of the fit men are bitter about me withholding it, explain my reasoning to them. For God’s sake don’t let morale sag now. We’re going to need all the grit we can muster to get through to tonight. I’m counting on you.”
I looked around and half-expected them to roll their eyes. Corporal Yeats, a short, patient little Irishman with a monstrous moustache and unfailing humour, inhaled deeply on his cigarette and then blew smoke upwards. He pushed his forage cap back and chuckled, “Ah don’ think the lads’ll have much choice, sar. An’ besides, there’s still a lot more fight in ’em yet. If Fritzie comes callin’ back, he’ll get the same again.”
By noon, the sun was warm and had we been anywhere else, I would have said it was developing into a glorious day. I received word that the platoons to the right and left of us were in as bad shape as we were. Our new company commander, the sergeant major, and two other platoon commanders were dead. Lieutenant Molson, from the platoon on my right, was the next senior officer and had assumed command. There was no telephone communication to anyone as all our cables had been cut. My plan was simply to hang on.
My men dug furiously, hollowing out their protected shelters and rebuilding as much of the trench line as possible. At just before two I was inside a dugout talking to one of the wounded, Private Turner, a dark-haired university man from Toronto. Turner had been hit by grenade fragments and most of his left shoulder was badly mangled. He’d lost a lot of blood and had no morphine. His face was turning pale and waxy; his breathing was raspy. He squeezed my hand with astonishing strength, an indication of his intense pain. I did my best to sound confident. “You’re going to be okay.”
I looked at his dressing. It was completely inadequate, the best someone could do in a bad situation. “It probably feels a lot worse than it is. You’ll be out of here just after dark. In fact, you’re probably going to be back at university this fall. You’ll be finished your degree long before the rest of us are out of here.” It was the closest I could come to a joke.
At that moment the shelling began again. Like the first salvo, this one came upon us without any ranging rounds to give warning. One moment it was quiet and the next we were being hammered. Because I was in another man’s dugout I tried to back out. As I did so, I collided with the occupant who was scrambling in. The man trying to crawl into his own dugout actually backed out and apologized for running into me. Once out in the trench, I pushed him into his own hole and went running off to find the hole I had taken to sharing with Sergeant Ferguson.
The barrage we endured that afternoon was even longer and more intense than the one in the morning. It was no comfort to us that we had already survived a heavy shelling that day. This second round was more wearing on our nerves. We were tired and strung out by then. In the morning, we screamed and cursed at the barrage; in the afternoon, we sat on the dirt floor clutching our knees.
I was terrified and more than any other time wanted to be away from this nightmare forever. Beside me, Sergeant Ferguson shook like a leaf throughout the last thirty minutes of the bombardment. Ferguson was a man I had come to rely upon and to trust implicitly. Witnessing his terrors only increased mine. It was clear to me then the truth of something I had been observing for some time. All men are given only a limited amount of courage; and each man expends that courage at a different rate. Ferguson was as brave as any man but he’d been through every one of the regiment’s actions, and for the first time I could see the physical effects that this constant psychological grinding was having on him.
I not only respected Ferguson, I truly liked him and enjoyed his company. He was quiet, genuinely a pious Methodist and only spoke when he had something to say. He was fair and intelligent and lived by simple values. Ferguson had been a rock for me in helping me to adjust as a new officer. He had come into the regiment as a lance corporal and was steadily promoted. He’d served around the world for seventeen years with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers and emigrated to Canada at the ripe old age of thirty-five. Four years of life as a building construction supervisor in Halifax and enlistment in the Patricia’s on the outbreak of war brought him to this trench.
Now he was trembling like a leaf in a hailstorm. Despite the heat of the day, his hands shook and his teeth chattered violently. Just as it seemed the bombardment was letting up, he began to shout. “That’s fucking long enough, that’s fucking long enough,” and he bolted from the dugout. The bombardment wasn’t over. As soon as he stood up a shrapnel round exploded behind our trench. I knew it was fatal because I could see Ferguson’s legs from where I sat. One moment they were two muddy columns wrapped in putties and the next it was as if someone poured a horse bucket of blood down them. My friend and mentor was hit by multiple fragments in the head and torso and died instantly.
I crawled out of the dugout to help him, but from the volume of blood I knew what I’d see. I was numb and for several minutes lost sensation in my lips and hands. Ferguson’s shoulders and head were gone and what was left of him just collapsed onto the duckboard trench floor like a sack of wet grain.
The barrage died down and once again we could hear the cheering and shouting of German soldiers as they got up from their trenches. This time we were much slower to react. It seemed like a long time before I remember hearing our machine-guns go into action. Once again I rushed up and down the line hoarsely shouting at men to get up and fight. Our trench was chaos. Whatever repairs had been made to it were long since obliterated. The trench was no longer a protective fortification. It had become an open sewer that carried the remains of our troops along to some godforsaken cesspit.
As the Germans closed to the wire, we repeated the same bloody choreography. This time when we crawled from our bunkers we could see the shelling had cut several gaping holes in our wire. Minutes after the barrage, my first indication that the Germans had made it into our trench lines was when a young baby-faced Württemberger poked his rifle around from the adjacent firing bay. He looked more curious than dangerous. I shot him instantly in the face with my revolver and then threw a Mills bomb over the trench wall. I rallied two men and we charged in to clear up once the bomb detonated. There was no time to think and all of us reacted on instinct. The trench was a shattered mess with upended duckboards torn and smashed like matches. Between the wooden slats were the contorted bodies of German and Canadian soldiers. From that point on, for several hours, I have no memory of anything that happened.
When I came to, I was at the bottom of a trench that was in deep shadow. Lying on the trench floor beside me was a dead soldier from Four Platoon. He was a freckled, red-haired lad with a prominent gap in his front teeth. He was on his back against the trench wall and looked to all the world like he was in a deep sleep. The firing had stopped and I could hear the sounds of digging and someone moaning softly in terrible pain a few feet from me. At first I felt nothing apart from a burning thirst and dizziness.
From the sounds around me, I realized I was lying in a bay with the wounded. There were several men in this section of the bay; at least two of them were already dead. Moving to prop myself up I was surprised to see that my left hand was bandaged halfway up to the elbow and that someone had tied a field dressing that covered my forehead and left eye. My head throbbed with every pulse. The crystal on my new watch was shattered and its hands were motionless at 2:30. I reckoned from the shadows we probably had only an hour or two before last light. Without thinking, I tried to use my left hand to steady me, and immediately a stabbing pain ran through my arm. Struggling to my knees, I was assailed with the sickly sweet smell of blood and vomit. I retched violently. As I did so, a sleek, heavy rat scurried in front of me from around behind the dead man with the gap in his teeth. It regarded me coolly for several seconds with its sharp little eyes. It looked me up and down, baring its yellow teeth and twitching its nose and whiskers, savouring its good fortune. The loathsome creature was weighing up how long it would be until I was dead and what kind of a feast it could make of me. At that moment, anger and the will to live surged through me. I was determined not to let myself die and allow those evil beasts to devour me.
Rising to my feet,
