1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [140]
Father Delaere.
The wounded were at the old wood market. I hurried there with the nurse, and the shells never stopped falling. One woman had her head cut, another her stomach split open, and Alfred Landtsheere had a hand cut off and his knee broken. These last two were mortally wounded.
After having given what aid we could we wanted to go back home. It was dark, but one would have thought that some barbarous assassins not only boxed us in but followed us all the way through the shadows. Many shells and shrapnel exploded just metres from us and followed on our heels through rue Courte de Thourout, Grand’ Place, rue St Jacques. We lost ourselves dozens of times, blinded by clouds of dust, and all round us the ground seemed paved with diamonds, for the shrapnel bullets struck the paving stones in a host of tiny scintillating stars, very bright, which sparkled all around us and seemed to spring up beneath our feet. It was very beautiful – but hardly reassuring. These evil little sprites followed us mercilessly. But we got through, and eventually Mademoiselle and I arrived safe and sound at the convent, covered with dust. Deo gratias!
All over the salient there were soldiers on the move and for the reinforcements marching into the salient the sight of Ypres ablaze was an ominous welcome.
Pte. Η. K. Davis.
We set off marching towards the front on cobblestones and cobblestones are the most awkward things to march on because they’re never level – one will be an inch higher, and the one before it an inch lower. You slip all over the place. To start off with, when we knew we were really going into it, we were paraded and they said, ‘It’s going to be a bit stiff. Anybody doesn’t think he can stand it, one pace forward.’ It took more pluck to do that than stand still, I can tell you, so we all stood still.
We started off just when dusk was falling and we kept going until one o’clock in the morning. Anyone who’s ever done any marching knows that if the man in front takes a quarter of an inch step shorter than you, you’re going to catch up and bang into him, and you’ve got to stop. And if he takes a quarter of an inch the other way he goes away from you and you have to run to catch him up. All the way we were either bumping or running. It’s hard to explain the sound of the guns. The best way is to imagine you’re walking up a clock face and you hear batteries firing on your left and your right, going pop, pop, pop, pop, and sometimes it was bong, bong, bong, bong because it was a louder battery than any of the others. We started off on this clock face, say at six o’clock, and the shells started off bursting, one at five and twenty to seven and one at five and twenty past seven, and gradually as you went on the batteries seemed to go up the scale until the shells were bursting at eleven o’clock and one o’clock, on your right and left. It was unnerving!
This march lasted all evening into the night and every now and again, something seemed to affect our eyesight and we could only walk on by the sound of men’s feet in front. I thought it was some disinfectant they had been putting down on dead men and horses but of course it was gas! The whole Battalion marched over the countryside in single file. We were filling up a hole in the line and the C.O. got four of us, one man each from the four companies, and we set off to fill up the line. He dropped me as the first one as a marker for my company. There I was alone in Belgium! He had gone off with the other three and before very long there was a whizz-bang, and then another one, and that made me wonder whether I was standing on the skyline and Jerry could see me, so I flopped down. I’ve never felt so lonely in my life being all alone in Belgium. Eventually the C.O. came back with the others and we were told not to fire