SMLEs In Turkish Service?

[smellie]

Both men, who were in the reserve Company of 8th Battalion ("A" Company, Royal Winnipeg Rifles, "The Little Black Devils" from their cap-badge, 8th Battalion of the CEF) told me that they saw the people from BHQ running from the German attack and abandoning a field hospial in their flight.

The men who told me this were Pte. Alex McBain and L/Cpl Robert Courtice. Both wee in the reserve company which ran up to the front when the gas came through and plugged the Line between the rest of the Canadian Corps and the French North African troops. They had gas proection in the form of a sock and a field dressing which had been urinated upon (urea causes chlorine to crystallise out into a solid form); the French troops, having nothing at all, either ran or died choking from the gas.

McBain took a bullet through the hand that day but kept fighting; he was sent home after treatment, the popular idea being that the War could not last and that a man should be wounded but once. Courtice was not wounded that day, although he was blown up by a 90-pdr at Givenchy which landed in the trench bay 2 nights before the attack. Of 12 men in the bay, he was the only survivor. He still had chunks of iron working their way out of his head when I met him, 57 years later.

Cpl. Courtice told me that there was no trouble with the Rosses except that they got awfully hot from being shot so much. He and McBain both switched rifles because their rifles had become too hot to hold. Both switched to a Ross rifle from a casualty..... which they then fired until it was too hot to hold, then going back to their now-cooled own rifles to continue. Pte. McBain very nearly became violent when I sugested that there might have been a problem with the rifles, denying this possibility most emphatically. Cpl. Courtice simply denied quietly that there had been ANY problems with the Ross.

I asked Cpl. Courtice what ranges they were shooting at (the official history being more than a bit vague on this); he just looked at the floor, shook his head and said very quietly, "Too close to miss..... too close to miss."

So there you have it.

I still think of them.
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