“We were kept back by French soldiers with fixed bayonets, but through the hedges of steel we had the painful experience of seeing a number of British soldiers with bandaged heads and limbs descending from the troop train. They looked spent with fatigue and pain after the journey, but some of them were sufficiently high spirited to laugh at their sufferings and give a hearty cheer to the comrades who came to relieve them with medical care.
“I had a few words with one of them and questioned him about the action, but like all British soldiers he was very vague in his descriptions, and the most arresting sentence in his narrative was the reiterated assertion that ‘we got it in the neck.’
“I understood from him, however, that the British troops had stood their ground well under terrific fire and that the Germans had been given ‘what for.’
“I saw the British soldier on this journey in many unexpected places and adapting himself to his unusual environment with his characteristic phlegm. I saw him at dawn in small camps, surrounded with haystacks and farmyard chickens, drinking the fresh milk offered to him by French peasant women, with whom he seems to have established a perfectly adequate ‘lingua Française.’
“I saw him scrawling up the words ‘hot water’ and ‘cold water’ above the taps in French railway stations, carrying the babies of Belgian refugees, giving cigarettes to German prisoners and rounding up French cattle which in due time will be turned into French beefsteaks.”
LIGHT BRIGADE OUTDONE
Returning from the front a correspondent of the London Times sends the following under a Paris date:
“Near Charleroi I heard some stories of the bravery of the French soldiers. The Germans were bombarding the city. The French troops made what amounted to a mediæval sortie, but, finding the enemy in much greater force than was expected, were compelled to withdraw. The bombardment continued relentlessly, whereupon the French Turcos—picked troops from Algeria—debouched from the town, and, with a gallantry which surely must live in history, charged the
