Great Britain. Army. Black Watch (Royal Highlanders); World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, English
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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