The Last Lady from Hell (44 page)

Both Sean and Bill had stopped playing and had joined me in watching this stunning battlefield duel and its astounding outcome. The entire event – from attack of the aeroplane to the revenge of the rifleman – had not taken more than forty-five seconds, but for some reason that seemed like a long time.

I looked back to where the young man had been standing and he was gone. The rest of the battlefield, which had seemingly stood still while this played out, was now active again and the noise and confusion of war had returned. We had only progressed some twenty feet when the aeroplane attacked, with still about thirty feet to go before we entered the second trench. The three of us once again refocused on our mission and began playing.

There was still a remarkable amount of fighting going on all around us, but it was clear that the Germans were retreating. I
looked around at the landscape, there were hundreds of gray and khaki bundles strewn about the battlefield like so many piles of dirty laundry, each one representing someone’s son.

Then, seemingly from nowhere, a German soldier ran toward us with his rifle held high over his head and its bayonet pointing right at me. I assume he must have been out of ammunition, or else he would have shot me.

He looked deranged as he charged us screaming something in his native tongue. We stopped playing and braced helplessly for the attack. Then, inexplicably, the German stumbled forward and fell face down in the muddy earth at our feet. Twenty meters away I saw the Irish rifleman who had killed the aeroplane bomber just minutes before with his gun pointing at the dead German. He glared at the body of our attacker then looked at me. Then, with a slight nod, he spun around and fired at two other Germans killing them both.

My heart was pounding wildly as just moments before I thought I was a dead man. My mind and body had not caught up with the quick turn of events. Sean looked at me wide-eyed and then at Bill who was equally wide-eyed. Looking at each other in disbelief we all seemed to let out a collected sigh of relief and then began to play “The Minstrel Boy” again.

My hands were shaking rather noticeably and I was having some difficulty with my playing when my right shoulder was abruptly punched back with such a force that my hand flew off the chanter and the blowpipe popped out of my mouth. I stumbled one or two steps, but was able to plug my blowpipe back into my mouth and raise my right hand back to the chanter. I fell back into place with Bill and Sean and resumed the tune afraid to think about what had just happened to me.

Both my friends realized, as it soon occurred to me as well, that I had just been wounded. They seemed to be more interested than I was as to the extent of the wound. Sean was looking at me across Bill as we continued to play and march. I kept on playing, looking straight ahead not wanting to acknowledge having been shot. The
pain had elevated from dull to intense as my nerves recovered from shock and began to send me the message that something bad had happened to me. I grimaced and my eyes began to water as the pain continued to build.

Bill was keenly aware of my deteriorating condition and, in mid-tune, his right arm came up across my chest with his hand held out flat.

“Hold on there buddy boy,” he said. “I think it’s time to take a look at you, eh.”

I was in no condition to argue and, in fact, was quite relieved that someone had made the decision to stop me.

Blood had soaked the right arm of my tunic and was dripping down my hand and off of my pinky finger. It had been interfering with my burls – I remember being very annoyed at that. As men continued to run past us and flood the German trenches, I stood unsteadily letting my friends open my tunic and search for the source of the scarlet flow.

“Bingo,” Sean said. It was a clean shot, he said, through the shoulder muscle just outside the joint. Judging from the blood flow, no major blood vessels had been hit, only tissue.

“Very lucky,” Bill said as he began to wrap the oozing wound with gauze from his small field dress kit. I was lightheaded, but immensely relieved.

“We must press on. These men need our support,” I said.

“Okay, then press on we shall!” Sean agreed. Bill smiled and muttered something about tough guys, but I didn’t really hear his full comment. We pressed on. The time was 10:00 and the 36th Ulster’s men had fought their way through the third German trench. It had taken two-and-a-half hours to make six hundred meters, and at what cost? The battle, which at the onset was projected to be a decisive and easy victory, had turned into a costly and devastating miscalculation.

Unknown to the men of the 36th, their advances had been among the greatest of the day. The German command, however, was
well aware of that fact and responded with a massive and focused artillery bombardment. The result was the killing of hundreds of Irish and German soldiers alike. Waves of Germans rushed the breach created by the Ulstermen and were met with well-placed Vickers and Lewis machine guns exacting some well-deserved revenge.

The fighting was everywhere around us, and we continued to pipe as ordered. Right in front of our trio lay a wounded Ulster soldier. He had been shot but was trying unsuccessfully to stand and continue the fight. The gunman who had shot him was thirty feet away and running at the wounded soldier with his gun held out in the bayonet thrust position. The wounded man was too focused on trying to stand to notice the charge of the German and only saw him at the last second.

Bill yelled, but it was too late. The Irishman spun and fell on his back, his arms held out in a vain effort to stop his attacker, but it was of little use. The German plunged his bayonet through the helpless young man’s chest causing his victim to curl into a fetal position. The pain was so intense, he couldn’t even scream, all he could do was look horribly surprised.

Bill Lewis cast off his drum and charged wildly at the German who was standing over the dead soldier. The Boche was too involved in watching the young soldier die to notice the rapidly approaching danger.

