The same man tells of "a low, dirty trick" that the Germans played in the course of this fight. Some of them put up a white flag, and when about fifty of the Warwickshires went out to take the surrendered men they opened fire with a machine gun and slaughtered the Warwicks. "That is the kind of warfare the Germans like to carry on."
Thus runs the account of the 13th of September, and on the following day, according to several accounts received, the colonel of the regiment, Colonel Sir Evelyn Bradford, was killed--he has since been mentioned in dispatches. The most circumstantial account is as follows:
"It was in the battle of the Aisne, when the Seaforths had taken up a position near a wood, that the Germans began a heavy fire. The colonel was standing with two other officers surveying the field of operations, when he was struck by a shell and killed instantly. A lieutenant of the Gordons, who was attached to the battalion, was killed, and a number of the men were struck and wounded--in all, there were about thirty wounded by the one explosion. They attempted to bury the colonel the same night, but were prevented from their task by the heavy and continuous shell-fire from the enemy." At about nine in the evening, however, a burial party set out to lay the dead commander to rest up on the face of a hill, near a large farmhouse which was the headquarters of the force for the time. "Poor Colonel Bradford!" comments a member of the party; "I cannot tell you how great our loss is. He was a brave commander, and was killed while trying to safeguard his regiment. We could not fetch his body in while daylight lasted, but at midnight we laid him, with two other officers, to rest on their field of honour, on a hill-side overlooking a valley of the river. It was a sad but glorious moment for us to stand and hear the padre tell us that they had not shrunk from their duty, and had fallen for the sake of their comrades. The next day I found some Scotch thistle growing close by, and I plucked the blooms to form a cross over the dead chieftain's grave."
Concerning this action of the 14th of September, another participant tells that the British troops were steadily driving the Germans back, and the company of the Seaforths to which he belonged had crossed the river two days before, and were holding a ridge, though the enemy had a great advantage in point of numbers. This man sent home a transcript of a German officer's diary, which makes very interesting reading.