One of the officers of the 1st Hampshire Regiment actually read Sir Walter Scott’s poem of “Marmion” aloud to his men while they were being subjected to a continuous fire. This fact becoming known to a retired naval officer, Commander Henry N. Shore, he wrote the following interesting letter to a paper:
“Curiously enough, the same thing happened a century ago during the last great war in which Great Britain was engaged. While Wellington’s army held the lines of Torres Vedras, a captain in an infantry regiment wrote to Sir Walter Scott telling him that while his men were waiting for an attack by the French he excited their martial ardour by reciting aloud to them a canto of ‘Marmion’ which had recently been published. Thus does history repeat itself.”
The French soldiers during this long drawn-out battle were astonished at the tidiness and cleanliness of their British comrades. Every morning our soldiers did their best to perform their toilets in the trenches, and that however hard the night had been. Each man had a little bit of looking-glass which he put up on the chalky earth, then he got his water and soap to hand, and shaved and washed as though for a parade! There was no compulsion; it was done because each man wanted to do it, and knew he would feel the better for it.
This kind of siege battle is very wearing to those engaged in it. The dogged courage, day and night, which it requires, seems to me every bit as splendid as those more striking deeds of gallantry for which men win the V.C. As a private wrote:
“We don’t care tuppence for shrapnel, which flies back and hardly ever hits us. What worries us is that the Germans have been turning their heavy siege guns upon us. The shells they fire are no joke. They rip a hole in the ground big enough to bury an entire regiment. One man standing near me was hurled into the lower branches of a tree by the concussion. We got him down, and strange to say he was comparatively unhurt.”
That makes one think of Sir Walter Scott’s lines:
“Three hundred cannon-mouths roared loud,
And from their throats with flash and cloud
Their showers of iron threw.”
It was early in the Battle of the Aisne that a British gunner, already slightly wounded, went on serving his gun, when suddenly down whizzed a shell and severely injured his leg. He picked himself up and calmly went on with his perilous job. The action was then very hot, and he refused to receive first aid. At last, when it became clear he could go on no longer, he was forced by his comrades to leave his post of duty and danger, but it took two of them to hold him down on the ambulance stretcher!