World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, Canadian
Well, Jack, our next trip in was at Hill 60, and it was a warm
spot--not artillery fire this time, but trench mortars. Every morning
Fritzie would send us "sausages" for breakfast; they came at the rate
of one a minute. It wasn't that they caused so many casualties, but
they made so much work. Every day Fritzie would blow up our front line
and we would have to build it up again each night under machine gun
fire. We took it in turns, half of us would be on working parties and
the other half on outpost duty. One night several of us were down in a
cutting on a bombing-post. The cutting had once been the Ypres
Commines railway and it ran across the German lines as well as through
ours. We had strong posts there to keep the Fritzies back in case they
took a notion to come over. In the daytime it was exposed to rifle
fire. We were sitting there this night when our Corporal came running
in and said, "Hurry back to the trench, there's a show going to start."
He had scarcely finished speaking when the trench mortar bombardment
opened up, and we had barely hit the trench when a sausage landed on
the very spot where we had been. The next few minutes were very
exciting and we were kept busy dodging the sausages. We could easily
see them coming through the darkness, for the fuse burned and left a
trail of sparks. One would have thought they were rockets, if he
hadn't seen them before. Then Fritzie opened up his artillery, and
things got very warm indeed. We had several casualties, but once more
our little bunch was lucky. We expected Fritzie would try to come
over, so a bunch of us got out on the parapet and threw bombs and the
others kept up a steady fire with their rifles. Our trench mortars
were doing great work throwing over six bombs for every one Fritzie
sent, and the Germans evidently thought we were too wide-awake, for
they failed to show up.
Next day I missed fourteen days' leave, and gee! I did feel sore over
it. I was on sentry duty with Ernie Rowe, and I was just in the act of
changing my boots for a pair of rubber waders when along came an
officer. I paid no special attention to him, as a sap ran underneath
Hill 60 and there were always engineering officers around. This chap
stopped and passed a few commonplace remarks about the wetness of the
trench, etc., and then passed on. I thought no more about it and was
taking my turn at looking through the periscope, when along came
Captain Breedan and a bunch of scouts. "Did you see an officer go by
here?" was their excited greeting. I answered, "He went past about
fifteen minutes ago. What about him?" "He's a spy, that's all, and if
you had caught him it would have meant fourteen days' leave for you,"
said Captain Breedan. Just my luck to miss a nice fat chance like
that--the beggar was never caught, he seemed to vanish into thin air.
After he left me the boys kept up the hunt for a long time and then
gave up in disgust.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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