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Authors: Jon E. Lewis
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time finding a billet in the thigh of a chap in No. 1 Platoon. He gave a howl of pain and was carried away. That was the first drop of blood shed by the 13th N.F.s, so far as I’m aware. It was not the last. Sure enough it was a sniper, and they weren’t long in getting him. He had been concealed among the rafters of one of the higher houses, and had potted away at us by whatever light there was – moon, flares, and cigarettes. An officer and a man brought him down the road between them. He was a small white-faced man. I felt a pang of pity for him. He was brave. His comrades had gone on and left him to an almost certain fate. He would be thinking of his wife and bairns, maybe, in some quiet rustic village in the Fatherland. I heard later that they plugged him with lead.
We seemed to stand in that street for an eternity of time; actually, I suppose, not more than two or three hours. At last we got the order to move out, and we emerged into an open field, over which we walked, stumbling over little cocks of hay.
At this point we deployed and became hopelessly lost to one another. It was a cursed bad piece of work to be severed so soon from one’s pals. It means a lot, that, in warfare. Friendship strengthens the heart.
Then there began to burst above us some kind of shell. We flopped on our stomachs when this began. The ground was a quagmire, but mud was better than blood, and we wallowed in the friendly filth.
After a while the cannonade quietened and word came along that we were to advance. We did not appear to have an officer anywhere near us. The fellows near me were strangers.
Hunger, thirst, and sleeplessness made me faint and weak. The mud on my greatcoat made it monstrously heavy, so that it flapped like lead against my legs, making the going utterly wearisome. I would willingly have died just then. The ground was so uneven that headway was difficult to make, not uneven by nature either, but by the huddled heaps of men’s bodies. The ground had been bitterly contested.
Hill 70 rose above us darkly. It scarcely deserves the name of hill; quite a moderate rise, but that night it appeared intensely black and forbidding against the flaring lights that gleamed intermittently in the sullen sky beyond it. So far we had seen no enemy. They were over the hill. Would to God, I prayed, they would stop over. Never was I more out of love with war than that first night at the Front. Arrived at the foot of the hill we got orders to lie down. My watch said two o’clock.
Shall I attempt to hide my feelings as I lay there? Why should I? They were the common property of the whole host. How easy it is to sit in an armchair and scorn the coward who flees the conflict. I confess that I lay in that welter of mud devising schemes of escape; of getting back to the rear on some flimsy pretext or other. I even thought of going sick if I could have found a pain other than in my heart and nerve.
Bullets started dropping all around us like heavy thunder rain. The men on both sides of me lay snoring in exhausted slumber. I felt lonely and wretched. At last I fell asleep.
‘The next b – I catch asleep I’ll put a bullet through him.’ By the flame light I could see the large face of an officer with the badge of the D.L.I.s in his cap. No one spoke, so he snarled again: ‘The next. Do you hear?
’
he grated. ‘Yes, sir,’ someone muttered. No sooner had he walked off than we all dropped off to sleep again till the grey morning dawned.
It was Sunday, if it mattered. The sun peeped brightly over the hill. Except for a general murmuring from the serried and prostrate ranks, there was scarcely a sound. In the early light an appalling scene lay before us. The ground was strewn with dead and dying men. Pieces of horse and gun equipment and the motley gear of war lay everywhere. Behind the blackening cocks of hay lay men in the attitude of firing, now dead. One lay not two yards from my feet, a giant Scotsman stretched out in the
We seemed to stand in that street for an eternity of time; actually, I suppose, not more than two or three hours. At last we got the order to move out, and we emerged into an open field, over which we walked, stumbling over little cocks of hay.
At this point we deployed and became hopelessly lost to one another. It was a cursed bad piece of work to be severed so soon from one’s pals. It means a lot, that, in warfare. Friendship strengthens the heart.
Then there began to burst above us some kind of shell. We flopped on our stomachs when this began. The ground was a quagmire, but mud was better than blood, and we wallowed in the friendly filth.
After a while the cannonade quietened and word came along that we were to advance. We did not appear to have an officer anywhere near us. The fellows near me were strangers.
Hunger, thirst, and sleeplessness made me faint and weak. The mud on my greatcoat made it monstrously heavy, so that it flapped like lead against my legs, making the going utterly wearisome. I would willingly have died just then. The ground was so uneven that headway was difficult to make, not uneven by nature either, but by the huddled heaps of men’s bodies. The ground had been bitterly contested.
Hill 70 rose above us darkly. It scarcely deserves the name of hill; quite a moderate rise, but that night it appeared intensely black and forbidding against the flaring lights that gleamed intermittently in the sullen sky beyond it. So far we had seen no enemy. They were over the hill. Would to God, I prayed, they would stop over. Never was I more out of love with war than that first night at the Front. Arrived at the foot of the hill we got orders to lie down. My watch said two o’clock.
Shall I attempt to hide my feelings as I lay there? Why should I? They were the common property of the whole host. How easy it is to sit in an armchair and scorn the coward who flees the conflict. I confess that I lay in that welter of mud devising schemes of escape; of getting back to the rear on some flimsy pretext or other. I even thought of going sick if I could have found a pain other than in my heart and nerve.
Bullets started dropping all around us like heavy thunder rain. The men on both sides of me lay snoring in exhausted slumber. I felt lonely and wretched. At last I fell asleep.
‘The next b – I catch asleep I’ll put a bullet through him.’ By the flame light I could see the large face of an officer with the badge of the D.L.I.s in his cap. No one spoke, so he snarled again: ‘The next. Do you hear?
’
he grated. ‘Yes, sir,’ someone muttered. No sooner had he walked off than we all dropped off to sleep again till the grey morning dawned.
It was Sunday, if it mattered. The sun peeped brightly over the hill. Except for a general murmuring from the serried and prostrate ranks, there was scarcely a sound. In the early light an appalling scene lay before us. The ground was strewn with dead and dying men. Pieces of horse and gun equipment and the motley gear of war lay everywhere. Behind the blackening cocks of hay lay men in the attitude of firing, now dead. One lay not two yards from my feet, a giant Scotsman stretched out in the
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