One of our men came face to face with four Germans, two of whom were armed with rifles and two with bombs. They were standing in the wreckage of a trench, pallid, and with the fear of death in their eyes. The rifles clattered to the earth, the bombs fell at their feet, and their hands went up when the young Scot appeared before them with his bayonet down. He was alone, and they could have killed him, but surrendered, and were glad of the life he granted them. As more men came up the slope there were greetings between comrades, of:
“Hullo, Jock!”
“Is that you, Alf?”
They were rummaging about for souvenirs in half-destroyed dugouts where dead bodies lay. They were “swapping” souvenirs—taken from prisoners—silver watches, tobacco-boxes, revolvers, compasses. Many of them put on German field-caps, like schoolboys with paper caps from Christmas crackers, shouting with laughter because of their German look. They thought the battle was won. After the first wild rush the shell-fire, the killing, the sight of dead comrades, the smell of blood, the nightmare of that hour after dawn, they were beginning to get normal again, to be conscious of themselves, to rejoice in their luck at having got so far with whole skins. It had been a fine victory. The enemy was nowhere. He had “mizzled off.”
Some of the Scots, with the hunter's instinct still strong, decided to go on still farther to a new objective. They straggled away in batches to one of the suburbs of Lens—the Cite St.-Auguste. Very few of them came back with the tale of their comrades' slaughter by sudden bursts of machine-gun fire which cut off all chance of retreat....
The quietude of Hill 70 was broken by the beginning of a new bombardment from German guns.
“Dig in,” said the officers. “We must hold on at all costs until the supports come up.”
Where were the supporting troops which had been promised? There was no sign of them coming forward from Loos. The Scots were strangely isolated on the slopes of Hill 70. At night the sky above them was lit up by the red glow of fires in Lens, and at twelve-thirty that night, under that ruddy sky, dark figures moved on the east of the hill and a storm of machine-gun bullets swept down on the Highlanders and Lowlanders, who crouched low in the mangled earth. It was a counter-attack by masses of men crawling up to the crest from the reverse side and trying to get the Scots out of the slopes below. But the men of the 15th Division answered by volleys of rifle-fire, machine-gun fire, and bombs. They held on in spite of dead and wounded men thinning out their fighting strength. At five-thirty in the morning there was another strong counter-attack, repulsed also, but at another price of life in those holes and ditches on the hillside.
Scottish officers stared anxiously back toward their old lines. Where were the supports? Why did they get no help? Why were they left clinging like this to an isolated hill? The German artillery had reorganized. They were barraging the ground about Loos fiercely and continuously. They were covering a great stretch of country up to Hulluch, and north of it, with intense harassing fire. Later on that Saturday morning the 15th Division received orders to attack and capture the German earthwork redoubt on the crest of the hill. A brigade of the 21st Division was nominally in support of them, but only small groups of that brigade appeared on the scene, a few white-faced officers, savage with anger, almost mad with some despair in them, with batches of English lads who looked famished with hunger, weak after long marching, demoralized by some tragedy that had happened to them. They were Scots who did most of the work in trying to capture the redoubt, the same Scots who had fought through Loos. They tried to reach the crest. Again and again they crawled forward and up, but the blasts of machine-gun fire mowed them down, and many young Scots lay motionless on those chalky slopes, with their kilts riddled with bullets. Others, hit in the head, or arms, or legs, writhed like snakes back to the cover of broken trenches.
“Where are the supports?” asked the Scottish officers. “In God's name, where are the troops who were to follow on? Why did we do all this bloody fighting to be hung up in the air like this?”