As soon as we got into touch with the Germans—and that was at Mons—they never left us alone. We had a hot time with them, but we gave them a hotter. Mons was a terrible experience, especially to men going straight into action for the first time, and so furious was the artillery duel that at its height some of the British and German shells actually struck each other in the air. In less than an hour we fired nearly six hundred rounds—the full number carried by a battery of six guns. But I must not talk of Mons; I will get to the neighbourhood of CompiÈgne, and tell of the fight that was sprung on the battery and left only three survivors.

All through the retreat we had been fighting heavily, and throughout the day on August 31st we fought till four o’clock in the afternoon; then we were ordered to retire to CompiÈgne. It was a long march, and when we got to Nery, near CompiÈgne, early in the evening, both horses and men were utterly exhausted and very hungry. As soon as we got in we gave the horses some food—with the mounted man the horse always comes first—and made ourselves as comfortable as possible.

Outposts were put out by the officers, and the cavalry who were with us, the 2nd Dragoon Guards (Queen’s Bays), were in a small field on the side of a road which was opposite to us. That road was really a deep cutting, and I want you to bear it in mind, because it largely proved the salvation of the few survivors of the battery at the end of the fight. For the rest, the country was just of the sort you can see in many places in England—peaceful, fertile and prosperous, with farms dotted about, but nobody left on them, for the warning had been given that the German hordes were marching, and the people had fled in terror.

Having made all our dispositions, we went to sleep, and rested till half-past three in the morning, when we were roused and told to get ready to march at a moment’s notice.

The darkness seemed to hang about more than usual, and the morning was very misty; but we did not pay much attention to that, and we breakfasted and fed the horses. We expected to be off again, but the battery was ordered to stand fast until further notice.

In war-time never a moment is wasted, and Sergeant-Major Dorrell thought that this would be a good opportunity to water the horses, so he ordered the right half-battery to water, and the horses were taken behind a sugar factory which was a little distance away. The horses were watered and brought back and hooked into the guns and waggons; then the left half-battery went to water.

Everything was perfectly quiet. Day had broken, and the landscape was hidden in the grey veil of the early morning. All was well, it seemed, and we were now expecting to move off. A ridge about 600 yards away was, we supposed, occupied by French cavalry, and a general and orderly retreat was going on in our rear. Then, without the slightest warning, a “ranging” shot was dropped into the battery, and we knew instantly that the Germans were on us and had fired this trial shot to get the range of us.

Immediately after this round was fired the whole place was alive with shrapnel and maxim bullets, and it was clear that the battery was almost surrounded by German artillery and infantry. As a matter of fact, the French cavalry had left their position on the ridge before daybreak, and a strong German force, with ten guns and two maxims, had advanced under cover of the mist and occupied the position, which was an uncommonly good one for artillery.

We were taken completely by surprise, and at first could do nothing, for the “ranging” shot was followed by an absolute hail of shrapnel, which almost blew the battery to pieces.

The very beginning of the German fire made havoc amongst the battery and the Bays, and the losses amongst the horses were particularly severe and crippling. But we soon pulled ourselves together, with a fierce determination to save the battery, and to do our best to give the Germans a vast deal more than they were giving us.

“Who’ll volunteer to get the guns into action?” shouted Captain Bradbury.

Every man who could stand and fight said “Me!” and there was an instant rush for the guns. Owing to heavy losses in our battery, I had become limber gunner, and it was part of my special duty to see to the ammunition in the limbers. But special duties at a time like that don’t count for much; the chief thing is to keep the guns going, and it was now a case of every one, officer and man, striving his best to save the battery. The officers, while they lived and could keep up at all, were noble, and worked exactly like the men. From start to finish of that fatal fight they set a glorious example.

We rushed to the guns, I say, and with the horses, when they were living and unhurt, and man-handling when the poor beasts were killed or maimed, we made shift to bring as heavy a fire as we could raise against the Germans. The advantage was clearly and undoubtedly with them—they were in position, they had our range, and they had far more guns and men, while we had half our horses watering by the sugar mill and shells were thick in the air and ploughing up the earth before we could get a single gun into action.

