1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [157]
In four months at the front the Patricias had earned a high reputation and not a few more medal ribbons to add to their collection. There had also been casualties for they had been in the gruelling close-fighting in the trenches at St Eloi and when they left to come to Ypres many of the originals were left behind in their own small regimental cemetery. The last to be buried was their Commanding Officer, Colonel Farquhar, shot by a sniper as he was handing over to the Colonel of the Battalion that relieved them. That had been a blow, and it was felt personally by every man, because now the Patricias were more than a regiment, they were a family. Major Gault had been wounded and, in his absence, Captain Buller had taken temporary command and a hundred reinforcements had arrived from Canada. Among them was Jimmy Vaughan. On the night of 3 May he was almost the last man to leave the line.
The Patricias had not expected to take part in the withdrawal, for they were long overdue for relief, but the 2nd Shropshire Light Infantry who should have relieved them had been hurried away to assist elsewhere and the Patricias had been twelve days in the line in front of Polygon Wood, fifty yards from the German trenches. Now they were to fall back, in the trickiest part of the whole retirement, and they were very tired, for each company, when it was not engaged in the firing line and was nominally ‘in support’, had been engaged in back-breaking labour helping to dig the new line three miles in the rear. The rudimentary trenches were far from complete, but it was time to go.
Like nine tenths of his comrades Vaughan was not Canadian born. Four years earlier he had left Stockton-on-Tees to work on a farm in Canada.
Pte. J. W. Vaughan, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, 80 Brig., 27 Div.
I joined up with my pal Jack Bushby and we didn’t join with the first lot because we were working near Winnipeg on a farm and it was harvest time. Well, the harvest was hard work but it was two dollars a day and that was good money so naturally we didn’t want to miss out, but we joined up in November when the Patricias called for reinforcements. We were young and we had the same idea that everybody did, ‘Oh, the war will be over in about three months, so we’ll get a nice trip home out of it and we’ll soon be back.’ Well, how wrong could you be? We didn’t get much in the way of training. We were shipped out in January, had a bit of training at Tidworth in England, and we joined the regiment in the field on 28 March and by 19 April we were in the front line at Polygon Wood, and there we stuck until we had to retire. We didn’t worry about the fact we had to retire, didn’t think we were losing out or anything, because it was all explained to us.
They started on the move as soon as it got dark and, of course, we had the wood behind us, quite a thick wood that time, so there was no problem about concealment or anything, and over a period of a couple of hours they moved off a platoon at a time. But they’d told us just how important it was that the Germans shouldn’t be given the idea that we were clearing off. I was one of thirteen men left behind as a rearguard and we were told exactly what we had to do. What we did was fire a shot – and of course at night you could see the flash of the rifle, the Germans could see it – then we would walk along the trench, maybe for about ten yards, and we would wait a few seconds and fire another