By Gregory Clark, May 7, 1921.

For one day spent in the trenches, the infantry soldier spent at least two or perhaps six or ten days well and safely back of the trenches – depending on what part of the war he saw.

We are just beginning to get perspective on the war. And it is astonishing the number of queer beliefs and misapprehensions that are entertained as to the kind of life the youth of Canada led for four years.

One of the commonest pictures in the minds of the elder generation is of two endless, straggling trenches, filled with thousands and thousands of fiercely-firing Britishers and opposing Germans, with cannon in rear of the respective trenches belching furiously a la Sebastopol1 – a sort of insane, bloody, awful melee.

Stealth is the big, predominant idea to be borne in mind when visualizing the war.

Stealth.

A vast loneliness. A belt of country several miles wide in the broad day light, in which not a living thing moved.

A wide scene of wreckage; neglected meadows, smashed farm-houses. crushed villages, all still in the sunlight; all still and motionless and lonely.

For man was underground, in trenches, in cellars, in holes burrowed fifty feet down into the earth.

The cannon – little guns firing swift shells the size of a quart bottle, of and big, fat howitzers firing slow, droning shells as big as nail kegs2 – the bright cannon were painted grey, covered with rubbish, and desperately, secretly, hidden away.

All the horses, all the motor lorries, the engines, the teeming camps, the “dumps” of food and shells and supplies all the machinery of war was back beyond those two opposing horizons.

But between those two horizons lay absolute peace.

The sun beat down beautifully, or the grey rain fell drifting, on a wide land of silence; motionless.

To be sure, once in a while, a far thud would wake the silence, a swift or slow but unseen creature would come wailing through the air and land with a terrific explosion in a cloud of blackish smoke and dust, somewhere in the peaceful scene. You would think this astonishing event would have disturbed the uncanny desolation.

But nothing happened. The smoke drifted away. Nothing stirred. Nothing appeared.

Oftentimes, for an hour at a stretch, those unseen missiles would come wailing and rushing in dreary regularity, a couple of minutes apart, to strike insanely in and about one particular spot. These were shells coming from some unseen, remote cannon to seek out a battery of our own unseen guns.

Other times, the shells would wearily drop one after another along the course of a dirty rambling ditch – sometimes hitting, mostly missing – “searching” a trench position, they called it – all through the lonely afternoon.

Stealth lay all day between those two horizons.

For each stricken plot of ground absorbed all the sensations of the plunging, aimless shells. Whatever horrors were created by the vicious bursts, nothing showed. Men agonized in secret, and died by stealth.

At evening, the hidden guns came alive, began barking and coughing, the dusk became filled with faint flashes and electric flickerings, and shells began to rush singly and in fearful flocks, to burst on trenches, on gun positions, on roads.

For at dusk all that stealthy world awoke. Over those ominous horizons came strings of wagons hastening in the first dark with food, ammunition, supplies for the thousands of men who lived in this eerie belt; came strings of wary-stepping soldiers to relieve some of those who had been living a week or more in it; came new guns: came muffled working parties to dig, to build, to improve that uderground world of the land of stealth.

All night men and horses came and went over the hidden horizons. All night men prowled – in the narrow strip between the two fierce front trenches: or repeating their ditches: carrying, distributing food, letters, water, bombs, shovels.

A regiment would come over the horizon in the night and “relieve” a tired regiment, take over its trenches, its tunnels, holes in the ground, its hidden “posts” out in the narrow plane called No Man’s Land. And the tired regiment would rack up and straggle in the darkness back over the horizon.

While all the long night the guns would flash and bark and cough heavily, the shells trying to seek out these furtive parties in the night far and near.

Then softly would come dawn, and silence.

A few guns would fire parting, bravado shots through the pearly mists. A belated wagon, a delayed platoon or working party, would scurry back over the horizon.

Then day – and silence, and stealth!

The weary troops greeted the sun; then sought out their burrows to sleep. Where the night had fostered a feverish activity, the sun found silence, with a few shying aeroplanes peeping and prying.

Of course, occasionally there was battle. The night or the dawn or the day would go mad with raving guns, and the curtain of mystery was torn aside in flame and smoke, while the thousands surged up out of hiding, and floundered in the open a little way; to disappear again, after a few days or a few weeks of wild confusion and abandon: when the sun would once more shine down on a desolation like unto Balclutha’s3.

But here is the point: the infantryman did not remain long in this unearthly country between the haunted horizons. He would do six or twelve or sometimes twenty days in it. He would return again to the same part of it a few times. But ever so often, he went weary and anxious in the night back over that horizon, to find himself at daylight in a camp of tents or huts. And ever so often, he would move still further back to a village, where there was baseball, little shops, drill, and taverns.

And then once in a longer while; he would go back twenty miles to a village or town, for two or three weeks, where there were civilians, girls, women, human beings, homes, hearths; just to remind him that all mankind was not in uniform, ordered about like galley-slaves, living like rats by night and hiding by day.

The war was stealthy, not at all like old valiant wars.

But the average soldier, counting up his days, finds he spent a minority of them in the blasted, forlorn country between the two horizons.

Editor’s Notes:

  1. This is reference to Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War of the 19th century. ↩︎
  2. Nail kegs were just barrels that nails came in. ↩︎
  3. Balclutha derives from the Gaelic Baile Chluaidh (“City on the Clyde”, a poetic name for Dumbarton). ↩︎