V

So ended our share in the Big Push.  It was a very small episode, spread over quite a short period, in one of the biggest and longest battles in the history of the world.  It would have been easy to select a more showy episode, but hard to find a better illustration of the character of the men who took part in it.  The battle which began upon that grey September morning has been raging, as I write, for nearly three weeks.  It still surges backwards and forwards over the same stricken mile of ground; and the end is not yet.  But the Hun is being steadily beaten to earth. (Only yesterday, in one brief furious counter-attack, he lost eight thousand killed.) When the final advance comes, as come it must, and our victorious line sweeps forward, it will pass over two narrow, ill-constructed, shell-torn trenches.  In and around those trenches will be found the earthly remains of men—­Jocks and Jimmies, and Sandies and Andies—­clad in the uniform of almost every Scottish regiment.  That assemblage of mute, glorious witnesses marks the point reached, during the first few hours of the first day’s fighting, by the Scottish Division of “K(1).” Molliter ossa cubent.

There is little more to add to the record of those three days.  For yet another night we carried on—­repelling counter-attacks, securing the Hohenzollern, making sorties out of Big Willie, or manning the original front line parapet against eventualities.  As is inevitable in a fight of these proportions, whole brigades were mingled together, and unexpected leaders arose to take the place of those who had fallen.  Many a stout piece of work was done that night by mixed bands of kilties, flat-heads, and even cyclists, marshalled in a captured German trench and shepherded by a junior subaltern.

Finally, about midnight, came the blessed order that fresh troops were coming up to continue the attack, and that we were to be extricated from the melee and sent back to rest.  And so, after a participation in the battle of some seventy-two hours, our battered Division came out—­to sleep the sleep of utter exhaustion in dug-outs behind the railway line, and to receive, upon waking, the thanks of its Corps Commander.

VI

And here I propose (for a time, at least) to take leave of The First Hundred Thousand.  Some day, if Providence wills, the tale shall be resumed; and you shall hear how Major Kemp, Captain Wagstaffe, Ayling, and Bobby Little, assisted by such veterans as Corporal Mucklewame, built up the regiment, with copious drafts and a fresh batch of subalterns, to its former strength.

But the title of the story will have to be changed.  In the hearts of those who drilled them, reasoned with them, sometimes almost wept over them, and ultimately fought shoulder to shoulder with them, the sturdy, valiant legions, whose humorously-pathetic career you have followed so patiently for fifteen months, will always be First; but alas! they are no longer The Hundred Thousand.