With the Scottish Regiments at the Front

by Evelyn Charles Vivian

"While we were in action on Tuesday," the record continues, "a shell struck the limber of the gun and almost blew it to bits. I was struck on the shoulder by a piece of shrapnel. On another occasion we were firing from an isolated position when a company of Germans surprised us by appearing about a hundred yards away. We were thirteen strong—one officer and twelve men—so we put up the gun and made for cover. We had about two hundred yards to run across a field, but every one of us escaped without a scratch."

On the 16th of September the War Office report of "Missing" included the names of men belonging to the Borderers, and of these many went to Doberitz camp of prisoners. One man, writing from Doberitz, stated that he had been captured on August 26th, and was being fairly well treated. Which recalls the fact that Colonel Stephenson, the commanding officer of the Borderers, had the misfortune to be wounded and captured in the very early stages of the war. It was at Le Cateau that the colonel was wounded, and, although the wound was not exceptionally serious, it was enough to put Colonel Stephenson out of action for the time. He was assisted to an ambulance waggon and got inside, but afterwards he came out of his own accord in order to make way for men more seriously injured. Almost immediately afterwards the retreat was continued, and according to one account the colonel was found lying wounded by the Germans. Another account states that the four horses of one of the ambulance waggons were lost during the retreat, and fifteen men of the Borderers were ordered to replace the horses in drawing the ambulance waggon, with the result that the whole party, including Colonel Stephenson in the waggon with other wounded, were captured. Major Leigh, D.S.O., another officer of the Borderers, was wounded at Mons and captured by the Germans, according to all accounts, while three other officers are reported to have been taken prisoners in the first weeks of the war.

It was at Mons, too, that young Lieutenant Amos, of the Borderers, who had only received his commission five months before, went out to the front and brought back a wounded man much bigger and heavier than himself. A few days later Lieutenant Amos led out his platoon of men in face of the enemy's fire, when he was shot down, and the men of the platoon thought at the time that he was only wounded. "When night came on," said one man of the platoon, "I went out to look for him, and just as I had got to where he was lying and had lifted his head, the moon shone out full from behind the clouds, and I saw he was quite dead. He had been shot through the heart."

Whatever dispatches may say with regard to individual officers and men, it is usually safe to take the opinions of the men themselves with regard to their officers. An instance of this is the case of Lieutenant Hamilton-Dalrymple, of the Borderers, who was described by his men as "a very daring man." He had excelled in patrol work and scouting, especially at night, and on the retreat was placed in charge of four platoons, which he led out for an attack. He had led out No. 16 platoon, and went back for No. 15, and, when leading these men out, he was shot in the leg by a German sniper and had to be carried to the rear. The man who told this story of his officer was subsequently hit by a splinter from a shell which accounted for five men.

Near Le Cateau the Borderers buried Lieutenant Amos and twenty-one of the men of the regiment. Throughout the day, while an artillery duel had raged, the dead had lain out on the battlefield, and a long grave was dug for them by their comrades. In this the bodies were laid, each covered by a waterproof sheet, and an officer recited a brief funeral service. While, during the next day, the artillery duel went on, the Borderers cut out in the grass that covered the grave of their comrades the letters "K.O.S.B.," and filled in the blank letter-spaces with small stones, completing their work by fashioning and erecting a small cross of wood to mark the place of burial.

There was one youngster of the Borderers in these first days who, at Mons, received a flesh wound while trying to cross two planks across a canal that was being peppered with machine-gun fire. Colonel Stephenson gripped him to save him from falling into the canal, and—"You had better go back to the hospital, sonny," said the colonel. But the youngster got little rest or respite in hospital, for the Germans shelled the hospital building, after their fashion, and the patients had to beat a quick retreat. Later, this same youngster came to the engagement at Béthune, one of the fiercest of the campaign, and one night he was on sentry duty at a wayside shrine. Just at the time the reliefs were coming round he saw Germans in the distance, and fired at them once or twice, "for luck," as he phrased it, considering that he was entitled to a last shot before going off duty. But the glare of his rifle fire must have betrayed his position, for almost immediately he received another wound in the body, and this time it was a sufficiently serious matter to cause him to be sent home.

By means of such letters as these one may trace the regiment through the first, and in some respects the worst, of the fighting. At the position of the Aisne, the accounts of the Borderers grow numerous, and it appears that the second battalion of the regiment was in the thick of things. One account describes the crossing of the Aisne under shell fire from the German guns. The second battalion got their orders to cross very early one morning, and turned out in a cold, rainy dawn; "but we got our pipes set going, and were all right then." On reaching the river, it was found that there were no bridges, but some rafts had been constructed by the Engineers, and these rafts were loaded each with six men, and hauled across to the opposite bank of the river with ropes. With the weight of men and equipment, the rafts were submerged so that the men were up to their knees in water while they crossed, but such incidents as that were regarded as trifling.

On the far bank of the river, the German shell fire was hotter than ever, and many men of the battalion were wounded, mostly in the arms and legs. "You bet we took all the cover we could get," says the narrator. "Some time after this three of us were lying in a field, and I was smoking my pipe, while my chum was puffing at a cigarette. The man next to my chum hadn't a match, and wanted a light badly, so he got up to get a light from my chum. As soon as he rose the poor beggar was hit by a fragment of shell and killed. My chum had got hold of a trench-making tool. It's like a spade at the one end, and like a pick at the other, and he stuck the pick end into the ground and lay down behind it, covering his head with the spade end. Every two or three minutes you could hear the bullets spattering against the iron of the tool."

Later, they got into the trenches, where some of the men were standing knee-deep in water, and others were submerged up to their waists. "It was no picnic, but they were a bright lot, cracking jokes or making remarks about the 'Black Marias,' or 'Jack Johnsons,' as they call the big German shells."