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."

HISTORISCHE KRANTEN

The Ypres Times (1921-1936) | 1927 | | pagina 19