In just four hours, the carefully crafted Black Watch rifle companies, whose men had grown so tight as they honed their skills during months and years of training in England, had taken 94 percent casualties. That scale of loss far surpassed anything their fathers might have experienced while trudging down their own Voies Sacrées and rivalled the rate suffered by the Royal Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont Hamel on the disastrous opening day of the Somme offensive on July 1, 1916.10
