16
The only time I had ever been in a hospital before Was When I broke my leg out from Phoenix, Arizona, where a horse bucked into a mesquite tree. That was a wonderful, small hospital, but this Toronto hospital is something to write home about, all full of pretty girls, and them I need bad.
Evidently the staff has been alerted that I am in a hurry, so I am given a fast shave and told they will operate in the morning. I am in a large ward where there are many sick people. I am possibly the healthiest person in the hospital, here for an operation I don’t need but may need some day if someone kicks me in the stomach.
The hospital believes in starting early. I am wheeled in their operating room at seven o’clock and moved onto a table, and before I can catch a fast breath they throw blankets over me from both sides. Then, some chains. When I was placed on the table, I spotted a gal who I supposed was the head nurse standing at the head of said table. She was a good-looking old bag, I guess about twenty-eight. While they were clamping the chains on to keep me from jumping off the table, I was trying to tell this dame something. She responded by dropping a mask over my face and I began to choke to death. Did she give a damn? No, she kept doing what she was doing while I passed into a beautiful field of flowers, hating this dame like the monster she was.
When I came to I was surrounded by a screen of curtains and was sicker than I had ever been in my life. Every once in a while a student nurse or some dame would peek through the screen, snicker, then go away. It took me all day to recover from the ether they had used for an anesthetic and take some interest in my surroundings. It seemed by some circumstance I was one hell of a curiosity to everyone.
Beginning to feel better, I asked my neighbor in the adjoining bed what all the laughter and curiosity were all about. It seems, a person recovering from an ether anesthetic talks a lot and usually expresses what is on their mind when they pass out. In my case, it was this old bag of twenty-eight. I went under hating her like nobody’s business, so when I started to talk she was my subject and my language was evidently not fit to eat. They should have brought me back to this world in a soundproof room. I didn’t relive my past, it was all my opinion of this gal who gave me the works and didn’t even say goodbye.
What was so interesting or pleasing to all the student nurses and most everyone concerned was the fact that my particular hate for this gal expressed their own feeling, only I did it with a vengeance. I was damned ashamed of myself and terribly embarrassed and very much wanted to apologize, but I never saw the young lady again.
By morning I had completely recovered and asked the doctor when I could go back to my unit, which he said was one week from date of operation. During this week, it seemed like our entire motor unit was in to see me. They came three and four at a time, both afternoon and night. Fellows I barely knew. The word went out that I had been operated on so I could go over with the gang, and they damned near made a hero out of nothing. Best of all, my major, whom I had never expected to hear from, came with Sergeant O’Brien. Now I was sure I wouldn’t miss the boat. I was sure to go with my unit. With what kind of rating I didn’t care, but here in the hospital I worked out a way to go as a first driver if they didn’t get me too soon with the examination.
Back at my bunk everyone was glad to see me. You would think I had performed a service for somebody other than myself. I was excused from drill for a week and allowed a weekend pass. But I had something on my mind, because the rating examination was coming up soon and I knew from nothing about driving a truck. Getting my friend Fish Ross in a corner, I tell him my troubles, which he more or less realized, as the Fish was one of our Calgary crowd. This boy is the most efficient all-around mechanic in our entire motor unit. All I want him to do is teach me all he knows in a few days. I want him for a godfather or something. The Fish is a prince, and assures me I have nothing to worry about. Even if I should fail and fall on my face in Toronto, this can all be remedied when we reach overseas.
So on the weekend we go into the city, where my friend rents a truck and tries to convert a cowpuncher into a first-class truck driver. If one knows about trucks, there is nothing to learn, but in me the Fish has a real dumbbell. Yet through Saturday and Sunday I have developed my driving enough to pass any driving examination as long as the boys don’t get too technical. As to why a truck goes and stops, I don’t know, but Fish says never mind, I’m in.
My idea has paid off, thanks to a real pal. The day for the great test arrives. We are to be examined in the mechanics’ building, where those who are trying for first driver are turned over to a sergeant assigned for the purpose of examination and rating. We are taken separately and asked a few oral questions. Whether the Fish had told the sergeant what to ask me, I didn’t know, but they were the same thing the Fish had taught me and I remembered the answers. So far I was in with flying colors. The driving I wasn’t worrying about. I felt pretty sure of my driving. It was the oral I was doubtful about.
