Listen. Suppose you were fighting in a trench. The wind comes toward
you, foul with odors from nameless, twisted, torn bodies unburied
between you and the Boches. Near you are your brave comrades. Some lie
wounded and dying in agony on the trench bottom. The bullets zing-zing
eternally over your head. There is a mighty swelling from an organ more
sonorous than ever human organist played. The rockets are bursting; the
flares shedding white glares over the torn ground. Your coffee grinders
are mowing them down.
Then, rising from somewhere near by, comes the gas, yellow or green.
Then comes a sudden stinging in your nose. Your eyes water and run.
You breathe fire. You suffocate. You burn alive. There are razors and
needles in your throat. It is as if you drank boiling hot tea. Your
lungs flame. You want to scratch and tear your body. You become half
blind, half wild. Your head aches beyond description, you vomit, you
drop exhausted, you die quickly.
Every other man seemed to fall. As I fought I marveled that I was
spared. And again came to me the belief that my life was charmed; that
the bullet had not been melted, the shrapnel not been loaded, the gas
not mixed which would cause my death. An ecstatic confidence buoyed me
up. I was brave, because I was so sure of life, while all my comrades
seemed groveling in death.
My platoon was under a withering fire, before which we crumpled and
melted away. We left the trench, pressing forward. All hell seemed
to rise suddenly from the bowels of the earth and pour over us flame
and molten lead. The ground seethed from the exploding shells. The
mitrailleuses vomited death.
Our thinned lines gave a yell. I saw a black hole in the ground.
Sergeant Albert Pichette shouted, "Into their trench!" I leaped in.
Four Germans were trying to escape on the further side. I did not fire,
intending to make them prisoners. But the only thing I took was a great
blow on the side of my head, and away went my prisoners.
I crawled up the trench a few feet and came upon two men trying to
strangle each other. I thought, then, of motion pictures I had watched
back home. Here was a more terrible drama than ever the movie camera
showed.
A bayonet charge is a street fight magnified and made ten thousand
times more fierce. It becomes on close range almost impossible to use
your bayonets. So we fought with fists and feet, and used our guns,
when possible, as clubs. We lay in our prize trench for about four
hours. The boys, excited because they still lived, sang and jested, and
told of queer experiences and narrow escapes they had had.
By 10 o'clock came the story that the British had lost four field
guns and asked our help to recapture them. I was one of twenty-one
from my company who volunteered to go. So we joined men from the Tenth
and Sixteenth Battalions, and at 11 o'clock prepared to storm the wood
where the cannons were.
We had only forty yards of open ground to cover, but the German
artillery and machine guns worked havoc among us. It did not take us
long to run those forty yards.
We were soon in the wood, where it was so dark that we could hardly
distinguish friend from foe.
I ran in and out among the trees and asked every one I met who he was.
I came upon one big fellow. My mouth opened to ask him who he was, when
his fist shot out and took me between the eyes. I went down for the
count, but I knew who he was--he was a German. I got up as quickly as I
could, you may be sure, and swung my rifle to hit him in the head, but
the stock struck a tree and splintered. I thought I had broken all my
fingers.
I found three wounded men, French, I thought they were, in that gloom.
So I carried them into our trench. As I brought in the last one, the
officer said, "You are doing good work, Houle." I asked him why he
thought so; and he answered: "You have brought in three wounded men
and when we put the light on them we found they were Germans." Well, I
am glad I saved them. I would have done so anyhow, had I known their
nationality. For we were all trained to give a wounded man help,
whether he were friend or foe.
Yet it is dangerous work, helping a wounded German. I never helped
another, after the experience I had. It was one of the two occasions
when I knew with certainty that I killed a man. He was a wounded German
soldier. We found him suffering and weak. But we knew we could save
his life and were dressing his wound. My back was turned. He took a
revolver out of his tunic pocket and fired point-blank at me.
I do not know how I escaped death. Perhaps it was because his hand
shook from weakness; perhaps my guardian saint turned aside that death
bullet. Anyhow, he had his revolver in his hand. We had to act quickly.
My officer spoke a quick word, and I made sure that he would never fire
another shot.
Well, we got our machine guns. But the Germans had blown them up, and
all our sacrifice of men was in vain.
We were relieved by a British regiment before morning and marched
back to our billets to have a rest. I slept all the rest of the night
until 11 o'clock the next morning. It was the first rest I had had in
forty-eight hours, with only a slice of raw bacon and a piece of bread
to eat.
These were little incidents of the bloody battle at Ypres. That
afternoon some of the boys brought out tables from a house and placed
them in the sun. The civilian populace, in their flight, had left
behind their live stock. We caught some hens and rabbits and cooked
them in wine we found in a cellar. Ah, that was a feast. I never had a
better one.
Yet we were strange feasters. Had some artist been able to paint us
he would have had a strong canvas. Some of the boys had their heads
bandaged, and nearly all of us were covered with dirt and blood. Some
sang for us, though others were downhearted. It surprised me that a few
hours after we had faced death and had been suffering untold hardships
we could now gather like college boys at a beer night feast and sing.
During the rest of that battle we lived in the reserve trenches,
bombarded day and night. The battle lasted twenty-one days. When it
was over they called a roll of our regiment. There were 500 of us when
we left Montreal. As the commander called the roll, name after name was
met with no response. At Ypres 480 out of 500 of us were left dead on
the field. And in reality our loss had been greater than that, for our
500 had been thinned out in other actions and filled with a full roster
again. Twenty of us out of 500 survived at Ypres.