CHAPTER XVIII

THE WORST ORDEAL

I am convinced that these two Germans I came upon were as greatly surprised as I was. I do not think I had been observed and they sent out after me. In that event, indeed, they would not have traveled together nor directly along the trench path, but would have stalked me and tried to meet me, one on either side. This is a natural plan in such hunts, for when the pursued turns to meet the attack of one man, the other has him at his mercy. But these Huns were together. And we faced one another not ten feet apart.

It certainly looked bad for me. They were both huge, robust fellows and just about then in the glare of the night lights appeared like devils--their pale eyes gleaming through trench grime, their clothing all wrinkled and bunched about their big bodies, their mouths gone open in astonishment and showing tobacco-blackened teeth. Not that I could have looked a beauty myself though I have to be thankful in view of what happened later that I had that morning given myself a clean shave. This fact was to save me in all probability from dreadful infection later.

Well, there must have been fully two seconds’ pause, I think, in which we stood and faced each other. As I look back on it, it was a most foolish pause on my part and the same is to be said for the pause on theirs.

With a gulp in my throat I noticed that both carried bombs--and in the very same instant I wondered why the devil I was standing there with a bomb in my own hand and not throwing it.

I let go at them--seeking to dash the bomb directly at their feet that there should be no failure of its instant explosion.

I honestly can’t tell you if that bomb of mine went off. For in the very lift of my arm, both Germans swung their arms into the air and hurled their bombs at me. One bomb went over my head. I am quite sure that my bomb was faulty and did not explode. The other fell directly at my feet.

I had been too long trained in that game not to know what I had to do and what I had to do in a hurry. I pounced on that bomb and without loss of movement--without trying to stand erect and aim it, I shunted the bomb back at them with an upward toss of both hands.

And then the big thing happened--a big thing to me but infinitely bigger to them. For that toss of the bomb cost them both their lives. I don’t like to recall what I afterward saw--when smashed, bleeding and reeling, I looked to see what had become of my two enemies. The truth is they were blown to pieces. One man’s severed head was nearly at my feet. The star-shell showed it to me. It was staring up at me with a frightful grimace. Their bodies were scattered in that pathway as though they had been hacked to pieces by an ax--worse than that--as though they had been hacked to pieces by an ax with a roughened, dull edge.

In the first of the explosion, of course, I knew nothing of this. I was receiving my own crippling from the back blast of the German bomb I had hurled at them. There was a glare and a sudden shock in my face as though I had been struck on the mouth with a sledgehammer. Of course, I went down. But as far as my own recollection goes I was not knocked unconscious and I was immediately afterward sitting up in the pathway while I coughed and sputtered blood from a mouth in which all the upper teeth had been cracked or blown out and the upper jaw itself broken. Then, as the earth stopped swaying, I knew my right arm was numb and stared at it. My hand was a red mangle. At the same time there came a realization of hellish paroxysms of pain on the left side of my face and biting savagely at my left arm. I touched my face with my left hand and instinctively drew the fingers away in horror. The flesh of my face was raw.

My long soldier’s training was my salvation now. I doubt whether without it I should have known just what to do and have done it with the promptness and precision of a man used to obeying military orders. At any rate, once I realized my condition, once I had looked upon my red, smashed hand, the slit sleeve and the flesh all torn beneath it, I immediately reached with my serviceable hand into the little pocket in the inside of my jacket for the precious vial of iodine.

Subconsciously I lifted the bottle with the idea of pulling the cork out with my teeth--good, strong, wholesome teeth they had been--when I realized the maimed condition of my mouth. Then you may believe I hesitated. But I did not dare risk the loss of any of that fluid. I must get antiseptic on my wounds. Here I was on the wrong side of No Man’s Land and in full knowledge of how much mercy I might expect from the Germans if I issued a call for help that would disclose a scout in their territory and beside that scout the dismembered bodies of their own dead. Again, if I lost the contents of this magic vial I must face the ordeal of dying in agonies of raging, infected wounds--die like a wounded rat in the enemy’s country. It would not do to risk breaking the vial against a stone in the hope of transferring most of its contents to my wounds. There was only too little of the fluid as it was.

