We must now return to the plight of the Cameron Highlanders and the Black Watch and the German counter attack on the left flank. As 1 Brigade fell back from the factory the Camerons and Black Watch fought a desperate fighting withdrawal until they reached the shelter of the woods north of Vendresse whilst smaller parties worked their way down the Chivy valley. But one party of some sixty Camerons under the command of Major Hon Alfred Maitland, stubbornly hung onto the ground they had taken at Blank Mont.¹⁹² Seriously short of ammunition they resorted to collecting rounds from the dead and wounded before they were forced to withdraw leaving Maitland dead behind them.

Devotion to duty was clearly very much to the fore amongst the ranks of the Cameron Highlanders on that shrapnel-torn ridge. Lieutenant James Matheson was badly wounded during the fighting in the morning and he was carried to a place of safety by Private Ross Tollerton. After the battalion had retired Tollerton had returned to Matheson to take him down to the dressing station but found himself and his wounded officer effectively cut off by advancing Germans. For three days Ross Tollerton – wounded in the head, back and hand – remained with the stricken Matheson before he was able to carry him down to Chivy. His award of the Victoria Cross was richly deserved.

The Cameron Highlanders had been all but decimated in the fighting of 14 September, only 6 officers and 200 men answered their names that evening at roll call. Writing to his father on 24 September whilst aboard the hospital ship SS Asturias, Captain Lord James Thomas Stewart Murray reflected on the Cameron Highlander’s attack and their casualties:

‘We were ordered to attack across an open plateau, exposed to the most awful shell fire. My company was the leading one, and suffered most severely. We went into action with 5 officers and 221 men, the roll call after the battle showed no officers and 86 men, I fear Mackintosh, Alastair Murray (Polmaise) and Hector Cameron193 are all gone, Iain Maxwell (Lovett’s nephew) was severely wounded, and I myself slightly. My Company Sergeant Major was killed. I felt his loss very much, as we had done 10 years’ service together continuously in the same company. Part of the Black Watch (who were on the right) and most of my company got almost as far as a sugar factory held by the enemy, only to be beaten back with tremendous losses.’¹⁹⁴

As the fighting around Cerny ebbed and flowed, von Zwehl, the German VII Reserve Corps commander, ordered a counter attack on the British left flank to divert some of the pressure away from the hard pressed 27 Reserve Brigade. Three battalions and two machine-gun companies from 25 Reserve Brigade launched their attack at 10.00am with the intention of driving a wedge between Haig’s two divisions. This attack was met by 1/SWB and the 2/Welch with assistance from 113/ and 46/Batteries and from all accounts the German attack appears to have been stopped very effectively by the two 3 Brigade battalions. Von Zwehl in his account of the engagement admitted to heavy casualties:

‘One battalion had to retire with heavy losses. The remains of it assembled under the steep slope, south of Courtecon. The other two battalions were compelled to give up their positions, as the companies had got thoroughly mixed up … They assembled on the reverse slope between Malval Farm and Courtecon. The brigade commander was mortally wounded.’195

It was during this engagement that Lance Corporal William Fuller of 2/Welch won the second Victoria Cross of the day for carrying a wounded officer, Captain Mark Haggard, a nephew of the novelist Henry Rider Haggard, to safety. Sadly Haggard died from his wounds the next day.¹⁹⁶ As had happened elsewhere, once the mist cleared the British gunners were able to bring down a substantial bombardment on the Chemin des Dames. Watching from the relative safety of a wood, Charles Paterson, the South Wales Borderers’ adjutant, felt the Germans were not getting it all their own way as he watched, ‘swarms of Germans on the ridge, rather massed. Our guns open on them at 1,800 yards, and one can see a nasty sight through one’s glasses. Bunches of Germans blown to pieces’.

There was a more sombre attitude amongst the men of the Cameron Highlanders and the Black Watch. 1st Division casualties from the fighting on 14 September amounted to over 3,500 officers and men and many of these were from the two highland regiments. The Cameron Highlanders alone lost some 600 officers and men and amongst the casualties suffered by the 1/Black Watch was their commanding officer, 44-year-old Adrian Grant-Duff, Major Lord Stewart Murray and Lieutenants Cumming, Don and Boyd.¹⁹⁷ Six other Black Watch officers were wounded along with 40 other ranks killed, 112 wounded and 35 missing.

Lieutenant Hon Gerard Freeman-Thomas, was the only officer killed in the 1/Coldstream but ten others, including John Ponsonby, were wounded along with 343 other ranks, many of whom were posted as missing.¹⁹⁸ Edward Bulfin reported 41 officers and 926 NCOs and men killed, wounded or missing from 2 Brigade, of these the Royal Sussex lost five officers killed, including the commanding officer, Ernest Montresor and four other officers wounded. Eleven other ranks were killed; seventy-nine wounded and 114 were still missing by nightfall, many of whom were wounded and still lying out on the battlefield. Amongst the Sussex dead was 25-year-old Sergeant George Hutson of B Company.199 Hutson competed for Great Britain in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics winning a bronze medal in the 5,000 metres and a team bronze in the 3,000 metre-race.

The Loyals suffered badly in their advance to the sucrerie and reported 78 other ranks and 12 officers killed, wounded or missing.²⁰⁰ Included amongst the dead was their commanding officer, Major Walter Lloyd, who was only in his third day of command after the death of Colonel Guy Knight at Priez on 11 September.²⁰¹ There is no accurate figure for the number of men wounded or missing from the battalion but from the war diary we know casualties were, ‘very heavy indeed’. The officer casualties in 2/KRRC were eight killed and missing – of which only two were recovered for burial – and seven wounded, which together with the 306 other ranks killed wounded or missing, represented a sizeable proportion of the battalion.

Initially the wounded were brought down to dressing stations which had been established in the Mairie at Vendresse and at the crossroads south of Vendresse near La Mal Bâtie Farm. But these two aid points were completely overwhelmed early on in the morning by the sheer numbers of wounded men flooding down from the fighting on the Chemin des Dames. Consequently Vendresse Château, belonging to the Comte de la Maisonneuve, was taken over by 3/Field Ambulance and a little further south at Moulins, 1/Field Ambulance established itself in a cluster of buildings which were sheltered from shell fire by the high ground above. 2/Field Ambulance originally set up its dressing station in a farm near Oeuilly but shell fire soon encouraged a rapid move south of the river to Villers, where they established themselves in the château and local Mairie. It was not long before the relatively secure Villers became the divisional collecting station. Close to the firing line the advanced dressing stations – which in many cases were combined with regimental aid posts – were at Beaulne, Troyon, Chivy and Paissy.

2/Field Ambulance originally set up its dressing station in a farm near Oeuilly but shell fire soon encouraged a rapid move south of the river to Villers, where they found a more secure base in the château and local Mairie. It was not long before the relatively sheltered Villers became the divisional collecting station but a crisis point was reached on 15 September when the numbers of wounded pouring into Villers were getting beyond the available resources of the field ambulance staff. An appeal to the French for assistance resulted in twenty motor ambulances and drivers arriving the next day to move wounded to Fère-en-Tardenois and Bazoches. This was the first instance in which British wounded had been transported by motor ambulance – as Brereton said of the occasion, ‘It was not quite a red letter day for the RAMC which was to come on the 20th when motor ambulances were first issued to all field medical units’.

Reflecting on the day’s events, Lieutenant Charles Paterson was thankful that he and his friends in the battalion had, ‘not yet taken a knock’, but with 220 casualties sustained in one day’s fighting and the German Army entrenched in front of him, he knew, ‘there was lots more to come’.