t been
through a tough wrestling match.

When we had counted up, we found that two company officers, Captain
Drummond and Captain Dalgleish, had been killed. We picked up about fifty
German rifles and broke them over the trunks of trees. Our casualties were
one hundred and fifty killed and only God knows how many wounded.

Our prisoners amounted to about one hundred and forty. Among them was a
man who had worked in London as a watchmaker. In very broken English, he
asked if he could get his job back if he were sent to London. We told him
that he would get a job all right, but that somebody else would see to the
watchmaking.

After capturing the crest, upon looking from the far side, we could see
great numbers of German cavalry and infantry in retreat. The plateau was
strewn with I should judge about five hundred dead bodies of the enemy.
Their horses that had been wounded were left behind--left to die. We let
go a few volleys of long-range fire to hurry the boches on their way.

CHAPTER SIX

We had very little rest after the fight I have just described. We were
getting down to the real business of war. It was fighting, and not the
incessant retreating, which had been sapping the life out of us for weeks.
You must remember, also, the weight that each man carried during all those
long wearisome retreats. Each of us had his heavily plaited kilt; his pack
containing great coat, flannel shirt, two pairs of socks, waterproof
sheet, extra shoes, and towel; his canteen, rifle, entrenching tool,
bayonet, and ammunition--the whole totalling ninety pounds weight.

Immediately after the fight, in shallow, narrow trenches, we began to bury
our dead. Before the work was finished, a detachment of Uhlans fired on
us, but one of our companies drove them across a rivulet and over the
crest of the next ridge.

One of our pipers--Dougall McLeod was his name--had lost his chum in the
fight. McLeod was a sentimental sort of chap, with little heart for the
work of killing. He was sitting on the ground fastening together a couple
of strips of wood to make a little cross for his chum's grave--or rather
his chum's share of the one long grave. The tears were trickling down his
grimy, bloody cheeks, and he wasn't ashamed of them, nor of the furrows
they cut in the caked dirt. It was just before he finished his work that
the Uhlans opened fire. McLeod threw the loose pieces of the cross to the
ground, and sprang to his place in the f