The 1/39th Garhwalis paid dearly on this day. By the time they had reached the objective assigned to them in the assault the battalion had been severely mauled, and its subsequent losses brought its total casualties to 330 out of a strength which did not exceed 600 all told. Every British officer was either killed or wounded before the fighting at Neuve Chapelle ended. Captain J. Taylor, I.M.S., in medical charge of the battalion, was awarded the D.S.O. on Colonel Swiney’s special recommendation for gallant conduct and devotion to duty. During the attack of the Garhwal Brigade the Dehra Dun Brigade had moved up in close support. At 10.45 A.M. the Jalandar Brigade also was ordered to move to Richebourg St. Vaast, and later, at 2.30 P.M., the Sirhind Brigade was ordered to Vieille Chapelle and La Couture. By 11 A.M. the Dehra Dun Brigade (less 1st Seaforths, detailed to assist the 1/39th Garhwalis’ advance) was ready to issue from the trenches along the La Bassée road and to advance to the attack of the Bois du Biez. Since, however, at that hour the enemy was still holding out in the trenches between the Leicesters and the 1/39th Garhwalis (who were isolated) this attack was postponed. The delay was most unfortunate, as had it been carried out on the heels of the first assault, great results might have been achieved. As will be seen later, even as it was the Bois du Biez might have fallen to us, but the inability of the British Brigade of the Eighth Division, on our left, to advance prevented it, and on this and the following days for the same cause an advance into the Bois du Biez became an impossibility, as our left flank was entirely enfiladed. As I stood that morning expectantly by the telephone, awaiting the first news of the results of our assault, it seemed as if ages were rolling by, but when the news came, it was one of the moments I often live again. “Practically all our first objectives captured.” “Hurrah!” I shouted, and with such energy that, as the French women at the back of the house afterwards told me, they thought a bomb had burst inside. And so it had! The bomb was the birth of a new life for India; the story that the cables would bear throughout the world, viz. that the Indians, led by British officers, could drive Germans from their own deliberately selected entrenchments. That the men who had fought against us from Seringapatam to Assaye, at Moodkee and Chillianwala, at Delhi, Lucknow, and Tirah, all classes, creeds, and clans, had banded together under the Union Jack, and trusting in the inviolable word of England’s King and the proven valour of their white leaders, had inaugurated a new era in the history of Hindustan.