"At Ypres, we found the trenches to be 40 yards from the German line. Firing was continuous, bombarded day and night. At 7 o'clock the Bosch tried to take our line, repeating their attacks all the night, but we rolled them back. They came even to within ten yards of us, a flood of human waves. But our machine guns, our "coffee grinders," as we called them, mowed them down like hay, and we lost not many men.
The following day, I looked through my periscope and saw between 400 and 500 unburied dead lying between the lines. The sun meanwhile was shining hotly on the heaps of dead bodies which lay not far away outside the trench. I was glad to cover my head with a blanket to shut out some of the awful stench.
For two days and two nights I was firing continuously. My rifle became so hot that I had to fill my hands with dirt before firing. The fighting became so fierce that we had to employ men to do nothing else but carry ammunition to us from 200 yards in the rear.
As we attacked across the fields, they poured upon us with deadly fire. We dropped among the dead bodies which littered the ground. And long I lay, sprawled across the corpse of some brave German lad killed there many days before.
The battle lasted 21 days.
When it was over, they called a roll of our regiment. There were 500 of us when we left Montreal. As the commander called the roll, name after name was met with no response.
At Ypres, 480 out of 500 of us were left dead on the field. And in reality our loss had been greater than that, for our 500 had been thinned out in other actions and filled with a full roster again.
Only 20 of us out of 500 survived." - Pvt. Roméo Houle, 4th Co., 14th Battalion, 65th Reg., 3rd inf. Brigade, 1st Canadian Division, Ypres, Belgium 1915 #ww1 #reality #stayzero #zerofoxtrot