I have only told you about the little bit I saw myself of the tremendous Battle of the Aisne. Considering the length of it and the fearful nature of the firing, it sometimes strikes me as a very strange thing that I should be alive at all; but stranger still that some men went through it all, right away from the beginning at Mons, and escaped without a scratch. CHAPTER V “THE MOST CRITICAL DAY OF ALL” [In the first four months of the war nineteen Victoria Crosses were gazetted for valour in the field, and of these no fewer than five were awarded for the sanguinary fighting at Le Cateau on August 26th, 1914. In his despatch dealing with the retreat from Mons Sir John French described the 26th as “the most critical day of all.” It was during this crisis of the battle that Corporal Frederick William Holmes, of the 2nd Battalion The King’s Own (Yorkshire Light Infantry), “carried a wounded man out of the trenches under heavy fire and later assisted to drive a gun out of action by taking the place of a driver who had been wounded.” Corporal Holmes has not only won the Victoria Cross, but he has been also awarded the Médaille Militaire of the Legion of Honour of France. His story gives further proof of the wondrous courage and endurance of the gallant British Army in Belgium and in France.] For seven years I was with the colours in the old 51st, which is now the Yorkshire Light Infantry, then I was drafted to the Reserve; but I was called back only a fortnight later, when the war broke out. The regimental depôt is at Pontefract, in South Yorkshire, which some unkind people say is the last place that God started and never finished, and in August, having become a soldier again, after marrying and settling down to civil life in Dublin, I found myself in a region which was almost like the South Yorkshire coalfields. There were the same pit-heads and shale-heaps, so that you could almost think you were in England again--but how different from England’s calmness and security! It was around these pit-heads and shale-heaps that some of the fiercest fighting of the earlier days of the war took place. We had left Dublin and reached Havre at midnight; we had been to the fortified town of Landrecies, where the Coldstreamers were to do such glorious things, and had got to Maroilles, where Sir Douglas Haig and the 1st Division became heavily engaged. We were at Maroilles, in billets, from the 18th to the 21st. Billets meant almost anything, and we lived and slept in all sorts of places as well as the trenches--but being in the open in summer was no hardship. The fields had been harvested and we often slept on the stacks of corn. The people were really most kind; they gave us every mortal thing as we marched, beer, wine, cigarettes and anything else there was.