The Last Lady from Hell (12 page)

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]

C
amp 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.

Before us a massive ship was docked with long, steep gangplanks reaching up to the top decks high above the dock side. It was the biggest vessel I had ever seen and it was painted in the most remarkable paint scheme imaginable. The entire hull, some seventy feet from gunnel to waterline, was painted in a bizarre pattern of geometric shapes, all having brilliant contrasting colors. Blues, yellows, greens, oranges, reds, and whites were splashed in these seemingly nonsensical patterns.

“What the frig is that?” asked Dan McKee.

Sean said he felt seasick just looking at the boat. A nearby deck hand overheard the comments and approached the group offering up his educated insight.

“Well, Lads, that is your ride to England. She is the RMS Olympic,” he said with a distinct Irish brogue. “She measures eight hundred eighty-two and-a-half feet in length overall with a beam of ninety-two and-a-half feet.” He swept his arm along the length as he described the ship in solemn terms. “The four stacks or funnels stand seventy-five feet above the top deck. She’s one of the fastest cruise ships at twenty-four knots, with the power of two large steam engines developing fifteen thousand horsepower each, and one low-power turbine developing sixteen horsepower. She was launched in 1910 at Harland and Wolff’s Belfast yard as one of the largest luxury liners ever built and had been converted to a troop transport just recently. She can now carry as many as seven thousand troops in one crossing.”

We all looked from him back to the ship nodding our heads in quiet appreciation.

“What about this peculiar paint job?” I asked.

He looked left and right as if to ensure that the coast was clear, then leaned toward us.

“It’s the dazzle paint job,” he said conspiratorially in a loud whisper.

Our puzzled expressions told him he needed to provide additional explanation.

“All the strange shapes and the angles with the bright colors create confusion,” he said.

“Confusion for who, the fish?” Bill Lewis asked.

“No smart guy, the Germans,” the Irishman said. “With this pattern, the U-Boats can’t tell which way we’re going or how close or far away we are! It makes it bloody hard for them to judge when launching torpedoes at us and it works like a charm.”

A small crowd had gathered around this well-informed gentleman as he rattled off the statistics pertaining to his ship. He said the HMS Olympic had also been outfitted with small cannons whose function was to blast the U-Boats out of the water.

Again, we all nodded with appreciation. The anti-submarine guns did provide a degree of comfort and the paint job was certainly optically confusing. The fact that the ship was several times faster than a U-Boat was reassuring. But because hardly a day went by without the newspapers reporting yet another sub attack, we weren’t completely sold on the safety of our crossing.

A sergeant was calling out orders to the multitude on the dock and it appeared that it must be time to board, so we gathered up our knapsacks, our Ross rifles, and webbing. By the way, webbing was the nickname for what was known as the Oliver pattern of straps that criss-crossed you and from which hung a shovel, a canteen, mess kit, a number of tools, some useful, some not, and a pouch for ammunition. The ammunition was useful in case your Ross rifle decided to fire properly. All in all, about 35 pounds of rubbish was attached to the webbing. Problem was when you walked you sounded like the donkey of a pots and pans salesman. We, of course, also had our pipes and drums to transport, which added to the weight and made for a laborious trek up the steep gangplanks.

We were directed to our quarters below deck and were surprised to find that, for a luxury liner, the accommodations were anything but luxurious. In her transformation to a troop transport, Harland and Wolff had stacked bunk beds into the small cabins of the upper decks and had turned steerage into a massive dormitory of endless cots, hammocks and bunks. My group claimed a small cabin with six bunks in it and settled in for our weeklong crossing.

THE CROSSING

A
s the giant ship prepared to cast off, Terry Manning tried to muster up an impromptu band to play on deck as we left the docks and harbor. Once a pipe major, always a pipe major. We grabbed our pipes and joined him. The drummers were less enthusiastic and had to be coaxed into joining us with promises of copious amounts of whiskey.