In The Firing Line 20

In The Firing Line 20

“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.