THE YPRES TIMES
169
At the head of the pontoon bridge, crossing the Canal, stood a French officer with
a revolver in each hand, threatening to shoot any man attempting to cross to the rear,
but on recognizing that the writer belonged to the Artillery, he inquired the situation,
an outline of which he attempted to give him, when a heavy shell struck the bridge, and
the next thing that he recalls is his waking up and finding himself immersed up to
the neck in the Yser Canal and finding that the pontoon bridge was no longer in existence.
Getting out as best he could, he proceeded along the bank of the Canal, picking up such
information as he thought would be useful for his battery commander.
A terrible sight was the country-side. When the first gas had appeared,
the Senegalese, thinking that it was a devil, had raised shouts of un diable vert arrive,"
and in spite of the most heroic efforts on the part of their officers to stay them, they had
retreated en masse, many being asphyxiated by the wayside, and the majority of the
others being mown down by the ruthless shell and machine-gun fire. The same fate
had befallen the majority of the French Territorials, while the Canadians to the east,
although many had been asphyxiated or killed by shell and machine-gun fire, had,
to a large degree, held fast.
It will be recalled that a break of several thousands of yards was left open to the
Germans, who, in all probability, at that moment more than any other during the
war, had a supreme opportunity of breaking the Allied front, had they but used it.
Down across the fields came a staggering, howling, shrieking, coughing mob of
French coloured troops, Territorials and mixed troops of all armies, enveloped in the
deadly greenish-yellow mist. Add to this picture the continual bursting of shrapnel
shells, the rattle of machine-gun fire and the roar of the battle, and no picture of Dante's
Inferno can compare, for in the pictures, at least, one is spared one of the worst
features of modern warfarethe almost incredible volume of mind-torturing sound.
But to return to the adventure. Separating himself from this mass of struggling
humanity, the scribe, in endeavouring to trace his battery, stumbled on two lonely
field guns of an isolated Canadian battery. Innocently he asked the way to the Blank
Battery of the Lahore Division, and almost immediately the Canadian Sergeant-Major,
being quite accountably in a state of nerves, and looking at the writer's dishevelled
appearance, and seeing the German hat peeping out of his pocket, placed him under
arrest as a spy. To make matters worse, on being asked the name of his battery com
mander, and to which brigade his battery belonged, the writer was incapable of replying,
his memory being temporarily gone, as a result of the experiences he had been through.
A heated debate apparently was then held as to what was to be done, and, being
searched, of course, the letters and documents which he had picked up earlier in the day
in the cellar were found, and were considered to be damning evidence.
In those days there was short shrift for spies caught in the act, and he would have
been shot then and there without mercy, had it not been for the fortunate fact that
no officer was available and the Sergeant-Major was loth, under those circumstances, to
take the responsibility, after the writer had made what possibly was the best and most
impassioned speech he has made or ever will make in his life-time.
And so, stumbling and violently ill, he was marched between a patrol of men, the
Sergeant-Major following behind with drawn revolver, some five miles to the nearest
General Staff, expecting at any moment that the Sergeant-Major's revolver would
accidentally go off, to save the trouble of the march. On arrival at General Staff
Headquarters, and with great difficulty obtaining an immediate interview with the
General, the scribe was quickly able to establish his innocence, and was thunderstruck
to hear the General ask him Is it really true that they are using gas a supreme
example of the communication difficulties in modern warfare and of its vital importance.
Having obtained permission to rejoin his battery, he was given an escort of an
N.C.O. and two men, and plunged across the now dark fields in the general direction of
his battery, collecting on the way a number of other lost souls attempting to refind
their units.
