Gold for Prince Charlie

by Nigel Tranter

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

In 1745 the Highlanders limped away from the bitter field of Culloden. Soon the Duke of Cumberland was offering a huge sum for the capture of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, dead or alive. Duncan MacGregor, great-nephew of Rob Roy, volunteers to join the small band of men escorting the Prince to safety. Just one day after the Prince's escape, a large amount of French gold is landed at the very spot from which he has sailed. Thus it is that Duncan becomes involved in a desperate attempt to save Prince Charlie's gold, helped by beautiful, headstrong Caroline Cameron. 'Through his imaginative dialogue, he provides a voice for Scotland's heroes' Scotland on Sunday

Release date: September 13, 2012

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 256

Sample

‘BLOW, damn you – blow!’ Glengyle cried. ‘If you call yourselves pipers, pipe now, by God! And no dirge, no lament! Give us . . . give us The Gregorach’s Challenge! Aye – give us the Challenge. As you’ve never blown it before. Yonder’s the Prince. Let him hear that MacGregor is with him yet. That all is not lost. Blow, in the name of God!’

Even Gregor Black Knee MacGregor’s great voice was hoarse and uneven with much shouting and much emotion. Red Knee indeed would have been an apter description of him this day, for the famous black mole on his left knee was completely hidden under the dried and caked blood which coated the entire leg below a bayonet thrust in the thigh, that had also torn a ragged rent in his kilt. Limping, he gestured forward, with the stained broadsword that he had not yet thought to sheath, towards a cot-house beside a group of windblown stunted trees across the high moor, where a scattering of horses and men were grouped.

At Glengyle’s broad back, his son spoke thickly. ‘They cannot do it. They’re done. Done, I say – finished! It is more than flesh and blood . . .’

‘As Royal’s my Race – they can! And shall!’ The big man turned round fiercely – though he did not leave hold of the semi-conscious figure that slumped only approximately upright on the plodding garron at his side – turned, he to whom fierceness of manner had never come naturally despite his style and reputation. ‘Lord – must I play them my own self? ’Fore God – have we come to that!’

It would be an exaggeration to say that this aroused a smile, a single smile, in all that weary, tattered and blood-stained company; but sunken heads were raised momentarily, dulled and hollowed eyes gleamed here and there. And from somewhere in the stumbling trudging throng, the first uncouth wails and groans of filling bagpipes sounded. One man handed over to another the arm of a comrade whom he had been supporting, and reached across to a baggage pony for his pipes. Another, who had been staggering along with difficulty on legs lacerated by grape-shot, had himself hoisted on to the broad back of a second garron, already overburdened with two wounded men, and perched ludicrously thereon sought air to fill his instrument. Slowly, unsteadily, amidst outlandish discords and howls, the three pipers strove to respond to the summons of their colonel and chieftain.

Only three sets of pipes, it seemed, had survived the holocaust – or only three pipers.

Gradually the painful caterwauling evened and steadied and merged into something recognisable, though still quite fantastic in the circumstances, into the savagely martial strains of a ranting march, a proud, swaggering, damn-your-eyes flourish that was not so much defiant as purely, scornfully triumphant. Louder and stronger the music swelled as the instrumentalists forgot their pain and hunger and wretchedness in their playing, and all along the shambling ranks teeth gritted, drooping shoulders squared, strides lengthened, and defeated, shocked and betrayed men became fighters again, the warriors that their name and fame demanded.

Up at the front of the straggling column, the young captain immediately behind Glengyle – who was in fact his youngest son Duncan MacGregor, sometimes called Duncan Beg or Little Duncan because he lacked fully three inches of his father’s six feet four – Duncan MacGregor was behaving strangely. Stripping off the red-and-green plaid which he had worn folded about his torso and one shoulder, he began to turn around in little circles even as he walked. Men near him looked at him askance, as though the sights that they had so lately left behind had turned his head – as well they might. Then it was seen that he was in fact unwinding something from his body – the colourful silken tree-and-sword banner of Clan Gregor, soiled and rent, which had been wrapped shaftless around his person. He drew his claymore, and thrusting the bloody point through and through like a skewer beside the torn socket for the shaft, he raised sword and standard arm’s length above his head.

A ragged snarling sound, part growl, part cheer, issued from hoarse dry throats behind him.

