the march. On arriving at La Grange, the Camerons, or what was left of them, joined us, taking the place of the annihilated Fusiliers in our brigade.

We were so tired that night that I could have slept on a bed of nails, points up, but we had not been in our billets very long when we were ordered out, as the outpost had reported the approach of Uhlans in considerable numbers.

We were half asleep as we ran down into the street to our allotted posts. One of the first persons we encountered in the town was a Frenchman, raving mad. We asked him what was the matter, but he could not reply. He jibbered like an ape; his twitching lips slavered and foamed. Some of his neighbours took him in hand and led him away. One of them told us his story:

“The Prussians came in here yesterday. There was no one to resist them. They posted sentries. Then those who were not on duty broke into cellars. Casks of wine were rolled up into the streets, and, where squads gathered together, there were piles of bottles. The soldiers did not stop to pull the corks. They knocked off the necks of the bottles and filled their aluminum cups with red wine and white, mixing one type with another, and swilling it in as fast as they could drink. Dozens of them fell in the gutters, drunk. Others reeled through the village, abusing and insulting men and women alike. If a man resisted, he was shot. This poor fellow, whom you have seen, was in his door yard with his wife. A Prussian seized her about the waist. She struggled. He crushed her to him with his brutish arm. His companions, all drunk, laughed and jeered. The woman’s clothes were ripped from her shoulders in her struggle. Meanwhile others bound the husband to one of his own fruit trees, so that he could not escape the horror of it. One—more drunken, more bestial than the others—slashed off the woman’s breasts and threw them to a dog. The woman died.”

This of itself was enough to have made us rage against the enemy whom hitherto we had regarded as an honourable foe, but it was not all. I, with other members of my own company, came upon a nail driven into the wall of a barn from which hung, by the mouth, the lifeless form of a baby. The child was dead when we found it, but it had died hanging from the rusty nail. I know it had, because I saw upon the wall the marks of finger-nails where the baby had clawed and scratched. And besides, a dead body would not have bled. An officer ordered the removal of the child’s body.

I do not tell these things for the sake of the horror of them. I would rather not tell them. I have spent months trying to forget them. Now that I have recalled them, I wake in the night so horrified that I cannot move. But to relate them may serve one useful purpose. There are those in America, as there were in England, who believed that war to repel invasion was justified, but who were not enthusiastic for war abroad. America entered the war after her patience was absolutely exhausted, and Americans should be devoutly thankful that they can fight abroad and not have to endure the presence of a single Prussian soldier on American soil. What we saw and learned in Guise galvanized our weary bodies to new efforts against the vandals whom we were fighting. With clenched teeth and curses we turned to fight again.

The Uhlans got into the outskirts of the town and cut down a number of our men, but, inch by inch, as they drove toward the centre of the village, our resistance became stiffer and stiffer. It was like a nightmare. The charging horses, the gruff shouts of the enemy, the groans of the men who fell beside me, were like their counterparts in a dream. My finger pressed the trigger of the rifle feverishly. Even when I saw the men I fired at topple from their saddles and sprawl on the cobblestones, I had only a dull sense that I had scored a hit.

Just as we were throwing the enemy back in some confusion, a party of British worked round a back street and fired on them from the rear. A second later a machine gun began strewing the ground with horses and men. Squads of them threw up their hands and cried: “Kamerad! Kamerad!”—which was not a new cry on the part of the Prussians. A young fellow by my side stopped firing for a moment, but the rest of us knew better. The Camerons had lost a score of men the day before because they had taken the Germans at their word, and, when they went to make them prisoners, a whole company of Prussians had risen from behind the crest to a hill and shot the Camerons down. So bullets from our rifles answered the cries of “Kamerad!”

A few of the enemy escaped down side streets, and a number of them remained lying where they had been shot. While we were on our way back to quarters, a Frenchman came up out of his basement and motioned us to follow him. We went into the cellar and found half a dozen Prussians lying there dead drunk. We made them prisoners and sent them to headquarters.

CHAPTER THREE

I had about got settled in the stable where I was billeted, when orders came to “stand to.” No more sleep that night. We took the road and left La Grange behind us just as the sun was pinking the sky. It was Sunday, and, although we knew war was no respecter of the Sabbath, we had not been in the field long enough to get the idea quite out of our heads that Sunday, somehow, in the nature of things, was a little easier than other days. When we halted in a ravine at about ten o’clock in the morning, after marching four hours, we thought after all that it was going to be an easier day. I was on outpost duty on a side road a little way from the main thoroughfare we had been following.

Suddenly an infernal racket broke out over to our left. First there came a few scattered cracks of rifle fire. Then I could hear clip firing and the rattle of machine guns. I learned later that the Scots Greys and the 12th Lancers had come across about seven thousand Germans resting in a wide gully. The Greys and the Lancers, catching them unawares by cutting down their sentries who had no opportunity even to give the alarm—charged through them, then back again. Three times they repeated their performance, while some of our brigade got on to the flanks and poured in such a rapid fire that the Prussians had no opportunity to re-form to meet each repetition of the attack. The details do not matter, but they made up for the annihilation of the Munster Fusiliers.

In the newspaper accounts of the campaign this incident was described as the “Great St. Quentin Charge,” in which, it was asserted, the Black Watch (foot soldiers) participated, holding onto the stirrups of the Scots Greys. This bit of colouring was an inaccuracy. We aided the Greys and the Lancers with rifle and machine-gun fire only. When the firing ceased and the Greys and the Lancers came cantering past, we learned from them the details of the Battle of “St. Quentin.”

At nightfall our section was still guarding the road at a point from which a cart road branched off at right angles to the main thoroughfare. It was here that the outpost received instructions in a few French phrases, the main one being “Votre passe, s’il vous plait.” (“Your pass, please.”) This was because the road was open to refugees who were fleeing from the Boches, and who had to show passes before being allowed to go on. The absence of the pass meant that the person would be sent to headquarters for examination.

It was quite natural that some