xpected
British columns and drifted across the shining August fields. The 2nd
battalion--the 1st was still in India--tramped cheerily on its way. To
no one then was there revealed that dreary vista of trenches that was to
be war to the mind of the modern soldier.

II

_The First Shock of War_

Mons and the 23rd of August saw The Royals in action. With other
battalions they occupied the Mons salient, actually the point on which
the torrent of war first broke and for a brief moment spent itself. On
that still night it seemed to hang suspended as a great wave does
before falling. As the battalion lay in the shallow trench the pregnant
silence was at last broken by the high, clear call of a bugle, one
single long note, indescribably eerie and menacing, and then the
listening men heard the rustling tread of feet moving through the grass
with a steady, regular, ominous advance. The might of Germany was on the
move, and still the thin brown line lay tense and silent, until only
forty paces separated the two. Then, at a word, The Royals' line broke
into a storm of flame which swept the line of the advancing men as a
scythe sweeps through the corn; and for the British infantry the great
war had begun.

Mons was a victory; the German advance was held up temporarily. But all
night the British troops were being withdrawn. It was after five in the
morning before The Royals got their orders to move, and 'A' Company
claims to be the last of the British army to leave Mons. But Le Cateau
was another story. Here our men learned what the concentrated fire of
artillery could be. The shallow trenches were obliterated; our gunners,
hopelessly outclassed in weight and number of pieces, could do little,
in spite of the greatest gallantry, to protect the infantry; and that
the army was able to withdraw at all was a striking proof of its stern
discipline. Audencourt was a shambles. Colonel McMicking, wounded near
this village and left behind, as all the wounded who were unable to walk
had to be, was hit again while being carried out of the blazing church.
The command devolved on Major, now Brigadier-General, Duncan. From this
time onwards the German guns had the range of the roads, and such a
superiority of fire that they could do almost as they pleased. The
infantry, at first furious at the necessity of retreat, turned again and
again--as did the guns--on their pursuers, but even so the pressure was
perilously near breaking point. The en