THE KING'S OWN SCOTTISH BORDERERS
If legend may be believed, the Scottish Borderers came into existence
with a strength of a thousand men in four hours of the 19th of March,
1689, a recruiting record which stands unbeaten in subsequent history.
The regiment was raised by the followers of King William III, and within
four months of the time of its formation was facing "Bonnie Dundee" at
the pass of Killiecrankie. General Mackay, the officer commanding the
King's troops, testified that only two regiments of his force bore
themselves as they ought, and of these two one was the King's Own
Scottish Borderers. When it is remembered that the regiment had only
been formed four months, this fact will be seen in its true light; and
for over two centuries the Borderers have maintained the reputation
given them by Mackay.
Having settled the authority of King William in Scotland, the Borderers
were sent over to Ireland, where they helped in driving out James and
his Irish and French adherents from the United Kingdom, and
consolidating the rule of the Orange king. Thence, in the service of
William, the regiment went to Flanders, where they took part in the
siege of Namur, and lost twenty officers and 500 men by the explosion of
one of the mines of the enemy. It was here that the Borderers were first
made acquainted with the practice of fixing the bayonet alongside the
muzzle of the musket instead of into it, for up to that time fixing
bayonets had involved thrusting the bayonet into the barrel, when the
weapon could not be fired. Seeing a French regiment advancing with fixed
bayonets, the Colonel of the Borderers ordered his men to fix theirs,
and calmly awaited the result, confident in the superiority of his men
over their opponents in this class of fighting. But at short range the
French amazed the Scots by pouring in a volley, for they had their
bayonets fixed round the muzzles of their muskets instead of in them.
Recovering themselves, the Borderers charged and routed the enemy, and
learned from one of the French muskets left on the field how this
apparent miracle had been accomplished. Thenceforth British troops fixed
their bayonets on instead of in their muskets.
When, in 1697, the treaty of Ryswick put an end to the campaign which
included the taking of Namur, the Borderers returned home. Their next
notable exploit was at Vigo, in 1719, where they destroyed the stores
collected for an invasion of England. Thirteen years later the regiment
was among the defending force at Gibraltar, and withstood the attacks of
a force of 20,000 men, who were eventually obliged to retire, leaving
the Rock in British hands. Then came Fontenoy, where the Borderers lost
206 officers and men; and later Minden, where sixty squadrons of French
cavalry charged again and again, only to be broken against the defence
of six British regiments, of which the Borderers formed one. Having thus
accounted for the cavalry, the six regiments put to flight two French
brigades of infantry, and virtually annihilated a body of Saxon
infantry, being the whole time under heavy artillery fire. Returning in
1763 from the many Continental fields in which it had taken part, the
regiment buried with full military honours at Newcastle-on-Tyne the
fragments of the colours carried from victory to victory for twenty
years.
There followed nineteen years of peace service, and then the Borderers
were sent to Gibraltar as reinforcements, arriving in time to assist in
the final discomfiture of the besieging force. In 1793 the Borderers
were transformed into Marines, in which capacity they came in for a
share of the prize money accruing from the capture of a ship valued at a
million sterling, and then took part in the victory won by Lord Howe
over the French fleet at Brest. There were Borderers, too, at the siege
of Toulon, where Napoleon I, at that time only an artillery lieutenant,
was wounded by a British soldier's bayonet.
In the Napoleonic wars the Borderers were faced with more hard work than
chances of glory. They went to the campaign in Holland in 1799, and took
part in the expedition to Egypt in 1801, while eight years later they
were at the capture of Martinique, a name borne on their colours. But
for the rest of the time up to Waterloo they were engaged mainly in
inconspicuous garrison duty, with no chance of adding to their
reputation. Their luck held to a similar course through the nineteenth
century, up to the outbreak of the last South African war, for they were
set to deal with a Boer insurrection at the Cape in 1842, sent to Canada
at the time of the Fenian raid in 1866, and engaged in the Afghan
campaign of 1878-80. They fought in the Egyptian war in 1888, and then
went to work on the Indian frontier, where is much fighting and little
glory for most regiments that take part. In the Tirah campaign alone the
Borderers were in action twenty-three times--yet who remembers the Tirah
campaign to-day?
