I blazed away as hard as I could, but an aeroplane on the wing is not an easy thing to hit. Whether I struck the machine or not I can’t say, but it came down in the road just where my company was. As far as I know the aeroplane was not struck--the chap that was in it planed down. He was determined not to be caught cheaply, for as soon as he landed he fired his petrol tank to destroy his machine, and then ran for it. He went off at a hard lick, but some of our cavalry rushed after him and caught him, and it was found that he was not hurt.
Just on our right was a railway, with a big cutting, and we were ordered to retire down into it; so into the cutting we got and along the line we went, retreating all that day by the railway and the roads, our gunners giving the Germans socks throughout that hard rearguard action.
On the Tuesday we were still retreating, and a miserable day it was, with a deluge of rain that soaked us to the skin. We reached a village and slept in barns, and a good sleep we got, without the trouble of undressing or drying our clothes or taking our boots off.
Early on the Wednesday morning the pickets quietly roused and warned us again, and we went out in front of the village and entrenched.
There was a big lot of coal-mines in front of us, about a mile away, with the refuse-heaps that are common to mines. Behind one of these great mounds a battery of German artillery had got into position, and one of the finest things you could have seen was the way in which our own grand gunners got on the Germans. They seemed to have found the range of the enemy exactly, and that was a good job for us, because the German shells were dropping just between us and our own artillery, and we expected to have them bang on us. But our guns silenced our opponents, and, what was more, scattered a lot of German infantry, about 1,500 yards away, who were making for us.
We got straight into our trenches, and in this respect we were lucky, because we went into one that the Engineers had made, while most of the other companies had to dig their own.
Our trench was in a cornfield. The corn had been cut down, and we spread it and other stuff in front of the trenches, on top of the earth, to make us invisible. From that queer hiding-place we resumed our blazing away at the pursuing Germans.