In scores of soldiers' letters we find references to the overwhelming numbers of the enemy. One young private wrote as follows to his father, who is a gardener: "You complained last summer, dad, of the swarm of wasps that destroyed your fruit. That will give you an idea of how the Germans came for us." Another man writes: "It looked as if we were going to be snowed under. The mass of men who came on was an avalanche, and every one of us must have been trodden to death, if not killed by shells or bullets, had not our infantry charged into them on the left wing, not five hundred yards from the trench I was in." A non-commissioned officer also refers to the odds against which our men struggled: "No regiment ever fought harder than we did, and no regiment has ever had better officers; they went shoulder to shoulder with their men. But you cannot expect impossibilities, no matter how brave the boys are, when one is fighting forces twenty to thirty times as strong." "They are more like flies," said another man: "the more you kill the more there seem to be."
[Illustration: Holding the Canal at Mons.
Here is the story of Lance-Corporal M'Auslan of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, who was fighting on the Mons-Condé line. He says: "I was up in the engagement before Mons on the Saturday. We marched thirty miles, and had an engagement with the enemy, and fought a rearguard action over twenty miles for twenty-four hours. The canal at Mons must be full of German dead now. We were working two nights to prevent them crossing the canal, and we mowed them down like corn. The D Company of our regiment was cut up in about ten minutes, and Captain Ross and Captain Young lost their lives. I was with Captain Ross when he got bowled over. It was not the rifle fire that hurt us--they could not hit us at fifty yards--but it was the shrapnel fire that caused the damage. The German big gun fire was good, but their rifle fire was rotten. The aeroplanes did all the piloting. They gave the Germans the range of our guns, and they shelled us pretty successfully; but we brought down two Zeppelins and an aeroplane in the first two days of the battle."
A _Times_ correspondent tells us that he was much impressed by the coolness and dash of our men, and their utter indifference to danger. "I shall never forget," he writes, "the admirable reply given by an English soldier, wounded in the hand, whom I found sitting by the roadside outside Mons, wearing an air of consternation. I began to talk to him, and asked him if his wound was hurting him. 'It's not that,' he said, with a doleful shake of the head, 'but I'm blessed if I haven't been and lost my pipe in that last charge!' I gave him mine, and he was instantly comforted."