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:
This is reference to Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War of the 19th century. ↩︎
Nail kegs were just barrels that nails came in. ↩︎
Balclutha derives from the Gaelic Baile Chluaidh (“City on the Clyde”, a poetic name for Dumbarton). ↩︎
The Star Weekly ran a series in 1919 called “Real Stories of the War, As Told by Returned Soldiers” where prizes were awarded. Jim illustrated some of these. The first one here was about the capture of a Prussian Brass Band, which won $1.
April 12, 1919
This story was about capturing Germans while gathering food, which also won $1. ($1 in 1919 would be $17 in 2025).
Just as the officer and duty sergeant reached the bay in rolled Corporal Fatty Boarding and a German trooper.
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.
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 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”. ↩︎
New! Starting in 2025, I’ve decided to expand the scope from the self-imposed timeline of only posting the work of Greg and Jim from 1919-1948. This will include Jim’s comics from his start in 1910-1918 (where there are more editorial comics), and Greg’s work from 1913-1918, as well as his later work after Jim’s death. This will include Montreal Standard work from 1948-1950 and his Weekend Magazine work until his death in 1977.
The above comic appeared in the Calgary “Morning Albertan” and references locals discussing war strategy from World War 1. Lord Kitchener was British Secretary of State for War at the time. It originally appeared in the Star Weekly on January 16, 1915. It looks a little better in that printing and maintains his signature.
EVERY PASSENGER SHIP that sets out from Canada or Great Britain has stewardesses aboard, taking their chances along with the crew and passengers of being torpedoed, bombed or mined. War has increased their work as well as their danger for into their capable care have come hundreds of babies and young schoolchildren en route from Britain to America.
By Gregory Clark, January 18, 1941.
The Sea Might of Britain – instantly there springs to mind the thought of great gray ships, of captains and tars, of the navy trailing its smoke across the tumbling seas of all the earth.
But in our vision of the sea might of Britain we never remember the women who go down to the sea in ships: So this is to be some little account of the women, most of them in their 30’s up, who at this hour, all over the world, through every danger zone where men go, through submarine-infested zones, facing the same dread perils that the bravest of our navy seamen face, are serving the empire by carrying their share of the great sea tradition.
They are the stewardesses. Every passenger ship that sails the seas these days – and there are a great many of them and nearly all British – has its quota of stewardesses aboard. A good standard 20,000 tonner will carry 25 stewardesses even in these times. To the witless passenger, these women are maidservants in white. To the seasick, they are nurses. To the sea-frightened, they are companions and confidantes. To the discerning, they are a class of women unique in the world of women, and rank, in actual training and character, somewhere near the universally respected sisterhood of nurses. In peacetime, they are looked upon by the world at large as some kind of upper-class servant. But in wartime, when you see them as I have seen them on Canada-bound ships carrying hundreds of children, the rating of a stewardess rises somewhere in the direction of Florence Nightingale herself. Before this war is over, and when stories can be told, there will unquestionably be added to the sea saga of Britain the names of many women.
So far, no outstanding story of a seawoman’s heroism has been reported out of the war. But since every passenger ship that has been torpedoed or lost has had aboard its staff of stewardesses, it requires little imagination to picture the part they have played. Because naturally, the women now serving in the greatly reduced passenger traffic of the seas are the pick of their profession.
In my two crossings of the Atlantic in this war so far, the majority of the stewardesses I encountered were women of Lancashire and the West of England. They were also the wives, daughters, sisters, and in many cases, the widows of seafaring men. In all shipping companies, it is normal practice that when a man in their service dies, especially at sea, the widow is given preferment when she applies for a job as stewardess. A great many of the stewardesses you see on a ship are mothers of families.
In the Submarine Zone
On one crossing of the war Atlantic last winter, I talked with a stewardess of nearly 60 years of age whose entire family. was at sea. She came of a sea-going Liverpool family that had been in ships longer than the family records went. Her husband was lost at sea when she was a young woman of 27 with four children. She at once got a job as stewardess and supported the home while her mother raised the children. At the time I talked with this valiant woman who was trying to suppress her true age for fear of having to retire from the sea, she had two sons in the navy, one son a steward at sea and her only daughter a stewardess, also now at sea, whose husband was in the navy.
And talking to this magnificent, capable and kindly woman made me ashamed of the fears I felt as we plowed through the submarine zone. In two crossings of the Atlantic and no fewer than eight crossings of the English Channel during this war, I must confess that the greatest fear I have felt was on these ships – two days out from Britain either coming or going; and of course every minute of the time spent on the channel. The blitzkrieg in France in May never roused in me a single minute of the tension that grips every nerve for hours and days aboard a ship. German bombers, without any interception by British or French fighters, came and lobbed their terror all about. But the unseen terror that lurks in the sea has me ever on edge. Yet every day, every hour, there are ships plodding those seas around Britain. And in those ships, women, on duty.
In wartime, there is, according to three great steamship companies I have talked to, not the slightest difficulty getting stewardesses for whatever distance the voyage may be, or through whatever war zone.
“In Liverpool and Glasgow,” stated one company executive who outfits the ships, “and in almost every seaport in Britain, there are hundreds and possibly thousands of experienced stewardesses not merely with their names down on the steamship company lists, but calling every few days to try and get themselves aboard. There is no difference between the men and the women of the British navy and merchant marine. Did it ever strike you as funny that we should have no difficulty manning every ship that Britain can build? Then it should not strike you as odd that we should have trouble fending off these women trying to get jobs at sea.”
“A woman’s nervous system,” I submitted, is not as ruggedly wired as a man’s.”
“Rubbish,” said the company man who had one time been a chief steward on ships. “There are no nerves at sea.”
And that is probably right. On one of my crossings, I came on a ship that carried 1,200 passengers and crew, 400 of whom were children. Most of them unaccompanied children or, if accompanied, part of far too large a party for the sole exhausted individual woman or man who had undertaken the task. Little children, most of them, at the most helpless and help-demanding age.
At It Early and Late
Those of us who had travelled the sea knew the capacity of our ship’s boats. We knew, the first hour aboard before we left the pier, just what was fated if we should come to any grief. This crowded ship was no place for any man who was anxious about his own future.
One aisle of six cabins on that ship will forever remain in a picture in my memory. The stewardess who served it and the next adjoining aisle of six cabins was a tall, handsome woman of about 40, with auburn hair. She had bright, humorous, observing eyes. Her whole bearing was that of a spirited woman.
In this row of six cabins were – a young, terribly frightened, thin little woman with two babies, one about two years old, the other an infant of two months. Next cabin, two aged ladies who hardly left their cabin for eight days. Next, a very tidy, masterful, tweedy woman, accustomed to bossing people about, with two very tidy, tweedy, haughty little sons of about eight and ten.
Opposite side, a young woman, possibly a school teacher or governess, a gaunt, startled, doe-eyed little woman of 35 who occupied two cabins with seven children she was shepherding across to Canada. The seven were the most lawless youngsters imaginable, ranging in age from four to about nine. The last of the six cabins was occupied by two government men, technical men, in visiting whom I got my daily picture of that corridor full of riot and grief.
I wish I could tell you what sort of people occupied the adjoining corridor of six cabins that this one stewardess had to attend. It was doubtless much the same.
