World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, English
No further mishaps befell until I was safely aboard ship. I was in
charge of a fatigue party, bringing hay from the bulkheads of the ship
up on to the different decks for the horses; there was a pulley leading
to the bottom of the boat by means of which the hay was hoisted up, and
in going down each man gripped it and was slowly lowered. On the trip
down the men would cling to the rope, two or three at a time, with about
ten to twenty feet of space between them. In making a downward trip I
was second; the man ahead of me going down was over twenty feet from me;
and the rope suddenly slipping off the pulley and out of the hands of
the men running it, I dropped fifty feet. The man below on the rope
broke his leg and on top of him I fell. Although my drop was twenty or
thirty feet longer than his, on account of the space between us being
that much greater, I was none the worse except for a bad shaking-up.
Like all the men in Canada's First Division, my pal was in excellent
physical shape, and it was not long before his leg mended and he was
himself again. Nothing of further moment happened until we heard the
welcome call of land!
The different batteries were ordered to remove their guns, limbers and
horses from the boat, and I had charge of one party unloading guns and
limbers. A derrick and cable was used to lift our pets from the vessel's
hold, swing them up across the side of the boat and over on to the dock.
In my duty I was stationed on the dock, catching hold of the guns and
wagons as they were swung out and over by the derrick, and pulling them
across on to the dock. While pulling over a gun, the cable skidded and
the gun, coming on top of me, caught me partly under it, knocking me
unconscious. Luckily the weight of the gun did not fall on me in its
entirety; if it had, I would not be telling this story; it caught me on
the hip, dislocating the hip bone. I was removed to the ship's hospital
and was under the doctor's care till morning, and from there I went to a
hospital in Plymouth City for six weeks. From there I was removed to the
field general hospital in Salisbury Plain, where I tarried an
additional ten days. While here I had a two-fold adventure.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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