“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 pointblank 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.”
The Battle of Ypres was a twenty-one day affair, and the toll exacted
was appalling. Of the 500 boys of Houle’s company who left Canada only
20 survived. Then came other engagements until in May, 1915, he was
again in Richebourg, and the next day an assault was made on the German
first line trenches. The first two lines of trenches were taken without
difficulty, but there was a counter attack at the third and out of
Houle’s company (now reinforced to 365 men) 75 were killed, 100 wounded
and 20 taken prisoners.
“We were obliged to leave our wounded in the trench with the dead. I
lay until night in the German second line trench among the dead and
wounded,” for of course there were no communications and no means of
getting medical help for the men “writhing in agony all around us.” At
night Highlanders from the 13th and 14th Battalions came to the relief.
Three days later there was an attack at a point near Lacouture, where
the Germans were entrenched in a hilly vantage. The French Canadians
had been reinforced again, this time to 420. The Scots Grays and the
Cold Stream Guards engaged in the assault. The artillery cleared
the way for the charge. “On the third tussle we got into the German
trenches. It was a close fight. We used even our fists. My bayonet was
broken, and I used my gun as a club. There we remained until we got
reinforcements. Out of 420 men my company was reduced to eighty. No, I
could not be killed.”
Then the French Canadians fought at Cuinchy and at La Basse—repetitions
of the same story. He had fought in the front lines from almost the
very opening of the war, “until all the bed I knew was wet earth, and
all the rest I knew was snatches of sleep obtained during lulls in the
roaring tumult. And long since I had had my fill of the fighting.”
Then Jan. 10, 1916, he was summoned to headquarters to receive his
discharge. He frankly rejoiced in the fact that he was free, free from
the trenches, their fevers, their wounded and dead, their noxious
odors, their deadly gases, their man-eating rats; free to go home to
relatives and friends neither maimed nor wounded. Not that he had gone
unscathed. There was a dent in his skull made by a spent bullet, and
a very bad bruise on the leg made by a piece of shell, but these were
trifles.