World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, Canadian
Bob and I woke up next morning and had our breakfast, and after awhile
we wandered out around town. Some German prisoners were coming down
the road, and we stopped and spoke to them. One who could speak a
little English said, "Too much shell." They were very hungry; one of
them spotted a piece of biscuit beside the road. He grabbed it up and
ate it like a dog. All at once we heard a shout, and turning we spied
Bink and Charlie Pound. When they got up to us they said, "Where the
devil have you fellows been? We want our rations." They seemed quite
peeved and they hadn't worried a bit about losing us. It was not
having their rations that bothered them.
Well, that night we went back to the same trenches that we had left
just three nights before, only this time we marched on the Ypres-Menin
road. This is the worst road in the salient; the Germans sweep it with
their machine guns every night, and it sure is wicked. Of course Rust
had been over it months before and knew all about it. He told us that
the bullets come about a foot from the ground, and if a fellow gets one
in the leg, he will get hit again before he can crawl away. We were
nicely started down the road when all at once the machine guns started
to crackle. I took one jump and landed, rifle and all, in a ditch full
of water. Most of the boys came with me, but I couldn't help laughing
at some of the reinforcements. They took refuge behind trees, just as
if a little tree would stop a machine gun bullet. Of course we told
them, but not till one or two of their number got hit did they realize
their danger. The Germans were shelling the trenches that we were
going into, and now and again they would send over some high-explosive
shells and sweep our road with shrapnel, so we had a few more
casualties.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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