As for the South African campaign, it has been placed on record that
the Borderers "put in as much hard work in marching and fighting as any
body of troops in the whole campaign." Paardeberg, Poplar Grove, and
Karee Spruit were three notable actions of this war in which the
Borderers took part, they having been allotted to the 7th Division of
the Army of South Africa. At the last-named action eighty-three officers
and men of the Borderers were killed or wounded. Later, at Vlakfontein,
the Borderers and the Derbyshires shared the honour of saving General
Dixon's column from utter disaster, and recapturing two British guns
which had been taken by the Boers.
Now, as for the war in France, the record of the Borderers is fairly
complete. It begins with the account of the adventures of a maxim-gun
section during the first week of the war, as related by a man of the gun
section who was invalided home very early in the campaign. He states
that at Mons his gun section were located inside a house at Mons, firing
from one of the windows, while Germans in considerable numbers were
searching the surrounding houses. It took the Germans four hours to
locate the maxim gun, and then, as they riddled the house with bullets,
the plaster and laths began to come down on the heads of the Borderers'
men, whereupon the latter thought the time had come to clear out. Under
fire they dismounted their gun and scrambled out from the back of the
house, whence they got under cover from the German fire, and, when night
fell, they were able to make their way back to their own lines.
"While we were in action on Tuesday," the record continues, "a shell
struck the limber of the gun and almost blew it to bits. I was struck on
the shoulder by a piece of shrapnel. On another occasion we were firing
from an isolated position when a company of Germans surprised us by
appearing about a hundred yards away. We were thirteen strong--one
officer and twelve men--so we put up the gun and made for cover. We had
about two hundred yards to run across a field, but every one of us
escaped without a scratch."
On the 16th of September the War Office report of "Missing" included the
names of men belonging to the Borderers, and of these many went to
Doberitz camp of prisoners. One man, writing from Doberitz, stated that
he had been captured on August 26th, and was being fairly well treated.
Which recalls the fact that Colonel Stephenson, the commanding officer
of the Borderers, had the misfortune to be wounded and captured in the
very early stages of the war. It was at Le Cateau that the colonel was
wounded, and, although the wound was not exceptionally serious, it was
enough to put Colonel Stephenson out of action for the time. He was
assisted to an ambulance waggon and got inside, but afterwards he came
out of his own accord in order to make way for men more seriously
injured. Almost immediately afterwards the retreat was continued, and
according to one account the colonel was found lying wounded by the
Germans. Another account states that the four horses of one of the
ambulance waggons were lost during the retreat, and fifteen men of the
Borderers were ordered to replace the horses in drawing the ambulance
waggon, with the result that the whole party, including Colonel
Stephenson in the waggon with other wounded, were captured. Major Leigh,
D.S.O., another officer of the Borderers, was wounded at Mons and
captured by the Germans, according to all accounts, while three other
officers are reported to have been taken prisoners in the first weeks of
the war.
It was at Mons, too, that young Lieutenant Amos, of the Borderers, who
had only received his commission five months before, went out to the
front and brought back a wounded man much bigger and heavier than
himself. A few days later Lieutenant Amos led out his platoon of men in
face of the enemy's fire, when he was shot down, and the men of the
platoon thought at the time that he was only wounded. "When night came
on," said one man of the platoon, "I went out to look for him, and just
as I had got to where he was lying and had lifted his head, the moon
shone out full from behind the clouds, and I saw he was quite dead. He
had been shot through the heart."
Whatever dispatches may say with regard to individual officers and men,
it is usually safe to take the opinions of the men themselves with
regard to their officers. An instance of this is the case of Lieutenant
Hamilton-Dalrymple, of the Borderers, who was described by his men as "a
very daring man." He had excelled in patrol work and scouting,
especially at night, and on the retreat was placed in charge of four
platoons, which he led out for an attack. He had led out No. 16 platoon,
and went back for No. 15, and, when leading these men out, he was shot
in the leg by a German sniper and had to be carried to the rear. The man
who told this story of his officer was subsequently hit by a splinter
from a shell which accounted for five men.
Near Le Cateau the Borderers buried Lieutenant Amos and twenty-one of
the men of the regiment. Throughout the day, while an artillery duel had
raged, the dead had lain out on the battlefield, and a long grave was
dug for them by their comrades. In this the bodies were laid, each
covered by a waterproof sheet, and an officer recited a brief funeral
service. While, during the next day, the artillery duel went on, the
Borderers cut out in the grass that covered the grave of their comrades
the letters "K.O.S.B.," and filled in the blank letter-spaces with small
stones, completing their work by fashioning and erecting a small cross
of wood to mark the place of burial.
