This book is not a history, and I must leave the story of the Guards’ achievements in this war to an abler pen than mine. From the outset they have been in the very thick of the fighting. At Mons we find the famous Guards Brigade--2nd Grenadiers, 2nd and 3rd Coldstream and 1st Irish Guards--with the Second Division, and with the First Division the 1st Coldstream and the 2nd Scots Guards. With Sir Henry Rawlinson’s Seventh Division in Belgium--that splendidly gallant division of whose exploits in the early days of the war we heard so little--were the 1st Grenadiers and the 2nd Scots Guards. At Mons the Guards battalions played their part gallantly in beating back the desperate attempt of the Germans to overwhelm “French’s contemptible little army” with vastly superior numbers. No battle honour will figure more gloriously in years to come on the colours of the four battalions of the Guards Brigade than Landrecies. The magnificent stand which the brigade, under General Scott-Kerr, made in this little town averted a disaster and inflicted enormous losses on the enemy. The Germans delivered a surprise attack on the place in the mist and darkness of the night of August 25, hoping, by dint of tremendously superior numbers, to overwhelm the Guards and burst through our line. The Guards hastily improvised a defence, and throughout the night, through hours of bloody and desperate hand-to-hand fighting in the narrow streets, held their own. At last the Germans realized that the surprise had failed, and withdrew, leaving their dead piled up in ramparts on the cobblestones. With the rest of the British Army, sorely pressed and exhausted, but not beaten, the Guards fell back from Mons. We hear of the Guards Brigade again in the woods of Villers-Cotterets, fighting a desperate rear-guard action, engaged at close quarters, as they love to be. Here the Irish Guards, on active service for the first time in this war--and right gallantly have they acquitted themselves--lost their Colonel, Lieutenant-Colonel Morris, a man as brave as he was big. When fortune changed, and to the stern ordeal of the retreat and the bad news from Belgium succeeded the spirited pursuit of Von Kluck falling back baffled from Paris, once more we find the Guards in the centre of things. They fought in the battle of the Marne, and advanced with the rest of the army to the Aisne. Carrying out Sir John French’s historic order to “make good the Aisne,” the Guards Brigade had a stiff fight at Chavonne, but managed to cross the river at this place, after overcoming severe German resistance in the woods, by ferrying a battalion over the stream.