Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 21, 2025
It was Canadian troops who broke the hitherto unbreakable Wotan line, or Drocourt-Queant switch; it was Canadians who served as the spearhead in the decisive thrust against Cambrai; and it was Canadians who captured Mons, the last German stronghold taken before the armistice was signed, and thus ended the war at the very spot where the British "Old Contemptibles" had begun their dogged fight four years before.
I wanted to see the soldiers. My reason was no better than some sentimental emotion; for I saw the original Contemptibles march off for Mons; and was with a battalion of the 9th Division, the first of Kitchener's men to go into the line; and saw the Derby men come out and begin; and at the last discovered that the conscripts were as good as the rest. Some of the survivors were marching towards me.
A few may be toiling still, where the fighting is thickest, the last remnants of the "Old Contemptibles." Their places in the camp and their work on the quays were taken by others, men disabled or broken in the later fights when the new armies won their glory. The character of the camp changed. We became more respectable than we were in the old days.
He glanced sideways over the field, as though reckoning his chance of escape. There was no chance. The colonel placed him under arrest and he marched back between the orderlies, with an old soldier of the Contemptibles behind him. Later in the day he was lined up for identification by the girl, among a crowd of other men.
In view, however, of the general situation of the Allies in the west it was imperative that the blow should be delivered not later than midsummer of 1916. The original British Expeditionary Force, popularly known as the "Old Contemptibles," who performed prodigies of valor in the first terrible weeks of the war, had largely disappeared.
That serious company of young Englishmen making soldiers of themselves in a day with so unpropitious an opening light did not look like national indifference. Those innocents getting used to rifles were as affecting as that single line of bodies I saw across a mile of stubble near Compiegne, where a rearguard of the "Contemptibles" had sacrificed themselves to their comrades.
The British gave these students of selfishness a surprise from which their military machine has never recovered, when the "Old Contemptibles" held up the advance of the Hun legions and won for Europe a breathing-space. The Dominions gave them a second lesson in magnanimity when Canada's lads built a wall with their bodies to block the drive at Ypres.
I am sure that if I had been one of the "Old Contemptibles" I should talk of nothing else all my life. But I came to see afterwards that if I had heard battle stories I should never have known the men. The centre of interest of their lives was at home. They, even those professional soldiers, were men of peace rather than war. The soldiers' trade was no delight to them.
And then, three or four days of icy coldness, with the bitter Arctic wind cutting the sodden, tired, breaking men like a knife. Fighting every hour, with rifles and bayonets and fists sleepless, tired out, finished. Only a spirit which made possible the impossible supported them: only the glory of their traditions held the breaking line of Old Contemptibles to the end.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking