S.O.S. Stand to! | Page 3

from being thrown off and having my precious neck broken.
To prevent in some measure the rain trickling down my neck, I took a rubber sheet, used to cover the horses, tied the two corners together, making a sort of cape of it, and put it round my neck.
Then I settled myself down to hold on to the limber and think at the same time of the great game of which I had become an infinitesimal part. I was sitting on the right hand side of the limber close to the wheel and, before long, the effort to think and hold on at the same time was too much for me, and I fell into a fairly sound sleep, Sergeant Johnson, my companion, doing likewise.
While dozing, the string from the end of the cape engaged itself with the axle, wound itself round and round and started pulling me down. When I awoke it had a grip on me and every moment I was being drawn closer to the wheel. I yelled to the driver to stop the horse, but the rattling and rumble of the limber and the gun carriage drowned my call; neither he nor the Sergeant heard me. Numb with cold, absolutely helpless, my head almost down to the wheel, I gave one more yell for dear life. The Sergeant suddenly and providentially woke up; he thought he had a nightmare. I was almost choked and could hardly breathe, but managed to make him understand, and he whipped out his knife, cut the string and released me from what in a couple of seconds more would have been instant death, as I would have been pulled from my seat and crushed to a jelly between the wheels. This was my first close shave from death. I had no horseshoe or four-leaf clover with me, and I can account for my escape in no other way than that it was my lucky star that has accompanied me throughout the long months of times that try men's souls and that has never deserted me.
No further mishaps befell until I was safely aboard ship. I was in charge of a fatigue party, bringing hay from the bulkheads of the ship up on to the different decks for the horses; there was a pulley leading to the bottom of the boat by means of which the hay was hoisted up, and in going down each man gripped it and was slowly lowered. On the trip down the men would cling to the rope, two or three at a time, with about ten to twenty feet of space between them. In making a downward trip I was second; the man ahead of me going down was over twenty feet from me; and the rope suddenly slipping off the pulley and out of the hands of the men running it, I dropped fifty feet. The man below on the rope broke his leg and on top of him I fell. Although my drop was twenty or thirty feet longer than his, on account of the space between us being that much greater, I was none the worse except for a bad shaking-up. Like all the men in Canada's First Division, my pal was in excellent physical shape, and it was not long before his leg mended and he was himself again. Nothing of further moment happened until we heard the welcome call of land!
The different batteries were ordered to remove their guns, limbers and horses from the boat, and I had charge of one party unloading guns and limbers. A derrick and cable was used to lift our pets from the vessel's hold, swing them up across the side of the boat and over on to the dock. In my duty I was stationed on the dock, catching hold of the guns and wagons as they were swung out and over by the derrick, and pulling them across on to the dock. While pulling over a gun, the cable skidded and the gun, coming on top of me, caught me partly under it, knocking me unconscious. Luckily the weight of the gun did not fall on me in its entirety; if it had, I would not be telling this story; it caught me on the hip, dislocating the hip bone. I was removed to the ship's hospital and was under the doctor's care till morning, and from there I went to a hospital in Plymouth City for six weeks. From there I was removed to the field general hospital in Salisbury Plain, where I tarried an additional ten days. While here I had a two-fold adventure.
The hospital was in a tent where I reclined with forty other patients, and directly opposite our tent was another in which were confined under guard a number of patients