Private Peat Part 7

I am not an Englishman, and I did not think very much of an Englishman before going overseas. I regarded him more or less as not "worth while." It did not take a year to convince me that the Englishman is very much "worth while."

The English soldier chums up quickly. The traditional formality and conventionality of the English are traditions only. There is none of it in the trenches.

Discipline there is, strict discipline, among men and officers. Between officer and man there is a marked respect, and a marked good fellowship which never degenerates into familiarity.

There is love between the English officer and the English soldier. A love that has been proved many times, when the commissioned man has sacrificed his life to save the man of lower rank; when the private has crossed the pathway of h.e.l.l itself to save a fallen leader.

The English soldier, and when I say English I mean to include Welsh, Scotch and Irish, reserves to himself the right to "grouse." He grouses at everything great or small which has no immediate or vital bearing on the situation. As soon as anything arises that would really warrant a grouse--napoo! Tommy Atkins then begins to smile. He grouses when he has to clean his b.u.t.tons; he grouses loudly and fiercely when a puttee frays to rags, and he grouses when his tea is too hot.

But when Tommy runs out of ammunition, is partly surrounded by the enemy, is almost paralyzed by bombardment; when he is literally in the last ditch, with a strip of cold steel the only thing between him and death--then Tommy smiles, then he cracks a joke. Without a thought of himself, without a murmur, he faces any desperate plight.

He smiles as he rattles his last bullet into place; he grins as his bayonet snaps from the hilt, and he goes to it hand-to-hand with doubled fists, a tag of a song on his lips, for "Death or Glory."

That is Tommy Atkins as I saw him. That is the real Britisher of the Old Country. We shall know him from now on in his true light, and the knowledge will make for a better understanding among the peoples of the English-speaking world.

It was Sandy Clark who, eating a hunch of bread and bully beef in a dugout, got partly buried when an H.E. (high explosive) came over. Sandy crawled out unhurt, his sandwich somewhat muddy but intact, and made his way down the trench to a clear s.p.a.ce. Here he sat down beside a sentry, finished his bully beef and muddy bread, wiped his mouth, and remarked some ten minutes after the explosion: "That was a close one."

Imperturbable under danger; certain of his own immediate immunity from death; confident of his regiment's invincibility; with a deep-rooted love of home and an unalterable belief in the might and right of Britain--there is Tommy Atkins.

Looking back from the vantage point of nearly two years, it seems to me that we were somewhat like young unbroken colts. We were restless and untrained, with an overplus of spirits difficult to control. Gradually the English Tommy influenced us until we gained much of his steadiness of purpose, his bulldog tenacity and his insouciance.

Tommy never instructed us by word of mouth. He lived his creed in his daily rounds. He never knows that he is beaten, therefore a beating is never his.

We have gained the same outlook, simply by a.s.sociation with him.

Were I a general and had I a position to _take_, I would choose soldiers of one nation as quickly as another--French, Australians, Africans, Indians, Americans or Canadians. Were I a general and had I a position to _retain_, to hold against all odds, then, without a moment's hesitation, I would send English troops and English troops only.

Now and again an American or a Canadian newspaper would come our way.

"Anything to read" is a never-ending cry at the front, and every sc.r.a.p of newspaper is read, discussed and read again. In the early days of 1914-15, these newspapers would have long and weighty editorials which called forth longer and weightier letters from "veritas" and "old subscriber." We boys read those editorials and letters, and wondered; wondered how sane men could waste time in writing such stuff, how sane men could set it in type and print it, and more than all we wondered how sane men could read it.

"Who started the war?" they asked.

"Bah!" we would say to one another, "who started the war? If only those folks who write and print and read such piffle, no matter what their nationality, could have had five minutes' look at the German trenches and another five minutes' look at the French and British trenches--never again would they query, 'Who started the war?'"

We of the Allied army knew nothing of trench warfare. After the fierce onslaught on Paris, which failed, the Germans entrenched. Thank G.o.d, they did. They entrenched, and by entrenching they have won the war for us. They made a mistake then that they can never now retrieve.

They were in a position to choose, and they chose to entrench in the high dry sections, leaving the low-lying swamps, the damp marshy lands, for us.

We had no alternative. It was either to take a stand there on what footing was left or be wiped off the map. We stood.

On that sector between La Ba.s.see and Armentieres it was practically an impossibility to dig in. The muddy water was of inconceivable thickness along the greater length of the whole front. It oused and eddied, it seemed to swirl and draw as though there were a tide. We did not attempt to dig.

We raised sandbag breastworks some five or six feet high and lay behind them day in and day out for an eternity, as it seemed.

Our shift in the trenches was supposed to be four days and four nights in.

It never was shorter, sometimes much longer. Once we spent eleven days and nights in the trenches without a shift, because our reinforcing battalion was called away to another sector of the front. I know of a Highland Battalion that was in twenty-eight days and nights without a change.

We were unequipped as to uniform. We were in the regulation khaki of other days. We had no waterproof overcoats. We had puttees, but the greater number of us had no rubber boots. A very few of the men had boots of rubber that reached to the knees. At first we envied the possessors of these, but not for long. The water and mud, and shortly the blood, rose above the top and ran down inside the leg of the boot. The wearers could not remove the mud, and trench feet, frost bite, gangrene, was their immediate portion. We lost as many men, that first winter of the war, by these terrible afflictions as we did by actual bullets and sh.e.l.l fire.

To us who had come from the Far Northwest the weather was a terrible trial.

