Saved by the Pole Star

This except from the book “Gallipoli to the Somme” by Alexander Aitken describes how valuable it is to know where the Pole Star is in the sky.

“It was past midnight, I was on duty again. The sky had cleared and was now of great beauty, could I have seen it so. I noted several bright stars, and identified those northern circumpolar constellations that we do not see in New Zealand. Suddenly I felt as if caught out of some neglect of duty. Had anyone taught the men to fox the celestial North Pole by reference to the Great Bear? I could not remember, since Egypt, any such lesson; the changer of hemisphere must somehow have been forgotten in our course of training. And so I made my turn of duty a tour of inspection, teaching small groups how to fix the Pole Star, making them describe it themselves, and insisting always that the Germans were to the north of us, and we to the south of them.

This was a lucky inspiration. Years afterwards in New Zealand, I met one of my platoon, O’Driscoll (23603) wounded like me on 27^th September 1916. He told me that this impromptu lesson, suggested by a starry sky, had without doubt saved the lives of himself and several others. He and these others members of a different company were all lying out wounded on the afternoon of the 27^th, waiting in shell-holes to crawl or scramble back when the machine-gunning should die down. They had to wait until night, and it had rained; they had lost their bearings and were in fact making for the north, so that they ended up on the wire of the Grid Trench, when the sky cleared and O’Driscoll picked out the Pole Star. He succeeded in convincing the others; they turn completely about and the whole group at last and without further harm reached our own trenches.”