Tag: A Medico's Luck in the War

On the 26th of July we handed over at Estaires to an Indian Field Ambulance and trekked to Ferme Roussel, three miles north of Merville, all three Divisional Field Ambulances going as one column, and next day went through the wood by St. Venant to Berguette, arriving at midnight with “Macfarlane’s lantern” full overhead. Here the unit entrained and travelled by Calais, Abbeville, Amiens and Corbie to Mericourt-Ribemont, where we encamped in a field near the communal boundary.

The Highland Division (the first Scottish troops the district had seen) was now in Picardy, right among the French, taking over the Labyrinth from them ; a sector where that lying jade Rumour had it that cows, pigs and poultry were kept in the trenches, and that these trenches (laid out as market gardens) were twenty-five feet deep – a sufficiently interesting yarn manufactured by the humorous poilu for the credulous stranger to put in his pipe and smoke!

Mericourt was rather a pretty village – we were to know it better next year in July – but, owing to heat, wood and water, flies and mosquitoes abounded, interfering unduly with feeding and sleeping. 

My own billet was in the house of … Read the rest

We landed at Le Havre on 1st May, I915, a beautiful, clear, sunny morning, every man heartily glad to be at last on French soil. For even the many allurements of Bedford – kindly, hospitable Bedford, our war station since August 1914, whose name still recalls benefits bestowed, Bunyan, and the blistered feet of the military pilgrim’s progress – had not reconciled us to home service. Hard work we had done there, and in lecture room, field and hospital had learned many things – much of which we had to unlearn later in the bitter school of experience – but our Stay in England had been far longer than we had expected, and hope frequently deferred had made us yearn all the more for what we held to be our legitimate work across the Channel. 

In bulk, mark you, we were an untravelled folk ; to most of the unit France was as yet a terra incognita. And as my party, with other divisional troops on that ancient Thames service paddle-boat, the “Golden Eagle” glided between the piers of Havre harbour, everything that savoured of the foreign – especially if it were feminine – was eagerly scanned and cheerily and … Read the rest

Give us again of the days gone by

A cheerier one or two, 

Think of the lads with hopes so high 

Whose quips and wiles we knew. 

Lord! If we had not laughed with them 

We had lost the half of our pay! 

For the echo-less heart is a thing apart 

And it goes by the Wearier Way.

To write, with even limited success, the history of any units which served in the Great War, the narrator would, I fear – and it is a large order – require to be a judicious mixture of George Borrow and Charles Lever ; the Borrow part of him to deal with the marching and roadside scenes, the wind on the heath, the clouds scudding before the breeze, the sunshine and the shade and the necessary little adventures of man on the move, whether solus or in column ; the Lever part, again, to treat of the tented field, the bivouac, the trenches, the camp-fire, the clash of arms, the cannikin’s clink, the songs the soldier sang, and of whatever takes the place (in these our present degenerate days) of broiled bones and devilled kidneys. Nay, more, one might with advantage add to … Read the rest