There was one youngster of the Borderers in these first days who, at
Mons, received a flesh wound while trying to cross two planks across a
canal that was being peppered with machine-gun fire. Colonel Stephenson
gripped him to save him from falling into the canal, and--"You had
better go back to the hospital, sonny," said the colonel. But the
youngster got little rest or respite in hospital, for the Germans
shelled the hospital building, after their fashion, and the patients had
to beat a quick retreat. Later, this same youngster came to the
engagement at Béthune, one of the fiercest of the campaign, and one
night he was on sentry duty at a wayside shrine. Just at the time the
reliefs were coming round he saw Germans in the distance, and fired at
them once or twice, "for luck," as he phrased it, considering that he
was entitled to a last shot before going off duty. But the glare of his
rifle fire must have betrayed his position, for almost immediately he
received another wound in the body, and this time it was a sufficiently
serious matter to cause him to be sent home.
By means of such letters as these one may trace the regiment through the
first, and in some respects the worst, of the fighting. At the position
of the Aisne, the accounts of the Borderers grow numerous, and it
appears that the second battalion of the regiment was in the thick of
things. One account describes the crossing of the Aisne under shell fire
from the German guns. The second battalion got their orders to cross
very early one morning, and turned out in a cold, rainy dawn; "but we
got our pipes set going, and were all right then." On reaching the
river, it was found that there were no bridges, but some rafts had been
constructed by the Engineers, and these rafts were loaded each with six
men, and hauled across to the opposite bank of the river with ropes.
With the weight of men and equipment, the rafts were submerged so that
the men were up to their knees in water while they crossed, but such
incidents as that were regarded as trifling.
On the far bank of the river, the German shell fire was hotter than
ever, and many men of the battalion were wounded, mostly in the arms and
legs. "You bet we took all the cover we could get," says the narrator.
"Some time after this three of us were lying in a field, and I was
smoking my pipe, while my chum was puffing at a cigarette. The man next
to my chum hadn't a match, and wanted a light badly, so he got up to get
a light from my chum. As soon as he rose the poor beggar was hit by a
fragment of shell and killed. My chum had got hold of a trench-making
tool. It's like a spade at the one end, and like a pick at the other,
and he stuck the pick end into the ground and lay down behind it,
covering his head with the spade end. Every two or three minutes you
could hear the bullets spattering against the iron of the tool."
Later, they got into the trenches, where some of the men were standing
knee-deep in water, and others were submerged up to their waists. "It
was no picnic, but they were a bright lot, cracking jokes or making
remarks about the 'Black Marias,' or 'Jack Johnsons,' as they call the
big German shells."
Although, in the first days on the Aisne, the first line of German
troops were opposed to the British, the latter had a very poor opinion
of their opponents. The general view was that the Germans were not very
keen on fighting, and a number of them when captured said that they were
forced by their officers to fight. In one case, when the men had refused
to fire, their officers had turned on them and shot them--as might have
been expected in any army. One wounded and captured German, placed in
the next bed in hospital to a wounded Borderer, spoke broken English,
and in the course of a chat was asked what he thought of the British.
"British artillery," he said, "no good--not enough. British
infantry--_mein Gott!_" His expression as he spoke completed the
comment.
A Borderer wounded at the Aisne had fought beside the French, whom he
described as very plucky, but rather slow. Their artillery, however, won
his admiration, and he declared it the best he had ever seen. He was
emphatic in his appreciation of the way in which the French people
treated the British troops, supplying them with food and fruit, and in
many ways expressing their sympathy.
"My chum and I came to a village one day," he said, "and wanted to get
some bread and tobacco. We met a peasant woman in the village, and I
said '_Du pain_.' She took me by the arm and pushed me into a dark room,
but I couldn't see where I was, and called for my chum, who came in as
well, though we were both afraid it might be a trap. Then we noticed
some food and wine on a table. It struck us, when we came to look round,
that nearly all the furniture in the house was smashed. 'The
Prussians,' the woman told us. And it's the same in every village you go
into--these Germans smash everything but us. They're trying hard to
smash us too, but they can't manage it."
