From the trench I was carried down steps into a deep dug-out and placed upon a sloping plank which rested on the lower steps. The first act of the Huns was to strip me of my clothing, one of them with great eagerness pulling off the heavy pair of riding boots that I wore. These seemed to please his fancy greatly. He looked them over, patting them approvingly, and then smiled at me as though in appreciation of a gift. Next they started to drag off my riding breeches, but the agony was so horrible that I asked them to cut down the seams. They did, possibly because what remained of them after the shell explosion was of little use for any purpose.
After returning from the scout of the previous day, I had neither time nor opportunity to get a change of socks. Those I wore were full of holes, wet from dragging through the mud and slime, and the night was bitterly cold. I asked them to take off the wet socks, but they simply shook their heads. They took all my clothes, excepting a shirt. Doctors and attendants came flocking around to examine my wounds, and quite a number of their soldiers came down to have a look at the fallen enemy. On seeing the nature of the injuries some of their faces at least expressed pity, but there was one fellow who laughed, clapped his hands, and made no secret of his exultation. ‘Most of them seem all right,’ I thought, ‘but save me from being left alone with that bird.’ I couldn’t forget the strange way in which my poor fellows had ceased to groan, impossible and horrible as the sinister suggestion seemed.
The surgeon who dressed my wounds spoke to some of the others, who shook their heads. One of their officers who spoke English then questioned me.
‘We were waiting for you,’ he said, ‘and had a welcome ready, but you were late, and we feared we might be disappointed. However, everything came off all right. It was a pretty big attack, wasn’t it?’
Believing that this particular view was one to be encouraged and that he would be almost sure to take the opposite of anything I told him as the real fact, I answered, ‘Oh no, it was only a reconnaissance.’
‘I see,’ he said with a smile. ‘It was the big attack that we expected, all right.’
Noting how seriously they regarded, I grinned up at them, and the one who spoke English asked: ‘What are you smiling at?’
‘I was just thinking how very ineffective your grenades are. If that had been a Mills bomb I would have been blown to fragments.Your old thing only bent me.’
He stared at me in amazement for a moment, then spoke a few words in German to a companion who also inspected me as curiously as if I were some unusual freak.
Placed on the ground sheet again, I was carried from the dug-out and dumped carelessly on the top of the trench. Then commenced a tour of torture across the open ground. The night was dark and bitterly cold, and occasionally the carriers dumped me down roughly for a rest. Apart from sheer fatigue, I had lost so much blood that I went out again, and for a time everything was blurred. I had a hazy impression of being placed upon a lorry or the truck of some light railway, then carried through a ruined village, much battered by gun fire, sometimes through gaping fissures in walls, until my bearers halted in front of a building which had somehow escaped the general destruction. I was very weak then, unable to speak above a whisper, and tortured with pain. Down a corridor of this building, and into a stuffy basement which seemed to be a hospital ward with beds set in tiers, cabin-fashion, one above the other, and dimly lit. Here I was again insensible for a while, and on recovery was taken to the operating theatre, and an anaesthetic stopped pain and trouble for a time. On coming round, an orderly, whose English was excellent, explained that as to the rent in my side, nothing could be done with the limp, hanging flaps of flesh, and these had been cut away. Again the balm of complete oblivion, and how long it lasted, I don’t know.
On my struggling back to consciousness once again, the same orderly was standing by. He felt my pulse and shook his head. ‘I can’t feel it,’ he said, then put his hand over my heart. ‘I can’t feel your heart beat.You are about done, and will die tonight.’
At intervals of about twenty minutes during the day he repeated his reassurance, ‘You will die tonight’ and I was so utterly weak that it seemed he was likely to be right. I put my hand over my heart and could find no beating. If it meant death, it would at least end the excruciating pain.
Then, all at once, in spite of my weakness and that utter indifference which seems to be a blessed provision to make death easy, I found myself ‘biting into the bullet’ again. That reiterated, ‘You’ll die tonight’ roused me, perhaps, better than anything else could have done. I determined that, in as far as my will had power to control the matter, I would not die. Shutting my teeth against it I whispered over and over again, ‘I won’t die!’
The enemy surgeons came once more, and after a whispered conversation in German, called for stretcher bearers, who took me out of the ward across a courtyard to what seemed to be a large railway goods-shed, with a single bed in it, where some German soldiers were billeted at night. I found out afterwards that, when death was regarded as inevitable, it was their common practice to take the patient out of the ward so that others might not be disheartened or disturbed. The ward was one for the worst cases, generally men who had been badly wounded by our shell fire. Two or three died every day, but the beds were not long vacant. Altogether it was a ghastly place.
In this shed I was offered a draught, which I refused to take. Later I learned that this was another convention with the German surgeon—an overdose of morphia to anticipate the impending end. Though some may think it callous, the purpose is humane, just a quiet transfer for the poor soul who is ‘passing West’ from the light to the longer sleep. Instead of dying, I went quietly to sleep, waking towards morning with the sensation that my feet were afire. I used the good foot to shuffle the blankets off, and each time I succeeded a considerate German soldier came over and put them back again.
