On
Two
Fronts
THE YPRES TIMES
233
By Michael Poole.
OMPARISONS are odious," says the adage, but, like so many platitudes,
t 1 it is very often untrue. It is chiefly by comparisons that nowadays one
gets some sort of perspective on the events and incidents of those strange
years when there was no sort of standard of living or of dying.
Looking back, or talking with one who served in some other arena than
France, one realizes that there were several different brands of war, as different in
quality and in their own peculiar trials and inconveniences and risks as the airman's
life differs from that of the man on board the submarine. I imagine that no one
would dispute, however, that for real concentrated essence of war, guaranteed to
contain every conceivable horror and discomfort with the minimum of compensa
tions, the first prize would be given to the brand served up in the Salient.
My own experience of the Ypres brand came towards the end of September,
1917. Through the summer we had had quite a lot of unpleasantness farther
south, but towards July it became chiefly a matter of holding the line somewhere
in the neighbourhood of Ecousttwelve days in supports and front line and then
back for twelve days' rest or so at camp near Mory. Possibly one got a week's
change out at rest by a course of musketry at the 7th Divisional School, and then
back again to go into the line once more.
But at the end of August the whole division began the long trek which
eventually landed our battalion (the 2nd/ist H.A.C.) in a temporary resting-place
somewhere just behind Polygon Wood. There were times during this month of
September when, without a doubt, it was quite a good war! Often enough we had
comfortable billets and could buy most of the luxuries which appealedfresh eggs
and butter, genuine milk (not from the tin), wine and coffee in odd estaminets
and quite often the rations were very nearly up to newspaper standard.
These good times came rather patchily, perhaps, and were mixed up with a
fair amount of hard work. They ended abruptly, changing, so the recollection
goes, with the weather. We went from our last camp to queer trenches with
little dug-outs hewn out of the walls, into which three or four men could crawl.
There came a spell of heart-breaking fatigues, carrying ammunition up to the line
through rain and mud and shells; memory still retains certain little pictures of
falling into a shell hole with a companion who held the other handle of the
ammo box, both of us wondering whether we had been hit, or what had
happened.
An officer appeared out of the blackness and warned us of gas, pulling his own
helmet aside to try to shout above the general row. We put on our masks in
quick time, then crawled out again, still clinging to that ammunition box. Of all
the desperately hard work I have ever done, that long-drawn-out struggle with
ammunition while wearing a gas-mask still stands (and, please Heaven, will ever
stand) as my own personal endurance recordI believe I am right in saying that
a day or two later my battalion had a special letter of praise for the work they did
that night.
I write as a private soldier with no knowledge of what was the plan and the
strategy behind what we did. That first week in October seemed to be an unending
succession of fatigues and of moving from one spot to another. One drew one's
