Jaliman - If you enjoyed that post about Jackson, you may enjoy this one from Winston Grooms book about Ypres. The following is about the Canadians entering the Great War at Ypres. Enjoy:
A Canadian soldier’s baptism of fire in the Ypres Salient during the quiet times:
This was from the diary of a Canadian named Agar Adamson of the Princess Pats who had prior military experience In the Boer war. This came from Adamson’s letters to his wife Mabel and his personal diary.
Several weeks after their arrival, the Princess Pats went into battle, in some very bad trenches near St. Eloi, 30 yards opposite the soldiers of the ferocious Prussian guard: They who eschewed the Christmas truce. At the time, the battle field was considered more or less inactive and it was here that Captain Addison got his first taste of WWI.
….it is beyond my powers to describe what has happened in the last 4 days but I know if I read what I am about to write I doubt I would be able to believe that it was not written by a liar or the ravings of a lunatic.
He tells of his arrival in the trenches and the relief of those that have been manning them.
We went in with 28 men after crawling in the mud about a mile. The trench consisted of sand bags about 5’ high and no trench whatever. I counted about 25 bodies: French, German and English, including one officer of the Lester regiment. This trench has been going for about 3 months.
He tells of being unable to bury the dead because of gunfire. As well, his men could not improve the trench by digging it out because the French had interred the corpses of their men who had been killed within the trench, in the floor of the trench system itself. He remarked on the smell and added “I suppose one can accustom oneself to anything.”
He went on:
In my trench I lost 6 killed and 21 wounded, this out of the detachment of 28. Poor Calhoun who went out alone in the dark to place his snipers, never came back. The King’s Royal Rifles Corp report having found him in the German sap in front of the trenches with 6 bullets in his head. Major Gault, who had founded and financed the regiment, was shot badly in the wrist. Another officer had 3 fingers shot off and a major named Ward was shot through the head and later died.
At one point a squad of Royal Engineers arrived with orders to dig under Adamsons’ trench through to the German trench only 10 yards away. These men were new not only to the engineers but to the army. They got frightened at the rifle fire and when they came to a dead Frenchmen, refused to dig further.
I had our men remove him and they started again and came back to me to say they had hit another dead man. They were shaking and crying so I sent them back to the support trenches ¾ a mile to the rear as they were having a bad effect on my men. We could hear the German’s talking and sapping in front of us. A constant rifle fire was kept up at our breast work.
For the next two days there was almost continuous shooting, machine gunning, grenade throwing, and from the German trenches, mortar fire. Replacements were sent to Capt. Adamson as his casualties mounted. At one point the BTN commander suggested doubling Adamson’s strength but when he saw the conditions of the trench, he saw that it could not hold with the slightest pinching, 28 men.
By his last morning in the trench, Adamson found himself with two dead men, one telephone operator, 17 men and one badly wounded man, his leg shot to pieces. They were due to be relieved but the problem was now, how to get out of the trench without everyone being killed. Between all of them they had only one working rifle. Mud and malfunctions had rendered the rest inoperative and their telephone line had been cut by German artillery. All they could do was lie huddled in the trench. It was finally decided to just after dark they would crawl out through a drainage ditch about 100 yards away. When Adamson gave the signal he and his men threw away their greatcoats - the coat when waterlogged weighed 90 lbs - and began crawling to the drainage ditch which to their disgust they found filled with foul water and full of dead bodies including horses, some of which had been there for three months. Somehow, even with the Germans firing on them, most made it through.
Later Adamson recorded,
I got the men some tea and rum. None of us ever expected to get out. Our only salvation was that the Germans had no idea how weak we were. All the men on both days behaved splendidly and particularly those with me for the last spell, with the exception of the bomb thrower who was a Royal Engineer and in a dreadful state of nerves the poor fellow. I suppose he could not help it but one man like that under said conditions is a danger when men are trying to save their own nerves.
Thus was a soldier’s baptism of fire during a quiet time in the Ypres Salient.
