occurred just to our right. The Gurkha scout had noted the head of a German sentry over the parapet at night. Like a jungle cat he slipped through, and under the wire and flattened himself against the sandbags of the enemy breast’work directly in front of that sentry. At intervals he would reach up with one hand and make a tap-tapping noise on the baked clay. After awhile the sentry got curious no doubt thinking of a rat or stoat and stretched forward to see what was making that peculiar noise–Zip. Away went his head and it was brought back as a trophy or souvenir. These were great troops in an attack. As long as they could see the enemy and had something definite to fight they were fearless fighters. The difficulty was to control them. They forgot all about schedules and time limits. They would keep on and on and then get all cut to pieces with their own barrage fire. At close quarters they would ditch their Enfield and bayonet and wade in with the big knife. They would seize the enemy’s bayonet with their left hand and slash off his head with the right. It became necessary to equip them with a heavy gauntlet glove for the left hand, as the dressing stations were full of them after a fight all wounded in that way.
On one of our route marches and road patrols we had an experience with a German spy. We, of the scout section in charge of Knobel were out on our own, marching south on a road running parallel to the front line system and about a mile to the rear of it. Here we met a tall man walking north. He was dressed up as though he had just stepped off one of the main boulevards of Paris. A spotless black suit and tall tile hat, gloves and walking stick, a regular fashion model. This looked a little peculiar to say the least for you never saw anyone dressed to that degree in country that close to the front lines. He walked with the stiff necked straightness of a military officer, and in his case, the clothes were a very thin disguise of the soldier underneath.
He had his mustache twisted out to two needle points as affected by some French gentry. He eyed us as we went by. Two of us sized him up then as worthy of investigation, but the sergeant said he did not want to make a foolish mistake and passed him up. He only got a short way down the road when some artillery men held him up and sure enough, he was an enemy officer spy. He had overdone the dressing part. I suppose he was going by pre-war standards and did not realize he was so conspicuous in his elaborate toilette and high tile.
There was another spy case while we were on this part of the front that seemed like a fairy tale so strange it was. At Labutillerie, as before stated, we had a couple of batteries of horse artillery concealed in the hedge rows a few hundred yards behind our front lines. Immediately in their vicinity there still lived an old farmer of Flemish or ex-German nationality. He still tilled his little fields enclosed by their thorn hedges. He was the owner of an old white horse, a white cow and also an aged wife. The batteries were concealed on the margins of his estate in willow clumps and hedgerows. Some of the gunners complained that the old man would take his white cow on fine days when the visibility was good and, leading it on a long rope would get directly in front of the gun position running his cow around in circles.
This they claimed was done in front of different gun positions and soon after that the guns were shelled by the enemy. He also pulled off something of the sort with the old white horse for variation I suppose. Not much attention was paid to these tales however. It was also reported that smoke signals or smoke puffs were sent up from his chimney after the manner used by the Red Indians and some of the Zulu tribes in Rhodesia. These they claimed were unmistakably signals and worked out in a code.
On account of all these rumors Sgt. Knobel was sent one day to interview the old couple. They told him they were terrified by the shell fire, and that they had been burning incense, offering up prayers for their safety and this accounted for the smoke. They succeeded in convincing Knobel that they were quite innocent and a harmless old couple he so stated.
There had been some men of our unit sniped and shot at behind our front lines. An officer of one of our units took it on himself to watch the old man one day as he was working up and down the east side of a thorn hedge with the old horse and a harrow. From concealment he saw the old man snatch a rifle from under a coat or blanket on top of the harrow and shot at somebody on the road winding away westward between the hedges. The officer shot the old man without further parley.
Then there was hustling around to find more evidence of the sniping business. I was one of the search party and climbed up to the garret loft of a barn that stood length wise of the road and had a round ventilator hole in the peak of the west gable. Standing on the attic floor behind this ventilator hole was a tall round topped stool such as you see in a restaurant at home at the quick lunch counters. On the floor at the bottom of this stool was a heap of empty rifle cartridge cases, some dozens in all. This sniping business must have been going on intermittently over quite a long period. The very unlikelihood of the thing was its screen that had enabled it to go on so long. I suppose the casualties were put down to stray bullets.
Death Valley
In the early part of April we were moved from this sector, heading north eventually arriving at Poperinge, about eight miles south-west of the City of Ypres. From here we were sent north again marching through Ypres when it was still full of civilians carrying on the life of a city. Men, women and children crowded out to cheer us on as we marched through. Some of the finer buildings were still standing including the Cloth Hall. Part of it had been shelled badly however, I can remember a large roofless room with elaborate frescoes or wall decorations.
Fritz had been dropping some heavy howitzer shells into the town in the neighborhood of the square. Here I saw a shell hole that included in its diameter the whole width of a main street and a row of houses. I was told that this hole was made by one of the big berthas or 17 inch skoda howitzers. While we were passing through he was shelling the city with 11 inch howitzers. These shells made a terrific roar during their high arc through the sky sounding like death itself made vocal when they started on their downward plunge toward you from out of the skies. Something like a heavy express train passing at speed through a tunnel. The ground literally rocked from the force of their bursting.
When we came next through this town it was a crumpled ruin, void of all civilian life, and a charnel house of riddled corpses, and heaped up brick and stone. We still tramped away to the north getting out in the dismal flat swampy country to the east of Passchendaele. Here we were to take over a section of line from the French. We began to meet the Frenchmen coming out long before we got near our objective. I had a trip into the front line sector on some message and immediately on returning I was nailed to act as guide to two companies back over the same ground. I must have been exhausted from all the hiking to and fro under full equipment, for that trip seems very hazy in my memory and more like a nightmare than a reality. I had not gathered much knowledge of the lay of the land the first trip up and was really hazy as to my location now, for the night had shut down as black as ink and there was a deadly monotony or sameness about all the crossroads with a total absence of anything in the way of landmarks. In addition to this I was being heckled by some upstart of a junior officer. You’re a scout aren’t you? Why don’t you know this and why don’t you know that, Blankety, Blank-Blank etc–and so on. It came to a clash of opinions at last. He wanting to go his way and I determined to go mine. Another officer by the name of Lieut. Durant struck his spoon into the soup and agreed to follow me. Eventually we got into country with no roads, and only slippery foot paths meandering over flat low grass land. I was staking all on a sort of Indian instinct of direction and location by this time for all other guidance was useless. As far as the map and compass were concerned I was going from no- place to no- where and had nothing to start from. I landed eventually among some dilapidated trenches filled with water. The earth thrown out of these formed a zigzag slippery ridge which we used in the pitch dark as a foot path. I eventually recognized a trench junction I had seen earlier in the evening and heaved a great sigh of relief for I had been right from the start. This French outfit was supposed to have guides posted to meet and guide us into our proper sections of the line. They did not furnish any and we had to locate ourselves as best we could, straightening things out the next morning.
This was a hard looking piece of
