Forty minutes later the advance began and the village of Neuve Chapelle was carried at the point of the bayonet.
It was in the rush upon the trenches that the Middlesex, faced by unbroken barbed wire, were mown down in scores and hundreds. Helplessly they tore at the entanglement—in silence they died rather than retreat.
Following that came the attack upon the German position, and in this advance were the 2nd Gordon Highlanders and their Territorial battalion the 6th. It was in this action that Lieutenant-Colonel Maclean of the 6th Gordons lost his life. To a subaltern who went to his assistance he said, “Thank you, and now, my boy, your place is not here. Go about your duty.”
The battle of Neuve Chapelle was finely conceived, and more finely carried out. Most unfortunately, owing to the lack of reserves at the height of the engagement, the full force of the attack was spent too soon.
The story of how the Canadians fought and died at the second battle of Ypres upon April 22, and how the comrade regiment of the Royal Highlanders brought immortal honour to the North, is a tale of four days’ heroism against unnatural and horrible odds.
Mr. J. Huntley Skrine has written somewhere:
Sons in my gates of the West,
Where the long tides foam in the dark of the pine,
And the cornlands crowd to the dim sky-line,
And wide as the air are the meadows of kine,