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For some weeks during the summer of 1916 Captain Hugh Bayly was Medical Officer of the 1st Scots Guards. Much later he wrote about shell shock: “The term ‘shell shock’ was far too loose a term as used during the war to cover: (1) Shell concussion, with a more or less prolonged period of unconsciousness and almost certain damage to brain substance. (2) Shell neurasthenia, the result of nerve exhaustion after a prolonged period of strain and tension and lack of sleep. (3) Abnormal nerve reaction to the stimuli of explosions owing to a sensitive and highly strung nervous system. (4) A lack of normal nerve control in the face of danger, to which the ugly name of ‘cowardice’ is sometimes, but only sometimes, rightly given. All gallant men dread shell shock more than any other wound, for the simple reason that an extremely small percentage of the men returned with this disability may possibly include a few poltroons. There is no form of casualty that has my greater sympathy.”

Hugh Ross and Right Flank Coy in the Trenches held by them on 14th September 1916

Hugh Ross was born in 1884, the second son of Edward and Margaret Ross, whose home was in North Berwick, and grandson of Horatio Ross, prominent sportsman, prolific early photographer and godson of Admiral Nelson. His father died when Hugh was twelve. He then went to school at both Eton and Glenalmond before going to Sandhurst, from where he was commissioned into the Scots Guards in 1905. When the First World War broke out, the 1st Battalion Scots Guards were at Ramillies Barracks, Aldershot, and Ross went with them to France at the start, taking part in the Retreat from Mons, the Battle of the Marne and the early stages of the Battle of the Aisne. Later in that battle he became Signal Officer at Headquarters 1st Guards Brigade, his predecessor having been posted missing. In the middle of October the 1st Guards Brigade, among the last British troops still on the Aisne, travelled north and from 21st October were heavily involved in the 1st Battle of Ypres. Somewhere near the Menin Road on 4th November Hugh Ross was severely wounded by shrapnel in his left thigh and sent home to hospital.

The snowwoman

It was not till February 1916 that Ross re-joined the 1st Scots Guards. Having spent the winter until then doing trench tours in the neighbourhood of Neuve Chapelle, the Guards Division had just moved north to the Ypres hinterland, but were not required immediately in the Salient. Consequently, among other diversions, each brigade spent nearly two weeks in very bracing conditions in tented camps outside Calais. While the 2nd Guards Brigade were there at the beginning of March, horse races were held on the beach. This, entitled the First Calais Spring Meeting, was the brainchild of Brigadier General John Ponsonby. In one race Hugh Ross was unplaced on his horse Fifinella. Soon afterwards in another camp near St Omer, where there was thick snow and no possibility of doing any worthwhile training, he and another company commander, Sir Iain Colquhoun of Luss, spent an afternoon building an enormous snowwoman, by the end of which they had given so much attention to the breasts that they had become ice. Sir Iain Colquhoun, likewise a pre-war regular in the 1st Battalion Scots Guards, had been through very much the same experiences initially, including being badly wounded during 1st Ypres, though he had recovered sooner and had been back out since October 1915.

From late March to the end of July 1916, the Guards Division were either in the Ypres Salient or in reserve behind it. There were some very rough trench tours but others when little or nothing happened. However, with the front and immediate support positions overlooked almost everywhere, movement in daylight of any sort was extremely hazardous because of snipers, while shelling and mortaring could be turned on by the enemy at will; it was a very testing environment. Nevertheless, only a little way back from the line it was possible to relax and, in the reserve dug-outs in the canal bank just north of Ypres, Hugh Ross and Sir Iain Colquhoun spent one happy morning playing a set of pipes that had been sent up to them. Later, one evening in July, while the Brigade was in reserve, the Grenadier Guards Regimental Band performed at Brigade Headquarters and General Ponsonby threw an impromptu party with the guns firing in the Salient to the east and later, as it got dark, rockets and lights flying up into the night sky. Hugh Ross played the pipes as Sir Iain Colquhoun and Lieutenant Henry Dundas of the 1st Scots Guards and Lieutenants Allan Mackenzie and Robert Wolrige Gordon of the 3rd Grenadier Guards danced the Foursome Reel. Sir Iain Colquhoun told his wife that he had also danced twice with the Prince of Wales.

