On the Fringe of the Great FightNasmith, George Gallie
History
On the Fringe of the Great Fight
Nasmith, George Gallie
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, English
The baby in the carriage had had typhoid. A little two year old boy
was just recovering, and was thought to have been the original case.
Two other boys of seven and nine years of age were getting some bread
and milk for their dinner, one of them being probably a mild case; and
a girl of eleven, evidently coming down with the disease, was going
about looking after the household.
With that swarm of disease-carrying flies in the house there was no
possibility of any of the children escaping the infection. It was with
the greatest difficulty that the sanitary officer of the division
succeeded in getting the French civilian authorities to move in the
matter and remove the cases to the French civilian hospital. The
father died a week later, and the sanitary officer himself was
subsequently killed during the battle of the Somme.
The French refugees do not complain; they are not that kind. They
told their stories simply and invariably finished with a shrug of the
shoulders and the phrase "c'est la guerre n'est ce pas?" (That is war,
is it not?) But if the French army ever gets on German soil I would
hate to be a German.
One night we found that our first Canadian brigade was going into the
trenches at Festubert without the chemical necessary to saturate their
gas masks, which had just been issued to the soldiers; we succeeded in
borrowing 500 pounds from a wide-awake army corps and took it down in
the car to an advanced dressing station which the brigade would have
to pass. The Germans were particularly jumpy that night as we felt our
way along that very rough road with no light to guide us except the
electric green light of the numerous German flares, the occasional
flashes of a powerful German search light sweeping the sky and ground,
and the angry red spurts from the guns which lit up the sky like
summer lightning.
Once we had occasion to make a trip from one shelled village to
another, the driver had been given the direction and no further
attention was paid to him until we came across a reserve trench manned
by Ghurkas. This drew our attention to the fact that the country was
quite unfamiliar. However, the next French sign post showed us that we
were on a road leading to the desired village and we kept on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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