When our chaps heard the trumpets and drums going and the German cheers they answered with a good old British “Hooray!” and a lot of them laughed and shouted, “Here comes the Kaiser’s rag-time band! We’ll give you ‘Hoch!’ when you get a bit nearer!” And I think we did. At any rate we kept on firing at them all the time they were advancing; but they swept ahead in such big numbers that we were forced to retire into the wood.
As soon as we got into the wood we came under very heavy machine-gun fire from the Germans, and the bullets rained about us, driving into the earth and into the trees and whizzing all around us everywhere. The German shells were smashing after us, too, but were not doing much damage at that point.
It was now that I lost a very old chum of mine, a fine chap from Newcastle named Layden, a private. He was in the thick of the machine-gun fire, a few paces from me, when he suddenly cried out and I knew that he was hit. The first thing he said was, “Give me a cigarette. I know I shan’t go on much longer.” When we asked him what the matter was he said he was hurt. “Are you wounded?” he was asked. “Yes, I’m hit in the stomach,” he answered—and he was, by about seventeen bullets.
The call went round for a cigarette, but nobody had one—lots of cigarettes were sent out to the soldiers that never reached them—but poor Layden was soon beyond the need of fags. He was delirious when our stretcher-bearers came and took him to a barn which had been turned into a temporary hospital. He lingered there for some time; but the last I saw of him was on the field. I missed him badly, because we had been good chums, and whatever we got we used to give each other half of it.
For about five hours, until two o’clock in the afternoon, that part of the battle went on, and all the time we were holding the Germans back; then we were reinforced by the remainder of our troops, who came across the pontoon bridge to our assistance.
The Germans now seemed to think that they had had enough of it and they held up white flags, and we left the shelter of the wood and went out to capture them. I should think that there were about three hundred of the Germans at that point who pretended to surrender by holding up the white flag; but as soon as we were up with them their people behind fired at us—a treacherous trick they practised very often. In spite of it all we managed to get the best part of the prisoners safe and drove them in before us to our own lines. When they really surrendered, and did not play the white flag game, we used to go up and take all their rifles, bayonets and ammunition, and throw them away out of their reach, so that they could not make a sudden dash for them and turn on us. When we had chased a few prisoners and had seen what the Germans meant by the white flag signal, we were told to take no notice of it, but to keep on shooting till they put their hands up.
A lot of the prisoners spoke English and said how glad they were to be captured and have no more fighting to do. Some said they loved England too much to want to fight against us, and a German said, “Long live King George, and blow the Kaiser!” But I don’t know how many of them meant what they said—you can’t depend on Germans.
We had plenty of talks with the German prisoners who could speak English. Some of them who had lived in England spoke our language quite well, and it was very interesting to hear what they had to say about us and the French and the Belgians. They couldn’t stand the British cavalry, and one man said, “We don’t like those Englishmen on the grey horses at all,” meaning the Scots Greys. Several of the prisoners said they didn’t mind so much fighting the French, because the French infantry fired too high, nor the Russians, because they fired too low; “but,” they said, “every time the Englishman pulls the trigger he means death.” That was a very nice compliment to us, and there was a great deal of truth in what was said about the British rifle fire. I can assure you that when we settled down to the work we often enough plugged into the Germans just as if we were on manœuvres.
At the very first—and I’m not ashamed to say it—I shook like a leaf and fired anyhow and pretty well anywhere; but when that first awful nervousness had passed—not to return—we went at it ding-dong all the time and fired as steadily as if we were on the ranges. The men were amazingly cool at the business—and as for the officers, well, they didn’t seem to care a rap for bullets or shells or anything else, and walked about and gave orders as if there were no such things in the world as German soldiers.
Most of the poor beggars we took were ravenous for want of food, and those who could speak English said they had been practically without food for days, and we saw that they had had to make shift with the oats that the horses were fed with. This starvation arose from the fact that a few days earlier we had captured the German transport and left them pretty short of food.