “Sir …” He didn’t finish his sentence. I threw myself into that tiny space, landed on top of him, and dug my fingers into the dirt floor, pulling myself downward as if willing to be swallowed by the earth. The first few seconds of that bombardment are imprinted in my mind as if etched in stone. My remaining two days in the Loop lasted a lifetime.
The initial bombardment on our forward trench line was the most intense part of the shelling and it went on continuously for over an hour. I’d been under artillery fire several times before, but nothing matched the concentration and length of this unforgiving pounding. With each explosion the ground shook. My brain and every bone in my body felt like it was being pounded by a mallet. My head ached with a piercing pain and my nose bled from any one of a hundred close concussions that smashed me into the trench floor and walls. Despite lying alongside Sergeant Ferguson, I was completely isolated. The two of us swore and screamed obscenities until we were hoarse, but still those horrifying explosions smashed and rattled us around the bottom of that scrape like we were insects caught in a jar of fire crackers. One of the early rounds hit the lip of our trench and the blast forced fine sand straight through my tunic. Almost sixty years later my wrinkled right shoulder is still the consistency of sandpaper from the grit embedded in it. The pounding went on for well over two hours. I was frightened the whole way through it but after an hour and a half of that merciless hammering, something changed in me physically. I became cold and very tired, as if my body couldn’t keep up with the physical and emotional intensity of the bombardment.
The barrage ended as abruptly as it had begun. One moment we were writhing in terror at the bottom of our trench, and the next the explosions and concussions stopped. It was like turning off an electric light. For almost a minute Sergeant Ferguson and I lay dazed and mistrustful, trying to get our senses back, waiting and watching to see if this was really the end of the barrage or simply a feint to lure us from our trenches so we could be cut down by a sudden secondary salvo.
After what seemed like an eternity’s silence, Ferguson and I crawled out. I sniffed the air. There was no indication of gas. The trench line that had been the Loop was a mess. In some places, walls that had been a full seven feet deep were reduced to four-foot ditches. Across no man’s land I could hear indistinct shouting and whistles blowing. The barrage started once again well to our rear.
I peeped over what had been our parapet and saw a long line of grey-clad figures scrambling through gaps in the German wire. I shouted to Ferguson, “They’re coming! Get them up and out at your end of the trench, I’ll do this half.” Ferguson nodded agreement and we were both off. I was screaming, “Get out, get out! They’re coming. For God’s sake get up, they’ll be on top of us in a few seconds!”
I was terrified, but it was a different kind of fear from the one that gripped me lying on the bottom of a trench when there was nothing to do but hope you didn’t take a direct hit. I was shrieking at the top of my lungs and running along the platoon line. Men groggily climbed from their dugouts. The roof from one of the platoon dugouts had been collapsed by a direct hit. Ominously from this hole there was no movement whatsoever. Men hauled weapons and ammunition cases up from hollowed sections of the trench wall. We frequently practised this drill during quiet spells in the line and that monotonous repetition was now paying off. Much to my relief, behind me came the rapid mechanical staccato chatter of the Vickers gun as it came into action.
In front of me, Lance Corporal Mullin’s gruff voice was calling out, “Jesus, Mary, Joseph! Hargreaves, you get that fucking Lewis gun up here! Move man, move!”
The sound of rifle fire crackled along our line as men found themselves a bit of cover on what was left of our trench parapet. With the Germans a hundred yards away I shouted the order: “Vickers and Lewis guns go on! Riflemen, prepare grenades! Use grenades only when they reach the wire.”
The order was passed up and down the line. While the two Lewis guns in my platoon and the Vickers heavy machine-gun continued to do their grisly work, men feverishly primed and prepared Mills bombs. When the assault closed to within thirty yards I shouted, “Grenades!” Three seconds later, a dozen Mills bombs sailed through the air and exploded on the far side of the wire. I could hear the shrieks of Germans shot and blasted in our wire and I could see men’s contorted faces as they went down in front of us.
Perhaps I
