Chapter XIII: "I've Got It"

Sometimes a man after being under fire for a considerable time without being wounded begins to fancy that he has a charmed life and that he is "not for it," as soldiers say. Still, if he is to be a billet for a bullet the bullet will in its own time find him out. Then, he who has been seeing comrades falling on either side of him will find this a more personal matter, an affair of his only. When the end comes to a poor fellow he is generally gone to "another place" before he knows he is dead--as an Irish soldier said.

What does the average soldier say or do when wounded, how does he take it? He usually remarks casually and quietly, "I've got it," or "I'm hit." Men speak and act differently according to temperament, according to moral and physical condition. Some as they roll over give a groan and a cry to mother or wife. Some pray, some curse. An officer said, "I'm done for," but immediately thinking of his men told them to lie down. A soldier when hit said, "I've got a ticket through. I'm put out of mess," but it was not as bad as that. Another fell and said to a chum: "Good-bye, old man. I'm done for. Tell poor old dad I died at the front. I began a letter to him; you finish it."

Sometimes a soldier is too excited to feel a wound until the fight is over. A man wrote in a letter the following when describing the battle of Mons: "When the Germans attacked us we were singing 'Hitchy Koo.' Before we were half through the chorus the man next to me got a wound in the upper part of his arm. He sang the chorus to the finish, and did not seem to know he was hit till a comrade on the other side said, 'Don't you think you had better have it bound up? It's beginning to make a mess.'"

A sergeant sent back to a hospital in England said: "It was at Ypres I was shot. The bullet struck me in the elbow. I felt no pain there and no sensation of any kind, except in the tops of the fingers, which began to stiffen and freeze. But even then I didn't know I was shot. Five or ten minutes afterwards my coat began to stick to my arm, thick blood came down my sleeve, and I realised that I was wounded."

One man, shot through the arm, felt "only a bit of a sting, nothing particular. Just like a needle going into me. I thought it was nothing till my rifle dropped out of my hand and my arm fell." That is the feeling of a clean bullet wound. Shrapnel, however, "hurts pretty badly."

This is how another man in a letter described being hit: "I didn't know what had happened at the time, but afterwards I found out that a bullet had entered my shoulder, grazed my spine, and lodged pretty firmly in the back of my neck. 'Are you wounded, mate?' asked a corporal who came up to me. 'Looks like it,' I replied, pointing to my shoulder. With that he ripped up the sleeve of my tunic, and had just bound up my wound when a shell struck him full in the back, and he fell forward dead without a word."

A man when hit in the hand jumped out of the trench and shouted to the man who had shot him to come and fight him. "It was hailing lead, so he was pulled back into the trench and told that he was rather amusing, but silly."

Two men are resting in a trench but not lying low enough. One is munching a biscuit, and the other is flicking small pebbles at him. A particularly sharp stone, as the man with the biscuit fancies, strikes him on the neck. He leaps round and demands indignantly, "Say, Bill, did you chuck that stone at me?" Bill denies the charge, and, perceiving the occasion for it, rejoins, "Why, mate, you're wounded." He had got a bullet and not a harmless pebble.

Firing in battle is now carried on at such long distances that if one is in the neighbourhood at all he may not be able to keep out of it. This was once the case with me in China. A hail of bullets came round us and we did not know from whence it came. A man on the right of me fell and said, "I'm hit," and another on the left did the same. As no enemy was visible I thought that it was a grim joke until I saw blood spurting up.

Writing in a letter of a second occasion on which he was wounded, a soldier said: "This makes twice their shrapnel has pipped me. If they do it again I shall say, 'I ain't going to play any more! You are too rough!'"

Another man was hit in the right arm when drinking tea. He carefully transferred the pannikin to the left hand, and finished his tea!

When a bullet got him an Irishman, exclaiming "The brutes have hit me," fired his rifle and said, "That's one back ter them." Then he got hit again and observed, "Be jabers, if they haven't struck me the second toime." A third hit was too much and he expostulated, "That's number three. The blackguards might leave a party alone after they've hit him wance."

With a machine gun a Highlander at a bridge over the river Marne kept back a column of Germans until reliefs came up. When he fell dead and was carried away thirty bullet wounds were found on his body.

It is strange to hear soldiers at home talking of soldiers who have gone to war, and have been wounded or died. They seldom express pity for them, nor do they feel much. And the want of what might seem a natural sensation is really very fine, for it is due to a conviction that a man has to do his duty, and that to die in the performance of it covers him with honour.

Strange, too, is the way soldiers can joke when hit themselves, or when someone near them has "got it." In one of the Highland regiments there was a very fat pipe major. His legs were like barrels, and when he was shot in them he said, "Weel, I wonder they didna do that before."

Two chums were discussing the relative values of their birthplaces. The Cockney was evidently having the best of the argument, when a shrapnel shell burst above them and the Londoner received a bullet in each leg, while the Birmingham man escaped unhurt.

"I should think you'll give way now!" said the man from Birmingham.

"Why?" asked the Cockney.

"Well, you haven't a leg to stand on," was the reply.

After a little experience of campaigning in France a young officer wrote, "I tried to like war, having heard and read so many fine things about it, but I could not; it is just beastly." Any one who talks of the glory of war should be invited to walk over a battle field when the fighting has ceased. He will see those who have "got it" from shells or bullets writhing in agony, he will hear many of them asking someone for the love of God to kill them and put them out of their misery.

A member of the Royal Army Medical Corps gives the following vivid picture of a battlefield after the guns had ceased firing:

"The last fight I was in the carnage had been fearful, and dead and dying of both sides were piled together. In one corner you could see a British Tommy with a bad wound lying with his head pillowed on the shoulder of a dying German, while a Frenchman near by was doing his best to cheer them up, and emptying his pockets in quest of some treasures to soothe the last moments of the other two. Close by a British Guardsman was propped against a tree smoking a cigarette and gazing intently at a photograph. Near to him was a wounded Frenchman, holding a little glass in one hand while he tried to curl a straggling moustache with the other. Further along I saw two men, a French artilleryman and a British rifleman, quietly playing cards while awaiting their turn to be taken to hospital. Next to them was a man of the Cameron Highlanders, with both legs shattered, munching a stick of chocolate, and trying to hide the twitching of his face as the pain racked his body. I approached another Highlander. 'It's ma birthday the day,' was what he said, with a wry face, and before the words were right out of his mouth he was dead. Under a little cluster of trees we find a party of wounded Germans, English, and French men. They were quietly praying for what they believed to be the last time on earth. Beyond them a Seaforth Highlander was lying with his Testament open at the story of the Crucifixion. He was beyond human aid."

How much more than "beastly" for the wounded must be the waiting for the stretcher-bearers to pick them up and the fear that they may not be able to come or that they may not find them? What torture for the mind there is in the uncertainty!

The next time we are impatient because a train is unpunctual or the dinner a few moments late, we should think of those who wait on battlefields, sometimes in danger of getting more wounds and sometimes exposed to great cold and falling rain or snow.