I had had my turn of picketing and was lying down to get a snatch of sleep when I was ordered to go up a road about a mile and a half away, to find out whether our relief had come. So out into the darkness and the wind and rain I staggered and fought my way through what was the worst night for weather that I ever saw. On and on I and my comrades went, looking hard for our relief, but we never saw it, and we waited there till next morning, when we rejoined our brigade.
Those were times when there was little rest for the Seaforths, or anybody else.
The aeroplanes gave us little chance of rest, and at times they had an uncanny knack of finding us.
One day, after a long, hard march, we put into a wood for shelter. A French supply column was already in the wood and doubtless the Germans knew of or suspected this; at any rate a German aeroplane came over us, with the result that in a few minutes we were shelled out. We rested in another part of the wood till it was dark, then we were taken on to billets, but we had to make another move, because we were shelled out again. That was the sort of thing which came along as part of the day’s work; and as part of the day’s work we took it cheerfully.
When we got the Germans on the move we took prisoners from time to time. I was on guard over a few prisoners, part of a crowd, when one of them came up to me and to my amazement I recognised him as a German who had worked in Soho Square and used often to go to the same place as myself for dinner—a little shop in Hanway Street, at the Oxford Street end of Tottenham Court Road. The prisoner recognised me at once and I recognised him. To show how ignorant the Germans were of the enemy they were fighting, I may tell you that this man said to me, “If we had known we were fighting the English, I would never have left London!”
Was it not strange that the two of us, who had so often met as friends for dinner in the little foreign shop, should meet again as enemies on the banks of the Marne?
I am now coming to a sorrowful personal incident—the loss of my chum, Lance-Corporal Lamont. We had been together from the beginning of the war and had shared everything there was, even to the waterproof sheet. He would carry the sheet one day and I would carry it the next, and whenever such a thing had to be done as fetching drinking-water, often a very dangerous task, we would share that too.
Throughout one awful night of ceaseless rain, which soaked us to the skin, the two of us were in the trenches—we had dug ourselves in, with just ordinary head cover. We lay there till next morning, when an officer came along my platoon and asked if we had any drinking-water.
We told him that we had not.
The officer said, “If you care to risk it, one of you can go and fetch some water.”