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Updated: June 12, 2025
A wounded soldier, on being brought back to the hospital at Paris, after only one week in the valley of the Aisne, said in a dazed sort of way: "Each day was like the others. It began at 6 o'clock in the, morning with heavy shellfire. There was a short interval at which it stopped, about 5:30 every day. Then in the night came the charges, and one night I couldn't count them.
On the Aisne front during July 31, 1917, there was violent artillery fighting south of La Royère; the French had won all their objectives and more. The German advanced trenches were filled with dead and the French captured 210 prisoners.
An Irish Guardsman records a white flag incident during the fighting on the Aisne: "Coldstreamers, Connaughts, Grenadiers, and Irish Guards were all in this affair, and the fight was going on well. Suddenly the Germans in front of us raised the white flag, and we ceased firing and went up to take our prisoners.
On into Acy, where I decided to head off the Division at Ciry, instead of crossing the Aisne and riding straight to Vailly, our proposed H.Q. for that night. The decision saved my life, or at least my liberty. I rode to Sermoise, a bright little village where the people were actually making bread. At the station there was a solitary cavalry man. In Ciry itself there was no one.
With Sir Charles Stuart's dispatches cut out of the Macclesfield Paper we ascended the Cathedral, and from thence, as upon a map, traced out the operations of both armies. Soissons is half surrounded by the Aisne, and stands on a fine plain, upon which the Russians displayed.
The left center of the attacking force was under the command of the Duke of Württemberg and extended across the whole southern end of the plain of Champagne to the upper streams of the Aisne south of St. Menhould. The extreme left of this advanced line was the army of the Imperial Crown Prince, holding the old line on the Argonne to the south of Verdun.
Thence, curling towards the east, and skirting the River Aisne and the famous city of Reims where the vandals who had destroyed Louvain and many another city had long since wrecked the Cathedral, famous throughout the world their line swept on over hill and dale, and hollow and furrow, across chalky plains and wooded heights and forest country to Verdun that famous city which for centuries has been a stronghold.
Up till now the booty captured in this battle includes fifty cannon and some thousands of prisoners. "West of Verdun the army is engaged in an advancing battle. In Lorraine and the Vosges district the situation is unchanged." This seems to be all that the German nation has heard from official sources of the German defeat on the Marne and the hurried retreat to the Aisne.
Private Fairweather, of the Black Watch, gives this account of an engagement on the Aisne: "The Guards went up first and then the Camerons, both having to retire. Although we had watched the awful slaughter in these regiments, when it was our turn we went off with a cheer across 1,500 yards of open country. The shelling was terrific and the air was full of the screams of shrapnel.
He gave me a vivid account of the campaign. He had been through everything, the retreat from Mons, the Battle of the Aisne, the great rush north, and the Battle of Neuve Chapelle on the 17th of March. I listened, fascinated, to his tale, which he told with a true soldier's impersonal modesty. "I was glad," said I, after a while, "to see you twice mentioned in dispatches." Mrs.
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