The Last Lady from Hell (10 page)

Alan had made it to the field dressing station and, via field phone, had informed his superiors of the changing conditions and the possibility of another gas attack.

Preparations were being made rapidly to respond to any German offensive. French, British, and Canadian commands were notified and Sir Douglas Haige ordered their plan into action.

All guns were properly positioned and ranges set to coincide with the most recent reconnaissance. When the time came, they would be ready to respond.

Alan was well away from No Man’s Land, but far from out of danger. The dressing station was about 600 yards from the front, which he knew reduced the danger of small arms fire to the point of being little to none. The heavy guns were, however, another matter.

Alan leaned outside the station against some timbers and lit a cigarette. Though the B.E.F. provided every man with twenty ounces of tobacco each week, sometimes it didn’t seem to be adequate.

Major McCrae, a lifelong asthma sufferer, insisted that all smoking be done outside the station, and Alan was happy to respect his friend’s wishes. He really didn’t know why he started the bad habit anyway, perhaps it was a grown up pacifier. He snorted at the mental image of himself with a sucker in his mouth.

A group of infantrymen trudged past, down the main trench toward the front. They ignored him as they passed and disappeared down the long trench. Alan turned away and looked at the rows of crosses tightly bunched together in the Essex farm fields. This is where the dead were buried. Alan knew why there were so many crosses packed in such a small area. He had helped dig several V-shaped burial trenches. They were designed to accommodate a single soldier at the bottom, over whom two more soldiers would be laid and then three, and finally four across, stacked like cord wood. It was the most efficient use of burial ground, but it seemed less than dignified or respectful for these soon to be forgotten young men.

The sun was high in the cloudless sky. Alan looked at his wristwatch. Though it was encrusted with mud he could still see the face, which read two o’clock.

“It’s too nice a day for a war,” he said to Major McCrae who had come outside and was jotting down some thoughts on a pad of paper.

“I hope you didn’t just jinx us. Better knock on wood,” McCrae said.

Alan smiled knowing that John McCrae was a deeply religious man and didn’t believe in such superstitious nonsense. Nonetheless, he rapped his knuckles three times on one of the support timbers of the dressing station, just in case.

McCrae went back to his writing. One of the ways that he dealt with the stress and madness of his duties was to write poetry. It was like taking a shower and washing off some of the filth of the war. Perhaps, this was his pacifier.

Several birds flew by chirping in a spring mating ritual. It was amazing to see the resiliency of nature. McCrae momentarily looked up from his pad in admiration and appreciation of this small event, then began to write again.

His pencil stopped. Alan stiffened. They had both heard it. Three or four distant thuds. The big guns were firing. The guns fired with a high trajectory and, because of this, the sound would reach the target area before the shell. The delay gave the soldiers several moments to take cover, but this was often futile because the big shells made big holes and cover wouldn’t help except maybe for debris protection.

It was the lighter field guns that would scare the hell out of you. Whizz-Bang! That was their nickname for obvious reasons. Because of their lower trajectory, the round would show before the report.

Toward the front, the sound of clanging could now be heard. Alan threw down his cigarette and darted inside to the field phone to pass on these developments. McCrae joined Alan in the station ordering his team to make ready for the eventual flood of casualties.

The men sprang into action, setting up clean dressing and rolled bandages in the most accessible and efficient order. Morphine and ether were readied for the quick and dirty job of patching and passing along the wounded. Instruments were immersed in an alcohol bath.

In the midst of this flurry of activity, Alan realized that the group of soldiers that had marched by moments before were heading into a death trap. He had to try to warn them.

“I’ll be back!” he yelled to Major McCrae, and ran outside and toward the front. Alan estimated that they hadn’t gone too far at their slow and unenthusiastic pace, so he hoped it wouldn’t take too long to catch up to them.

The first of the big shells hit about 100 yards south of Alan as he ran toward the men. Debris and mud rained down on him as he ran with his head down in a crouched trot. He knew that this area was about to become a madhouse of confusion when the main bank hit so he picked up his pace.

He saw them just ahead. “Turn back!” he yelled as a shell whistled down and hit to the north of him. “There’s gas ahead! Turn back, now!”

The men needed no more explanation and began to run back at a far more enthusiastic pace, but it was too late. The area was being destroyed and only luck could see them through safely at this point.