Let us call the stewardess Baxter. On a little sign in your cabin is given the names of your steward and stewardess. The smart thing, of course, among us upper classes who travel the sea, is to call both the stewardess and the steward by their last name, without prefix. But some of us are green and stay green all our lives, and we always call our stewardess Miss Baxter, much to her amusement. If you just call her Baxter, she can see through you and knows you’re a snob. And if you call her Miss Baxter, you’re a snob also. But since she’s a snob too, and since we’re all snobs, what’s the difference?
So it was a great pleasure to observe Miss Baxter, whose name was probably Mrs., and doubtless had sons in the navy, proving for eight days that at sea there are no nerves.
In the first cabin, when the tiny infant wasn’t squalling in that curious steam whistle tone of a new baby, the two-year-old was bellowing, and the poor, terrified little mother was popping in and out of the cabin every two minutes, carrying things, changing things, heating things, cooling things. Then she took seasick and stayed seasick six days. Miss Baxter took charge.
The two elderly ladies were seasick before they boarded ship. Ever little while you would catch a glimpse of a haggard elderly lady peering from behind the green cabin curtain, weakly crying, “Stewardess, stewardess,” and there were times when everybody, including both the elderly ladies, wished they were dead.
The tweedy woman, the competent, the accustomed, knew how to wring the most out of a stewardess. And she was also, as is characteristic of the feline tribe, anxious to teach her two haughty little boys how to wring the most out of stewardesses. One must become accustomed young, mustn’t one? That woman’s cool, level but excruciatingly penetrating voice cutting through the riot of that aisle will linger in my memory forever. Probably I will grow a prejudice as big as a piano against all women with that kind of voice.
But the spirited Miss Baxter never lost a twig of her red hair. Even her alive, darting eyes never showed sparks. “Yes, me lady,” she would say. And only she and the two government technicians and I shared the joke of that. A deep, smooth “Yes, me lady.” And me lady purred like a cat. And her two little boys thought up some more rude questions to ask Miss Baxter.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, right through the week and the day we were at sea, Miss Baxter never rested. Up at five in the morning and to bed whenever at last she could leave the situation to the elderly, stubborn and plodding night stewardess who was supposed to tend the wants of five or six aisles of cabins. I would be very surprised if Miss Baxter got to bed before midnight any night. But I know she was up at 5. Making tea for the two old ladies. Sweeping, arranging, swabbing, preparing, with the help of the steward on duty for the same series of cabins, for another day of riot.
The woman with the seven children, the governess, was of course completely helpless in two or three days at most. But Miss Baxter seemed to be doing as much for her as for any of the others.
I think she got £1 from the tweedy lady. The government men told me the transaction was very publicly and regally done. What the young woman with the two babies, what the governess or the two elderly women forked over, might have been 10 shillings or what have they? But if Miss Baxter got $1,000 for the trip from the company and gifts of precious gold from her passengers she would have been ill paid.
In Time of Emergency
In case of emergency, the duty of a stewardess is to go at once to the cabins to which she is appointed and see that her passengers are warned and assisted. When the seven blasts of the ship’s whistle – or the thud of explosion causes that anguished instant of silence on a ship, you will see the stewardesses, in their white uniforms and caps, suddenly and very swiftly appearing from every direction.
No running, no uplifted hands in feminine flutter. They set down the tray or whatever they are carrying. They pause to consider which of their charges should come first, in the ever-shifting conditions of the hours of the day at sea.
First they must see that every cabin is warned. If the lights have gone out, they must have their torches. If anybody acts silly they must quiet them.
“And the best trick of all,” admitted one stewardess, “is to ask the panicky one to help you.”
What a feminine trick! When every cabin has been visited and no one left asleep, or helpless with either illness, fear or actual injury, the next thing is to help them get properly clothed and carrying their life-belts.
“Many women,” said another stewardess, “instinctively will not obey the order to wear their heaviest clothes. They always, instinctively, grab for their newest or most fancied clothes. I’ve seen a woman head for the boat deck in her nightgown, clutching the evening gown she had worn that evening to dinner.”
The stewardess has been allotted the same lifeboat as the passengers she is assigned to. After getting them all on their way to the boat deck and their muster stations, she is supposed to follow along and see that they don’t try to dart back for something forgotten. She is supposed to check them over, when she, too, reaches her station, and if any are missing to do what she can to locate them.
They are the last women into the boats.
And when in the boats their duty as stewardess does not finish; it just begins. For they must lend aid, help, comfort and care to the women in the lifeboat and set an example of calmness and courage.
THANKS TO the ship’s stewardess, this little war guest arrives happy and smiling in Canada. Her parents in Britain could not have given her better care on the voyage than did the stewardess in whose care she was placed.
So on the ship I refer to, with the 400 children aboard, you can figure with what sort of courage the 25 stewardesses left their own homes and kissed their own children good-by for just another crossing…
On one of the Canadian passenger liners is the stewardess, Mrs. Riley. I do not know where in England she lives, or any detail of her family. She was at sea when I garnered this story, and the steamship officials did not know her domestic particulars.
But from Mrs. R. Code, of 512 Rideau Rd., Calgary, Alberta, there came to the offices of the steamship company at Montreal a letter addressed as follows:
“To the stewardess who looked after the Tredennick children when crossing on the Duchess of…
“Dear Stewardess:
“Do you remember Joy, Mary and Christopher Tredennick? They have mentioned you many times, and we realize what good care you took of them on board the ship. They got off at Winnipeg, where I met them. They stayed with me for 10 days and then I brought them to Calgary, where my daughter lives and where they are to make their home.
“When Joy reached Winnipeg she was so upset because she had forgotten her purse, but I told her it might be in Calgary, and that is where we found it. Thank you so much for seeing about it. The crossings with all those little people running about must be very trying. I marvel at how you manage at all.
“The children look much better; they are getting so brown and their appetites have quite returned. It will soon be time for the little girls to go to school. They have settled in very well and are very happy in their new home. My daughter never had any children, but she and her husband are very fond of them.
“We all wanted you to know how much we appreciated your care of the children; they send their thanks too.
“Joy wondered whether you knew anything about the bottom part of one of Christopher’s pyjama suits. It is a gray flannelette. I mention this only in case you may be wondering to whom they belong. You must have found it very difficult keeping track of their belongings, and we think you managed it very well. “I remain,
“Very sincerely.
“(Sgd.) G. C. Code
“Mrs. R. Code.”
The steamship company looked up the passenger list and found what cabin the Tredennick children had occupied. Then they checked the duty list and found it was Mrs. Riley. And they sent the letter off to Mrs. Riley, somewhere at sea or in England or Canada-bound; and also kept a copy for me and you.
Then they looked up the parcel of “lost articles” which is always sent ashore to the offices when a ship docks. And sure enough, among the lost articles, was a small pair of gray flannelette pyjama pants.
And they had been all neatly washed and pressed with an iron by Mrs. Riley before she sent them ashore.
So the pyjama pants were sent on to Calgary by the steamship company, and there is Christopher, all safe and sound in Canada, even to the bottom of his pyjamas.
And there is Mrs. Riley, complete with as nice a letter as ever came to an anonymous person. I don’t know, but that letter to Mrs. Riley and what happened in and around it somehow carries a better story of what a stewardess is and does than all my story.