Let me stop for a minute to explain what actually happened to the guns, so that you can understand the odds against us as we fought. The guns, as you have seen, were ready for marching, not for fighting, which we were not expecting; half the horses were away, many at the guns were killed or wounded, and officers and men had suffered fearfully in the course literally of a few seconds after the “ranging” shot plumped into us.

The first gun came to grief through the terrified horses bolting and overturning it on the steep bank of the road in front of us; the second gun had the spokes of a wheel blown out by one of the very first of the German shells, the third was disabled by a direct hit with a shell which killed the detachment; the fourth was left standing, though the wheels got knocked about and several holes were made in the limber, and all the horses were shot down. The fifth gun was brought into action, but was silenced by the detachment being killed, and the sixth gun, our own, remained the whole time, though the side of the limber was blown away, the wheels were severely damaged, holes were blown in the shield, and the buffer was badly peppered by shrapnel bullets. The gun was a wreck, but, like many another wreck, it held gallantly on until the storm was over—and it was saved at last.

In a shell fire that was incessant and terrific, accompanied by the hail of bullets from the maxims, we got to work.

We had had some truly tremendous cannonading at Mons; but this was infinitely worse, for the very life of the battery was in peril, and it was a point-blank battle, just rapid, ding-dong kill-fire, our own shells and the Germans’ bursting in a fraction of time after leaving the muzzles of the guns.

As soon as we were fairly in action, the Germans gave us a fiercer fire than ever, and it is only just to them to say that their practice was magnificent; but I think we got the pull of them, crippled and shattered though we were—nay, I know we did, for when the bloody business was all over, we counted far more of the German dead than all our battery had numbered at the start.

The thirteen-pounders of the Royal Horse Artillery can be fired at the rate of fifteen rounds a minute, and though we were not perhaps doing that, because we were short-handed and the limbers were about thirty yards away, still we were making splendid practice, and it was telling heavily on the Germans.

As the mist melted away we could at that short distance see them plainly—and they made a target which we took care not to miss. We went for the German guns and fighting men, and the Germans did all they knew to smash us—but they didn’t know enough, and failed.

As soon as we got number six gun into action I jumped into the seat and began firing, but so awful was the concussion of our own explosions and the bursting German shells that I could not bear it for long. I kept it up for about twenty minutes, then my nose and ears were bleeding because of the concussion, and I could not fire any more, so I left the seat and got a change by fetching ammunition.

And now there happened one of those things which, though they seem marvellous, are always taking place in time of war, and especially such a war as this, when life is lost at every turn. Immediately after I left the seat, Lieutenant Campbell, who had been helping with the ammunition, took it, and kept the firing up without the loss of a second of time; but he had not fired more than a couple of rounds when a shell burst under the shield. The explosion was awful, and the brave young officer was hurled about six yards away from the very seat in which I had been sitting a few seconds earlier. There is no human hope against such injuries, and Mr. Campbell lived for only a few minutes.

Another officer who fell quickly while doing dangerous work was Lieutenant Mundy, my section officer. He was finding the range and reporting the effects of our shells. To do that he had left the protection of the shield and was sitting on the ground alongside the gun wheel. This was a perilous position, being completely exposed to the shells which were bursting all around. Mr. Mundy was killed by an exploding shell which also wounded me. A piece of the shell caught me just behind the shoulder-blade. I felt it go into my back, but did not take much notice of it at the time, and went on serving the gun. Mr. Mundy had taken the place of Mr. Marsden, the left-section officer. The latter had gone out from home with us; but he had been badly wounded at Mons, where a shrapnel bullet went through the roof of his mouth and came out of his neck. In spite of that dreadful injury, however, he stuck bravely to his section.

I am getting on a bit too fast, perhaps, so I will return to the time when I had to leave the seat of the gun owing to the way in which the concussion had affected me. When I felt a little better I began to help Driver Osborne to fetch ammunition from the waggons. I had just managed to get back to the gun with an armful of ammunition, when a lyddite shell exploded behind me, threw me to the ground, and partly stunned me.

