CHAPTER VIII

THE BATTLE OF THE AISNE

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light, In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look! the land is bright! ARTHUR CLOUGH.

After the German army had fallen back a long, long way, close on a hundred miles, they suddenly came to a stop, and prepared for a new and desperate stand.

Gradually, those of us who were watching anxiously from far off, learnt what the men at the front knew almost at once; General von Kluck had decided to turn and face his pursuers along the line of the river Aisne. It was an excellent choice. This river, broad and deep, was one of the easiest to defend in the whole of Europe. Moreover, von Kluck was well aware that in days of peace cunning Germans, masquerading in many cases as quiet wine merchants, had prepared there a series of almost impregnable trenches. Now the word impregnable means “impossible to take,” and when our officers, later, saw the trenches out of which the Germans had been driven, they declared that our men would have held them for ever!

It was there, in the beautiful country of vineyards and of the low, swelling hills which surround the famous town of Rheims, that began what has come to be known as the Battle of the Aisne.

I expect most of you know the meaning of the word “fortress.” Those of you who don’t will understand it best if I tell you that in old days every castle was a fortress. It was so built with ramparts, battlements, and little narrow windows, that every stone of it could be defended, either by archers with bows and arrows, or with men and guns.

Now the most striking fact about the great Battle of the Aisne, which, beginning on September 10, was to last longer than any previous battle in the history of the world, was that on the German side it was exactly like fortress or castle fighting. I mean that the Germans, with a foresight which did credit to their cleverness, had evidently thought it possible, though not probable, that they might be pushed far back, as in fact they were. They had, therefore, prepared long beforehand trenches and quarries which, from a little way off, actually looked like the battlements of a castle. There, snugly hidden behind natural and artificial ramparts, they were able to keep the British troops and those of our ally at bay during many long weary days.

The German trenches were all ready for the enemy to step into them, but every British and French trench had to be dug out and prepared at short notice. This, however, was soon done, and then there began that strange “life in the trenches,” of which so many vivid accounts were written home by officers and privates.

You will certainly want to know what a trench is like. A one-man trench is best described by its other name, “dug-out.” It is a large, neat hole, cut so deeply in the ground that a man can stand upright in it without being seen.

There is a great art in digging a trench. When finished it should be not unlike a tiny cottage room; the floor, however, is quite unlike that of a room, for instead of being flat it is slightly sloped, so that any rain that gets in may run away quickly. At the side there is a step, so that the occupier, when he cares to do so, can cautiously raise his head above the ground and look round. The best trenches have a kind of roof or head-cover. This protects the man inside, not only from rain and sun, but also from the awful bullets which come out of the shrapnel shells.

It is interesting to know that the shrapnel shell, which has done such deadly harm in this war both to ourselves and to the enemy, is called after a distinguished English soldier, General Henry Shrapnel, who invented it. On the park gates of the ancestral home of the Shrapnel family near Trowbridge are still to be seen inscribed the names of over twenty battles won with the aid of this shell. Sir George Wood, who commanded the artillery at Waterloo, declared that we owed to shrapnel the recovery of La Haye Sainte, on which part of the battle depended.

As to what trench life was like during the long Battle of the Aisne, it was in some ways like playing at keeping house.

When I was a little girl I often played at keeping house with my brother, but as we were very fond of soldiers, and lived in a stretch of beautiful country which was very suitable for _la petite guerre_, as military manœuvres were then called in France, our house was always a tent.

In those days we knew nothing of trenches, or it would have been a trench. Into our little house—we always called it a house though it was really a tent, for the roof was always made with a sheet, and the door was a big towel—we used to bring all the sort of things that we thought soldiers would want. But in these days a soldier’s requirements have grown, if only because he has to live in his trench for far longer than the soldier of long ago used to live in his tent.

I think it may interest some of you to know both what an officer generally has, and what he would like to have, with him, when he is in a trench. He generally has a canteen containing a knife, fork, and spoon; also a sponge, a tooth-brush, a piece of soap, and an extra pair of socks. As to a change of clothes, boots, and sleeping bag, they form part of his equipment. He also has a water-bottle, a revolver, a pair of field-glasses, and a compass. Only if he is lucky does he possess as extras a waterproof sheet, a torch with re-fills (many on the Aisne preferred candles), a canvas bucket, notepaper and envelopes, and an air pillow. There should be six thick pairs of socks made of good wool, twelve coloured handkerchiefs, four thick flannel shirts (khaki colour), a good wide comforter, and two sleeping caps (in case one gets wet). Any pencils sent to a man on active service ought to be indelible. Valuable, too, is a tiny medicine chest.

Very few people realise what an important part food—good, hot, and plenty of it—plays in war. Napoleon, who was the first great general to study closely the comfort of his troops, would have admired and envied the British commissariat.

