With A Field Ambulance At Ypres, Being Letters Written March 7-August 15, 1915

William Boyd

• Publisher: Lucknow Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781782890669
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Première Guerre mondiale

As an Allied soldier, the Ypres salient was a hellish tongue of land to serve in during the First World War. Overlooked by German forces, surrounded on three sides by the enemies' guns, with little or no protection from the land features, it became a symbol of the stubborn resistance of the Allied soldier in the thin grim trenches. The troops faced shells, bullets, mortars, grenades and poison on a daily basis, whilst only just behind the frontline the Royal Army Medical Corps struggled to deal with the influx of wounded.Captain Boyd, as he then was, recounts his experiences in the bloody, cramped and over-worked hospitals as he attempted to save lives so brutally injured by the war. The Author went on to have an illustrious career as an internationally famed pathologist in Canada.Author –William Boyd, MB, ChB, MD, MRCP.Text taken, whole and complete, from the edition published in New York, George H. Doran company 1916.Original Page Count – 110 pages.

III—INITIATION

March 23, 1915.

LAST night I had to take out a party of stretcher bearers to collect the wounded from a certain regimental aid-post, a very interesting experience. The exposed part of the road is not long, but while we were on it bullets kept singing past in the dark, producing a curious sinking sensation in my epigastric region, and an intense longing to become like the mathematical point, which, as Euclid assures us, has position but no magnitude. When for the first time you hear a bullet with its long-drawn “wh-e-e-w” crossing the road on which you are walking you experience a remarkable disinclination to move forward rapidly, and a great and affectionate yearning for the ditch at the side of the road. I believe, however, that you soon get over these preliminary feelings of discomfort, and you forget all about bullets when shells begin to fly around.

On our return journey we passed a row of houses, most of which had been reduced to ruins by shell fire. At the end of the row there stood a church, which had been shelled three or four times a week for the last four months, and the tower of which had been blown to pieces three days ago. The church was little more than a heap of ruins. The Germans have a machine gun trained on the corner where the church stands, and now and then they open fire in the hope of getting somebody. And yet the curé has lived in his house all through the winter, although that house is only fifteen yards from the church, and every window in it had been broken. At any hour of the day you may see the priest going about visiting the sick, comforting the bereaved, burying the dead, and cheering the survivors. That is what Kipling would call “a proper sort of padre.”{1}

This afternoon I actually went to a variety entertainment given by some of the —th Division, who call themselves “the Follies.” The performance took place in a little building adjoining the technical school, which must have been built as a theatre or concert hall, for there was a stage, footlights, curtain and scenery. The party was got up just like the Follies, the stage was decorated with Chinese lanterns, and everything went with a swing and without a hitch of any kind, for there was plenty of talent in the company. The hall was crowded from floor to ceiling—brigadier-generals, colonels, subalterns and Tommies. And suddenly you realised what it all meant. These men in their grotesque costumes singing humorous or sentimental songs, these crowds of officers and men in an audience which seemed to contain representatives from almost every regiment in the army, had, many of them, come from the trenches and would return there in a few hours, or from the guns, or from aeroplanes. And this delightfully amusing show was being held only a couple of miles behind the firing line, and well within range of the German artillery. If a Prussian officer had walked into that hall I think he would have been considerably astonished. To me it was a very wonderful experience.

To-morrow we leave Armentières, as our course of instruction is finished. This is a very quiet part of the line, and that no doubt is the reason why we were sent here, but we have at least learned what it feels like to have a bullet singing past one’s ear. So far I have said nothing about the place itself. It is a large manufacturing town, which shows very little evidence of war in the way of ruined buildings, and quite a large proportion of the population has remained. There has been hardly any serious shelling of the town—very different from what one hears of Ypres. I forgot to say that last night the news came in of the fall of Przemysl, and when it reached our men in the trenches you could hear round upon round of cheering. When the Germans heard of the loss of our ships in the Dardanelles they gave vent to similar expressions of joy.

April 2, 1915.

We are having a spell of delightful weather after the bitter east winds that have prevailed ever since we landed; it is balmy, sunny, and genial, and at last it seems that “the hounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces.” The early morning to-day was just perfect, and it is a blessing that we have to get up so early. Physical drill at seven o’clock on an April morning with the sun already blazing down from a cloudless heaven is worth getting up for. Such a day as this makes one long to be in some of the good places of the earth instead of this billiard-table land of endless ploughed fields. Imagine such a morning as this in the jaws of Borrow-dale with Derwentwater gleaming through the birches, or on the cliffs between the Logan Rock and Land’s End, or on that winding road along Loch Long which will soon be a mass of violets and primroses, or amongst the pines of Lake Louise, or on the snows of Mount Sir Donald. But I suppose that we did not come out here for scenic effects, and if you choose to fight in the Low Countries you must not look for Alpine grandeur.