And so, pipes playing and banner flying, after a fashion, the remnant of Glengyle’s Regiment of the army of King James the Eighth and Third, marched, not off the field of Culloden – for they were already a couple of miles from that shameful blood-soaked place – but across Drummossie Moor to where rumour said that the Prince had halted.

Duncan MacGregor kept his arm held high, although presently it demanded his other hand to support it thus.

The thin rain, now and then laced with sleet, blew chill in their faces off the grey shrounded hills.

Despite the wet, the party for whom they headed were congregated outside the lonely cot-house, not within it, under the doubtful shelter of the dark dripping Scots pines. All there were far past noticing the effects of rain or cold, that late afternoon of the 16th of April, 1746. In twos and threes and little groups they stood or sat or lay about, in various attitudes of exhaustion, anger or despair. Yet however preoccupied they were, each and all, in their own distresses, it was very noticeable how frequently all eyes turned in the direction of one man who sat alone, a little way apart, on a fallen tree-trunk. Head in his hands, he crouched, a picture of utter despondency.

Apparently it took the sound of the pipes some time to penetrate to this man’s inner consciousness, deep sunk as he was in grief and dejection. When at last, affected more perhaps by the cries of his companions than by the message of the music, he looked up, it was to reveal a handsome sensitive face, too young, at twenty-four, to be so drawn with hurt and care, large eyes ringed with fatigue, high forehead bruised from a fall and streaked with dirt below natural fair hair sadly in need of powder and curling-tongs.

Heavily those tired, rather prominent brown eyes stared, and lightened a little at what they saw – though only a little. Charles Edward Stuart rose to his feet, however, a graceful well-made figure of a man, with a strange distinction of bearing by no means always to be observed in royalty, tall, slender, bare-headed, dressed in long tartan jacket and tight riding-trews, with a buff waistcoat, and no single indication of his rank and position. Shaking his head, he awaited the Gregorach.

By the time that the clansmen came level, two or three others had joined the Prince – O’Sullivan, the Adjutant-General and Quartermaster; old Sir Thomas Sheridan, Charles’s second-cousin and former tutor; and Lord Elcho, commander of cavalry. When Gregor of Glengyle held up his hand to halt his followers and still the pipes, it was indeed O’Sullivan who spoke, frowning, before his Prince.

‘Very stirring, i’ faith, Glengyle – very dramatic!’ he said, in his curious Frenchified Irish, into the hush. ‘But have you no thought for His Highness’s safety? Do you want to bring Cumberland himself and all his baying pack down upon this wretched spot, with your brayings and squealings? It has been sore enough, by the Blessed Virgin, to bring him so far, undiscovered, without your shouting aloud . . .!’

‘My God, sir – is that the way of it now!’ Gregor Black Knee burst out, hotly. ‘Is our Prince sunk so sudden from Captain-General of his army to a skulking fugitive who hides from his own fighting men . . .?’

‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen!’ Charles Edward intervened. ‘What talk is this? Be silent, both! Colonel O’Sullivan – you forget yourself, I think.’ His attractively musical voice, with its foreign intonation, was unusually strained, with an edge to it. ‘I still command here, God pity me!’ Then quickly he relented, he whom many blamed for being ever too ready to trust and overlook and forgive. He touched his friend’s arm lightly. ‘Though well I know, John, that it is but anxiety for my safety that moves you.’ Turning back to the huge MacGregor, he mustered a smile – and he had a particularly sweet and disarming smile, however wan and brief it was today.

‘Glengyle – I rejoice to see you,’ he said. ‘If joy is a word that I may ever use again, mon Dieu! Your coming thus lifts my heart . . . a little. I had feared that you, too, were, were . . .’

‘We are fewer than we were, Highness – but still at your service,’ Glengyle told him, simply.

‘Aye, mes braves – I should have known that if any could cut their way out of that sorry ruin it would be my gallant MacGregors . . .’

‘Provided always that they left in good time, of course!’ a voice murmured from behind the Prince, where Hay of Restalrig, the Military Secretary, had come up.

There was a choking indrawing of breath from every MacGregor near enough to hear. Hands dropped to broadsword hilts, involuntary paces were stepped forward. There was little love lost between the Highland and the Lowland components of that army – or indeed between many of the units of either persuasion themselves – witnessed to by the sourly laughing voice that spoke as Captain Alexander MacLeod, aide-de-camp, came strolling over even as Charles Edward raised a hand to still them all.

