As we climbed out of the shelter of our trenches for my first—and, perhaps, my last, I thought—adventure in “No Man’s Land,” the word was passed:

“Over the top and give ’em hell!”

That is the British Tommies’ battle cry as they charge the enemy and it has often sounded up and down those long lines in western France as the British, Canadian, and Australian soldiers go out to the fight and the death.

We were divided into six parties of ten men, each party having separate duties to perform. We crouched forward, moving slowly in single file, stumbling into shell holes and over dead men—some very long dead—and managing to keep in touch with each other though the machine-gun bullets began to drop men almost immediately. Once we were started, we were neither fearful, nor rattled. We had been drilled so long and so carefully that each man knew just what he was to do and he kept right on doing it unless he got hit. To me, it seemed the ground was moving back under me. The first ten yards were the toughest. The thing was perfectly organized. Our last party of ten was composed of signallers. They were paying out wires and carrying telephones to be used during the fifteen minutes of our stay in the German trenches in communicating with our battalion headquarters. A telephone code had been arranged, using the names of our commanding officers as symbols. “Rexford 1” meant, “First prisoners being sent back”; “Rexford 2” meant, “Our first wounded being sent over”; “Rexford 3” meant, “We have entered German trench.” The code was very complete and the signallers had been drilled in it for a week. In case the telephone wires were cut, the signallers were to send messages back by the use of rifle grenades. These are rifle projectiles which carry little metal cylinders to contain written messages, and which burst into flame when they strike the earth, so that they can be easily found at night. The officer in charge of the signallers was to remain at the point of entrance, with his eyes on his watch. It was his duty to sound a warning signal five minutes before the end of our time in the German trenches.

The leader of every party of ten also had a whistle with which to repeat the warning blast and then the final blast, when each man was to drop everything and get back of our artillery fire. We were not to leave any dead or wounded in the German trench, on account of the information which the Germans might thus obtain. Before starting on the raid, we had removed all marks from our persons, including even our identification discs. Except for the signallers, each party of ten was similarly organized. First, there were two bayonet men, each with an electric flash light attached to his rifle so as to give light for the direction of a bayonet thrust and controlled by a button at the left-hand grasp of the rifle. Besides his rifle, each of these men carried six or eight Mills No. 5 hand grenades, weighing from a pound and five ounces to a pound and seven ounces each. These grenades are shaped like turkey eggs, but slightly larger. Upon withdrawing the firing pin, a lever sets a four-second fuse going. One of these grenades will clean out anything living in a ten-foot trench section. It will also kill the man throwing it, if he holds it more than four seconds, after he has pulled the pin. The third man of each ten was an expert bomb thrower, equipped as lightly as possible to give him freedom of action. He carried a few bombs, himself, but the main supply was carried by a fourth man who was not to throw any unless the third man became a casualty, in which case number four was to take his place. The third man also carried a knob-kerrie—a heavy bludgeon to be used in whacking an enemy over the head. The kind we used was made by fastening a heavy steel nut on a stout stick of wood—a very business-like contrivance. The fourth man, or bomb carrier, besides having a large supply of Mills grenades, had smoke bombs, to be used in smoking the Germans out of dug-outs and, later, if necessary, in covering our retreat, and also fumite bombs. The latter are very dangerous to handle. They contain a mixture of petrol and phosphorous, and weigh three pounds each. On exploding they release a liquid fire which will burn through steel.

The fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth in line, were called utility men. They were to take the places of any of the first four who might become casualties. In addition, they carried two Stokes-gun bombs, each. These weigh nine pounds apiece, have six-second fuses, and can be used in wrecking dug-outs. The ninth and tenth men were sappers, carrying slabs of gun-cotton and several hundred yards of instantaneous fuse. This explosive is used in demolishing machine-gun emplacements and mine saps. The sappers were to lay their charges while we were at work in the trenches, and explode them as soon as our party was far enough out on the return journey to be safe from this danger. In addition to these parties of ten, there were three of us who carried bombs and had orders to keep near the three officers, to take the place of any one of them that might go down, and meanwhile to use our own judgment about helping the jolly old party along. I was one of the three.

In addition to the raiding party, proper, there was a relay all across “No Man’s Land,” at ten paces interval, making a human chain to show us our way back, to assist the wounded and, in case of opportunity or necessity, to re-enforce us. They were ordered not to leave their positions when we began to come back, until the last man of our party had been accounted for. The final section of our entourage was composed of twelve stretcher-bearers, who had been specially trained with us, so that they would be familiar with the trench section which we were to raid.