However fierce the fighting during the Battle of the Aisne, there was in each trench or dug-out “the dinner ’ush from twelve to one.” The shells might continue to roar, and men be hit by bullets, but out fifty yards behind the trench the battalion reserves had their fires alight and were cooking dinner. Fifty yards of shell-swept ground behind men in trenches is, however, a long way off.

There were, however, always plenty of volunteers ready to rush to the belt of trees and return triumphant with mess-tins riddled with shrapnel bullets and some of their number on the ground, but with dinner safe for the famished battalion.

I wonder if you can guess what is the worst thing connected with life in the trenches? It is not the cold or the heat. It is not the damp or the wet. It is not even the fact that the soldier, however cleverly he may be entrenched, is in perpetual danger of death, or if not of death itself, then of some terrible and painful wound.

No, the worst thing about life in the trenches is the noise! All day long, and very often all night too, the boom of the great guns, and the long drawn-out screaming whistle of the shells, went on, backwards and forwards, across that narrow valley of the Aisne. Who can wonder that many of our brave soldiers were made temporarily deaf?

And yet, in spite of the distracting noise, a good deal of reading was done, for quite a number of books had been brought to the trenches.

One of the officers of the 1st Hampshire Regiment actually read Sir Walter Scott’s poem of “Marmion” aloud to his men while they were being subjected to a continuous fire. This fact becoming known to a retired naval officer, Commander Henry N. Shore, he wrote the following interesting letter to a paper:

“Curiously enough, the same thing happened a century ago during the last great war in which Great Britain was engaged. While Wellington’s army held the lines of Torres Vedras, a captain in an infantry regiment wrote to Sir Walter Scott telling him that while his men were waiting for an attack by the French he excited their martial ardour by reciting aloud to them a canto of ‘Marmion’ which had recently been published. Thus does history repeat itself.”

The French soldiers during this long drawn-out battle were astonished at the tidiness and cleanliness of their British comrades. Every morning our soldiers did their best to perform their toilets in the trenches, and that however hard the night had been. Each man had a little bit of looking-glass which he put up on the chalky earth, then he got his water and soap to hand, and shaved and washed as though for a parade! There was no compulsion; it was done because each man wanted to do it, and knew he would feel the better for it.

This kind of siege battle is very wearing to those engaged in it. The dogged courage, day and night, which it requires, seems to me every bit as splendid as those more striking deeds of gallantry for which men win the V.C. As a private wrote:

“We don’t care tuppence for shrapnel, which flies back and hardly ever hits us. What worries us is that the Germans have been turning their heavy siege guns upon us. The shells they fire are no joke. They rip a hole in the ground big enough to bury an entire regiment. One man standing near me was hurled into the lower branches of a tree by the concussion. We got him down, and strange to say he was comparatively unhurt.”

That makes one think of Sir Walter Scott’s lines:

“Three hundred cannon-mouths roared loud, And from their throats with flash and cloud Their showers of iron threw.”

It was early in the Battle of the Aisne that a British gunner, already slightly wounded, went on serving his gun, when suddenly down whizzed a shell and severely injured his leg. He picked himself up and calmly went on with his perilous job. The action was then very hot, and he refused to receive first aid. At last, when it became clear he could go on no longer, he was forced by his comrades to leave his post of duty and danger, but it took two of them to hold him down on the ambulance stretcher!

The Russians have an excellent proverb, “The bullet is a fool, but the bayonet is a brave fellow.” The bullet, however, especially when shot by one of our British soldiers, is by no means a fool, as our enemies have again and again found to their cost. The German soldiers usually fired their rifles at random from the hip. But our men are trained to take aim steadily from the shoulder, and so not many British bullets are wasted.

The modern bullet has a tremendous range. Before the Battle of Omdurman a wounded officer was placed at what was thought to be five thousand yards from the nearest point of fire. Yet a stray bullet traversed those three miles of desert, and striking him on the head killed him.

One is glad to know that the latest type of bullet usually inflicts quite a small, clean wound, which heals up quickly. In old days it was thought that no one could survive being shot through the heart, but it has now been proved that a bullet may actually puncture the heart without doing any permanent harm.

Sometimes—and this is a very piteous and woeful thought—a wounded soldier has to lie out a long time on the field of battle before he can be carried in. I am sorry to say that the Germans often fired on the men sent out to pick up wounded. As an example, I will tell you of the case of a soldier whose left thigh was fractured and right foot wounded in a very fierce engagement. He lay alone among the dead and dying, unseen, and apparently without any power of attracting the attention of the ambulance men. At last he plucked up enough strength to crawl along towards the British trenches.