‘You have your clans mixed, I think, Colonel Hay! It was the MacDonalds who were, h’m, over dainty on this occasion!’

‘Aye – they would not fight! They would not charge, damn them! Because they had not the right of the line, by all the saints!’ That was O’Sullivan again. ‘And who denied them it? The Lord George. The Lord George again! For his accursed Athollmen . . .’

‘Sawny! John! Peace – I command you!’ the Prince cried, and now his voice was vibrant with emotion. The fine eyes flashed, the glazed weariness momentarily gone. ‘This is insufferable! Enough of it! Has there not been hurt enough, sorrow enough, for one day . . .?’

‘Aye, sir – and treachery enough, too! The Lord George knew well that the MacDonalds would not fight, denied the right of the line. I heard Keppoch tell him so, with my own ears. Yet he took it for himself . . .’

‘Christ God!’ Glengyle roared, that quiet giant who could out-shout them all on occasion. ‘Who talks of Clan Donald not fighting, Storekeeper? If they were slow to charge, they were slower still to leave the field! They did not leave the field, I say. They have not left it yet, whatever. Because they are dead, all dead. They died where they stood, I tell you, around Keppoch and Lochgarry and the others, because they would not run Keppoch is dead . . .’

‘Keppoch!’ the Prince cried. ‘Keppoch, my good friend . . .!’

‘Aye. And most of his own and Clanranald’s and Glengarry’s officers with him. Those that did not die then are being butchered now, my God! Cumberland’s Hessians are butchering the wounded and the prisoners, like dumb animals. Now, at this moment, they are dying like slaughtered cattle.’ Glengyle’s voice broke. ‘I . . . I have never seen the like, nor heard it.’

‘Yes. Yes we . . . we heard of it.’ Charles nodded, biting his lip. ‘It is monstrous, beyond all belief. Ma foi, they are barbarians, brute beasts! But, you – you escaped?’

‘By holding together, just. By holding close, we fought our way out. Some of us.’ Gregor Black Knee glanced back at his ragged battle-worn veterans. There were perhaps one hundred and twenty men there, mainly MacGregors, many of them Rob Roy’s former freebooters, but with forty or so of the hundred Perthshire Stewarts who had been attached to the regiment. Few there were wholly unscathed. ‘These, out of four hundred! We Gregorach have been cutting our way out of ill places from our mothers’ knees. But not as today. Never the like of that!’

‘No. No – it is a cataclysm, a disaster! And Locheil? My good brave Locheil? Do not tell me that he has fallen, mon Dieu? And the Duke? My lord of Perth? You were brigaded with him, in the centre, were you not? What of the Duke?’

‘I think that he escaped, sir. I saw his brother, the Lord John, leading him off the field. They tell me that Locheil fell, both ankles shot with grape. But his Camerons carried him off in time. They were on the right. I did not see . . .’

Captain Duncan MacGregor touched his father’s arm, and gestured behind him, wordlessly. Glengyle nodded.

‘But, sir – my men are in no state to be standing by, while we talk here. You can see their need. I ask Your Highness’s permission that they may stand down. Rest for a little . . .’

‘Certainement, Colonel. Forgive me . . .’

Both Elcho and O’Sullivan spoke at once. Elcho, son to the Earl of Wemyss, prevailed.

‘Your Royal Highness – this is folly!’ he exclaimed. ‘All these men will but bring down Cumberland upon us. Your immediate safety is all-important, now, if the Cause is to be saved. That is why we brought you here. Already there were over-many of us. My pickets tell me that dragoons are scouring all around for you. Videttes are all over the moor, searching. Already they may have spied us. These MacGregors will bring them down on us like a swarm of locusts! You must order them to leave us, Highness. At once.’

‘God in Heaven – is that what you think of the Gregorach, now!’ Glengyle cried. ‘Is his Highness safer in the midst of a hundred MacGregors, every one of whom would die for him? Or amongst a wheen Sassunach secretaries and storekeepers!’ And his hand swept in scornful gesture over the dozen or so of the Prince’s company.

‘Gentlemen – I pray you! A truce to this talk . . .’

