While advancing again we caught a column of Germans. Our brigade-major saw them and came tearing back and told us that they were about fourteen hundred yards to the left of us. Within ten minutes we had a firing line made and our artillery was in position as well. It was a grand sight to see our fellows running into the firing line smoking cigarettes, as cool as if they were doing a bit of skirmishing on training.
We gave the Germans about three hours’ hot firing, then a company went round to take the prisoners. The white flag had been shown, but we had not been allowed to take any notice of that until we were sure of our men, because the Germans had so often made a wrong use of the signal of surrender. When the company got round to the Germans it was found that they had already thrown down their rifles. Our brigade took about 500 prisoners, and the rest we handed over to the 1st Division. The Germans had about a mile and a half of convoy, which got away; but the French captured it in the evening, and so made a very nice little complete victory of the affair.
At that time, early in the war, the Germans thought they were going to have it all their own way, and they considered that any trick, white flag or otherwise, was good enough. So certain were they about victory that in one village we passed through we saw written on a wall, in English, evidently by a German, “We will do the tango in Paris on the 13th.” We laughed a good deal when we read that boast, and well we might, for it was on the 13th that we saw the writing on the wall, and the Germans by that time were getting driven a long way back from the French capital.
On the Monday morning we went out as flank guard on the Aisne, and were going along behind some hills when our captain spotted swarms of Germans coming up over a ridge about twelve hundred yards away. He ordered two platoons to go out and line the ridge, and for the ridge we went. When we reached it, our captain told us that not a man was to show his head over the ridge until he gave the word to fire.
The Germans came on, getting nearer and nearer, in dense masses, and it was the hardest thing in the world not to let fly at them. They advanced till they were about seven hundred yards away, then we showed them what British rifles could do. We simply went for them, and our rifles got so hot that we could scarcely hold them. Despite that awful hail of bullets the Germans came on, and hurled themselves against us till they were not more than a hundred yards away; then we wanted to charge them, and begged to be let loose with the bayonet, but our captain told us that there were not enough of us to do it. So we retired to our own battalion, the whole of which had the joy of going for them. But the Germans didn’t wait for us. They don’t like the British steel, and when we had pushed them right back, without actually getting at them, they cleared off.