TRAINING FOR THE WAR

BEST O' LUCK

CHAPTER I

TRAINING FOR THE WAR

I don't lay claim to being much of a writer, and up 'till now I never felt the call to write anything about my experiences with the Canadian troops in Belgium and France, because I realized that a great many other men had seen quite as much as I, and could beat me telling about it. Of course, I believed that my experience was worth re­lating, and I thought that the matter pub­lished in the newspapers by professional writers sort of missed the essentials and lacked the spirit of the "ditches" in a good many ways despite its excellent literary style, but I didn't see any reason why it was up to me to make an effort as a war histo­rian, until now.

Now, there is a reason, as I look at it.

I believe I can show the two or three mil­lions of my fellow countrymen who will be "out there" before this war is over what they are going to be up against, and what they ought to prepare for, personally and individually.

That is as far as I am going to go in the way of excuse, explanation, or comment. The rest of my story is a simple rela­tion of facts and occurrences in the order in which they came to my notice and happened to me. It may start off a little slowly and jerkily, just as we did not knowing what was coming to us. I'd like to add that it got quite hot enough to suit me later—several times. Therefore, as my effort is going to be to carry you right along with me in this account of my experiences, don't be impatient if nothing very impor­tant seems to happen at first. I felt a little ennui myself at the beginning. But that was certainly one thing that didn't annoy me later.

In the latter part of October, 1915, I de­cided that the United States ought to be fighting along with England and France on account of the way Belgium had been treated, if for no other reason. As there seemed to be a considerable division of opin­ion on this point among the people at home, I came to the conclusion that any man who was free, white, and twenty-one and felt as I did, ought to go over and get into it single-handed on the side where his convictions led him, if there wasn't some particular reason why he couldn't. Therefore, I said good-by to my parents and friends in Lexington, and started for New York with the idea of sailing for France, and joining the Foreign Legion of the French Army.

A couple of nights after I got to New York I fell into conversation in the Knickerbocker bar with a chap who was in the reinforce­ment company of Princess Pat's regiment of the Canadian forces. After my talk with him, I decided to go up to Canada and look things over. I arrived at the Windsor Ho­tel, in Montreal, at eight o'clock in the morning, a couple of days later, and at ten o'clock the same morning I was sworn in as a private in the Canadian Grenadier Guards, Eighty-seventh Overseas Battalion, Lieut.-Col. F. S. Meighen, Commanding.

They were just getting under way mak­ing soldiers out of the troops I enlisted with, and discipline was quite lax. They at once gave me a week's leave to come down to New York, and settle up some personal affairs, and I overstayed it five days. All that my company commander said to me when I got back was that I seemed to have picked up Canadian habits very quickly. At a review one day in our training camp, I heard a Major say:

"Boys, for God's sake don't call me Harry or spit in the ranks. Here comes the Gen­eral!"

We found out eventually that there was a reason for the slackness of discipline. The trouble was that men would enlist to get $1.10 a day without working for it, and would desert as soon as any one made it un­pleasant for them. Our officers knew what they were about Conditions changed in­stantly we went on ship-board. Discipline tightened up on us like, a tie-rope on a colt.

We trained in a sort of casual, easy way in Canada from November 4th to the fol­lowing April. We had a good deal of trou­ble keeping our battalion up to strength, and I was sent out several times with other "non-coms" on a recruiting detail.

Aside from desertions, there were rea­sons why we couldn't keep our quota. The weeding out of the physically un­fit brought surprising and extensive re­sults. Men who appeared at first amply able to stand "the game" were unable to keep up when the screw was turned. Then, also, our regiment stuck to a high physical standard. Every man must be five feet ten, or over. Many of our candidates failed on the perpendicular requirement only. How­ever, we were not confined to the ordinary rule in Canada, that recruits must come from the home military district of the bat­talion. We were permitted to recruit throughout the Dominion, and thus we gathered quite a cosmopolitan crowd. The only other unit given this privilege of Do­minion-wide recruiting was the P. P. C. L. I. (Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry), the first regiment to go over­seas from Canada, composed largely of vet­erans of the South African and other colo­nial wars. We felt a certain emulation about this veteran business and voiced it in our recruiting appeals. We assured our pro­spective "rookies" that we were just as first-class as any of them. On most of our recruit­ing trips we took a certain corporal with us who had seen service in France with a Mon­treal regiment and had been invalided home. He was our star speaker. He would mount a box or other improvised stand and describe in his simple, soldierly way the splendid achievements of the comrades who had gone over ahead of us, and the opportunities for glory and distinction awaiting any brave man who joined with us. When he described his experiences there was a note of com­pelling eloquence and patriotic fervor in his remarks which sometimes aroused the greatest enthusiasm. Often he was cheered as a hero and carried on men's shoulders from the stand, while recruits came forward in flocks and women sweepingly bade them go on and do their duty. I learned, after­wards that this corporal had been a cook, had never been within twenty miles of the front line, and had been invalided home for varicocele veins. He served us well; but there was a man who was misplaced, in vo­cation and geography. He should have been in politics in Kentucky.

