The Last Lady from Hell Page 7
Alan tried to read his lips.
“Are you all right?” the man asked again.
Why is he asking me that? Alan wondered. This was the first, modestly clear, cognitive thought that had run through Alan’s head in at least forty minutes. As Alan began to recognize his surroundings, or what was left of them, he realized what had happened and the background images began to make sense. His hearing was partially returning and he became aware of the rattling of machine guns and the pops of the Enfield rifles being interrupted by the explosions of the ever-falling artillery.
He preferred the temporary deafness that had accompanied his close call with a Krupp 5.9-inch shell, known by his comrades as a “Crump.”
The man with the dirty face was checking Alan’s arms, legs, and torso. Alan recognized him now. It was his friend John McCrae. He brought his face close to Alan’s and yelled, “Do you know who I am Alan?”
“Yes, John,” Alan responded, dazed.
“Can you move your arms and legs?” McCrae asked.
“I think so,” Alan said.
“Then do it for me!” McCrae commanded.
Alan painfully moved his extremities for the doctor.
“You’re one lucky bugger, Alan,” McCrae said. Then with a pat on Alan’s shoulder, he turned and ran into the confusion to attend to the wounded.
Alan was lying in an awkward position. On his back, he felt like a sheep in a ditch. He moved his arms and legs around and made an effort to roll over onto his stomach. With a great heave, he pushed himself into an unsteady upright position which caused a wave of searing pain to run through his body he thought he might pass out, but fought to hold on. Lucky bugger, eh? He thought.
His first step was unsure and he almost toppled over on the rough terrain. His gate was that of a string puppet, a Pinocchio, as he walked in a strange, animated manner, trying to regain his balance. Alan’s equilibrium was returning slowly as he walked in a zigzag pattern. He tried to establish his location, but everything had changed.
“The sun,” Alan said aloud, testing his hearing as much as his senses. “It’s setting in the western sky, that’s the way back.”
Now he knew which way to go, but, before he could start his retreat, Major McCrae reappeared.
“Al, I need you to help with the wounded. Bring them back to the dressing station,” McCrae ordered.
Confused, Alan looked at John and then at the landscape around him. There were men everywhere. Some were crawling, some running, some writhed in pain on the ground. Others lay dead in the mud. He recalled what had happened and how he had gotten there. The devastation slowly sank in, and brought him back to the present. Despite his own pain and unsteadiness, he knew he was needed.
Alan went to the first and closest man he saw. Following orders like a mechanical man, he grabbed the wounded lad under the arms and tried to help him to a standing position. The wounded man let out a howl that would curdle blood as Alan brought him upright. A passing ambulance corps stretcher bearer yelled to Alan.
“Put him down you fool! He has no feet! His feet are gone!” Stunned by the revelation, Alan looked down at the fellow’s legs and indeed, his pant legs were bleeding and tattered with no sign of feet.
“Tourniquet his legs and carry him out!” the stretcher bearer commanded. Alan quickly took out his pocket knife and cut the pant leg off at the knees. He used the material to make tourniquets which helped to slow the bleeding greatly.
Having grown up on a farm where he had to slaughter chickens, pigs, and cows, the sight of blood was nothing new to Alan, but this was different. He fought a wave of lightheadedness at the sight of the soldier’s shredded legs, but he did what he knew he had to do.
The other advantage of growing up on a farm was that he was no stranger to physical effort. As a youth, Alan and his younger brother, Ian, would compete when carrying bags of grain. He could carry two 100-pound bags with ease and run from one barn to another in an effort to show up his younger brother. The soldier weighed about 170 pounds and went up and over Alan’s shoulder with relatively little effort.
He trotted down what was left of the duckboard path with his wounded cargo and arrived at the field dressing station in several minutes. The scene was total chaos, with McCrae yelling out orders. Two orderlies grabbed the wounded man from Alan’s back and yelled, “Go get more!”
