that the pilot was dead. So fortunate had been the aim of the
Englishman that he had shot the German through the head. In his dying
moments the latter had started to descend, and when he reached the
earth his hands still firmly gripped the controls.
The aeroplane was absolutely undamaged, and was appropriated by the
British aviators.
IN HOSPITAL.
(3) _From a “Daily Telegraph” correspondent at Rouen_:
It was known that there were British wounded in Rouen--I had even
spoken to one of them in the streets--but how was one to see them? The
police commissaire sent me to his central colleague, who sent me on to
the état major, who was anxious to send me back to him, but finally
suggested that I should see the military commissary at one of the
stations. He was courteous, but very firm--the authorisation I asked
for could not be, and was not, granted to anyone. At the headquarters
of the British General Staff the same answer in even less ambiguous
terms.
It was then that Privates X., Y., Z. came to my aid. Private Z. had a
request to make of me. It was that I should see to it that the black
retriever of his regiment now at the front should be photographed, and
that the photograph should appear in _The Daily Telegraph_. Private
Z. had a temperature of 102·5, and looked it, but he was not worrying
about that. He was worrying about the photograph of the regimental
retriever, which I understood him to say, though dates make it almost
incredible, had gone through the Boer campaign, and had not yet had his
photograph in the papers. So I met by appointment Privates X., Y., and
Z. outside the Hospice Général of Rouen, and by them was franked in to
the hospital, where a few dozen of our wounded were sunning themselves.
It was just time, and no more, as orders had been received a few
minutes before that the British wounded were to be transferred from
Rouen to London, for something grave was afoot.
“Do you want to get back to England?” someone called out to a soldier
whose arm was in a sling, and the whole sleeve of whose jacket had been
ripped by the fragment of a shell.
“Not I,” he shouted; “I want to go to the front again and get my sleeve
back, and something more.”
I managed to speak with two or three of the wounded as they were
getting ready for the start. One of them, an artilleryman, had been
injured by his horses falling on him at Ligny, I guessed it was--only
guessed, for Tommy charges a French word as bravely and much less
successfully than he charges the enemy. It was the same story that one
hears from all, of a heroic struggle against overwhelming odds. “They
were ten to one against us, in my opinion,” he said. “They were all
over us. Their artillery found the range by means of aeroplanes. The
shell fire was terrible.”
He says that it was very accurate, but that fortunately the quality of
the shells is not up to that of the shooting. My informant’s division
held out for twenty-four hours against the overwhelming odds. Then,
when the Germans had managed to get a battery into action behind, they
retired during the night of Wednesday, steadily and in excellent order,
keeping the German pursuit at bay. The next man I spoke to really spoke
to me. He was anxious to tell his story.
“I have been in the thick of it,” he said; “in the very thick of it. I
was one of the chauffeurs in the service of the British General Staff.”
He told me that he was not a Regular soldier, but a volunteer from the
Automobile Club, an American who had become a naturalised English
citizen, and had once been a journalist. His own injury, a burnt arm,
was from a back-fire, but his escape from the German bullets had been
almost miraculous. Three staff officers, one after another, had been
hit in the body of the car behind him. This is his story:
“On Friday, the 25th, the British were just outside Le Cateau. On
Saturday morning the approach of the Germans in force was signalled. On
Sunday morning at daybreak a German aeroplane flew over our lines, and,
although fired at by the aeroplane gun mounted in the car, and received
with volleys from the troops, managed to rejoin its lines. Twenty
minutes later the German artillery opened fire with accuracy. The
aeroplane, as so often, had done its work as range-finder. For twelve
hours the cannonade went on. Then the British forces retreated six
miles. On Monday morning the bombardment began again, and at two that
afternoon the German forces entered Le Cateau from which the English
had retired. Many of the houses were in flames. The Germans, who had
ruthlessly bayonetted our wounded if they moved so much as a finger as
they lay on the ground, were guilty of brutal conduct when they entered
the city.
“On Tuesday, the British, who had retired to Landrecies, were again
attacked by the Germans. They believed, wrongly, that on their right
was a supporting French force. The range was again found by aeroplane,
and the British were compelled to evacuate. That was on Tuesday. The
British troops had been fighting steadily for four days, but their
morale and their spirits had not suffered.”
