Letter 16 From Private Robert Robertson, of the Argylls, to His Parents at Musselburgh
The poor Argylls got pretty well hit, but never wavered a yard for all their losses. The Scots Greys are doing great work at the front—in fact they were the means of putting ten thousand Germans to their fate on Sunday morning. I will never forget that day, as our regiment left a town on the French frontier on Saturday morning at 3 o’clock and marched till 3 a.m. on Sunday into a Belgian town. I was about to have an hour in bed, at least a lie down in a shop, when I was wakened to go on guard at the General’s headquarters, and while I was on guard a Captain of the crack French cavalry came in with the official report of the ten thousand Germans killed. The Scots Greys, early that morning, had decoyed the Germans right in front of the machine guns of the French, and they just mowed them down. There was no escape for them, poor devils, but they deserve it the way they go on. You would be sorry for the poor Belgian women having to leave their homes with young children clinging to them. One sad case we came across on the roadside was a woman just out of bed two days after giving birth to a child. The child was torn from her breast, and her breast cut off that the infant was sucking. Then the Germans bayoneted the child before the mother’s eyes. We did the best we could for her, but she died about six hours after telling us her hardships.