The Ypres Times. £29-
It was in the August of 1916 that Second-Lieutenant Boyd Rochfort won the second
Victoria Cross for the Scots Guards by a splendid act of bravery near La Bassée..
In the early hours of the morning a German trench mortar bomb landed on the side of
the parapet of the communication trench in which he stood, close to a small working party
of his battalion. He might easily have stepped back a few yards round the corner into
perfect safety (to quote the official record) but, shouting to his men to lqok out, he rushed
at the bomb, seized it and hurled it over the parapet, where it at once exploded. There
is no doubt that this splendid combination of presence of mind and courage saved the lives
of many of the working
party.
Told, as the Guardsmen
themselves remember the
fourteen months' fighting,
the record looks bare and
inconspicuous, but it is
merely the skeleton of a
narrative of most desperate
battling with battalions
thinned and made good,
and thinned again, and the
original Guards who fought
at Mons becoming scarcer
and scarcer. They had seen
themselves shelled day and
night, while our artillery,
on its part, had been com
pelled to be economical with
its shells, and because of
that experience they were
able to appreciate the differ
ence as illustrated in the
battle of Loos, when the
ability to rain shells with
out stint on the enemy's
trenches was noticed to be
no longer confined to the
Germans.
From Mons to the Marne,
from the Marne to the Aisne,
from the Aisne to Ypres,
from Ypres to Richebourg
and Festubert, and from
Festubert to Loos and Hill
70that is the story of the
Scots Guards' fourteen
months' experience at the Imperial War Museum.] \Photo Crown Copyright
front. And the spirit of WAITING TO ATTACK,
the regiment may be summed up in their motto, taken from the Rue du Bois epic We
stand to the last cartridge."