We owed our lives to kind fate in bringing the Scots Greys to our timely aid, and to them all honour! But for them we should have met the fate of the Munster Fusiliers.
Crawling on their bellies, some of our men went out and brought in those of the Black Watch who were lying wounded. The others we left, for their own men would be there presently. For us, it was retreat again. After traversing ditches, ravines and barbed-wire fences, we finally assembled on the road. The artillery was beginning to pound once more. We had to trudge on, watching for the next attack, planting one bleeding foot before another, with nobody knew how many days of forced marching before us—marching (so we thought) to let the Russians get to Berlin. I don’t think anything else would have induced us to resume our retreat after the brush with the Uhlans.
At evening we found ourselves at the village of Oise about six miles from the abovementioned scene. As we arrived at the bridge over the River Oise, the engineers who were on the other side, and who had fused the bridge, shouted to us to keep back, but our colonel gave us the order to double. We had cleared the bridge by about only two hundred yards, when it blew up into atoms!
After trudging, mostly uphill, in a downpour of rain, we reached a place called Guise at 2 A.M. Here we managed to get some food. I was glad enough to throw my waterproof sheet over me and fall asleep. On being awakened, I felt as though I had slept for weeks, but found it had only been for one hour and twenty minutes. We then received some “gunfire” and our first issue of rum. We resumed the march. On arriving at La Grange, the Camerons, or what was left of them, joined us, taking the place of the annihilated Fusiliers in our brigade.
We were so tired that night that I could have slept on a bed of nails, points up, but we had not been in our billets very long when we were ordered out, as the outpost had reported the approach of Uhlans in considerable numbers.
We were half asleep as we ran down into the street to our allotted posts. One of the first persons we encountered in the town was a Frenchman, raving mad. We asked him what was the matter, but he could not reply. He jibbered like an ape; his twitching lips slavered and foamed. Some of his neighbours took him in hand and led him away. One of them told us his story:
“The Prussians came in here yesterday. There was no one to resist them. They posted sentries. Then those who were not on duty broke into cellars. Casks of wine were rolled up into the streets, and, where squads gathered together, there were piles of bottles. The soldiers did not stop to pull the corks. They knocked off the necks of the bottles and filled their aluminum cups with red wine and white, mixing one type with another, and swilling it in as fast as they could drink. Dozens of them fell in the gutters, drunk. Others reeled through the village, abusing and insulting men and women alike. If a man resisted, he was shot. This poor fellow, whom you have seen, was in his door yard with his wife. A Prussian seized her about the waist. She struggled. He crushed her to him with his brutish arm. His companions, all drunk, laughed and jeered. The woman’s clothes were ripped from her shoulders in her struggle. Meanwhile others bound the husband to one of his own fruit trees, so that he could not escape the horror of it. One—more drunken, more bestial than the others—slashed off the woman’s breasts and threw them to a dog. The woman died.”
This of itself was enough to have made us rage against the enemy whom hitherto we had regarded as an honourable foe, but it was not all. I, with other members of my own company, came upon a nail driven into the wall of a barn from which hung, by the mouth, the lifeless form of a baby. The child was dead when we found it, but it had died hanging from the rusty nail. I know it had, because I saw upon the wall the marks of finger-nails where the baby had clawed and scratched. And besides, a dead body would not have bled. An officer ordered the removal of the child’s body.
I do not tell these things for the sake of the horror of them. I would rather not tell them. I have spent months trying to forget them. Now that I have recalled them, I wake in the night so horrified that I cannot move. But to relate them may serve one useful purpose. There are those in America, as there were in England, who believed that war to repel invasion was justified, but who were not enthusiastic for war abroad. America entered the war after her patience was absolutely exhausted, and Americans should be devoutly thankful that they can fight abroad and not have to endure the presence of a single Prussian soldier on American soil. What we saw and learned in Guise galvanized our weary bodies to new efforts against the vandals whom we were fighting. With clenched teeth and curses we turned to fight again.
The Uhlans got into the outskirts of the town and cut down a number of our men, but, inch by inch, as they drove toward the centre of the village, our resistance became stiffer and stiffer. It was like a nightmare. The charging horses, the gruff shouts of the enemy, the groans of the men who fell beside me, were like their counterparts in a dream. My finger pressed the trigger of the rifle feverishly. Even when I saw the men I fired at topple from their saddles and sprawl on the cobblestones, I had only a dull sense that I had scored a hit.