The allied artillery was barking and flashing behind the dressing station up on a hill, and wounded were being brought in at an alarming rate. Alan returned to the trenches. He ran back to the area he had just left minutes ago and found that the scene had not changed except for the presence of a medic who was busily moving from man to man tying up tourniquets, bandaging wounds and administering morphine.
Alan ran over to a man curled up in a fetal position who the medic had just finished with. He bent over and was about to grab the man for transport when the medic reached over and held his hand against Alan’s shoulder stopping him. Not a word was said. He simply shook his head then pointed to another. The medic had been trying to help those who could be saved and heavily morphine dosing those he knew were doomed. Alan passed over the poor soul who was slipping into a quiet sleep of death and picked up the fellow the medic had indicated.
It wasn’t long before Alan lost count. He became like a machine carrying out of this hell hole the broken remains of every mother’s sons. He didn’t lose himself in deep thought about man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. In fact, he didn’t think at all, he simply did what he was told with mindless perseverance.
The more men that ran through the trenches toward the front to meet the battle, the more wounded Alan had to carry off. He was carrying a soldier on his back when a shell landed in the trench behind them knocking the ungainly duo to the ground. Alan clambered to his feet and began to hoist the wounded man up onto his back again when he realized that the young man was now dead. He had absorbed the force of the explosion along with a deadly dose of shrapnel and, as a result, Alan’s life had been spared. Alan left him in the mud and went back for more wounded.
Time seemed to be inconsequential as the battle raged on. The gas had done its dirty work and had dissipated, yet the Germans couldn’t take advantage of the attack by pressing forward because of the continuous bombardment by the French, British, and Canadian artillery.
The steady stream of soldiers moved up to meet the battle and the steady stream of wounded returned to move through John McCrea’s dressing station. It was dark now and the horizons to the east and to the west were alive with great muzzle flashes. The artillery rounds would explode with a blinding flash, like a huge camera flashbulb, leaving a momentary imprint on Alan’s eyes and exposing the panorama of mud and wounded. He would begin to move toward the outline of a wounded man and then wait for another round to flash and light his way.
There were still so many wounded in the area that it seemed his job would never cease. He kept moving toward the wounded man and noticed the dim lantern of the medic as he kept up his marathon of mending the broken bodies.
Alan’s foot kicked into something in the darkness and a howl was heard from right beneath Alan’s feet. He toppled over a wounded soldier and landed partially on top of him producing another howl.
“Sorry,” Alan said as he tried to right his equilibrium. The lamp swung around to dimly illuminate Alan on top of the soldier he had just tripped over.
“I’ll have the litter bearers take him. He’s stable,” the medic hollered. “There’s someone over the top who’s calling for help. See if you can do something!”
Alan knew that the trench system provided modest protection against the bombs and machine guns, and to leave them would be suicide. Yet, between the explosions and constant growling of the Maxim MG08s, the wounded man’s pleas rolled over No Man’s Land and into the ears of all in the outer trenches.
Alan took a rough bearing on the sound of the man’s cries and waited at the edge of the trench peering into the darkness in that direction. All he needed
was a flash from an explosion to get a visual on the wounded man.
He hadn’t waited long before a shell, about fifty meters away, lit up the dismal panorama with a ghostly white flash. The picture was imprinted on Alan’s eyes. He saw the man. He quickly scrambled up and over the parapet stumbling and running over the uneven terrain in the direction of the fallen soldier. Another flash from an exploding shell froze the landscape in front of Alan for an instant and he clearly saw the wounded man four meters ahead of him.
He dove ahead and landed on his belly in the muck as an observant machine gunner hosed the area where Alan’s frozen image had been moments before.
“I don’t even have a gun! I’m just trying to save this man!” Alan yelled in frustration to an enemy gunner who couldn’t hear or even understand his angry rant.
