It was the mildest of upheavals--a standard-pattern affair hardly noted by any one, but it serves to show what a priest’s and a doctor’s duties are when the immediate heavy silence after a shell-burst, that seems so astoundingly long, is cut by the outcries of wounded men, and the two hurry off together, stumbling and feeling through the dark, till the electric torch picks up some dim, veiled outline, or hideously displays the wounds on the body they seek. There is a tale of half a platoon among whom a heavy gas-shell dropped as they lay in the flank of a cutting beside a road. Their platoon-commander hurried to them, followed by the sergeant, calling out to know the extent of the damage. No one replied. The question was repeated. Then: “Speak up when the Officer’s askin’,” cried the scandalized sergeant. But even that appeal failed. They were all dead where they lay, and, human nature being what it is, the sergeant’s words became a joke against him for many days after. Men cannot live in extreme fear for more than a very limited time. Normal little interests save them; so while they lay in cellars by candle-light at Ypres and worked stealthily at night, the Battalion found time to make a most beautiful Irish Star, four feet across, of glass and pounded brick from the rubbish of the Convent garden. It was a work of supererogation, accomplished while cleaning up the billets, which drew favourable notice from high authorities.
On the 16th April they were shifted to relieve the 2nd Grenadiers at Railway Wood north-west of Hooge. This was almost the most easterly point of the Salient on the north of the Menin road by the Roulers railway, and ranked as quite the least desirable stretch of an acutely undesirable line. In addition to every other drawback, the wood welled water at every pore, for the Bellewaarde Beck brought to it all the drainage from the Bellewaarde ridge, and even the trenches on high ground were water-logged. They were bombed from overhead as soon as they moved in; Hell Fire Corner was shelled on the 17th April and six men were wounded.
The 18th April was quiet, only two men wounded, and “except for violent bombardments, north and south, and an attack on Wieltje and other places,” so was the 19th. Wieltje was two thousand yards, and the “other places” even farther away. The “disturbance” was nothing more than principal German attacks on four different fronts of the Salient among mud and mud-filled shell-holes and craters of old mines where men sunk and choked where they fought waist-deep in the dirt; where the clogged rifles were useless, and the bomb and the bayonet were the only hope. From any reasonable point of view the Salient was a particularly weak position, always worth an attack in the intervals of its regular use as a gunnery school for German artillery. The enemy knew that we were on the way to take the pressure off the French at Verdun, which had been a factory of death since February, and argued that it would be well to make trouble anywhere they could. They chose the 1st and 2nd Canadian Divisions round Ypres, and fought them for two days with very little profit beyond filling more shell-holes with more dead.