‘His lordship is right, Highness,’ O’Sullivan insisted. ‘In this matter, at least. The fewer men about your person now, the better. What could a hundred of infantry, MacGregors or other, do against a regiment of dragoons? Yourself it is that Cumberland wants – the rest he can hunt down at his leisure. Send them away, sir.’

‘Very well, gentlemen. Glengyle – you will take your gallant regiment yonder. Behind these trees there is a hollow where a stream runs. Take your men there, Colonel. Rest them in that hollow. They will be out of sight. Then yourself come back here. For a council.’

‘But, sir – here is no time nor place for a council!’ Elcho protested. ‘You should be gone. Ere this. As far from this fatal place as is possible. Southwards into Badenoch. To join up with Cluny. To Ruthven . . .’

‘My lord – your advice will be welcome. At the council. Others give me contrary advice. We must decide what is best. What is wisest. What is possible, mon Dieu!’ Charles drew a hand over his bruised brow. ‘Glengyle – you have your orders.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The MacGregor hesitated for a moment. ‘Highness – might I ask? For my men. Your Quartermaster – has he any food? Any provisions? Anything . . .?’

‘Alas, Glengyle . . .’

‘I have nothing, sir. Nothing nearer than Inverness,’ O’Sullivan said.

Gregor Black Knee inclined his head. The entire Jacobite army had had one biscuit apiece for sustenance that whole grim day. And not much more the day before – with an allnight march of abortive folly in between. ‘Your servant, sir,’ he said. ‘I shall be back.’ And raising his voice. ‘Pipes! Dia – let us have the pipes!’

‘’Fore God – not again!’ Lord Elcho burst out. ‘Not again, Glengyle! No more of that damnable noise . . .!’

The rest of his protest was lost in the clansmen’s growling wrath and contempt, and in the bubbling ululation of the bagpipes.

In a fold of the high moor, eight hundred feet above the sea, where a burn ran down towards the River Nairn, Glengyle left his men to bathe their wounds and fill their empty bellies with water if with nothing else, and limped back towards the cot-house, taking his son with him. Four miles away to the north, down at sea-level, the towers of Inverness Castle could just be distinguished through the grey curtains of the rain squalls. Beyond, although the massive outline of Ben Wyvis itself could not be seen, the stark white streaks of snow in the mountain’s corries stood out strangely.

Under the dripping trees the MacGregors passed Charles Edward’s personal bodyguard, dismounted and waiting, sixteen troopers of FitzJames’s Horse. Their French officer eyed the two bare-kneed Highlanders with unconcealed scorn, and offered no greeting.

Back at the Prince’s party, they found the council already in progress, after a fashion. Another couple of officers had arrived – Major Maxwell of Kirkconnell, of Elcho’s Horse, and the Master of Lovat. Tempers were brittle, and words were high.

Young Lovat was speaking, son of the wily Fraser chief.

‘. . . nor do I trust Cluny. He has held off all day. He is but six miles off, with five hundred Macphersons. He might have tipped the scales had he thought fit to join us. It would be folly for Your Highness to turn south into his country.’

‘How do you know that Cluny is but six miles off?’ Lord Elcho demanded. ‘The Lord George Murray left him yesterday at Ruthven, fifty miles away . . .’

‘This is Fraser country, my lord. I learn quickly all that passes in it.’

‘Then perhaps, Master of Lovat, you could tell us where the rest of the great Clan Fraser is hiding? Only two hundred men were here to face Cumberland . . .!’

‘Damnation, sir! Do you jest – or must I teach you that in Fraser country no man speaks so to . . .?’

‘My lords! Gentlemen!’ the Prince intervened wearily. ‘May I remind you that this is a council-of-war – not a tavern brawl? Here is Glengyle. And Captain Duncan. Sit in, Colonel. You are wounded, I see. Your leg . . .?’

‘A scratch, Highness – no more. A bayonet prick.’

‘You were at close quarters, then?’

‘Oh, aye – we were close enough. Too close for Barrel’s fusiliers, I warrant you! But yourself, sir? Your head? Your brow?’

