A German cavalry division was pursuing a division of English infantry.
The English ranks were suddenly reinforced; they turned and charged the
Germans, who fled in disorder.
All the Germans fled--but one. Says an English soldier, Trooper S.
Cargill:
When they saw us coming they turned and fled, at least all but
one, who came rushing at us with his lance at the charge. I
caught hold of his horse, which was half mad with terror, and
my chum was going to run the rider through when he noticed the
awful glaze in his eyes, and we saw that the poor devil was
dead.
That ghastly vision of the mounted corpse can find no place in histories
of this war. It has no historical significance even if it did receive a
place in the cable dispatches from the front. Only from the lips of
soldiers or from their pens when they snatch a few moments from the
business of war to write to their people at home come such naïvely
graphic accounts of trivial but illuminative incidents.
In many an American family is treasured a packet of yellow papers, on
which are written, in ink fast fading away, brief and intimate
impressions of the civil war by men who waged it. Every war has thus its
unknown, unhonored chroniclers, who send to their little home circles
narratives that for startling realism no highly paid special
correspondent could surpass.
Trooper Cargill's letter is one of a number contained in an
extraordinary volume just published by the George H. Doran Company of
New York, with the title "In the Firing Line," (50 cents net.) Mr. A.
St. John Adcock collected a large number of letters sent home during the
last few weeks by English soldiers fighting in France and has arranged
them to form what is perhaps the most essentially human account of the
great war that has yet appeared.
Consider, for instance, the narrative of Private Whitaker of the
Coldstream Guards. He fought through the terrific four-day battle near
Mons, and his account of it follows. It must be remembered that the
British troops who took part in that battle had sailed from Southampton
only four days before:
You thought it was a big crowd that streamed out of the
Crystal Palace when we went to see the Cup Final. Well,
outside Compiègne it was just as if that crowd came at us. You
couldn't miss them. Our bullets plowed into them, but still
they came for us. I was well intrenched, and my rifle got so
hot I could hardly hold it. I was wondering if I should have
enough bullets when a pal shouted, "Up, Guards, and at 'em!"
The next second he was rolled over with a nasty knock on the
shoulder. He jumped up and hissed, "Let me get at them!" His
language was a bit stronger than that.
When we really did get the order to get at them we made no
mistake, I can tell you. They cringed at the bayonet, but
those on our left wing tried to get around us, and after
racing as hard as we could for quite five hundred yards we cut
up nearly every man who did not run away.
You have read of the charge of the Light Brigade. It was new
to our cavalry chaps. I saw two of our fellows who were
unhorsed stand back to back and slash away with their swords,
bringing down nine or ten of the panic-stricken devils. Then
they got hold of the stirrup-straps of a horse without a rider
and got out of the mêlée. This kind of thing was going on all
day.
In the afternoon I thought we should all get bowled over, as
they came for us again in their big numbers. Where they came
from goodness knows; but as we could not stop them with
bullets they had another taste of the bayonet. My Captain, a
fine fellow, was near to me, and as he fetched them down he
shouted, "Give them socks, my lads!" How many were killed and
wounded I don't know; but the field was covered with them.
It is also of the four days' battle that Private J.R. Taft of the Second
Essex Regiment wrote. How typical of real life, as distinct from
romance, is his ready transition from his devout thanksgiving for his
safety to his amused recollection of the popular song that rose above
the crash of shot and shell:
We were near Mons when we had the order to intrench. It was
just dawn when we were half way down our trenches, and we were
on our knees when the Germans opened a murderous fire with
their guns and machine guns.
We opened a rapid fire with our Maxims and rifles; we let them
have it properly, but no sooner did we have one lot down than
up came another lot, and they sent their cavalry to charge us,
but we were there with our bayonets, and we emptied our
magazines on them. Their men and horses were in a confused
heap. There were a lot of wounded horses we had to shoot to
end their misery.
We had several charges with their infantry, too. We find they
don't like the bayonets. Their rifle shooting is rotten; I
don't believe they could hit a haystack at 100 yards.
We find their field artillery very good; we don't like their
shrapnel; but I noticed that some did not burst; if one shell
that came over me had burst. I should have been blown to
atoms. I thanked the Lord it did not. I also heard our men
singing that famous song, "Get Out and Get Under." I know that
for an hour in our trench it would make any one keep under,
what with their shells and machine guns. Many poor fellows
went to their death like heroes.
The writer of the following letter, too, was telling of Mons. To friends
far away, at peaceful Barton-on-Humber, he wrote:
Just a line to tell you I have returned from the front, and I
can tell you we have had a very trying time of it. I must also
say I am very lucky to be here. We were fighting from Sunday,
23d, to Wednesday evening, on nothing to eat or drink--only
the drop of water in our bottles which we carried.
No one knows--only those that have seen us could credit such a
sight, and if I live for years may I never see such a sight
again. I can tell you it is not very nice to see your chum
next to you with half his head blown off. The horrible sights
I shall never forget. There seemed nothing else only certain
death staring us in the face all the time. I cannot tell you
all on paper. We must, however, look on the bright side, for
it is no good doing any other.
There are thousands of these Germans, and they simply throw
themselves at us. It is no joke fighting seven or eight to
one. I can tell you we have lessened them a little, but there
are millions more yet to finish.
