One of my officers was lying behind a hedge observing, and on leaving me the old Lovat walked down this hedge soliloquizing. He did not see the officer, who, however, overheard his soliloquy. It ran thus:
“Forty Englishmen to be trained as Lovat Scouts! Abominable!—Preposterous!—and it can’t be done!”
The 1st Corps had a splendid system under which the Lovat Scouts attached to it worked. It possessed a grand group under Lieut. Whamond, M.C., whose equal at his work I never saw in France. The system was this: Scouts from the group were available on application to the Corps Intelligence Office. Thus, if a battalion had been ordered to raid the enemy trenches, the Commanding Officer of that battalion could indent for some Lovats to go and make a reconnaissance of the enemy wire for him. Or if a Divisional Commander thought the enemy activities increasing, he could obtain some special pairs of Lovats to watch the part of the line he considered threatened. The group, in fact, were at the service of all units in the Corps, and the result was that when they were applied for, their assistance was fully valued, and they went always to a definite job.
Various scouts from this group used to come up to First Army School of S.O.S. to recoup, for, during the long drawn out operations in front of Lens, the continual use of the glass was very trying.
A story, probably apocryphal, was always told in the 1st Corps concerning a gigantic corporal of the Lovats who stood six feet five inches in height, and was certainly one of the strongest men in the Army. He was talking with his companion—for the scouts worked in pairs—when his conversation was overheard by some men of a new formation. As the Lovats were speaking Gaelic, these men at once jumped to the conclusion that they were listening to German, and demanded an instant surrender.
The night was dark, but, as the story goes, it was not the new formation who brought back the Lovats as prisoners, but the Lovats who brought back the new formation.
The final arrangement in the B.E.F., which never took effect, allotted groups of Lovat Scouts to each Division. At each Army there was to be a Major in charge on the Headquarters staff, and a captain at the Corps; but, as I have said, this system had hardly begun to operate when the war ended.
In training glassmen, one wonderfully soon realized how impossible it was to teach any man to use his telescope skilfully who had not been accustomed to it from early youth. Every soldier can, of course, be taught which end to look through, and how to focus, and such details, but these men who began late in life never got the same value from their glasses as did the gillies and the stalkers, and from the point of view of accuracy they were in no way comparable. The truth, that to use a stalking telescope well needs just as much time, practice, and natural gift as first-class shooting, was soon recognized, and would-be observers were sent to the First Army School from all over the B.E.F. But work on them as we would, they never averaged anything like the Lovat standard.
It sounds a bold statement to make, but the Lovats never let one down. If they reported a thing, the thing was as they reported it. Certainly the men who follow the red deer of Scotland proved themselves once again in this war to possess qualities which, let us hope, will never pass from the British race.
As ammunition grew plentiful, and observation more and more adequate, it naturally became less and less healthy for the German to move about in his back areas in daylight. Thus, one day, two officers happened to be in an observation post which was connected with the guns, when out of a wood some thousands of yards behind the German line emerged three figures. The light was beautiful, and as the figures came nearer and nearer one of the officers began to take an interest.