“OVER THE TOP AND GIVE ’EM HELL”
As we climbed out of the shelter of our trenches for my first--and,
perhaps, my last, I thought--adventure in “No Man’s Land,” the word was
passed:
“Over the top and give ’em hell!”
That is the British Tommies’ battle cry as they charge the enemy and it
has often sounded up and down those long lines in western France as the
British, Canadian, and Australian soldiers go out to the fight and the
death.
We were divided into six parties of ten men, each party having separate
duties to perform. We crouched forward, moving slowly in single file,
stumbling into shell holes and over dead men--some very long dead--and
managing to keep in touch with each other though the machine-gun
bullets began to drop men almost immediately. Once we were started, we
were neither fearful, nor rattled. We had been drilled so long and so
carefully that each man knew just what he was to do and he kept right
on doing it unless he got hit. To me, it seemed the ground was moving
back under me. The first ten yards were the toughest. The thing was
perfectly organized. Our last party of ten was composed of signallers.
They were paying out wires and carrying telephones to be used during
the fifteen minutes of our stay in the German trenches in communicating
with our battalion headquarters. A telephone code had been arranged,
using the names of our commanding officers as symbols. “Rexford 1”
meant, “First prisoners being sent back”; “Rexford 2” meant, “Our first
wounded being sent over”; “Rexford 3” meant, “We have entered German
trench.” The code was very complete and the signallers had been drilled
in it for a week. In case the telephone wires were cut, the signallers
were to send messages back by the use of rifle grenades. These are
rifle projectiles which carry little metal cylinders to contain written
messages, and which burst into flame when they strike the earth, so
that they can be easily found at night. The officer in charge of the
signallers was to remain at the point of entrance, with his eyes on his
watch. It was his duty to sound a warning signal five minutes before
the end of our time in the German trenches.
The leader of every party of ten also had a whistle with which to
repeat the warning blast and then the final blast, when each man was
to drop everything and get back of our artillery fire. We were not
to leave any dead or wounded in the German trench, on account of the
information which the Germans might thus obtain. Before starting on
the raid, we had removed all marks from our persons, including even
our identification discs. Except for the signallers, each party of
ten was similarly organized. First, there were two bayonet men, each
with an electric flash light attached to his rifle so as to give light
for the direction of a bayonet thrust and controlled by a button at
the left-hand grasp of the rifle. Besides his rifle, each of these
men carried six or eight Mills No. 5 hand grenades, weighing from a
pound and five ounces to a pound and seven ounces each. These grenades
are shaped like turkey eggs, but slightly larger. Upon withdrawing
the firing pin, a lever sets a four-second fuse going. One of these
grenades will clean out anything living in a ten-foot trench section.
It will also kill the man throwing it, if he holds it more than four
seconds, after he has pulled the pin. The third man of each ten was
an expert bomb thrower, equipped as lightly as possible to give him
freedom of action. He carried a few bombs, himself, but the main
supply was carried by a fourth man who was not to throw any unless the
third man became a casualty, in which case number four was to take
his place. The third man also carried a knob-kerrie--a heavy bludgeon
to be used in whacking an enemy over the head. The kind we used was
made by fastening a heavy steel nut on a stout stick of wood--a very
business-like contrivance. The fourth man, or bomb carrier, besides
having a large supply of Mills grenades, had smoke bombs, to be used
in smoking the Germans out of dug-outs and, later, if necessary, in
covering our retreat, and also fumite bombs. The latter are very
dangerous to handle. They contain a mixture of petrol and phosphorous,
and weigh three pounds each. On exploding they release a liquid fire
which will burn through steel.
The fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth in line, were called utility men.
They were to take the places of any of the first four who might become
casualties. In addition, they carried two Stokes-gun bombs, each.
These weigh nine pounds apiece, have six-second fuses, and can be used
in wrecking dug-outs. The ninth and tenth men were sappers, carrying
slabs of gun-cotton and several hundred yards of instantaneous fuse.
This explosive is used in demolishing machine-gun emplacements and mine
saps. The sappers were to lay their charges while we were at work in
the trenches, and explode them as soon as our party was far enough out
on the return journey to be safe from this danger. In addition to these
parties of ten, there were three of us who carried bombs and had orders
to keep near the three officers, to take the place of any one of them
that might go down, and meanwhile to use our own judgment about helping
the jolly old party along. I was one of the three.
In addition to the raiding party, proper, there was a relay all across
“No Man’s Land,” at ten paces interval, making a human chain to show
us our way back, to assist the wounded and, in case of opportunity
or necessity, to re-enforce us. They were ordered not to leave their
positions when we began to come back, until the last man of our party
had been accounted for. The final section of our entourage was composed
of twelve stretcher-bearers, who had been specially trained with us, so
that they would be familiar with the trench section which we were to
raid.
