Sheer hard work was the order of the day for our chaps from the time I landed in France from an old Irish cattle-boat till the day when I was packed off back to England suffering from rheumatic fever.
We worked excessively hard, and so did everybody else. Wherever there was an obstacle it had to go, and the infantry themselves time after time slaved away at digging and clearing, all of which was over and above the strain of the fighting and tremendous marching. It was a rare sight to see the Guards sweeping down the corn with their bayonets—sickles that reaped many a grim harvest then and later.
It was during the early stage of the war that bridges were blown up in wholesale fashion to check the German advance, and the work being particularly dangerous we had some very narrow escapes. A very near thing happened at Soissons.
We had been ordered to blow up a bridge, and during the day we charged it with gun-cotton, and were waiting to set the fuse until the last of our troops had crossed over. That was a long business, and exciting enough for anybody, because for hours the men of a whole division were passing, and all the time that great passing body of men, horses, guns, waggons and so on, was under a heavy artillery fire from the Germans.
At last the bridge was clear—it had served its purpose; the division was on the other side of the river, and all that remained to be done was to blow up the bridge. Three sections of our company retired, and the remaining section was left behind to attend to the fuse.
Very soon we heard a terrific report, and the same awful thought occurred to many of us—that there had been a premature explosion and that the section was lost. One of my chums, judging by the time of the fuse, said it was certain that the section was blown up, and indeed it was actually reported that an officer and a dozen men had been killed.
But, to our intense relief, we learned that the report was wrong; but we heard also how narrowly our fellows had escaped, and how much they owed to the presence of mind and coolness of the officer. It seems that as soon as the fuse was fired the lieutenant instinctively suspected that something was wrong, and instantly ordered the men to lie flat, with the result that they were uninjured by the tremendous upheaval of masonry, though they were a bit shaken when they caught us up on the road later. This incident gives a good idea of the sort of work and the danger that the Royal Engineers were constantly experiencing in the earlier stages of the war, so that one can easily understand what is happening now in the bitter winter-time.
An Engineer, like the referee in a football match, sees a lot of the game, and it was near a French village that we had a fine view of a famous affair.
We had been sent to the spot on special duty, and were resting on the crest of a hill, watching the effects of the enemy’s field-guns.
Suddenly in the distance we saw figures moving. At first we could not clearly make them out, but presently we saw that they were Algerian troops, and that there seemed to be hosts of them. They swarmed on swiftly, and took up a position in some trenches near us.