December 13, 1917 
LAINU & WATER 
11 
The Old Guard 
By Centurion 
" Noire armce avail reciuilli les invalides dc la grandc armee 
ft lis mouraicnt dans nos bras, en nous laissanl ic souvenir 
de Icurs caractcrcs primitifs ct singulicrs. Ccs homines 
nous ptiniissaienl les resles d'une race i^ii^antesque (jiii 
s'elcignail hommc par liommc el pour toujours " — Dc Vigny. 
THIS is a plain talc — the tale of a West-country 
regiment and how it carried on in the first three 
months of the war. It is the regiment with a hole 
in its soup-tureen, bi;t I'll tell that story another day. 
They went into the first battle of Ypres with four companies ; 
thcv came out of it at the end of twenty-one days with rather 
less than two. During those three weeks they never took 
their boots off, but one of their officers believes he once had 
a wash. 
But I must go back a bit. Their transport cast off her 
Tioorings and cleared a certain harbour on August 14th, 
[914, at the going down of the sun. The quays were black 
with crowds who had come to wish them God-speed, but 
as the ship backed away the drum-fire of cheering which 
followed them suddenly fell to a dead silence, and the spec- 
tators held their breath ; the stern of the great ship was 
ivithin a hair's breadth of crashing into the bows of another. 
The captain ran to the telegraph, .^t the same moment a 
clear tvnoT voice from among the crowd of men on deck 
broke into a song ; with the second note the whole battali(jn 
took it up, singing \'ery softly and in perfect time. The 
.^ong rolled away from the ship,' echoed against the tall ware- 
houses oii the quay and died away upon the upper reaches of 
the river. It was " Tipper^ry." The crowd listened in 
silence, hanging upon every note ; a woman sobbed hysterically ; 
the waters churned with the thrash of the propelloi, and 
slowly the transport as she answered her helm described a 
irreat arc until her bows were pointing towards the open sea. 
bhe glided down the river amidst a flutter of handkerchiefs, 
and the subdued cheers of people who had suddenly grown 
thoughtful. They watched her in silence as she diminished 
to the size of a ship's buoy, faded into a wreath of smoke, and 
finally sank below the red horizon. 
Within a week they were at Mons, and on a Sunday afternoon 
inider a blazing sun, they found themselves on the "far side of 
the canal where they put out outposts and dug themselves in. 
As they watched the white road in front of them, small patrols 
of men in field-grey uniforms suddenly appeared upon it 
and, not liking the look of them, scuttled back. At four 
o'clock a solid mass of the enemy advanced towards a point 
which the battalion had carefully ranged on — to be precise, 
it was ' 500 ' ; the battalion lay very still, each man with his 
eye on the sights of his rifle and his finger on the trigger, 
looking back occasionally at the platoon commanders wlio were 
standing up behind them, which is a way platoon commanders 
liad in those days. There was a shrill whistle, a crackle of 
musketry, and amidst spurts of dust the grey mass ahead 
of them suddenly dissolved like smoke. The remnant of a 
German battahon fell back in disorder, and told a strange talc 
of the English " swine-dogs " having massed some hundred 
machine-guns on a front of a few hundred yards. The enemy 
lielieved that story for quite a long time, until they discovered 
that they were up against the finest marksmen in the world. 
After that they were busy, learning many things — among 
others not to put their heads up.and that this wasn't manoeuvres 
after all. Of the next ten days they have no very clear re- 
collection, except that they "lost nearly everything except 
their wits, their horses and first-line transport having been 
badly " strafed " at Le Cateau. They beat all records in 
somnamljulism, init when the Germans trod on their toes at 
Crepy tlK^y suddenly showed themselves most disagreeably 
wide awake. This, I think, was also on a Sunday, and long 
after that the men would bet any odds ever>' Saturday night 
on there being quite a big " scrap " the next day. 
During those days they led a vagabond life, quite unlike 
anything they had ever known in banacks. It was very 
much to the taste of Private John Yeoman, the black sheep 
of the regiment, whose conduct-sheet covered six pages of 
flimsy. " No guard room, no orderly room, no morning 
parade — a bit of allright." Yeoman has succeeded where 
ambitious men of letters have failed; he has described the 
Great Retreat in a single sentence. 
On the third Sunday at Tournan they quite forgot them- 
selves on parade when the CO. read out a Brigade Order, of 
which they only heard the first three words : " Army is 
advancing...." The rest, which does not matter, "^was 
inaudible, and Yeoman threw his cap into the air. He was 
always a little premature. 