As I write, a detachment of the R.A.M.C. is filing past, and people
have risen from their chairs and are cheering and saluting. Half an
hour ago Engineers passed with their pontoons decorated with flowers
and greenery. The men had flowers in their caps, and even the horses
were flower-decked. Tommy Atkins has the completest faith in his
leaders and in himself. He quite realises the necessity for secrecy of
operations in modern warfare. Of course, he has his own theories. This
is one of them textually:
“The Germans are simply walking into it. Of course, we have had losses,
but that was part of the plan--the sprat to catch the whale. They are
going to find themselves in a square between four allied armies, and
then,”--so far Private X., but here Private Y. broke in cheerfully:
“And then they will be electrocuted.”
And at this moment it begins to look as if--apart from that detail
of the square of four armies--Privates X. and Y. had known what they
were talking about; for some few days ago the great retreat came to an
abrupt end, the British and French forces carrying out General Joffre’s
carefully laid plan of campaign, turned their defensive movement into
a combined attack, the Germans fell back before them and are still
retiring. They marched through Belgium into France with heavy fighting
and appalling losses, only to be held in check at the right place and
time and beaten back by the road they had come, when Paris seemed
almost at their mercy. But that retirement is another story.
VI
THE SPIRIT OF VICTORY
“_He only knows that not through_ HIM
_Shall England come to shame_.”
SIR F. H. DOYLE.
Even through those three weeks when they were retreating before the
enemy, the whole spirit of the British troops was the spirit of men
who are fighting to win. There is no hint of doubt or despondency in
any of their letters home. They talk lightly of their hardest, most
terrible experiences; they greet the unseen with a cheer; you hear of
them cracking jokes, boyishly guying each other, singing songs as they
march and as they lie in the trenches with shells bursting and shots
screaming close over their heads. They carried out their retreats
grudgingly, but without dismay, in the fixed confidence that their
leaders knew what they were after, and that in due time they would find
they had only been stooping to conquer. “They won’t let us have a fair
smack at them,” says “Spratty,” of the Army Service Corps, in a letter
home. “I have never seen such a sight before. God knows whose turn is
next, but we shall win, don’t worry.” This is the watchword of them
all: “Don’t worry--we shall win.”
“Wine is offered us instead of water by the people,” wrote Private S.
Browne, whilst his regiment was marching through France to the front;
“but officers and men are refusing it. Some of the hardest drinkers in
the regiment have signed the pledge for the war.”
“Tommy goes into battle,” a French soldier told a reporter at Dieppe,
“singing some song about Tip-Tip-Tip-Tipperary, and when he is hit he
does not cry out. He just says ‘blast,’ and if the wound is a small one
he asks the man next to him to tie a tourniquet round it and settles
down to fighting again.” A corporal of the Black Watch explained to a
hospital visitor, “It was a terrible bit of work. The Germans were as
thick as Hielan’ heather, and by sheer weight forced us back step by
step. But until the order came not a living man flinched. In the thick
of the bursting shells we were singing Harry Lauder’s latest.”
Trooper George Pritchard wrote to his mother from Netley Hospital the
other day: “I got hit in the arm from a shell. Seven of our officers
got killed last Thursday, but Captain Grenfell was saved at the same
time as me. What do you think of the charge of the 9th? It is worth
getting hit for.”
“We are all in good heart, and ready for the next round whenever it may
come,” writes Private J. Scott, from his place in the field; and “South
Africa was child’s play to what we have been through,” writes Corporal
Brogan, “but we are beginning to feel our feet now, and are equal to a
lot more gruelling.”
“We are all beat up after four days of the hardest soldiering you ever
dreamt of,” Private Patrick McGlade says in a letter to his mother. “I
am glad to say we accounted for our share of the Germans. We tried hard
to get at them many a time, but they never would wait for us when they
saw the bright bits of steel at the business end of our rifles. Some
of them squeal like the pigs on killing day when they see the steel
ready. Some of our finest lads are now sleeping their last sleep in
Belgium, but, mother dear, you can take your son’s word for it that
for every son of Ireland who will never come back there are at least
three Germans who will never be heard of again. When we got here we
sang ‘Paddies Evermore,’ and then we were off to chapel to pray for the
souls of the lads that are gone.”
“Some of us feel very strongly about being sent home for scratches
that will heal,” writes Corporal A. Hands. “Don’t believe half the
stories about our hardships. I haven’t seen or heard of a man who made
complaint of anything. You can’t expect a six-course dinner on active
service, but we get plenty to fight on.”