So through a big door into another part of the building, and here I am sunk. Someone has gone nuts. They have a light beat-up automobile for the test. The car is one of the Henry Ford variety with a foot movement known to no human other than a Ford driver. We’re given no explanation of what to do or why or that a Ford is different from a truck in the gear shift and other departments. The mechanics’ building has big cement pillars about one hundred feet apart with a cement floor smooth as glass. To stop, a fellow can choose his own pillars. This I know because up against one of these is where I stop when my driving examination is over.
The sarge is a brave man. “Take the wheel, Libby. It will soon be over.” The guy didn’t know how right he was. When I asked where the hell is the gear shift, he brushed me off with, “Everything is done with your feet. All you do is push the pedal down, give her gas and you’re off!”
He was absolutely right. We are off, like a wild man with the itch. We fly past one post, make a fast turn on two wheels and are gaining speed when I want to stop, ducking another pillar. Old Sarge turns the ignition off as we hit the next pillar square in the face. The old Ford gives a cough, her radiator spouts water, someone yells, “Ride ‘em cowboy,” and I have been examined.
No one is killed, not even hurt except the sarge. He don’t feel so good and is about to give me a zero rating when the Fish shows up. He was the joker who yelled, “Ride ‘em cowboy.” The examining sergeant is only human. When the Fish explains to him what a lousy way to examine a truck driver, and goes so far as to say I have been his driver on a truck for two days, this more than satisfies the sarge, who has a lot of respect for my friend’s ability.
So without any more worries until I get a truck, I am supposedly one of the best, at least that is what the rating shows. What happened to the Ford we never learn, the junk pile perchance.
We have been in training six months, which has paid off. We are the best dressed, best drilled unit in the Exposition Park. The man in Calgary said this would be our first stop, how long he didn’t say. We all expected just to change cars here in Toronto, and then to France without any training. From all we can hear, the more training the better, as what started out to be a small battle is a real crisis and the first Canadians to go in action have taken an awful beating with horrible losses.*
These Canadian people are wonderful. They never cry, they are back of England with everything. I’m real glad I didn’t quit and return to the U.S.A. True, I’ve lost my citizenship, but America isn’t going to finance me in the Peace River country. So the boys in Washington can go sit on a tack. I’m for the Canadians through this thing, right or wrong, and they speak my language, so they must be right.
It’s April 1915, and we are away in a cloud of dust, the great day has arrived. There is no doubt about France. We are loading out and on our way for Halifax, then the boat to somewhere over there. Everyone is more than ready to be moving. It is a thrill in itself.
From Halifax we sail in a passenger boat, the HMCS Metagama, where we go first class, with dining room and service complete. We spend several days ducking around to avoid submarines and such, which gives my young pal Coapman time to get into trouble. This lad can stir up a row with the least effort of any human I have ever known. It is not done to give anyone trouble, just to have fun, which often boomerangs. This is one of those occasions. Some of the birds who have it in for him were about to throw him in the drink for giving the impression he was a German spy. It seems to be my painful duty to fight for this bird the rest of my life. At least while we are together in this man’s war, I don’t intend to let anyone push either of us around too much.
Liverpool at night. We couldn’t arrive in daylight, when a fellow could see what he was doing. It’s always night with nobody knowing what it was all about. Our officers are trying to find out where we go from here, so all we can do is wait.
We are finally aboard a train for a trip across England to our new quarters in tents on a spot where mud was first discovered. Here we are supposed to be equipped with trucks for use in France. Evidently the honeymoon is over and we are down to business.
I have been wanting to travel, so here I am in Good Old England on Dibgate Plains, near the city of Folkestone. Our tents are large with a center pole and a wooden floor and sleep six, everyone with their feet toward the pole. Everybody crabs. The quarters in Toronto were too good. We were all spoiled with too much comfort. We have always been paid promptly and far too much for what we are doing, especially when one thinks and remembers that thousands died of exposure this winter in the trenches, to say nothing of the wounded and killed.
