Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 10, 2025
One morning Huggie, Cecil, and I obtained leave to visit Béthune and the La Bassée district. It was in the middle of January, three months after we had left Beuvry. We tore into Bailleul and bumped along the first mile of the Armentières road. That mile is without any doubt the most excruciatingly painful pavé in the world. We crossed the railway and raced south.
Nobody realised how serious the situation must have been until the accounts were published. Huggie has a perfect mania for getting frightened; so one day, instead of leaving the routine matter that he carried at a place whence it might be forwarded at leisure, he rode along the Menin road to the Chateau at Hooge, the headquarters of the 15th Brigade.
The night that Huggie and I slept down at Ciry, the rest of the despatch riders, certain that we were taken, encamped at Ferme d'Epitaphe, for the flooded roads were impassable. There we found them in the morning, and discovered they had prepared the most gorgeous stew of all my recollection.
The shell hit the house, the house did not hit Huggie, and the sniper forgot to snipe. So every one was pleased. On my last journey I passed a bunch of wounded Sikhs. They were clinging to all their kit. One man was wounded in both his feet. He was being carried by two of his fellows. In his hands he clutched his boots. The men did not know where to go or what to do.
I could not make them understand, but I tried by gestures to show them where the ambulance was. I saw two others they were slightly wounded talking fiercely together. At last they grasped their rifles firmly, and swinging round, limped back towards the line. Huggie did most of the work that day, because during the greater part of the afternoon I was kept back at brigade headquarters.
Elated with our capture of the car we scented greater victories. We heard of a motor-boat on the river near Missy, and were filled with visions of an armoured motor-boat, stuffed with machine-guns, plying up and down the Aisne. Huggie and another made the excursion. The boat was in an exposed and altogether unhealthy position, but they examined it, and found that there was no starting-handle.
A smart change saw me tearing along the road to meet with a narrow escape from untimely death in the form of a car, which I tried to pass on the wrong side. In the evening we received our first batch of pay, and dining magnificently at a hotel, took tearful leave of Huggie and Spuggy. They had been chosen, they said, to make a wild dash through to Liége.
You will remember how the night we arrived on the Aisne Huggie and I stretched ourselves on a sand-heap at the side of the road just above Ciry and watched dim columns of Germans crawling like grey worms up the slopes the other side of the valley. We were certain that the old Division was still in hot cry on the heels of a rapidly retreating foe.
Their house was now a heap of nothing in particular. The mirror I had used lay broken on the top of about quarter of a wall. Still something was wrong, and Huggie, who had been smiling at my puzzled face, said gently in an off-hand way "Seen the church?" That was it! The church had simply disappeared.
I can express neither. On the following day the Brigadier moved to a farm farther north. It was the job of Huggie and myself to keep up communication between this farm and the brigade headquarters at the farm with the forgettable name. To ride four miles or so along country lanes from one farm to another does not sound particularly strenuous. It was.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking