Books: Now It Can Be Told

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"On the front of the Third Army," wrote Sir John French, "subsidiary
operations of a similar nature were successfully carried out."

From the point of view of high generalship those holding attacks had
served their purpose pretty well. From the point of view of mothers'
sons they had been a bloody shambles without any gain. The point of
view depends on the angle of vision.

VII

Let me now tell the story of the main battle of Loos as I was able to
piece it together from the accounts of men in different parts of the
field--no man could see more than his immediate neighborhood--and from
the officers who survived. It is a story full of the psychology of
battle, with many strange incidents which happened to men when their
spirit was uplifted by that mingling of exultation and fear which is
heroism, and with queer episodes almost verging on comedy in the midst
of death and agony, at the end of a day of victory, most ghastly
failure.

The three attacking divisions from left to right on the line opposite
the villages of Hulluch and Loos were the 1st, the 15th (Scottish),
and the 47th (London). Higher up, opposite Hulluch and Haisnes, the
9th (Scottish) Division and the 7th Division were in front of the
Hohenzollern redoubt (chalky earthworks thrust out beyond the German
front-line trenches, on rising ground) and some chalk-quarries.

The men of those divisions were lined up during the night in the
communication trenches, which had been dug by the sappers and laid
with miles of telephone wire. They were silent, except for the chink
of shovels and side arms, the shuffle of men's feet, their hard
breathing, and occasional words of command. At five-thirty, when the
guns in all our batteries were firing at full blast, with a constant
scream of shells over the heads of the waiting men, and when the first
faint light of day stole into the sky, there was a slight rain
falling, and the wind blew lightly from the southwest.

In the front-line trenches a number of men were busy with some long,
narrow cylinders, which had been carried up a day before. They were
arranging them in the mud of the parapets with their nozles facing the
enemy lines.

"That's the stuff to give them!"

"What is it?"

"Poison-gas. Worse than they used at Ypres."

"Christ! . . . supposing we have to walk through it?"

"We shall walk behind it. The wind will carry it down the throat of
the Fritzes. We shall find 'em dead."

So men I met had talked of that new weapon which most of them hated.

It was at five-thirty when the men busy with the cylinders turned on
little taps. There was a faint hissing noise, the escape of gas from
many pipes. A heavy, whitish cloud came out of the cylinders and
traveled aboveground as it was lifted and carried forward by the
breeze.

"How's the gas working?" asked a Scottish officer.

"Going fine!" said an English officer. But he looked anxious, and
wetted a finger and held it up, to get the direction of the wind.

Some of the communication trenches were crowded with the Black Watch
of the 1st Division, hard, bronzed fellows, with the red heckle in
their bonnets. (It was before the time of steel hats.) They were
leaning up against the walls of the trenches, waiting. They were
strung round with spades, bombs, and sacks.

"A queer kind o' stink!" said one of them, sniffing.

Some of the men began coughing. Others were rubbing their eyes, as
though they smarted.

The poison-gas. . . The wind had carried it half way across No Man's
Land, then a swirl changed its course, and flicked it down a gully,
and swept it right round to the Black Watch in the narrow trenches.
Some German shell-fire was coming, too. In one small bunch eight men
fell in a mush of blood and raw flesh. But the gas was worse. There
was a movement in the trenches, the huddling together of frightened
men who had been very brave. They were coughing, spitting, gasping.
Some of them fell limp against their fellows, with pallid cheeks which
blackened. Others tied handkerchiefs about their mouths and noses, but
choked inside those bandages, and dropped to earth with a clatter of
shovels. Officers and men were cursing and groaning. An hour later,
when the whistles blew, there were gaps in the line of the 1st
Division which went over the top. In the trenches lay gassed men. In
No Man's Land others fell, swept by machine-gun bullets, shrapnel, and
high explosives. The 1st Division was "checked." . . .

"We caught it badly," said some of them I met later in the day,
bandaged and bloody, and plastered in wet chalk, while gassed men lay
on stretchers about them, unconscious, with laboring lungs.

VIII

Farther south the front-lines of the 15th (Scottish) Division climbed
over their parapets at six-thirty, and saw the open ground before
them, and the dusky, paling sky above them, and broken wire in front
of the enemy's churned-up trenches; and through the smoke, faintly,
and far away, three and a half miles away, the ghostly outline of the
"Tower Bridge" of Loos, which was their goal. For an hour there were
steady tides of men all streaming slowly up those narrow communication
ways, cut through the chalk to get into the light also, where death
was in ambush for many of them somewhere in the shadows of that dawn.

