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Updated: June 14, 2025
It was felt that I had triumphed, and it was felt that no recruit had a right to triumph over any officer, however young or however lowly placed. Even a lance-corporal must be respected, or it was clear that the service was going to the devil.
Smedley's messenger was Lance-Corporal G.W.F. Franklin, whose services on the field won him a commission, and who played a splendid part in the subsequent annals of the Battalion. He was given a like message of recall for Captain Smedley, and with it he too clambered back over the parapet and passed out into the night.
Lindsey, a new officer in D Company, was killed on his first visit to the trenches, and Herbert, of B, was wounded. D Company also lost as casualties Sergeant Buller and Lance-Corporal Barnes and half-a-dozen Lewis gunners in the line. The night of our relief was spent in bivouacs near Tilloy.
"Napoleon was right," observed a small, red-haired lance-corporal, whose remarks generally had a sardonic touch, "when he said the worse the man the better the soldier. It's only people who have no imagination and no intelligence who are courageous in modern war.
There was a Lance-Corporal in the Company who was not as generous to his fellows as the Senior Subaltern had been. He smoked the cigarettes he had been sent, persistently, and with obvious enjoyment. The men around him were hungry for a "whiff"; the sight of him calmly lighting a fresh "fag" at the stump of the old maddened them beyond endurance. At length one man could bear it no longer.
It was a risky thing, too, because Old Pepper wouldn't have been exactly mild with us if he had got next to the game. "Me and my mate, a lad named Harry Cassell, a Bombardier in D 238 Battery, or Lance-Corporal, as you call it in the infantry, used to relieve the telephonists. We would do two hours on and four off.
Company Headquarters were no more, the scattered few had no means of access to their C.O., joined in and formed fighting blocks with mutual consent and without actual leaders, and carried on the hourly withdrawal. From out this remnant Lance-Corporal Hamel scrambled away to a dressing station, two ominous trickles of blood streaming down his legs.
"I was lying wounded when an artillery major picked me up and took me into camp, or I would never have seen England again," writes Lance-Corporal J. Preston, Inniskilling Fusiliers. Lieutenant Sir Alfred Hickman was wounded in the shoulder while rescuing a wounded sergeant under heavy fire.
He comes of a soldier race and family, his father having served in the East India Company's army before him, and he having from his youth followed the same profession for the past eighteen years, serving successively as Private, Lance-Corporal, Corporal, and Sergeant in a native Regiment. He went through the last Afghan campaign, having been to Cabul, Quetta, and other places.
They were under the command of a lance-corporal, who had gained possession of the stables above the Menin road and now defended their ruins. During the previous twenty-four hours he had managed to send through several messages, but they were not to report his exposed position nor to ask for supports nor to request relief. What he said each time was, "Send us more bombs."
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