So, red and torn as my mouth was, the upper jaw broken, I put the cork to my lips determined to stand whatever shock of pain the effort must cost me. I did not know it then, but curiously enough when this wound came to be examined it was found that although the shock of the back-blast had broken my upper jaw and cracked or blown away all the teeth in it, my lower jaw and teeth were intact. There wasn’t a tooth injured. I don’t remember exactly, but this escape of my under jaw in the explosion indicates that I had probably opened my mouth to utter some yell or taunt at my enemies as we fought.

Well, somehow, I got that cork between what was left of my teeth, closed on it and drew it. Hurt? I was blind with pain in the process. My one good hand shook and I all but dropped the bottle. But then, I was in such a whirl of pain anyway that the shock of more could not possibly destroy me.

I could not lift the right arm or move the hand of which I now observed that the entire thumb and base of it down to the wrist had been blown off. But while holding the bottle of iodine in my good hand, I managed to bare the entire wound from the torn sleeve and shirt sleeve that clung to it. I poured the biting iodine carefully all over the wound. It stung poignantly, but there had come over me a certain desperation that seemed to give me unlimited power to resist pain, made me in an astonishing degree impervious to it.

The arm was bleeding in gouts and I knew this had to be stopped and stopped quickly or it would not take many minutes to make a dead man of me. Already I was beginning to experience a daze of weakness. So I had to go through another agonizing ordeal.

I got out my handkerchief and again employing my wounded mouth to aid my serviceable hand, tied the handkerchief around my arm in the manner of a tourniquet--a performance in which I had expert training and practice--made a final loop, found a knife in my pocket, inserted it into the loop and though my arm throbbed excruciatingly in appeal for gentleness, turned the lever relentlessly until I knew the flow of blood must be greatly checked if not entirely stopped.

Now you must not think this took me any great time. I did it shakily but in greatest haste. For common sense gave its warning that the explosion of the bomb in territory near their batteries must soon bring investigators. And what I knew they did to soldiers they caught in their man-traps I knew they would as certainly do to me if I was found--just cold-bloodedly and in Hun fashion slay and mutilate me. I heard the grumblings and sharp mutterings of men coming up from a dug-out. And when I say in Hun fashion I mean something horrible--more horrible than even the world has yet learned.

And in that most crucial moment of my life, I leaped out of the trench and in the same instant I saw my savior. I hope it is all right to call a mud-hole a savior. There it was behind a clump of ragged bushes. I like to reflect now that it was one of the shells from our own guns as they sought out this battery of the enemy that had made for me this refuge.

I stumbled and plodded for this mud-hole. Most gratefully I sank into it. I threw myself into it fully, a dead weight, that I might sink the deeper into it. I didn’t in the least mind the pain to my wounds that the fall cost me. I then began with all the speed I could muster, slapping the mud all over me as in happier days at the ocean side, I had buried myself in the hot, dry sands.

I reveled in this reeking, black muck. And with good reason. As I sank deeper and deeper into it and slapped it over my body, then over my face, when I was submerged in the black, glutinous, offensive pudding so that only my nose stuck out, a nose smeared also to conform to the surface color of the muck-hole--well, then and only then I began to feel that I had a chance for my life.

A mud-hole may be an ignoble thing, but God’s blessing on this one. It proved, as I have said, my life-saver. I had hardly thoroughly concealed myself in the black mess when a dozen soldiers came treading the path and the surrounding land--came wearily, some with rifles, some with bombs.

I had dared to leave an eye open at the surface of my hiding place and saw them coming. But I did not continue this foolishness. Well enough I realized that just this eye--its gleam and movement (even in the night) might attract notice, especially of men keenly watchful. I closed that eye--and with the merest movement sunk my head deeper into the mud. I had hoped to keep my nostrils sufficiently clear of mud to breathe, but in this action they also clogged up and I must have strangled if my enemies had delayed long in the vicinity of my mud-hole.

But they saw the dismembered bodies of their comrades, and could see no enemy wounded nearby. They concluded that, escaping our guns, no enemy would remain long in the territory and were equally certain he would not continue his advance toward their batteries. It was natural for them to judge he had retreated for his own lines. This, I suppose, is the way their minds worked and that they continued the pursuit to No Man’s Land until it became dangerous to follow it further and abandoned the hunt.

I don’t know. For I did not see them when they departed. I took no chances on peering out. I took only one chance and that was to thrust my nose into the air to keep myself from strangling, but I did this most cautiously.

