Later, along the position of the Aisne, the first battalion of the Guards were busy. On a certain Sunday afternoon the Guards and the Black Watch were in the thick of the fighting, and that night they were ordered to the trenches--and the Germans had the position of the trenches ranged to a nicety, so that they were able to drop shells with wicked precision all night. Next morning the German infantry retreated for a matter of a mile, uphill, and there waited for the inevitable advance of the Guards and the Black Watch. The retreat was a trap, for on the advance the two British battalions were subject to shell as well as rifle fire, and out of one section of fourteen men only one was left. This one, a corporal, was badly cut about the face, and had one knee severely damaged, but with a field dressing tied round his leg he remained in the firing line all day, going over to the Black Watch, since he had drifted too far away from his own battalion to rejoin it at once. "I had to stick it in the field all day," he says, "and the fighting was awful. The Germans had all their big guns firing at us, and we could not get our own guns up to fire back at them. I never expected to get out of it alive. Well, after lying half the night wet in the open, among the dead Germans and our own dead, I got strength enough to crawl back, and managed to find a hospital about twelve o'clock at night, nearly dead. I never got any sleep that night, but guess what the Germans did in the morning! They blew the hospital up in the air. I happened to be near the door, so I got away all right; but I got another bit in the back that flattened me out for awhile. I missed all the ambulances through this. The next carts that came along were the ammunition ones. The driver helped me on to the back of one, but I had hardly enough strength to hang on. The Germans shelled all these carts for miles, and the horses of the one I was on got hit with a shell, and I had not the strength to climb on to another one. The drivers were hurrying away for their lives, so I had to scramble along for two miles on my own to a big barn, which they called a field hospital."
And there the record ends. It makes a scrap of history of the Guards, though when the regimental histories of this war come to be written it will be found that such stories as these are only scraps of the whole, for the battles of the Aisne and of the coast do not mark the end.