The next thing they knew was that they were picking up 
the trail. They followed a hot scent and pungent — the aslics 
of the enemy's bivouacs were still warm and they stank 
like dung-heaps. Yeoman, who had often incurred extra 
latigues and pack-drill for appearing " dirty on parade," 
drew the line at offal and broken bottles, and he wondered 
what kind of enemy it was who could smash a child's 
toys and throw them into tlie street. There were other 
things at which he drew the line ; it was near Fere-en- 
Tardenois, and the mother who had given him a glass 
of vin rouge showed him the body of her little daughter, 
with whom the Prussians had done their worst. Yeoman 
was a hard nut, but he wept. He emptied his pockets 
on to the table and bolted. They had halted there, and this 
made him late in falling in, for which he got " crimed " to 
the tune of three days' P.P. No. i. He did not think it 
worth while to e.xplain. 
During those days they spent most of the time dodging 
in and out of thick beechwoods and climbing steep 
chalk cliffs, driving the Germans, who were uncommonly 
strong on the wing, before them like a line of beaters. They 
were advanced-guard and had >to feel their way, with the 
result that they got into a very hot c^orner where they were 
held up by German wire and badly enfiladed. It was here 
that \'eoman lost his pal ; ha\ing no crape he blacked 
the second button of his tunic and made certain re- 
solutions, which may account for his getting the D.C.M. — ■ 
but that comes later. The sun was very hot and the. German 
dead lay where they had fallen some days before ; and for the 
first time he realised the meaning of the words he had as a boy 
often heard in the jjarish church, before he fell from grace 
and went " mouching " on the Sabbath, words about a " cor- 
ruptible bod)'." He began to associate war with beastlj' s.mells. 
Most of the time he lay very flat on his stomach, clicking his 
bolt and emptying the magazine ; at intervals he heard the 
order "Cease Pire ] Advance," whereupon he advanced 
in short rushes and again lay on his stomach with his cap on 
the back of his neck to keej) off the sun. He had a most 
amazing thirst, and sighed often for a pint of bitter. It was 
at this stage that he realised that the wants of man are really 
very simple, and although artificially multiplied by civilisation 
may be reduced to four : — Cover, Drink, Victuals and Sleep ; 
later, in ITanders, he found tiiere was a fifth, whicli was 
Warmth. \\'omen he had' always regarded as a lu.xury an'.l 
unattainable, and on the last sheet of his Pay-book, opposite 
his M.O.'s certificate that his inoculation was complete, 
and below the words " IN THE EVENT ' OP MY 
DEATH I GIVE THE WHOLE OP MY PROPERTY 
.\ND EFFECTS TO " he had written " Hannah 
Honey, whom I hereby appoint my next-of-kin," which was 
magnanimous, seeing that Hannah had refused him thrice. 
He sometimes wondered whether she knew about his conduct 
sheet. He did not know that it was Hannah who, recognising 
the. tenor voice when he struck up " Tipperary " on the 
transport, had sobbed hysterically, for -with all his faults, 
which were many, he was a simple soul and had a very poor 
opinion of himself which he felt sure was shared by the whol c 
battalion. 
He did not know that his C.O.'s sense of values 
was also undergoing a revision, and that just as Yeoman 
had discovered that on active service there were only four 
'wants, so his CO. had discovered there were only four virtues 
— truthfulness, courage, fortitude and unselfishness. All 
these Yeoman had, and although he did not know it, there 
were some who were beginning to take note of the fact. 
On the night of September 9th, having run clean out of 
ammunition, they withdrew three-quarters of a mile, and the 
platoon sergeant called tlie roll ; there were many who never 
answered it. Here they learnt for the first time that there had 
been a big " battle " and, with sorte astonishment, that 
they had been in it. The men themselves called it a " scrap"; 
and as it did not happen to fall on a Sunday they stuck 
stoutly to the opinion that it was a very minor affair. They 
were told later that it will be known to future generations as 
" The Battle of the Marnc," but in the battalion it is always 
referred to as 'the scrap at Montrool.' "The place where 
I got stopped all them days' pay for losing my pack " gave 
it the dignity of history in the opinidn of John Yeoman. 
Up to this time the enemy, being in a hurry, had only got 
his field-guns in action, and they had encountered little 
but shrapnel, which, although surprisingly indiscriminate 
and deadly enough, is nothing like so intimidating as lyddite 
and much cleaner. Most of the men were under the impression, 
difficult to explain and hard to eradicate, that big guns were 
a private alYair between opposing batteries ; as Yeoman put 
it. " it bain't ' warfare,' " to use iK'uvy guns against infantry. 
