With Our Soldiers in France | Page 4

reflects the flash of the great guns, as with the constant vibration of heat lightning. Flares and Verey lights of greenish yellow and white turn the night into ghastly day, and like the lurid flames of an inferno light up the battlefield, while the rifles crackle in the glare. Here a parachute-light like a great star hangs suspended almost motionless above us, lighting up the whole battlefield, and now a burning farmhouse or exploding ammunition dump illuminates the sky as from some vast subterranean furnace flung open upon the heavens. All the long sullen night the earth is rocked by slow intermittent rumbling, till with the silent dawn the birds wake and the war-giants sink for a few hours in troubled sleep. Then the new day breaks and the war-planes climb in the clear morning air to begin the battle afresh.
But let us turn from the hard-won ground of Messines to some of the men who fought over it and survived. Here is a young American, Fred R----, a graduate of Johns Hopkins, who fought in this battle with the Canadians, and who told us in his own words the story of those brief hours.
"Our opening barrage lasted about twenty minutes, but in that short time some two million shells were dropped on the enemy from about nine thousand of our guns. We could hear no distinct reports, just one steady roar of continuous explosion. The ground shook beneath us and fragments from the trenches and dugouts caved in about us from the shock. The air was oppressive and you felt difficulty in breathing, as if you were in a vacuum.
"About three o'clock in the morning the order came to 'Stand to!' and shortly after the word rang out 'Up and over! Over the top boys, and the best of luck!' With one foot on the fire step we climbed out of the deep trench and with our rifles we started forward at a walk, behind our advancing barrage. I was tense now and all of a tremble. At a time like this every man is driven to his deepest thoughts. It is not fear exactly, but apprehension and dread of the unknown.
"As we started forward, one young boy fell at my side. I heard him call, 'O, Mother!' as he fell. Another cried, 'O, God!' and sank down on the other side. Then my partner, a boy of eighteen, fell, both legs blown away above the knee. I bound up his wounds and carried him on my back to the nearest dressing station. 'Fred,' he said, 'would you mind kissing me just once? So long!' and with that he was gone. Then I got mad and began to see red. In the first trench I ran amuck and with rifle, bayonet, and bombs I suppose I accounted for twenty men in the hour that followed.
"I've been gassed three times, twice with the old gas and once with the new, and I've had my share. Would I like to go home now? Say, I'd rather be a lamp-post at the foot of Michigan Boulevard in Chicago than the whole electric light system in all the rest of the universe!"
We turned from this young American to Sapper W---- of Western Canada, who had just been through the same battle underground, and asked him to tell us his own story.
"Well, sir, long before the battle we were digging under Hill Number 60. A chance shell exploded on the surface above us and buried us all underground. Three of us were killed and the other two left alive. I had one man across my chest and another across my legs, one dead and the other wounded. We could not move hand or foot. We were buried in there for seven hours and they finally dug us out unconscious.
"Then we started another sap to lay a mine. My pal was listening, with an iron rod driven in the ground and two copper wires leading from it to a head piece, such as a wireless operator uses, so that we could hear the approach of the enemy's sappers, who were countermining against us. My pal asked me to come and listen. But I had hardly got the headpiece on when I said, 'O Lord, they're on us!' and before I could get the thing off my ears the end of our sap fell through and the Germans were at us. There was only room to use revolvers and bayonets in that dark hole and the Germans seemed to get nervous and could not shoot straight in the panic. We lost only one of our men, but we killed seven and took the rest of the twenty prisoners. Then, before they found out what had happened, we crawled through to the German end of the tunnel