Read Ebook: Back from Hell by Benson Samuel Cranston

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Ebook has 393 lines and 50691 words, and 8 pages

The Knights of Columbus contribute quite as freely to the comfort of the soldiers, and I do not believe there is a boy on the Western front who would tolerate a word against either of them. It strikes me that the religion of the Red Cross type--a type which includes the Y. M. C. A. and the Knights of Columbus--is the kind which the Master exemplified in His life and the kind which he intended for us. I feel that it is a far truer and higher form of religion than many of the brands that are being peddled about the world today, and I hope when the war is over, that the whole world may adopt it.

WHEN FRANCE WAS FIRST "GASSED"

At the stations these days we found numbers of poilus who were "done in" by the German explosive bullets, many of them breathing their last. Poor devils, writhing in pain and agony! It was bad enough to have their flesh penetrated by the capsule of lead and steel, but to have added to it the excruciating torture of having the bullet explode or expand after it got inside, was fiendish.

But such was the German's idea of "military necessity." They had thrust aside every consideration of humanity, and every ideal of morality, and were employing ruthless and frightful methods to gain their military goal, which as they said "must be attained at all costs."

And cost it did.

It cost innocent life and untold agony.

It was daily costing conscience and character.

It was costing Germany that standing among the nations which is so necessary to the future, and she was sacrificing her national honor for transitory dreams of power and wealth.

The Germans had employed the most fearful implements that the genius of their fertile brains could devise.

Liquid fire which seared the flesh, and electric currents which burned most dreadfully, were among the lighter forms of their torturous warfare.

The poison gases capped the climax.

One afternoon, at the second battle of Ypres, they let loose this demon of the devil.

From a distance of two miles the ambulance men had been watching the engagement, waiting for the signal to come forward to transport the wounded men.

The field glasses betrayed every movement on the battle line.

Suddenly, and without any apparent cause, the Allied lines seemed to break, and the fields were alive with running figures.

Astonishment took hold of the spectators.

The impossible had happened, and the French Army was in wild retreat.

Figures were seen tottering and stumbling across the meadow, soldiers were reeling to and fro, staggering like drunken men. Falling down upon the ground, waving their arms frantically, they kicked their legs in the air, agonized and groaning. Some of them came into the Red Cross dressing station, coughing, choking, and strangling. Their faces were green and their chests were heaving. Between gasps, they related an incredible tale.

The Germans had opened up a bombardment of our trenches with some new, but hellish, weapon. A greenish, gray gas had appeared above them, and hung low, instead of rising. It seemed to be heavier than air, and soon it made its way down into the trenches, choking our men and throwing them into a state of terror.

They tried to fan it away with their blankets. But no use, it only spread the gas, which got into their throats and lungs and tortured them beyond all description.

"God knows we will fight like men," they said, "but to be smothered like rats is different. No human being could endure such suffocation. God never meant a man to breathe that stuff and we'll make those hell-hounds pay for it."

But hundreds of poor poilus had already "gone West," and those who escaped were in such a condition of permanent disability and weakness that there was no danger of their making the Germans pay. Many Canadians, too, brave fellows, died that day, but on that day also they became immortal.

The stretcher bearers had seen it all, and now upon the signal, plunged into the work of lifting the sufferers into the ambulances and carrying them back to be treated and cared for. For days this thing endured, until at last the Allies devised a gas mask or respirator which completely nullified the effects of the deadly chlorine, but they paid an awful price before they got it. It is a very simple device, consisting of a long cap of light canvas or similar material, soaked in a chemical solution which absorbs or neutralizes the poison of the gases. The cap has large eye holes with glass windows. The air from the lungs is expelled through a tube which has an outward opening valve, so that you must breathe in through the treated gauze. One's coat is buttoned tightly around the lower end of this cap or "smoke helmet," so that no gas can enter from below. It is put on in twenty seconds and can withstand five hours of the poison gas.

WHEN JACQUES "WENT WEST"

One of the most pathetic of the personal experiences which I had while I was in the service was in my association with a young poilu of about nineteen.

I had become well acquainted with the lad and we had many an interesting talk together, he speaking in his inimitable French manner and I responding in my butchered-up attempt at that language.

One day, however, after we had been speaking of how we were going to get the Germans, Jacques must have become a little careless, and when he went up to his fire step, raised his head a little too high, for he received an ugly skull wound.

Some time afterwards I was by his side and, in a husky whisper, he told me he was seriously wounded. He asked me to bring him a pencil, and said he was afraid he was "done in." He then fumbled clumsily about in the pocket of his grand-tunic, or great coat, until he found a piece of paper. It was in reality a piece of cardboard on which was a photograph of himself taken with his mother some years before. It was old, faded, and discolored, and on the back of it he wrote a message which ran something like this:

Jacques.

That's an example of heroism and patriotism for America!

And after that, for several weeks, that little loyal French mother, now alone in the world, sent me regularly some cakes and delicacies, with the message that as she did not have any of her own now to care for, she must try to do her best to help those who were helping France to win the battle for liberty.

