The Warbington lad fell into a creek and was sinking when his chum went to his rescue. Wayne is a manly little chap. Asked if he was a pretty good swimmer, he said he wasn’t. “But you went after this boy when he was drowning?” he was reminded. “Sure,” said Wayne. “Anybody would have done that.”
Discipline Saves British from Loss.
If discipline were not now being maintained in the British army, it would lose, according to P.M. Neilson, now at the front in France with the First Lowland Company of Engineers. In a letter received recently by his sister, Miss Bessie R. Neilson, of Wilkinsburg, Pa., he tells of several striking instances to show this.
“The Germans made an attack in the night,” he says, “on the —— Regiment, which took panic, and nearly all, except two, of their officers fled. Our twenty, however, under Mr. Clark—one of the officers—who had retreated a little, came back to a charge. The other two officers were killed, but our good old Lowland regained the trenches after very hot work.
“One of the men left to tell the tale of Ypres says he and a few others saw the Prussians going around the British wounded, bayoneting them. They could not stand that, so they charged the Germans, who had three times as many men. The Germans, as usual, fell back into their trenches, but the Scotch and English boys pursued them, and then, of all the cheek in the world! the Germans threw down their arms and pleaded for mercy. Our fellows simply shot them all down. Their blood was up.
“Night before last a bullet passed through a box on which I was leaning, but I have had few exciting times myself. Two men of a regiment who tried to desert were killed on the twelfth, after a court-martial, and if discipline were not now maintained, we would lose.
“It’s a terrible thing, but I’m afraid it will last a long time. You have no idea what it is like. Our company, which gets home each night, is luckier than the infantry. They are in the trenches for days, even weeks, and some of them don’t know what they are doing. Being there so long makes them mad. There is no doubt about that. If you want to speak to them, they just stare at you. They don’t understand.
“If, at many points, a man is wounded and falls down, he has to lie there and die in the mud. Should the medical transport come in time, he will be attended to, but they can only remove the wounded at night, on account of the enemy. So that if a man gets wounded at daylight he has to stay where he is until night.
“Some of our dear old Scotch regiments have been wiped out. The Black Watch and Camerons have about ninety-four and one hundred and fifty-eight, respectively, of above one thousand each. They have been out since the beginning of the war, and it was at Ypres they suffered so terribly.”
Although, because of the censor, Mr. Neilson is unable to tell just where he is, he says the villages have not a single inhabitant. He describes the beautiful houses, filled with furniture, now occupied by troops. The people, he adds, will never return.