Of the battle that reddened the foam of the North Sea during the last
days of August many a seaman recorded his impressions. And what curious
things stuck in the memories of the weary, powder-stained survivors!
"The funny thing which you should have seen," wrote Midshipman Hartley
to his parents, "was all the stokers grubbing around after the action
looking for bits of shell." And a seaman on H.M.S. Hearty wrote:
Two cooks were in the galley of the Arethusa, just having
their rum, when a shell killed one and blew the other's arm
off. A funny thing, they've got a clock hanging up; it smashed
the glass and one hand, but the blooming thing's still going.
There is fine realism in Seaman Gunner Brown's letter to the parents who
waited for tidings in their cottage on the Isle of Wight:
We and another ship in our squadron came across two German
cruisers. We routed one and started on the second, but battle
cruisers soon finished her off. Another then appeared, and
after we had plunked two broadsides into her she slid off in
flames.
Every man did his bit, and there was a continuous stream of
jokes. We penciled on the projectiles, "Love from England,"
"One for the Kaiser," and other such messages. The sight of
sinking German ships was gloriously terrible, funnels and
masts lying about in all directions, and amidships a huge
furnace, the burning steel looking like a big ball of sulphur.
There was not the slightest sign of fear, from the youngest to
the oldest man aboard.
[Illustration: ENGLAND'S SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR, FIELD MARSHAL EARL
KITCHENER.
(_From the Painting by Angelo._)]
[Illustration: GEN. VON BISSING,
Recently Made Military Governor of Belgium to Succeed Field Marshal von
der Goltz.
(_Photo from Ruschin._)]
But it remained for a naval Lieutenant, whose name is not given, to
describe, in a letter to a friend, one of the most remarkable incidents
of the war, an incident which might have occurred in the imagination of
Jules Verne or of H.G. Wells in his youth. He wrote:
The Defender having sunk an enemy, lowered a whaler to pick up
her swimming survivors; before the whaler got back an enemy's
cruiser came up and chased the Defender, and thus she
abandoned her whaler. Imagine their feelings--alone in an open
boat without food, twenty-five miles from the nearest land,
and that land the enemy's fortress, with nothing but fog and
foes around them. Suddenly a swirl alongside and up, if you
please, pops his Britannic Majesty's submarine E-4, opens his
conning tower, takes them all on board, shuts up again, dives,
and brings them home, 250 miles!
In his introduction to the book St. John Adcock calls the private
letters of the soldiers "the most potent of recruiting literature."
Undoubtedly this is true of some of them. The casual, almost flippant,
records of splendid heroism, the reflection of a spirit of gay courage,
the description of the most picturesque and romantic aspects of
battle--these tend, certainly, to fill the mind of the stay-at-home
readers with a desire for participation in this great adventure.
But, on the other hand, such passages as "The dead were piled up in the
trenches about ten deep, and there were trenches seven miles long," and
"Our Maxim gun officer tried to fix his gun up during their murderous
fire, but he got half his face blown away," are not likely to make
fighting seem a pleasant occupation. It is true that the dead referred
to in the first of these passages are the enemy's dead; still, there is
a wholesale quality about those seven-mile trenches filled with dead ten
deep that is not a recruiting allurement.
Nor is this letter, vivid in its realism, likely to make those not
already warlike eager to enlist. It was sent to his parents at
Ilfracombe by Private William Burgess of the Royal Field Artillery:
We left our landing place for the front on the Tuesday and got
there on Saturday night. The Germans had just reached Liége
then, and we got into action on the Sunday morning. The first
thing we did was to blow up a bridge to stop the Germans from
crossing. Then we came into action behind a lot of houses
attached to the main street. We were there about ten minutes
when the houses started to fall around us. The poor people
were buried alive. I saw poor children getting knocked down by
bursting shells.
The next move was to advance across where there was a Red
Cross hospital. They dropped shells from airships and fired on
it until the place was burned down to the ground. Then they
got a big plan on to retire and let the French get behind
them. We retired eight miles, but we had to fight until we
were forced to move again. We got as far as Le Cateau on
Tuesday night. We camped there until 2 o'clock next morning.
Then we all heard there was a big fight coming off, so we all
got together and cleared the field for action. [The letter
mentions the numbers of men engaged, and states that the
Germans were in the proportion of three to one.] We cut them
down like rats. We could see them coming on us in heaps and
dropping like hail. The Colonel passed along the line and
said, "Stick it, boys."
I tell you, mother, it was awful to see your own comrades
dropping down--some getting their heads blown off and others
their legs and arms. I was fighting with my shirt off. A piece
of shell went right through my shirt at the back and never
touched me. It stuck into a bag of earth which we put between
the wheels to stop bullets.
We were there, all busy fighting, when an airship came right
over the line and dropped a bomb, which caused a terrible lot
of smoke. Of course, that gave the Germans our range. Then the
shells were dropping on us thick. We looked across the line
and saw the German guns coming toward us. We turned our two
centre guns on them and sent them yards in the air. I reckon I
saw one German go quite twenty yards in the air.
Just after that a shell burst right over our gun. That one got
me out of action. I had to get off the field the best way I
could. The bullets were going all around me on the way off;
you see, they got completely around us. I went about two miles
and met a Red Cross cart. I was taken to St. Quentin Hospital.
We were shelled out of there about 2 in the morning, and then
taken in a train and taken down to a plain near Rouen. Next
morning we were put on a ship for dear old England.