"I should judge that, altogether, we retreated quite eighty miles. We passed through Cambrai, and halted at St. Quentin; the Germans, straining every nerve in the effort to get to Paris, had never been far behind us, and when we came to St. Quentin we got the word that we were to go into action again--and the men of the battalion were quite joyous at the prospect, for they had been none too well pleased at the continued retirement from the enemy. They started to get things ready with a will, and the engagement opened in lively fashion, both our artillery and the German going at it for all they were worth. We were in good skirmishing order, and under cover of our guns we kept on getting nearer and nearer to the enemy, till, when we were about a hundred yards of the German lines, orders were issued for a charge, and the Black Watch charged at the same time that the Scots Greys did. Not far from us the 9th Lancers and the Cameronians joined in the attack, and it was the finest sight I ever saw." The writer continues with a description of the charge, in which, he says, the men of the Black Watch hung on to the stirrup-leathers of the Greys and went through machine-gun fire on to the German lines, and thence through to the guns of the enemy. "There were about 1,900 of us in that charge against 20,000 Germans, and the charge itself lasted about four hours. We took close upon 4,000 prisoners, and captured a lot of their guns. In the course of the fighting I got a cut from a German sword--they are very much like saws--and fell into a pool of water, where I lay unconscious for nearly a day and night. I was picked up by one of the 9th Lancers." There the story ends. It is circumstantial and well borne out by other accounts of the doings of the Black Watch up to the time of St. Quentin, but one fears to accept the story of that charge in its entirety. If the men of the Black Watch advanced to within a hundred yards of the enemy under cover of their own artillery, then where did the Greys come from? For surely no artillery ever kept on firing at the enemy until _cavalry_ were within a hundred yards of their objective in a charge. It is curious, too, but this is the only account that has come to hand--the only personal account of a participator--with regard to that charge of the Greys with Black Watch men hanging on to their stirrup-leathers. The story is given as told, for what it is worth.