By Gregory Clark, February 19, 1927.
It is not courage that wins wars nowadays. Courage, was no doubt the chief virtue of a soldier in the days when they fought battles hand to hand. But it was a sort of dogged dumbness that made the German a good soldier long after he was licked. When the Canadians were nearly insane with mud and racket and lice, you could go out on patrol in No man’s Land and hear the German posts singing. Stolid dumbness is a great quality in modern armies. Far greater than courage. The only virtue that approaches it in general serviceability is craft.
Craft won Sergeant Fatty Boarding both his stripes and his decoration. Yet he had no courage and only a little dumbness. He was nervous as a little boy going down cellar1. He started at the slightest sound. It was a treat to see him start violently. Early in his career, he showed he had no courage by being caught jammed head first into a funk hole2 so tightly the captain had to get a working party to dig him loose. And the first week, he made a name for himself by suddenly, in the midst of the evening strafe, giving a wild yell and starting to run. He ran down the communication trench until he got lost in the dark. The file detailed to go after him heard him yodeling pitifully in the midst of a field of weeds half a mile back of the reserve trenches, and he was pathetically glad to be put under arrest. But they took him back up the line.
His appearance before the c.o. became regimental history.
“Well, sir,” said Fatty, “I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have enlisted. This is all just a bad mistake. Send me back home.”
“My man, you’re in the army now,” said the colonel.
“But do you mean to say,” said Fatty, pop-eyed, “that if a man doesn’t want to stay here he’s go to stay here and run the risk of getting killed?”
“Good heavens!” exclaimed the colonel.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered,” said Fatty.
His punishment, in view of his obvious innocence, was fourteen days and the charge was altered to absence without leave. And it was in the fourteen days at Fatty spent cleaning pails and paving paths around the officers’ huts that he worked out the theory that won him more than most men got out of the war.
Probably his close confinement in the clink3 with that famous old soldier, Provost Sergeant Harkins, showed him some of the fundamentals of soldiering. Harkins never tired of relating his numerous adventures in ‘is Majesty’s service In Hindia, Hafrica, Hafganistan and wot not. And fourteen nights of these yarns was a good general education for Fatty.
Fatty came from a small settlement – you couldn’t call it a village, exactly – in Northern Ontario. He had spent his life mostly sitting around. He was an intense thinker. His favorite amusement was sitting with the upper part of his back and the back of his neck propped against a wall, the rest of him laid out on the ground, while he screwed his face up into an expression of deep concentration. As soon as he was released from the clink, he found a good wall with a southerly exposure and laid himself out to think.
Fatty a Graceful Volunteer
When cook house sounded at five o’clock in the afternoon, Fatty fell in, not somewhere in the first flight, which was his usual position, but at the very end of the line with the batmen4, who, haying eaten most of the officers’ supper, only turned out to cook house for appearance’s sake.
“What’s a matter, Fatty,” called the company wits. “Lost your energy layin’ flagstone pavements?”
When Fatty at last came up to the kitchen, he said in a kindly way to the cook:
“If you need any help cleanin’ up, call on me.”
“Buckshee?5” sneered the cook, who, like all cooks, was a suspicious man.
“No, no! I been workin’ lately and it’s good for me. Just call on me.”
And Abbs, the cook, did. Fatty cheerfully spent the evening as a volunteer, scrubbing up dixies6, carrying water from the distant well. There were half a dozen aspirants amongst the older members of the company who felt they were in line for the job of cook’s helper. But Fatty was so graceful a volunteer, during the rest of the stay in billets, that when Abbs asked, as usual, to be excused duty cooking in the line on the ground of queer pains he had in his stomach, sides, chest, legs and back, the captain, learning that Fatty was the man Abbs wanted to send in his place, agreed.
“That fat fellow is cut out for a cook’s helper,” said the captain.
Thus smoothly did Fatty slip into the job of company cook in the line, a job that kept him strictly on duty in a deep dugout twenty-four hours of the day.
The only thing Fatty had to worry about now was the trips up to the line and the trips back to the rest areas. But he managed to soften these somewhat. Ordinarily, a working party which is detailed to carry in the rations from the dump where the wagons leave them also carries in the four dixies which the company requires in the line. But Fatty showed himself a gallant worker. When he reached the dump, he picked up all four dixies himself. He put one over his head, hung two in front of him and one behind.
