The Durhams have done splendidly and suffered terribly, and many a chum of mine is sleeping with thousands more British soldiers on the battlefields of France and Belgium. A great many have been wounded, and of course there are a number of missing, mostly men, I dare say, who are prisoners of war.
I had been at sea before joining the army, and thought I knew something about roughing it; but even the North Sea in bad weather was nothing compared with the hardships of the retirement from Mons, and the living and sleeping in the trenches when the ground was sodden and deep in water.
Sometimes we were very short of food, and once for several days on end we were almost starving, because the supplies could not get up to us, and we had been forced to throw away a lot of our packs and things.
A good many of us had to carry a seven-pound tin of bully beef in addition to our heavy packs and a great many rounds of ammunition. In the fearfully hot weather we could not carry all this weight, and the tins of beef had to go. We should have been thankful for them later on, when we ran short and some of the beef we had with us had gone bad through the tins getting punctured, which happened in all sorts of strange ways, including bullet-holes and bayonet pricks. But these were things that couldn’t be helped, and in spite of them all we kept very cheerful, and often enough, both on the march and in the trenches and French forts, when we got to them, we sang and joked and whistled as if there was no such thing going on as war.
Our officers shared everything with us, and suffered just as we did, though often worse, so that whenever we got a bit downhearted, their example cheered us up and put us right. I don’t think there’s a man who’s fought in this great war who won’t say the same thing about his officers.
We had so much fierce fighting when the work really began, and saw so many strange and dreadful things, that it is not easy to say what stands out most clearly in our minds in such a business, but one of the things I do remember, and shall never forget, is the week or so we spent in one of the big French forts at Lille, fighting side by side with French soldiers. I will tell you about that later, but we did a lot before we got to Lille.