By seven-forty the two assaulting brigades of the 15th Division had
left the trenches and were in the open. Shriller than the scream of
shells above them was the skirl of pipes, going with them. The Pipe
Major of the 8th Gordons was badly wounded, but refused to be touched
until the other men were tended. He was a giant, too big for a
stretcher, and had to be carried back on a tarpaulin. At the dressing-
station his leg was amputated, but he died after two operations, and
the Gordons mourned him.

While the Highlanders went forward with their pipes, two brigades of
the Londoners, on their right, were advancing in the direction of the
long, double slag heap, southwest of Loos, called the Double Crassier.
Some of them were blowing mouth-organs, playing the music-hall song of
"Hullo, hullo, it's a different girl again!" and the "Robert E. Lee,"
until one after another a musician fell in a crumpled heap. Shrapnel
burst over them, and here and there shells plowed up the earth where
they were trudging. On the right of the Londoners the French still
stayed in their trenches--their own attack was postponed until midday-
-and they cheered the London men, as they went forward, with cries of,
"Vivent les Angdais!" "A mort--les Boches!" It was they who saw one
man kicking a football in advance of the others.

"He is mad!" they said. "The poor boy is a lunatic!"

"He is not mad," said a French officer who had lived in England. "It
is a beau geste. He is a sportsman scornful of death. That is the
British sport."

It was a London Irishman dribbling a football toward the goal, and he
held it for fourteen hundred yards--the best-kicked goal in history.

Many men fell in the five hundred yards of No Man's Land. But they
were not missed then by those who went on in waves--rather, like
molecules, separating, collecting, splitting up into smaller groups,
bunching together again, on the way to the first line of German
trenches. A glint of bayonets made a quickset hedge along the line of
churned-up earth which had been the Germans' front--line trench. Our
guns had cut the wire or torn gaps into it. Through the broken strands
went the Londoners on the right, the Scots on the left, shouting
hoarsely now. They saw red. They were hunters of human flesh. They
swarmed down into the first long ditch, trampling over dead bodies,
falling over them, clawing the earth and scrambling up the parados,
all broken and crumbled, then on again to another ditch. Boys dropped
with bullets in their brains, throats, and bodies. German machine-guns
were at work at close range.

"Give'em hell!" said an officer of the Londoners--a boy of nineteen.
There were a lot of living Germans in the second ditch, and in holes
about. Some of them stood still, as though turned to clay, until they
fell with half the length of a bayonet through their stomachs. Others
shrieked and ran a little way before they died. Others sat behind
hillocks of earth, spraying our men with machine-gun bullets until
bombs were hurled on them and they were scattered into lumps of flesh.

Three lines of trench were taken, and the Londoners and the Scots went
forward again in a spate toward Loos. All the way from our old lines
men were streaming up, with shells bursting among them or near them.

On the way to Loos a company of Scots came face to face with a tall
German. He was stone-dead, with a bullet in his brain, his face all
blackened with the grime of battle; but he stood erect in the path,
wedged somehow in a bit of trench. The Scots stared at this figure,
and their line parted and swept each side of him, as though some
obscene specter barred the way. Rank after rank streamed up, and then
a big tide of men poured through the German trench systems and rushed
forward. Three--quarters of a mile more to Loos. Some of them were
panting, out of breath, speechless. Others talked to the men about
them in stray sentences. Most of them were silent, staring ahead of
them and licking their lips with swollen tongues. They were parched
with thirst, some of them told me. Many stopped to drink the last drop
out of their water-bottles. As one man drank he spun round and fell
with a thud on his face. Machine-gun bullets were whipping up the
earth. From Loos came a loud and constant rattle of machine-guns.
Machine-guns were firing out of the broken windows of the houses and
from the top of the "Tower Bridge," those steel girders which rose
three hundred feet high from the center of the village, and from slit
trenches across the narrow streets. There were one hundred machine-
guns in the cemetery to the southwest of the town, pouring out lead
upon the Londoners who had to pass that place.

Scots and London men were mixed up, and mingled in crowds which
encircled Loos, and forced their way into the village; but roughly
still, and in the mass, they were Scots who assaulted Loos itself, and
London men who went south of it to the chalk-pits and the Double
Crassier.