“I was about finished,” he wrote afterwards, “when a man of the Welsh Regiment saw me and came out for me. That man ought to get the Victoria Cross. I didn’t ask his name, and I don’t know what it was, but he was a real good one, and no mistake. He got me up on his shoulders and he carried me right in. The Germans were firing all the time, and I was so near finished that I wanted him to drop me and let me die. It didn’t seem right for him to be worrying about getting me in. All he said was, ‘You hold tight, old man; I’ve got you all right, and I don’t intend to let you go!’”

Wherever the British wounded passed they were loaded with gifts by the French peasants. Old men and women, children even, brought them the best they had. They would bring the milk kept for the baby’s bottle, or their only and much valued bottle of champagne or old wine.

A Lancashire private showed his comrades an agricultural medal an old man had given him. “It is not much in itself, I dare say,” he said, to excuse the tears in his eyes, “but I could see it was what the old fellow was proudest of, so you see I have to keep it careful.”

Some of you, when walking through one of our beautiful, peaceful, country churchyards, may have cast a sad thought to the lonely graves where so many of our bravest soldiers lie in France. But let me tell you that one of the best traits in the French character is respect for death. A tramp found dead on the wayside near a French village will be given a decent funeral, and what is more there will be women present, not only at the Mass said for his soul, but also at the grave side.

That being so, you will readily imagine with what reverence and care the British dead who have died fighting for France have been treated by the people whose sad fate it has been to live close to the great battlefields of this war. After each action the dead were sought for, and after their personal possessions had been put aside for their relations, they were buried on a strip of ground called “The Field of Honour.” There French and British lie side by side, as you will see from the following letter written by a lieutenant of the Royal Army Medical Corps serving with the 2nd Seaforth Highlanders:

“Poor Colonel Bradford! I can’t tell you how great our loss is. He was brave, and a born commander, but in the twinkling of an eye, while trying to safeguard his regiment, a shell carried him off. We could not fetch him in during daylight because of drawing fire, but at midnight, on September 14, we laid him with two other officers and men to rest in their _champ d’honneur_, on a hillside overlooking a fair river and valley.

“It was a sad but glorious moment for us to stand and hear the padre tell us that they had not shrunk from duty, and had fallen for the sake of comrades. The next day I found some Scotch thistle growing close by. I plucked the blooms, and formed a cross over our chieftain’s grave.”

In a letter to Miss Rose-Innes, of Jedburgh, Colonel Richardson-Drummond-Hay, writing from the regimental quarters of the Coldstream Guards at the Battle of the Aisne, paid a splendid tribute to a Scots surgeon, named Dr. Huggan. It told how two days before the young man was killed he was recommended for the Victoria Cross for organising and leading a party of volunteers to remove a number of wounded from a barn that had been set alight by the German shells. The work was carried out under very heavy fire, and all the wounded were saved.

Dr. Huggan, who was killed at the Battle of the Aisne on September 16, was a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps, attached to the 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards. He was a native of Jedburgh, and played Rugby with the Jedforest Club for some years.

The doctors on both sides have taken a splendid part in this great war.

Let me tell you here of an exceptionally kind and delicate-minded action on the part of a German doctor.

In a French town temporarily captured by the Germans, a certain French gentleman lay very ill. He was an old man, too old for fighting, and just now too ill to be moved away by his friends. There were no French doctors left in the town. Hearing of this case, one of the German doctors took off his uniform, put on an overall, and pretended to be a captured English doctor, in order to go and see the sick man. He took all this trouble because he thought the excitement (hatred of the Germans by his patient) would be bad for the old gentleman. This was all the kinder, inasmuch as, being an Army doctor, he was, of course, under no obligation to treat people in the town.

I am sorry that I cannot tell you the name of one of the bravest men mentioned in this book. There is, however, one fact about him which can be stated. He is a private in the West Yorkshire Regiment.

This soldier was in the trenches when suddenly he saw that close to the German lines a number of his comrades had been struck down while in the act of charging the enemy. He took off his coat and equipment, and walked over to where they lay under a perfect hail of bullets. Beginning with the adjutant, he made altogether eleven journeys, bringing in also his colonel and nine men. Small wonder that he is said to have been recommended for the Victoria Cross.

During the first two months of the war, the British Veterinary Corps, which, by the way, was first formed after the South African War, had 30,000 horse patients through its hands. Horses, in spite of motor transport, have already played an important part in this great war, and it does not require much thought to know that their supply in almost every country is limited. Russia alone seems to have an inexhaustible number—in fact, it has been asserted that there are no fewer than thirty million horses at the disposal of the Tsar.

Our horses are better looked after than any others in the field. The wounded ones are cared for most tenderly, and are often cured of quite serious wounds. Not only have they their comfortable hospitals, but there have actually been set apart for them splendid convalescent homes. Some of these consist of the fine racing stables belonging to well-known Frenchmen whose colours are often seen on English racecourses.