There were two things which made it possible for our raiding party to
get started across “No Man’s Land.” One was the momentary quickening
of the blood which follows a big and unaccustomed dose of rum, and
the other was a sort of subconscious, mechanical confidence in our
undertaking, which was a result of the scores of times we had gone
through every pre-arranged movement in the duplicate German trenches
behind our lines. Without either of those influences, we simply could
not have left shelter and faced what was before us.
An intensified bombardment from our guns began just as soon as we had
climbed “over the top” and were lining up for the journey across.
“Lining up” is not just a suitable term. We were crawling about on all
fours, just far enough out in “No Man’s Land” to be under the edge of
the German shell-fire, and taking what shelter we could in shell-holes
while our leaders picked the way to start across. The extra heavy
bombardment had warned the Germans that something was about to happen.
They sent up star shells and “S. O. S.” signals, until there was a
glare over the torn earth like that which you see at the grand finish
of a Pain’s fire-works display, and meanwhile they sprayed “No Man’s
Land” with streams of machine-gun fire. In the face of that, we started.
It would be absurd to say that we were not frightened. Thinking men
could not help but be afraid. If we were pallid--which undoubtedly we
were--the black upon our faces hid it, but our fear-struck voices were
not disguised. They trembled and our teeth chattered.
We sneaked out, single file, making our way from shell-hole to
shell-hole, nearly all the time on all fours, crawling quickly over
the flat places between holes. The Germans had not sighted us, but
they were squirting machine-gun bullets all over the place like a man
watering a lawn with a garden hose, and they were bound to get some
of us. Behind me, I heard cries of pain, and groans, but this made
little impression on my benumbed intelligence. From the mere fact that
whatever had happened had happened to one of the other sections of
ten and not to my own, it seemed, some way or another, no affair to
concern me. Then a man in front of me doubled up suddenly and rolled
into a shell-hole. That simply made me remember very clearly that I was
not to stop on account of it. It was some one else’s business to pick
that man up. Next, according to the queer psychology of battle, I began
to lose my sensation of fear and nervousness. After I saw a second
man go down, I gave my attention principally to a consideration of
the irregularities of the German parapet ahead of us, picking out the
spot where we were to enter the trench. It seems silly to say it, but
I seemed to get some sort of satisfaction out of the realization that
we had lost the percentage which we might be expected to lose, going
over. Now, it seemed, the rest of us were safe until we should reach
the next phase of our undertaking. I heard directions given and I gave
some myself. My voice was firm, and I felt almost calm. Our artillery
had so torn up the German barbed wire that it gave us no trouble at
all. We walked through it with only a few scratches. When we reached
the low, sand-bag parapet of the enemy trench, we tossed in a few bombs
and followed them right over as soon as they had exploded. There wasn’t
a German in sight. They were all in their dug-outs. But we knew pretty
well where every dug-out was located, and we rushed for the entrances
with our bombs. Everything seemed to be going just as we had expected
it to go. Two Germans ran plump into me as I round a ditch angle, with
a bomb in my hand. They had their hands up and each of them yelled:
“Mercy, Kamarad!”
I passed them back to be sent to the rear, and the man who received
them from me chuckled and told them to step lively. The German trenches
were practically just as we had expected to find them, according to our
sample. They were so nearly similar to the duplicate section in which
we had practiced that we had no trouble finding our way in them. I was
just thinking that really the only tough part of the job remaining
would be getting back across “No Man’s Land,” when it seemed that the
whole earth behind me, rose in the air. For a moment I was stunned,
and half blinded by dirt blown into my face. When I was able to see, I
discovered that all that lay back of me was a mass of upturned earth
and rock, with here and there a man shaking himself or scrambling out
of it or lying still.
Just two minutes after we went into their trench, the Germans had
exploded a mine under their parapet. I have always believed that in
some way or another they had learned which spot we were to raid, and
had prepared for us. Whether that’s true or not, one thing is certain.
That mine blew our organization, as we would say in Kentucky, “plumb to
Hell.” And it killed or disabled more than half of our party.
There was much confusion among those of us who remained on our feet.
Some one gave an order to retire and some one countermanded it. More
Germans came out of their dug-outs, but, instead of surrendering as per
our original schedule, they threw bombs amongst us. It became apparent
that we should be killed or captured if we stuck there and that we
shouldn’t get any more prisoners. I looked at my wrist watch and saw
that there remained but five minutes more of the time which had been
allotted for our stay in the trench, so I blew my whistle and started
back. I had seen Private Green (No. 177,250) knocked down by a bomb in
the next trench section, and I picked him up and carried him out over
the wrecked parapet. I took shelter with him in the first shell-hole
but found that he was dead and left him there. A few yards further back
toward our line I found Lance Corporal Glass in a shell-hole, with
part of his hip shot away. He said he thought he could get back if I
helped him, and I started with him. Private Hunter, who had been in a
neighboring shell-hole came to our assistance, and between us, Hunter
and I got Glass to our front trench.
