The unsteadiness of the 73rd Brigade on the afternoon of the 26th was a source of great uneasiness to General Thesiger and his staff, and at 5.30 A.M. he moved up to the Fosse to ascertain the exact state of affairs. Early in the morning some of the defenders of the Fosse began to retire, and a telephone message from the 26th Brigade, received at 6.15 A.M., stated that a few men of the 73rd were leaving their positions, and that support was urgently required. The ordeal had been too severe for untried troops. During the 26th they had held the Fosse against many attacks, but the constant storm of shot and shell to which they were exposed, and the general misery of their surroundings, aggravated by the thick drizzle of a grey September dawn, weakened their power of defence.[18] Before the German attacks they gave way, and for a time it seemed that the Hohenzollern Redoubt would be lost as well as the Fosse. It was here that the gallant General Thesiger, who had gone forward to reconnoitre the position in person, was killed. He belonged to a well-known military family, and, though his career with the Ninth had been brief, he had proved himself a sterling and able commander, and his death at the crisis of the battle was a serious calamity.
The situation was saved by men of the 26th Brigade; 70 of the Black Watch and 30 Camerons were sent up to the Redoubt about 10 A.M. This party rallied the remaining defenders, and checked the German advance after stubborn and prolonged bombing fights. The enemy made strenuous efforts to reach the Redoubt from Little Willie, and heavy bombing went on there all day. For his heroic bravery in one of these encounters, Corporal James Dalgleish Pollock of the Camerons was awarded the V.C. When the enemy bombers in superior numbers were storming a way into the Redoubt from Little Willie, Corporal Pollock jumped out of the trench, and, bombing the Germans from above, forced them to retreat. For an hour he maintained his position though exposed to a hail of bullets, and did not retire until he had been severely wounded.
Reserves were at once sent up to meet the danger, and the divisional mounted troops were placed under Brig.-General Ritchie. At the same time, the artillery shelled Madagascar Trench, Mad Point, Cemetery Alley, and Lone Farm. A brigade of the Twenty-eighth Division was ordered by the Corps to relieve the 73rd Brigade, which the Corps still believed to be in possession of the Fosse. Small parties of the 73rd held their positions in the Fosse up to noon; but, long before that hour, the enemy had penetrated the defences, and was even attacking the Redoubt.
On the right of the Division the 27th Brigade maintained its position in Fosse Alley for a considerable time, and at 5 A.M. an attempt of the enemy to rush the trench was easily repulsed by rifle and machine-gun fire. The weak point of the line was on the extreme right, where it was exposed to a flank attack by the Germans from the Quarries and Cité St Elie. From 9 A.M. the Royal Scots Fusiliers were engaged in a continuous and furious bomb fight, and supplies of bombs were passed to them as quickly as they could be brought from the dumps. On the left the Argylls sent up a machine-gun[19] to support the Sussex Regiment of the 73rd Brigade. When the 73rd withdrew from the Fosse, the position of the garrison in Fosse Alley became hopeless. The Argylls and the Fusiliers were now attacked not only from the flanks but from the rear, and it was imperative for them to withdraw before they were surrounded. It was a model retirement. The men never wavered or showed any inclination to retreat until ordered to do so, and their well-directed rapid fire inflicted numerous casualties on the enemy. Under a devastating hail of bullets they faced about to stem the hostile advances on the word of command. Closely followed by the Germans, the Argylls and the Scots Fusiliers withdrew to Dump Trench, which their pursuers did not venture to attack. The operation reflected the greatest credit on all concerned. After Dump Trench was reached, many of the men went back to bring in their comrades who had been wounded. Lieut.-Colonel Mackenzie of the Argylls was hit during the retreat, and Private M’Fadyen with great gallantry went out and brought him in, though previously several men had been wounded in the same attempt.
When the Corps was informed of the loss of Fosse 8, it ordered the 85th Brigade (Twenty-eighth Division) to advance immediately and counter-attack across the open. But this brigade was delayed while coming up, and at 3 P.M. the 26th was ordered to counter-attack the Fosse at once. All the troops of the brigade had been continuously engaged, and most of the men were leg-weary and tired out by the exertions of the last two days. Its total strength now mustered less than 600 bayonets, and there were few officers left. Nevertheless a very gallant charge was made over ground pitted by bullets and shrapnel; the men reached the West Face of the Hohenzollern Redoubt, but beyond this they could make no further progress. From Mad Point and Madagascar Trench the approaches to Fosse 8 were swept by rifle and machine-gun fire under which no man could move and live; and the enemy’s artillery, posted near Auchy, drenched the Redoubt with shrapnel. But although the Highlanders failed to capture Fosse 8, their arrival saved the Hohenzollern, and put new spirit into the officers and men of the 73rd Brigade. The onslaughts of the enemy against the Redoubt were definitely checked, and he was driven back to Fosse 8.
