Alma Russell Letters
Letters of British Columbia men on active service with Canadian and British Expeditionary Forces, 1914-1918. Learn more.
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trench we walked across lighting the cigarettes he had left in his first one. Undoubtedly the Infantry we met there was a beaten disheartened force and would have gladly surrendered en masse.
I have seen some wonderful things among the horrors of it. I have seen the Prussian Guard break and run like rabbits thirty yards in front of us; I have seen a lad of eighteen calmly stop and bandage a pal in the midst of the worst shell fire of the whole attack, only to see them both killed a moment later. I have seen those merry tanks and the helpless efforts of the Germs to stop them. I have also had a nasty broken down tank fifty yards from the little hole I had scooped out for myself, and of course Fritz shelled it all night and every shell that missed it nearly hit me and kept me awake. Most wonderful of all I have seen one of our planes swoop down out of the sky in the middle of a big attack and fly at a height of only twenty feet all along a German trench firing its machine gun and clearing the trench. Can you imagine what such a trench is like when we take it? Don't try! I won't write any more about the filthy war except to tell you about my narrow escape, which I think I mentioned when I wrote last.
We were holding a line of trench of which Fritz held one end in fact at that spot he seemed to be on all four sides of us, and was surely on three. I had been taking messages all night and was about all in, it was raining hard and the trench was full of dead and wounded and we had not men enough to carry the latter out. The officer who sent me had very little idea of where I had to go to get stretcher bearers, but I thought I could find the way across country, of course the ground is a mere honeycomb of shell holes. I took another man
BC Archives, MS-1901 Box 1 File 19 / RUSSELL, Alma M., 1873 - 1964. Victoria; librarian. / Letters from Cecil Harrow Unwin, 1916 - 1917.