While we were in the training camp at St. Johns, I made the acquaintance of a young Canadian who became my "pal." He was Campbell Macfarlane, nephew of George Macfarlane, the actor who is so well known on the American musical stage. He was a sergeant. When I first knew him, he was one of the most delightful and amusing young fellows you could imagine.

The war changed him entirely. He be­came extremely quiet and seemed to be borne down with the sense of the terrible things which he saw. He never lost the good-fellowship which was inherent in him, and was always ready to do anything to oblige one, but he formed the habit of sit­ting alone and silent, for hours at a time, just thinking. It seemed as if he had a pre­monition about himself, though he never showed fear and never spoke of the dangers we were going into, as the other fellows did. He was killed in the Somme action in which I was wounded.

I'm not much on metaphysics and it is difficult for me to express the thought I would convey here. I can just say, as I would if I were talking to a pal, that I have often wondered what the intangible mental or moral quality is that makes men think and act so differently to one another when confronted by the imminent prospect of sud­den death. Is it a question of will power—of imagination, or the lack of it—of some­thing that you can call merely physical cour­age—or what? Take the case of Macfar­lane: In action he was as brave as they make them, but, as I have said before, the prospect of sudden death and the presence of death and suffering around him changed him ut­terly. From a cheerful, happy lad he was transformed into an old man, silent, gloomy and absent-minded except for momentary flashes of his old spirit which became less and less frequent as the time for his own end drew nearer.

There was another chap with us from a little town in Northern Ontario. While in Canada and England he was utterly worth­less; always in trouble for being absent with­out leave, drunk, late on parade, or some­thing else. I think he must, at one time or an­other, have been charged with every offense possible under the K. R.&O. (King's Regu­lations and Orders). On route marches he was constantly "falling out." I told him, one day when I was in command of a pla­toon, that he ought to join the Royal Flying Corps. Then he would only have to fall out once. He said that he considered this a very good joke and asked me if I could think of anything funny in connection with being ab­sent without leave which he was, that night. In France, this chap was worth ten ordinary men. He was always cheerful, al­ways willing and prompt in obeying orders, ready to tackle unhesitatingly the most un­pleasant or the most risky duty, and the hot­ter it was the better he liked it. He came out laughing and unscathed from a dozen tight places where it didn't seem possible for him to escape. To use a much-worn phrase, he seemed to bear a charmed life. I'll wager my last cent that he never gets an "R. I. P."—which they put on the cross above a soldier's grave, and which the Tom­mies call "Rise If Possible." Then there was a certain sergeant who was the best in­structor in physical training and bayonet fighting in our brigade and who was as fine and dashing a soldier in physique and car­riage as you ever could see. When he got under fire he simply went to pieces. On our first bombing raid he turned and ran back into our own barbed wire, and when he was caught there acted like a madman. He was given another chance but flunked worse than ever. I don't think he was a plain coward. There was merely something wrong with his nervous system. He just didn't have the "viscera." Now he is back of the lines, instructing, and will never be sent to the trenches again. We had an officer, also, who was a man of the great­est courage, so far as sticking where he be­longed and keeping his men going ahead might be concerned, but every time he heard a big shell coming over he was seized with a violent fit of vomiting. I don't know what makes men brave or cowardly in action, and I wouldn't undertake to say which quality a man might show until I saw him in action, but I do know this: If a man isn't frightened when he goes under fire, it's because he lacks intelligence. He simply must be frightened if he has the ordinary human attributes. But if he has what we call physical courage he goes on with the rest of them. Then if he has extraordinary courage he may go on where the rest of them won't go. I should say that the greatest fear the ordinary man has in going into action is the fear that he will show that he is afraid not to his offi­cers, or to the Germans, or to the folks back home, but to his mates; to the men with whom he has laughed and scoffed at danger.

It's the elbow-to-elbow influence that car­ries men up to face machine guns and gas. A heroic battalion may be made up of units of potential cowards.

