I shall never forget those Germans. When our guns suddenly spoke their
front line melted; their second crumpled before this destruction;
but on, on, on they came, unflinching, marching with even steps into
certain death. We were like lions at bay. It was our lives or the
Germans'. Then, as fourteen of us fought together, a bomb dropped amid
us, and killed eleven. I came to consciousness, lying in the bottom of
a trench, with Roy leaning over me.
"Are you living, Roméo!" he exclaimed in amazement. I rose dizzily. He
and I and one other stood alone among our eleven dead friends.
Then Roy told me that I had been blown clear of the trench, twenty
feet from where I stood, and that he had braved death to secure, as
he supposed, my dead body. A careful examination showed that my only
injury was a terrible bruise on the calf of my leg, where the round
surface of a flying shard had struck me, but without breaking the skin.
Miracles are but small matters when you fight in the presence of death.
"I'm not afraid now," I told Roy. And from then on I and all my soldier
friends believed my life was charmed and that the Germans could not
kill me.
We were driven back before their heavy guns to the fourth line, and
were almost immediately told in haste to leave it as quickly as we
could. Our engineers had mined the place, and as we fled the Germans
poured down a gray horde of men. So we blew them up.
Have you ever seen a thousand men hurled to atoms by a giant blast? I
cannot forget that awful sight. The whole earth seemed to leap skyward,
and through and through the black mountain of earth and stones shot
heads and arms and legs, torn fragments of what were once heroic men.
Next to the gas which they gave us, I think our blowing them up like
this was surely the worst thing men could do to men.
Perhaps you have heard of the friendship which often springs up
between the Allies and their foes. I know something about it. It was
at Laventie that the Germans began to amuse themselves by putting a
bullseye on a biscuit box and letting us use it for a target. We then
returned the compliment and set up a similar bullseye for the Teuton
boys. For between Germans and Allies as individuals, there is no hate,
though I must except the treacherous German prisoner I had to kill to
save my life.
Every time the Germans made a bullseye, I would raise a shovel. If they
missed, I put up a handkerchief. They did the same for us. And so we
who sought each other's lives played together, and death spoke sharply
all around.
Sergeant Pichette was a wag. He put an old derby on a stick and ran
along the trench as if it were a man, and the Germans fired at it. He
would pull the hat down occasionally to make the enemy believe that the
man under it had been shot, but soon afterward he would raise it again,
thereby causing much amusement.
We used to talk back and forth--those German boys and we Canadians.
They were the 157th and most friendly. "Hi! Where do you come from?" a
voice in French once called over to us.
"We are French Canadians," we replied with pride.
"Well, we're Canadians, too," came the astonishing answer. "We come
from Ontario."
There came a pause. There was no firing. Then the German shouted, "Let
me see one of your group; let him stand above the trench, and on my
word of honor we shall not fire."
One of us sprang out of the trench and stood up. There fell a deep
silence upon the two armies. Then many stood up, and finally the
Germans, too, were rising. We talked for hours so, when the officers
were not looking. When they looked we did a deal of firing--but our aim
was much too high.
One day the Germans threw over a bit of paper wrapped around a stone.
"If you don't fire on us, we won't fire on you," some one had written.
We kept that strange pact for days, until the officers, discovering
this pact of peace, moved us to another part of the trenches.
Some months later, curiously enough, we found ourselves opposite
the same regiment. Neither side forgot we were both Canadian, and
steadfastly kept our treaty of peace. They did not consider that rough
note a "scrap of paper." Not a single shot was fired and only one man
was killed, and he by a stray bullet.
Because friendships started easily between hostile bodies, they kept
moving a regiment from one part of the trenches to another, that we
might not get too friendly with our enemies. We had no heart in the
butchery, Germans or we French Canadians.