From Bertaucourt, then, where the Battalion spent another night in an orchard, it marched very early on the 30th August to Terny via Deuillet, Servais, Basse Forêt de Coucy, Folembray, Coucy-le-Château, then magnificent and untouched—all closer modelled country and, if possible, hotter than the bare lands they had left. Thence from Terny to Pasly, N.W. of Soissons. Here they lay down by moonlight in a field, and here an officer dreamed that the alarm had been given and that they must move on. In this nightmare he rose and woke up all platoon-officers and the C.O.; next, laboriously and methodically, his own company, and last of all himself, whom he found shaking and swearing at a man equally drunk with fatigue.
On the 31st August the Battalion took position as right flank-guard from 9 A. M. to 3 P. M. on the high ground near Le Murger Farm and bivouacked at Soucy. So far, there had been little fighting for them since Landrecies, though they moved with the comforting knowledge that an unknown number of the enemy, thoroughly provided with means of transportation, were in fixed pursuit, just on the edge of a sky-line full of unseen guns urging the British always to move back.
Villers-Cotterêts
On the 1st September, the anniversary of Sedan, the Battalion was afoot at 2 A. M. and with the 2nd Coldstream Guards acted as rear-guard under the Commanding Officer, Lieut.-Colonel the Hon. G. Morris. There had been heavy dew in the night, followed at dawn by thin, miserable rain, when they breakfasted, among wet lucerne and fields of stacked corn, on the edge of the deep Villers-Cotterêts beech-forests. They fell back into them on a rumour of advancing cavalry, who turned out to be troops of German infantry running from stack to stack and filtering into the forest on their either flank. Their first position was the Vivières Puiseux line, a little south-west of Soucy village: the
