It is really very difficult to reconstruct this fight. I think every man's attention was fixed like iron on doing his own job, otherwise they would all have noticed more. I carry in my mind a number of very vivid pictures-Desmond on his horse, Valentine and I discussing fatalism, the C.O. smoking cigarettes in the cinema holders that I had bought for him a few days before.
As I lay on the stretcher a jarring thought came to me. I had in my pocket the flat-nosed bullets which the War Office had served out to us as revolver ammunition. They are not dum-dum bullets, but they would naturally not make as pleasant a wound as the sharp-nosed ones, and it occurred to me that those having them would be shot. I searched my pockets and flung mine away. I did not discover one which remained and was buried later on,-but neither did the Germans. It was first hearing German voices close by that jogged my memory about these bullets, and the Germans were then so close that I felt some difficulty in throwing the bullets away. The same idea must have occurred to others, for later I heard the Germans speaking very angrily about the flat bullets they had picked up in the wood, and saying how they would deal with any one in whose possession they were found.
The glades became resonant with loud, raucous German commands and occasional cries from wounded men. After about an hour and a half, I suppose, a German with a red beard, with the sun shining on his helmet and bayonet, came up looking like an angel of death. He walked round from behind, and put his serrated bayonet on the empty stretcher by me, so close that it all but touched me. The stretcher broke and his bayonet poked me. I enquired in broken but polite German what he proposed to do next; after reading the English papers and seeing the way he was handling his bayonet, it seemed to me that there was going to be another atrocity. He was extraordinarily kind and polite. He put something under my head; offered me wine, water and cigarettes. He said: "Wir sind kamaraden." Another soldier came up and said: "Why didn't you stay in England-you who made war upon the Boers?" I said: "We obeyed orders, just as you do; as for the Boers, they were our enemies and are now our friends, and it is not your business to insult wounded men." My first friend then cursed him heartily, and he moved on.
The Germans passed in crowds. They seemed like steel locusts. Every now and then I would hear: "Here is an officer who talks German," and the crowd would swerve in like a steel eddy. Then: "Schnell Kinder!" and they would be off. They gave a tremendous impression of lightness and iron. After some hours, when my wound was beginning to hurt, some carriers came up to take me to a collecting place for the wounded. These men were rather rough. They dropped me and my stretcher once, but were cursed by an officer. They then carried me some distance, and took me off the stretcher, leaving me on the ground. The Germans continued to pass in an uninterrupted stream. One motor cyclist, but with a bayonet in his hand, was very unpleasant. He said: "I would like to put this in your throat and turn it round and round," waving it down to my nose. That sort of thing happened more than once or twice, but there were always more friends than enemies, though as night fell the chance of being left without friends increased. As it grew dark, I got rather cold. One of the Germans saw this, covered me with his coat and said: "Wait a moment, I will bring you something else." He went off, and, I suppose, stripped a dead Englishman and a dead German. The German jersey which he gave me had no holes in it; the Englishman's coat had two bayonet cuts.
The wounded began to cry dreadfully in the darkness. I found myself beside Robin, who was very badly wounded in the leg. The Germans gave me water when I asked for it, but every time I drank it made me sick. At, I suppose, 9.30 or 10 p.m. they took us off into an ambulance and carried us to a house that had been turned into a hospital. I was left outside, talking to a Dane who was very anti-German, though he was serving with them as a Red Cross man. He cursed them loudly in German. He said it was monstrous that I hadn't been attended to, that the Germans had had a defeat and would be beaten. I said: "Yes, it's all true, but please stop talking, because they'll hear you and punish me."
Just before 12 o'clock they carried me into the hospital on to the operating table, and dressed my wound quickly.