At the time when Macfarlane was given his stripes, I also was made a sergeant on account of the fact that I had been at school in the Virginia Military Institute. That is, I was an acting sergeant. It was explained to me that my appointment would have to be confirmed in England, and then recon­firmed after three months' service in France. Under the regulations of the Canadian forces, a non-commissioned officer, after final confirmation in his grade, can be re­duced to the ranks only by a general court-martial, though he can escape a court-mar­tial, when confronted with charges, by re­verting to the ranks at his own request.

Forty-two hundred of us sailed for Eng­land on the Empress of Britain, sister ship to the Empress of Ireland, which was sunk in the St. Lawrence River. The steamer was, of course, very crowded and uncom­fortable, and the eight-day trip across was most unpleasant. We had tripe to eat until we were sick of the sight of it. A sergeant reported one morning, "eight men and twenty-two breakfasts, absent." There were two other troop ships in our convoy, the Baltic and the Metagama. A British cruiser escorted us until we were four hundred miles off the coast of Ireland; then each ship picked up a destroyer which had come out to meet her. At that time, a notice was posted in the purser's office informing us that we were in the war zone, and that the ship would not stop for anything, even for a man overboard. That day a sol­dier fell off the Metagama with seven hun­dred dollars in his pocket, and the ship never even hesitated. They left him where he had no chance in the world to spend his money.

Through my training in the V. M. I., I was able to read semaphore signals, and I caught the message from the destroyer which escorted us. It read:

"Each ship for herself now. Make a break!"

We beat the other steamers of our convoy eight hours in getting to the dock in Liver­pool, and, according to what seemed to be the regular system of our operations at that time, we were the last to disembark.

The majority of our fellows had never been in England before, and they looked on our travels at that time as a fine lark. Every­body cheered and laughed when they dusted off one of those little toy trains and brought it up to take us away in it. After we were aboard of it, we proceeded at the dizzy rate of about four miles an hour, and our regu­lar company humorist—no company is com­plete without one—suggested that they were afraid, if they went any faster, they might run off of the island before they could stop. We were taken to Bramshott camp, in Hampshire, twelve miles from the Alder­shott School of Command. The next day we were given "King's leave"—eight days with free transportation anywhere in the British Isles. It is the invariable custom to give this sort of leave to all colonial troops immediately upon their arrival in England. However, in our case, Ireland was barred. Just at that time, Ireland was no place for a newly arrived Canadian looking for sport.

Our men followed the ordinary rule of soldiers on leave. About seventy-five per cent, of them wired in for extensions and more money. About seventy-four per cent, received peremptorily unfavorable replies. The excuses and explanations which came in kept our officers interested and amused for some days. One man—who got leave—sent in a telegram which is now framed and hung on the wall of a certain battalion orderly's room. He telegraphed:

"No one dead. No one ill. Got plenty of money. Just having a good time. Please grant extension."

After our leave, they really began to make soldiers of us. We thought our training in Canada had amounted to something. We found out that we might as well have been playing croquet. We learned more the first week of our actual training in England than we did from November to April in Canada. I make this statement without fear that any officer or man of the Canadian forces alive to-day will disagree with me, and I submit it for the thoughtful consideration of the gentlemen who believe that our own armies can be prepared for service here at home.

The sort of thing that the President is up against at Washington is fairly exemplified in what the press despatches mention as "ob­jections on technical grounds" of the "younger officers of the war college," to the recommendations which General Pershing has made as to the reorganization of the units of our army for service in Europe.

The extent of the reorganization which must be made in pursuance of General Pershing's recommendations is not apparent to most people. Even our best informed militia officers do not know how funda­mentally different the organization of Euro­pean armies is to that which has existed in our own army since the days when it was established to suit conditions of the Civil War. But the officers of our regular army realize what the reorganization would mean and some of them rise to oppose it for fear it may jeopardize their seniority or promotion or importance. But they'll have to come to it. The Unites States army can not operate successfully in France unless its units are convenient and similar multiples to those in the French and British armies. It would lead to endless confusion and diffi­culty if we kept the regiment as our field unit while our allies have the battalion as their field unit.

