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Updated: May 7, 2025
"Thank the good Lord I have lived to see this day. Look at the boys," he added in a low tone, to the Australian beside him. They glanced over their shoulders and saw two of the orderlies executing a fox-trot in the heavy shell-ploughed soil. "What's the row?" inquired the Australian. "Why, my dear chap," replied the M. O., "don't you know we have never seen a gun in action in the open that way.
Slowly, an inch or two at a time, Reginald Simpkins slithered down the sloping side of the shell hole till he reached the bottom. To the batches of prisoners coming back just a casualty; to the reinforcements coming up just a casualty. To the boy himself the great price. And so, in the shell-ploughed, gun-furrowed No Man's Land is the seed of Britain sown. And the harvest ?
For any boy who, like this boy, craved for excitement, and, while hating war theoretically and disliking it temperamentally, was not blind to the romance and grand drama of it all, there was ample satisfaction in the Great War; and perhaps on no other sector of the line did all the factors which are conducive to excitement obtain as they did in the dead city of the Salient and the shell-ploughed fields around it.
Left of us was the salient, studded with broken villages that became household names during the two epic Battles of Ypres. The brown soil was dirty, shell-ploughed, and altogether unlovely. Those strange markings, which from our height looked like the tortuous pathways of a serpent, were the trenches, old and new, front-line, support, and communication.
The old squire remembered the straight, broad-shouldered boy with his father's eyes and also remembered the debt he owed him, and with the vision of a stern-faced man with eyes of flame riding quietly at the head of his men across a shell-ploughed field, he wrote to Gordon to come. "If he's got half of his daddy in him he'll straighten 'em out," he said. So, Gordon became a school-teacher.
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