I was on the ground for what seemed to be about five minutes and thought I was gone; but when I came round I got up and found that I was uninjured. On looking round, however, I saw that Captain Bradbury, who had played a splendid part in getting the guns into action, had been knocked down by the same shell that floored me. I had been thrown on my face, Captain Bradbury had been knocked down backwards, and he was about two yards away from me. When I came to my senses I went up to him and saw that he was mortally wounded. He expired a few minutes afterwards. Though the captain knew that death was very near, he thought of his men to the last, and repeatedly begged to be carried away, so that they should not be upset by seeing him or hearing the cries which he could not restrain. Two of the men who were wounded, and were lying in the shelter of a neighbouring haystack, crawled up and managed to take the captain back with them; but he died almost as soon as the haystack was reached.

By this time our little camp was an utter wreck. Horses and men were lying everywhere, some of the horses absolutely blown to pieces; waggons and guns were turned upside down, and all around was the ruin caused by the German shells. The camp was littered with fragments of shell and our own cartridge-cases, while the ground looked as if it had been ploughed and harrowed anyhow. Nearly all the officers and men had been either killed or wounded.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Germans literally rained shrapnel and bullets on us. A German shell is filled with about three hundred bullets, so that with two or three shells bursting you get as big a cloud of bullets as you would receive from a battalion of infantry.

The Germans had ten of their guns and two machine-guns going, and it is simply marvellous that every man and horse in our battery was not destroyed. Bear in mind, too, that the German artillery was not all field-guns—they had big guns with them, and they fired into us with the simple object of wiping us out. That is quite all right, of course; but they never gave a thought to our wounded—they went for them just as mercilessly as they bombarded the rest.

There was a little farmhouse in our camp, an ordinary French farm building with a few round haystacks near it. When the fight began, we thought of using this building as a hospital; but it was so clear that the place was an absolute death-trap that we gave up that idea very quickly, and got our wounded under the shelter of one of the haystacks, where they were pretty safe so long as the stack did not catch fire, because a good thick stack will resist even direct artillery fire in a wonderful manner. But the Germans got their guns on this particular stack, and it was a very bad look-out for our poor, helpless fellows, many of whom had been badly mangled.

As for the farmhouse it was blown to pieces, as I saw afterwards when I visited it, and not a soul could have lived in the place. Walls, windows, roof, ceilings—all were smashed, and the furniture was in fragments. A building like that was a fair target; but the haystack was different, and the Germans did a thing that no British gunners would have done. At that short distance they could see perfectly clearly what was happening—they could see that as our wounded fell we got hold of them and dragged them out of the deadly hail to the shelter of the stack, about a score of yards away, to comparative safety. Noticing this, one of the German officers immediately concentrated a heavy shell fire on the heap of wounded—thirty or forty helpless men—in an attempt to set fire to the stack. That was a deliberate effort to destroy wounded men. We saw that, and the sight helped us to put more strength into our determination to smash the German guns.

The Germans were mad to wipe us out, and I know that for my own part I would not have fallen into their clutches alive. My mind was quite made up on that point, for I had seen many a British soldier who had fallen on the roadside, dead beat, and gone to sleep—and slept for the last time when the Germans came up. On a previous occasion we passed through one place where there had been a fight—it must have been in the darkness—and the wounded had been put in a cemetery, the idea being that the Germans would not touch a cemetery. That idea proved to be wrong. One of the German aeroplanes that were constantly hovering over the battery had given some German batteries our position, but we got away, and the German gunners, enraged at our escape, instantly dropped shells into the cemetery, to wipe the wounded out. If they would do that they would not hesitate to fire deliberately on our wounded under the haystack—and they did not hesitate.

