Upon June 12 at Givenchy, Lance-Corporal William Angus of the Highland Light Infantry won the V.C. for rescuing a wounded officer under heavy fire, sustaining some forty wounds from bombs. In the middle of June at Hooge, the Liverpool Scottish, a Territorial battalion second to none, advanced against the German trenches, supported by the H.A.C. The plan of attack was that the Scottish should take the first line of German trenches, and leaving the H.A.C. to hold them should advance upon the second line. Following the cannonade of our guns, the Scottish leapt over the parapets and charged into the curtain of smoke. The first trench was carried without a halt, the second fell immediately after, and pausing to take a breath the battalion captured the third after severe fighting, and faced the fourth. This, too, was carried. What need for comment when words are blinded by achievement! Many gallant men fell, including Captain Graham, the great amateur golfer. Unhappily a sorrowful toll of lives must ever be the fruit of bravery and self-sacrifice. It is difficult where heroism has become a commonplace, and courage inseparable from the nature of the task that lies behind us and in the future, to conclude this chapter and this book upon a note at once comprehensive and mature, a note that will not sound dim when other tales are told, nor sufficiently local to be overshadowed by some vast offensive. With the battle of Festubert certainly one, and perhaps two stories of Scottish heroism will, in my opinion, be for ever sacred in Scottish hearts. Nothing could be more forlorn, more Celtic in tragedy than the tale of the 4th Cameron Highlanders, whose night attack was checked by a deep ditch full of water. Some swam across, many sank never to rise again, but the battalion passed on. In the black darkness they struggled on, undaunted. A desolating fire raked their ranks. One company was annihilated, another was hopelessly lost, a third took a German trench. But the battalion was cut off. No machine guns could cross the stream to their support, and in the grey dawn the situation for the Gaelic remnant grew intolerable. The company in the German trench were forced to retire under a heavy fire. Colonel Fraser and twelve other officers had fallen. But that single company of Camerons were unbroken. Sergeant-Major Ross it was who gathered the remnants to him and brought them safely across the zone of fire. Never has a more hopeless withdrawal faced a British force. Never has a finer fortitude awaited it. Again, in the British advance a detachment of the Scots Guards lost touch with the main body, and were surrounded. Admirably has Mr. John Buchan spoken of their end. “For them,” he says, “as for the steel circle around the King at Flodden, there could be no retreat. When, some days later, we took the place we found the Guards lying on the field of honour with swaths of the enemy’s dead around them. The history of war can show no more noble ending.”