When the ship docks, there is a good day or two days’ work for the stewardesses in attending to the ship’s laundry and cleaning everything up in preparation for the arrival of the passengers for the return trip. But the stewardesses come ashore and usually visit friends. You might be surprised how many Liverpool or Glasgow homes there are in New York or Montreal. Doubtless many a stewardess and many a steward has set up house in a foreign land when he tired of the sea. But they have all got friends to visit and stay with in the few days “off” between voyages. Certain hotels – not the big fashionable ones, but those pleasant, home-like hotels you find in all seaports are favorite hangouts for the stewardesses who have no friends to visit.
One odd thing about stewardesses is this, that they have to present very good credentials and must pass a strict examination before being admitted to the service of the company. With this remarkable result!
“I have never, in 40 years’ experience,” said the official of a steamship company, “known of a stewardess who got a job and made only two or three trips. When they join, they remain for a long period of years.”
Which may explain in some measure the fact that all over the perilous war seas today are British women following the sea and upholding the ancient tradition of our race’s maritime genius.
Once upon a time there were three wise men living in a hole in the ground.
The hole was deep and dark and cold. In the light of one guttering candle the walls of the hole shone wet. And down the steep, rotting, stairway ran little streams of icy water of melted snow. For it was winter, up above this hole in the ground.
In fact, it was Christmas Eve.
And the three wise men crouched close to an old tin pail, which was punched full of holes to be a brazier, and in it burned a feeble fire.
“Cold!” said the first wise man who was wise in the matter of bombs and knobkerries1 and of killing men in the dark.
“Bitter!” said the second, whose wisdom was of maps and places and distances: a man who was never known to be lost in the blackest night In Noman’s Land.
“Cold as Christmas!” added the third, who was wise in the way of food, who had never let himself or his comrades go hungry, but could always find food, no matter how bright the day or how watchful the eyes of quartermasters or French peasants.
“Christmas!” exclaimed the first. “Why, let’s see! Why, to-morrow is Christmas. To-night, boys, is Christmas Eve.”
And the three wise men stared across the brazier silently at each other; so that only the crackle of the feeble fire and the trickle of the icy water down the stairway could be heard.
They stared and stared. Strange expressions came and went in their eyes. Tender expressions. Hard, determined expressions.
“Right now,” said the first man, finally, “my girl will be putting my two little kiddies to bed. And a hard time she is having. They want to stay down stairs to see what all the mysterious bustle is about.”
He paused to put his hands over the little glow of coals. Then added:
“I sent the boy one of them blue French caps, and the girl a doll I got in Aubigny2–“
The second, who had been staring into the glow intently, said softly:
“I haven’t any kids, but my mother will be hanging up one of my old black cashmere socks to-night. She’ll probably fill it with candies and raisins, and send it in my next box. She’s probably now sitting in the red rocking chair, with my picture resting on her knee, humming the way she used to–“
The third wise man, whose eyes were hard and bright, probably thinking of the Christmas dinners he had eaten of old, drew a sharp breath, stared about him at the wet earth walls, at the rotting stairway and the water and filth all around him.
“Christmas!” he cried, in a strained voice. “Think of it! Peace on earth, good will towards men. And here we are, like beasts in our cave, killers, man-hunters, crouching here in this vile, frozen hole until the word is passed and we go out into the night to creep and slay!”
“Steady,” admonished the first.
For the sound of someone slowly descending the rotting wet stairway could be heard.
And into the hole in the ground came a Stranger. He was dressed in plain and mud-spattered uniform. He wore no rank badges or badges of any kind. In fact, he had neither arms nor equipment, which was odd, to say the least, in the forward trenches.
“I heard you talking of Christmas,” he said, “so I just dropped in to wish you the compliments of the season.”
When he removed his helmet, they saw he was fine looking man with kindly face, but pale and weary.
“Thanks,” said the first, moving over. “Edge up to the fire. It ain’t much, but it’s warm, what there is–“
“What unit are you?” asked the second, as the Stranger knelt by the brazier.
“Oh, no particular unit,” replied the Stranger. “I just visit up and down.”
“A padre?” asked the third, respectfully but doubtfully, as he eyed the Stranger’s uniform, which was a private’s, and his fine, gentle face.
“Yes, something of the sort,” replied the Stranger. “You boys were talking about Christmas and home. Go on. Don’t stop for me. I love to hear that sort of thing, once in a while.”
And as he said it, he drew a breath as if in pain; and his face grew whiter.
“Here,” exclaimed the first wise man. “Let me give you a drop of tea. You’re all in.”
And he placed on the brazier his mess tin to warm over a little tea he had left.
“And eat a little, of this,” said the second wise man, handing the stranger a hard army biscuit. “Dry, but it’ll take away that faint feeling.”
“Say, here’s an orange,” said the third, producing a golden fruit from his side pocket. “The last of my loot, but you’re welcome to it.”
The Stranger accepted these gifts with a smile that touched the hearts of the three.
“I am hungry,” he admitted. “And weary. And sick, too, I expect.”
And as he ate and drank, the three wise men continued, with a somewhat more restraint, their talk of Christmas. The Stranger listened eagerly, drinking in each word, each bashful, chuckle of the three.
And at last, the third, reverting defiantly to his original theme, exclaimed:
“But think of it! Christmas, peace on earth; and here we are like wolves in our den! How can we be here, and yet celebrate Christmas? It is unthinkable. What do you say, sir?
And the Stranger, with an expression of pain and a light on his countenance replied:
“The ways of God are hidden from us. But remember this: out of all this suffering, by every divine law, good must come. On Christmases still to be, you men must recall to-night, so that the sacrifice be not forgotten, and a mocking world again betray those who died for ideals.”
The Stranger rose abruptly.
“I must be on my way,” he said. “I have a long way to go to-night.”
And he handed the first wise man the mess tin.
“Hello,” said the first, remarking an ugly scar on the Stranger’s hand. “I see you’ve been wounded.”
“A long time ago,” said the Stranger.
“On the head, too,” observed the second wise man, eyeing a series of small scars on the Stranger’s brow.
“My helmet,” replied the Stranger, “presses heavily.”
And he bade the three good-night.
But as he stepped up the rotting stairway, the three were staring speechless at one another.
“An hungered and ye gave me meat!3” whispered the first. “A stranger, and ye took me in!”
And the three leaped to the foot of the stairway.
But the Stranger had gone.
Editor’s Notes: This is an earlier version of the story published on December 23, 1939, The White Hand.
A knobkerrie is form of wooden club, used mainly in Southern Africa and Eastern Africa. ↩︎
This is from Matthew 25:35 in the Bible. The New International Version has it as: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in.” I’m not sure what version has it as “an hungered”. ↩︎
The ghostly figure, with a boost from his two companions, climbed softly over the parapet beside Horse Alley.
Those who care to will remember that Christmas Eve of the year 1917, in France, was a perfect Christmas card.
When “stand-to” was passed along from dugout to dugout, the boys came up out of their deep dens, muffled and yawning, to find the evening glorious with softly falling snow.
Not a breath of wind disturbed the huge, feathery flakes as they dropped, silently twirling, straight to the ground. And the hideous pale chalk of that mangled Hill 70 region was hidden by a pure blanket that lay like a blessing under the soft evening sky.