I was left secure for the time at least in my mud-hole.

And I was to exist in this wallow for three days. I afterward found out that it was three days. How long I had no idea at the time. There were hours of torture, hours, I presume, of coma, hours of delirium in which I thought I underwent crazy experiences, had amazing visions, dreamed both horrible and beautiful dreams. I could not at any time have been entirely bereft of all my senses for I clearly retain a memory of these mental fantasies, none but two very clearly, but the others, while vague, are still not altogether indefinable.

Some time passed and no bayonet came thrusting into my body and no bomb that would rend me and my muddy blankets into a ghastly mess, had fallen. The pain suddenly quieted and a tremendous languor seized me.

Immediately I was possessed of a deadly fear of falling asleep. I feared in the first place the peril and horror of the man-eating rat. I feared as well that I would sink so deeply into the mud-hole that I would suffocate as I slept. Yet I realized that it could not be of so very great depth or I must have long ago gone beneath the surface as in a quicksand. I remembered the general aspect of the gap as torn by the shell. It had been a small shell. The gap was not large. And was probably shallow. Besides, the ground beneath me below the mud had a reassuring firmness.

But had the mud in the hole been of a depth for me to drown in, it would have made no difference then. A weariness too intense to permit consideration of life and death gripped me. For all I knew it was death itself. What I did know was that I could not fight it. I simply passed out.

For my eventual survival from the predicament I now found myself in, I can only give credit to the good physical condition I was in when my injuries befell me, the injuries that were to put me out of the big game for good, send me to “Blighty” and to get me honors from King and country reverently to be prized and which in my greatest imaginings I had not dreamed of winning. A practical, regular soldier doesn’t frequently dream of such things. It is your amateur soldier who is most filled with such aspirations. Not that he hasn’t a right to entertain them, coddle them and try to act on them for they have led many new-made soldiers into great and brave accomplishments. I don’t mean such dreams and aspirations are bad for a man. They are distinctly good. I only mean that with regulars like myself soldiering is his cold, hard business and he isn’t given to enhancing it with romantic imaginings.

But now I was to take a turn at imaginings myself--the wildest! I suppose I fought again at least a hundred times my duel with the two Germans who grew to giant-size in some of my dreams and always their countenances were a thing of horror--pale eyes shining through grime, stubbled chins and lips, cracked lips apart with blackened, fang-like teeth showing. Sometimes they beat me. They would have me down and be kneeling on my chest. And one of them would have a knife out with which to slash my throat. And I’d come out of such a horror, writhing and screaming.

Then again I would suffer the keenest tortures because of the roaring of guns--imaginary guns at that, I suppose they were, smashed at my ears and racked my burning head. I would find myself screaming at them to desist.

Then I had fine, serene dreams when I traveled through a great land--I can’t tell what land, merely Dreamland--that was all at peace.

There were no ugly shell marks in it. There were no frightened, helpless women, no whimpering children. There was bright sunlight, huge herds of peaceful cattle, and I passed (I don’t know how--in auto, horse-back, aëroplane or on wings) beautiful, happy old farm-houses, saw playing children, and the only time I had war in my mind was when I came upon a group of old men at the fire of a famous, ancient inn I knew in Ireland. And what they were having to say about the big fight was to marvel that such a great tragedy could ever have occurred. And I stood beside them and wept at my memories of the ghastly war.

But the master dream--one that seemingly never left me, I have to confess, was of a girl. Of course, a wonder girl. It seems that this dream was always hovering in my brain, that it was always recurring to displace the other dreams. This girl was of changeless aspect. She was blue-eyed, always blue-eyed. These eyes were always blessing me with the assurance that everything in the end was to come out right. Her mouth was a marvel of kindliness and tenderness. I suppose my fevered brain was simply evolving the ideal girl that had always been in my mind. At any rate, this girl was my angel then--the angel of the mud-hole, if you will, but she certainly was God-sent to me while my mind wandered and my body, without my will or direction, was putting up its fight for life.

Even in such times as I came into possession of my senses, she was still only half-veiled from me. I could close my eyes and bring her vision back at will.

I had my lucid moments right enough--startlingly clear mental periods when I realized the desperation of my plight, when I despaired of ever getting out of the wretched black wallow alive and when I had thought for food.