There were two things which made it possible for our raiding party to get started across “No Man’s Land.” One was the momentary quickening of the blood which follows a big and unaccustomed dose of rum, and the other was a sort of subconscious, mechanical confidence in our undertaking, which was a result of the scores of times we had gone through every pre-arranged movement in the duplicate German trenches behind our lines. Without either of those influences, we simply could not have left shelter and faced what was before us.

An intensified bombardment from our guns began just as soon as we had climbed “over the top” and were lining up for the journey across. “Lining up” is not just a suitable term. We were crawling about on all fours, just far enough out in “No Man’s Land” to be under the edge of the German shell-fire, and taking what shelter we could in shell-holes while our leaders picked the way to start across. The extra heavy bombardment had warned the Germans that something was about to happen. They sent up star shells and “S. O. S.” signals, until there was a glare over the torn earth like that which you see at the grand finish of a Pain’s fire-works display, and meanwhile they sprayed “No Man’s Land” with streams of machine-gun fire. In the face of that, we started.

It would be absurd to say that we were not frightened. Thinking men could not help but be afraid. If we were pallid—which undoubtedly we were—the black upon our faces hid it, but our fear-struck voices were not disguised. They trembled and our teeth chattered.

We sneaked out, single file, making our way from shell-hole to shell-hole, nearly all the time on all fours, crawling quickly over the flat places between holes. The Germans had not sighted us, but they were squirting machine-gun bullets all over the place like a man watering a lawn with a garden hose, and they were bound to get some of us. Behind me, I heard cries of pain, and groans, but this made little impression on my benumbed intelligence. From the mere fact that whatever had happened had happened to one of the other sections of ten and not to my own, it seemed, some way or another, no affair to concern me. Then a man in front of me doubled up suddenly and rolled into a shell-hole. That simply made me remember very clearly that I was not to stop on account of it. It was some one else’s business to pick that man up. Next, according to the queer psychology of battle, I began to lose my sensation of fear and nervousness. After I saw a second man go down, I gave my attention principally to a consideration of the irregularities of the German parapet ahead of us, picking out the spot where we were to enter the trench. It seems silly to say it, but I seemed to get some sort of satisfaction out of the realization that we had lost the percentage which we might be expected to lose, going over. Now, it seemed, the rest of us were safe until we should reach the next phase of our undertaking. I heard directions given and I gave some myself. My voice was firm, and I felt almost calm. Our artillery had so torn up the German barbed wire that it gave us no trouble at all. We walked through it with only a few scratches. When we reached the low, sand-bag parapet of the enemy trench, we tossed in a few bombs and followed them right over as soon as they had exploded. There wasn’t a German in sight. They were all in their dug-outs. But we knew pretty well where every dug-out was located, and we rushed for the entrances with our bombs. Everything seemed to be going just as we had expected it to go. Two Germans ran plump into me as I round a ditch angle, with a bomb in my hand. They had their hands up and each of them yelled:

“Mercy, Kamarad!”

I passed them back to be sent to the rear, and the man who received them from me chuckled and told them to step lively. The German trenches were practically just as we had expected to find them, according to our sample. They were so nearly similar to the duplicate section in which we had practiced that we had no trouble finding our way in them. I was just thinking that really the only tough part of the job remaining would be getting back across “No Man’s Land,” when it seemed that the whole earth behind me, rose in the air. For a moment I was stunned, and half blinded by dirt blown into my face. When I was able to see, I discovered that all that lay back of me was a mass of upturned earth and rock, with here and there a man shaking himself or scrambling out of it or lying still.

Just two minutes after we went into their trench, the Germans had exploded a mine under their parapet. I have always believed that in some way or another they had learned which spot we were to raid, and had prepared for us. Whether that’s true or not, one thing is certain. That mine blew our organization, as we would say in Kentucky, “plumb to Hell.” And it killed or disabled more than half of our party.

There was much confusion among those of us who remained on our feet. Some one gave an order to retire and some one countermanded it. More Germans came out of their dug-outs, but, instead of surrendering as per our original schedule, they threw bombs amongst us. It became apparent that we should be killed or captured if we stuck there and that we shouldn’t get any more prisoners. I looked at my wrist watch and saw that there remained but five minutes more of the time which had been allotted for our stay in the trench, so I blew my whistle and started back. I had seen Private Green (No. 177,250) knocked down by a bomb in the next trench section, and I picked him up and carried him out over the wrecked parapet. I took shelter with him in the first shell-hole but found that he was dead and left him there. A few yards further back toward our line I found Lance Corporal Glass in a shell-hole, with part of his hip shot away. He said he thought he could get back if I helped him, and I started with him. Private Hunter, who had been in a neighboring shell-hole came to our assistance, and between us, Hunter and I got Glass to our front trench.

