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There was a Scotch Countess of Buchan, who is carrying a pure rosy vulgar face to heaven, and who asked Miss Rich, if that was the author of the poets. I believe she meant me and the "Noble Authors." The Bedfords came last night. Lord Chatham was with me yesterday two hours; looks and walks well, and is in excellent political spirits. STRAWBERRY HILL, July 20, 1767.
Our 12th Division was ordered to drive them out a division of English county troops, including the Sussex, Essex, Bedfords, and Middlesex and those country boys of ours fought their way among communication trenches, burrowed into tunnels, crouched below hummocks of earth and brick, and with bombs and bayonets and broken rifles, and boulders of stone, and German stick-bombs, and any weapon that would kill, gained yard by yard over the dead bodies of the enemy, or by the capture of small batches of cornered men, until after seventeen days of this one hundred and forty men of the 3rd Prussian Guard, the last of their garrison, without food or water, raised a signal of surrender, and came out with their hands up.
On many occasions working parties toiled with pick and shovel within talking distance of one another, and, although it was, of course, never safe to presume upon immunity, they usually forbore to interfere with one another. The Bedfords and the South Staffords worked in broad daylight with their bodies half exposed above the trenches, raising the parapet as the water rose.
The road along the canal and through Mareuil is the one over which the German cavalry would have advanced had von Kluck's army succeeded in crossing the Marne at Meaux, and it was patrolled and guarded by the Yorkshire boys on September 2, and the Bedfords from the night of the 3d to the morning of the 5th.
Personal offence I have given them none. The part they take against me is from zeal to the cause. It is well, it is perfectly well. I have to do homage to their justice. I have to thank the Bedfords and the Lauderdales for having so faithfully and so fully acquitted towards me whatever arrear of debt was left undischarged by the Priestleys and the Paines.
In the attempt to dissolve all parties, Pitt met with some difficulties. Some Whigs, whom the court would gladly have detached from Lord Rockingham, rejected all offers. The Bedfords were perfectly willing to break with Grenville; but Pitt would not come up to their terms. Temple, whom Pitt at first meant to place at the head of the treasury, proved intractable.
The administration which he had formed had never been, at any one moment, entirely changed. But there had been so many losses and so many accessions, that he could scarcely recognize his own work. Charles Townshend was dead. Lord Shelburne had been dismissed. Conway had sunk into utter insignificance. The Duke of Grafton had fallen into the hands of the Bedfords.
The British dashed forward until they were in range of the machine guns. Then they suffered such severe losses that they were forced to retreat, even though they had almost taken the inviting German trenches. The Highlanders and the Bedfords had made a gallant charge and felt especially humiliated to have to withdraw when victory was about to perch on their banners.
British trenches had been driven close to this hill by the Bedfords, whose sappers tunneled under the mound and there prepared three mines. At the same time the Germans were tunneling to plant mines under the Bedfords' trench.
And this brigade was not the Guards Brigade. There were no picked men in the brigade. It contained just four ordinary regiments of the line the Norfolks, the Bedfords, the Cheshires, and the Dorsets. What the 15th Brigade did, other brigades have done. Now little has been heard of this fighting round La Bassée in October, so I wish I could tell you about it in more detail than I can.
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