In the morning, very much to the astonishment of both surgeons and orderlies, I was still alive and feeling better, so they carried me back to the ward and put me to bed again. The orderly told me that the man in the next bed was an Australian officer, and I found that he was Lieutenant Ahnall of the 7th Brigade, who had been badly wounded by a bomb.19
‘You will be Captain Cull of the 22nd Battalion,’ he said.
‘How do you know?’ I whispered.
He explained that his unit had attacked Malt and Gamp Trench twenty-four hours later, and before going in he heard that I had been killed. Several parties, he explained, had been sent out after the raid to try and get me. Two stretcher-bearers stated that they had found me, but that I was dead. His men, too, had charged into the German wire only to be knocked out helplessly, and he assured me that he had actually seen the Huns killing the wounded with the butts of their rifles.
‘I know,’ he added, ‘they did the same with your men.’
They had professedly kept the wounded officers as what they called ‘souvenirs’ but really with the hope of extracting information from them later on.
‘How long have you been here?’ Ahnall asked.
‘About twenty-four hours,’ I said, but the orderly corrected, ‘He doesn’t know that he was unconscious for nearly three days.’
The Germans were much interested in a gold identification disc which Lieutenant Ahnall wore, possibly a present from his family or friends. They used to take it frequently from his wrist to show it around, and seemed to think it wonderful that a soldier’s disc should be made of pure gold. It gave them a new, and from the German point of view, an appealing interest in Australia.
Ahnall had been badly cut about with a bomb and died early next morning. He was constantly pleading for water and the attendants explained that it would be wrong to give him any, though they frequently moistened his lips with a wet sponge. At midnight he was calling for his mother.
After six days in that hospital, which I was told was just outside Bapaume, I was taken in an ambulance with German wounded to another hospital at Cambrai, and before leaving the orderly said: ‘Well, we are not so bad as they say, are we? Did you expect to be killed?’
‘Certainly not,’ I said. ‘We treat your wounded well and we expect the same thing from any honourable enemy.’
I was the only Britisher in hospital at Cambrai and my presence seemed to cause a sensation. Soldiers rushed about yelling, ‘Engländer! Engländer!’ They shouted something at me in German which I could not understand. Then one who knew English came along and asked me my rank.
‘That’s very good for one so young,’ he remarked, and seemed to become friendlier. Later the orderly who had grinned and shouted at me came along, and taking me by the hand, said, ‘Captain, I apologise.’ Even in the case of an enemy rank claims respect in Germany. He next brought along a surgeon, a fine looking man, who was most kind in his attention, turning me carefully over to examine the wounds, and being evidently anxious to cause as little suffering as possible. In this he was a marked exception, though I had thus far no cause to complain of unprofessional treatment.
Next morning a German sergeant major, a short, strongly built man with a manner more frank and open than is usual with the Hun, came to see me. He spoke sufficient English to enable us, with a smattering of French here and there, to understand one another fairly well. He was so amiable, so anxious to please, that I suspected a purpose behind it. He would sit beside my bed for an hour each day, turning over illustrated papers of the usual propaganda pattern, showing maps of England with a chain of U-boats all around it. If the purpose were to draw me on to confidences, I could not but admire the thoroughness with which he went about it. But following such a policy they hoped, no doubt, that with my great weakness I would become an easy victim.
‘Are you really an Australian?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘why do you ask?’
‘Oh, Australians are said to be such big men, but you are not a big man, nor are the other prisoners we have taken lately big men.’
‘Oh, that goes for nothing,’ I explained. ‘You see, in the smaller stunts of no importance Australian commanders only send over the weeds and keep all the big men in reserve to give you a towelling by and by.’
‘Oh, you are splendid soldiers all right,’ he admitted. ‘You fight very bravely, but you cannot hope to beat us.’
He knew about the Referendum vote in Australia, and asked: ‘Why should you fight for England? The good Australians have turned her down. They say that they have done enough, and they are working for Germany now.’
In some measure he was correct, though that kind were not usually called ‘Good Australians’.
One day, after a long dissertation on the devastation of London by Zeppelins, the starvation of all England by U-boats, I said, ‘I’ll wager you don’t really believe it.’
He looked at me a long time before answering, then very slowly and a bit sadly answered: ‘No, I don’t believe it, but a great many of our people do.’
One item of news which he repeated over and over again was: ‘You Australians have done enough for England. Since the Referendum they are afraid that you will be a trouble by and by, and the doctors take every opportunity of amputating when your men are wounded in the legs. They are sending crippled Australians by trainloads to Switzerland, 3000 of them. You can’t hope to beat us. Time will show.’
‘Yes, about two years!’ I remarked.
‘Two years!’ he exclaimed in astonishment.
‘Yes,’ I said smiling. ‘Don’t you think you can last that long?’
Wounds, and especially the worst kind from shell or bomb, are not a pleasant subject to dwell upon in detail. It is sufficient to say that my wounds included the total loss of the right hip bone, thigh and pelvis both shattered, and the lower part of the abdominal wall on the right side torn away, so that I was partly disembowelled. There were many other injures, but that was enough. The mystery then and now, say the specialists, is how I managed to survive them.