A couple of days ago, however, I did have a wonderful view. A few miles away there is a certain small hill, which rises like a cone from the surrounding flatness, and on top of which there is a Trappist monastery, now converted into a hospital. Thither I rode on a lovely morning, and as my horse climbed the hill a marvellous view gradually unfolded itself. In every direction to the furthest horizon stretched the great Flanders plain, as flat as the palm of a man’s hand, save where here and there a little knoll broke the dead level. Half of Belgium seemed to lie spread out in front of me. It is little wonder that the Germans chose this flat land for the great steam-roller of their advance, instead of the wooded, hilly, and highly fortified line of the Franco-German frontier.

April 3, 1915.

I had a really great time last night, and I now feel that I have passed out of the novitiate stage. Our division is to hold part of the line running in front of Neuve Eglise, a little place just over the Belgian frontier, and M— and I came over last night to see how the evacuation of wounded was worked before the rest of the unit should arrive. We reached our future headquarters, a farm about a mile on our side of the village, at nine o’clock, and made the acquaintance of the ambulance whom we were to relieve on the morrow. After a short time spent in their mess-room we started out with one of their officers and the chaplain who were to act as guides. I need hardly say that it is not advisable to start out on a pitch dark night in an unknown country and find your way to a house just behind the firing line without a guide. You are apt to get into situations such as you did not reckon on.

Soon we entered the village of Neuve Eglise, which we found in a very battered condition. One of the first buildings we came to had been used as a dressing-station by our predecessors until three weeks ago, when a couple of shells crashed through the roof and converted the place into a shambles. One of the next buildings was a nunnery, roofless and with crumbling walls, and many of the other houses were in a similar condition. A few of the inhabitants still live on in the cellars, outside which are great piles of sandbags, for the Germans put about a dozen shells into the place every day. In the road there are great gaping holes made by recent shells, which constitute a very real danger to the horses and men in the darkness, for of course we were unable to show a light of any kind. Our party consisted of a dozen stretcher bearers and two horse ambulance wagons.

Leaving the village behind we tramped along the dark road for a couple of miles. It was raining steadily, but even under those conditions it was a fascinating walk, with the unending rows of poplars towering mysteriously above our heads; in the branches the wind moaned drearily, and overhead the dark clouds scudded by. Every now and then the whole sky would be lit up by the flares on the firing line, and once we saw a bright red glow which proved to come from a burning farm fired by the German shells. The night, however, was wonderfully quiet. Not a gun and hardly a rifle shot was to be heard. There seemed to be a general truce on both sides.

Now the object of our expedition was to collect the casualties from two regimental aid posts, which lay more than half a mile apart. It is perfectly safe going as far as the first, for the ground rises between the road and the German trenches, but beyond that there is no shelter of any kind, and it is not reckoned a healthy place to linger in. We reached the first of the aid posts, a little, solitary, wayside house, apparently absolutely deserted, and producing a most dismal effect upon the onlooker, especially under the conditions which prevailed that night. Not a ray of light came from the door or windows. On the other side of the road there was a little military cemetery where the dead of the day were buried under cover of darkness. The little wooden crosses could just be made out against the dark sky. The whole scene recalled irresistibly some lines of Emile Caemmaert’s, which I came across a few days ago, and of which the following is a translation:

A hundred yards from the trenches,

Close to the battle front,

There stands a little house,

Lonely and desolate.

Not a cry, not a sound, not a life, not a mouse,

Only the stillness of the great graveyards,

Only the crosses, the crooked wooden crosses,

On the wide lonely plain.

A low thatched cottage,

With doors and shutters closed,

The roof torn by a shell,

Standing out of the floods alone.

Not a man, not a cat, not a dog, not a soul,

Only a flight of crows along the railway line,

The sound of our boots on the muddy road,

And, along the Yser, the twinkling fires.

We entered the little house and found it full of wounded. The regimental medical officer lived there—a strange sort of existence. The window was carefully screened, so that no light would be visible to the Bosche, otherwise the place would soon have been made uninhabitable. The room was lit by two guttering candles stuck in empty bottles. The wind howled round the corners of the house and down the chimney in a manner calculated to give any one the blues. The place was almost bare of furniture; and yet the medical officer looked upon it as his home, for he had lived there for the last two months, and often it had served him as a refuge from the storm, “when the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall.” And in...