11 / 44
battle of loos
9
Sergeant Thomas Bowman, 4th Black Watch
, who had been awarded
the Distinguished Conduct Medal for gallantry at Neuve Chapelle in
March, doubled across a battlefield ‘swept by rifle fire’. He wrote,
‘
It was a very hazy morning and you couldn’t see far
ahead. We had to keep close together to keep in touch
with each other’.
11
He had only gone a short distance when he encountered his
brother, Sergeant John Bowman, whose right leg had been
shattered by a bullet. The brothers shook hands and Bowman
resumed the advance. Both men survived the battle but John
Bowman’s leg would be amputated as a result of his wounds.
12
‘Stand after stand was made, the men of the 4th
halting and firing as they retired’.
13
Bowman wrote,
‘Men
were falling thick. I realised we would have to retreat.
I jumped into the open with the intention of making a
race for our own trenches. Immediately there was a burst
of fire... Afterwards we realised how serious were the
losses sustained by the 4th Black Watch’.
14
Corporal William Linton Andrews,
a D.C. Thomson journalist,
and one of Dundee’s renowned ‘Fighter Writers’, took part in
the charge.
‘Our Companies moved steadily into the enemy’s front
line. Those Germans who survived surrendered in
batches. Most of them were young and well built,
but pale compared with our weather beaten veterans’.
15
11 The Courier and Advertiser, Saturday, 28 September 1933, 4.
12 The Courier, Monday, 18 October 1915, 4.
13 A. G. Wauchope, A History of the Black Watch in the Great War, Vol. II,
(London, 1926), 20.
14 The Courier and Advertiser, Saturday, 28 September 1933, 4.
15 The Evening Telegraph, Monday, 5 May 1936, 3.