Snowballs flew. Like a gang of boys released for recess, the clumsy figures emerging from dugout entrances into the trench scuffled with each other, their half-suppressed shouts rising into the silence. From across the white waste of No Man’s Land, from the German trench, came an interested shout:
“Hi!”
As much as to say: “Hi, you Canadians– don’t you know there is a war on?”
Weaving his way through the trench now rapidly filling with men, came the major, second in command of the battalion, on his regular nightly prowl, to oversee the formality of “stand- to.” the regiment’s awakening.
“Merry Christmas!” cried all the troops to him. He was a jovial favorite. A snowball clanked smartly off his tin hat.
“Merry Christmas, boys, dammit!” called the major.
At the junction of the main communication trench to the rear, the major halted. A dozen of the men were gathered there.
“How about Christmas?” said a corporal. “When do we go out, major, and are we going to celebrate this year?”
“Yes,” replied the major. “It’s all fixed. We will be out in Mazingarbe1 in three or four days, and the Christmas dinner will be held in the big red brick mine building there. Orders were sent back to the quartermaster this evening to have tables and benches got together in readiness, and he has been given leave to go back as far as he likes in search of pigs, turkeys, chickens, and so forth!”
“Jake!” muttered the boys, standing about. “Jake-aloo!2“
“We have the usual gift,” said the major, “of Christmas puddings from the Red Cross. There will be roast pork, roast fowl, vegetables, fruit and nuts. I have spent some of the canteen fund on a supply of bottled beer – Bass’s3…”
“Have you got it? Is it got?” asked the corporal, eagerly.
“The canteen sergeant is sitting up, getting no sleep at all, guarding it. One thousand bottles,” said the major.
“That’s one bottle all around and two for corporals,” said the corporal.
The Promised Dinner
“Go on, sir,” said another dark figure in the falling snow. You got as far as fruit and nuts.”
“Well,” said the major, “then will come Christmas pudding hot, with hot sauce on it.”
“Rum sauce?” asked a voice wistfully.
“No. We are saving the rum for punch made hot with lemons, oranges and red wine.”
“Put a little stout in it, major,” said a thick voice, “and it will have a little more body.”
The voice pronounced it “boady.”)
“The sergeants will be the waiters,” went on the major. “The regimental sergeant-major will be the head waiter, and when the punch is served the officers will come in to the big hall and drink the King’s health with the troops.”
“No officers present during the dinner?” exclaimed another.
“Nary a one. And the band will be present throughout the show to play, they having their dinner afterwards with the sergeants.”
A silence fell. The still snow dropped in noiseless clouds.
“When’s this for?” asked a voice.
“The night after we go out – I hope, four days from now,” said the major. “Well, cheerio, and Merry Christmas, boys!”
“Merry Christmas,” said they all.
And the major, with his runner at his heels, crunched away down the white trench.
“I don’t believe it,” said one of the clumsy figures at the trench junction. “It will be just the same old skilly4.”
“No,” said the corporal. “I was here last Christmas and it certainly went over good. Half a platoon to a table. Turkey, roast pork, potatoes, carrots–no, no, them little cabbages, you know–“
“Brussels sprouts.”
“And pickles, fruit; they had oranges, apples and some tinned fruit,” said the corporal. “The padre had decorated the place, the band kept banging away, everybody was merry and the officers came in at the last – I remember Dunc McNeil made the major take a drink out of his glass.”
Again the boys stood silent, thinking of the prospect.
“Well, said one, suddenly. “It’s Christmas Eve!”
“All right,” exclaimed the corporal, recalling his duty. “Get back to your places; here comes the Captain.”
And, except for the spotless coverlet over all that desolate world in which they dwelt, the men went back to the old routine of standing in the trench in lonely pairs, one man up on the firestep5, gazing silently to the east, his partner down in the trench, stamping his feet, hunching his shoulders, and moodily waiting his turn to mount the fire step above.
But the snow, Christmas Eve, seventeen, was enough of a marvel in France, where they have slush, which they called neige – and that precisely describes it – to create an illusion of the Christmas spirit in the hearts of some seventy-five thousand Canadians manning the trenches and the guns, the Vickers and the Stokes, the telephone wires and the supply dumps in their little section of the Great War.
Captain Brings Disturbing News
The captain commanding the company, with his sergeant major, came through the trench. He met the officer of the platoon, and they stood listening.
“Quiet as a church,” said the lieutenant. “No patrols to-night, of course.”
“Yes. One,” replied the captain.
“What! On that white snow? Surely not,” exclaimed the lieutenant. “It couldn’t be done.”
“It’s got to be done,” said the captain. “You know that little concrete box they found, out from Horse Alley?”
“It can’t be done,” said the lieutenant, doggedly.
“There’s a listening set there, they believe.”
“A listening set?”
“The scout officer was out near it last night. He heard talking and sounds as of some one adjusting some sort of an instrument. They think it is some new type of listening set for intercepting either our wire messages or actually overhearing conversations in the trench. Anyway, they are going out to get it to-night.”
“They? Oh, that’s different.”
“Yes,” said the captain. “But we’ve got to give them a covering patrol.”
“Oh, but it’s folly! On this snow? They will be barn door targets.”
“They can sneak up the old trench, right to the concrete shanty. All we need is a couple of men out on the flanks.”
“And they,” said the lieutenant, “will be brought in flat, with their heels dragging. I know that game. For Heaven’s sake!”
“You provide four men to stand by for orders from the scout officer,” said the captain, in his official voice, starting to move off.
“Oh, say….” began the lieutenant. Then he stood alone in the white trench, stabbing his stick into the snow.
The hours wore on. Not a shell disturbed the silence of that Christmas card night. Not a rifle cracked. Faint sounds of singing could be heard far back in the German lines. A couple. of young officers from battalion headquarters returned the singing, as they moved, boisterously, from company headquarters to company headquarters in the maze of the battalion’s trenches, paying Christmas visits to the officers of the companies.
But so spread-out was Christmas in France, there was little evidence of it that might in any of the numerous deep caves in which the thousand soldiers of the battalion lived. Christmas parcels, mailed by loving folks at home in November, kept arriving in batches all through December. And as fast as they came, with their contents of cake, tinned and bottled dainties, shirts, gloves, sleeping caps, they were opened and their prizes disposed of. A few of the boys had saved bits of cake, bottles of peanut butter or pickles, for Christmas Day.
The Proposed Patrol
The men on watch in the trenches may have spent their loneliness dreaming somewhat grimly of other Christmas eves. Those down in the dugouts awaiting their turn on top, for the most part slept huddled in dirty blankets on the bare, damp boards of the dugout floor, in the dim, guttering light of a candle.
At midnight, a slim, quiet young officer from headquarters, known as scout or intelligence officer, the master of maps, the searcher of mysteries, the commander of patrols that required more expert knowledge than the ordinary company patrols could apply, appeared in the front line trench. He had two men with him, members of the battalion scout section, specialists in the job of securing information.
The scout officer sought out the captain of the company, and a messenger was sent to bring the platoon lieutenant with the four men he had been ordered to detail for covering patrol. They all assembled in the captain’s dugout, around the rough table lighted by candles set in empty bottles.