Our winters were possibly more severe, but we could stand them so much better, with their sharp dry cold in contrast to the damp, misty, soaking chill of this non-zero country. Possibly, at night, the thermometer would register some two or three degrees below freezing. A thin sh.e.l.l of ice would form on the ditch which we called a trench. This would crackle round our legs and the cold would eat into the very bone. At dawn the ice would begin to break up and a steady sleet begin to fall. Later the sleet would turn to rain, and so the day would pa.s.s till we were soaked through to the skin. At night the frost would come again and stiffen our clothes to our tortured bodies, next day another thaw and rain, and so to the end of our turn, or to the time when an enemy bullet would finish our physical suffering.

We could have borne all this without a murmur, and did bear it in a silence that was grim, but we had a greater strain, a mental one, with which to contend. We knew--we knew without a doubt that we were out there alone. We had not a reserve behind us. We had not a t.i.the of the gun power which we should have had. Our artillery was not appreciable in quant.i.ty. What there was of it was effective, but as compared to the enemy gun power we were nowhere. They had possibly ten to our one. They were very considerably stronger than they are to-day. We, to-day, can say with truth that we are where they were in 1914-15. We, with our two years of hurried and almost frenzied work, and they, with their forty years of crafty preparation!

And they knew how to use those guns, too. Our engineering and pioneer corps at that time were non-existent. We had practically none. The Germans would put over a few sh.e.l.ls during the day. They would level our sandbag breastworks and blow our frail shelters to smithereens. We had no dugouts and no communication trenches. With a sh.e.l.l of tremendous power they would rip up yards of our makeshift defenses and kill half a dozen of our boys.

Sometimes we would groan aloud and pray to see a few German legs and arms fly to the four winds as compensation. But no. We would wire back to artillery headquarters: "For G.o.d's sake, send over a few sh.e.l.ls, even one sh.e.l.l, to silence this h.e.l.l!" And day after day the same answer would come back: "Heaven knows we are sorry, but you've had your allotment of sh.e.l.ls for to-day."

Perhaps one sh.e.l.l, or it may have been three, would have been the ammunition ration of our particular front for the day.

It was n.o.body's fault at the moment of fighting. It lay perhaps between those who had antic.i.p.ated and prepared for war for forty years and those who had neglected to foresee the possibility of such an enterprise. The fact remained, we had no sh.e.l.ls.

Every day our defenses were leveled. Every night we would crawl out, after long hours spent flat on our stomachs, covered to the neck in mud and blood, and endeavor to repair the damage. Every night we lost a few men; every day we lost a few men, and still we held our ground.

The day casualties were the worst. The wounded men had to lie in the damp and dirt until night came to shelter them; then some one would help, or if that were not possible, the wounded would have to make his own pain-strewn way back to a dressing station. During the day some one might discover that he had developed a frozen toe. He could get no relief; he dare not attempt to leave his partial shelter. The slightest movement, and the enemy would have closed his career. By night his foot would be a fiery torture, and by the time a doctor was near enough to help it would be a rotting ma.s.s of gangrene, and one man more would be added to the list of permanent cripples.

I am asked, "How did you live? How did you 'carry on'?"

Many a time I have said to myself in thinking of the enemy: "Why don't they come on--why don't the fools strike now? There's no earthly reason why they should not defeat us, and roll on triumphantly to Paris, to Calais, to London, to New York, and so realize their original intention." There was no _earthly_ reason. No.

The Kaiser had talked in lordly voice of "ME and G.o.d." The Kaiser has manufactured a G.o.d of his own fancy, a G.o.d of blood and iron. There is no such G.o.d for us. For us, there was always that Unseen Hand which held back the enemy in his might. The All Highest who is not on the side of blood and murder and pillage and outrage and violation; the Almighty, who, crudely though I may express it, is with those who fight for the Right and on the square.

And that is why we were not driven back to the sea. That is why we stood the test. That is why we, the Allied Nations, shall win.

Again, if the German hordes, with their iron power behind them, had had five per cent. of the Anglo-Saxon sporting blood in their veins, they could have licked us long ago. They did not. They have not. They are poor sports. They have eliminated the individuality of "sport" for the efficiency of machinery, and they can not lick us.

Who started the war? The War Machine that had the preparation of half a century, or the peace-loving peoples who, at a day's notice, took their stand for humanity?

Who started the war? There is no room for argument. The Germans started the war.

Who will finish the war? There is no room or argument. We will finish the war.

CHAPTER VIII

"AND OUT OF EVIL THERE SHALL COME THAT WHICH IS GOOD"

The worst days of this war are over. The worst days were those through which we came in the winter of 1914-15. The war may last ten years; the war may be over inside of a few months. Neither contingency would surprise me.

We might lose twice as many in killed and wounded as we did through that winter; every white man, British, French, American, of military age, might pay the supreme price, and yet the worst days are gone by.

The worst days of the war pa.s.sed when the chance of the Hun defeating us was lost. Though all the flower of our manhood were crippled or dead, though our old men and our boys were called to the field, though women had to gird on sword and buckler, none of these things could be worse than to be licked--licked is the word--by a dastardly and cowardly foe.

And if the German Army at the zenith of its strength could not lick one thin line of English, of French and Canadians, how can they lick us when we have Uncle Sam in the balance?

A question to daunt even the scientific brain of a Kaiser, of a Hindenburg, of a Von Bernstorff.

The folks back home are always wondering and inquiring how it is possible to feed the troops under such terrible and awful conditions. The folks back home are the only ones who worry. We do not. Tommy Atkins is much more sure of getting his rations to-morrow than he is of living until to-morrow to eat them.

Right here I would pay a sincere tribute to two departments of our British Army. The Commissary Department which supplies every want of the soldier, from a high explosive sh.e.l.l to a b.u.t.ton. It is as near to the one hundred per cent. mark of efficiency as it is possible for a human organization to become. It is not too much to say that it is perfect.