With our army in Flanders

9–29 April 1918

Battle of the Lys (1918)

CHAPTER I

Take the Scottish regiments, for instance. I have little acquaintance with the dialects of Scotland, but my ear has told me that the speech of almost every Scottish regiment, save such regiments as the Gordons and the Black Watch, that attract men from all over the United Kingdom, differs. I spent a most fascinating half-hour one morning with a handful of Glasgow newsboys serving in a famous Scottish regiment that wears the trews. Their speech was unmistakably the speech of the Glasgow streets, and their wits were as sharp as their bayonets. I told them they were newsboys, and newsboys they were, or of the same class, van-boys and the like. I visited the Cameron Highlanders--what was left of their Territorial battalion--after the second battle of Ypres, and heard, in the speech of Inverness-shire, their story of the battle. Many of them speak Gaelic. One of their officers confided to me that during the battle, requiring two men to go down to the rear, the wires being cut, to ascertain the whereabouts of the brigade headquarters, he selected two notorious deer poachers as likely to have their wits about them. How many poachers of the red deer of Sherwood or the New Forest were there not at Agincourt?

CHAPTER I

It is a gratifying task, this identification of dialects. I have heard two sappers “fra’ Wigan” engaged in a lively argument with two privates (from Cork) of the Leinster Regiment, in whose trench the two gentlemen “fra’ Wigan” were operating. A London cockney, say, from one of the innumerable battalions of the Royal Fusiliers, would have understood less of that conversation if it had been carried on in German, but only a little less. During the Battle of Ypres two privates of the Monmouthshire Regiment, who were talking Welsh, were pounced upon by two prowling Southerners from one of the Home Counties, and carried off to Brigade Headquarters as German spies. What with Welsh miners talking Welsh and Cameron Highlanders Gaelic, the broad speech of the Yorkshire _Geordies_, the homely burr of the 3rd Hussars and other regiments recruited in the West Country, the familiar twang of the cockneys, the rich brogue of the Irish regiments, the strong American intonation of the Canadians, a man out here begins to realize of what composite layers our race is formed.

CHAPTER I

Fortune, the fair goddess, has high jinks at the front. I wanted to find a relation of mine, a sergeant in a famous London regiment, and wrote to his people to get the number of his battalion and his company. When the reply came I discovered that the man I wanted was billeted not a hundred yards from me in the village, in which the War Correspondents’ Headquarters were situated, where he had come with the shattered remnant of his battalion to rest after the terrible “gruelling” they sustained in the second battle of Ypres. At the front one constantly witnesses joyous reunions, brother meeting brother in the happy, hazardous encounter of two battalions on the road or in the trenches. The very first man I met on coming out to the front was a motorcar driver whose father had particularly asked me to look out for his boy. I discovered that he was the man appointed to drive me!

CHAPTER III

Yet I have contrived to visit in person many corners of the battlefield of Ypres, sometimes a day or two after the great contest had raged itself out. On the _chaussée_ by the Yser Canal, north of Ypres, I have seen the humble graves, many of them nameless, in which the poor French victims of the first great gas attack were laid to rest, their rusting rifles and blood-stained uniform close at hand. I have stood in the emplacements of our guns about Ypres amid the putrefying carcasses of horses and piles of empty shell-cases. I have walked through trenches dug across the battlefield where, through fissures in the ground, one yet might see the dead, buried as they died, in uniform.