There are but unimportant differences in the unit organization of the French, British and Canadian forces. The British plan of organization is an exemplar of all, and it is what we must have in our army. There is no such thing in the British army as an established regimental strength. A battal­ion numbers 1,500 men, but there is no limit to the number of battalions which a regi­ment may have. The battalion is the field unit. There are regiments in the British army which have seven battalions in the field. Each battalion is commanded by a lieutenant-colonel. All full colonels either do staff duty or act as brigaders. There are five companies of 250 men each in every battalion. That is, there are four regular companies of 250 men each, and a head­quarters company of approximately that strength. Each company is commanded by a major, with a captain as second in com­mand, and four lieutenants as platoon com­manders. There are no second lieuten­ants in the Canadian forces, though there are in the British and French. The senior major of the battalion commands the headquarters company, which in­cludes the transport, quartermaster's staff, paymaster's department (a paymaster and four clerks), and the headquarters staff (a captain adjutant and his non-commissioned staff). Each battalion has, in addition to its full company strength, the following "sections" of from 30 to 75 men each, and each commanded by a lieutenant: bombers, scouts and snipers, machine gunners and sig­nallers. There is also a section of stretcher-bearers, under the direct command of the battalion surgeon, who ranks as a major. In the United States army a battalion is com­manded by a major. It consists merely of four companies of 112 men each, with a cap­tain and two lieutenants to each company.

As I have said, a British or French bat­talion has four ordinary companies of 250 men each and the headquarters company of special forces approximating that num­ber of men. Instead of one major it has six, including the surgeon. It has seven cap­tains, including the paymaster, the adjutant and the quartermaster. It has twenty lieu­tenants, including the commanders of spe­cial "sections." You can imagine what con­fusion would be likely to occur in substitut­ing a United States force for a French or English force, with these differences of organization existing.

In this war, every man has got to be a specialist. He's got to know one thing bet­ter than anybody else except those who have had intensive instruction in the same branch. And besides that, he's got to have effective general knowledge of all the specialties in which his fellow soldiers have been particu­larly trained. I can illustrate this. Imme­diately upon our return from first leave in England, we were divided into sections for training in eight specialties. They were: Bombing, sniping, scouting, machine-gun fighting, signalling, trench mortar opera­tion, bayonet fighting, and stretcher-bear­ing. I was selected for special training in bombing, probably because I was supposed, as an American and a baseball player, to be expert in throwing. With the other men picked for training in the same specialty, I was sent to Aldershott, and there, for three weeks, twelve hours a day, I threw bombs, studied bombs, read about bombs, took bombs to pieces and put them together again, and did practically everything else that you would do with a bomb, except eat it.

Then I was ordered back along with the other men who had gained this intimate acquaintance with the bomb family, and we were put to work teaching the entire battalion all that we had learned. When we were not teaching, we were under in­struction ourselves by the men who had taken special training in other branches. Also, at certain periods of the day, we had physical training and rifle practice. Up to the time of our arrival in England, inten­sive training had been merely a fine phrase with us. During our stay there, it was a definite and overpowering fact. Day and night we trained and day and night it rained. At nine o'clock, we would fall into our bunks in huts which held from a half to a whole platoon—from thirty to sixty men—and drop into exhausted sleep, only to turn out at 5 A.M. to give a sudden imitation of what we would do to the Germans if they sneaked up on us before breakfast in six inches of mud. Toward the last, when we thought we had been driven to the limit, they told us that we were to have a period of real, intensive training to harden us for actual fighting. They sent us four imperial drill sergeants from the British Grenadier Guards, the senior foot regiment of the British army, and the one with which we were affiliated.

It would be quite unavailing for me to attempt to describe these drill sergeants. The British drill sergeant is an institution which can be understood only through per­sonal and close contact. If he thinks a major-general is wrong, he'll tell him so on the spot in the most emphatic way, but with­out ever violating a single sacred tradition of the service. The sergeants, who took us in charge to put the real polish on our training, had all seen from twenty to twenty-five years of service. They had all been through the battles of Mons and the Marne, and they had all been wounded. They were perfect examples of a type. One of them ordered all of our commissioned officers, from the colonel down, to turn out for rifle drill one day, and put them through the manual of arms while the soldiers of the battalion stood around, looking on.

"Gentlemen," said he, in the midst of the drill, "when I see you handle your rifles I feel like falling on my knees and thanking God that we've got a navy."

On June 2d, after the third battle of Ypres, while Macfarlane and I were sitting wearily on our bunks during an odd hour in the afternoon when nobody had thought of anything for us to do, a soldier came in with a message from headquarters which put a sudden stop to the discussion we were having about the possibility of getting leave to go up to London. The message was that the First, Second and Third divisions of the Canadians had lost forty per cent, of their men in the third fight at Ypres and that three hundred volunteers were wanted from each of our battalions to fill up the gaps.

"Forty per cent.," said Macfarlane, get­ting up quickly. "My God, think of it! Well, I'm off to tell 'em I'll go."