It was not many minutes after the fight began in the mist when only number six gun was left in the battery, and four of us survived to serve it—the sergeant-major, who had taken command; Sergeant Nelson, myself, and Driver Osborne, and we fired as fast as we could in a noise that was now more terrible than ever and in a little camp that was utter wreckage. There was the ceaseless din of screaming, bursting shells, the cries of the wounded, for whom we could do something, but not much, and the cries of the poor horses, for which we could do nothing. The noise they made was like the grizzling of a child that is not well—a very pitiful sound, but, of course, on a much bigger scale; and that sound of suffering went up from everywhere around us, because everywhere there were wounded horses.

It was not long before we managed to silence several German guns. But very soon Sergeant Nelson was severely wounded by a bursting shell, and that left only three of us.

The Bays’ horses, like our own, had been either killed or wounded or had bolted, but the men had managed to get down on the right of us and take cover under the steep bank of the road, and from that position, which was really a natural trench, they fired destructively on the Germans.

British cavalry, dismounted, have done some glorious work in this great war, but they have done nothing finer, I think, than their work near CompiÈgne on that September morning. And of all the splendid work there was none more splendid than the performance of a lance-corporal, who actually planted a maxim on his own knees and rattled into the Germans with it. There was plenty of kick in the job, but he held on gamely, and he must have done heavy execution with his six hundred bullets a minute.

This rifle and maxim fire of the Bays had a wonderful

effect in silencing the German fire, and it helped us greatly when we came to the last stage of the duel.

I don’t know how many of the Bays there were, but it was impossible for them to charge, even if they had had their horses, owing to the fact that the road in front of us was a deep cutting. If the cutting had not been there the Uhlans, who alone considerably outnumbered us, would have swept down on us and there would not have been anyone left in L Battery at any rate.

By the time we had practically silenced the German guns the three of us who were surviving were utterly exhausted. Osborne, who was kneeling beside a waggon wheel, had a narrow escape from being killed. A shell burst between the wheel and the waggon body, tore the wheel off, and sent the spokes flying all over the place. One of the spokes caught Osborne just over the ribs and knocked him over, backwards.

I looked round on hearing the explosion of the shell, and said, “I think Osborne’s gone this time,” but we were thankful to find that he was only knocked over. One of his ribs was fractured, but we did not know of this till afterwards.

Meanwhile, the men who had gone to water the horses of the left-half battery had heard the firing, and had tried hard to get back to help us; but they were met on the road by an officer, who said that the battery was practically annihilated, and it would be useless for them to return. The Germans had seen them watering the horses, and had begun to shell the sugar factory. This caused the remaining horses of the battery to gallop away, and a lot of them were killed as they galloped, though a good many got away and were afterwards found in the neighbouring town of CompiÈgne, wandering about. As for the men, they “mooched” in any direction as stragglers, and eventually we came up with them.

The three of us had served the gun and kept it in action till it was almost too hot to work, and we were nearly worn out; but we went on firing, and with a good heart, for we knew that the Germans had been badly pounded, that the Bays had them in a grip, and that another battery of horse-gunners was dashing to the rescue. On they came, in glorious style—there is no finer sight than that of a horse battery galloping into action.

Two or three miles away from us I Battery had heard the heavy firing, and knew that something must be happening to us. Round they turned, and on they dashed, taking everything before them and stopping for nothing till they reached a ridge about 2000 yards away; then they unlimbered and got into action, and never was there grander music heard than that which greeted the three of us who were left in L Battery when the saving shells of “I” screamed over us and put the finish to the German rout.

In a speech made to I Battery Sir John French said—

“No branch of the Service has done better work in this campaign than the Royal Horse Artillery. It is impossible to pick out one occasion more than another during this campaign on which I Battery has specially distinguished itself, because the battery has always done brilliant work. Your general tells me that you were in action continuously for ten days....”

We had been pretty well hammered out of existence, but we had a kick left in us, and we gave it, and what with this and the Bays and the bashing by the fresh battery, the Germans soon had enough of it, and for the time being they made no further effort to molest us.

At last the fight was finished. We had—thank God!—saved the guns, and the Germans, despite their frantic efforts, had made no progress, and had only a heap of dead and wounded and a lot of battered guns to show for their attempt to smash us in the morning mist. We had kept them off day after day, and we kept them off again. We had been badly punished, but we had mauled them terribly in the fight, which lasted about an hour.

