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The German dead had been gathered into heaps like autumn leaves. They were soaked in petrol and oily smoke was rising from them.... That was after the retreat from Mons, and the French retreat along all their line, and the thrust that drew very close to Paris, when I saw our little Regular Army, the "Old Contemptibles," on their way back, with the German hordes following close.
But "I'm a poor man," said he, "and have to earn my living at my old job." "And what's that?" "I'm a music-hall artist," said Andrew. "You? Good Lord! I thought you had been a soldier all your life. One of the old contemptibles." "I enlisted as a private in the Grenadier Guards," smiled Andrew. "And came to be a General in a brass hat and now you're back on the stage. Somehow it doesn't fit.
It began to dawn on the most optimistic of us that the little British Army the Old Contemptibles hadn't gone to France on a holiday jaunt. The sternness of the hour was brought home to me by one obscure incident. Straggling across Trafalgar Square in mufti and commanded by a sergeant came a little procession of recruits. They were roughly dressed men of the navy and the coster class.
I cannot lay hands on a sketch of her, but the one reproduced at the head of this chapter will give some idea of her character. Take away one funnel and place it amid-ships, reduce her tonnage a little, and you have the Shushan to the life. This gallant little curiosity is no late conscripted product of the war. She is one of the pukka ships of the Navy in Mesopotamia one of the Old Contemptibles.
I'm coming to it at last: old Bob Halliday that's been through it from the beginning, one o' the Old Contemptibles, come down to be mothered and hushaby-baby'd by a blanky recruit, with the first polish hardly off his new buttons."
The first battles by the Old Contemptibles, down from Mons and up by Ypres, were defensive actions of rear guards holding the enemy back by a thin wall of living flesh, while behind the New Armies of our race were being raised.
I remembered how Von Kluck was trapped like a rat, in the couloir of the Ourcq, by the genius of Gallieni, and the glorious coöperation of General Manoury and the dear British "contemptibles" under General French. It was a desperate adventure that to try and take the Germans in the flank; and Gallieni's advisers told him there were not soldiers enough in his command to do it.
But against that these "Old Contemptibles" admit that they never in the old days fought under such favorable conditions, that here in this fight they were in better constructed and deeper trenches, that they were far better provided with machine-guns, and, above all, that they had never, never, never had such a magnificent backing from our guns, such a tremendous stream of shells helping to smash the attack.
That was after the retreat from Mons, the victory of the Marne, the early battles round Ypres, and the slaughter at Neuve Chapelle. The "Old Contemptibles" were an army of ghosts whose dead clay was under earth in many fields of France, but whose spirit still "carried on" as an heroic tradition to those who came after them into those same fields, to the same fate.
There were some of these "Old Contemptibles," as they proudly style themselves now, who said when it was all over, and they had time to think of anything but loading and firing a red-hot rifle, that this attack did not compare favorably with the German attacks of the Mons-Marne days, that it lacked something of the steadiness, the rolling majesty of power, the swinging stride of the old attacks; that it did not come so far or so fast, that beaten back it took longer to rally and come again, that coming again it was easier than ever to bring to a stand.
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