Twenty seriously wounded Patricia’s and all the medical staff were killed. All casualties had to be evacuated three and a half miles further to the rear to the town of Zillebeke. We joined a stream of shattered men and walking wounded from the other companies.
Hendricks half-carried me all the way. He kept up a constant chatter. “You’re safely out of this one then, sir. You’re doing fine. It’s not much farther.” Despite the threat of artillery fire, for ten minutes of each hour we rested. Near the end of that march, Hendricks began to sing music hall songs to me to keep my spirits up. He was imposing his will on me not to let me die and in doing so he frequently changed the tone of his encouragements. “You’re an officer, sir, and I don’t care how you feel, you’re not going to let the others down now by quitting. Ah, that’s wonderful; you’re doing marvellously … Almost there now … How about another chorus of ‘Green Grow the Rushes O’? … Ups-a-daisy, over this embankment … We’re here, sir, please sit down, I’m going to get you onto a stretcher.” Hendricks sat with me throughout that night until I was taken away by medical orderlies to see one of the divisional surgeons.
My days as a combatant officer were over and from the frying pan I was now heading unwittingly for the fire.
After several hours, my turn came. I was carried into a large tent that was lit by flickering kerosene lanterns. My stretcher was set down upon two sawhorses, beside which sat a folding wooden chair. An exhausted orderly in a blood-stained white coat with a high collar sat himself beside me and gingerly removed my field dressings. He sat back and grimaced. The kerosene light glinted on his bald head. He began swabbing at the left side of my face with a piece of linen soaked in a chlorine solution. The pain was immediate and I hissed sharply.
“Sorry about that, sir. It’s gotta be done if we’re to see what kind of wounds you’ve got.”
My good eye was tightly shut and I could hear him muttering. “Whatever it was that hit you must have given you one hell of a headache, sir. I don’t see any shrapnel lodged in the wound. It looks like you got winged by something. A fraction of an inch over and you wouldn’t be here. You’re lucky, very lucky, sir.”
He prodded and probed and examined my head wound from several angles. “The flesh around your eye is pretty chewed up and it’s too swollen and bruised to tell much just now – but I’d guess you’ve been seriously concussed as well. Where else are you hurt? Ah, someone’s tied up your hand.” He picked up my left hand and held it up the light. “Not a bad job, not a bad job at all considering where you’ve just come from.”
Less gently, he unwrapped the dressings from my hand and whistled appreciatively. He picked up my hand and sniffed it like a connoisseur sniffs a wine cork. “That’s nice, sir. You’ve been hit three days, living in a shit pit and not a whiff of infection. Someone’s looking out for you. This, sir, is what you gentlemen in the infantry refer to as a blighty, kinda like a home run in baseball, isn’t it? One good smack and you go round all the bases.”
He called out, “Corporal, this one’s for the surgeon as well. Have the bearers get him in to see the nursing sister in surgery please! Fresh dressings on the head and prepare his left hand for surgery.” He patted my arm. “Don’t worry, sir, six to ten weeks you’ll be right as rain and heading back to Canada. Good luck.” He waved for the stretcher-bearers to move me, smiled a fatigued and kindly smile, and said, “Next! Come on. Come on Bearers, these lads haven’t got all day to sit around waiting for dimwits like you. Look alive now, boys.”
I was moved to another, more brightly lit tent where a silent nursing sister, who I could make out only in silhouette, cleaned my face and swabbed my eye; she then re-applied clean dressings. She left my stretcher, going beyond our circle of light for a few moments and then came back and set about with a large pair of scissors to cut away the filth of my uniform until I was lying naked. I was long past feeling embarrassed.
Once this was done, a very tired and short-tempered-looking doctor, who looked more like Teddy Roosevelt dressed up as a butcher than a surgeon, came in and checked me over. He had large rimless spectacles, prominent yellow teeth, and a thick bushy moustache. He parted his thinning hair severely down the centre. Instead of a clean white surgical gown, he had a yellowing vulcanized apron that was smeared and stained with wet blood and he wore heavy rubber gloves. The doctor peeled off his gloves, moved around the stretcher, and examined my left hand for several minutes. Like the orderly, he sniffed it and studied it closely. “I think I can save your hand. You’re going to lose two fingers, but I’m going to try to save the rest.” He turned to the nursing sister. “Let’s do it now.”
My last recollection was overwhelming weariness and the urge to cry as a rubber face-piece was placed over my mouth and nose.
5
THE UNREPAIRED cobblestone roads jolted and jarred the ambulance wagon carrying me from the hospital complex to the railhead on the Ypres–Poperinge road. I had been lying in bed for a week in a wooden fifty-man temporary building. My fever had abated and my wounds were showing signs of healing without infection. Now I was certified as “Fit, limited travel/Unfit, frontline duty.” I thought it would be the beginning of my journey home. In accordance with Canadian army evacuation policy, I was to be transferred from the forward casualty clearance and holding centre to a treatment hospital somewhere in England.
As bad as I felt, it was a delight to be out of that hospital. I wanted to be away from the climate of death that enveloped Flanders. The nurses and orderlies were kind, but the casualty clearance centre was a thoroughly depressing place. From my bed I was able to see acres of graves covering the countryside and each day the borders of the graveyard spread as fresh crosses sprouted across the landscape. Each morning and afternoon, sombre khaki processions traipsed behind long lines of coffins. I was thankful to be getting away from this gloomy complex of makeshift buildings, shattered men, and its death garden.
My stretcher, along with one other, was lashed to the frame of a rickety commandeered Belgian dry goods wagon. Looking out the back of the wagon with my good eye, I saw low clouds scudding across the sky. Like the rolling distant thunder I had once heard on the prairies, guns boomed and rumbled back and forth intermittently in the distance. The sun was gone the whole time I’d been at the casualty clearing hospital and cold rain spattered intermittently down on the broken Belgian countryside. My thoughts were muddled. As the dangers from concussion receded, the doctors gave me morphine for my pain. At the time, I almost wept with relief; my hand and eye caused me intense pain. The suspension of pain left me blissfully numb, and for much of my time in the casualty clearing station I lay in a trance.
That morning I was lucid enough to realize my lack of sensation was a blessing as the wagon driver repeatedly apologized. “Sorry, lads, sorry. It’ll be a lot smoother when we’ve got you on the train, believe me.” I didn’t answer him, but I wasn’t feeling much. Just before I was transferred to my stretcher, one of the nursing sisters thoughtfully injected me with morphine. The man next to me said nothing. He was wrapped in a blanket and his face stared in blank terror at the canvas tarpaulin above us. I never learned his name or a thing about him; but the sight of him made me grateful I was not more seriously wounded. Whatever physical wounds the poor man suffered paled in comparison to the torment within his mind.
I no longer needed the handrails that lined the hallways of my ward at Number Two Canadian Army Stationary Hospital in London. It was the first time I was walking without feeling dizzy or faint. On my sixth day in London, I was dressed in army-issue paper slippers, blue pyjamas, and dressing gown, and shuffling along with great determination through the corridors when I saw a striking
