Blown From the Trench
“The water relieved me a little and I wet my handkerchief in it and covered my face. I crawled out and half blindly sought my chum, who was unconscious, and dragged him to the crater where the water was. I laid him there face downward, and he, too, revived a little, and then we lay waiting for death.”
Ten minutes later there was a shouting that announced the approach of the Germans on a charge. Houle, followed by Robillard, ran back into the trench, got his gun and began firing. When the rifle became so hot that it burned his hands he threw it down and began hurling bombs. They were ordered to retreat to the next trench and the Germans began pouring into the vacated one. Houle and his fellows got hold of two machine guns, good for from 560 to 700 shots a minute.
“I shall never forget those Germans. When our guns suddenly spoke their front line melted; their second crumpled before this destruction; but on, on, on they came, unflinching, marching with even steps into certain death. We were like lions at bay. It was our lives or the Germans’. Then, as fourteen of us fought together, a bomb dropped amid us, and killed eleven. I came to consciousness, lying in the bottom of a trench, with Roy leaning over me.
“‘Are you living yet, Roméo!’ he exclaimed in amazement. I rose dizzily. He and I and one other stood alone among our eleven dead friends.
“Then Roy told me that I had been blown clear of the trench, twenty feet from where I stood, and that he had braved death to secure, as he supposed, my dead body. A careful examination showed that my only injury was a terrible bruise on the calf of my leg, where the round surface of a flying shard had struck me, but without breaking the skin. Miracles are but small matters when you fight in the presence of death.
“‘I’m not afraid now,’ I told Roy. And from then on I and all my soldier friends believed my life was charmed and that the Germans could not kill me.”
The defenders were driven back to the fourth trench which they were almost immediately ordered to leave, which they did with all speed as it had been mined by the engineers and was ready to give the Germans a warm reception as they came surging in. Houle describes the explosion. “The whole earth seemed to leap skyward, and through and through the black mountain of earth and stones shot heads and arms and legs, torn fragments of what were once heroic men. Next to the gas which they gave us, I think our blowing them up was surely the worst thing men could do to men.”
He describes mining operations, which are a big part of trench warfare, as one of the most dismaying features of trench life. Apparently the mines were more feared than anything else. “It was more terrible than gas poisoning to think that at any moment you would be thrown a thousand ways at once.... The soldier in the trench never knows when he may be blown into small pieces,—and that is why we are always prepared to risk uncertain dangers between the lines at night, instead of lying down in the wet trench hopelessly waiting for death.