Though Alan’s ears rang from the explosions, he could still hear a massive volley of distant thuds. Many more were on their way. As he ran down the wide trench toward the Yser canal and the dressing station, the entire horizon to the west erupted with thunderous noise and huge muzzle flashes. The French, Canadian, and Algerian artillery were answering the German assault. Being close down range
of the assault, the impact of these brutal weapons had a staggering affect. Even though these guns were hundreds of yards away, the reports of the cannons felt like someone was kicking Alan in the chest with each flash.

More German shells were landing all around. This was not a battle. It was simply survival. A low ”woof” came from deep behind the German lines like a bark from some huge dog. It was a distinctive noise that Alan had heard before.

“Big Bertha,” he said.

Big Bertha was the name given to a massive howitzer built by Gustav Krupp, and named after his wife. At seventy tons, the weapon was so heavy that it could only be moved by rail, and couldn’t be brought very close to the front. But with the ability to deliver a 2,200-pound shell some twenty-five miles at a maximum elevation of eighty degrees, it didn’t have to get too close.

Big Bertha’s drawback was that it required a team of more than ten men to operate it, and it could be loaded and fired only about three times per hour.

From the ally’s side, the French 75s were rapid-fire for field artillery. They had been designed in 1891 and were so successful as a close support weapon that they would remain the mainstay of the French military for the next several decades.

The 75 was capable of delivering sixteen-pound shrapnel shells at the rate of fifteen rounds per minute. Because the gun was designed to absorb most of its own recoil, it seldom had to be repositioned to remain on target. Its trajectory was shallow, unlike Bertha’s, and it would skip a shrapnel shell up to chest height before it exploded and sent shrapnel in all directions.

This skip and explode property made it ideal for trench warfare because it would explode down as well as up and shower the Germans in the trenches with deadly shrapnel balls of metal.

Today, the French were using the 75s to try and hit the chlorine delivery canisters and disrupt and disperse the wall of deadly gas. The Germans were using Big Bertha to pass up the trenches
and pound the artillery positions, and end the French and Canadian counter attack.

In the middle of this barrage, Alan and a large number of retreating troops were desperate to stay alive. They were in the thick of it, safely down range of the gas for the moment, but right in the area of maximum bombardment by the Germans.

There was no longer any real reason for Alan to run. After all he could be simply running into an exploding shell. He decided to hunker down. There were several dugouts in the walls of the trench where he could take cover. The dugouts not only provided relief from the mud and protection from the rain, they provided shelter from shrapnel shells. Alan crawled into a deep funk-hole keeping his head down. The wide brim of his helmet provided modest protection against any shrapnel coming down.

Nothing much to look at anyway, so keep your head down and hope for the best, he thought. A number of the retreating soldiers ran through the system past Alan, apparently believing that a moving target was harder to hit. Alan knew better.

The explosions were so frequent and relentless that Alan could barely hear the men shouting and screaming. All he could hear was a loud ringing, occasionally interrupted by the yelling of men who still believed that they still had some control over their destiny.

A gut-wrenching explosion went off so close to Alan that it sucked the air right out of him. As he gasped for air, he flashed back to the two dead men in the funk-hole earlier that day. He began to lose consciousness, and a wave of fear came over him.

“Oh God, no,” he whispered. “Not like them!”

Any semblance of daylight was blotted out and replaced by a gray cloud of dust and smoke. He fought hard to hang on, gulping for what little oxygen was still available, only to find that it had been
completely replaced by sulphur, burnt gunpowder, and the stink of death, so thick he could taste it.

A high-pitched squeal in Alan’s head began to replace the screams and crying of men. His peripheral vision was beginning to close in as he strained to look around. What little he saw through a closing gray tunnel vision was a confused scene of men and parts of men in various states of death and dying.

Then, for some reason, the images faded and were replaced with the vision of a robin hopping along a lush green lawn. Alan felt soft warm breezes caressing his face as they were blowing off the end of Lake Ontario and up the foot of Wolfe Island.

Shock was setting in and his mind was defending itself against the horrors of the moment. The pleasant recollection of spring was now replaced by a white light of increasing intensity. The squeal in Alan’s ears was now a soft buzz. It was the last thing Alan was aware of.

YPRES, 24 APRIL, 1915.

The Carnage