"I've Got It"
Sometimes a man after being under fire for a considerable time without
being wounded begins to fancy that he has a charmed life and that he
is "not for it," as soldiers say. Still, if he is to be a billet for a
bullet the bullet will in its own time find him out. Then, he who has
been seeing comrades falling on either side of him will find this a
more personal matter, an affair of his only. When the end comes to a
poor fellow he is generally gone to "another place" before he knows he
is dead--as an Irish soldier said.
What does the average soldier say or do when wounded, how does he take
it? He usually remarks casually and quietly, "I've got it," or "I'm
hit." Men speak and act differently according to temperament, according
to moral and physical condition. Some as they roll over give a groan
and a cry to mother or wife. Some pray, some curse. An officer said,
"I'm done for," but immediately thinking of his men told them to lie
down. A soldier when hit said, "I've got a ticket through. I'm put out
of mess," but it was not as bad as that. Another fell and said to a
chum: "Good-bye, old man. I'm done for. Tell poor old dad I died at the
front. I began a letter to him; you finish it."
Sometimes a soldier is too excited to feel a wound until the fight is
over. A man wrote in a letter the following when describing the battle
of Mons: "When the Germans attacked us we were singing 'Hitchy Koo.'
Before we were half through the chorus the man next to me got a wound
in the upper part of his arm. He sang the chorus to the finish, and
did not seem to know he was hit till a comrade on the other side said,
'Don't you think you had better have it bound up? It's beginning to
make a mess.'"
A sergeant sent back to a hospital in England said: "It was at Ypres
I was shot. The bullet struck me in the elbow. I felt no pain there
and no sensation of any kind, except in the tops of the fingers, which
began to stiffen and freeze. But even then I didn't know I was shot.
Five or ten minutes afterwards my coat began to stick to my arm, thick
blood came down my sleeve, and I realised that I was wounded."
One man, shot through the arm, felt "only a bit of a sting, nothing
particular. Just like a needle going into me. I thought it was nothing
till my rifle dropped out of my hand and my arm fell." That is the
feeling of a clean bullet wound. Shrapnel, however, "hurts pretty
badly."
This is how another man in a letter described being hit: "I didn't know
what had happened at the time, but afterwards I found out that a bullet
had entered my shoulder, grazed my spine, and lodged pretty firmly in
the back of my neck. 'Are you wounded, mate?' asked a corporal who
came up to me. 'Looks like it,' I replied, pointing to my shoulder.
With that he ripped up the sleeve of my tunic, and had just bound up
my wound when a shell struck him full in the back, and he fell forward
dead without a word."
A man when hit in the hand jumped out of the trench and shouted to the
man who had shot him to come and fight him. "It was hailing lead, so he
was pulled back into the trench and told that he was rather amusing,
but silly."
Two men are resting in a trench but not lying low enough. One is
munching a biscuit, and the other is flicking small pebbles at him.
A particularly sharp stone, as the man with the biscuit fancies,
strikes him on the neck. He leaps round and demands indignantly, "Say,
Bill, did you chuck that stone at me?" Bill denies the charge, and,
perceiving the occasion for it, rejoins, "Why, mate, you're wounded."
He had got a bullet and not a harmless pebble.
Firing in battle is now carried on at such long distances that if one
is in the neighbourhood at all he may not be able to keep out of it.
This was once the case with me in China. A hail of bullets came round
us and we did not know from whence it came. A man on the right of me
fell and said, "I'm hit," and another on the left did the same. As no
enemy was visible I thought that it was a grim joke until I saw blood
spurting up.
Writing in a letter of a second occasion on which he was wounded, a
soldier said: "This makes twice their shrapnel has pipped me. If they
do it again I shall say, 'I ain't going to play any more! You are too
rough!'"
Another man was hit in the right arm when drinking tea. He carefully
transferred the pannikin to the left hand, and finished his tea!
When a bullet got him an Irishman, exclaiming "The brutes have hit me,"
fired his rifle and said, "That's one back ter them." Then he got hit
again and observed, "Be jabers, if they haven't struck me the second
toime." A third hit was too much and he expostulated, "That's number
three. The blackguards might leave a party alone after they've hit him
wance."
With a machine gun a Highlander at a bridge over the river Marne kept
back a column of Germans until reliefs came up. When he fell dead and
was carried away thirty bullet wounds were found on his body.
It is strange to hear soldiers at home talking of soldiers who have
gone to war, and have been wounded or died. They seldom express pity
for them, nor do they feel much. And the want of what might seem a
natural sensation is really very fine, for it is due to a conviction
that a man has to do his duty, and that to die in the performance of it
covers him with honour.
Strange, too, is the way soldiers can joke when hit themselves, or when
someone near them has "got it." In one of the Highland regiments there
was a very fat pipe major. His legs were like barrels, and when he was
shot in them he said, "Weel, I wonder they didna do that before."
Two chums were discussing the relative values of their birthplaces. The
Cockney was evidently having the best of the argument, when a shrapnel
shell burst above them and the Londoner received a bullet in each leg,
while the Birmingham man escaped unhurt.
"I should think you'll give way now!" said the man from Birmingham.
"Why?" asked the Cockney.
"Well, you haven't a leg to stand on," was the reply.
After a little experience of campaigning in France a young officer
wrote, "I tried to like war, having heard and read so many fine things
about it, but I could not; it is just beastly." Any one who talks of
the glory of war should be invited to walk over a battle field when the
fighting has ceased. He will see those who have "got it" from shells or
bullets writhing in agony, he will hear many of them asking someone for
the love of God to kill them and put them out of their misery.
A member of the Royal Army Medical Corps gives the following vivid
picture of a battlefield after the guns had ceased firing:
"The last fight I was in the carnage had been fearful, and dead and
dying of both sides were piled together. In one corner you could see
a British Tommy with a bad wound lying with his head pillowed on the
shoulder of a dying German, while a Frenchman near by was doing his
best to cheer them up, and emptying his pockets in quest of some
treasures to soothe the last moments of the other two. Close by a
British Guardsman was propped against a tree smoking a cigarette and
gazing intently at a photograph. Near to him was a wounded Frenchman,
holding a little glass in one hand while he tried to curl a straggling
moustache with the other. Further along I saw two men, a French
artilleryman and a British rifleman, quietly playing cards while
awaiting their turn to be taken to hospital. Next to them was a man
of the Cameron Highlanders, with both legs shattered, munching a stick
of chocolate, and trying to hide the twitching of his face as the pain
racked his body. I approached another Highlander. 'It's ma birthday
the day,' was what he said, with a wry face, and before the words were
right out of his mouth he was dead. Under a little cluster of trees we
find a party of wounded Germans, English, and French men. They were
quietly praying for what they believed to be the last time on earth.
Beyond them a Seaforth Highlander was lying with his Testament open at
the story of the Crucifixion. He was beyond human aid."
How much more than "beastly" for the wounded must be the waiting for
the stretcher-bearers to pick them up and the fear that they may not be
able to come or that they may not find them? What torture for the mind
there is in the uncertainty!
The next time we are impatient because a train is unpunctual or the
dinner a few moments late, we should think of those who wait on
battlefields, sometimes in danger of getting more wounds and sometimes
exposed to great cold and falling rain or snow.