BY THE SEAT OF MY PANTS: CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER 2

 

 

On December 1, 1916, I was drafted into the 42^nd Black Watch in France. I landed at Le Havre aboard a troop carrier.  I went directly to the Canadian Corps base, an operational and administrative grouping of most Canadian fighting units and their supporting services. I waded through mud up to my knees. My accommodation was a bell tent housing twenty men. We were jammed in so tight it was impossible to take a full breath. A few days later, we were shipped to the front lines. I was given a sniper role. D

The winter of 1916 to 1917 was relatively quiet. I spent five days on the front line, five days in support and five days in reserve. In March 1917, I was pulled from the front line to train for the assault on Vimy Ridge. Practice trenches and battleground miniatures were built and used to rehearse. I spent hours and days reviewing the simulation with thousands of other soldiers. On            April 7^th, we went up the line at night and slept in a wheat field. It was raining, and we had no shelter. On April 8^th, we moved into position for the jump-off the following day. The morning of April 9^th, we woke up to sleet and overcast skies. We brushed off any lice found crawling on our bedding and went through the mud along the trenches. We were going to live, or we were going to die. We reached the Bosch (a French slang word meaning rascal that was applied to German soldiers) line and annihilated everyone. By eleven, we had reached our objective of occupying a German trench, but many soldiers died and lay in no man's land to rot. We moved about one hundred yards forward that night and dug a new trench. Heine (German occupier) didn’t have the artillery range, resulting in shells flying over our heads. We went without food or water for three days until we were relieved. We rotated into and out of the front lines to provide a break from combat stress. We spent four to six days in the front trenches before moving back and spending an equal number of days in the secondary and, finally, the reserve trenches. This system of rotation prevented many soldiers from breaking down.

At night, I slipped out of the trench and crawled on my hands and knees through no man's land to a stump close to an adjacent tree line. My role as a sniper was simple: kill or be killed. After about thirty minutes of quiet watching - with my rifle in a ready position, I saw movement up behind the Pimple. The day was bright and clear, and I hadn't the slightest difficulty in taking a most calculated aim, but somehow, I couldn't press the trigger to shoot a fellow human deliberately in cold blood. It wasn’t like shooting squirrels and small game back home. This required more real courage than I possessed. After a good look around, my target disappeared, and I argued with myself about my duty. If my enemy were fool enough to come up again, I would not hesitate to shoot him. I consider it my duty to be ready for that contingency. He was a fool, and I did my duty. Before the war, I was a skilled marksman and did not doubt this man's death. I felt weird for days, and the shooting of another German at stand-to the next morning did nothing to remove those horrid feelings I had. We secured an elephant gun which could penetrate through enemy loop-holes. F The next day, I was sent on respite. I reflected on my actions in the tree trunk but concluded I had done my duty. On the way back to the front line, a piece of shrapnel broke my shoulder, but I never reported it. An x-ray of my shoulder in 1947 at the University Hospital in Edmonton revealed the healed blade. However, on the same trip, I ran afoul of a machine gun, and my right leg suffered a bit. I was in the hospital from June 8th, 1917, till the end of September.

          Here is an example of why you should always be on the bit. One day, we were lined up on the parade ground. I was the first man on the right when the sergeant said, “First two files, two steps forward.” We were marched off to the core of engineers. I was on the running personnel of a narrow-gauge railway delivering supplies behind the front lines. It was perilous. There was continuous shelling, but we ate well and slept well behind enemy lines. Each division required 1000 tonnes of supplies, equivalent to two 50-wagon trains, daily. This interlude lasted till January 2018, when we entered the gates of hell, Passchendaele, and hell it was. Monsoon rains turned the battlefield into a mud bog filled with dead soldiers, dead horses, and submerged tanks. Four thousand of my comrades were slaughtered at Passchendaele. I took a knee and thanked God for my continued safekeeping. In spring 2018, we returned to the Vimy front and started the long push over the Plains of Duai. Our victory at Vimy had given us the upper ground as we marched to Mons, Belgium. G

 

 

On November 11, 2018, the guns went silent.

 

 

My friend and I were given leave, so we went to Paris. I was an avid reader back home. I dreamed of visiting Paris and the Eiffel Tower one day, so this was my chance. H We made the most of our visit to Paris by visiting the Arc De Triomphe and climbing the Eiffel Tower. We walked by a few brothels but resisted the temptation.

We returned to Le Havre just before being shipped to Ryles, Wales, for demobilization. Here, I went through my third riot. The first one was in Aldershot; The Second one was in the burning of Witley camp in England, and now Ryle, where there was mayhem when conscripts were being sent home before volunteers. It was a terrible night. The officer's quarters were machine-gunned, and everything else was looted and burned to the ground. I spent the night in the bottom of a trench for fear I would get shot by friendly fire. I spent three years here and was not going home in a body bag.