He crawled over to the moaning man and tried to quiet him. It was no use. The fellow was in agony and was beyond caring. Alan fished around in the dark until he found a small stick of wood about an inch thick and four inches long. He rolled it up and down his muddy tunic sleeve, cleaning off most of the mud and pushed it into the man’s mouth crosswise.
“Bite hard on this and be quiet!” Alan yelled in the man’s ear. He did as he was told. Alan looked around to get his bearings and took a deep breath.
“Now’s as good a time as any,” he told the wounded man. “This may hurt a lot, but I’ll have you to safety in no time!”
The man looked up at Alan, his eyes wide with pain and piercingly white compared to his mud-caked face. “Thank you,” he snorted through the tightly clenched piece of wood in his mouth.
Alan grabbed the man under his arms and began dragging him backward toward the forward trenches of the allied forces. The artillery was being kind for the moment. Alan was being protected by the veil of darkness. Only the sweeping Maxim machine guns, randomly firing at ghosts, presented a threat. Alan continued to trudge backward sweating profusely from the combination of physical and mental stress.
The night became oddly quiet for a moment, and the loudest sound Alan could hear seemed to be the pounding of his own heart as he struggled with his load over the uneven ground.
Thump… thump… thump… Alan knew that sound. It wasn’t his heart pounding. It was the distant report of German artillery guns firing. He knew there would be only seconds before he saw the flash of explosions from incoming shells. He had to increase his pace.
The first explosion was several hundred meters to his left, toward the Algerian forces. The flash momentarily lit up the countryside just enough for Alan to see that the trenches were only two meters away. He tugged at the man’s armpits, but he would only drag so fast and Alan was beyond exhaustion. The next explosion was to his right, well into the Canadian trench system, lighting up the area behind Alan as if he had back lighting on a theater stage. He was at the trench’s edge.
The sniper had been watching No Man’s Land for some time. He was a patient man. That was the secret of a good sniper. He had seen the entire journey of Alan Macdonald over the fifty meter stage. He knew the bravery that was involved in Alan’s actions, and admired the man from his hidden position 100 meters away. With each flash, he watched the stop action picture show progress, but now it was almost to an end.
He thought back to his boyhood, when he and his father would hunt deer in the Black Forest near Baden Baden. He recalled the beautiful buck that they had been watching for fifteen minutes. The buck was protecting his small herd, trumpeting and charging at a pack of wolves before eventually defeating the vicious animals. The buck was wounded but victorious, a magnificent animal. While the boy was marveling at the courage and strength of the buck, his father took aim and shot him dead. The boy looked at his father, stunned.
“He was something to be admired,” the father said. “This is not personal, my son, it’s just hunting.”
An exploding shell flash silhouetted Alan and the wounded man at the trench edge, and the sniper fired.
“It’s not personal, my friend. It’s just hunting,” he murmured, as he pulled the bolt back and expelled the spent hot shell. He quietly hoped that he had missed.
Both men tumbled down the embankment of the forward trench. The medic ran to help Alan with the wounded man and to congratulate this remarkable hero on his impossible retrieval.
The wounded man had dropped the wooden stick from his mouth and was howling loudly, no longer being concerned about making noise. Alan lay face down on the muddy floor of the trench.
The medic drew closer with his lamp.
“Hey, buddy, nice job,” he said hopefully. In the dim lamplight, he could now plainly see a hole in the top of Alan’s helmet from which blood was oozing and a small puddle of blood was forming on the ground around Alan’s head.
The medic closed his eyes for a moment. He was already emotionally dead from the endless horror he saw every day, but he knew this would be yet another bad memory that he would have to try to forget later on in life. He turned his attention to the wounded man that Alan had saved.
PART FOUR
THE JOURNEY
“The RMS Olympic, Ol’ Reliable
[Transcribed from Ian MacDonald’s recording]
Camp Valcartier had been two weeks of modest training. We did our daily calisthenics, learned basic infantry concepts artillery, some trained for cavalry, some trained for engineering and some just trained as infantry or rifles.