Bill hit the man at a full sprint, as he had many times on the Queen’s rugger field. This time though, instead of trying to yank the rugby ball out of the arms of his opponent, he grabbed the German’s head around the neck and under the chin. As Bill would have with a rugby ball, he pulled and snapped the man’s neck twisting it grotesquely, one hundred-eighty degrees from its original position. The result was instant. The man fell dead next to the dead Irishman with Bill standing over both of them. His breathing was tight from the anger that had driven him to kill without mercy.

When Sean and I arrived moments later, Bill was still staring menacingly at the man he had just killed.

“He should never have killed that wounded boy,” he said in a low growl. I put my hand on his shoulder. That seemed to help bring him out of his rage.

“Where’s my drum?” he asked. He was concerned about having left it behind.

“I have it, Bill. I brought it,” I assured him.

Bill nodded, took his muddy but undamaged instrument and clipped it to his harness. The dead German lay stomach down on the muddy ground, his head twisted, looking up at his killer with unseeing eyes. We walked past him with no pity or remorse and started to play another tune.

By 1400 hours, six-and-a-half hours after we had started the advance, our reserves were running dry. Lieutenant McDonnell had ordered us back to the third German trench, which was being adequately held. He feared that the B.E.F. had horribly underestimated its enemy and, as a result, there would be few if any reinforcements coming.

A small group of Ulstermen had fought up to the Beaucourt Station, but the resistance was so intense and the support so inadequate that they were unable to hold on to the position.

The three of us had stopped our piping and drumming to help retrieve the wounded – our other very important duty. It seemed to be an endless task. Trip after trip, we would go out and collect the wounded and return to the newly set up field station.

It had become very apparent to me that the number of injured men moving back toward our lines far outnumbered the soldiers coming from behind our lines. The waves had completely stopped by 1800 hours and we were ordered to fall back to the second German trench.

The three of us were preparing to withdraw when Sean realized that he had placed his pipes in a temporary aid post that had been
set up in one of the third German trenches being evacuated. Bill and I had moved our equipment back to the German first trench earlier.

“I have to get my pipes before darkness sets in,” Sean announced. There was a hesitance in his voice. Bill and I tried to reason with him – it was still too dangerous to leave the relative safety of our position – but it was to no avail.

“I’ll be right back,” he yelled over his shoulder as he trotted toward the now poorly held location of his pipes. Ten minutes later Bill and I had just off loaded a badly wounded man at a new aid post and were returning to the battlefield when Sean reappeared with a gravely wounded man draped over his back.

“That doesn’t look like your pipes to me,” I said, relieved to see my friend had safely returned.

“I couldn’t just leave him suffering there, could I? Will one of you take him from here? I need to get going.” We agreed to take the wounded man and Sean turned once again and ran off to retrieve his beloved pipes. “I’ll be right back,” he called again.

Bill hollered to him over the constant noise of the front. “You haven’t got much time before dark.”

I don’t know if he ever heard Bill’s warning.

Machine gun teams were repositioned so as to protect our troop retirement, but the task left to them was a difficult one.

As our troops retreated, the gunners had to take care not to shoot their own men. With the approaching darkness, their job would soon become impossible.

Sadly, too many men who fought bravely against the enemy were mistakenly gunned down by their own troops as they retreated to a safer position. Our runners were being sent with desperate requests for support, but there were few reserves. Moreover, the command was in a state of total shock, confusion, and denial.

Nightfall was upon us now and the fighting had subsided from continuous to sporadic. There was still no sign of Sean. Both sides were reeling from their losses. It was too stunning to comprehend. Bill and I were now employed completely as stretcher-bearers. We had been collecting the wounded for several hours and were beyond the point of exhaustion. Yet neither of us would dare speak of resting or quitting. There were too many men still out there and one of them could be Sean – although neither of us would voice our concern out loud.

The Germans had taken back all but the last of their trenches and were again securing their positions and tending to their own wounded. As we stumbled around the shell-riddled area between their position and ours, we occasionally had to dive for cover as a star shell illuminated the landscape.

Our enemy wanted to make sure that no raiding parties were coming their way and would communicate that desire with several bursts of machine gun fire. What they didn’t realize was that we had only enough manpower to collect our wounded. We soon discovered that the warning shots were just that – warnings – and not aimed at any of us, but fired high.

There was a good reason for that. As with our own side, teams of German stretcher-bearers were roaming around in the darkness looking for their own injured colleagues, so this gave us a degree of relief.

With that realization, we became bolder when the star shells lit up the night using the luminescence to help find the fallen men. They were everywhere.

In the blackness, we heard a moaning coming from a crump hole several meters away. We were manning a four-man stretcher, having been joined by two mildly injured men from the 9th Irish Fusiliers. Moving cautiously in the direction of the moaning we finally saw the man deep in a crater thanks to the light of another star shell. The phosphorus light revealed that our wounded soldier was a German lad, not more than 19 years old.

We were as stunned as he was and we all just stood looking at each other for several moments. The young fellow had no fight left in him and resigned himself to his fate – no doubt he believed we would kill him. But, he was just another wounded man to us and we went to work dressing his wounds as he moaned to us in German.