While we have had the best clothes in the Canadian Army, with top pay, the poor guys in the trenches were dying for one-ten per day. We were to be paid before leaving Toronto, but due to some mix up and our hasty departure we were not and are on our seventh week in England without pay. From the crabbing and bellyaching, it is a major crisis, which might not have happened had our commanding officer, Major Harris, been with us, but he was too ill to leave Canada and had not joined us, although it was rumored he would in a few days.
What followed was not the fault of our officers. It was a spoiled group of trained men who thought they were soldiers but weren’t. Of these I was one, and am entirely responsible for my part with no alibis for my actions because, while I was younger in years than many, I had lived a rugged life and was fully conscious that we were wrong, dead wrong.
Who was our guiding light in this dumb show I don’t rightfully know, but somehow, some way, it was agreed upon by two hundred and seventy men that when the bugle blew for our morning parade, no one would leave their tent until paid, or until some agreement had been reached.
Imagine if one can, in time of war, a small group of would-be soldiers of every kind, where at an order we could all be shot for not obeying a command. When I think of this, I still get sick at my stomach. It was the one blight on my record, and the one thing I have always been ashamed of. The mutiny for a few lousy dollars was so wrong, and I knew how wrong, which doesn’t excuse me, only makes it worse.
Out of the two hundred and seventy there was only one corporal who appeared on the parade ground with our officers. This fellow I have always admired. Here we were, a unit who had been given more than any other group, letting our officers down and disgracing the entire Canadian Army without any thought of the fellows fighting and dying in France. That we were not all shot or given hard labor the rest of our life was due to the protection given us by our officers. Among our officers was Captain McKinnon, who sent word to every tent that if we would carry on and parade, he would personally see that we would be paid the following day.
True to his word, we were all paid in full, including our back pay, so everyone was loaded, and here again trouble started. Those who could get passes hit for London. Those who didn’t have passes left anyway, so the camp was almost deserted. In a very short time they were picking some of our soldiers up all over England. With all this, our officers protected us, and our major finally showed up from Canada just in time to see us equipped with new trucks in preparation for France. Soon our entire unit was complete with new Pierce Arrows, Locomobiles and Peerless and Packard trucks, all fresh from America. Also, we acquired some light English Daimlers and Leylands, with special motorcycles for our non-coms. The Second Division supply column was ready for service at the front. With a few days getting our trucks adjusted and the personnel assigned to each truck, we took off across England for Southampton, where we loaded our trucks aboard ship for the Seine River, destination Rouen, France.
I had joined the Canadians at Calgary on the spur of the moment with a wish, as the recruiting sergeant said, to see the world, with no expectation of ever getting into a battle. While our chances of getting in the fighting end of the war were still questionable, at least we were coming closer. This we realized after leaving Rouen and heading toward the lines, where we could hear the roar of the big guns and meet ambulances on their way back to a hospital with their sick and wounded. Then the observation balloons began to show up and we met thousands of troops on the march, both going and coming. The ones coming had just left hell, those going were just entering hell, some for the first time, many never to return.
This war, which many optimists thought would be over quick, had the appearance of just starting, and the Canadian troops had suffered terrible losses, with replacements filling the gap in all regiments. The Western Front stretched from the North Sea at Nieu-port, Belgium, nearly four hundred miles southeast to the Swiss Alps. The trenches in the eighty-five-mile-long British sector were held by nearly half a million of our men. Our motor transport was to haul supplies to the boys in the trenches from a loading base in Hazebrouck. We were parked on both sides of the road out of the town of Météren, and from here we loaded our trucks in the daytime with every known ration, together with a very special ration of rum in two-gallon stone jugs. This particular rum saved more lives from respiratory disease than all the medicine. To a boy soaked with rain for days, the ration of rum was a Godsend. It stimulated the circulation and warmed the insides so a fellow could digest the cold food, and when necessary an extra portion of rum would take the place of food.