Here I was not wholly bereft. Of course, going on such an expedition as had brought me into my present situation, I had forethought to carry emergency rations. I had in my pockets four biscuits and seven cakes of chocolate.

My clothes were soon soaked through and through with the ooze of mud. The biscuits in one pocket were as mush, the chocolate cakes also and the biscuits had, because of the muddy water, turned the same color as the chocolate cakes.

I was thankful for the softened condition of both. My wounded mouth was swollen and inflamed. I could hardly move my lips. I never could have broken between my torn gums a bite off a biscuit. But because they had been thoroughly wet I could suck at them and draw the bits of pasty food down and swallow them. And likewise with the chocolate.

In these clear-headed moments I well enough knew myself to be the victim of fever and I was hoping and praying that if it ever left me I might find myself with strength enough to crawl out of my black bed of mud and make at least a fight to get back to my own, to protection, to the hospital and perhaps--yes, for all my wounds, for all the terrors and horrors I had been through, I did hope I would be able eventually to get back into the big fight. And this is not heroics. It is because I am a man and no man could have seen the crimes of the Germans I have seen and not want to fight the Boches as long as he could stand.

Fortunately, thoughts of food had only come to me in my sane moments and I had therefore been able rigidly to adhere to my plan to eat sparingly--only a portion of a biscuit at a time, only a portion of a chocolate cake. On the morning of the third day I still had fragments of each left.

The mud-hole was the only fountain to slake my thirst for my water bottle had been blown away with my thumb and other fragments of my flesh by the bomb. It wasn’t drinking from a crystal spring. I would press the mud down and make a small hole that filled with stale black water that tasted even worse than it looked. But it was, for all that, delicious to my fevered, wounded mouth. Drinks of it put more life in me than ever “trench rum” did.

And I cannot help but believe that my good, old mud-hole had done more for me than conceal me from my enemies. I believe it acted as a poultice for my wounds in the three days or nearly three days in which I soaked in it. My fevers had come on at night most violently, I honestly do not remember ever having experienced a thorough chill. I was cold and clammy in my waking hours but never cold to the point of suffering acutely on that score.

But my food was gone and though my head was light and my wounded arm hurting me intensely I found myself on the night of this third day feeling that possibly I had acquired strength for the five-hundred yards journey back to our lines. In my weakened condition, I had to think of how the obstacles, quite aside from danger from the Germans, would impede me in the night. I mean the shell-holes, the sections of barbed wire left upstanding in No Man’s Land, and the countless dead bodies I might fall over, the ravenous rats which might attack me. But to have attempted to crawl away in the day-time would have meant certain death.

It may seem a strange statement, but it is true--I have the dead men of No Man’s Land to thank for the fact that I am still living.

There was a mist over the land the night I made my escape. The mist decided me that the time had come to “carry on” unless I could resign myself to rot to death in the mud-hole.

Surely the fog would last until I could stagger out of immediate German territory and merge myself into the torn and blasted waste of No Man’s Land.

I decided to make the try.

The first twenty feet I walked seemed as far as I was ever going to get. I was breathless, giddy, and my legs were almost as irresponsible to direction as was my wounded arm whenever I tried to raise it. I sat or rather fell into some smashed shrubbery and rocked and wept in despair. But that spell of weakness passed and I got to my feet again.

To my surprise--you must understand my long imprisonment in the mud-hole had made my mind almost as wavery as my legs--my legs seemed stronger. Of course, they would. The confinement in the mud-hole had benumbed them. My feet began to tingle with an almost acute pain. But as I continued to move along I walked the more easily. But I was dazed and I was continuously falling over obstacles of brush or loose stones.

With death threatening behind you can perform marvels and it is my only explanation of how I ever made the journey I did. I can’t attempt to tell this journey in detail. It was a nightmare of pain and horrors, myself more like a sleepwalker than anything else as I endured its hardships.

As I think back on it, it seems to me that I was always swaying, always stumbling. But I remember finding myself well out in No Man’s Land and prone on my back where I had blindly fallen.

Then the reek of the dead brought me staggering to my feet and to my senses. I looked about me like a frightened, bewildered child. The things I saw were so horrible--the dead, sprawled as they were struck down, distorted, maimed in so many ways, made a spectacle so awful that I cried out: “Good God! I’m not going to become one of these. God help me! I must not. God help me.”