I told him I was with him, and we started for headquarters, expecting to be received with applause and pointed out as heroic ex­amples. We couldn't even get up to give in our names. The whole battalion had gone ahead of us. They heard about it first. That was the spirit of the Canadians. It was about this time that a story went 'round con­cerning an English colonel who had been called upon to furnish volunteers from his outfit to replace casualties. He backed his regiment up against a barrack wall and said:

"Now, all who don't want to volunteer, step three paces to the rear."

In our battalion, sergeants and even offi­cers offered to go as privates. Our volun­teers went at once, and we were re-enforced up to strength by drafts from the Fifth Canadian division, which was then forming in England.

In July, when we were being kept on the rifle ranges most of the time, all leave was stopped, and we were ordered to hold our­selves in readiness to go overseas. In the latter part of the month, we started. We sailed from Southampton to Havre on a big transport, escorted all the way by destroyers. As we landed, we got our first sight of the harvest of war. A big hospital on the quay was filled with wounded men. We had twenty-four hours in what they called a "rest camp." We slept on cobble stones in shacks which were so utterly comfortless that it would be an insult to a Kentucky thoroughbred to call them stables. Then we were on the way to the Belgian town of Poperinghe, which is one hundred and fifty miles from Havre and was, at that time, the rail head of the Ypres salient. We made the trip in box cars which were marked in French: "Eight horses or forty men," and we had to draw straws to decide who should lie down.

We got into Poperinghe at 7 A. M., and the scouts had led us into the front trenches at two the next morning Our posi­tion was to the left of St. Eloi and was known as "The Island," because it had no support on either side On the left, were the Yser Canal and the bluff which forms its bank. On the right were three hundred yards of battered-down trenches which had been re­built twice and blown in again each time by the German guns. For some reason, which I never quite understood, the Germans were able to drop what seemed a tolerably large proportion of the output of the Krupp works on this particular spot whenever they wanted to. Our high command had con­cluded that it was untenable, and so we, on one side of it, and the British on the other, had to just keep it scouted and protect our separate flanks. Another name they had for that position was the "Bird Cage." That was because the first fellows who moved into it made themselves nice and comfy and put up wire nettings to prevent any one from tossing bombs in on them. Thus, when the Germans stirred up the spot with an accu­rate shower of "whiz-bangs" and "coal-boxes," the same being thirteen-pounders and six-inch shells, that wire netting pre­sented a spectacle of utter inadequacy which hasn't been equalled in this war.

They called the position which we were assigned to defend "The Graveyard of Can­ada." That was because of the fearful losses of the Canadians here in the second battle of Ypres, from April 21, to June 1, 1915, when the first gas attack in the world's history was launched by the Germans, and, although the French, on the left, and the British, on the right, fell back, the Cana­dians stayed where they were put.

Right here I can mention something which will give you an idea why descrip­tions of this war don't describe it. During the first gas attack, the Canadians, choking to death and falling over each other in a fight against a new and unheard-of terror in war­fare, found a way—the Lord only knows who first discovered it and how he happened to do it to stay through a gas cloud and come out alive. It isn't pretty to think of, and it's like many other things in this war which you can't even tell of in print, be­cause simple description would violate the nice ethics about reading matter for the pub­lic eye, which have grown up in long years of peace and traditional decency. But this thing which you can't describe meant just the difference between life and death to many of the Canadians, that first day of the gas. Official orders: now, tell every soldier what he is to do with his handkerchief or a piece of his shirt if he is caught in a gas at­tack without his mask.

The nearest I can come, in print, to tell­ing you what a soldier is ordered to do in this emergency is to remind you that am­monia fumes oppose chlorine gas as a neu­tralizing agent, and that certain emanations of the body throw off ammonia fumes.

Now, that I've told you how we got from the Knickerbocker bar and other places to a situation which was just one hundred and fifty yards from the entrenched front of the German army in Belgium, I might as well add a couple of details about things which straightway put the fear of God in our hearts. At daybreak, one of our Fourteenth platoon men, standing on the firing step, pushed back his trench helmet and remarked that he thought it was about time for coffee. He didn't get any. A German sharpshooter, firing the first time that day, got him under the rim of his helmet, and his career with the Canadian forces was over right there. And then, as the dawn broke, we made out a big painted sign raised above the German front trench. It read:

WELCOME,

EIGHTY-SEVENTH CANADIANS

We were a new battalion, we had been less than seventy-two hours on the continent of Europe and the Germans were not supposed to know anything that was going on behind our lines!

We learned, afterward, that concealed telephones in the houses of the Belgian bur­gomasters of the villages of Dinkiebusch and Renninghelst, near our position, gave communication with the German headquar­ters opposite us. One of the duties of a de­tail of our men, soon after that, was to stand these two burgomasters up against a wall and shoot them.