WHO STARTED THE WAR?
The wisest thing that our commanders did was to sandwich the Canadian boys
in with the British regulars. Without a doubt we of the First Division were
the greenest troops that ever landed in France.
In two short turns that we spent with the British, we learned more than we
could have otherwise in a month's training. We also became inspired with
that "Keep cool and crack a joke" spirit that is so splendidly Anglo-Saxon.
I am not an Englishman, and I did not think very much of an Englishman
before going overseas. I regarded him more or less as not "worth while." It
did not take a year to convince me that the Englishman is very much "worth
while."
The English soldier chums up quickly. The traditional formality and
conventionality of the English are traditions only. There is none of it in
the trenches.
Discipline there is, strict discipline, among men and officers. Between
officer and man there is a marked respect, and a marked good fellowship
which never degenerates into familiarity.
There is love between the English officer and the English soldier. A love
that has been proved many times, when the commissioned man has sacrificed
his life to save the man of lower rank; when the private has crossed the
pathway of hell itself to save a fallen leader.
The English soldier, and when I say English I mean to include Welsh, Scotch
and Irish, reserves to himself the right to "grouse." He grouses at
everything great or small which has no immediate or vital bearing on the
situation. As soon as anything arises that would really warrant a
grouse--napoo! Tommy Atkins then begins to smile. He grouses when he has to
clean his buttons; he grouses loudly and fiercely when a puttee frays to
rags, and he grouses when his tea is too hot.
But when Tommy runs out of ammunition, is partly surrounded by the enemy,
is almost paralyzed by bombardment; when he is literally in the last ditch,
with a strip of cold steel the only thing between him and death--then
Tommy smiles, then he cracks a joke. Without a thought of himself, without
a murmur, he faces any desperate plight.
He smiles as he rattles his last bullet into place; he grins as his bayonet
snaps from the hilt, and he goes to it hand-to-hand with doubled fists, a
tag of a song on his lips, for "Death or Glory."
That is Tommy Atkins as I saw him. That is the real Britisher of the Old
Country. We shall know him from now on in his true light, and the knowledge
will make for a better understanding among the peoples of the
English-speaking world.
It was Sandy Clark who, eating a hunch of bread and bully beef in a dugout,
got partly buried when an H.E. (high explosive) came over. Sandy crawled
out unhurt, his sandwich somewhat muddy but intact, and made his way down
the trench to a clear space. Here he sat down beside a sentry, finished his
bully beef and muddy bread, wiped his mouth, and remarked some ten minutes
after the explosion: "That was a close one."
Imperturbable under danger; certain of his own immediate immunity from
death; confident of his regiment's invincibility; with a deep-rooted love
of home and an unalterable belief in the might and right of Britain--there
is Tommy Atkins.
Looking back from the vantage point of nearly two years, it seems to me
that we were somewhat like young unbroken colts. We were restless and
untrained, with an overplus of spirits difficult to control. Gradually the
English Tommy influenced us until we gained much of his steadiness of
purpose, his bulldog tenacity and his insouciance.
Tommy never instructed us by word of mouth. He lived his creed in his daily
rounds. He never knows that he is beaten, therefore a beating is never his.
We have gained the same outlook, simply by association with him.
Were I a general and had I a position to _take_, I would choose soldiers of
one nation as quickly as another--French, Australians, Africans, Indians,
Americans or Canadians. Were I a general and had I a position to _retain_,
to hold against all odds, then, without a moment's hesitation, I would send
English troops and English troops only.
Now and again an American or a Canadian newspaper would come our way.
"Anything to read" is a never-ending cry at the front, and every scrap of
newspaper is read, discussed and read again. In the early days of 1914-15,
these newspapers would have long and weighty editorials which called forth
longer and weightier letters from "veritas" and "old subscriber." We boys
read those editorials and letters, and wondered; wondered how sane men
could waste time in writing such stuff, how sane men could set it in type
and print it, and more than all we wondered how sane men could read it.
"Who started the war?" they asked.
"Bah!" we would say to one another, "who started the war? If only those
folks who write and print and read such piffle, no matter what their
nationality, could have had five minutes' look at the German trenches and
another five minutes' look at the French and British trenches--never again
would they query, 'Who started the war?'"
We of the Allied army knew nothing of trench warfare. After the fierce
onslaught on Paris, which failed, the Germans entrenched. Thank God, they
did. They entrenched, and by entrenching they have won the war for us. They
made a mistake then that they can never now retrieve.
They were in a position to choose, and they chose to entrench in the high
dry sections, leaving the low-lying swamps, the damp marshy lands, for us.
We had no alternative. It was either to take a stand there on what footing
was left or be wiped off the map. We stood.
On that sector between La Bassee and Armentières it was practically an
impossibility to dig in. The muddy water was of inconceivable thickness
along the greater length of the whole front. It oused and eddied, it seemed
to swirl and draw as though there were a tide. We did not attempt to dig.
We raised sandbag breastworks some five or six feet high and lay behind
them day in and day out for an eternity, as it seemed.
Our shift in the trenches was supposed to be four days and four nights in.
