But that was in the dark days of the long retreat, when the Highlanders, heedless of their own safety, hung on to their positions often in spite of the orders to retire, and avenged their own losses ten-fold by their punishment of the enemy.  Private Smiley, of the Gordons, describing the German attacks, speaks of the devastating effects of the British fire.  “Poor devils!” he writes of the German infantry.  “They advanced in companies of quite 150 men in files five deep, and our rifle has a flat trajectory up to 600 yards.  Guess the result.  We could steady our rifles on the trench and take deliberate aim.  The first company were mown down by a volley at 700 yards, and in their insane formation every bullet was almost sure to find two billets.  The other companies kept advancing very slowly, using their dead comrades as cover, but they had absolutely no chance....  Yet what a pitiful handful we were against such a host!”

The fighting went on all through the night and again next morning, and the British force was compelled to retreat.  In the dark, Private Smiley, who was wounded, lost his regiment, and was picked up by a battery of the Royal Field Artillery who gave him a lift.  But he didn’t rest long, he says, for “I’m damned if they didn’t go into action ten minutes afterwards with me on one of the guns.”

Some fine exploits are also given to the credit of the Black Watch.  They, too, were in the thick of it at Mons—­“fighting like gentlemen,” as one of them puts it—­and the Gordons and Argyll and Sutherlands also suffered severely.  In fact, the Highland regiments appear to have been singled out by the Germans as the object of their fiercest attacks, and all the way down to the Aisne they have borne the brunt of the fighting.  Private Fairweather, of the Black Watch, gives this account of an engagement on the Aisne:  “The Guards went up first and then the Camerons, both having to retire.  Although we had watched the awful slaughter in these regiments, when it was our turn we went off with a cheer across 1,500 yards of open country.  The shelling was terrific and the air was full of the screams of shrapnel.  Only a few of us got up to 200 yards of the Germans.  Then with a yell we went at them.  The air whistled with bullets, and it was then my shout of ‘42nd forever!’ finished with a different kind of yell.  Crack!  I had been presented with a souvenir in my knee.  I lay helpless and our fellows retired over me.  Shrapnel screamed all around, and melinite shells made the earth shake.  I bore a charmed life.  A bullet went through the elbow of my jacket, another through my equipment, and a piece of shrapnel found a resting place in a tin of bully beef which was on my back.  I was picked up eventually during the night, nearly dead from loss of blood.”