Three of our guns had been disabled, two waggons blown up, and many wheels blown off the waggons.

Some strange things had happened between Mons and CompiÈgne, and now that the duel had ended we had a chance of recollecting them and counting up the cost to us. Corporal Wheeler Carnham was knocked down while trying to stop a runaway ammunition waggon, and one of the wheels went over his legs. He managed to get on his feet again, but he had no sooner done so than he was struck on the legs by a piece of shell. At CompiÈgne two gunners were blown to pieces and could not be identified. Driver Laws had both legs broken by a waggon which turned over at Mons, and afterwards the waggon was blown up, and he went with it. Shoeing-Smith Heath was standing alongside me at CompiÈgne when the firing began. I told him to keep his head down, but he didn’t do so—and lost it. The farrier was badly wounded, and the quartermaster-sergeant was knocked down and run over by an ammunition waggon. Gunner Huddle, a signaller, was looking through his glasses to try to find out where the shells were coming from, when he was struck on the head by a piece of bursting shell.

Our commanding officer, Major the Hon. W. D. Sclater-Booth, was standing behind the battery, dismounted, as we all were, observing the fall of the shells, when he was hit by a splinter from a bursting shell and severely wounded. He was removed, and we did not see him again until we were on the way to the base. As far as I remember, he was taken off by one of the cavalry officers from the Bays.

Lieutenant Giffard, our right section officer, was injured early in the fight by a shell which shattered his left knee, and he was taken and placed with the rest of the wounded behind the haystack, where in a very short time they were literally piled up. As soon as the officers and men fell we did the best we could for them; but all we could do was just simply to drag them out of the danger of the bursting shells. Luckily, this particular haystack escaped fairly well, but very soon after the fight began nearly every haystack in the camp was blazing fiercely, set on fire by the German shells.

The first thing to be done after the fight was to bury our dead and collect our wounded, and in this sorrowful task we were helped by the Middlesex Regiment—the old “Die-Hards”—who have done so splendidly and suffered so heavily in this war. They, like I Battery, had come up, and we were very glad to see them. Some of our gallant wounded were beyond help, because of the shrapnel fire.

We buried our dead on the field where they had fallen, amidst the ruins of the battery they had fought to save, and with the fire and smoke still rising from the ruined buildings and the burning haystacks.

Another thing we did was to go round and shoot the poor horses that were hopelessly hurt—and a sorry task it was. One waggon we went to had five horses killed—only one horse was left out of the six which had been hooked in to march away in the mist of the morning; so we shot him and put him out of his misery. We had to shoot about twenty horses; but the rest were already dead, mostly blown to pieces and scattered over the field—a dreadful sight.

When we had buried the dead, collected our wounded, and destroyed our helpless horses, the guns of our battery were limbered up on to sound waggon limbers, and a pair of horses were borrowed from each sub-section of I Battery to take them away. Everything else was left behind—waggons, accoutrements, clothing, caps, and so on, and the battery was taken to a little village about four miles from CompiÈgne, where we tried to snatch a bit of rest; but we had no chance of getting it, owing to the harassing pursuit of big bodies of Uhlans.

From that time, until we reached the base, we wandered about as best we could, and managed to live on what we could get, which was not much. We were in a pretty sorry state, most of us without caps or jackets, and we obtained food from other units that we passed on the road.

We were marching, dismounted, day and night, till we reached the rail-head, where I was transferred to the base and sent home. The sergeant-major and Osborne came home at the same time, and the sergeant-major is now a commissioned officer. So is Sergeant Nelson.

After such a furious fight and all the hardships and sufferings of Mons and the retreat, it seems strange and unreal to be back in peaceful London. I don’t know what will happen to me, of course, but whatever comes I earnestly hope that some day I shall be able to go back to the little camp where we fought in the morning mist in such a deadly hail of shell, and look at the resting-places of the brave officers and men who gave their lives to save the battery they loved so well.