112
THE YPRES TIMES
crumped back of the Prison. The little lane among piled wreckage where we sat
and shivered until waiting became intolerable and we scrambled over debris into a
dank, shadowy passage with a film of moisture on its walls, ending at a door as cold
and rigid as anything in death. I can see again, in its dreadful scum and
desolation, the part of California Trench we occupied on a night of incessant rain, with
a foot of water in its depths and no place where any man could lie. We sprawled against
the slimy, sloping banks of the trench, which was only a huge ditch, our heads and
shoulders covered with ground sheets, our feet ankle deep in the mire, trying to hold
ourselves there while we dozed. Every now and then some poor chap, worn beyond
resistance, would slide down into the muck. His comrades would pull him, whimpering,
back to his place and try to hold him there. It was a night of incredible weariness and
the drizzle in the ghoulish dawn chilled us to the bone. Plastered with mud, red-eyed
from lack of rest, irritable beyond measure, we stood about like cattle huddled in a
storm, and watched an officer slide into the trench actually to see if it were clean,that
we had not left a cigarette butt visible. And the shell came, one of those heart-stopping,
high velocity brutes, as if sent to complete the gruesome picture. I can see again the
men standing there, scarcely looking a second time at the mangled remains.
And the tents at St. Jean, leaking, rain-soaked, filthy, with wooden flooring
covered with mud and water, where we placed our steel helmets and packs on the floor
and sat on them, back to back, cramped and doubled, trying not to topple over when
we reached a comatose state that answered for sleep, sitting there in the dark,
unmoving, without speaking, numbed by the awfulness of everything while icy water
pooled inches deep wherever the floor might sag.
Then rain and rain, and more rain, and we, in kilts, so soaked and bedraggled
that rain had ceased to mean more misery, in assisting gunners to drag their guns
through quagmires in which mules bogged and drowned, toppling the guns over and
over in the soupy morass, twenty or thirty pulling on the ropes.
Memories. I see now, as then, those big, black-winged Gothas overhead,
dropping bombs on the shell-laden mules and long files of working parties.
The plunging, wading, labouring move we made from Abraham Heights to the
front line stands out among all the frightfulness of that first tour as the one that tested
every ounce of our endurance. We had had nothing warm in our stomachs for two days
and we had spent hours in craters unfit to shelter any living thing. The night was
pitch-black, and drenching, the mud more than knee-deep in many places. Somehow,
we reached our lineto relieve a remnant of a company who had simply squatted in
the swamp and made no attempt at trenching. They were exhausted beyond word or
gesture. We slumped down where they had been, then, lashed by our wills, sluggish
muscles responded. A sort of line was dug, and one hole in which our platoon had
placed its machine gun was deepened enough to permit a cavity in its side over which
we hung a groundsheet, and in which we placed a mess tin and tommy cookers. We
made tea, boiling, strength-giving tea, getting the water from a shell-hole in front of
the post I had made. As one mess tin was being emptied another was being heated,
and so it went until morning.
From out in front, where shattered stubs protruded like fingers of a dead hand
reaching to high heaven in protest, there came a constant groaning, long shuddering
moans, and at last two sergeants clambered from our ditch and went exploring. They
came back, labouring and gasping, carrying a German soldier. He had been terribly
wounded and gangrene had already set in. In lucid minutes before daylight he gritted
his teeth and snarled at us like a cornered animal. But in the first light he was carried
back, an hour of frightful labour, to the pillbox that was being used as a first aid post
and there, before he could be taken inside, a shell killed him and one of the lads who
helped the stretcher-bearers.
Memories. That long day, crouching in our ditch in helpless, freezing,
unnerving waiting while shells burst behind, in front, overhead, all around us, but
