en he was brought down. He was seen
from the other trenches, and half a dozen men ran to his aid.
They were all shot; but the man with the message was now
crawling towards the battalion in danger. With assistance he
reached them and the object was gained; they were withdrawn to a
new position before the Germans succeeded in their plan of
cutting them off."

By August 29th the British had fallen back to the line
Compiegne-Soissons, before the German hordes. The weather generally
was intensely hot, making the retreat still more trying to the Army.
The situation was further complicated by the flight southwards of
almost the entire population, thronging and blocking the roads. When
the British fell back the inhabitants had just commenced the saving of
the harvest which, undreaming of war, they had tended with solicitude
and saw growing with joy. But the corn and grass were to be garnered
by a dissolute and predatory foreign soldiery whose hands, in many
instances, were red with the innocent blood of those who had sown
them. So, accompanied by tens of thousands of fugitives--wailing women
and children for the most part, distracted by the dread and terror of
this calamity which had so incomprehensibly fallen upon them--the
British hastened on towards Paris.

On Tuesday, September 1st, the 4th Guards Brigade--Grenadiers,
Coldstreams, and Irish--had to sustain at Villers-Cotterets the brunt
of another of these fierce onslaughts which the Germans delivered
against such of the British troops as attempted to stem the pursuit.
The Brigade had had little rest since the commencement of the retreat
with the enemy ever at their heels. Only the day before, August 31st,
the Irish Guards had the longest and most trying of their forced
marches. Hardy, wiry, and fleet-footed, they covered thirty-five miles
with very little food, as their transport had to keep far in advance
of the column to avoid capture. At a parade of the battalion on the
roadside at Villers-Cotterets on the morning of September 1st, the
commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Morris, addressing them on
horseback, congratulated his men on their grit and vitality. He made
the very interesting statement that whilst a substantial percentage of
the other regiments in the Guards' Brigade had succumbed to the heat
and fatigue of the march, only five men of the Irish Guards had fallen
out from exhaustion.

Then all of a sudden, as the tale is told by P