Medicine, Military; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, Canadian
The officers of No. ---- Canadian Field
Ambulance, with that camaraderie so prevalent
out there, invited us to share with them
a couple of old cellars to which they had gone
on deserting the brewery. We accepted gladly.
One of their two cellars they used as sleeping
and eating quarters, the other as a dressing
station where they were kept exceedingly
busy attending the wounded. The Germans
had the range of Vimy to a nicety, and with
true German love of destruction they poured
five hundred to a thousand shells into the ruins
daily. Whenever the Germans are driven from
a village, their practice is to ruin it by high
explosive shells sent from their new line of
defense. And these two cellars were about the
center of the Vimy target.
The previous day two officers of the field
ambulance were standing a few feet apart in
a little room off from the cellar used as
sleeping quarters. A table stood between them, on
which were two lighted candles. Suddenly
through the floor above came a four-inch shell,
just missing the table, and sinking into the
floor. Fortunately for the two officers it did
not explode--it was a dud. The rush of air
caused by the shell extinguished one of the
candles. The other remained lighted. It may
be understood easily that the officers felt a
bit unnerved. After staring at the hole in
the floor for some moments, Captain M----
picked up the lighted candle in one hand and
the extinguished one in the other and endeavored
to light one from the other. His hands
shook so that he could not make the candles
meet. After a number of vain attempts to
bring them together he gave it up. His
nervous system was so shaken that he was sent
to the rest station on two weeks' leave.
We arrived shortly after the shell had gone
through the cellar. Captain M---- himself told
us of it, and his humorous description of his
attempts to get the candles within six inches of
each other was ludicrous in the extreme.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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