‘Nothing, mon ami. A bump, a bruise. My horse was shot under me – that is all. No more honourable scar! Alors – we have but now heard more of the battle, from the Master of Lovat here, and Major Maxwell. And ill tidings they bring! The Mackintoshes are cut to ribbons. The Chisholms died where they stood, like the MacDonalds. Dillon’s Regiment is no more. The Drummond Horse were decimated by cannon-fire and grape, and my Lord Strathallan is dead. As is Mercer of Aldie. My Lords Kilmarnock and Balmerino are prisoners. All gone. My brave army is no more. There is nothing left – nothing!’

The MacGregor shook his head, fair still, the golden hair only faded a little by silver-grey. ‘It is bad, sir – bad. But there is much left, see you. A battle lost, it is – not a campaign. Och, sir, the half of your army were not here, at all. No more than four or five thousand men faced Cumberland this day, and him with twice that number.’

‘And there we have it!’ Hay of Restalrig interjected. ‘Your Royal Highness had twelve thousand at Perth. Many more than that at Edinburgh. Where are the rest?’

‘Aye, sir – there’s the rub,’ O’Sullivan nodded. ‘Sure, more than a battle is lost.’

‘I fear that you are right, John.’

‘But much may yet be saved, Your Highness,’ Elcho insisted. ‘Go south to Ruthven. That is where Lord George and his Athollmen are making for. And the remnant of Drummond’s Horse. With the Duke. Both your Lieutenants-General. It is Cluny’s country . . .’

‘And claim you that as recommendation!’ Young Lovat cried. ‘The Lord George Murray and Cluny! My beloved brother-in-law. Better put your life in the hands of honest men . . .’

‘Like my Lord of Lovat?’ Elcho gave back.

The Prince had to beat on the tree-trunk with his sword-hilt to quell the uproar.

‘I will have none of my good friends and faithful officers mis-called!’ he exclaimed. ‘We have had that, a-plenty! I seek true and wise counsel, not raillery and malice.’

‘There is but the one true and wise counsel for Your Highness in this pass,’ O’Sullivan declared earnestly. ‘Go back to France, sir. King Louis has promised men and arms and money. If we had waited, and brought them with us at the first, this whole endeavour would have turned out differently, I swear. Go back to France and raise them now. Then return with them. Next year, mayhap. There is the only wise and practical course, sir.’

‘And what of the men who have come out for your Cause, sir?’ Glengyle demanded. ‘If you sail away and leave them, for France? What is to become of them?’

‘They will disperse to their homes. Such as have not already done so!’ Hay said. ‘I agree with the Adjutant-General. The only sound course is to return to France . . .’

‘Sound for whom?’ the MacGregor cried. ‘My God – think you that there is any safety in their homes for the thousands you leave behind? Think you the Government will forgive and forget?’

‘And King Louis has been promising men and money for years, Your Royal Highness,’ Maxwell of Kirkconnell pointed out. ‘You still have an army, if you will but collect it, reassemble it. Scattered wide it may be, now. But it can come together again. Go to Ruthven in Badenoch. Assemble there.’

‘Or in Lochaber. In Cameron’s country. Better there, in the West. It is more remote. Bid the clans assemble there,’ Young Lovat proposed.

‘Safely away from your doorstep . . .?’ MacLeod the aide suggested softly.

‘Damn you, sir . . .!’

‘There should have been a rendezvous appointed,’ Elcho interrupted, looking accusingly from the Prince to O’Sullivan. Of them all, Elcho had ever been most critical of Charles’s leadership and his Irish friends. ‘That was elementary. Had there been such, we should not be in this pickle, at least. But since neither Captain-General nor Adjutant-General ordered a rendezvous in case of defeat, surely it behoves us that we all seek to join the two Lieutenants-General. Lord George has left word that he is making for Ruthven, with the Duke of Perth. To Ruthven, therefore, all should go. And swiftly, before Cumberland thinks to close the passes of Moy and The Slochd.’

‘I agree,’ Glengyle said, although he frowned. ‘That is what an army should do. Not that I wouldn’t sooner see your Highness making for the north-west, for Kintail and Torridon and Gairloch – the wild MacKenzic country where the Redcoats could never come at you. The Earl of Cromartie is north of Inverness, with eight hundred Mackenzies, watching Sutherland. MacDonnell of Barrisdale likewise. I left them there but two days ago. I say, go south now to Ruthven, and join Lord George and the others. Then head you north through the mountains, by the Corryarrack Pass, Fort Augustus, Glen Moriston and over to Kintail, with your men. I will guide you by high ways where no dragoons nor fusiliers may follow. Bring in Cromartie and the others to join you there – and you have an army again. The summer is coming . . .’