Cases of personal pluck were so common that we soon ceased to take
notice of them, a wounded driver in the Royal Artillery told an
interviewer. “There was a man of the Buffs, who carried a wounded chum
for over a mile under German fire, but if you suggested a Victoria
Cross for that man he would punch your head, and as he is a regular
devil when roused the men say as little as they can about it. He thinks
he didn’t do anything out of the common, and doesn’t see why his name
should be dragged into the papers over it. Another case I heard of was
a corporal of the Fusilier Brigade--I don’t know his regiment--who
held a company of Germans at bay for two hours by the old trick of
firing at them from different points, and so making them think they had
a crowd to face. He was getting on very well until a party of cavalry
outflanked him, as you might say, and as they were right on top of him
there was no kidding about his ‘strength,’ so he skedaddled, and the
Germans took the position he had held so long. He got back to his mates
all right, and they were glad to see him, for they had given him up for
dead.”
“No regiment fought harder than we did, and no regiment has better
officers, who went shoulder to shoulder with their men,” says a
non-commissioned officer of the Buffs, writing from hospital, “but you
can’t expect absolute impossibilities to be accomplished, no matter how
brave the boys are, when you are fighting a force from twenty to thirty
times as strong. If some of you at home who have spoken sneeringly of
British officers could have seen how they handled their men and shirked
nothing you would be ashamed of yourselves. We are all determined when
fit again to return and get our own back.”
Everywhere you find that the one cry of the soldiers who are invalided
home--they are impatient to be cured quickly and get back “to have
another slap at them.” We know how our women here at home share that
eager enthusiasm in this the most righteous war Britain has ever gone
into; and isn’t there something that stirs you like the sound of a
trumpet in such a passage as this from the letter a Scottish nun living
in Belgium has written to her mother?
“I am glad England is aroused, and that the British lion is out with
all his teeth showing. Here these little lions of Belgians are raging
mad and doing glorious things.
“Tell father I am cheery, and feel sometimes far too warlike for a nun.
That’s my Scottish blood. I hope to goodness the Highlanders, if they
come, will march down another street on their way to the caserne, or I
shall shout and yell and cheer them, and forget I mustn’t look out of
the window.”
An extract from Sergeant T. Cahill’s letter to his friends at Bristol
gives you a snap-shot of our women in the firing line, and of the
fearless jollity and light-heartedness with which our Irish comrades
meet the worst that their enemies can do:
“The Red Cross girleens, with their purty faces and their sweet ways,
are as good men as most of us, and better than some of us. They are not
supposed to venture into the firing line at all, but they get there all
the same, and devil the one of us durst turn them away,” and he goes on
casually, “Mick Clancy is that droll with his larking and bamboozling
the Germans that he makes us nearly split our sides laughing at him
and his ways. Yesterday he got a stick and put a cap on it so that it
peeped above the trenches just like a man, and then the Germans kept
shooting away at it until they must have used up tons of ammunition,
and there was us all the time laughing at them.”
But I think there is perhaps nothing in these letters that is more
touching or more finely significant than this:
“The other day I stopped to assist a young lad of the West Kents, who
had been badly hit by a piece of shell,” writes Corporal Sam Haslett.
“He hadn’t long to live, and knew it, but he wasn’t at all put out
about it. I asked him if there was any message I could take to any one
at home, and the poor lad’s eyes filled with tears as he answered: ‘I
ran away from home and ’listed a year ago. Mother and dad don’t know
I’m here, but you tell them that I’m not sorry I did it.’ When I told
our boys afterwards, they cried like babies, but, mind you, that’s the
spirit that’s going to pull England through this war. I got his name
and the address of his people from his regiment, and I am writing to
tell them that they have every reason to be proud of their lad. He may
have run away from home, but he didn’t run away from the Germans.”
And if you have caught the buoyant, heroic ardour that rings through
those careless, unstudied notes our gallant fellows have written home,
you know that there is not a man in the firing line who will.
_Wyman & Sons Ltd., Printers, London and Reading._
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not
changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced
quotation marks retained.
Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.
Page 68: “smoking concerts” probably should be “smoking, concerts”.
Page 72: “from Mons, It was” was punctuated and capitalized that way.
Page 150: “1.0 p.m.” was printed that way.
End of Project Gutenberg's In The Firing Line, by A. St. John Adcock