And I went tottering along.

And that is why I have said that if it were not for the dead I would not be now among the living. For whenever my strength seemed altogether spent, whenever I began telling myself it was no use, that I’d have to give up, my eyes would turn upon the constant spectacle of the dead in No Man’s Land, as the bursting lights in the sky revealed them. Some of them were headless. Some hung grotesquely on patches of barbed-wire entanglement that had not been smashed down by the shells of previous battle, some--but detail of this sort is perhaps too frightful to even simply describe. All I know is that every time I was ready to surrender, the sight of these piteous dead men nerved me to go on. I would not join them. I would not become as they were. I would not fall and lie there to fester and rot, to become a noisome thing.

Positively, unreservedly, it was these men, who had already given their lives for their countries, whom I have to thank for the preservation of my own. Their grim presence drove me on and on.

Evidently I had escaped from my mud-hole unobserved by the enemy. No bullets had sung after me; there had never been a sign of pursuit.

But now I had to consider a new danger. Weak as I was, feeling that every next step must be my last, I realized that it would not do for me to go marching straight for the Canadian trenches which I knew to be almost straight beyond. The 48th Toronto battalion were there. In such case, I might expect them to do for me what the Germans had failed to do. I might expect a clutter of bullets to strike me down.

They could not know me from a Boche. I was caked all over with mud. I was a strange figure. And I well knew that so many had been the schemes and strategies of the Boche spies that in all probability the Canadians would shoot first and inquire regarding me afterward.

I had to rake my confused mind for a recollection of the lay of the land along the trenches, for a recollection of the secret paths by which they might be flanked and then approached. I never put in a greater effort of will. And finally I remembered.

After that it was just a long stumble. I was falling like a clown at almost every step. I would faint and awaken to find myself flat on my back or on my face.

But in the end I huddled in a narrow pathway so near a Canadian trench that I could hear some chap singing. It didn’t help me any that he was singing a hymn and singing it most lugubriously.

Daylight had come.

My whole thought and effort now were in gathering sufficient strength to utter a yell loud enough to carry to that trench. I was panting. It was agony for me to move my lips. And weak! Good heavens, I would have fallen over at the kick of a rabbit!

I breathed hard, tried to fill my lungs and after a wait of nearly ten minutes, I am sure, let go my “yell.” It was the most pitiful “yell” ever made. It was as slight as a sick infant’s cry. What I had tried to shout was “Oh, Canadians!” Of course, none heard it. So I waited there, resting another fifteen minutes. I tried again to shout. To my surprise my voice came out strong and loud:

“Oh, Canadians!”

With my last strength I repeated the cry and it came loudly again: “Oh, Canadians! Oh, Canadians!”

“Who’s there?”

I tried to answer and couldn’t.

Then a tall fellow with set bayonet ran down the pathway. He saw my helpless condition readily enough and strode straight for me.

“British officer,” I was able to whisper. “Wounded.”

“Cheero, sir,” he answered. “Lots of help for you here.”

He lifted me, got a long, strong arm under my shoulders and began leading me along the little path.

And just then the damned battery of the Huns, from which I had so laboriously, painfully and at times helplessly fled, opened up an intensive fire. Not this battery alone, but scores all along the line. But I thought only of that particular battery just then. And no sooner had I thought of it than a shell burst almost upon us. We were slammed to the ground. A burst of light swept the entire position. My companion’s sturdy support fell from me and he uttered a scream. I stared toward him as the dust and smoke cleared away. Simultaneously with the shock or the shell explosion a sniper’s explosive bullet had struck him in the left arm. The dum-dum bullet tore the arm completely from his shoulder. He was looking dazed but conscious.

“See, I’m hit!” he said in child-like astonishment.

“Sorry,” I whispered at him. “Sorry that I was the cause.”

He nodded and tried to smile.

“It’s all in the game,” he answered and fell over.

There came a rush of men out of the trench to our rescue and they carried us both into its protection. They pushed a cigarette between my lips, the first thing that’s always done for a wounded comrade in the trenches, but I was too weak and sick to want that small, immediate comfort. The cigarette hung on my wounded lips. I tried to thank them, but could say nothing. I was making a desperate fight to hold on to consciousness.