We were infantry, although we were trained to perform as stretcher-bearers and given basic first aid. Although we were not expected to carry rifles into battle, much to Terry’s disappointment, we were expected to be able to use them should the occasion arise. So we, along with a group of fifty other trainees reported to the rifle range for rifle etiquette, bayoneting, and target practice.
Sergeant Mac MacLellen was our instructor for the day. He was a stocky, barrel-chested redhead and stood about five-foot-nine. We immediately liked him because he wore the kilt of the Canadian Scottish Regiment, consisting of a hunting Stewart tartan along with the khaki hose and puttees wrapped around his ankles above his hobnailed boots.
He looked and acted every bit the rough-and-tumble career fighting man, although at fifty years old we questioned his being, perhaps, a little long in the tooth.
“This, my fine young men is the Canadian model 10 Ross rifle. It weighs nine pounds, fourteen ounces and is sixty-and one-half inches long. It fires a .303 caliber bullet and is bolt action, with a clip of 5 cartridges. A steady infantryman can hit a target at 100 yards. Should your target somehow get closer, you have a detachable 10-inch bayonet fixed to the muzzle with which you can convince your target to stop.”
We all laughed nervously, but Mac was all business, showing us how to break down the rifle, clean it, and reassemble it in lightning fast speed. He put on a great show until the time when he was to demonstrate marksmanship.
“Gentlemen, from a standing position, one places one’s foot in front t’other in a wide stance. The butt of the rifle should be placed firmly into your shoulder while you stand sideways to your target, like so.”
He took up the classic rifleman stance. “The muzzle should be supported by your left hand and that hand should have the rifle strap wrapped around it to steady your aim. Look down the sights, align them on your target and squeeze, not pull, the trigger.”
It should be noted that at this time in Canada, there were no allowances made for left handed people. If you were a southpaw, you were taught in school to write with your right hand and function as a righty in all aspects.
We all waited for Mac to impress us with his marksmanship and braced for the inevitable crack of the gun but all we heard was click – nothing. We could see Mac’s jaw flex as he pulled the bolt back to toss the misfired shell out and replace it with another. He steadied again and… click… nothing.
He didn’t look back at us, but you could see his eyes looking left and then right while his face reddened and his jaw flexed more profoundly. He reached up and cleared
the chamber again only the cartridge did not eject properly. He was visibly shaking with anger as he dropped to one knee and slammed the butt of the gun on the ground. The shell popped out of the chamber.
Trying to regain his composure, he chambered another cartridge and, again… nothing! Then, in a wild display of outrage–and with a barrage of remarkable curse words–he heaved the rifle with all his might at the target.
We all watched in awe at this stunning performance while the Ross arched high into the air and came down 50 feet down range. This time it went off with a loud crack, causing Mac and the rest of us to hit the dirt.
“Those friggin’ shit sticks will end up killing more Canadians than Germans!” Mac barked. He thoroughly abandoned his composure as he raised himself to his feet.
The rest of us looked on in disbelief. If our lives depended upon this rifle, perhaps we should reconsider our joining the CEF. Fortunately the Ross would be replaced with the far superior Lee Enfield Rifle by the time our troops reached the trenches of the Western Front.
Our Canadian training had not all been that noteworthy and was, thankfully, behind us quickly. Another Canadian Pacific Railway rattled us toward Halifax at the end of the two-week training period to an awaiting troop transport ship bound for England.
It was late afternoon when our train finally arrived near the Halifax Harbor. We were directed to assemble several hundred feet from the station. So we dutifully filed out of the coaches. The brief walk was welcome after hours of being cramped into a noisy coach car. It was a cool afternoon. The sea breeze easily countered the weak attempt of the spring sun to warm us up. The pungent smell of the sea had an almost recuperative effect, a smell of life and death. We drew the salty aroma deeply into our lungs to clear the stink of too many men being transported for too long in too close quarters.