“Horse Alley,” said the scout officer, when all were gathered, “as you know, continues on out from our front line into No Man’s Land, but there it peters out, neglected and fallen in. We have found, as you also know, a mysterious concrete hut, about the size of a piano, out in that old trench. Some of you have been close to it. Last night, with these two scouts here, I got within a few feet of it. There were Germans talking in it, and sounds as if they were handling or adjusting some sort of instrument. We have now been ordered to raid that box. It will be simple. Such wire as there is in front of it can be got over with a piece of matting I have up in the trench. The actual raiding will be done by myself and my two scouts here. But we want to prevent anybody coming up the old trench from the German end, and catching us in the act. There may be – there will likely be – a couple of Heinies in their bit of the old trench, guarding whoever is in the concrete box. You will have to handle them.”
“How?” asked the lieutenant, “do you expect us to work in this white snow? We will show up like ink spots on a table cloth.”
“It is unfortunate,” said the scout officer. “We will be down in the old trench. You will have to get out on the sides, for we can’t use bombs in there. The door of the box is towards the Germans, and bombs would hit us as we work at that door. It will have to be a rifle and bayonet job.”
“Well, to be frank,” said the lieutenant, “I don’t see why we can’t put it off one night; for this snow will ten chances to one be gone tomorrow.”
“And again, it might last for a week,” said the scout officer.
One of the four men brought by the lieutenant, a comical, good-natured farmer by the name of Adair, begged pardon and asked if he might speak.
“Well, excuse me sir,” said he, “but if one man was able to hide himself, what I mean is, camouflage himself, couldn’t he do all the covering necessary for you scouts to do your job?”
“I had thought of camouflage,” said the scout officer. “But I was unable to get a thing.”
Private Adair’s Camouflage
“Well now,” said Adair, reddening and embarrassed, “I have a thing that would cover me from head to foot in white, and if I could get out there on the snow, beside that old trench, I could prevent anybody coming out to disturb you, and nobody could see me, and one man could do it as well as five.”
“What have you got, Adair?” asked the lieutenant.
“Well, sir, it’s just a thing I have; I’d rather not say, sir. But if you think one man, all in white, could get up there and do it, while I’ll do it.”
The scout officer sat thinking.
“All in white?” he said to Adair. “Head and all?”
“I can tie ordinary bandages around my head and boots and rifle,” said Adair.
“Of course!” cried the scout officer. By jove, I believe one man could do it, if he were not visible on the snow. I only counted on two, if it hadn’t been for the snow I admit it is a tough job, out there in the white.”
“May I go and get ready?” asked Adair.
“We’ll meet you in the trench in ten minutes,” said the scout officer, “and see if it will work.”
The group sat making their plans, agreeing that, in perfect silence, the scout officer would himself go first up the old trench, and if there were any signs of Germans on the watch he would rush the box, his two scouts with him, perhaps throw one bomb beyond the box, in doing so, and then swarm around or over it, loot it of whatever it contained, while the covering party would be responsible that nobody got out from the German end to disturb him. It was only to take a moment.
Then they went upstairs. And with two uproariously laughing companions stood Adair, a ghostly figure in snow-white from head to feet. The only dark spot on him was a slit where hist eyes showed.
“Ordinary shell dressing bandages on my head, feet, legs, hands and rifle,” said he in a muffled voice. “The rest is unmentionable.”
His companions chuckled.
“Great!” said the scout officer.
“Let me go out,” said Adair, through the bandages over his mouth, “and look the ground over. If you don’t hear any sound in ten minutes come on out to the trench. I will be up on top, near the box, and when you approach make a sound, and then if there are any watchers to shoot I will do the shooting.”
“You can be seen against the skyline,” warned the officer.
“It’s a gully in front,” replied Adair.
“Look out for our wire,” admonished the scout officer.
And without another word the ghostly figure, with a boost from his two companions, climbed softly over the parapet beside Horse Alley, and stooping over marched straight for Hunland.
“Hope it works,” said the lieutenant, stiffly. The moments passed. Not a sound came from in front. The scout officer was standing up, looking over the top.
“I’ve lost him,” he said. “Can’t see a sign of him.”
After ten full minutes of perfect stillness the scout officer, and his two scouts, with pistols drawn and cocked in their hands, and their roll of matting slung between them, slipped quietly into that piece of Horse Alley which, shallow and broken down, rambled across No Man’s Land to the Germans. A few feet behind followed the lieutenant and his three men.
Grandma Makes Him a Hero
Horse Alley twists, changing direction about every fifteen feet. At the last turn. of all, before coming upon the mysterious concrete box, the lieutenant stamped smartly on the frozen earth.
Instantly, ahead and a little to the right, a shot rang out. And instantly, from the same place, another.
And bending low the scout officer and his two men rounded the curve on the full jump. They had feared a sentry would have been peering over the top of the concrete box, as he had been the night before. That was but one of the chances of a scout officer’s life. But there was no opposition as the three flung, with practised swiftness, their piece of cocoanut matting across a tangle of wire this side of the box. In another instant they were upon and around the concrete box, where, on the far side, they found a little door, letting into the concrete. There, half out of it, was a German, clutching frantically in his arms a square box that seemed to be infinitely precious. Meantime a rifle, somewhere up above and to the right, continued to crack. And muffled shouts and cries came from the direction of the German trench.
“Ah,” said the scout officer, tapping the bended German on the cap with his pistol, “that little box is what we want. Up! Over! See, follow this man. I’ll carry your little box.”
Inside was another German, waiting his turn to get out. In his tight grasp were sundry ear phones and wires, coils and a flat leather case.
“Come out,” said the scout officer. “Make it snappy. I guess you speak English.”
And indeed the German seems to. With the long black nose of the scout officer’s pistol touching his teeth, the second German handed over his armful of gear to the waiting scout and clambered heavily after his comrade over the concrete box towards the Canadian lines.
The scout officer was bending down to take a quick survey of the interior of the box when a voice above him said:
“You had better get back now, there’s a bombing squad coming out.”
Looking up, he saw the ghostly form of Adair standing on the edge of the trench. And at that moment, a German bomb, with its unmistakable rending crash, burst out somewhere on the side.
“Where I was,” said Adair, stepping into the box, “but not where I is.”
He and the lieutenant scurried back down Horse Alley to the waiting group of the lieutenant and his three men.
“Coming down with bombs. Give ’em a few yourself and then come back in,” said the scout officer to the, lieutenant.
A mighty racket of conflicting bombs disturbed the beautiful quiet of that Christmas Eve. But not for long. The Germans found their cave deserted, a couple of dead sentries lying near it, shot through the head by an unseen foe, their two precious engineers with their more precious instruments spirited away. When the news reached High Command, back about fifteen miles, they ordered their guns to fire a little hate. So Christmas morning found a number of large, round, black and grey smears on the pure white garment of the snow.
Adair was the hero of the day.
“The credit,” said Adair, to the officers who were pouring him a friendly libation, “goes to my dear old grandmother, her affection for her soldier grandson, and her total ignorance of a soldier’s life. Her Christmas box first filled me with alarm, then fright, then shame. I hid what it contained in the very bottom of my packsack, wondering how to get rid of it. Now it has been the means of me being a hero. Dear old grandmother!”
