CORPORAL EDWARDS TAKES UP THE TALE
Amongst the Wounded--Trench Nerves--Resting in Coffins.
It was on this day that I rejoined the regiment. I had been wounded in
the foot at St. Eloi in February and had come up in a draft fresh from
hospital and had lain in the supports at the huts all of the Fourth.
The survivors of the front line fire joined those at the huts shortly
after nightfall. They were stupid from shell fire, too dazed to talk.
I saw one man wandering in half circles, talking to himself--and with
a heavy pack on. There were others in worse plight; so there was no
help for him.
Myself, I was too much engrossed in a search for my comrade Woods to
bother with other men less dear, however much I might sympathise with
them.
He and I had been "mates" since Toronto days, had made good cheer
together in the hot August days of mobilisation at Ottawa and had
rubbed mess tins together under the starry sky at Levis before the
great Armada had taken us to English camps and other scenes.
It was he who had fetched me out of danger at St. Eloi. And now it was
my turn. They told me he was somewhere on a stretcher.
I searched them all. I struck matches--and was met by querulous
curses; I knelt by the side of the dying; I inquired of those wounded
who still could walk, but find him I could not. It appears that a new
and heavy moustache had helped to hide him from me. I was in great
distress, but in the fullness of time and when our small circles had
run their route, I discovered him in Toronto.
The word was that we were to go to Vlamertinghe, where the Zeppelins
had bombed us in our huts. It lay well below threatened Ypres.
We of Number One Company passed Belle-waarde Lake, with its old
dug-outs and its smells, and struck off across the fields, the better
to avoid the heavy barrage fire which made all movement of troops
difficult beyond words. We reached the railroad up and down which in
quieter times the battalion had been wont to march to and fro to the
Polygon Wood trenches.
The fire became heavier here and the going was rough so that what with
the burden of packs which seemed to weigh a ton and all other things;
we moved in a mass, as sheep do. When slung rifles jostled packs, good
friends cursed one another both loud and long. This was trench nerves.
Shortly, we ran into a solid wall of barrage fire. The officer
commanding the company halted us. We were for pushing on to that rest
each aching bone and muscle, each tight-stretched and shell-dazed
nerve fairly screamed aloud for. But he was adamant. We cursed him. He
pretended not to hear. This also was trench nerves.
It was growing late. The star shells became fewer. The search-lights
ceased altogether. In half an hour those keen eyes in distant trees
and steeples would have marked us down--and what good then the agony
of this all-night march? Better to have been killed back there in
Belle-waarde. We were still a good two miles from Ypres town.
The officer literally drove us back over the way we had come. His
orders had anticipated this eventuality so that rather than force
the passage of the barrage fire, merely for a rest, we should rest
here where no rest was to be had. Undoubtedly, if we had been "going
up" it would have been different. We should have gone on--no fire
would have stopped us.
[Illustration: BRITISH WOUNDED WAITING FOR TRANSPORTATION TO A
DRESSING STATION.]
[Illustration: THE PRINCESS PATRICIAS IN BILLETS AT WESTOUTRE,
BELGIUM. ON TOP OF WAGON IN FOREGROUND IS "KNIFE-REST" TYPE OF
WIRE ENTANGLEMENTS.]
The half hour limit brought us to a murky daylight and an old and
sloppy support trench which bordered the track and into which we flung
ourselves, to lay in the water in a dull stupor that was neither sleep
nor honest waking.
Later, when the rations had been "dished out" we bestirred ourselves
and so found or dug queer coffin-shaped shelves in either wall. Out of
courtesy we called them dug-outs.
I do not remember that any one spoke much of the dead.
The rain stopped and for a time the unaccustomed sun came out. We
drove stakes in the walls above our coffins, hunted sand-bags and hung
them and spare equipment over the open face and then crawled back into
the water which, as usual, was already forming in the hollows that our
hips made where we lay. Until noon there was little heard but the
thick breathing of weary men. Occasionally one tossed and shouted
blasphemous warnings anent imaginary and bursting shells; whereat
those within hearing whined in a tired and hopeless anger, and, if
close by, kicked him. Trench nerves.
All day the fire of many guns sprayed us. Near by, the well defined
emplacement of one of our own batteries inevitably drew to the entire
vicinity a heavy fire so that one shell broke fair amongst our
sleeping men.