II
The First Shock of War
Mons and the 23rd of August saw The Royals in action. With other battalions they occupied the Mons salient, actually the point on which the torrent of war first broke and for a brief moment spent itself. On that still night it seemed to hang suspended as a great wave does before falling. As the battalion lay in the shallow trench the pregnant silence was at last broken by the high, clear call of a bugle, one single long note, indescribably eerie and menacing, and then the listening men heard the rustling tread of feet moving through the grass with a steady, regular, ominous advance. The might of Germany was on the move, and still the thin brown line lay tense and silent, until only forty paces separated the two. Then, at a word, The Royals' line broke into a storm of flame which swept the line of the advancing men as a scythe sweeps through the corn; and for the British infantry the great war had begun.
Mons was a victory; the German advance was held up temporarily. But all night the British troops were being withdrawn. It was after five in the morning before The Royals got their orders to move, and 'A' Company claims to be the last of the British army to leave Mons. But Le Cateau was another story. Here our men learned what the concentrated fire of artillery could be. The shallow trenches were obliterated; our gunners, hopelessly outclassed in weight and number of pieces, could do little, in spite of the greatest gallantry, to protect the infantry; and that the army was able to withdraw at all was a striking proof of its stern discipline. Audencourt was a shambles. Colonel McMicking, wounded near this village and left behind, as all the wounded who were unable to walk had to be, was hit again while being carried out of the blazing church. The command devolved on Major, now Brigadier-General, Duncan. From this time onwards the German guns had the range of the roads, and such a superiority of fire that they could do almost as they pleased. The infantry, at first furious at the necessity of retreat, turned again and again—as did the guns—on their pursuers, but even so the pressure was perilously near breaking point. The enemy had every means of mechanical transport, and was able to find time for rest. Our men had to press on to the last point of human endurance. There was no respite. The French Foreign Legion have a grim saying, 'March or die.' Here the word was 'March or be captured,' and even when every other conscious feeling but that of utter exhaustion seemed dead, somewhere deep down in their hearts the will to endure urged them on.
Is there no painter, no poet, who can enshrine for future generations the memory of this historic scene? We have here a sudden glimpse of Britain at her best. Hot sun, torment of burning feet on the cruel, white, and endless roads, the odour and sight and sound of death and wounds, pressure of pressing men, and love of life and the horrid loneliness of fear—all that was Giant Circumstance; but he could not extinguish the souls of men made in the image of God for suffering and endurance and triumph. English and Irish and Scottish—but brothers in hatred of retreat and in their determination to push on until they could turn and strike—the glamour of great names hung round all those tattered battalions; and the very essence of it was in the oldest of them all, in history and in campaigns, this famous Lowland regiment. Of that at such a time they thought little, if at all; sheer physical facts pressed too hard, yet in their desperate victory over circumstance they wrote the most golden page of their story, and enriched the blood of all who follow them.
You can find a certain humour in war if you look for it, though war is not amusing, and life at home has many more entertaining incidents in it than life at the front. One officer of The Royals fell sound asleep in a trench during the climax of a terrific bombardment, and awoke to find himself alone among the dead. (He makes us laugh when he tells the story, but at the time it cannot have been just very humorous.) He pushed on after the retreating army, and though—owing to the mistake of an officer at a cross-roads who stood saying, 'Third division to the right, So-and-so division to the left,' when it should have been the other way about—he lost his way, he found the battalion a fortnight later. Two others came in sight of the last bridge standing on one river just as the explosive was about to be detonated, and maintain that, running furiously toward the bridge, they persuaded the engineer in charge to postpone the fatal moment by brandishing a large loaf, rarest of all articles on the heels of a retreating army. Another who had been sent on ahead to find a billet in a château saw a beautiful bathroom, and was preparing to make use of a priceless opportunity when he found that the enemy was upon him, and fled in haste. The transport officer, peering round the corner of a house, saw his beloved transport which he had gathered and cherished until it was reputed the best in the army, go up in matchwood and iron splinters. One subaltern, finding himself on the ground, discovered to his horror that he had a hole in his chest, but struggled gamely on, now walking, now stealing a ride on a limber—just catching the last train of all—and finally arriving in England with no other articles of kit or clothing but a suit of pink pyjamas and a single eyeglass.
At Meaux the steeples of Paris were in sight; but the hour had struck, and The Royals at last wheeled to pursue.