And Adair was one of the feature performers at the Christmas banquet of the regiment, four nights later, in the mine building of Mazingarbe, when, amidst a storm of cheers and waving of steaming mugs, he rose on top of a table to make a speech, clad in a snow-white flannel night shirt.
Editor’s Notes: This is another variation of the night shirt story that was also written about in 1929 that was covered here.
Mazingarbe is a is a commune in the Pas-de-Calais area of France. ↩︎
Jake and Jake-aloo is a slang term that means something is excellent or great. ↩︎
Skilly is slang for a thin porridge or soup (usually oatmeal and water flavored with meat). ↩︎
A fire step was built into each trench, cut into its wall some two or three feet from the trench floor. It’s purpose was to enable each occupant of the trench to peer over the side of the trench through the parapet into No Man’s Land in the direction of the enemy trench line. ↩︎
“Jim,” I said, “don’t look now but there’s a rumor starting.”
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, October 21, 1939.
If you wear an Alpine hat or if your hair is cut like a Prussian officer’s, there’s no telling where you will end up
“Did you hear,” asked Jimmie Frise excitedly, “about the two Germans that…”
“Were caught,” I carried on sarcastically, “trying to poison the waterworks and were…”
“Shot,” cried Jimmie, “after they had been made to dig their own graves?”
“Yes,” I informed him, “I heard that one. And I heard the ones about the German with the bottle full of germs, and about the ones that were caught filing the struts of airplanes, and the one about the German that was poisoning candy. I’ve heard all the rumors.”
“Don’t you believe them?” demanded Jim indignantly. “Don’t you believe that there are hundreds of Germans locked up in Canada’s prisons and barracks? Every one of them caught in the act?”
“I suppose,” I retorted, “that it is our patriotic duty to believe rumors.”
“What else is there to believe?” sighed Jim. “When the censorship goes on, the rumors begin.”
“We can still submit to censorship,” I explained, “and not give way to every childish rumor that comes along. I’m willing to bet that every rumor we’ve heard about local people was started either in fun or in spite.”
“I doubt it,” said Jim darkly. “Those Germans.”
“I don’t hold any brief for any German1,” I admitted heartily. “In the last war, I used to read what the statesmen said about us fighting the kaiser and not the German people. And I always used to wonder who the heck that was across No Man’s Land shooting at me and heaving trench mortars over. Now they’re talking about us not fighting the German people but Hitler and his gang. I still think it’s the German people we’re fighting. And we’re fighting them because they’re such dang fools to let themselves be ruled by any old type of gangster that comes along, whether it’s a titled Hohenzollern or a house painter.”
“Now you’re talking,” agreed Jim.
“We’re fighting the German people,” I insisted, “so long as they follow these crackpot leaders who think they can conquer the world. We’ve got to keep fighting them until we teach them that they can’t go and conquer the world, no matter what kind of leader they follow.”
“I’ve known some good guys who came of German blood,” admitted Jim.
“That’s what I’m trying to get at,” I clinched. “Most of these people the rumors are about are the grandsons or great-grandsons of men who left Germany because they couldn’t stand the Germans. They came to this country for the same reasons we did. To escape from oppression or misfortune and to find a new life and new freedom in a new world. Probably these German grandparents left Germany for the same reasons we’re fighting Germany today.”
Growing Like a Snowball
“We had Germans in our battery in the last war,” admitted Jim.
“In my battalion,” I recounted, “we had dozens of men of German descent who were some of the best soldiers we had. I remember one especially. He could even talk German, though his grandmother came out from Germany as a child. One of the last things I ever saw him do was climb up the corner of a pill box at Passchendaele and drop Mills bombs down the air hole on 19 of his blood relations.”
“He was a Canadian all right,” agreed Jim.
“I used to take him out on listening patrols,” I recalled, “and we’d sit outside the German wire listening to them muttering and mumbling in their trench. And he translated.”
“It’s too bad to circulate rumors about people like him,” Jim submitted.
“Most rumors start,” I repeated, “in fun or out of spite. Just for fun, a man tells somebody a ridiculous tale about somebody else they both know. The story is repeated, all in fun. Pretty soon, somebody who doesn’t know the party hears the tale, and away it goes, getting bigger and bigger, like a snowball. All these rumors sooner or later get into the hands of some born story-teller. And he, looking at the rumor, says: ‘What a poor, puny little tale that is.” And he sets to work to make it dramatic, with a punch, with some quality to it. Lo, a rumor is born!”
“I can see that clearly,” said Jim. “In my own time, I’ve improved a story now and then.”
“The spite rumors are worse,” I pointed out. “For example, I know a German who is Canadian to the core. He is an athlete, and he makes his living teaching gymnastics and athletics. There are plenty of second-rate athletes who envy him his job. The war was not a week old before I heard rumors that this man had been caught putting acid on airplane wires up at one of the big airdromes. I helped trace this story back. It took two days. But we traced it right back to a second-rate athlete who thought he had a fair chance of stealing the German’s job, now that war was on.”
“Could Canadians hold jobs in Germany now?” demanded Jim.
“Probably not,” I confessed. “But that is not the point. The point is, this is not Germany. And this German is as Canadian as it is possible to be without being born here. I know lots of Canadians who were born here who are really less Canadian, in their hearts, than plenty of foreigners who have come here because they loved this country.”
“We can’t trust anybody, though, in time of war,” stated Jim. “If we go around with a sappy faith in everybody, we’ll get skunked sure as fate.”
“You can trust human nature, I decreed, “to see to it that no German will get away without some hostility, even to the third and fourth generation. For one of us who won’t believe rumors, there are twenty who will. For one of us who will be rational about foreigners, there are a hundred who will be irrational, who will see mischief in every angle of the foreigner, who will notify police, who will watch and guard. All I suggest is, that a few of us keep alive a little feeble flame of tolerance and common sense, so that it will be ready to stoke up again after the war is over. I’d hate to see the sacred fire die out.”
“But don’t let us get so innocent,” countered Jim, “that we let the country get overrun with Nazis.”
“And when I’m looking for Nazis,” I retorted, “I’m not going to confine my attention to people with German names.”
“Here’s a note from the editor,” said Jim. “He bawls us out for drawing all the soldiers in old-fashioned uniforms. He wants us to draw the troops in the new uniform.”2
“It makes them look like gas-station attendants,” I scoffed.
“They look like skiers,” snorted Jim. “Give me the good old army uniform, every time.”
“Imagine a Highlander done up in baggy pants and a blouse,” I submitted.
“Well, the editor is the editor,” sighed Jim. “And if he wants us to draw the troops in the new-fangled outfit, okay. We’ll have to see what the new uniform looks like.”
To See the New Uniform
“I’ve seen pictures of it,” I stated, “but I haven’t seen any of the boys wearing it.”
“We ought to go out and look around the armories,” suggested Jim.
“We can drop off at Exhibition Park on our way home,” I said.
Which we did. And I took along my little candid camera for some shots of any men we might see in the new uniform, to help Jimmie with his drawings.
But all we saw were squads and platoons of husky lads in the same uniform Jimmie and I wore twenty-five years ago.
“I suppose,” said Jim, “they’re wearing out all the old stuff first. But how about taking some snapshots to show the editor? We can write a nice sarcastic note back to him enclosing photos.”
