“I never felt so secure, indeed, as when I was on guard between the
trenches. Through all the night I could hear the bullets go over me.
Men go crazy there. And the insane are sent to England. Sometimes men
go mad and become a menace to their own comrades and officers. They
sometimes have to be killed. And there have been times when I crouched
in some first line trench, where no communication trench joined us to
the second or third line, where no doctor could reach us. And I have
seen men so terribly wounded, enduring such agonies, and screaming
so heart-breakingly for somebody to kill them, that our boys have
done what they asked, to save them the unnecessary horror of living
dismembered. And I have seen men of good health grow so weary of the
trenches that they have simply stood up at noonday. Some machine guns
swiftly ended them. And others, as I have written, simply stick their
hands above the trench top and bullets trim off their fingers.”
Fingerless hands are unprofitable in the trenches, and not very useful
elsewhere in the activities of war. Getting rid of one’s fingers is a
comparatively cheap exchange for release from the dangers and maddening
anguish of long periods in the trenches. Houle did not think these
men were cowards. “But only men who have lived in the trenches can
understand.” Though he makes no claim to heroism for himself, Houle’s
record shows that he was a resolute soldier doing valiant things that
he sets down in his story quite as matters of routine experience—such
as going out under fire to bring in the wounded.
He names Ypres the “graveyard of the old Sixty-first.” They were
carried to within six miles of the place in London buses, twenty-five
men to a bus. The remaining distance they tramped. At Ypres they first
met “the gallant French troops,” and his company of French-Canadians
being at the left of the English line acted as interpreters. Here the
trenches were but forty yards from the Germans and in bad condition;
they were raked terribly by German machine guns on a height. There were
dead bodies of Germans and French lying between that had been there
three months, neither side having the chance to bury its dead. These
were to be seen through the periscopes—but one did not need to see to
know they were there. The Battle of Ypres was one of the greatest of
the war, one of the most desperate, one of the most deadly in human
toll, but out of it all comes the memory of the gas attacks to which
the men were then so helplessly exposed.
“There comes a sudden stinging in your nose. Your eyes water. 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 tear your body. You become half wild. Your
head aches beyond description. You vomit, you drop exhausted, you die.
It is a frightful thing to see your friends like that. Every other
man seemed to fall. As I fought I marveled that I was spared. Again
and again came to me the belief that my life was charmed. An ecstatic
confidence bore me up. I was brave because I was so sure of life, while
all my companions seemed groveling in death.”
[Illustration:
_Drawn by Joseph Cummings Chase._