Colonel Lucas and staff were all in readiness. Here were wheeling chairs, there stretchers. The preparations for the reception of the broken Tommies could not have been better, more elaborate, or more humane. It was the humanity of it all—the quiet consideration that told of complete preparedness—that made not the least moving chapter of the story that I have to tell. And out of the train stern-faced men began to hobble, many with their arms in a sling.
Here was a hairless-faced, boyish-looking fellow, with his head enveloped in snowy-white bandages; his cheeks were red and healthy, his eyes bright and twinkling. There was pain written across his young face, but he walked erect and puffed away at a cigarette. One man, with arms half clinging round the neck of two injured comrades, went limping to the reception-room, his foot the size of three, and as he went by he smiled and joked because he could only just manage to get along.
When the last of the soldiers able to walk found his way into the hospital, there to be refreshed with tea or coffee or soup, before he was sent to this or that ward, the more seriously wounded were carried from the train. How patient, how uncomplaining were these fellows! One, stretched out on a mattress, with his foot smashed, chatted and smoked until his turn came to be wheeled away. And when the last of these wounded heroes had been lifted out of the train I took myself to the reception-room, and there heard many stories that, though related with the simplicity of the true soldier, were wonderful.
The wounded men were of all regiments and spoke all dialects. They were travel-stained and immensely tired. Pain had eaten deep lines into many of their faces, but there were no really doleful looks. They were faces that seemed to say: “Here we are; what does it all matter; it is good to be alive; it might have been worse.”
I sat beside a private, named Cox. An old warrior he looked. His fine square jaw was black with wire-like whiskers. His eyes shone with the fire of the man who had suffered, so it seemed, some dreadful nightmare.
“And you want me to tell you all about it. Well, believe me, it was just hell. I have been through the Boxer campaign; I went through the Boer War, but I have never seen anything so terrible as that which happened last Sunday. It all happened so sudden. We believed that the Germans were some fifteen miles away, and all at once they opened fire upon us with their big guns.
“Let me tell you what happened to my own regiment. When a roll-call of my company was taken there were only three of us answered, me and two others.” When he had stilled his emotion, he went on. “So unexpected and so terrible was the attack of the enemy, and so overwhelming were their numbers, that there was no withstanding it.”
Before fire was opened a German aeroplane flew over our troops, and the deduction made by Private Cox and several of his comrades, with whom I chatted, was that the aeroplane was used as a sort of index to the precise locality of our soldiers, and, further, that the Germans, so accurate was their gunnery, had been over this particular battlefield before they struck a blow, and so had acquired an intimate knowledge of the country. Trenches that were dug by our men served as little protection from the fire.
Said Cox: “No man could have lived against such a murderous attack. There was a rain of lead, a deluge of lead, and, talk about being surprised, well, I can hardly realise that, and still less believe what happened.”
By the side of Cox sat a lean, fair-haired, freckle-faced private. “That’s right,” he said, by way of corroborating Cox. “They were fair devils,” chimed in an Irishman, who later told me that he came from Connemara. “You could do nothing with them, but I say they are no d—— good as riflemen.”