I have been told that one of the strangest and, in a sense, most pathetic sights on the battlefields of the Aisne was the loose horses which rushed hither and thither aimlessly while shells whistled overhead. Another curious sight is the terror of the birds when an aeroplane flies low. They swirl about, beside themselves with fright, and evidently believe that the flying machine is a huge monster of their own kind bent upon their extermination.

A private of the Royal Irish Fusiliers described how he and his comrades once went under fire:

“As we stood up, there was a ghastly shower of bullets, and shells burst all round. Into it we had to go, and as I looked ahead one of our chaps said, ‘I think we’ll have to get our great-coats, boys; it’s raining bullets to-night, and we’ll get wet if we’re not careful.’ Men of “C” Company started laughing, and then they took to singing ‘Put up your umbrellas when it comes on wet!’ The song was taken up all along as we went into the thick of it, and some of us were humming it as we dashed into the German trenches.”

During the retreat from Mons a slightly wounded Scot, an artilleryman, asked a German for water, and was refused. Long afterwards, during the Battle of the Aisne, the artilleryman recognised the same German among a party of wounded whose cries for water couldn’t be attended to quickly enough.

The recognition was mutual, and the German stopped his moaning, thinking he was sure to be paid back in his own coin. But the Highlander took out his water-bottle and handed it to the German without a word. According to one who was there, the German had the grace to look very shamefaced indeed.

Our flying men played a most important part in this Battle of the Aisne. What they did, and how they did it, was excellently described in the following letter written by Lord Castlereagh from Champagne. As you read it you will feel as if you were there, watching the wonderful and inspiring sight:

“The thing that has impressed me most here has been the aeroplane service, a splendid lot of boys who really do not know what fear is. The Germans shoot shrapnel at them, and you see the aeroplane like a dragon-fly in the air, and then a lot of little puffs of white smoke, which are the shells bursting. Luckily the shots are very wide, and so far none have been brought down. One man was shot in the thigh by a German airman whom he was chasing.

“I watched for twenty-five minutes an aeroplane doing what is called ‘ranging’ for a battery of heavy guns. The aeroplane watches where the shells drop, and then signals to say where the shells are falling, whether too far or not far enough. This aeroplane was being shelled by the enemy with shrapnel, and three times it flew round and showed the battery where they were shooting. The Germans must have fired forty shells.

“The aeroplane, about five thousand feet up, and easily in sight, looked like an eagle, and about the same size, and the shells made a cloud of white smoke and looked about the size of a cabbage. It was a wonderful sight, and if such a picture appeared in an illustrated paper no one would think it was anything else but an imaginary one.”

On September 22 a daring exploit was performed by a group of British aviators. They flew off and made a successful raid into Germany. Flight-Lieut. C. H. Collet dropped three bombs on the Zeppelin shed at Düsseldorf, and as the whole shed burst into flames it is clear that his object was accomplished.

Both this gallant airman and his companion were most careful to do no harm to private or public buildings in the towns through which they flew. In fact, they could have destroyed another Zeppelin shed had they not thought it wrong to run the risk of injuring innocent women and children in the misty weather which then prevailed.

I cannot help contrasting this behaviour with the conduct of German airmen, who killed or mutilated with their bombs numbers of women and children in open towns like Paris and Ostend.

Some of the most gallant deeds of this great war have been done some way from the fields of battle, and in what may be called cold blood. A fine story of Irish heroism was told by a trooper of the Irish Dragoons:

“There was a man of ours who carried a chum to a farmhouse under fire, and when the retreat came got left behind. A German patrol called and found them. There were only the two, one wounded, against a dozen Uhlans. Behind a barrier of furniture they kept the Germans at bay. At last the Germans made off and brought a machine gun to the house and threatened to destroy it.

“The two soldiers were not unmindful of the kindness shown them by the owners of the farm, and rather than bring loss on them or the village they made a rush out with some mad idea of taking the gun. Just over the threshold of the door they both fell dead.”

Among the most moving and beautiful stories of this great struggle is one that also has as hero a nameless Irish private. What happened was perfectly told by a wounded corporal of the West Yorkshire Regiment:

“The regiment was approaching a little village near Rheims. We went on through the long narrow street, and just as we were in sight of the end the figure of a man dashed out from a farmhouse on the right. Immediately the rifles began to crack in front, and the poor chap fell dead before he reached us.

“We learned that he had been captured the previous day by a marauding party of German cavalry, and had been held a prisoner at the farm where the Germans were in ambush for us. He tumbled to their game, and though he knew that if he made the slightest sound they would kill him, he decided to make a dash to warn us of what was in store.

“He had more than a dozen bullets in him, and there was not the slightest hope for him, so we carried him into a house until the fight was over. We buried him the next day with military honours, but as his identification disc and everything else was missing, we could only put over his grave the tribute that was paid to a greater: ‘He saved others; himself he could not save.’”