The true story of the trenches has never been told. I know, because for
many months I have lived in trenches. I have slept daily in dread of
bullet, shrapnel, mine, and deadly gas; and nightly in fear of mine and
gas--and the man-eating rats.
I am one of the few soldiers living who entered the front trenches at
the opening of the war and who lived to fight the Germans in the front
trenches in February, 1916. Of my original company (the Fourth of the
Fourteenth Battalion, Third Brigade, First Canadian Division), which
marched away to that hell at Laventie and Ypres so gaily--500 brave
boys--I am one of the sixteen who survive....
Who has seen hell? Who has experienced the horrors of Milton's terrible
vision or the slow tortures of Dante's inferno? God! If Dante's dream
madness were truth, and those seven circles were seven encircling
battle lines in Northern France or the torn fringe of brave little
Belgium, I could stand up and say there is no agony of body or mind
which I have not seen, which I have not experienced. I thank God and
give Him the glory that I still am sane. Gas? What do you know of it,
you people who never heard earth and heaven rock with the frantic
turmoil of the ceaseless bombardment? A crawling yellow cloud that
pours in upon you, that gets you by the throat and shakes you as a huge
mastiff might shake a kitten, and leaves you burning in every nerve and
vein of your body with pain unthinkable; your eyes starting from their
sockets; your face turned yellow-green.
Rats? What did you ever read of the rats in the trenches? Next to gas,
they still slide on their fat bellies through my dreams. Poe could
have got new inspiration from their dirty hordes. Rats, rats, rats--I
see them still, slinking from new meals on corpses, from Belgium to
the Swiss Alps. Rats, rats, rats, tens of thousands of rats, crunching
between battle lines while the rapid-firing guns mow the trench
edge--crunching their hellish feasts. Full fed, slipping and sliding
down into the wet trenches they swarm at night--and more than one poor
wretch has had his face eaten off by them while he slept.
Stench? Did you ever breathe air foul with the gases arising from a
thousand rotting corpses? Dirt? Have you ever fought half madly through
days and nights and weeks unwashed, with feverish rests between long
hours of agony, while the guns boom their awful symphony of death, and
the bullets zip-zip-zip ceaselessly along the trench edge that is your
skyline--and your deathline, too, if you stretch and stand upright?...
You wouldn't believe all I have seen, all I have left. Ah, no; you
would say, "Roméo Houle, you are lying," were I to tell you some
unbelievable things that I have really lived through. Men go mad over
there. When you know what life in the first-line trenches is like you
will wonder that I have returned, and that, having returned, I am still
in my right mind. Sometimes, at night, I find myself again carrying
the wounded back after the charge, and listening to dying soldiers
telling me to look into blood-soaked pockets for last letters to their
sweethearts or mothers back home. "Tell mother that I received the
Blessed Sacrament before the battle began." I hear their breaking
voices whisper, "Tell mother," while the thundering artillery pours
its curtain of fire upon us, and our boys throw back from their rude,
handmade sling shots their deadly "jam-pots." "Tell mother!" I think
all the battle front is crying now those words. O Mother of God, hear
them and end this needless butchery!
I fought at Ypres. I fought at St. Julien. I fought at Lacouture and
Festubert. I fought at Cuinchy. I fought at Givenchy and La Bassée, and
in the first-line trenches at Messines. And before all these I fought
in the first line at Richebourg and Laventie, and I live, one of 16
alive out of 500.