So I moved about, choosing the best looking squads, and getting the sun behind me, and I shot some long range infinity snaps, and got a few close-ups as the squads marched near us. Jimmie got out his drawing pad and made some sketches, too. Jimmie can always make a soldier look more like a soldier than a soldier really is.
One of the squads that had marched past several times finally halted near us and the boys were standing idly watching us, when a civilian who had been observing us take pictures and draw sketches, hurried over to the sergeant drilling the squad and whispered to him.
I saw the sergeant eyeing us narrowly, and the civilian giving us a very hostile look.
“Jim,” I said, turning aside and trying to hide my camera, “don’t look now, but there’s a rumor starting.”
Jim glanced up and saw the sergeant bending his ear to the agitated civilian. Jim turned his back so as to conceal the drawing pad.
“Let’s go,” I offered.
We started to stroll away.
“Hye, there,” said the sergeant, striding towards us. The civilian trotted eagerly in the sergeant’s wake. “What are you two up to?”
“We’re a couple of newspapermen,” I explained. “We were just making some notes.”
“Look at his hat,” hissed the civilian. He was a baleful individual, with a long suspicious jaw.
“Why, it’s an ordinary alpine model…” I began.
“And look at the other fellow’s hair,” hissed the stranger to the sergeant. “Sticking straight up. Like Hindenburg’s! Why, it’s as plain as the nose on your face.”
“Have you any permission,” demanded the sergeant, cautiously, “to be on this parade ground making pictures and drawing plans?”
“Look,” said Jim. “Do you call those plans?”
The sergeant studied Jim’s sketches and the stranger looked over his shoulder.
“What do you call them?” demanded the sergeant. “Do you call those pictures of us? Is this an insult to the uniform?”
“Those are just rough sketches,” explained Jim, lamely. “Just ideas I can develop later.”
“If I was to show these to my boys,” said the sergeant, “you’d have something rough, all right.”
“Arrest them,” hissed the civilian. “Put them under guard. With bayonets.”
“I’ve a good mind to,” said the sergeant. “I certainly think the little bird has a German hat. And the hair on the tall guy certainly looks foreign to me.”
Suspicious Characters
It was then a movement in the squad caught my eye. One of the boys in the squad was bent double in agony, and three or four others were having a hard time to stand steady like soldiers. As the young man straightened up. I recognized him as a former office boy on The Star, and when he caught my eye, he waved a hand at me in gleeful derision.
“Here, sergeant,” I cried, “there’s a lad knows who we are. That fourth man in the front rank. Call him over.”
“Perkins,” commanded the sergeant.
And the boy fell out and came awkwardly over, saluting with his rifle because he remembered I used to be a major in all the war stories I used to tell the office boys in bygone years.
“Do you know these men?” demanded the sergeant.
“Why,” interrupted the civilian, when he saw Perkins, “this is the lad who called my attention to these two spies.”
“What’s this?” I cried. And the sergeant and Jimmie cried: “How’s that?”
“Why, only 10 minutes ago, over by that tree,” said the civilian, his long, suspicious jaw getting kind of black with blushes, “when this platoon was resting, this very same young man came over to me and pointed out these two spies and asked me to sneak around and see if they weren’t taking snapshots and making drawings. He said I was to tell the sergeant, if I saw that’s what they were doing.”
“Perkins!” said the sergeant.
“Why,” said the civilian, bitterly, “it was even him who pointed out the German hat the little man is wearing and the way the taller man’s hair sticks up.”
“Perkins,” repeated the sergeant sternly for Perkins was just standing there grinning from ear to ear.
“It was just a little joke,” said Perkins. “I know these two gentlemen very well indeed.”
And he introduced us to the sergeant, and the sergeant was very happy to meet us because his wife reads our stuff every week and his little boy wants to be a cartoonist some day, like Jimmie. In fact, the sergeant has a bunch of drawings the kid has done, and he would like to bring them down some day for Jimmie to have a look at.
Meanwhile, the stranger was slowly oozing away, trying to make his escape without being noticed.
“Hey,” called the sergeant, “just a second, mister. Don’t feel bad about this. Come here a minute.”
“No hard feelings,” said Jim. “It was just a joke on all of us.”
“I’ll attend to Perkins,” declared the sergeant grimly. “If there’s anything I hate in a platoon, it’s a witty guy. However, I’ll let him down easy, because he may be the means of me having a famous cartoonist for a son, some day, hey, Mr. Frise?”
“You bet,” said Jim, stowing his drawing pad with its rough notes, so as to spare the sergeant’s feelings.
“I only want to say to you, sir,” said the sergeant, tapping the suspicious civilian on the chest, “that you did quite right, sir. If you see or hear of anything suspicious, it is your duty to call it to the attention of the nearest authority, in this case, me.”
“As a matter of fact, sir,” replied the stranger firmly, “that is what I am doing, hanging around the parade grounds. I’m too old to be of much use to the country, but I can keep my eye peeled for suspicious characters.”
“That’s the idea, sir,” said the sergeant, waving the gentleman on.
So it all worked out just as it should. And we gave young Perkins, the scalawag, all our cigarettes to divvy up with the squad. And as we departed, I glanced back in time to see the sergeant get a handful of them.
Editor’s Note:
“Not to hold any brief” means not to support something. ↩︎
The uniform worn by soldiers in World War 2 was different than the first war. At the very start, there was not enough of the new uniform so some had to wear the old one until they could be produced. ↩︎
“EVERY STEP ON THE WAY in this awful flight was blazing with terror. The path before these refugees was filled with menace… They fled from one in the full knowledge that they were heading into unremitting horror…”
Writing from London after returning there from France and Belgium, Gregory Clark tells the tragic story of the millions of refugees who have been forced to flee from their native lands, from their homes-into an unknown filled with ever-present horror and peril
By Gregory Clark, June 8, 1940.
LONDON
Neither Attila the Hun nor Genghis Khan, who mercilessly exterminated all humanity they met in their paths for the same reason that we might exterminate grasshoppers in the west, ever had pleasure of seeing more human tragedy and disaster than we have seen in Belgium and France in the past few weeks.
The tragedy of the refugees was not fully told at its full tide because of the staggering character of other news. The speed of the German mechanized attack and unexpected twists of events stole the spotlight from what was after all a far greater tragedy–the bloody pilgrimage of several millions of people from their native lands, from their kind homes, into an unknown filled with ever present horror and peril. In what used to be called the Great War there also was tragic pilgrimage of Belgians, but at least they fled with the path fairly open before them.
In this awful flight every step of the way was blazing with terror. The path before them was filled with menace. They fled from the one horror in the full knowledge that they were heading into unremitting horror of the millions who took part, and are still taking part in that awful pilgrimage I feel sure I saw nearly 200,000 of them in the seven days I toiled my way from Brussels to the coast ahead of the rapidly advancing enemy. And this article will detail with such detachment as possible to an emotional man the main features of the picture that now must hang on the walls of humanity’s grand gallery along with the tragic murals of Caesar, Attila, Genghis Khan, Napoleon and all the great names of pride.
