England -- Fiction; Imaginary wars and battles -- Fiction
In the afternoon of Black Saturday, General von Fuechter, the
Commander-in-Chief of the German Army in England, took up his quarters,
with his staff, in the residence of the German Ambassador to the Court
of St. James in Carlton House Terrace, and, so men said, enjoyed the
first sleep he had had for a week. (The German Ambassador had handed in
his credentials, and been escorted out of England on the previous
Monday.)
Throughout the small hours of Saturday morning I was at work near
Romford as one of the volunteer bearers attached to Constance Grey's
nursing corps. That is one reason why the memory of the north of London
massacre will never leave me. One may assume that the German Army had no
wish to kill nurses, but, as evidence of the terrible character of the
onslaught on the poor defences of London, I may recall the fact that
three of our portable nursing shelters were blown to pieces; while of
Constance Grey's nurses alone five were killed and fourteen were badly
wounded.
Myself, I had much to be thankful for, my only wound being the ploughing
of a little furrow over the biceps of my right arm by a bullet that
passed out through the back of my coat. But a circumstance for which my
gratitude was more deeply moved was the fact that Constance Grey,
despite a number of wonderfully narrow escapes, was entirely uninjured.
The actual entry of General von Fuechter and his troops into London has
been so often described that nothing remains for me to say about that.
Also, I am unable to speak as an eye witness, since Constance Grey and
myself were among those who returned to London, in the rear of the
German troops, with the ambulances. The enemy's line of communications
stretched now from the Wash to London, and between Brentwood and London
there were more Germans than English. I believe the actual number of
troops which entered London behind General von Fuechter was under
forty-eight thousand; but to the northward, northeast, and northwest the
huge force which really invested the capital was spread in careful
formation, and amply provided with heavy artillery, then trained upon
central London from all such points as the Hampstead heights.
Although a formal note of surrender had been conveyed to General von
Fuechter at Romford, _after_ the annihilation of our entrenched troops,
occasional shots were fired upon the enemy as they entered London.
Indeed, in the Whitechapel Road, one of the General's aides-de-camp,
riding within a few yards of his chief, was killed by a shot from the
upper windows of a provision shop. But the German reprisals were sharp.
It is said that fifty-seven lives paid the penalty for the shooting of
that aide-de-camp. Several streets of houses in northeast London were
burned.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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