The remnants of the 108th Brigade had taken up a line west of Erches, putting themselves under the orders of General Hessey, as their own Brigade Staff had been cut off from them by the German patrols which had burst through. There was now heavy shelling and trench-mortaring of the British positions, the enemy having moved up guns and mortars into Andechy. A patrol sent out at 1-45 a.m. on the morning of the 27th by the 121st Field Company, saw long columns of the enemy; infantry, transport, a troop of cavalry, and a battery of artillery, moving into Erches. Captain Miller's company of 15th Rifles, west of the village, was pounded with artillery and mortar fire, the trenches being obliterated and heavy casualties suffered. He had with him one machine-gun, and, as light appeared, this gun began to obtain many targets in Erches, inflicting considerable loss upon the enemy. At 8 a.m. the enemy entered a sap in front of his trench and began to bomb his way up. Lieutenant Young, with a handful of riflemen, promptly drove him out. Meanwhile, clinging to a trench on the Erches-Guerbigny Road, was Captain Densmore Walker of the Machine-Gun Battalion, whose diary has previously been drawn upon in the course of this narrative, with a handful of men of his company, armed with rifles. Behind him was a party of the 107th Brigade with one machine-gun. Captain Walker had with him a rifleman of the old 14th Rifles, now in one of the Entrenching Battalions, named Gilmour, one of those curious individuals who, when all seems to be melting about them in moments of great emergency, suddenly display resource and coolness which amaze all who have known them. Together they had already carried out a patrol into Guerbigny, into which some of the enemy had been seen to move, in the course of which, Captain Walker cheerfully confesses, Rifleman Gilmour, rather than he, had been the leader. The counter-attack which followed may be described in Captain Walker's own words, because it succeeds, as no official account ever can, in picturing the exact details for the mind's eye.