We found them lining up the survivors of our party for a roll call.
That showed so many missing that Major John Lewis, our company
commander, formerly managing-editor of the _Montreal Star_, called for
volunteers to go out in “No Man’s Land” and try to find some of our
men. Corporal Charleson, Private Saunders and I went out. We brought
in two wounded, and we saw a number of dead, but, on account of their
blackened faces, were unable to identify them. The scouts, later,
brought in several bodies.
Of the sixty odd men who had started in our party, forty-three were
found to be casualties--killed, wounded, or missing. The missing
list was the longest. The names of these men were marked, “M. B. K.”
(missing, believed killed) on our rolls. I have learned since that some
few of them have been reported through Switzerland as prisoners of war
in Germany, but most of them are now officially listed as dead.
All of the survivors of the raiding party were sent twenty miles to
the rear at seven o’clock, and the non-commissioned officers were
ordered to make reports in writing concerning the entire operation.
We recorded, each in his own way, the ghastly failure of our first
aggressive effort against the Germans, before we rolled into the hay
in the same old barn where we had been quartered during the days of
preparation for the raid. I was so dead tired that I soon fell asleep,
but not for long. I never slept more than an hour at a time for several
days and nights. I would doze off from sheer exhaustion, and then
suddenly find myself sitting straight up, scared half to death, all
over again.
There may be soldiers who don’t get scared when they know they are in
danger or even when people are being killed right around them, but I’m
not one of them. And I’ve never met any of them yet. I know a boy who
won the Military Medal, in the battle of the Somme, and I saw him on
his knees before his platoon commander, shamelessly crying that he was
a coward and begging to be left behind, just when the order to advance
was given.
Soldiers of our army who read this story will probably observe one
thing in particular, and that is the importance of bombing operations
in the present style of warfare. You might say that a feature of
this war has been the renaissance of the grenadier. Only British
reverence for tradition kept the name of the Grenadiers alive, through
a considerable number of wars. Now, in every offensive, big or small,
the man who has been trained to throw a bomb thirty yards is busier
and more important than the fellow with the modern rifle which will
shoot a mile and a half and make a hole through a house. In a good many
surprising ways this war has carried us back to first principles. I
remember a Crusader’s mace which I once saw in the British museum that
would make a bang-up knob-kerrie, much better than the kind with which
they arm our Number 4 men in a raiding party section. It had a round,
iron head with spikes all over it. I wonder that they haven’t started a
factory to turn them out.
As I learned during my special training in England, the use of hand
grenades was first introduced in warfare by the French, in 1667. The
British did not use them until ten years later. After the battle of
Waterloo the hand grenade was counted an obsolete weapon until the
Japanese revived its use in the war with Russia. The rude grenades
first used by the British in the present war weighed about eight
pounds. To-day, in the British army, the men who have been trained to
throw grenades--now of lighter construction and much more efficient
and certain action--are officially known as “bombers” for this reason:
When grenade fighting came back to its own in this war, each battalion
trained a certain number of men in the use of grenades, and, naturally,
called them “grenadiers.” The British Grenadier Guards, the senior foot
regiment in the British Army, made formal complaint against the use of
their time-honored name in this connection, and British reverence for
tradition did the rest. The Grenadiers were no longer grenadiers, but
they were undoubtedly the Grenadiers. The war office issued a formal
order that battalion grenade throwers should be known as “bombers” and
not as “grenadiers.”
Up to the time when I left France we had some twenty-seven varieties of
grenades, but most of them were obsolete or ineffective, and we only
made use of seven or eight sorts. The grenades were divided into two
principal classes, rifle grenades and hand grenades. The rifle grenades
are discharged from a rifle barrel by means of a blank cartridge. Each
grenade is attached to a slender rod which is inserted into the bore of
the rifle, and the longer the rod the greater the range of the grenade.
The three principal rifle grenades are the Mills, the Hales, and the
Newton, the former having a maximum range of 120 yards, and the latter
of 400 yards. A rifle discharging a Mills grenade may be fired from
the shoulder, as there is no very extraordinary recoil, but in using
the others it is necessary to fasten the rifle in a stand or plant the
butt on the ground. Practice teaches the soldier how much elevation
to give the rifle for different ranges. The hand grenades are divided
also into two classes, those which are discharged by percussion, and
those which have time fuses, with detonators of fulminate of mercury.