For sleeping quarters, we were billeted out with French families. Whenever away from our trucks, we were in some chateau out of the rain. For our food we had the best, naturally, hauling the rations. We always had corned meat with canned butter from Sweden. With this butter, French bread and a bottle of vin rouge, which was the French standard drink of ordinary red table wine, along with a couple jiggers of rum, no one was undernourished. I shared a billet with three of my closest friends — Coapman, Robinson and Cornell. We stuck close together on all occasions and shared our food and bed, good or bad, but with our gang there was very little bad. Everyone was on the alert to help the other fellow.
The winter of 1915 is upon us. Such rain I have never seen. Where we are located, it is always wet. To keep the big truck in the center of these cobblestone French roads is not too bad. It is when you pass, or meet someone, that the big babies gently slide in the ditch which lines these roads on each side.
Running at night you have just a small front light, from the lower part of one headlamp, for the purpose of seeing the truck in front with its very dim taillight. When a fellow makes the round trip up to the depot near the trenches, from which the load is then packed by horse transport in to the trenches, and returns to his base, he has had a full night. If a truck hits the ditch, he is left to be picked up by an emergency empty truck for that purpose and the convoy goes on.
If we think we have trouble, we always try to remember the poor devils living in the trenches. With water everywhere, it is impossible to keep dry, and along with the weather there are the damned rats, cooties and, just a rock’s throw away, our enemy, the Hun. The Germans seized the high (and dry) ground on a long chalk ridge, while our boys are dug in across from them in what had once been swamplands.
Anytime I start feeling sorry for myself, I always think, but for the grace of God I could be an infantryman. I didn’t know any better. It was just luck being in a motor transport. It’s a cinch that if the Calgary sergeant had been recruiting infantrymen at the time he nailed me with his line, I would have joined anything to see the world. I was overripe for picking, regardless of what the boy was recruiting.
Always I have been told of the wonderful French girls. I know somewhere the sun must be shining and there are girls with time for pleasure. But where we are there are the young things who work in the bakery at Meteren, whose parents see them home. Poor kids, I know they don’t want to go home, but father knows best. Then there are a few who work in the stores and drinking establishments, who are overstocked with applications. For girls, this is a hell of a place. They are pretty wonderful to carry on with a pursuing male at every turn. If they stand still they are ruined. If they run they might break a leg. So who wants to break a leg? After all, these gals are all for France, vive la France. Vivent les Canadiens, a few million strong. It is la Guerre, who cares? The girls are wonderful. They have done their bit to make the world safe for democracy.
In our sector where there are so few girls, a medal should be issued reading Far and Beyond the Call of Duty, for a public relations job well done. Everyone is talking about leave and where to go. If they start alphabetically, I will be a real old man before I go and the rain will be over. The first place I will go if it happens is somewhere there is sun, any place out of this damned rain. Water in any form disgusts me. It isn’t even good to drink. It’s habit forming. Tonight, thank God for our billet. I don’t have to drive, so shall fold up out of this cockeyed rain with a crock of rum. Tomorrow it may be worse. It’s a bitch of a night for man or beast and the boys in the trenches will suffer. There is no way to keep dry. I’ve seen prairie dogs with better places to go than the trenches.
How anything like this could happen in a civilized world — it’s unbelievable that millions could be buried in the ground just to hold a front or stop an advance. The folks at home will never understand or believe it. Certainly they will never understand the hardship. It is so impossible. Those who survive will live in a world of their own, isolated in thought from families and others to whom they seem unreal. The few infantrymen who survive the trenches will not be able to talk to anyone other than their own kind, as the civilian chatter will never be their dish. They will always think and remember things no one believes who wasn’t there.
Footnote
*This is undoubtedly a reference to the Canadian divisions that helped stem the German advance during the fighting in the Ypres salient in Flanders in November 1914. The Germans, in their sweep through Belgium at the outset of the war, were rushing to capture ports on the English Channel at the northernmost point of what would soon become the Western Front. They were stopped at the small town of Ypres by a combination of British, Canadian, Indian, and French forces, but at a terrible cost.