With the Scottish Regiments at the Front

by Evelyn Charles Vivian

Although, in the first days on the Aisne, the first line of German troops were opposed to the British, the latter had a very poor opinion of their opponents. The general view was that the Germans were not very keen on fighting, and a number of them when captured said that they were forced by their officers to fight. In one case, when the men had refused to fire, their officers had turned on them and shot them—as might have been expected in any army. One wounded and captured German, placed in the next bed in hospital to a wounded Borderer, spoke broken English, and in the course of a chat was asked what he thought of the British. "British artillery," he said, "no good—not enough. British infantry—mein Gott!" His expression as he spoke completed the comment.

A Borderer wounded at the Aisne had fought beside the French, whom he described as very plucky, but rather slow. Their artillery, however, won his admiration, and he declared it the best he had ever seen. He was emphatic in his appreciation of the way in which the French people treated the British troops, supplying them with food and fruit, and in many ways expressing their sympathy.

"My chum and I came to a village one day," he said, "and wanted to get some bread and tobacco. We met a peasant woman in the village, and I said 'Du pain.' She took me by the arm and pushed me into a dark room, but I couldn't see where I was, and called for my chum, who came in as well, though we were both afraid it might be a trap. Then we noticed some food and wine on a table. It struck us, when we came to look round, that nearly all the furniture in the house was smashed. 'The Prussians,' the woman told us. And it's the same in every village you go into—these Germans smash everything but us. They're trying hard to smash us too, but they can't manage it."

"It is a grand thing," says another man of the regiment, "to shoot at Germans—they make such a lovely target. We can't miss them, and, poor things, they are wishing it was over. Every prisoner we take says they are starving, and they look it, too. Well, never mind, we are there to kill, and kill we do. They are frightened of us, and say we shoot too straight—the French and British are finishing them off in thousands."

As regards the Flanders battle, the last sentence of this letter may be taken literally, but the rest of it is open to question. The dogged resistance on the Aisne, and the tremendous attacks up by Ypres and along the coast, were not made by men starving and utterly miserable—the work has been too fierce for that to be possible. The reserve troops of the German Army have no liking for their work, and, newly taken from comfort to the rigid discipline and severe conditions of the firing line, are naturally inclined to complain at what the first-line troops regard as mere everyday inconveniences; and doubtless it was some of these that were referred to in this letter.

But, to revert to the position on the Aisne, there is yet another Borderer's story that is worthy of reproduction. The narrator states that during the battle two German women, masquerading as nurses, went about the British lines by motor, accompanied by a chauffeur. Among the British soldiers on outpost duty they freely distributed cigarettes, which were afterwards found to be inoculated by poison. Before any fatal results had accrued, the nature of the cigarettes was discovered, and the pseudo-nurses were rounded up and shot. The story may be true, but it seems a little improbable that no ill results should have attended the distribution of these cigarettes before discovery of the trick. The man who tells this story adds that two Scottish pipers held up and captured eight Germans in a wood near Crecy. The pipers had become detached from their division, and carried no arms, but on coming on the Germans they assumed a firing position and pointed the long drones of their pipes at the enemy, calling on them to surrender. The Germans at once threw down their rifles, and were taken prisoners.

Let it be remembered that both of these stories are told by the same man, and that both are on the face of them improbable—and then the reader must form his own conclusion.

The next missive takes us on to the work in the trenches around Béthune, after the opposing lines had crept up to the north-west of France. "There were few breathing-spaces," says the writer. "Ground would be gained, and our troops then had to resort to the expedient of digging themselves in: at parts of the line about a hundred yards divided our trenches from those of the enemy." The man who tells of this fighting exposed himself to get a shot at precisely the same moment that a German out in the opposite trenches took aim, and both pulled their triggers almost simultaneously. The German bullet passed right across the Borderer's scalp, but in the firing line it was impossible to get immediate medical attention, and the wounded man had to be in the trench for hours before nightfall gave him the chance to get back to the field hospital under cover of darkness.