Medicine, Military; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, Canadian
The major loved dearly going into dangerous
zones, just wandering off to see what he
could see. After we had taken Vimy Ridge,
but not yet progressed beyond it, we had
outposts on the German side of it, looking down
on Vimy and other German positions, 400 or
500 yards away. A good deal of sniping was
going on against us, as our men were so much
exposed on the side of the hill, where they had
very little protection except an odd shellhole
or a few feet of shallow trench here and there.
Our battalion was holding this line, and I, on
the day Vimy village was taken, April 13th,
had occasion to make a hurried trip along this
whole front, At one spot, where a trench two
feet deep was the only protection from possible
sniping or shell fire, Major Peters stood,
leaning back against the parados, two-thirds of
his body exposed, hands in pockets, gazing
pensively across at the Vimy ruins.
"What are you trying to do? Get your
bally head blown off?" I demanded.
Without looking around, or otherwise changing
his position, he replied in his slow voice:
"I don't think there's anyone there to blow
my head off." This shows his judgment, for
he was right, as it proved a little later when
our scout officer, followed by a single platoon,
entered it. But it showed also his carelessness
as to danger, for at the moment he was
only guessing, or surmising, that there was no
one in Vimy, and at any moment he might have
found it out to his sorrow.
A few minutes after this the accidental
explosion of a Mills bomb killed one man,
wounded two officers severely, and six men
almost as severely, and I was kept busy for some
time attending to them. Having finished, I
found Major Peters near me, looking longingly
toward Vimy, into the ruins of which
our scout officer, Lieutenant A----; our
O.C. battalion, Major E----; and a platoon in
charge of ever-smiling Lieutenant G---- had
all disappeared. Major Peters was apparently
impatient to go across, though he had no right
to do so without orders. Leaving the wounded
to be evacuated by my always trustworthy and
fearless assistants, Corporal H---- and Private
B----, M.M., and their stretcher bearers,
I joined him. Though I had even less right
to go across than he, we dared each other to
go, and off we went. An odd shell was falling
about and it was quite characteristic for
Pete to remark, slowly and seriously,--
"I don't mind dodging shells, but I do hate
dodging that damned orderly room of ours."
But he was as joyously gay as if he were a
schoolboy going on some forbidden picnic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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