We fought as at Mons. The arrowhead of the division consisting of two
or three regiments, the Dublins, the Munsters and the Connaughts,
took the shock of the enemy attacks, while the sides made good their
retirement, then the arrowhead rapidly fell back and joined us with the
main body, while other regiments received the shock in turn.
In the two days we drew four miles nearer to the Greek frontier. If we
could continue to maintain this deliberate rate of retirement with our
formations still intact we could hope for salvation, for we knew that
re-enforcements were due.
The night of the 7th the Bulgars made a final attempt to smash our
resistance. They redoubled the force of their bombardment; they
increased still more the momentum of their infantry attacks. They
came very near to achieving their purpose, and there were hours when
one would have asked prayers for the Tenth Division, but British
bulldog courage and obstinacy withstood all the fury of the enemy's
onset, and our mountain artillery always found an easy target. By
the 8th the force of the Bulgar attacks had spent itself.... In the
two days' battle the Tenth Division inflicted on the enemy at least
four times their own number of casualties and, what is possibly of
equal importance, they taught him the temper and morale of British
infantry....
The Tenth Division outlived the horrors of Sulva; it outlived the
days and nights of biting cold on the Serbian frontier ranges, and it
finished the miracle, to quote the official phrase, by "sustaining
violent attacks delivered by the enemy in overwhelming numbers." The
slow, punishing, rearguard action it fought allowed the Allies to
withdraw all their accumulated stores and munitions and to fall back
without congestion into Greek territory again.
The Tenth Division saved the situation by a display of courage and
dogged heroism that cannot be too highly praised. One of these days we
shall be told what the general said to the thinned units when he met
them again at Salonica....
You ask the most talkative of them to give you a picture of the
oncoming Bulgar masses.
"A mad, swearing mob, they were," he says, "on us as thick as ants. I
suppose they were swearing. Anyhow, we couldn't understand their lingo,
and they didn't say much after we had let them have five rounds of
rapid fire." You ask another what he said when the Bulgars stormed the
trench. "Said?" is the reply, "said? I never said anything. I was too
busy pumping hell into them to say anything. But my pal was shouting
hard enough for me and him as well." Get men with that spirit and
neither Bulgar nor German shall best them.
It is hard to explain how the Tenth Division, encompassed as it was,
won through, and perhaps the most satisfactory thing to do is to fall
back on the explanation of a Munster Fanger, whose only grumble is that
he was kept twelve hours in those terrible forty-eight hours' fighting
without food.
"They beat us with numbers. We couldn't hope to hold up against the
crowd they sent against us, a daft, clumsy gang of men. We gave 'em
hell, but their numbers beat us. But two days wasn't much of a time
to give theirselves to make us see we were beaten, and so we got away
with them still coming after us. You'd got to be there to see what
happened." It sounds very much like an anti-climax, but it is really
what happened. The Tenth Division escaped because it hadn't time to
know that by all the rules it was beaten.