2IO
THE YPRES TIMES
By WILL R. BIRD.
IN this high-speed age that has followed the war there is no time to halt on the
travelled ways and study those whom we meet. Everyone is swung along in
the mad turmoil for money and prestige, and it is only those whose hearts have
been branded too deeply to heal who turn aside at the little lanes and seek out the
tired, listless ones not entered in the race.
The lads who lie buried in known or unknown graves over there will never
come back to us. They have gone on. But there are many others who, while they
are with us, are really in another world from which there is no return. They, too,
will never come back to us. They are chained by pictures that are burned in their
brain, by sounds that still ring in their ears, by things which will grip their souls
until death shall release them. They are the prisoners who cannot escape-and
they are the listless ones not entered in the race.
One of the little lanes aside from the racing throng leads to a remote
country home in the province of New Brunswick, and there, away from all that jars
or offends the ear or eye, Danny Dick awaits his release, one of the prisoners who
cannot escape.
Danny Dick was a farmer boy who loved horses, and he enlisted in the
Canadian Mounted Rifles. They landed in France in '15 and, after numberless
working parties, his battalion was disbanded in order to bring another up to
infantry strength, and Danny Dick was told that he would never have a horse to
ride into battle, and found himself a bomber of the Fourth Canadian (dismounted)
Rifles then in trenches near Hooge. He was a well-built athletic chap with a sunny
disposition and a merry laugh, and was liked by all his platoon.
On the night of May 31stJune 1st, 1916, the 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles
took over, from the 58th Battalion, the trenches just south of Hooge, a corner of a
salient known as Mount Sorrel. They sent scouts on a patrol along the front, and
these men reported that the Germans were digging saps into no man's land. The
Colonel himself went out to the ruins of a building and there listened and watched,
trying to learn the intentions of the enemy, but the Germans were quiet. There
was a fifty-yard gap between the trenches of the 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles
and the 5th Battalion, and the line was held by the Royal Canadians, the Princess
Pats, the 1st Canadian Mounted Rifles, the 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles, the Fifth
and others of the 1st Division, extending in this order south to the canal.
Stand-to was between four and five o'clock on the morning of Tune 2nd,
and after it was over Danny Dick went back to his bivvy" to rest, as the world
seemed fairly quiet. But, at half-past eight, the heavens seemed to split asunder.
A deluge of Minnies fell in front of, behind, and in the trench of the Fourth,
burying men in their shelters, destroying machine guns, ammunition, blowing in
entire bays. Salvos of shells poured over the Canadian lines, seeming to come
from every direction. There men who were huddled in the far end of the bay were
buried by one' shell, and Danny tried to dig them out. In the tempest of shell fire
it was 'impossible to be heard, and he could not summon assistance, and soon the
men on either side of him were stricken, some wounded, some killed, and the
wounded were gradually buried as shell bursts flattened parapets and tossed sand
bags about like playthings. From Hooge to trench 47, a mile and a quarter, a