‘Och, heed them not, me boy,’ old Sir Thomas Sheridan, at the Prince’s back, said in his thin reedy Irish voice. ‘Ye will not turn the clock back, thus. The die is cast. ’Tis France for ye now, lad. The only thing, at all, at all. ’Tis but foolishness to be knocking your dear head against the wall . . .’

‘God in Heaven – the Tutor-General now!’ Elcho snorted.

A new uproar sank and dwindled at the hollow beat of horse’s hooves on the heather. A single rider came pounding across the moor from the north-east, from the direction of the battlefield, on a shaggy and sweat-lathered Highland garron. A tall lean handsome figure this, dressed in MacGregor tartans and a major’s insignia.

‘James Mor!’ Glengyle exclaimed. ‘So we have not lost him yet!’ Gregor Black Knee muttered something else below his breath, and he and his son exchanged glances.

‘I sent him back to endeavour to reach Locheil,’ the Prince said. ‘To bring him here, if he might. Alas, it appears . . . otherwise.’

The newcomer flung himself dramatically off his foundered pony, and came swaggering up to the waiting group. Everything that man did was done with a swagger – whether it was leading a charge, seducing a woman, cutting a throat, or merely undermining confidence in lesser men than himself. His bonnet, with its single eagle’s feather, now swept low in an exaggerated yet somehow fleering obeisance to the Prince.

‘I thank God for your safe return, Major MacGregor,’ Charles said – who, unlike some others, esteemed him highly. ‘But . . . you are alone, I see!’

‘And, on my soul, devilish lucky to be that itself, Highness!’ the horseman replied, grinning. ‘But, then – the devil aye looks after his own, does he not? Eh, Gregor?’ And he glanced side-long at his cousin. ‘You preserved your soul also, I see. And even dear Duncan Beg here, likewise!’

‘And Locheil?’ the Prince asked urgently. ‘We have just heard, from Glengyle, that he is said to be wounded. But in the hands of his own people . . .’

‘That is more or less the way of it, yes,’ the new MacGregor agreed, elaborately stifling a yawn. ‘Locheil sends suitable greetings, Highness, and suggests that he will see you another day!’

‘Another day? You mean . . .?’

‘I mean, sir, that Locheil is off home to Achnacarry on Loch Arkaig-side as fast as some hundreds of running Cameron heels can carry him. And the Camerons were ever good at running!’

‘James Mor will have his little jest, sir,’ Gregor of Glengyle interpreted quietly. ‘If Cameron of Locheil is shot in both ankles with grape, then he is in no state to be sending greetings, nor yet ordering his clansfolk. And Achnacarry is the best place for him, whatever – and the faster there, the better. Ewan Cameron is as true and sure a man as your Highness commands.’

‘Yes, indeed, Glengyle. I know it well . . .’

The two MacGregors looked at each other. They were full cousins, although James Mor was considerably the younger – only a little older, indeed, than Gregor’s son, the Captain Duncan. He was a dark, sardonically good-looking man, hawk-faced with just a wicked wisp of moustache and beard, almost as tall as Gregor although less broadly built. He was a son of the famous Rob Roy, now dead some eleven years, but a very different man from his father. Nominally second-in-command of Glengyle’s Regiment, which he had led with great gallantry and no less than five wounds at Prestonpans, he had latterly spent most of his time in the Prince’s personal entourage as a sort of extra aide-de-camp and courier. His cousin made no complaint at this development – nor his second-cousin either.

‘Do not tell me that your own self and Duncan are the sole survivors of our graceless band, Gregor?’ James Mor asked.

‘There are some six score behind the trees younder. We cut our way out. You were . . . otherwise engaged, I take it, James?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Have you heard aught of Glencarnock? How his regiment fared?’

There were two MacGregor regiments in the Prince’s army, for the clan was split. A part of it recognised Balhaldy as chief of the name of MacGregor, long with King James in France, and of these Glengyle was the foremost chieftain; the other part claimed the leadership for Murray MacGregor of Glencarnock, and he had brought his own following to the Jacobite array. It had been brigaded with the Mackintoshes in the centre of the first line.

‘They fared but i. . .