Next the Guards Division moved south and for a short while rested and waited out to the west of the Somme battlefield, though there were a few trench tours as well. It was obvious that something more serious was coming and on 9th September the 1st Scots Guards moved up towards the front line much further east and camped in Happy Valley, near Fricourt, where they first saw tanks. Further still to the east, during that day and the next, the 16th Irish Division captured most of Ginchy and then had to be relieved in a situation which was far from stable. The 3rd Guards Brigade went up there on 10th September and there was continuous heavy fighting before some of the 2nd Guards Brigade became involved from the 12th, including two companies from the 1st Scots Guards, Right Flank under Hugh Ross being one of them. They went into support trenches behind Ginchy where they were much shelled and there were many casualties.

15th September became the day for the biggest attack on the Somme, both British and French, since 1st July, concentrating on the eastern and southern parts of the battlefield. The situation at Ginchy was improved, but cramped and far from ideal, as the Guards Division prepared for a two brigade attack northeast towards Lesboeufs. The 2nd Guards Brigade were to attack on the right but it was extremely difficult to brief and resupply those already forward near Ginchy. The start line was more or less secure, but behind it the congestion was severe and consequently, soon after the attack began, the waves of men became mixed up. The 3rd Grenadiers were the leading battalion on the right with the 1st Scots Guards following them. Immediately the enemy retaliated. Forward of their main front line trench they had prepared improvised trench lines in shellholes, the existence of which was unknown to the British. There was heavy artillery fire and off to the right machine guns opened up in enfilade from outside the divisional boundary (the same was happening to the 1st Guards Brigade on the left). In spite of all this, the Guards Division took the enemy front line and in places a bit more. Everywhere was noise and confusion. At one stage Hugh Ross and Sir Iain Colquhoun were together when there was another burst of machine gun fire and they and five men jumped into a shellhole, where they were joined by an officer from the 2nd Guards Brigade Machine Gun Company. A soldier who moved to make space for him was immediately shot dead. They were in the shellhole for over an hour, at the end of which only Sir Iain Colquhoun was unwounded. Two of the men had been sniped, shrapnel had killed the other two and wounded the other officer and Hugh Ross had been slightly wounded twice and gone ‘off his head’.

Captain Hugh Bayly RAMC was hit in the knee, but went on dressing men’s wounds in the captured German front line trench until he was carried back after dark. When he reached a casualty clearing station ‘Hugh Ross was in the next bed with a head wound. One of the 1st Battalion officers spoke to me about him and asked me to do my best here and at the Base hospital to prevent his return for several weeks as, though his head wound did not appear serious, he had severe shellshock, as he had got to the state where he wanted to go forward and fight the whole German Army by himself. This is a not uncommon symptom in a brave man whose nerves are beginning to feel the strain…Hugh Ross told me at once that he was perfectly fit and was going back to the Battalion immediately, but I got at the doctor and told him the facts and Ross got his ticket for Rouen all right! He crawled out from under the side of the tent in his eagerness to return to the Battalion, but was spotted by an MO and ignominiously tied into a stretcher and taken back to hospital! I think he hated me!’ Some time afterwards Hugh Ross told him that later he went temporarily blind ‘and a minute fragment of iron was…extracted from the eye by means of a powerful magnet’. At the end of October Hugh Ross was awarded the DSO.

