On another occasion the Brigade of Guards, who were doing a slow retreat for rest, and who were being followed by a brigade of Germans, over double their strength, suddenly stopped, and hiding in a wood waited for the Germans. In a pitched battle, with fixed bayonets, they wiped the whole crowd out--over 4,000 of them. General French had this recorded, and it was read out to all the troops on special parade. Rifleman Cummings, of the King's Royal Rifles, wrote to his mother: "I shall never forget the first day under fire. It commenced on our left, and in a short time, in spite of heroic efforts, we watched it silence a battery of our guns. The ear-splitting crash of eight shells bursting along our line at once was terrible. However, we held on all day and part of the night. We knew it was part of the scheme, our retiring, and, although hundreds must have been suffering agonies with their feet, the boys always managed a song and a cheer. One night we reached a town and had just settled down in our billets saying to ourselves, 'Now for a well-earned rest,' when we were suddenly ordered to fall in. Our officer told us the Germans had captured a bridge about a mile from the town, and the General had sent word it had to be taken at all costs. It was a dark road and we were all in single file. There was a continued stream of wounded coming up from the bridge. After one or two charges the bridge was taken at the point of the bayonet." Private Fairweather, of the Black Watch, gives this account of an engagement on the Aisne: "The Guards went up first and then the Camerons, both having to retire. Although we had watched the awful slaughter in these regiments, when it was our turn we went off with a cheer across 1,500 yards of open country. The shelling was terrific and the air was full of the screams of shrapnel. Only a few of us got up to 200 yards of the Germans. Then with a yell we went at them. The air whistled with bullets, and it was then that my shout of '42nd for ever!' finished with a different kind of yell. Crack! I had been presented with a souvenir in my knee. I lay helpless and our fellows retired over me. Shrapnel screamed all round, and melinite shells made the earth shake. I bore a charmed life. A bullet went through the elbow of my jacket, another through my equipment, and a piece of shrapnel found a resting place in a tin of bully beef which was on my back. I was picked up eventually during the night, nearly dead from loss of blood." There is little of the glory of war for the wounded when they are waiting to be picked up by the stretcher-bearers and wondering whether they will be picked up at all. No wonder that an officer wrote in a letter: "If ever I come back, and anybody at home talks to me about the glory of war, I shall be d----d rude to him." This is how another Scotch regiment cleared a road for French artillery when German guns were preventing them from passing along it.