It never was shorter, sometimes much longer. Once we spent eleven days and
nights in the trenches without a shift, because our reinforcing battalion
was called away to another sector of the front. I know of a Highland
Battalion that was in twenty-eight days and nights without a change.
We were unequipped as to uniform. We were in the regulation khaki of other
days. We had no waterproof overcoats. We had puttees, but the greater
number of us had no rubber boots. A very few of the men had boots of rubber
that reached to the knees. At first we envied the possessors of these, but
not for long. The water and mud, and shortly the blood, rose above the top
and ran down inside the leg of the boot. The wearers could not remove the
mud, and trench feet, frost bite, gangrene, was their immediate portion. We
lost as many men, that first winter of the war, by these terrible
afflictions as we did by actual bullets and shell fire.
To us who had come from the Far Northwest the weather was a terrible trial.
Our winters were possibly more severe, but we could stand them so much
better, with their sharp dry cold in contrast to the damp, misty, soaking
chill of this non-zero country. Possibly, at night, the thermometer would
register some two or three degrees below freezing. A thin shell of ice
would form on the ditch which we called a trench. This would crackle round
our legs and the cold would eat into the very bone. At dawn the ice would
begin to break up and a steady sleet begin to fall. Later the sleet would
turn to rain, and so the day would pass till we were soaked through to the
skin. At night the frost would come again and stiffen our clothes to our
tortured bodies, next day another thaw and rain, and so to the end of our
turn, or to the time when an enemy bullet would finish our physical
suffering.
We could have borne all this without a murmur, and did bear it in a silence
that was grim, but we had a greater strain, a mental one, with which to
contend. We knew--we knew without a doubt that we were out there alone. We
had not a reserve behind us. We had not a tithe of the gun power which we
should have had. Our artillery was not appreciable in quantity. What there
was of it was effective, but as compared to the enemy gun power we were
nowhere. They had possibly ten to our one. They were very considerably
stronger than they are to-day. We, to-day, can say with truth that we are
where they were in 1914-15. We, with our two years of hurried and almost
frenzied work, and they, with their forty years of crafty preparation!
And they knew how to use those guns, too. Our engineering and pioneer
corps at that time were non-existent. We had practically none. The Germans
would put over a few shells during the day. They would level our sandbag
breastworks and blow our frail shelters to smithereens. We had no dugouts
and no communication trenches. With a shell of tremendous power they would
rip up yards of our makeshift defenses and kill half a dozen of our boys.
Sometimes we would groan aloud and pray to see a few German legs and arms
fly to the four winds as compensation. But no. We would wire back to
artillery headquarters: "For God's sake, send over a few shells, even one
shell, to silence this hell!" And day after day the same answer would come
back: "Heaven knows we are sorry, but you've had your allotment of shells
for to-day."
Perhaps one shell, or it may have been three, would have been the
ammunition ration of our particular front for the day.
It was nobody's fault at the moment of fighting. It lay perhaps between
those who had anticipated and prepared for war for forty years and those
who had neglected to foresee the possibility of such an enterprise. The
fact remained, we had no shells.
Every day our defenses were leveled. Every night we would crawl out, after
long hours spent flat on our stomachs, covered to the neck in mud and
blood, and endeavor to repair the damage. Every night we lost a few men;
every day we lost a few men, and still we held our ground.
The day casualties were the worst. The wounded men had to lie in the damp
and dirt until night came to shelter them; then some one would help, or if
that were not possible, the wounded would have to make his own pain-strewn
way back to a dressing station. During the day some one might discover that
he had developed a frozen toe. He could get no relief; he dare not attempt
to leave his partial shelter. The slightest movement, and the enemy would
have closed his career. By night his foot would be a fiery torture, and by
the time a doctor was near enough to help it would be a rotting mass of
gangrene, and one man more would be added to the list of permanent
cripples.
I am asked, "How did you live? How did you 'carry on'?"
Many a time I have said to myself in thinking of the enemy: "Why don't they
come on--why don't the fools strike now? There's no earthly reason why they
should not defeat us, and roll on triumphantly to Paris, to Calais, to
London, to New York, and so realize their original intention." There was no
_earthly_ reason. No.
The Kaiser had talked in lordly voice of "ME and God." The Kaiser has
manufactured a God of his own fancy, a God of blood and iron. There is no
such God for us. For us, there was always that Unseen Hand which held back
the enemy in his might. The All Highest who is not on the side of blood and
murder and pillage and outrage and violation; the Almighty, who, crudely
though I may express it, is with those who fight for the Right and on the
square.
And that is why we were not driven back to the sea. That is why we stood
the test. That is why we, the Allied Nations, shall win.
Again, if the German hordes, with their iron power behind them, had had
five per cent. of the Anglo-Saxon sporting blood in their veins, they could
have licked us long ago. They did not. They have not. They are poor
sports. They have eliminated the individuality of "sport" for the
efficiency of machinery, and they can not lick us.
Who started the war? The War Machine that had the preparation of half a
century, or the peace-loving peoples who, at a day's notice, took their
stand for humanity?
Who started the war? There is no room for argument. The Germans started the
war.
Who will finish the war? There is no room or argument. We will finish the
war.