Sir Iain Colquhoun

For some months he remained the other side of the Channel but by the summer of 1917 was commanding Right Flank back at Ypres. In June Right Flank were manning reserve trenches at Elverdinghe near Brigade Headquarters, where Lieutenant Dundas was now the Bombing and Intelligence Officer. Captain Oliver Lyttleton, a Grenadier, remembered them being ‘in some dug-outs along the garden wall of the Château. During the whole of one afternoon and early evening this part of the grounds was shelled with great intensity, and several men were buried and had to be dug out, whilst all had narrow escapes. Hugh, at this time, was suffering from fever and strain, and few in his condition would have been still at duty. When the shelling was over he came into Brigade Headquarters covered with brick dust, exhausted, and nearly ‘through’. He was asked to dinner. Henry was in particularly good form, and his high spirits were so infectious that by the end of dinner Hugh had recovered. The irrepressible Henry must of course begin Scotch songs…they started to dance a reel and give out the chorus with the utmost vigour. Outside the evening shells were homing like wild duck into the ponds and garden of the house, whilst inside Hugh and Henry beat up the singing to a frenzy, and eventually collapsed perspiring and laughing on the floor’.
On 30th July 1917 a shell landed on the dug-out which Lieutenant Colonel Bernard Romilly, Winston Churchill’s brother in law, was in and he was evacuated permanently, though not physically wounded. He should probably never been sent out to command the 1st Scots Guards because of his very severe head wound in the spring of 1915 and it was immediately obvious when he arrived a few weeks earlier that it was very questionable whether he could take the strain. The Second in Command, Major Miles Barne, was away, having just before this damaged a rib when he slipped while jumping across a trench. So Hugh Ross commanded the Battalion in the Battle of Pilckem Ridge on 31st July, the start of the 3rd Battle of Ypres and for the Guards Division that day a major, but painful, success. By all accounts Hugh Ross did very well and a French Croix de Guerre followed. Until October the 1st Scots Guards were not involved in any more major operations but there were a number of very unpleasant trench tours and in and out of the line there were endless exhausting fatigues, while gas of various types, delivered by shells, was constantly in use by the Germans. On 9th October the Guards Division attack was again a successful one in the Battle of Poelcapelle and they were successful again three days later in the 1st Battle of Passchendaele, though the 1st Scots Guards did not take part directly in that. On 11th October it was recorded that Hugh Ross was slightly wounded but remained at duty, there being no more details.

A few days later the Guards Division were withdrawn from the Ypres area for the last time. Hugh Ross was appointed from 21st October as Chief Instructor at the XIV Corps School, a classic role for someone identified as needing a rest. He remained there till the turn of the year and was then sent to the British Expeditionary Force in Italy in some administrative or staff appointment. He did not like it and wanted to return to France but told Sir Iain Colquhoun in a letter that the medical authorities would not let him. However, by June 1918 he was back in London, apparently passed fully fit. While there was doubt in at least some minds as to what he should do, it would appear that it was left to Hugh Ross himself to decide whether or not to go to France. There was an urgent vacancy as Second in Command of the 2nd Scots Guards and no one else about who was suitable. He accepted it, was promoted Major and sailed at the end of June. Early in August Lieutenant Colonel Francis Alston, a Scots Guardsman at Headquarters Guards Division, approached Major Edward Warner, Second in Command of the 1st Scots Guards, and asked him to put to Hugh Ross that he should go home to the 3rd Scots Guards to train men at Wellington Barracks. This could have been arranged quite informally. Major Warner tried, Hugh Ross did not like it and although Major Warner thought he would go, he did not do so.

Early in September, Lieutenant Colonel Jack Stirling, who commanded the 2nd Scots Guards, was slightly gassed, needing treatment, and then went on sick leave to England. So Hugh Ross was commanding on 27th September when the Guards Division crossed the Canal du Nord and captured the Hindenburg Support Line north of Flesquières. For this, starting early in the morning, the brigades followed each other forward in stages. The first stage went well, but the projected second and third stages were hampered and disrupted by very heavy machine gun fire from around Graincourt, outside the left divisional boundary, which could only be suppressed once the neighbouring troops drew level. This was not until well into the afternoon. Exactly what happened to the 2nd Scots Guards was not spelled out in subsequent reports but when the 3rd Guards Brigade moved forward after the other two had advanced by the time that the 3rd Grenadiers had reached Flesquières, with the 1st Welsh Guards following them, both had lost contact with the 2nd Scots Guards who should have been on their left. While the other two stormed on along the north side of the Flesquières Ridge towards Premy Chapel, the 2nd Scots Guards, though complying with their orders not to move until those to their left were able to do so, simply occupied captured trenches north of Flesquières. It did not help that the brigade commander had been killed earlier and that quite separately there was a prolonged brigade communications breakdown.

Next day Major Warner was told to take command of the 2nd Scots Guards and Hugh Ross went back to London. Sir Iain Colquhoun, elsewhere by this time, heard of this and wrote ‘Hugh seems to have let them all down pretty badly, they ought to have sent him home long ago. He will be awfully cut up about it poor old fellow’. Early in the 1920s Hugh Ross became Commanding Officer of the 1st Scots Guards, but his health deteriorated and he had to give up and leave the Army. From long before he had sketched and drawn to a very high standard. While unfortunately almost nothing he drew during the war still exists much has survived that he later drew of wildlife, plants and scenes, beautifully observed and depicted. He died unmarried on 23rd June 1940, his fifty sixth birthday, and was buried in the same tomb as his parents in North Berwick.