Waste deep in dead bodies

First World War Audio Archive

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Waste deep in dead bodies

Transcript

When night time came I was told I better go back and try and find

Soldier standing "at ease."

the medics, where the medics were. I was told to follow this communication trench and it would take me back to where they had a medical unit. It was very dark, very dark at night and shells were exploding overhead. The Germans had a direct bead on our lines. I was going through something and I couldn’t even stand. Every step I took I went down to my hips. And the suction. It turned out to be a communication trench full of Australian

Soldier sitting on a chair holding his hat and a baton in each hand.

dead bodies, and they had been there for a month or so, and the smell was something. If you’ve ever smelled a human dead body, you’ve never smelled any odour in your life until you have. You’ve never smelled a bad odour. Anyway, I got maybe a hundred yards, a hundred feet through that trench and I came to another trench and I saw what I thought was cigarette lights facing one another. And it turned out to be two boys that had dug a foxhole in the side of the trench, squatted down facing one another to escape the artillery gunfire, shrapnel, etc. I asked them where the medics were and not one, not one would usher a word.

Photograph of five friends who enlisted together.

I shook their shoulders and they wouldn’t talk. Petrified with fear. Anyway, I left them and I found a dugout. I couldn’t see down in there and I stepped my way down five or six feet and I felt some cloth. So, I was scared myself and I laid down and stayed there to escape the shrapnel overhead and I fell asleep. When daylight broke the next morning, I’m laying between two dead Germans and they had their spiked helmets on. They never took the their helmets off, they just throw the bodies in there.

Mr. Hatch wearing a suit.

Description

Mr. Hatch describes a gruesome discovery while trying to locate a First Aid post in pitch darkness, witnessing terror, and sleeping with the enemy.

George Frederick Hatch

George Frederick Hatch was born in Manchester, England, on May 15, 1898. He moved to Colborne, Ontario, with his parents in 1904. After his father was killed in the Boer War, Mr. Hatch worked on the family farm. He ran away to enlist at the age of sixteen, and, with the help of a creative recruiter, was accepted into the 20th Canadian Overseas Infantry Battalion, going overseas in May 1915. He spent Christmas at Ypres, and then saw serious action at the Somme, where he was wounded. Mr. Hatch then joined the Royal Flying Corps, firstly as a “volunteer” machine gunner and then as a fully qualified pilot. He was shot down and, although partially blinded by his own blood, was able to land safely behind his own lines. After the war, Mr. Hatch emigrated to the United States, living in Virginia, then Montana. He and his wife were killed in a car accident on November 26, 1986.

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