Maclean by Allan Donaldson Page A

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    Captain Bolton gave the order, and over they went, not standing up or any of that craziness, but over and into the first shell hole and then the next one and some of them working along the communication trenches throwing mills bombs. Everybody except the English lieutenant. When the order was given to go over, he gave a shout and climbed over the parapet and went charging ahead waving the cane and the revolver. The Germans were so surprised by this fit of suicidal lunacy that they let him run fifty yards or more before they turned a machine gun on him. The blood flew, and he went ass over teakettle down into a shell hole.
    They lost a third of the company, dead and wounded, in the attack. But somewhere down the line, one of the other companies got back into the forward trench, and the Germans in front of their company started trying to get back to their own line before they got cut off. A lot of them were picked off as they tried to make it from shell hole to shell hole, and some of them were hit by their own machine gun fire.
    When the boys got back into the forward trench, there weren’t any Canadians left alive. Some of the dead men who had been badly wounded had been bayoneted too, and the boys figured that the only way that could have happened was that the Germans had gone around and bayoneted wounded men who couldn’t resist. There were three wounded Germans left in the trench, and the boys shot them. One of them, Maclean remembered, had been shot in both legs, and he was half-sitting against one of the angles of a traverse. He had lost his helmet, and you could see that he wasn’t more than twenty years old, blond-haired, blue-eyed, as smooth faced and innocent-looking as the English lieutenant back in the shell hole.
    â€œBitte. Bitte. Bitte,” he kept saying.
    Some of the boys felt sorry for him and were for letting him off, but there was a big man named Nelson who had lost one of his pals in the attack, and he said, “Bitte, yourself, you little son of a whore, you bayoneted our boys.”
    And he shot him between the eyes and blew the whole back of his head off.
    When Captain Bolton came along and asked what the shooting was about, Nelson said, “They resisted, sir.”
    Bolton knew well enough what had happened, but he had seen the bayoneted men too, and he said, “All right, but no more.”
    Sometimes, if no one was attacking anyone else, the Germans and Canadians let each other get in their wounded, but everyone was too mad this time to do that, so a lot of the wounded in the open had to lie there until dark. Then the boys managed to get in all the ones who were still alive without losing anybody doing it. Their dead men, including the English lieutenant, they shoveled some dirt over and marked with a piece of board in case they wanted to try to get them later. The dead Germans they left. They were going to stink, but there was no sense getting killed over a stink.
    Everyone expected another artillery barrage the next morning and another attack. But the next morning nothing happened except a lot of random rifle and machine-gun fire. The day after that they were pulled back for their three days out. In fact, they were out for over a week while they were brought back up to strength. When they got back, the trenches had been fixed up, but the bodies, half-buried Canadians and what the rats had left of the unburied Germans, were still out there between the support trench and the forward trench.
    Then one afternoon, a few days after they got back into the line, two English majors and a lieutenant arrived in the support trench along with Captain Bolton and their new lieutenant, named Archie Macleod, one of the best while they had him.
    One of the majors was the father of the English lieutenant who had got himself killed in the counter-attack, and he had come to get his son’s body. He was a fat little man who didn’t look any more like a soldier than Miss Audrey