dugouts tunnelled into the wet earth beside them. Men were occupying some of these tiny reserve dugouts. We could tell they were there because they swore at us when we stumbled over their muddy legs sticking out into the trench. The smell of those trenches and the next line farther forward was unlike anything I’ve ever encountered since the war. The area around the Ypres Salient was littered with thousands of unburied French, British, and German corpses in varying stages of decay. I didn’t know it that night, but there were also enormous rats in their tens of thousands teeming in the fields and trenches surrounding us.
Those churned-up fields had been fertilized for centuries with human and animal waste, and in the trenches latrines were little more than open sewage pits. The effect of those reeking fields was stomach churning. The stench caused me to heave several times as we plodded forward. You never really became used to it; but somehow we managed to carry on with that overpowering and disgusting smell relegated to our sub-conscious. It is the only smell that has invaded my dreams. Dante may have tried to describe the depths of hell and mediaeval artists have tried to paint it. But for me, that murderous odour was the most vivid evocation of hell I can think of. Thankfully, I have never encountered anything like it since leaving those ghastly fields.
The frontline trenches in our sector were deeper, but they were so soggy and shell blasted they were more like an intermittent creek bed than a military defensive works. When standing, our heads were just below ground; but even in the darkness of that first night, there was none of the snug sense of security that I had once imagined trenches would have. I spent the next night and day crawling around what looked to me like a badly maintained ditch. I learned every nook and cranny and peered into no-man’s land with a homemade periscope given to me by a British officer. I drew a detailed sketch of the area, marking each dugout, each communication trench, each machine-gun position, each known enemy sniper position, and the routes through our own wire.
That first tour in the trenches was like many others I was to experience. Fatigue and discomfort blurred and overrode the constant strain of being so near to violent death. The overall effect was to create a weary numbness. We coped by developing a crude sense of humour that my family and friends in Montreal would never understand. I still marvel more of us didn’t die from sickness. The food was appalling; it invariably consisted of tins of gristly Machanochie stew or fat-encrusted bully beef; it was invariably eaten cold and sprinkled with sand and mud. While in the line, we drank inadequate quantities of sweet tea, which came forward in one-gallon water cans, a good number of which had at some time seen service carrying gasoline.
We didn’t really sleep; we were wet and cold for long periods of time and our personal hygiene was as primitive as it could be. All of us were infected with lice. We had lice in every seam of our clothing and in our hair; we itched constantly. Not just soft scratching, but violent clawing at a painful never-ending irritation. Rats overran our dugouts and were forever slithering about the trenches. Great fat corpse-fed rats would come out even by day trying to steal our rations and every night they scuttled across our legs as we tried to sleep hunched against a trench wall. Shooting rats was a hazard to everyone and so the only authorized weapon for rat control was a sharpened spade. Necessity turned ratting into a sport; and with our misshapen sense of humour, we kept our spirits up hunting the wretched animals, turning it into a contest between companies.
The trench’s dirt quickly got into everything. We ate dirt. We breathed it constantly. It was in our mouths, hair, and ears. It turned our socks and puttees into sand paper and trickled down our necks whenever we sat down.
I found sleep to be near impossible under those circumstances, although during the days, for an hour or two, I could go back to the company officers’ bunker and manage to drift into a periodic kind of half-wakefulness. Nights were, more often than not, frequently times of feverish digging, filling sand bags, and standing to on what passed as a fire step to watch the exhibition of flares and rockets illuminate the sky whenever a suspicious sentry raised the alarm.
We were occasionally attacked by German patrols, frequently shot at by snipers, harassed by machine-gun, artillery, and mortar fire, and on one occasion low-flying German aeroplanes strafed us. Our casualty rate wasn’t high, but it was steady. During one of these “quiet tours” the battalion usually lost three or four men killed and many more wounded.
It was for my actions on a patrol during one such “period of inactivity” that I was awarded the Military Cross. Although I will never willingly part with my “MC,” I am the first to admit that for everyone who was awarded such a gallantry decoration, there were many more who could have just as readily qualified for one.
On my fifth tour in the trenches, Captain Adamson sent a runner for me asking that I forego conducting a foot inspection of the soldiers in my platoon and come see him.
“Rory,” he said in a grave voice. “It’s our turn to visit the enemy on his side of the wire. We’ve been tasked to provide a patrol by Brigade headquarters. I think you should be the man to lead it. How do you feel about that?” I was surprised; I’d never been asked to agree or disagree with an order before. I was also acutely aware that I was the only junior officer in Number Two Company who hadn’t yet led a fighting patrol into no man’s land. I did my utmost to appear indifferent. “No, that should be no problem, sir. When’s the patrol scheduled to take place?”
“Tonight. I want you to get back to battalion HQ now. They’re waiting to brief you now.”
The battalion headquarters’s dugout was centrally located in low ground about a hundred yards to the rear of our company’s reserve trenches. Although we called it the battalion “rear area,” it was scarcely out of grenade-throwing distance of the most forward sub-units. I sloshed my way through the communication trenches and was briefed on the particulars of this specific operation in a dingy candle-lit hole with a corrugated tin ceiling.
Since arriving in the battalion I’d been “over the top” a half-dozen times with wiring parties. These were nasty night-time jobs that entailed stringing barbed wire and marking routes through our wire so that our own patrols could get in and out. When we were ordered to put out wiring parties, we watched carefully for signs of the enemy doing the same thing. Our reasoning was that the Germans were unlikely to fire on us if they had one of their own patrols out in front of them as well. We timed our work on our wire obstacles to coincide with that of the enemy. It was a kind of truce tacitly arranged between the two sides and in its own perverse way it worked well.
At the back of the battalion headquarters’s dugout, Colonel Buller was trying to get some sleep on a cot made of sticks and telephone wire. His second-in-command, Major Hamilton Gault, briefed me on the general plan. Gault was an imposing-looking man with penetrating eyes and a substantial but carefully trimmed moustache. For me, he was still much larger than life, as he was the wealthy businessman who had provided the money to raise the regiment and then refused to accept being named its colonel. Until that day, I’d never had a real conversation with him. Gault smiled when I entered and in a low voice beckoned me over to the map board. He wasted no words.
“Rory, as part of the overall plan to maintain an aggressive posture in this area we’ve been tasked by Brigade to conduct a raid with a view to bringing back a prisoner and inflicting casualties on the enemy. The enemy to our front is believed to be a Württemberg Reserve Division, but aerial reconnaissance indicates major supply and troop activity in the enemy’s rear.” He looked at me inquisitively to see if I was taking all this in. I nodded and he went on.
“Division is anxious to confirm as to whether or not the Württemberg troops have been replaced. If they have, it’s probably an indication of unusual activity and could possibly indicate a major offensive in our area. On the other hand, if the Württemberg Division is still hanging on here, it probably means Fritz is keeping them in the line so he can concentrate all his resources to resist the French push to the south of us at Artois. Rory, you are to take a patrol out tonight and bring back a prisoner.
