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Updated: May 18, 2025
We started early in the ambulance to-day, and went to pick up the wounded. It was a wild gusty morning, one of those days when the sky takes up nearly all the picture and the world looks small. The mud was deep on the road, and a cyclist corps plunged heavily along through it. The car steered badly and we drove to the edge of the fighting-line.
As they raised their blackened, desperate faces and saw the car there, actually there, incredibly there, black with its load of men, they gave a deep-throated shout of relief, though they did not for an instant stop the frantic plying of their picks and hoes. The nine men sprang out, their implements in their hands, and dispersed along the fighting-line.
So the firing was stopped; but not until ten o'clock did it entirely cease. The advance of the IId Corps resulted in some good, however, for these fresh troops could occupy the fighting-line for the night, while the mixed companies of the VIIth and VIIIth Corps were enabled to re-form in their rear.
But more fun is the fight and tussle in that wonderful surface fighting-line between sea and wind, which laugh as they fight, blowing and buffeting, with you between and the little boat-part of you, now intensely alive and glad like you to be alive, to sing back to the wind any old song as she passes her fingers through your hair.
The edge of the forest, One hundred and fifty to two hundred yards in rear, looked down upon an open and gentle slope, and along the brow of this natural glacis, covered by the thick timber, Jackson posted his fighting-line.
We cast our eyes along the fighting-line and saw the like going on; and then came up their second line, in two curves, east and west, to their friends' assistance. Now, this was our signal to ride forward and engage them.
This time our objective was Furnes, a little town fifteen miles east of Dunkirk, and about five miles from the fighting-line. The line of the Belgian trenches ran in a circle, following the course of the River Yser, the little stream which has proved such an insuperable barrier to the German advance.
Superb though their organization was, lengthening lines of communication across a country ill-supplied with roads and railways, and the necessity of guarding against a hostile population told upon their armies in the fighting-line. The heaviest blow will spend itself in time against an elusive foe, and the longest arm will find the limit of its reach.
Under generals in German pay, betrayed by a widespread net of anarchy and corruption so villainous that arms and armaments sent out from England had to be bribed on their way from one official to another, and never reached the front, so foul in callousness of human life that soldiers were put into the fighting-line without rifle or ammunition, these Russian peasants flung themselves not once, but many times, against the finest troops of Germany, with no more than naked bayonets against powerful artillery and the scythe of machine-gun fire, and died like sheep in the slaughter-houses of Chicago.
On the far side of the Potomac the Shepherdstown Ford was protected by the remainder of the reserve artillery, with an infantry escort; but so small was the force whose retreat was thus secured that nearly every man was required in the fighting-line. Except the divisions of Hood and Walker, 5500 men all told, there was no immediate reserve.
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