It was eight o'clock in the morning when the first crowds reached the
village, and for nearly two hours afterward there was street-fighting.

It was the fighting of men in the open, armed with bayonets, rifles,
and bombs, against men invisible and in hiding, with machine-guns.
Small groups of Scots, like packs of wolves, prowled around the
houses, where the lower rooms and cellars were crammed with Germans,
trapped and terrified, but still defending themselves. In some of the
houses they would not surrender, afraid of certain death, anyhow, and
kept the Scots at bay awhile until those kilted men flung themselves
in and killed their enemy to the last man. Outside those red-brick
houses lay dead and wounded Scots. Inside there were the curses and
screams of a bloody vengeance. In other houses the machine-gun
garrisons ceased fire and put white rags through the broken windows,
and surrendered like sheep. So it was in one house entered by a little
kilted signaler, who shot down three men who tried to kill him. Thirty
others held their hands up and said, in a chorus of fear, "Kamerad!
Kamerad!"

A company of the 8th Gordons were among the first into Loos, led by
some of those Highland officers I have mentioned on another page. It
was "Honest John" who led one crowd of them, and he claims now, with a
laugh, that he gained his Military Cross for saving the lives of two
hundred Germans. "I ought to have got the Royal Humane Society's
medal," he said. Those Germans--Poles, really, from Silesia--came
swarming out of a house with their hands up. But the Gordons had
tasted blood. They were hungry for it. They were panting and shouting,
with red bayonets, behind their officer.

That young man thought deeply and quickly. If there were "no quarter"
it might be ugly for the Gordons later in the day, and the day was
young, and Loos was still untaken.

He stood facing his own men, ordered them sternly to keep steady.
These men were to be taken prisoners and sent back under escort. He
had his revolver handy, and, anyhow, the men knew him. They obeyed,
grumbling sullenly.

There was the noise of fire in other parts of the village, and the
tap-tap-tap of machine-guns from many cellars. Bombing-parties of
Scots silenced those machine-gunners at last by going to the head of
the stairways and flinging down their hand-grenades. The cellars of
Loos were full of dead.

In one of them, hours after the fighting had ceased among the ruins of
the village, and the line of fire was forward of Hill 70, a living man
still hid and carried on his work. The colonel of one of our forward
battalions came into Loos with his signalers and runners, and
established his headquarters in a house almost untouched by shell-
fire. At the time there was very little shelling, as the artillery
officers on either side were afraid of killing their own men, and the
house seemed fairly safe for the purpose of a temporary signal-
station.

But the colonel noticed that shortly after his arrival heavy shells
began to fall very close and the Germans obviously were aiming
directly for this building. He ordered the cellars to be searched, and
three Germans were found. It was only after he had been in the house
for forty minutes that in a deeper cellar, which had not been seen
before, the discovery was made of a German officer who was telephoning
to his own batteries and directing their fire. Suspecting that the
colonel and his companions were important officers directing general
operations, he had caused the shells to fall upon the house knowing
that a lucky shot would mean his own death as well as theirs.

As our searchers came into the cellar, he rose and stood there,
waiting, with a cold dignity, for the fate which he knew would come to
him, as it did. He was a very brave man.

Another German officer remained hiding in the church, which was so
heavily mined that it would have blown half the village into dust and
ashes if he had touched off the charges. He was fumbling at the job
when our men found and killed him.

In the southern outskirts of Loos, and in the cemetery, the Londoners
had a bloody fight among the tombstones, where nests of German
machine-guns had been built into the vaults. New corpses, still
bleeding, lay among old dead torn from their coffins by shell-fire.
Londoners and Siiesian Germans lay together across one another's
bodies. The London men routed out most of the machine-gunners and
bayoneted some and took prisoners of others. They were not so fierce
as the Scots, but in those hours forgot the flower-gardens in
Streatham and Tooting Bec and the manners of suburban drawing rooms. .
. It is strange that one German machine-gun, served by four men,
remained hidden behind a gravestone all through that day, and
Saturday, and Sunday, and sniped stray men of ours until routed at
last by moppers-up of the Guards brigade.

As the Londoners came down the slope to the southern edge of Loos
village, through a thick haze of smoke from shell-fire and burning
houses, they were astounded to meet a crowd of civilians, mostly women
and children, who came streaming across the open in panic-stricken
groups. Some of them fell under machine-gun fire snapping from the
houses or under shrapnel bursting overhead. The women were haggard and
gaunt, with wild eyes and wild hair, like witches. They held their
children in tight claws until they were near our soldiers, when they
all set up a shrill crying and wailing. The children were dazed with
terror. Other civilians crawled up from their cellars in Loos,
spattered with German blood, and wandered about among soldiers of many
British battalions who crowded amid the scarred and shattered houses,
and among the wounded men who came staggering through the streets,
where army doctors were giving first aid in the roadway, while shells
were bursting overhead and all the roar of the battle filled the air
for miles around with infernal tumult.

Isolated Germans still kept sniping from secret places, and some of
them fired at a dressing-station in the market-place, until a French
girl, afterward decorated for valor--she was called the Lady of Loos
by Londoners and Scots--borrowed a revolver and shot two of them dead
in a neighboring house. Then she came back to the soup she was making
for wounded men.

Some of the German prisoners were impressed as stretcher-bearers, and
one, "Jock," had compelled four Germans to carry him in, while he lay
talking to them in broadest Scots, grinning despite his blood and
wounds.

A London lieutenant called out to a stretcher-bearer helping to carry
down a German officer, and was astounded to be greeted by the wounded
man.

"Hullo, Leslie!. . . I knew we should meet one day."

Looking at the man's face, the Londoner saw it was his own cousin. . .
There was all the drama of war in that dirty village of Loos, which
reeked with the smell of death then, and years later, when I went
walking through it on another day of war, after another battle on Hill
70, beyond.

IX

While the village of Loos was crowded with hunters of men, wounded,
dead, batches of panic-stricken prisoners, women, doctors, Highlanders
and Lowlanders "fey" with the intoxication of blood, London soldiers
with tattered uniforms and muddy rifles and stained bayonets, mixed
brigades were moving forward to new objectives. The orders of the
Scottish troops, which I saw, were to go "all out," and to press on as
far as they could, with the absolute assurance that all the ground
they gained would be held behind them by supporting troops; and having
that promise, they trudged on to Hill 70. The Londoners had been
ordered to make a defensive flank on the right of the Scots by
capturing the chalk-pit south of Loos and digging in. They did this
after savage fighting in the pit, where they bayoneted many Germans,
though raked by machine-gun bullets from a neighboring copse, which
was a fringe of gashed and tattered trees. But some of the London boys
were mixed up with the advancing Scots and went on with them, and a
battalion of Scots Fusiliers who had been in the supporting brigade of
the 15th Division, which was intended to follow the advance, joined
the first assault, either through eagerness or a wrong order, and,
unknown to their brigadier, were among the leaders in the bloody
struggle in Loos, and labored on to Hill 70, where Camerons, Gordons,
Black Watch, Seaforths, Argyll, and Sutherland men and Londoners were
now up the slopes, stabbing stray Germans who were trying to retreat
to a redoubt on the reverse side of the hill.

For a time there was a kind of Bank Holiday crowd on Hill 70. The
German gunners, knowing that the redoubt on the crest was still held
by their men, dared not fire; and many German batteries were on the
move, out of Lens and from their secret lairs in the country
thereabouts, in a state of panic. On our right the French were
fighting desperately at Souchez and Neuville St.-Vaast and up the
lower slopes of Vimy, suffering horrible casualties and failing to
gain the heights in spite of the reckless valor of their men, but
alarming the German staffs, who for a time had lost touch with the
situation--their telephones had been destroyed by gun-fire--and were
filled with gloomy apprehensions. So Hill 70 was quiet, except for
spasms of machine-gun fire from the redoubt on the German side of the
slope and the bombing of German dugouts, or the bayoneting of single
men routed out from holes in the earth.

One of our men came face to face with four Germans, two of whom were
armed with rifles and two with bombs. They were standing in the
wreckage of a trench, pallid, and with the fear of death in their
eyes. The rifles clattered to the earth, the bombs fell at their feet,
and their hands went up when the young Scot appeared before them with
his bayonet down. He was alone, and they could have killed him, but
surrendered, and were glad of the life he granted them. As more men
came up the slope there were greetings between comrades, of:

"Hullo, Jock!"

"Is that you, Alf?"