By 8 P.M. the 85th Brigade had arrived. One battalion was in Big Willie, two companies held the West Face of Hohenzollern, one battalion was moving up Central Boyau on Little Willie, and one was still at Vermelles. The remnants of the 26th Brigade and some of the 27th were holding Hohenzollern with part of the 73rd. Portions of the 27th were also in Dump Trench and our original front line. The enemy’s bombardment was still intense, and to avoid casualties it was decided to withdraw the 73rd Brigade and the 26th and 27th Brigades of the Ninth Division. At midnight, therefore, the 26th went back to the old reserve trenches, and the 27th to its old assembly positions; on the 28th both brigades were drawn back to the neighbourhood of Bethune. The 28th Brigade, which ever since the 25th September had been engaged in clearing trenches and burying the dead, was not relieved until the 29th, on which date it joined the rest of the Division at Bethune. The artillery, which remained in the line covering the Twenty-eighth Division until its own artillery arrived, were relieved on the 1st October. Brig.-General Armitage received a letter from Major-General Bulfin thanking him for the efficient support of his batteries.
The active part of the Division in the battle ended on the 27th September. No battle of the war has excited so much controversy as Loos; it has been claimed as a victory and deplored as a defeat. Defeat means not merely the loss of or the failure to secure definite tactical and strategical gains, but also, and chiefly, the decline of the men’s moral. This was emphatically not the case with the men of the Ninth Division. Even the bald narratives of the action as described in the battalion diaries reveal a note of triumph. The moral of the troops of the 28th Brigade, even after disaster, remained unshaken, and many men of the H.L.I. joined in with the Camerons at the Fosse. The capture of the Dump and Fosse 8 by the Highland Brigade will rank as one of the finest feats of arms ever performed by the Division, and the glorious counter-attack on the 27th September was the best evidence that up to the end of the battle the Highlanders never lost heart. If the work of the 27th Brigade was less conspicuous, its several battalions had fought with great courage and tenacity, and the defence of Fosse Alley by the Argylls and the Scots Fusiliers, besides taking heavy toll of the enemy, prevented him from using his full strength in an attack on the Redoubt. When the Division was withdrawn from the conflict it had solidly established its reputation as a first-rate fighting division. From the men’s point of view the main thing achieved was that they had measured themselves against the Germans at their best and had proved themselves the better men, and this was perhaps the chief result of the battle for the New Armies. In future actions, the men always entered into the fray with the consciousness of superiority that is the fundamental basis of moral. At the same time, it would be idle to deny that the resistance of the enemy had shown both gallantry and resource, and the small number of prisoners[20] taken was a sufficient indication that the foe’s courage had not been shaken by the preliminary bombardment. The losses of the Germans on the first day were probably less than ours, as their front defences were held chiefly by machine-guns, and most of their field-guns[21] had been withdrawn in time. Their counter-attack was admirably organised and was carried out with skill and determination, though it was during this phase of the battle that they suffered their most serious losses.
The general feeling of the Division, however, was that if there had been more artillery to support it, and better arrangements to reinforce it or relieve it with fresh troops, a heavy disaster would have been inflicted on the enemy. Under the circumstances, it had accomplished as much as was possible. When the Second Division, which could not have been expected to get forward without the aid of gas, was paralysed by the failure of the gas, the attainment of all the Ninth’s objectives became impossible. Auchy on the left bristled with machine-guns, housed numerous batteries, and was a position of such commanding strength that any attempt to advance far beyond the Fosse became a forlorn hope. How formidable the obstacles were may best be judged by the inability later of such divisions as the Twenty-eighth, Guards, and Forty-sixth to make any impression on the hostile defences.
It was the first action of the Division and it was inevitable that mistakes should be made, but most of them were venial. Not enough consideration had been given to the necessity of guarding the rifles against bad weather, and the Bethune bomb was useless in damp. It also proved a misfortune to allot a complete company of the R.E. to each brigade; owing to the failure of the attack on the left, the 63rd Field Coy. R.E. had no definite task to carry through, and it was impossible to withdraw it, as it had become involved in the fighting. The trench mortar teams attached to the 26th Brigade had a sorry time. The team of the 2-inch mortars were all knocked out, and though two 1½-inch mortars reached Fosse 8 they could find no targets, and the two officers in command were killed. These mortars were too unwieldy to carry forward, and as matters turned out, it would have been better if they had been used on the left to mask the fire from the Railway Work with smoke-bombs. It is possible that if this had been done, the assault of the 28th Brigade would have succeeded.
Perhaps the most deplorable feature of the battle was the comparative breakdown of the medical arrangements for the evacuation of the wounded from the forward areas. Many of them lay out not for hours but for days, and not a few shocking and pathetic sights were to be seen between Hohenzollern and Pekin Trench. This was entirely due to lack of staff. Doctors and regimental stretcher-bearers worked with the greatest heroism to bring in the wounded, but they were too few, and many of them were shot down. In a big engagement, especially in trench warfare, the staff of stretcher-bearers should be enormously increased if the wounded are to be expeditiously and satisfactorily evacuated. The importance of this cannot be over-estimated, because nothing so depresses a man as the fear that if injured he will be left out to die. The memory of such scenes as were too common at Loos lingered with the survivors, and remained after other impressions had become faint.