One poor fellow, whose head was so smothered in bandages that his features could not be seen, remarked, “We could beat them with bladder-sticks if it were not for the shells, which were appalling. The effect could not be described.”
A private of the West Kent Regiment, who was through the Boer War, said there was never anything like the fighting at Mons in South Africa. That was a game of skittles by comparison.
They came at us, he said, in great masses. It was like shooting rabbits, only as fast as you shot one lot down another lot took their place. You couldn’t help hitting them. We had plenty of time to take aim, and if we weren’t reaching the Bisley standard all the time, we must have done a mighty lot of execution. As to their rifle fire, they couldn’t hit a haystack.
A sergeant gunner of the Royal Field Artillery, who was wounded at Tournai, owing to an injury to his jaw was unable to speak, but he wrote on a pad:
I was on a flank with my gun and fired about sixty rounds in forty minutes. We wanted support and could not get it. It was about 500 English trying to save a flank attack, against, honestly, I should say, 10,000. As fast as you shot them down more came. But for their aeroplanes they would be useless. I was firing for one hour at from 1,500 yards down to 700 yards, so you can tell what it was like.
In Hospital.
(4) At London.
All the heroism that has been displayed by British troops in the present war will never be known. A few individual cases may chance to be heard of. Others will be known only to the Recording Angel. Two instances of extraordinary bravery are mentioned by a couple of wounded soldiers lying in the London Hospital in the course of a narrative of their own adventures.
One of them, a splendid fellow of the Royal West Kent Regiment, told a Daily Telegraph reporter:
We were in a scrubby position just outside Mons from Saturday afternoon till Monday morning. After four hours each of our six big guns was put out of action. Either the gunners were killed or wounded, or the guns themselves damaged. For the rest of the time—that is, until Monday morning, when we retired—we had to stick the German fire without being able to retaliate. It was bad enough to stand this incessant banging away, but it made it worse not to be able to reply.