The high explosives used are ammonal, abliste and sabulite, but ammonal
is the much more commonly employed. There are also smoke bombs, the
Mexican or tonite bomb, the Hales hand grenade, the No. 19 grenade and
the fumite bomb, which contains white phosphorous, wax and petrol,
and discharges a stream of liquid fire which will quickly burn out a
dug-out and everything it contains. Hand grenades are always thrown
with a stiff arm, as a bowler delivers a cricket ball toward the
wicket. They cannot be thrown in the same manner as a baseball for
two reasons. One is that the snap of the wrist with which a baseball
is sent on its way would be likely to cause the premature discharge
of a percussion grenade, and the second is that the grenades weigh so
much--from a pound and a half to ten pounds--that the best arm in the
world couldn’t stand the strain of whipping them off as a baseball is
thrown. I’m talking by the book about this, because I’ve been a bomber
and a baseball player.
A bomber, besides knowing all about the grenades in use in his own
army, must have practical working knowledge concerning the grenades in
use by the enemy. After we took the Regina trench, on the Somme, we
ran out of grenades at a moment when a supply was vitally necessary.
We found a lot of the German “egg” bombs, and through our knowledge of
their workings and our consequent ability to use them against their
original owners we were able to hold the position.
An officer or non-commissioned officer in charge of a bombing detail
must know intimately every man in his command, and have such discipline
that every order will be carried out with scrupulous exactitude when
the time comes. The leader will have no time, in action, to prompt his
men or even to see if they are doing what they have been told to do.
When a platoon of infantry is in action one rifleman more or less makes
little difference, but in bombing operations each man has certain
particular work to do and he must do it, just as it has been planned,
in order to protect himself and his comrades from disaster. If you can
out-throw the enemy, or if you can make most of the bombs land with
accuracy, you have a wonderful advantage in an attack. But throwing
wild or throwing short you simply give confidence to the enemy in his
own offensive. One very good thrower may win an objective for his
squad, while one man who is faint-hearted or unskilled or “rattled” may
cause the entire squad to be annihilated.
In the revival of bombing, some tricks have developed which would
be humorous if the denouements were not festooned with crepe and
accompanied by obituary notations on muster rolls. There may be
something which might be termed funny on one end of a bombing-ruse--but
not on both ends of it. Whenever you fool a man with a bomb, you’re
playing a practical joke on him that he’ll never forget. Even,
probably, he’ll never get a chance to remember it.
When the Canadians first introduced bombing, the bombs were improvised
out of jam tins, the fuses were cut according to the taste and judgment
of the individual bomber, and, just when the bomb would explode, was
more or less problematical. Frequently, the Germans have tossed our
bombs back into our trenches before they went off. That was injurious
and irritating. They can’t do that with a Mills grenade nor with any
of the improved factory-made bombs, because the men know just how they
are timed and are trained to know just how to throw them. The Germans
used to work another little bomb trick of their own. They learned
that our scouts and raiders were all anxious to get a German helmet
as a souvenir. They’d put helmets on the ground in “No Man’s Land,”
or in an advanced trench with bombs under them. In several cases, men
looking for souvenirs suddenly became mere memories, themselves. In
several raids, when bombing was new, the Canadians worked a trick on
the Germans with extensively fatal effect. They tossed bombs into
the German trenches with six-inch fuses attached. To the Germans they
looked just like the other bombs we had been using, and, in fact
they were--all but the fuses. Instead of having failed to continue
burning, as the Germans thought, those fuses had never been lighted.
They were instantaneous fuses. The ignition spark will travel through
instantaneous fuse at the rate of about thirty yards a second. A German
would pick up one of these bombs, select the spot where he intended
to blow up a few of us with our own ammonal, and then light the fuse.
After that there had to be a new man in his place. The bomb would
explode instantly the long fuse was ignited.
The next day when I got up after this disastrous raid, I said to my
bunkie:
“Got a fag?” (Fag is the Tommy’s name for a cigarette.)
It’s never, “will you have a fag?” but always, “have you got a fag?”
They are the inseparable companions of the men at the front, and you’ll
see the soldiers go over the top with an unlit fag in their lips.
Frequently, it is still there when their work is done.
As we sat there smoking, my friend said:
“Something sure raised hell with our calculations.”
“Like those automatic self-cocking revolvers did with a Kentucky
wedding when some one made a remark reflecting on the bride,” I replied.
* * * * *
It may be interesting to note that Corpl. Glass, Corpl. Charleson and
Private (later Corpl.) Saunders have all since been “Killed in Action.”
Charleson and Saunders the same morning I was wounded on the Somme,
and Glass, Easter morning at Vimy Ridge, when the Canadians made their
wonderful attack.