Poor Jacques had "gone West." And she need not send him any more clothes or food, but Jacques and his two brothers and his father too, have thrown their lives into the scale, and have added just so many more names to that honor roll, which already is large, of patriots of France. They loved their country. Every man, woman, and child over there does likewise, and France will honor them all eternally.

I pray God's blessing on Jacques' mother now.

"TRENCH NIGHTMARE"

Often in the long, long hours of the midnight during that period I brooded over the situation. Frequently the wheels of my thought would turn swiftly, and cause me to reflect upon that life in the terrible trenches; in those uncanny and frightful sewers, dug in the ground, cut there in No Man's Land, and, it sometimes seemed, in no God's land, where the guns bark, and the red fire leaps, and the shrapnel hisses, and the howitzers rip and snort in the daytime, and where glassy-eyed rats and vermin sneak and glide, spying upon the fatigued soldier in the night time, ready to finish up the work which the explosive may not quite have ended.

Out there, in those animal burrows, surrounded by mud and blood and bacterial mold, where, week after week, the poor, plucky poilus existed, it could not be called living, and month after month remained in the weird, grim business of killing their unseen opponents by machinery.

I can picture them now lying upon that bank of dirt, some two feet high and eighteen inches wide--the fire step, they call it--which runs along the front side of the trench, six feet in the ground and three or four feet wide, with nothing overhead, or nothing but branches of trees covered with dust and mud.

As I write I can see the entire spectacle: How those men stuck out their rifles through the openings left for them and, at the given signal, fired, never knowing whether they hit and killed their objects.

But those bullets went home, all right.

The list of wounded on either side, at the end of the week or the end of the month, told more tragically than any individual report could tell that those bullets went home. And day after day, and week after week, every three minutes, or every four minutes, those men raised their smoking, reeking tubes of death, and let fly the fatal messengers.

And night after night they had to lie upon that bench bed of dirt and indulge in disturbed sleep, or else gaze out upon that knotted, gnarled mass of barbed-wire entanglements in front of the trenches, as it glistened in the moonlight; that barrier, which, unlike the barbed wire that civilized man--and civilized beast--is accustomed to, has barbs upon it, not one but four inches in length, to rend and tear and catch the flesh of man, and hold him wriggling, writhing and squirming as he tries to charge the enemy, just long enough to give that enemy the chance, from his hiding place over yonder under the ground, to shoot him full of bullet holes.

God, what a nightmare it is! And when an assault was ordered and they charged down the alleyways between the sections of barbed-wire entanglement, they found themselves confronted by storms of bullets from those wicked machine guns, each one of which speaks at a rate of 450 to 3,000 times per minute.

In order to have even a gambler's chance of capturing the enemy's trench, therefore, sometimes it became necessary to abandon the open alleyways and charge right across and "over the top" of those awful masses of barbed wire. This was almost certain death for those of the first ranks. Other lines of men following close upon the first might also be mowed down as well, as they were caught upon the wire, but after a while all the wire is covered up, and all the space is filled between the top of it, waist high, and the earth, with soldiers' bodies, a veritable foundation of human flesh, upon which the following waves of men usually rushed over successfully without becoming entangled.

If fortune was with them, they had some possibility of taking the trench of the enemy.

If they did, what next?

The enemy, or what was left of him, retreated through communicating trenches to others in the rear, of which there are many, planted a stick of dynamite after him, to blow up his retreat, and found himself, in a few moments, a hundred yards back, and intrenched just as solidly as he was before. Perhaps even more solidly, because he had now the men who escaped from the front line trench in addition to the same number in the second line, which now became the first.

Such is war today.

And, because of this method of warfare, the death list is a hundredfold more frightful, and so along that battle line in France, three hundred and fifty miles in length, the weekly toll of human life staggers all conception. The contemplation of it saddens the soul. Nothing but the vision of Liberty and Right triumphant can ever compensate for the slaughtered loved ones.

The piles of dead and wounded men, bleeding, groaning masses of human pulp, rotting flesh and decaying bones, carry disease and fever to ambulance rescue workers and all. These are the black silhouettes which go to make up that grim and gloomy picture, that nightmare of the trenches. These, of course, are the things one sees in his dark and somber moments. But it is not all like this.

CALM BEFORE A STORM

Section "Y," to which I had been attached, was about this time transferred to a point much farther east and south. They were a jolly bunch of good fellows and always had a sociable time together. As a rule the best of feeling existed between all of the members but I remember one occasion on which the tranquillity of the party came perilously near being upset, temporarily at least. One of the boys was of a rather argumentative turn of mind and would often deny the statements of the other boys apparently just for the sake of controversy. I think he believed that matching wits and defending one's position were wholesome mental exercises. I will not mention his name as there is no animosity whatever between us, but I will say that he went later into the diplomatic service of our country. He had been a kind of soldier of fortune and without a doubt had knocked about the world a lot and seen a number of things. In his time he had been to nearly all the countries of the globe and had been in some colleges and universities.

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