Felt Safest When on Guard
“I never felt so secure, indeed, as when I was on guard between the trenches. Through all the night I could hear the bullets go over me. Men go crazy there. And the insane are sent to England. Sometimes men go mad and become a menace to their own comrades and officers. They sometimes have to be killed. And there have been times when I crouched in some first line trench, where no communication trench joined us to the second or third line, where no doctor could reach us. And I have seen men so terribly wounded, enduring such agonies, and screaming so heart-breakingly for somebody to kill them, that our boys have done what they asked, to save them the unnecessary horror of living dismembered. And I have seen men of good health grow so weary of the trenches that they have simply stood up at noonday. Some machine guns swiftly ended them. And others, as I have written, simply stick their hands above the trench top and bullets trim off their fingers.”
Fingerless hands are unprofitable in the trenches, and not very useful elsewhere in the activities of war. Getting rid of one’s fingers is a comparatively cheap exchange for release from the dangers and maddening anguish of long periods in the trenches. Houle did not think these men were cowards. “But only men who have lived in the trenches can understand.” Though he makes no claim to heroism for himself, Houle’s record shows that he was a resolute soldier doing valiant things that he sets down in his story quite as matters of routine experience—such as going out under fire to bring in the wounded.
He names Ypres the “graveyard of the old Sixty-first.” They were carried to within six miles of the place in London buses, twenty-five men to a bus. The remaining distance they tramped. At Ypres they first met “the gallant French troops,” and his company of French-Canadians being at the left of the English line acted as interpreters. Here the trenches were but forty yards from the Germans and in bad condition; they were raked terribly by German machine guns on a height. There were dead bodies of Germans and French lying between that had been there three months, neither side having the chance to bury its dead. These were to be seen through the periscopes—but one did not need to see to know they were there. The Battle of Ypres was one of the greatest of the war, one of the most desperate, one of the most deadly in human toll, but out of it all comes the memory of the gas attacks to which the men were then so helplessly exposed.
“There comes a sudden stinging in your nose. Your eyes water. You breathe fire. You suffocate. You burn alive. There are razors and needles in your throat. It is as if you drank boiling hot tea. Your lungs flame. You want to tear your body. You become half wild. Your head aches beyond description. You vomit, you drop exhausted, you die. It is a frightful thing to see your friends like that. Every other man seemed to fall. As I fought I marveled that I was spared. Again and again came to me the belief that my life was charmed. An ecstatic confidence bore me up. I was brave because I was so sure of life, while all my companions seemed groveling in death.”
They left the trench for a charge, under a withering fire, but they pressed forward, and came to the enemy’s trench and leaped in. He saw four Germans trying to escape on the further side. “I did not fire, intending to make them prisoners. But the only thing I took was a great blow on the side of my head, and away went my prisoners.” That night he was one of twenty of his comrades who volunteered to attempt the recovery of four field guns the English had lost. They joined men from the Tenth and Sixteenth Battalions. They were to storm the wood where the guns were. There were forty yards of open ground to traverse. The Germans worked havoc among them, but the remnant made the wood. In the darkness it was almost impossible to distinguish foe from friend.
“I ran in and out among the trees and asked every one I met who he was. I came upon one big fellow. My mouth opened to ask him who he was, when his fist shot out and took me between the eyes. I went down for the count, but I knew who he was—he was a German. I got up as quickly as I could, you may be sure, and swung my rifle to hit him in the head, but the stock struck a tree and splintered. I thought I had broken all my fingers.
“I found three wounded men, French, I thought they were, in that gloom. So I carried them into our trench. As I brought in the last one, the officer said, ‘You are doing good work, Houle.’ I asked him why he thought so, and he answered: ‘You have brought in three wounded men and when we put the light on them we found they were Germans.’ Well, I am glad I saved them. I would have done so anyhow, had I known their nationality. For we were all trained to give a wounded man help, whether he were friend or foe.