9. Frightful Nighttime Raids
Germans unfortunately placed in trenches across no man’s land from Canadians were particularly fearful of nighttime raids. Such raids embodied WWI at its rawest and most ferocious, as the dark of night suddenly erupted into combat and mayhem in the trenches. Sleeping soldiers awoke to terror, to be mangled by explosives, mercilessly stabbed, shot, or machine gunned in the back as they fled in panic to the rear. Hand to hand fighting in crowded, darkened chaos. Whole dugouts of sleeping Germans burned or buried alive by tossed grenades. As a reporter described one Canadian raid, “[t]here were screams of German soldiers, terror-shaken by the flash of light in their eyes, and black faces above them, and bayonets already red with blood … It was butcher’s work, quick and skilful … Thirty Germans were killed before the Canadians went back“.
