When we awoke it was not to music of birds, but of shrapnel; for the Germans were following us and began to fire on us as soon as we started to retire again. Hour after hour we went on, feeling pretty bad at having to retreat; but a bit cheered when, at about two o’clock on the Monday afternoon, we began to dig trenches again. We had the field-gunners behind us once more, and joyous music it was to hear their shells screaming over our heads.
It was about dinner-time on the Monday when we had one of the most thrilling experiences of the whole fight—one of the extraordinary incidents that have become part and parcel of a modern battle, although only a very few years ago they were looked upon as mad fancies or wild dreams. We were marching along a road when we sighted a German aeroplane—a bird-like-looking thing in the sky. It was keeping watch on us, and signalling our position to the main German body. It gave the position, and the Germans promptly gave us some shells. The thing was most dangerous and unpleasant; but the German airman was not to have it all his own way.
Two of our own aeroplanes spotted him and went for him, just like immense birds—the whole business might have been carried out by living creatures of the air—and there was as fine a fight in the air as you could hope to see on land—firing and swift manœuvring with the object of killing and destroying, and both sides showing amazing pluck and skill. It was an uncommonly exciting spectacle, and it became all the more thrilling when we opened fire with our rifles.
I blazed away as hard as I could, but an aeroplane on the wing is not an easy thing to hit. Whether I struck the machine or not I can’t say, but it came down in the road just where my company was. As far as I know the aeroplane was not struck—the chap that was in it planed down. He was determined not to be caught cheaply, for as soon as he landed he fired his petrol tank to destroy his machine, and then ran for it. He went off at a hard lick, but some of our cavalry rushed after him and caught him, and it was found that he was not hurt.
Just on our right was a railway, with a big cutting, and we were ordered to retire down into it; so into the cutting we got and along the line we went, retreating all that day by the railway and the roads, our gunners giving the Germans socks throughout that hard rearguard action.
On the Tuesday we were still retreating, and a miserable day it was, with a deluge of rain that soaked us to the skin. We reached a village and slept in barns, and a good sleep we got, without the trouble of undressing or drying our clothes or taking our boots off.
Early on the Wednesday morning the pickets quietly roused and warned us again, and we went out in front of the village and entrenched.
There was a big lot of coal-mines in front of us, about a mile away, with the refuse-heaps that are common to mines. Behind one of these great mounds a battery of German artillery had got into position, and one of the finest things you could have seen was the way in which our own grand gunners got on the Germans. They seemed to have found the range of the enemy exactly, and that was a good job for us, because the German shells were dropping just between us and our own artillery, and we expected to have them bang on us. But our guns silenced our opponents, and, what was more, scattered a lot of German infantry, about 1,500 yards away, who were making for us.
We got straight into our trenches, and in this respect we were lucky, because we went into one that the Engineers had made, while most of the other companies had to dig their own.
Our trench was in a cornfield. The corn had been cut down, and we spread it and other stuff in front of the trenches, on top of the earth, to make us invisible. From that queer hiding-place we resumed our blazing away at the pursuing Germans.