“Some of us feel very strongly about being sent home for scratches that will heal,” writes Corporal A. Hands. “Don’t believe half the stories about our hardships. I haven’t seen or heard of a man who made complaint of anything. You can’t expect a six-course dinner on active service, but we get plenty to fight on.”
Cases of personal pluck were so common that we soon ceased to take notice of them, a wounded driver in the Royal Artillery told an interviewer. “There was a man of the Buffs, who carried a wounded chum for over a mile under German fire, but if you suggested a Victoria Cross for that man he would punch your head, and as he is a regular devil when roused the men say as little as they can about it. He thinks he didn’t do anything out of the common, and doesn’t see why his name should be dragged into the papers over it. Another case I heard of was a corporal of the Fusilier Brigade--I don’t know his regiment--who held a company of Germans at bay for two hours by the old trick of firing at them from different points, and so making them think they had a crowd to face. He was getting on very well until a party of cavalry outflanked him, as you might say, and as they were right on top of him there was no kidding about his ‘strength,’ so he skedaddled, and the Germans took the position he had held so long. He got back to his mates all right, and they were glad to see him, for they had given him up for dead.”
“No regiment fought harder than we did, and no regiment has better officers, who went shoulder to shoulder with their men,” says a non-commissioned officer of the Buffs, writing from hospital, “but you can’t expect absolute impossibilities to be accomplished, no matter how brave the boys are, when you are fighting a force from twenty to thirty times as strong. If some of you at home who have spoken sneeringly of British officers could have seen how they handled their men and shirked nothing you would be ashamed of yourselves. We are all determined when fit again to return and get our own back.”
Everywhere you find that the one cry of the soldiers who are invalided home--they are impatient to be cured quickly and get back “to have another slap at them.” We know how our women here at home share that eager enthusiasm in this the most righteous war Britain has ever gone into; and isn’t there something that stirs you like the sound of a trumpet in such a passage as this from the letter a Scottish nun living in Belgium has written to her mother?