Then I was helped out to an outhouse and lay beside Robin. It was full of English and German wounded. They gave us one drink of water and then shut and locked the door and left us for the night. One man cried and cried for water until he died. It was a horrible night. The straw was covered with blood, and there was never a moment when men were not groaning and calling for help. In the morning the man next to Robin went off his head and became animal with pain. I got the Germans to do what was possible for him. I asked the Germans to let me out, and they helped me outside into a chair, and I talked to an officer called Brandt. He sent a telegram to the German authorities to say that Robin and I were lightly wounded, and asking them to let our families know. He would not let me pay. I would have liked to have done it for every one, but that wasn't possible. They took us away in an ambulance at about 11 o'clock. It was a beautiful September day, very hot indeed. The heat in the covered ambulance was suffocating, and Robin must have suffered horribly. He asked me the German for "quick," and when I told him, urged the Germans on. There were great jolts and....
At Viviers I found Shields, who said to me: "Hullo, you wounded, and you a volunteer, too?"-as if a volunteer ought to be immune from wounds. We were carried upstairs and told that Valentine and Buddy, whom I had last met under the cedars, were in the same hospital. Valentine had the point of his elbow shot away just after I had left him. He raised his hand to brush a wasp off his neck, and only remembered pitching forward when a bullet struck his elbow. He woke up in a pool of blood. A German came up and took the flask of brandy that I had given him after my visit to Soissons. He gave Valentine a drink, and then, when Valentine had said he did not want any more, swigged the whole of the rest off. It was enough to make two men drunk, solidly, for hours. Later, five Germans came up to Valentine and ragged him. One of them kicked him, but an officer arrived, took all their names, promised Valentine they should be punished, and attached an orderly to him for the night. Buddy was badly wounded in the back and arm. He found his servant in the church at Viviers. Then we all met at the house in Viviers. The doctors gave Robin and me a strong dose of morphia. That afternoon a German doctor, whose name was Hillsparck, came in and woke me. He gave me a gold watch with a crest on it, and a silver watch and a purse of gold (£8 in it). He said that a Colonel to whom the watch belonged had been buried close by in the village of Haraman, and asked me if I could say who he was. We heard that the Colonel had been killed, and I imagined it must have been him, but we could not tell, as apparently every single man of the seventy odd who had charged with him had been killed. The doctor left this watch with me. In the hospital we believed that the General of the Division, Monro, and also our own Brigadier, General Scott Kerr, were wounded, and that the Colonel and T. were killed; Hubert we knew was killed.
Our experiences on the field were all the same. We were all well treated, though occasionally we were insulted. In hospital an old ober-stadt was in command of the doctors. He was very good to us. The English doctors were W., in command, S. next, Rankin and Shields. They were all good doctors. W., Rankin and Shields were excellent fellows. Rankin, who has been killed since, himself wounded, was dressing the wounded on the field and was recommended for the V.C. Shields has been killed in the same way, and I believe would have been recommended but that his C.O. was also killed. They were both the best sort of man you can find.
After a couple of days I moved into Buddy and Valentine's room. A little way down the street there was the château, full of wounded Germans. Our men were carried there to be operated upon.
W. and the other doctors who went to help discovered that there were 311 wounded Germans as against 92 of our own, so we didn't do badly.
Every morning the German sentries used to come in and talk to us. My German and Buddy's was very weak, but we managed to get along all right. Downstairs those who were lightly wounded sat outside in the chairs they took from the house, in the sunny garden. It was a fairly luxurious house, with paper marked "F. H." I thought it was a girls' school, for the only books we could find were the Berger de Valence and Jules Verne. My side was painful the first few days. Then they cut me open and took out the bullet, which was all in bits. It was rather hard lines on the others to perform an operation in the room, but I felt much better after it. The food difficulty was rather acute. There was very little food, and what there was was badly cooked. We lived principally on things that S. called "chupatti"-thick, unleavened biscuits. The men began to give trouble. There was nobody in command of them. There was an ex-comedian who was particularly tiresome. We had to ask the Germans to punish one man for us. About the fourth day one of the orderlies escaped-Drummer McCoy. He passed for four days through the German lines, and on one occasion watched a whole Army Corps go by from the boughs of a tree. Then he found the French, who passed him...
