He fell dead at my feet

I was at the front line with some of my own men and some of the 18th Battalion men and I was standing right near a chap. He was looking over the parapet of the front line and bullets were coming over, right along, plenty of bullets and a bullet caught this chap right in the forehead as he was peering over watching to see what was going on, which he was supposed to do, and he fell dead at my feet. The shelling started about nine o’clock and continued until four o’clock that afternoon. They sent all sorts of stuff over. The small ones we used to call “fish tails.” And you couldn’t see them coming. You’d hear them and they’d land and burst. Sometimes they’d land in the trench. And one of them did about eleven o’clock and caught one of my men, this young lad from Dundurn, caught him right in the chest. I took him out behind the (inaudible) and opened his shirt and I saw little marks on his chest where the shrapnel had struck him. He asked me for a drink of water, and I said, “Oh, I’m not supposed to give you any water if you’ve got a wound in your chest,” and I thought, I must get him back to the first aid station. So I asked my men who were watching me if I could have some volunteers to carry the lad back. Half a dozen of them immediately said, “Sure, we’ll take him back” but I only wanted four. So I put him on a walk, board walk that we laid him on because we had no stretchers, and so they start taking back over then, and on the way back he died on this board walk. Later on that afternoon, my corporal, Hewitt, who was another NCO in my platoon went berserk, went absolutely crazy with shellshock so I had to send him back to the casualty station. Twenty-five feet behind our, behind our front line there were two chaps that were sending Stokes gun shells over into the . . . against the enemy. I talked to them and watched them sending the shells over. And I came along a few minutes later and I saw there had been a direct hit on them. The gun was blown up and the two men were also blown to bits. I can remember distinctly there’d be a leg, about 10 feet away and another arm would be a few feet in the other direction and they were just blown to bits. That was quite a day. One which I never want to go through again.