asked him, “Is the driver from the battalion?”
The young Patricia smiled and shook his head. “No, sir, these lads never go forward of the battalion rest areas.”
“In that case, I want to ride in the back. I want you to tell me about life in the battalion.”
The soldier’s name was Private Reid. He was originally from a village outside Newcastle. Prior to emigrating to Canada, Reid had served for four years in the Coldstream Guards. He had joined the Princess Patricia’s when they were raised in Ottawa and had fought with the regiment since its arrival in the line nine months before. He was a cheerful sort and readily answered my questions. To my great relief, he showed no concern that I was to be in a position of authority. Like every other young officer, I secretly harboured the fear that veteran troops would somehow refuse to accept me because I was so obviously inexperienced.
The trip from the divisional rear headquarters to the rest billets was a stop-and-start affair. More than once we pulled off the dirt road to allow higher-priority traffic carrying wounded to the rear to pass and we waited for almost a half-hour on one occasion to allow a long mule-train laden with artillery ammunition to go forward.
Reid cheerfully answered my questions and, sensing my anxiety, ended his explanations with comments such as, “Don’t worry, sir; you’ll be fine once you get into the swing of things.” Reid told me that the Patricia’s had been out of the line for twenty-four hours and that he expected them to be in a rest area for another two or three days.
Reid was proud of his unit and I didn’t interrupt him. Men like him were probably in the minority now, as more than two hundred Canadian reinforcements had joined the unit and more were arriving each day. When the lorry lurched to a halt at a shattered hamlet called Loenhoek, Reid showed me the way to battalion headquarters and said, “You’ve got to report directly to the adjutant, sir. I’ll wait and take you up to see the company commander after.”
Like Reid, the adjutant was also a British regular soldier. He was a friendly fellow: disarmingly polite and quietly deferential. He greeted me as if I was a long-lost relative. It was obvious he’d been sleeping, but despite the interruption, he was accommodating and helpful. He apologized that the colonel was off at a conference at Brigade, gave me a well-boiled cup of tea, and briefed me on a map of the area, explaining that the battalion was going back into the line again in two nights time. The unit was short of officers and I was to become a platoon commander in Number Two Company. With business over, he nodded and said, “Right then, Reid can take you to see Captain Adamson.” He shook my hand and I was hustled off to a barn a quarter of a mile distant.
Number Two Company should have been 170 men strong. That day, it was much less than that. The company was divided into four platoons and a headquarters. Each platoon was divided into four sections with a small platoon headquarters group. There were four such company organizations in the battalion. Theoretically, the regiment could have had any number of battalions. The Princess Patricia’s had only one, so the regiment and the battalion were for all purposes one and the same.
Number Two Company was, like the rest of the battalion, still in a state of near exhaustion. There was little movement and men were wrapped in their blankets and stacked like grey cocoons across the barn floor and hayloft. As I was soon to learn, the company was at about two-thirds of its strength. Although they had been in a quiet sector of the line, in the last three days they had had four men killed and three seriously wounded due to shelling. One of the first things I noticed about these sleeping men was their continual coughing and rasping, even as they slept. Colds and flu-like symptoms were chronic, but as I was to see for myself, few men reported on sick parade until they were nearly incapacitated by the onset of pneumonia.
A soldier on fire piquet who was awake and fully dressed showed me the company officers. The officers were only distinguishable from the other sleeping cocoons by the fact that they were off in a corner by themselves and had a field telephone beside them sitting on a web pack. I told the fire piquet not to wake anyone and sat down waiting for my introductions.
Several hours later the company gradually stirred into life, and dirty khaki-clad men could be seen cooking outside, writing letters, or just relaxing, sitting or smoking by themselves deep within their own private thoughts. When my company commander awakened, he too offered me bitterly strong tea that had been brewed some time ago by the battalion’s batmen.
My company commander was a bespectacled Montreal businessman and was at least two decades my senior. He had the peculiar name of Agar Adamson. Adamson blearily welcomed me to his company and said he knew my father well. He matter-of-factly advised me, “Rory, you’ll be going up the line tomorrow night. I need to send an advance party for our next tour in the trenches. The entire battalion will follow you in twenty-four hours time. We’ll be replacing the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, and this’ll be a good chance for you to get a feel for things, see how another unit operates, and learn how things are done before your own men arrive.”
Later, when I thought about this, I was grateful to Adamson. He knew I didn’t want to appear the new boy and was positioning me to put me in the strongest possible light before my troops, men who would take a more than passing interest in my abilities and character.
I spent the remainder of that day meeting my platoon, wrote letters home, and, to my surprise, received a cheerful and gossipy letter from Jeanine who disappointingly signed herself “As ever, your true friend.” I was still very naïve. Late the next morning, I played a game of pick-up baseball with the newer Canadian-born members of the platoon. For the most part, the British veterans amongst them watched the game and provided high-spirited but unprintable comments about the level of play. By five that afternoon, I was off with the advance party for my first experience at the front.
Going up the line for the first time was an experience I think few men ever forget. In my case, I did it after dark. The night was cloudy and warm but despite the weight of my kit and the fact that I was sweating, I was shivering and my throat was sore. I must have caught a cold during my short stay with the battalion. Three lance corporals and I were to act as guides for the incoming Patricia’s. We met up with a British re-supply column consisting of two dozen men heavily laden with sand bags tied around their necks or wearing pack boards with boxes of machine-gun ammunition or several gallon tins of water. The sand bags contained rifle ammunition and rations broken down into section allotments. I was slotted into the column with a guide and men from Number 3 Company of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, the organization we were to replace. Once the column was organized and checked by a young officer, we were on our way.
The approaches to our new position were in low ground and could be observed by day by the Germans sitting on the higher ground to the north of us. As it was, the German artillery had long since ranged in on sections of the road and periodically fired in the dark in the hopes of hitting something. They tried that night, but fortunately no one from our column was hit. I was more than a little alarmed by my first experiences of artillery exploding in the dark. As it turned out, the rounds landed two hundred yards behind me. But to my overactive imagination it was much closer. The sudden blinding flashes and the violence of those first rounds exploding in the darkness were unforgettable.
In front of me, a short, heavily laden Tommy with an unlit pipe clenched in his teeth grumbled to no one in particular something that sounded like “Let’s fucking keep moving then, shall we?” We did. And in what seemed like a short time we were met by a second group of guides and began to break into separate groups; we were then led into the rear-area communication trenches.
These were trenches only in name. In some areas they were just shallow scrapings with mud-puddle bottoms. We splashed on