Like a Forest Fire
But do not console yourselves as you read this in thinking all this is over. It goes on. Where could these rivers of humanity go? Could they just sink into the ground? At the time of writing, the estimate is that 150,000 of them have perished and so sunk into the ground. But poor splendid France has taken them in their millions and is spreading them somehow all over her already crowded campagne. In my time I have heard my fellow countrymen speak critically of the French, saying they were too canny, too parsimonious, too greedy for money. Never again can I be silent before so vicious an opinion. For I have seen France with absolutely wide arms welcoming to her soil these tortured, laboring, penniless millions. Not with canniness, but with generosity sublime from the highest to the lowest, France has to her great military peril welcomed and made safe the path of these refugees. If France is canny about money it is because so many times each century France has to mother another million of the earth’s forsaken. To be so great a mother France must indeed be thrifty.
Many years ago when I was a boy camping on the Muskosh river in the Georgian bay, I saw a great forest fire. I witnessed that never-to-be-forgotten spectacle of the forest’s secret people, the deer, the birds, the squirrels, the fox, the slow, struggling porcupine fleeing before the crackling horror of fire.
When I stood on the road between Tournai and Brussels and watched the full tide of refugee columns I saw the gentle creatures of the wilds once more.
Here before me on the wide highway was an endless throng, in cars, in huge farm wagons, on bicycles, but far the greatest number just on foot, toiling, not fast but with exhaustion already two or three days old in terrible forward-bending agony. In a forest fire creatures do not race, they flee in little exhausted, bewildered spurts. So with these women and children and men in a never ending flood to the number of millions on all roads.
Allies Show Humanity
I first contacted the tragedy at Arras, where I arrived in the war area by train. The advance guard of the refugees were there–the fairly well off, who had good cars and experience of travel to enable them to make time. These were citizens of Holland and Belgium who had already experience of bombing in the larger cities of their native lands. The night I arrived Arras was bombed for the first time. It was set on fire, and hardly had flames started to leap, before out from hotels, private homes, sheds and shelters where they had taken refuge, emerged the tide of refugees to continue their tragic way.
“We cannot remain,” they told me. “We have already been bombed every place we have stopped since we left our homes. We must be on our way.”
“Where to?” I always asked and without one exception to that question the answer was ever the same. They did not know.
From the moment of my arrival until, along with all the rest of the war correspondents, I was marched by the officers in charge of us aboard a ship at Boulogne, already under intense bomb fire, there was no yard of road, no village however tiny, no field that was not filled with this awful tide of humble humanity. You must realize now, of course, that this refugee flood was a German weapon as coldly calculated and as viciously employed as any fifth column. In despatches to The Daily Star I called it the sixth column, and that describes it. The reason for the random bombing of cities and towns was merely to drive out of those places onto the roads again the pilgrim hordes to block and embarrass the roads for French and British armies. With heart in mouth, I watched from day to day for any sign that our armies might face the problem with an almost lawful necessity and drive the refugees from the roads. God be praised, whatever the net results of this first battle may be, both French and British treated these hopeless people with humanity that never lapsed.
Look at Your Canada
So much for argument of the case. Now for the evidence. If these be too cruel throw the paper aside, get to your feet and look out the window at your beloved Canada, and dedicate yourself to it anew. For there are no non-military objectives any more. Your sweetest child is today a military objective of first rank. For if that tender child be blasted before your eyes so rendering you and all who see it helpless, then surely is not that a military objective of greatest importance?
Near Enghien while watching Junker dive bombers methodically and very technically blasting that little town to radiant hell, I stood on the roadside while the refugee throng, hurried by this fury, went bending by. Two children, possibly three and four years old, hand in hand, their heads wobbling on necks so weary were they, struggled along behind their parents. The father pushed a barrow, the mother carried a great sheet bag of treasures. They got ahead of the toddlers following, when one Junker, having dropped its bombs on Enghien, banked around and followed the road, emptying machine-guns into the crowds. Three great Belgian horses drawing a heavy cart stampeded. Nobody had time to reach the children. They were trampled as little moths and crushed under foot.
I carne through Tournai in the morning and saw in the sunlit old Belgian town dense mobs of refugees trying to buy bread massed in the park and all along the curbs in family and village groups, while old men went foraging in vain. It was like a fair day. But on every face were terror and exhaustion. Eyes were glazed in the fight with sleep, for sleep was too deadly for a mother with their children lying in attitudes of endless weariness across their laps or clasped in their arms. There could be no sleep in this funeral march of a nation for at any minute out of blue summer sky might come howling death.
Seeing a City Die
On my way back through Tournai five hours later, after witnessing the death and destruction of cities and towns, I found that 29 bombers in precise formation had come over at 4.30 in the afternoon and dropped 200 high-explosive bombs at random into the fair-day-thronged town. No place of military importance had been hit; not the station, not the main road junctions in or around the town, no barracks, no defences. Just the streets, the parks, two churches, a convent. And how many died in that carnage of a summer afternoon has not been known.
With heart shut tight and eyes half closed against the horror, we went through Tournai, its flames rising in four great pillars of smoke for the spectacled professors on high in their planes to note and check. In the streets and alleys and doorways the dead had been already laid aside by the doggedly toiling Belgian police, firemen and emergency crews. In one convent four nuns at prayer were killed and 20 wounded and their mother superior, a princess of Belgium 67 years of age, was marshalling what was left of her Benedictine daughters to flee and join the sleepless army on the road.
In Amiens we arrived to find a city with street cars and traffic and busy shops not unlike a decent residential area of Paris. The following morning bombs were falling, and the city was dying under our eyes, with shops and homes deserted. Amiens, crammed with refugees at nightfall, was by morning light a city of the dead, with all its people and all its refugees joined in that strange, slow toiling flood, that slow stampede if such a thing is imaginable. Near Amiens I saw a car laden on the roof with mattresses packed with family and bags and with a dead child tied on a running board seeking a burial place and an hour’s respite for the last rites. Hundreds of young people had bandaged heads and bodies. Older people injured simply gave up and quit the flight.
I saw a company of Belgian boy scouts on bicycles in scout uniform, three of them with bandaged wounds pull up where a bomb had fallen near the road to render first aid to 10 or 15 people laid out in fields. A scoutmaster about 20, who was superintending work of his refugee scouts, said rather hopelessly to me, “The trouble is these poor souls want to die. We haven’t been able to do much good this past week because the minute they get hit they take it for an excuse to go and die under a hedge. Maybe I will be the same when my turn comes.”
I saw this same scoutmaster in Boulogne later and three of his boys were killed in bombing at Arras while working in the inferno there, rescuing wounded. Three boys I had seen stacking bicycles on the roadside to leap to the help of others.
Use Refugees as Screen
The thing to remember amidst all this of which I only give most terribly sketchy glimpses of what I, one man, was able to see at any tiny given instant at one tiny spot in wide France, is that amidst it all, the British and French armies had to try to organize defence against the on-rushing enemy. All savage tribes shove a screen of prisoners ahead of them in attacking. Nobody who witnessed that first terrible week in Belgium and Northern France can ever be persuaded that the Germans did not use with complete heartlessness the screen of millions of refugees behind which to make their attack.
But do not think of the refugees as having found rest now at last. Millions of them are in France and a haven has to be found for them. Millions with only what they could carry of their earthly goods. Few of them without some member of their little flock lost.
They are members now of that ancient and noble brotherhood embracing all races and all ages of the martyrs of innocent and trampled humanity.
Editor’s Note: Greg arrived as a war correspondent just in time to see the early retreats and fall of France during World War 2.
