When officers arrive in England they are given the option of going to
France as lieutenants or going back home. That is the reason you see
so many bold footed officers holding down staff jobs in England and
Canada. Colonel Hilliam who was now our commanding officer, says that
the 25th battalion made his name; but the 25th boys are equally
positive that he made the battalion. It was truly wonderful the
confidence we placed in him and he never disappointed us. He was very
strong on discipline, and when all is said and done that is most
essential in the army. Without it a battalion simply becomes a mob.
During the winter we were on the Kimmel front. It was a bad year in
the trenches, for the rain and mud were something awful. The mud was
waist deep and of such a nature that once a fellow got stuck it took
another chap to get him out. For about two months they were trenches
in name only; they were caved right in and the boys that were doing
front line work would go in at 8 o'clock one night and would not be
relieved until 8 o'clock the next night--twenty-four hours without any
hot food. I must say that we found the hot rum ration that winter to
be a most desirable thing.
Our colonel was a regular fire eater, and wanted to be at it all the
time. He organized a raiding party in charge of Capt. Tupper along
with Brooks, Cameron and Roberts. All four of them proved to be great
fighters. They were the pick of the battalion.
And now enters that great hero--Toby Jones--"the Man who came back!"
He was machine gun officer, and the Colonel also put him in charge of
a wire cutting party, and thus he was carrying the responsibility of
both jobs. He would be around his guns all day and at night he would
be scouting all over "No Man's land" and in December, 1915 it was no
joke crawling around in the mud. He never got any rest. He would not
eat, and the day of the raid Fritz had straffed us quite a lot. I was
in trench S.P. 12 along with Toby when a message came to tell us that
a shell had knocked in one of the dugouts and had killed one of our
N.C.O's, Corporal Ferguson, a chap who was well liked by everybody. A
road named the "V.C. Road" separated us from J 4. The Germans were
shelling this road pretty bad; but as soon as Toby got the message he
did not hesitate one minute but went across to J 4. He seemed to have
had a charmed life. Shells were bursting all around him but he never
got a scratch. That night Corporal Ingraham and the McNeil brothers,
the three biggest dare devils that were in our battalion left our
dugout on a wire cutting expedition. Imagine, three or four men lying
on their backs in mud and water cutting at Fritz's wire just a few
feet away from his trench! Jones would go around his gun teams to make
sure that everything was all right and then he would visit his wire
cutting party.
Night after night Toby would be engaged in this dangerous and telling
work. It proved too much for flesh and blood, and one night just as a
visit was planned he broke right down and was carried to our lines on
a stretcher. Well, Toby got the blame for the failure of that evening
and left our battalion; but as the old adage puts it "You can't keep a
good man down" and Toby Jones enlisted again as a private in the 42nd
Battalion--won back his commission with the D.C.M. and a bar. Every
man in the "Fighting Twenty-Fifth" lifts his hat to Toby Jones--the
greatest hero of them all!
We carried out several raids the next few weeks on the Kimmel front,
and, as a matter of fact, it is no exaggeration to say that
trench-raiding which has since been carried out so extensively was
really initiated by the "Fighting Twenty-Fifth." Before proceeding
further, let me describe a trench. They are all transversed, because
if a shell or bomb should burst in one part of the trench the
transverse prevents the spread of the shrapnel. A communication trench
is usually to connect the trenches together, and sometimes these
trenches are a mile long reaching from the front line to some part
behind the line where it is comparatively safe to walk around. They
are very deep and zig-zag in shape so that they cannot be enfiladed.
On the Belgian front we could not have deep dugouts for the soil was
so soft. To dig down a few feet was to strike water. At first we only
had sand bags shelters, then we had the corrugated iron ones which
were shrapnel and bomb proof.