          In March 1919, I returned to Canada. The North Atlantic in March was something else. We had a rough trip aboard the thirty-five thousand-ton Belgic. I was discharged in March 1919.

 

Interesting fact:

I wouldn't say that Canadian soldiers were considered fearless. But the Germans feared them and created a memorable name for them - storm troops. Perhaps the main reason was that they were consistently victorious on the battlefield despite the British high command using them as cannon fodder. Time and again, they achieved seemingly impossible tasks after everyone else had tried and failed.

 

          As unbelievable as it may sound, my grandfather never laid hands on a typewriter until his seventies. He had an uncanny grasp of the English language. I learned that quite early while playing Scrabble. He was quite a poet. His poetry was a collection of life experiences from his time during WW1 until he died in 1981; I am forever blessed. He always had an opinion. Here are two—one from Vimy Ridge and one from Passchendaele.

 

VIMY

Make your way, make your way in mud ‘long the trenches,

You will live or be dead.

 

The front line is reached zero hour approaches

You lean on the parapet, awaiting the hour.

Breaks into a roar, the artillery behind you

Up over the parapet forward, you bore.

 

The Bosch line is reached and annihilated in passing

The advance continued to the lip of the ridge.

By eleven o’clock, we have reached our objective

But for many a poor soul, the last dismal dirge.

 

 

 

 

 

PASSCHENDAELE

Mud, mud, liquid mud

As far as the eye can wander.

The quaking mud doth swallow up

Man, mule, and cannons thunder.

 

Is then man's destiny

In the mud, there lying?

An inert form and mangled limbs

Is this the end this dying?

 

In nature, one life doth pass.

Engendering many others

The maggots swell the carcass up

And from his gaping mouth

To nature, ‘tis no bother.

 

 

 

 

BLURB

 

A

As a wartime measure, the Olympic was painted in a grey colour scheme, portholes were blocked, and deck lights were turned off to make the ship less visible.

The vessel had been leased by the Canadian government from 1916 to 1917. She was a sister passenger ship to the ill-fated Titanic that had sunk in 1912 in the North Atlantic. The Olympic was designated as an HMT or a HIRED MILITARY TRANSPORT. The 45,000-ton ship was lent to the war effort by THE WHITE STAR LINE. The ship had to be armed to defend the troops, so she was retrofitted with 12-pounders, a gun that shot a projectile of about twelve pounds, and 4.7-inch guns. She was retrofitted again the following year with six-inch guns.

Carrying more Canadian soldiers than any other troopship, the Olympic was vital to Canada's war effort. Able to accommodate close to 6000 troops at a time, Olympic made ten round trips from Liverpool to Halifax between March and December 1916.

 

B

SM U-103 was an Imperial German Navy Type U 57 U-boat rammed and sunk by HMT Olympic during the First World War.

 

C

King David I built the chapel around 1130 and named it for his mother. Queen Margaret, said to have performed many acts of charity, was canonized by Pope Innocent IV in 1250. In the 1500s, the chapel was used as a gunpowder store – it was later given bomb-proof vaulting.

 

D

During the First World War (1914-18) the regiment raised 25 battalions for service in France and Flanders, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. By the time of the Armistice in November 1918, over 8,000 members of the regiment had lost their lives.

 

E

At the start of the war, only Imperial Germany had troops that were issued scoped sniper rifles. Although sharpshooters existed on all sides, the Germans specially equipped some of their soldiers with scoped rifles that could pick off enemy soldiers showing their heads out of their trench.

Before Vimy, maps were for officers only - but not anymore! Maps were handed out to every soldier (40,000 in all), and each man knew his precise objective and approximate time of arrival before going into battle.

 

F

Loopholes were steel plates built into parapets to let soldiers see out of a trench without exposing their heads to enemy fire.  By the end of 1915, France was mass-producing the first generally-issued steel helmet of the 20th century. As early as November 1915, British military authorities recognized that every soldier on the battlefield should always be equipped with a helmet.

 

G

The final period, known to the Canadian Corps as the Pursuit to Mons, was part of a general pursuit all along the front throughout October 1918.

 

H

Origins and Construction of the Eiffel Tower

For the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the date that marked the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, a great competition was launched in 1886.

 

The first digging work started on the 26th of January, 1887. On the 31st of March 1889, the Tower was finished in record time – 2 years, two months, and five days – and was established as a veritable technical feat. Gustave Eiffel built the tower, which would have been torn down due to a twenty-year lease, except for its use as a giant radio antenna.

 

I

During World War I, in Paris alone, US Army officials estimated that there were 40 major brothels, 5,000 professionally licensed streetwalkers, and another 70,000 unlicensed prostitutes. By 1917, at least 137 such establishments across 35 towns on or close to the Western Front.

One of the most significant disease challenges for medical officers during the war years was not typical camp infections like measles or mumps but sexually transmitted diseases, mainly gonorrhea and syphilis.  Long acknowledged as a drain on the military, the diseases accounted for more sick time than any other ailment except influenza.