The moment came.
A battalion on their left surged out and went plunging across the open, the high-explosive shells bursting and flinging fountains of spouting black earth and smoke amongst them, the ground puffing and dust-spurting under the hailing bullets. The Highlanders were supposed to wait until this other battalion had gained a certain line before they, the Highlanders, attacked; so they lay in their ditch, watching the line struggle forward and the men falling in swathes under the pouring fire, watched it stop at last and drop flat and then begin to break back to cover. It was no time to wait longer, and the Colonel, making up his mind swiftly, launched his attack. It was met by a devastating storm of fire, even heavier and more deadly than the one they had watched. The battalion, barely clear of their cover, wilted under the storm, hesitated, stopped, and began to fire back at the enemy they could not see. Those of the men who stood firing were cut down quickly, the others dropped prone or jumped into shell-holes or such cover as they could find. The officers did their best, jumping up and running forward and calling on their men to follow. But few of them ran more than a score of paces before bullet or shell fragment found them, and they fell; such men as rose and tried to follow only followed them into the next world. The air was alive and trembling to the whistle and whine and hiss of bullets, their snap and smack and crack, and to the quick following crash on crash of the earth shaking shell-bursts.
Again some of the officers tried to rally and start the line forward; but, by now, so great was the noise, so dense the air with smoke and dust, so chaotic and confused the whole business, that the officers' attempts resulted in no more than spasmodic and isolated movements of little groups, movements that were worse than useless, because each could be dealt with in detail, and, one after another, the sweeping machine-guns sluicing bullets on each and cutting them to pieces in turn. Those that made these separate attempts were mostly cut down; those that watched their failure were more convinced than ever that the whole was useless.
The Colonel, too, saw that it was useless and vain slaughter unless by some desperate chance the line should move together ... and even now it was perhaps too late, because the battalion on the left, lying in the open and scourged with fire, was giving way solidly and struggling back to cover.
It was a crisis in the battle, and where in the crisis many brave men had failed, one brave man tried and won. From somewhere down the line high over the roar of the battle there rose a wailing skirl of the pipes. There was no note of the music that was not familiar to every man there, that they did not know each word to fit to it. The pipes might have been crying the very words aloud to them instead of the music:
"Thro' the depths of Loch Katrine the steed shall career,
O'er the peaks o' Ben Lomond the galley shall steer,
And the rocks of Craig Royston like icicles melt
Ere our wrongs be forgot, ere our vengeance unfelt."
It was the voice of their own Highlands, their own clansmen, their own regiment, that was calling to those crouching men in the ditch. They stirred, lifting their heads and looking for the piper. They could not see him, but the pipes shrilled on: