Soldiers’ Stories

Huntly Press and District Gazette, Volume 4, 29 January 1915, Page 3

Soldiers’ Stories

GALLANTRY OF OUR TROOPS.

The driver of a motor-am-bulance transport writes on November 10 :

j We are still going strong, and ! though the cars in our convoy | have suffered severely from shell fire, etc,., we lead a charmed life. The beautiful town we came to over three weeks ago is practically a ruin now. and blazing fires in every quarter. The “Jack Johnsons have done their work, but in spite of tbeir continued bombardment we have been and still are, successful in getting the wounded right through it to safer quarters ; a daeh past the blazing buildings, a sudden halt and rapid retreat to avoid a falling building, or a new “ Jack Johnson ” hole, is our hourly routine, relieved by dodging a shower of shrapnel or an aeroplane bomb, or extracting ourselves from a skid into the ditch. However, the last few trips have been comparatively quiet, only an occasional shell to liven us up. I shall really miss them when they cease to bombard us, as one gets so used to their whistle overhead, followed by a crash. I have great admiration for the - British

“ Tommy;” the more they hit him the longer he’ll stick it, and I think the Germans know it now ; but their big guns do play hell with them, and they seem to have endless ammunition. Our armoured trains (Samson’s K.N.‘ equipped with guns and manned by the Navy) have cone splendid work. If people at home only realised what a German invasion means they would sacrifice everything to avoid it. The . German spy system in this country is perfect, and I am baffled to know by what mysterious and rapid means they so quickly transmit their messages. The arrival of an ammunition column or reinforcement receives an immediate volley of shells, and at their departure they immediately cease. I don’t like passing civilians on the road at night, as one feels they are all spies, and I have good reason to suspect some of them. THE THIN KHAKI LINE.

An officer in the Army Service Corps writes : —You know, read ing the home papers —I could almost wish that a horde of these gentry could descend on old England's shores. I don’t think anything but that will ever arouse them to the awfulness of the thing that this thin (very very thin in some places) khaki line in the trenches out here is fighting hard to keep from them; and that very thin line is doing each day something that has never been equalled even by the thin red line of bygone days. I am not patting myself on the back, for my work dies behind the trenches, and I take off my hat to every mother’s son that is there. I should have thought that the recruits to the new army would have exceeded the second million by now, and yet they dod’t seem to have got the first completed yet. If they only took the youth of England on a personally-conducted "tour along our lines here so that they could realise what we are up against, I think they’d join in a body ; but, failing that, the best way to buck them up would be a hundred thousand Germans landing in England. I don’t suppose they’d get' very far, still they would bring home to tjie smug armchair brigade as nothing else ever will something at least of the awful way in which Belgium and part of France has suffered. Those who are out here are doing miracles. In the meantime, however confident one rqay be of the result, we are still a long way off that salvation, and the present battle, is still raging backward and forwards as fiercely as ever As you said in your other letter, tbe -old Scottish have done splendidly and, I am afraid, have lost rather heavily, but there isn’t one regiment in the firing line that is doing better than another ; they are all doing their best and a splendid best too. ,