THE ROYAL SCOTS FUSILIERS
The titles of regiments are apt to be confusing to the lay mind, and it
is difficult at first to distinguish between the Royal Scots and the
Royal Scots Fusiliers, on paper. In old time the Fusiliers were the
"twenty-first" regiment of infantry; they were raised in Scotland in
1678 for service under Charles II, and served under William III in
Holland and Flanders, as well as under the great Duke of Marlborough and
under George II when the latter commanded his troops in person at the
battle of Dettingen.
Their history in previous campaigns to this of France and Belgium is a
long one. At Blenheim, Malplaquet, and Ramillies the Scots Fusiliers
won particular distinction--the brigadier who led the principal attack
at Blenheim was a colonel of the Scots Fusiliers. At Dettingen and
Fontenoy, again, the Fusiliers were well to the front, and in the
last-named engagement the regiment suffered so severely that it became
necessary to move it to Flanders. In 1761 the Scots Fusiliers took part
in the capture of Belle Isle, and later, in the American War of
Independence--bolstering up a bad cause--they underwent intense
privations, and, foodless and minus ammunition, capitulated with General
Burgoyne at Saratoga to a force five times the strength of that which
Burgoyne commanded. 1793 saw them engaged in capturing the islands of
the West Indies from the French, and in 1807 they formed part of the
second expedition to Egypt. Then at Messina the Fusiliers alone were
responsible for the capture of over a thousand officers and men out of
a force which attempted to land there, and up to the time of the
abdication of Napoleon the regiment was engaged in active service. In
St. Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh, are deposited the tattered colours
carried by the regiment in the Napoleonic campaigns.
In the Crimea the Fusiliers again lost their colonel; at Inkermann,
where the colonel fell, the regiment was in the very front of the battle
throughout the day, fighting throughout the battle without food, and
calling for more ammunition. They were present throughout the great
siege and at the fall of Sevastopol, and the colours borne in that
campaign--presented to the regiment in 1827 by King William IV--cost the
life of one officer and led to two more being severely wounded at
Inkermann, while 17 N.C.O.'s and men who acted as escort were either
killed or severely wounded. These colours were subsequently deposited
in the parish church of Ayr, the depot headquarters of the regiment.
In Africa against the Zulus and Basutos, as well as against the Boers in
the first war of the Transvaal, the Fusiliers fought next after the
Crimean campaign; and then they took part in the subjugation of King
Theebaw in Burmah. In 1899 the 2nd battalion embarked for South Africa,
and was set to form a part of the 6th Fusilier brigade. From Colenso
they brought away a Victoria Cross, awarded to Private Ravenhill for
conspicuous gallantry in saving guns from which the gunners had been
shot away.
To the Fusiliers fell the honour of being the first British regiment to
enter the Transvaal during the war, and they took part in the hoisting
of the British flag at Christiana, the first Transvaal town to be
captured. A little later, the colonel of the regiment, with a force of
under 120 men, went on to Potchefstroom, and there hoisted a British
flag that had been buried there at the time of the peace of 1881, and,
after being disinterred, had been kept in the possession of the family
of a former commanding officer of the Scots Fusiliers. So distinguished
was the conduct of the regiment in the South African campaign that, on
the representation of Colonel Carr, C.B., the commanding officer, the
white plume that had not been worn since 1860 by the Fusiliers was given
back to them, as a recognition of their services. To a civilian this may
seem a very little thing, but the regiment regards it far otherwise.
As for the campaign in France, there are very few authentic records of
the men of the regiment to hand at the time of writing, but from those
few one can reconstruct a good deal of the work of the Royal Scots
Fusiliers. One man tells that the Germans captured all the transport,
which contained all the kits of the men, who were thus left with only
the clothes they stood in for a matter of five weeks. Since this account
came through in the latter part of October, it may safely be assumed
that the regiment was concerned in the great retreat to the Marne,
though no letter of those received tells of doings at Mons, Landrecies,
or the very early battlefields. Still, it is not safe to assume that the
regiment--or some part of it--was _not_ engaged in the first actions.
One may picture what the men looked like from the account sent by one of
them. "I got a bit of a shave a week ago," he says, "but I have not had
a wash for over a fortnight." Kipling's "I wish my mother could see me
now" fits the case admirably.
Again, evidently concerning the retreat, the same soldier writes: "We
got an order to stop a motor car one day, and as the driver pulled up a
man tried to escape on the opposite side, and I collared him. He got
into an awful state, and started pulling photos and papers from his
pockets and talked in a very excited manner. He was taken away, and I
believe he was shot the next morning as a spy."
This might possibly have been at the position of the Marne, or between
that time and the holding of the line of the Aisne, but it is far more
likely to have occurred at the time of the retreat, when motorists on
the roads were plentiful, and spies could do good work for their
employers.
There are various stories which go to describe the work of the Fusiliers
at the Aisne, and the monotony of life in the trenches is well portrayed
in one letter. The writer says: "As we can't always be killing Germans
we are sometimes hard put to it to kill time in the trenches. _Next to
religion_, I think football is the thing that interests us most, and we
are always eager to hear news of our teams at home. The papers that
reach us have not got much news of that kind in, and it would be a
godsend to us if only somebody would take in hand to start a paper for
circulating among the troops giving nothing but the latest football
news."
On the more serious side is a communication from a man of the regiment
who was wounded at the position of the Aisne. He stated that "the men
have come through an awful time," and added that he himself was stuck in
the trenches for seven days without a break, while he went for fourteen
days without being able to wash his face. The German way was to attack
in order to draw the British fire, and then to retire, after which would
come a terrific artillery bombardment--but the British stuck to their
ground always. Finally this man was hit in the head by shrapnel, while
his particular chum was shot in the stomach, and they both went into a
French hospital.
By these simple records one may trace the regiment from the great
retreat to the Aisne; and then another letter takes the story on very
nearly to the great coast battle, where, by what the writer says, the
second battalion of the Scots Fusiliers have been from the beginning of
the German attempts on Calais. The writer, in describing how the German
spies adopt the very old trick of assisting artillery fire by the use of
the hands of a steeple clock, locates his story at Ypres, where some of
the fiercest fighting of the whole war has taken place.
"It was at the town of Ypres--a name, by the way, that gets many quaint
pronunciations from our men--and the hands of the steeple clock stood at
10.40. When the men of the battalion had been in the place a quarter of
an hour, such shelling began as they had never known before--and then
somebody pointed out that the hands of the clock had been altered to
indicate 12.40. Thereupon a search was made of the clock tower, when
three Germans were found and taken prisoners, much to the disgust of the
men who had seen their comrades suffering from the shell fire. They
would willingly have given these spies shorter shrift than mere capture,
but of course the rules of war had to be observed, even in such a clear
case of espionage as this."
There is one man of the second battalion who, wounded and sent home from
the battle in the north-west of France, speaks of the fighting there as
"past description." He had seen hard fighting in India, but reckoned the
work against the Germans as beyond words to express it. "Germans came on
in solid masses, urged on by the officers with the points of their
swords, and on over the bodies of their dead comrades. This," producing
a German forage cap, "belonged to one poor devil I sent to his long
home; and this," producing a rosary, "was given to me by a Frenchwoman
in return for helping her to get her daughter away to a place of safety,
out of the way of the Germans."
Little things, these, but the contrast afforded by the two trophies goes
to prove that the men of the Fusiliers are fighting in the right way and
with the right spirit. There is little doubt, however, that the second
battalion of the regiment has lost very heavily in the Flanders
fighting. One report--an unofficial one, it is true--speaks of the
battalion as being reduced to less than 150 officers and men. This may
mean anything, for companies are sent away on detached duties, bodies of
men get cut off from their battalions and join up with others--all sorts
of things may happen in addition to real casualties to reduce the
strength of a battalion in such a series of actions as has been fought
between Lille and the coasts of France and Belgium. But, whatever may
have happened in this way, there can be no doubt that the Royal Scots
Fusiliers, of which the second battalion certainly took part in these
battles, has maintained the honour of the regiment to the full, and such
of its officers and men as have fallen have rendered good account of
themselves.