120 AWARDED FOR VALOUR
personally, a practice frowned on in the Victorian Officer Corps. The officers
in coming years would be expected to get their hands dirty.^45
From 10 October to 22 November the British doggedly defended the key
to the Channel Coast. The BEF had taken heavy casualties in battles of Mons,
La Cateau ,and the Aisne. The First Battle of Ypres (19 October–15 November
1914) bled it white: 58,155 men were killed or wounded during the defense
of the Ypres sector. Many battalions were almost entirely destroyed.^46 In the
words of the official history:
In the British Battalions which fought from Mons to Ypres there scarcely
remained with the colours an average of one officer and thirty men who
had landed in August 1914. The Old British Army was gone beyond
recall.^47
Vestiges of the nineteenth-century hero still surfaced in 1915 and 1916,
with purely symbolic acts winning Victoria Crosses; in the tradition of Piper
George Findlater, who at Dargai in 1897 had been wounded in both legs
but continued to skirl the troops forward:
On 25 September 1915 near Loos and Hill 70, France, prior to an assault
on enemy trenches and during the worst of the bombardment, Piper
[Daniel] Laidlaw, seeing that his company was shaken with the effects
of the gas, with complete disregard for danger, mounted the parapet
and, marching up and down, played his company out of the trench. The
effect of his splendid example was immediate and the company dashed to
the assault. Piper Laidlaw continued playing his pipes even after he was
wounded and until the position was won.^48
The Victorian image in this case was a bit tarnished, as the chlorine gas
giving so much trouble to Laidlaw’s company had been released by the
British Army. This attack took place before gas shells were available and
the chemical agent had been dispersed from cylinders in the British lines
through pipes laid out into no-man’s-land. The wind was light and variable
and in Laidlaw’s sector blew the gas back into the British lines.^49
The Scots provided one last musical VC in 1916, When on 1 July Drummer
Walter Potter Ritchie;
on his own initiative, stood on the parapet of an enemy trench and,
under heavy machine-gun fire and bomb attacks, repeatedly sounded the
‘Charge’ thereby rallying many men of various units who, having lost
lily
(lily)
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