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Davenport's men were a disorganised mixture of many battalions, including, besides the Oxfords and other representatives of the 184th Brigade, a number of Cornwalls and King's Liverpools. They were unfed, and the demoralisation of the retreat was beginning to do its work. As always on these occasions, when officers of different services were thrown together, divided counsels were the result.
It was very annoying using a feeble word to battalion officers and men of the 3d Division Suffolks and King's Own Liverpools, Gordons and Royal Scots who had first come out of the salient, out of its mud and snow and slush and shell-fire, to a pretty village far behind the lines, on the road to Calais, where they were getting back to a sense of normal life again.
Field-guns from the nek near Lombard's Kop joined in chorus, shooting with effect on Tunnel Hill, held by the Liverpools, several of whom were hit. Colour-Sergeant Macdonald went out of the bomb-proof to mark where one shell had struck, when another burst on the same spot, and he fell terribly mangled by jagged fragments of iron.
And still the steady tack and tap from the right among the Devons and Liverpools, from the right centre, where the Leicesters were, from the left centre, among the 60th, and the extreme left, from Cæsar's Camp. The fight tacked on six mortal hours and then guttered out.
They hoped either to rush the place, or to keep us where we were. The 13th Battery, stationed at the railway cutting, opened upon them, and the pickets of the Gloucesters and the Liverpools checked them with a very heavy fire. As I watched the fighting from the hill above my cottage, the sun appeared over Bulwan, and a great gun fired upon us with a cloud of purple smoke.
Climbing up the ridge towards its left end, I sat among the rocks with the Liverpools and Devons beside one of the batteries, and got a good view of the Boer position. Both of these points looked down upon our position, and it was only by keeping close among the stones under the edge of our ridge that we got any cover, and that indifferent.
In a little while we saw three others arrive Father Roach of the 17th King's Company of Liverpool and Private Stringfellow of the Liverpools, also Mechanic Jens Laursen of our own "M" Company who had escaped death in the machine gun ambush that had killed his comrade Mechanic Dial and driver and horse. Later Lieut. Tatham of the Royal Air Force came in with a shattered arm.
Fortunately few casualties were incurred. In the afternoon one company was sent to form a defensive flank at Priel Bank, and another to reinforce the 6th Liverpool Rifles at Cruciform Post. On the 2nd December the Battalion took over from the 6th Liverpools, and had the task of putting the line from Heythrop Post, Cruciform Post, to Priel Bank in a state of defence.
Reports came in of the failure of the Russian-British force that was to attack Tarsevo, and of the counter attack of the Reds in the Onega Valley. So the Liverpools and the French company and Winslow's "I" Company and Lt.
With him was a comrade belonging to the "Lilywhites," the old 82nd, now known as the first battalion of the South Lancs, with whom the H.L.I. have an ancient friendship. The South Lancs have also their antipathies the King's Liverpools among them but that is neither here nor there. "It were just like a coop-tie crowd was the retreat," he drawled in the broad Lancashire dialect.
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