In the dusk, you would see him slowly plodding forward, on his own, far in rear of the company, like an unhorsed knight of old.
“My dear man, those dixies are heavy!” cried the Padre7, one night, meeting Fatty.
“Yeh,” said Fatty. “And thick!”
And he carefully and noisily clanked down into the trench.
It was on a trip in on the Mericourt front that Fatty won his first stripes. In addition to his four empty dixies, he was carrying the sergeants’ primus stove8 which he had cheerfully offered to transport into the line because it just covered the lower part of his abdomen which the dixies that hung in front of him did not quite reach. That night, the Bosch9 had learned of the relief and decided, quite rightly, that it was a good time to raid. The trenches would be full, the old and the relieving troops encumbered with baggage, all unready for a surprise attack. Fatty, nearing the forward trenches, met outcoming troops in the narrow communication, and as he could not pass them, laden as he was with dixies, he studied the night carefully and finding it quite still, decided to risk climbing up into the open and walking along the trench to the front line. As he prowled along, he saw that the communication took a wide bend, and to make the short cut, he angled out into the open meadow. At that moment, the Bosch barrage came down like a thousand of brick.
Wild Yell of “Flammerwerfer!10“
Fatty, leaping for the trench, let the dixie on his head fall forward so that it completely obstructed his vision. In order to keep his mind intent on covering as much of his delicate anatomy as possible with the dixies and the primus stove, he could not concentrate on the direction he must take. He made a couple of frantic circles, shells and splinters whooping and zinging around him, and then, in a complete and directionless panic, the heavy dixie over his head, he decided to run straight on until he should fall into a trench. The raiders had got to the front trench and were flinging bombs and cutting furiously to get through the wire.
Fatty had the smoldering stub of a cigaret in the hand that held the primus stove. A shell splinter, just as Fatty reached the front line trench, made a hole in the brass stove. The escaping gasoline took fire from the cigaret and there was a wild streak of hissing flame. Fatty, with a shriek, hurled the thing from him. With the dixie fallen over his head, he did not know where he flung it. He certainly did not know he had pitched it fair forward into the thickest of the raiders.
“Flammenwerfer!” went a wild yell from out in No Man’s Land. Someone in charge fired a red rocket and the raiders withdrew in haste just as their first men were about to pitch into the trench.
The Fatty they picked up from the bottom of the trench and disentangled from all his dixies, was speechless with fright. One of the lieutenants who had been within a few feet of the spot came and wrung his hand, shouting:
“Good man! Good man! What in hell was…”
By the time they had got him down into his dugout with a nip of rum in him and surrounded by a group of admiring comrades, Fatty was sufficiently recovered to remember that he was an old soldier.
“I seen my duty,” he remarked casually, “and I done it.”
An hour later, the captain had told Fatty that he was promoted to lance corporal and would be attached to one of the platoons just as soon as somebody could be got to take his place as cook.
Two lieutenants and one sergeant had already given Fatty a drink. The captain offered Fatty his water bottle when he made this announcement. With the resultant courage, Fatty looked his captain in the eye and solemnly saluted.
“Say la gerry!” he remarked.
A few weeks later, at the battle of Passchendaele, in which Fatty was deprived of the honor of participating by an untimely attack of violent cramps in his stomach, the company lost most of its n.c.o.’s and Fatty was promoted to corporal. And it was Corporal Fatty Boarding who brought up the rear of his platoon, gladly carrying the haversacks, the heavily stuffed haversacks, shovels, and other impediments of his weaker comrades, when they marched back into the old Loos sector.
“I don’t see how you can walk with all that stuff hung about you,” said the lieutenant.
“Oh, I don’t mind a few small compact things, sir,” said Fatty. “The heavier they are, the better cover they are, after all.”
“True,” said the lieutenant.
It was Corporal Fatty who was on trench duty at the top of Horse Alley, much to the amusement of his subordinates, when the company commander came through the trench and said in a hoarse voice:
“The enemy are not thirty yards from you here. I guess the safest place in the world, right along here, is No Man’s Land.”
“Boys, I Seen a Rabbit!”
And Fatty climbed up on the firestep11 and took a gingerly look out into that eerie darkness.
“I seen a rabbit,” said he, dropping down into the trench. “Boys, I seen a rabbit!”
“A rat, you mean.”
“No, a rabbit. A big fat rabbit, hoppin’ along not eight feet from my nose. Oh, boy, I could almost smell him cookin’.”
All that night, on duty and off, in the trench and in the dugout, Corporal Fatty Boarding could talk of nothing but rabbits.
“I didn’t do nothing but snare rabbits, back home. I have snore thousands of rabbits. Not these issue rabbits, mind, from Australia, but soft, chickeny, white meat rabbits. Fried rabbits, and boiled rabbits, and rabbit stew…”
“Shut up!” roared the dugout.
And in that one night, Fatty took at least a dozen good long looks over the parapet.
“They’s a woods just back there a bit,” he said, after one of his peeps towards morning. “I bet that place is just swarming with rabbits. Now a rabbit cooked in bacon fat, deep…”
The following day, Corporal Fatty was seen working in his concentrated way with pieces of signal wire, making nooses. He collected several yards of old wire. He borrowed a trench periscope and studied No Man’s Land for the better part of the afternoon. When the lieutenant came along and found him staring over, he asked what he saw.
“I see an old bit of a battered-in trench,” said Fatty, “that looks like a-looks just exactly like a sort of a rabbit runway!”
It must truthfully be told that, before taking any steps himself, Corporal Fatty asked several of his men if they would care to go out into No Man’s Land and set a few rabbit snares for him. But in view of the profane answers, he had to spend the night staring, with his eyes barely clear of the parapet, into the night towards the enemy lines.
“Seen any more rabbits?” asked some of the boys.
“Yes. I think I seen a thousand,” said Fatty.
The third night, he could bear it no longer. The company commander himself had said that No Man’s Land was the safest place around there. So about midnight, through a narrow oblique gap cut in the wire to permit patrols to go out, Fatty crawled forth and set three wire snares in the shallow abandoned trench, which ran from the Canadian to the German side.
He returned all of a lather. He had to alt a long time on the fire step before he gained his voice.
“I guess I didn’t do a very good job. I had to set ’em bigger than at home, because these here Belgian rabbits is big. Maybe I won’t get any the first try.”
However, he posted himself to wait and listen for the squeaks and struggles that would tell of a capture.
Nothing happened for an hour.
Then came a sudden loud squeak. A thrashing around, not twenty feet out.
“Gosh!” said Corporal Fatty, Belgian rabbits seemed as big as horses.
But he leaped forth and wriggled into No Man’s Land. There was a shot. A loud yell. A strangled cry. And just as the officer and duty sergeant reached the bay, in rolled Corporal Fatty Boarding holding by his ears a German trooper with a copper wire strangling him around the neck.
Bombs flew. Corporal Boarding seemed so unaware of help being at hand that he struggled furiously with his captive on the bath mats12, though it was curious that he seemed to want to keep his victim not underneath but on top of him.
“Good man! Good man!” gasped the lieutenant, hurrying the corporal towards the company commander’s dugout, the prisoner staggering ahead at the point of Fatty’s bayonet.
“You find out,” said Corporal Fatty, holding the tin mug up gallantly, as he told his story to the company commander. “You find out where the Germans is crawlin’, then you set snares just as if – well, just as if you was snaring rabbits.”
“Great lad!” breathed the company commander, earnestly.
They made Fatty a sergeant forthwith and six weeks later his ribbon came through.
Editor’s Notes: There is a lot of World War One slang in this one…
- When something is “down cellar” is means it is in the basement. My grandmother used this phrase all the time! ↩︎
- A “funk hole” is a small dugout usually for a single man dug in to the side of an existing trench, with just enough space to sometimes lay down. The term comes from a slang term for cowering in fear. ↩︎
- A “clink” is a prison. ↩︎
- A batman in WW1 is a soldier assigned to an officer as a personal servant. This was based on tradition in the British Army where an officer was a “gentleman”. ↩︎
- “Buckshee” means “free of charge”. ↩︎
- A dixie is a large pot used for cooking or distributing food to the men in the trenches. ↩︎
- A padre in the military is a military chaplain, usually a priest, minister, or rabbi. ↩︎
- A primus stove was the first pressurized-burner kerosene stove. ↩︎
- The Bosch was a derogatory term for the Germans. ↩︎
- A flammenwerfer is a German flamethrower that was used in World War I and World War II. ↩︎
- A firestep is a step or ledge on which soldiers in a trench stand to fire. ↩︎
- A bath mat is slang for wooden floors used to line trenches to help with controlling mud. They are also referred to as duckboards. ↩︎
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