The Black Watch: A Record in Action

On a day in February, 1916--a week prior to the sailing of the S.S. _Tuscania_, on which I had taken passage to the United States--I had left the office of the Anchor Line and w...

As we neared Pinon, the sound of artillery fire could be heard, and the inhabitants were all leaving the town in any way that they could. Here I saw further effects of Prussian...

We had very little rest after the fight I have just described. We were getting down to the real business of war. It was fighting, and not the incessant retreating, which had bee...

I seemed to awake from a long sleep, only to discover that instead of being in a trench or a billet I was in a hospital; one of the kind made of canvas. There were two great mar...

Most of the time while we were dragging our exhausted, diminishing numbers ahead of the German wave of shot and steel, I was on scout duty. For a while, I was "connecting file"...

Our trenches were pretty effective against rifle fire, but we had not yet learned to make them deep and narrow enough in proportion to protect us against shrapnel, which is not...

As we--the other scouts and I--advanced, firing details, which had been left behind under close cover by the Germans, did a good deal of execution amongst us. The hay-stacks, pa...

No doubt, if I had been trained in writing rather than in the tactical requirements for service in the British army, I should call this the appendix of my book. I prefer not to...

After the first dressing of my wound, I was sent to our transport station, a short distance behind the lines, being told that in a few days I would be fit for duty again. There...

It was still morning when it was reported by one of our look-out men, who had been scanning the boche lines with a pair of field glasses (only his head showing above the top of...

Our regiment was now shifted from the position where the Germans had tried to drown us out to another section near a place which we afterwards christened "The Glory Hole." The G...

For more than two years now, I have been trying to forget those first months of the war. The months when the Black Watch and other regiments of the immortal "contemptible little...

After spending a few more days in this last, very warm position, we moved to billets a little way off behind our left flank, and we certainly needed the rest. There was no indic...

I had about got settled in the stable where I was billeted, when orders came to "stand to." No more sleep that night. We took the road and left La Grange behind us just as the s...

We were by no means well acquainted with our new position, and one night shortly after our arrival, two of the men who had been sent out to reconnoitre, were captured by the ene...

For a day or two after this we had comparative quiet. Only bursts of shell fire threatened us, but these were so common as to be hardly noticed. The stench of the dead was terri...