But There Seems To Have
Been No Thought Of Imminent Danger, And The Regiment Had Pitched
Its Tents And Gone Very Comfortably To Sleep Without A Thought Of
The Gentleman In The Tinted Glasses.
In the middle of the night he
was upon them with a hissing sleet of bullets.
At the first dawn
the guns opened and the shells began to burst among them. It was a
horrible ordeal for raw troops. The men were miners and
agricultural labourers, who had never seen more bloodshed than a
cut finger in their lives. They had been four months in the
country, but their life had been a picnic, as the luxury of their
baggage shows. Now in an instant the picnic was ended, and in the
grey cold dawn war was upon them - grim war with the whine of
bullets, the screams of pain, the crash of shell, the horrible
rending and riving of body and limb. In desperate straits, which
would have tried the oldest soldiers, the brave miners did well.
They never from the beginning had a chance save to show how gamely
they could take punishment, but that at least they did. Bullets
were coming from all sides at once and yet no enemy was visible.
They lined one side of the embankment, and they were shot in the
back. They lined the other, and were again shot in the back.
Baird-Douglas, the Colonel, vowed to shoot the man who should raise
the white flag, and he fell dead himself before he saw the hated
emblem.
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