We found them lining up the survivors of our party for a roll call. That showed so many missing that Major John Lewis, our company commander, formerly managing-editor of the Montreal Star, called for volunteers to go out in “No Man’s Land” and try to find some of our men. Corporal Charleson, Private Saunders and I went out. We brought in two wounded, and we saw a number of dead, but, on account of their blackened faces, were unable to identify them. The scouts, later, brought in several bodies.

Of the sixty odd men who had started in our party, forty-three were found to be casualties—killed, wounded, or missing. The missing list was the longest. The names of these men were marked, “M. B. K.” (missing, believed killed) on our rolls. I have learned since that some few of them have been reported through Switzerland as prisoners of war in Germany, but most of them are now officially listed as dead.

All of the survivors of the raiding party were sent twenty miles to the rear at seven o’clock, and the non-commissioned officers were ordered to make reports in writing concerning the entire operation. We recorded, each in his own way, the ghastly failure of our first aggressive effort against the Germans, before we rolled into the hay in the same old barn where we had been quartered during the days of preparation for the raid. I was so dead tired that I soon fell asleep, but not for long. I never slept more than an hour at a time for several days and nights. I would doze off from sheer exhaustion, and then suddenly find myself sitting straight up, scared half to death, all over again.

There may be soldiers who don’t get scared when they know they are in danger or even when people are being killed right around them, but I’m not one of them. And I’ve never met any of them yet. I know a boy who won the Military Medal, in the battle of the Somme, and I saw him on his knees before his platoon commander, shamelessly crying that he was a coward and begging to be left behind, just when the order to advance was given.

Soldiers of our army who read this story will probably observe one thing in particular, and that is the importance of bombing operations in the present style of warfare. You might say that a feature of this war has been the renaissance of the grenadier. Only British reverence for tradition kept the name of the Grenadiers alive, through a considerable number of wars. Now, in every offensive, big or small, the man who has been trained to throw a bomb thirty yards is busier and more important than the fellow with the modern rifle which will shoot a mile and a half and make a hole through a house. In a good many surprising ways this war has carried us back to first principles. I remember a Crusader’s mace which I once saw in the British museum that would make a bang-up knob-kerrie, much better than the kind with which they arm our Number 4 men in a raiding party section. It had a round, iron head with spikes all over it. I wonder that they haven’t started a factory to turn them out.

As I learned during my special training in England, the use of hand grenades was first introduced in warfare by the French, in 1667. The British did not use them until ten years later. After the battle of Waterloo the hand grenade was counted an obsolete weapon until the Japanese revived its use in the war with Russia. The rude grenades first used by the British in the present war weighed about eight pounds. To-day, in the British army, the men who have been trained to throw grenades—now of lighter construction and much more efficient and certain action—are officially known as “bombers” for this reason: When grenade fighting came back to its own in this war, each battalion trained a certain number of men in the use of grenades, and, naturally, called them “grenadiers.” The British Grenadier Guards, the senior foot regiment in the British Army, made formal complaint against the use of their time-honored name in this connection, and British reverence for tradition did the rest. The Grenadiers were no longer grenadiers, but they were undoubtedly the Grenadiers. The war office issued a formal order that battalion grenade throwers should be known as “bombers” and not as “grenadiers.”

Up to the time when I left France we had some twenty-seven varieties of grenades, but most of them were obsolete or ineffective, and we only made use of seven or eight sorts. The grenades were divided into two principal classes, rifle grenades and hand grenades. The rifle grenades are discharged from a rifle barrel by means of a blank cartridge. Each grenade is attached to a slender rod which is inserted into the bore of the rifle, and the longer the rod the greater the range of the grenade. The three principal rifle grenades are the Mills, the Hales, and the Newton, the former having a maximum range of 120 yards, and the latter of 400 yards. A rifle discharging a Mills grenade may be fired from the shoulder, as there is no very extraordinary recoil, but in using the others it is necessary to fasten the rifle in a stand or plant the butt on the ground. Practice teaches the soldier how much elevation to give the rifle for different ranges. The hand grenades are divided also into two classes, those which are discharged by percussion, and those which have time fuses, with detonators of fulminate of mercury. The high explosives used are ammonal, abliste and sabulite, but ammonal is the much more commonly employed. There are also smoke bombs, the Mexican or tonite bomb, the Hales hand grenade, the No. 19 grenade and the fumite bomb, which contains white phosphorous, wax and petrol, and discharges a stream of liquid fire which will quickly burn out a dug-out and everything it contains. Hand grenades are always thrown with a stiff arm, as a bowler delivers a cricket ball toward the wicket. They cannot be thrown in the same manner as a baseball for two reasons. One is that the snap of the wrist with which a baseball is sent on its way would be likely to cause the premature discharge of a percussion grenade, and the second is that the grenades weigh so much—from a pound and a half to ten pounds—that the best arm in the world couldn’t stand the strain of whipping them off as a baseball is thrown. I’m talking by the book about this, because I’ve been a bomber and a baseball player.

