The shattered remnants of the 15th Division were withdrawn in the evening from the blood-stained slopes of Hill 70, but the battalions were played in by their own pipers. The 9th Black Watch numbered only 100 of all ranks and one piper; the 7th Cameron pipers were practically annihilated, the 8th Seaforths lost ten, and others suffered in similar degree.
It is a far cry from Hill 70 to Scaur Donald, and they were only regimental pipers, but to these brave men the words of the old song are surely applicable.
"There let him rest in the lap of Scaur Donald,
The wind for his watcher, the mist for his shroud,
Where the green and the grey moss shall weave their wild tartan,
A covering meet for a chieftain so proud."
In the fighting subsidiary to the main action of Loos, at Mauquissart and in the neighbourhood of Neuve Chapelle, the 2nd Black Watch pipers distinguished themselves greatly. They played their companies into and beyond the first line of German trenches. One of them, A. Macdonald, stood playing on the German parapet while the position was being cleared, and then on, through a hurricane of fire, over three lines of trenches, until dangerously wounded. For this he was given the D.C.M.
Three others, J. Galloway, R. Johnstone and David Armit, did precisely the same; and yet another, David Simpson, behaved with such gallantry that he also came to be known as "the Piper of Loos," the third of the brave trio to earn that honourable title. He had already played over three lines of German trenches, and was leading towards the fourth when he was killed. Johnstone, on this occasion, played till he fell gassed.
Throughout the long succession of actions which punctuated the Somme operations in 1916, the pipes continued to be much in evidence, and references to them and to their effect upon the men during that bloody fighting are frequent in the contemporary reports of observers, and in private letters subsequently published. French reports also have placed on record their admiration for the company pipers of Scottish regiments. "Some of the finest work," writes one well-known French military writer, "was accomplished at the very outset by the Highlanders, who carried the trenches in lightning fashion, urged on by the inspiriting music of their pipes."
The fighting at Loos had shown, on a comparatively small scale, that the pipes, when freed from the restrictions placed upon their employment by the exigencies of trench warfare, were still capable of fulfilling their historic rôle in open fighting The gallantry of the pipers at Hulluch and Hill 70 was worthy of the units they led, and established a record which was hard to beat; but for months on end their great achievements were emulated by those of their successors in the new armies which had poured into the field.