"It is a grand thing," says another man of the regiment, "to shoot at
Germans--they make such a lovely target. We can't miss them, and, poor
things, they are wishing it was over. Every prisoner we take says they
are starving, and they look it, too. Well, never mind, we are there to
kill, and kill we do. They are frightened of us, and say we shoot too
straight--the French and British are finishing them off in thousands."
As regards the Flanders battle, the last sentence of this letter may be
taken literally, but the rest of it is open to question. The dogged
resistance on the Aisne, and the tremendous attacks up by Ypres and
along the coast, were not made by men starving and utterly
miserable--the work has been too fierce for that to be possible. The
reserve troops of the German Army have no liking for their work, and,
newly taken from comfort to the rigid discipline and severe conditions
of the firing line, are naturally inclined to complain at what the
first-line troops regard as mere everyday inconveniences; and doubtless
it was some of these that were referred to in this letter.
But, to revert to the position on the Aisne, there is yet another
Borderer's story that is worthy of reproduction. The narrator states
that during the battle two German women, masquerading as nurses, went
about the British lines by motor, accompanied by a chauffeur. Among the
British soldiers on outpost duty they freely distributed cigarettes,
which were afterwards found to be inoculated by poison. Before any
fatal results had accrued, the nature of the cigarettes was discovered,
and the pseudo-nurses were rounded up and shot. The story may be true,
but it seems a little improbable that _no_ ill results should have
attended the distribution of these cigarettes before discovery of the
trick. The man who tells this story adds that two Scottish pipers held
up and captured eight Germans in a wood near Crecy. The pipers had
become detached from their division, and carried no arms, but on coming
on the Germans they assumed a firing position and pointed the long
drones of their pipes at the enemy, calling on them to surrender. The
Germans at once threw down their rifles, and were taken prisoners.
Let it be remembered that both of these stories are told by the same
man, and that both are on the face of them improbable--and then the
reader must form his own conclusion.
The next missive takes us on to the work in the trenches around
Béthune, after the opposing lines had crept up to the north-west of
France. "There were few breathing-spaces," says the writer. "Ground
would be gained, and our troops then had to resort to the expedient of
digging themselves in: at parts of the line about a hundred yards
divided our trenches from those of the enemy." The man who tells of this
fighting exposed himself to get a shot at precisely the same moment that
a German out in the opposite trenches took aim, and both pulled their
triggers almost simultaneously. The German bullet passed right across
the Borderer's scalp, but in the firing line it was impossible to get
immediate medical attention, and the wounded man had to be in the trench
for hours before nightfall gave him the chance to get back to the field
hospital under cover of darkness.
It fell to the lot of the Borderers to witness the first charge of the
Indian troops, and evidently the dark men enjoyed themselves. "When they
got the order to advance, you never saw men more pleased in all your
life. They went forward with a rush like a football team charging their
opponents, or a party of revellers rushing to catch the last train. They
got to grips with their enemies in double-quick time, and the howl of
joy that went up told us that those chaps felt that they were paying the
Germans back in full for the peppering they had got while waiting for
orders. When they came back from that charge they looked very well
pleased with themselves, and they had every right to be. They are very
proud of being selected to fight with us, and are terribly anxious to
make a good impression. They have done it, too.
"I watched them one day under shell fire, and was astonished at their
coolness. 'Coal boxes' were being emptied all round them, but they
seemed to pay not the slightest heed, and if one of them did go under,
his chums simply went on as though nothing had happened. They make light
of wounds, and I have known cases where men have fought for days with
wounds that might have excused any man for dropping out. When the wounds
are very bad, I have seen the men themselves dressing them in the firing
line. One day I questioned one of them about this, and he said, 'We must
be as brave as the British.' It's amusing to hear them trying to pick up
our camp songs. They have a poor opinion of the Germans as fighting men,
and are greatly interested when we tell them of the horrors perpetrated
on the Belgians and French."
Thus writes a wounded sergeant of the Borderers. Now the official
account states that the first charge of the Indians was made to recover
ground and trenches that had been taken by the Germans by sheer weight
of numbers from British troops--so we may safely conclude that the
Borderers, probably the second battalion, were among the men holding
those trenches, and probably were in the section of the line that was
forced back. And there, beside the Indian contingent, we may leave them,
certain that in all the fighting in Flanders and for the recovery of
Belgium they will acquit themselves like men.