A bomber, besides knowing all about the grenades in use in his own army, must have practical working knowledge concerning the grenades in use by the enemy. After we took the Regina trench, on the Somme, we ran out of grenades at a moment when a supply was vitally necessary. We found a lot of the German “egg” bombs, and through our knowledge of their workings and our consequent ability to use them against their original owners we were able to hold the position.

An officer or non-commissioned officer in charge of a bombing detail must know intimately every man in his command, and have such discipline that every order will be carried out with scrupulous exactitude when the time comes. The leader will have no time, in action, to prompt his men or even to see if they are doing what they have been told to do. When a platoon of infantry is in action one rifleman more or less makes little difference, but in bombing operations each man has certain particular work to do and he must do it, just as it has been planned, in order to protect himself and his comrades from disaster. If you can out-throw the enemy, or if you can make most of the bombs land with accuracy, you have a wonderful advantage in an attack. But throwing wild or throwing short you simply give confidence to the enemy in his own offensive. One very good thrower may win an objective for his squad, while one man who is faint-hearted or unskilled or “rattled” may cause the entire squad to be annihilated.

In the revival of bombing, some tricks have developed which would be humorous if the denouements were not festooned with crepe and accompanied by obituary notations on muster rolls. There may be something which might be termed funny on one end of a bombing-ruse—but not on both ends of it. Whenever you fool a man with a bomb, you’re playing a practical joke on him that he’ll never forget. Even, probably, he’ll never get a chance to remember it.

When the Canadians first introduced bombing, the bombs were improvised out of jam tins, the fuses were cut according to the taste and judgment of the individual bomber, and, just when the bomb would explode, was more or less problematical. Frequently, the Germans have tossed our bombs back into our trenches before they went off. That was injurious and irritating. They can’t do that with a Mills grenade nor with any of the improved factory-made bombs, because the men know just how they are timed and are trained to know just how to throw them. The Germans used to work another little bomb trick of their own. They learned that our scouts and raiders were all anxious to get a German helmet as a souvenir. They’d put helmets on the ground in “No Man’s Land,” or in an advanced trench with bombs under them. In several cases, men looking for souvenirs suddenly became mere memories, themselves. In several raids, when bombing was new, the Canadians worked a trick on the Germans with extensively fatal effect. They tossed bombs into the German trenches with six-inch fuses attached. To the Germans they looked just like the other bombs we had been using, and, in fact they were—all but the fuses. Instead of having failed to continue burning, as the Germans thought, those fuses had never been lighted. They were instantaneous fuses. The ignition spark will travel through instantaneous fuse at the rate of about thirty yards a second. A German would pick up one of these bombs, select the spot where he intended to blow up a few of us with our own ammonal, and then light the fuse. After that there had to be a new man in his place. The bomb would explode instantly the long fuse was ignited.

The next day when I got up after this disastrous raid, I said to my bunkie:

“Got a fag?” (Fag is the Tommy’s name for a cigarette.)

It’s never, “will you have a fag?” but always, “have you got a fag?”

They are the inseparable companions of the men at the front, and you’ll see the soldiers go over the top with an unlit fag in their lips. Frequently, it is still there when their work is done.

As we sat there smoking, my friend said:

“Something sure raised hell with our calculations.”

“Like those automatic self-cocking revolvers did with a Kentucky wedding when some one made a remark reflecting on the bride,” I replied.

It may be interesting to note that Corpl. Glass, Corpl. Charleson and Private (later Corpl.) Saunders have all since been “Killed in Action.” Charleson and Saunders the same morning I was wounded on the Somme, and Glass, Easter morning at Vimy Ridge, when the Canadians made their wonderful attack.