They were rummaging about for souvenirs in half-destroyed dugouts
where dead bodies lay. They were "swapping" souvenirs--taken from
prisoners--silver watches, tobacco-boxes, revolvers, compasses. Many
of them put on German field-caps, like schoolboys with paper caps from
Christmas crackers, shouting with laughter because of their German
look. They thought the battle was won. After the first wild rush the
shell-fire, the killing, the sight of dead comrades, the smell of
blood, the nightmare of that hour after dawn, they were beginning to
get normal again, to be conscious of themselves, to rejoice in their
luck at having got so far with whole skins. It had been a fine
victory. The enemy was nowhere. He had "mizzled off."

Some of the Scots, with the hunter's instinct still strong, decided to
go on still farther to a new objective. They straggled away in batches
to one of the suburbs of Lens--the Cite St.-Auguste. Very few of them
came back with the tale of their comrades' slaughter by sudden bursts
of machine-gun fire which cut off all chance of retreat. . . .

The quietude of Hill 70 was broken by the beginning of a new
bombardment from German guns.

"Dig in," said the officers. "We must hold on at all costs until the
supports come up."

Where were the supporting troops which had been promised? There was no
sign of them coming forward from Loos. The Scots were strangely
isolated on the slopes of Hill 70. At night the sky above them was lit
up by the red glow of fires in Lens, and at twelve-thirty that night,
under that ruddy sky, dark figures moved on the east of the hill and a
storm of machine-gun bullets swept down on the Highlanders and
Lowlanders, who crouched low in the mangled earth. It was a counter-
attack by masses of men crawling up to the crest from the reverse side
and trying to get the Scots out of the slopes below. Bst the men of
the 15th Division answered by volleys of rifle-fire, machine-gun fire,
and bombs. They held on in spite of dead and wounded men thinning out
their fighting strength. At five-thirty in the morning there was
another strong counter-attack, repulsed also, but at another price of
life in those holes and ditches on the hillside.

Scottish officers stared anxiously back toward their old lines. Where
were the supports? Why did they get no help? Why were they left
clinging like this to an isolated hill? The German artillery had
reorganized. They were barraging the ground about Loos fiercely and
continuously. They were covering a great stretch of country up to
Hulluch, and north of it, with intense harassing fire. Later on that
Saturday morning the 15th Division received orders to attack and
capture the German earthwork redoubt on the crest of the hill. A
brigade of the 21st Division was nominally in support of them, but
only small groups of that brigade appeared on the scene, a few white-
faced officers, savage with anger, almost mad with some despair in
them, with batches of English lads who looked famished with hunger,
weak after long marching, demoralized by some tragedy that had
happened to them. They were Scots who did most of the work in trying
to capture the redoubt, the same Scots who had fought through Loos.
They tried to reach the crest. Again and again they crawled forward
and up, but the blasts of machine-gun fire mowed them down, and many
young Scots lay motionless on those chalky slopes, with their kilts
riddled with bullets. Others, hit in the head, or arms, or legs,
writhed like snakes back to the cover of broken trenches.

"Where are the supports?" asked the Scottish officers. "In God's name,
where are the troops who were to follow on? Why did we do all this
bloody fighting to be hung up in the air like this?"

The answer to their question has not been given in any official
despatch. It is answered by the tragedy of the 21st and 24th
Divisions, who will never forget the misery of that day, though not
many are now alive who suffered it. Their part of the battle I will
tell later.

X

To onlookers there were some of the signs of victory on that day of
September 25th--of victory and its price. I met great numbers of the
lightly wounded men, mostly "Jocks," and they were in exalted spirits
because they had done well in this ordeal and had come through it, and
out of it--alive. They came straggling back through the villages
behind the lines to the casualty clearing--stations and ambulance-
trains. Some of them had the sleeves of their tunics cut away and
showed brown, brawny arms tightly bandaged and smeared with blood.
Some of them were wounded in the legs and hobbled with their arms
about their comrades' necks. Their kilts were torn and plastered with
chalky mud. Nearly all of them had some "souvenir" of the fighting--
German watches, caps, cartridges. They carried themselves with a
warrior look, so hard, so lean, so clear-eyed, these young Scots of
the Black Watch and Camerons and Gordons. They told tales of their own
adventure in broad Scots, hard to understand, and laughed grimly at
the killing they had done, though here and there a lad among them had
a look of bad remembrance in his eyes, and older men spoke gravely of
the scenes on the battlefield and called it "hellish." But their pride
was high. They had done what they had been asked to do. The 15th
Division had proved its quality. Their old battalions, famous in
history, had gained new honor.