In those villages--Heuchin, Houdain, Lillers, and others--on the edge
of the Black Country the Scottish troops of the 15th Division were in
training for the arena, practising attacks on trenches and villages,
getting a fine edge of efficiency on to bayonet-work and bombing,
and having their morale heightened by addresses from brigadiers and
divisional commanders on the glorious privilege which was about to be
theirs of leading the assault, and on the joys as well as the duty of
killing Germans.
In one battalion of Scots--the 10th Gordons, who were afterward the
8/10th--there were conferences of company commanders and whispered
consultations of subalterns. They were “Kitchener” men, from Edinburgh
and Aberdeen and other towns in the North. I came to know them all after
this battle, and gave them fancy names in my despatches: the Georgian
gentleman, as handsome as Beau Brummell, and a gallant soldier, who was
several times wounded, but came back to command his old battalion, and
then was wounded again nigh unto death, but came back again; and Honest
John, slow of speech, with a twinkle in his eyes, careless of shell
splinters flying around his bullet head, hard and tough and cunning in
war; and little Ginger, with his whimsical face and freckles, and love
of pretty girls and all children, until he was killed in Flanders; and
the Permanent Temporary Lieutenant who fell on the Somme; and the
Giant who had a splinter through his brain beyond Arras; and many other
Highland gentlemen, and one English padre who went with them always to
the trenches, until a shell took his head off at the crossroads.
It was the first big attack of the 15th Division. They were determined
to go fast and go far. Their pride of race was stronger than the strain
on their nerves. Many of them, I am certain, had no sense of fear, no
apprehension of death or wounds. Excitement, the comradeship of courage,
the rivalry of battalions, lifted them above anxiety before the battle
began, though here and there men like Ginger, of more delicate fiber, of
imagination as well as courage, must have stared in great moments at the
grisly specter toward whom they would soon be walking.
In other villages were battalions of the 47th London Division. They,
too, were to be in the first line of attack, on the right of the Scots.
They, too, had to win honor for the New Army and old London. They were a
different crowd from the Scots, not so hard, not so steel--nerved, with
more sensibility to suffering, more imagination, more instinctive revolt
against the butchery that was to come. But they, too, had been “doped”
for morale, their nervous tension had been tightened up by speeches
addressed to their spirit and tradition. It was to be London's day out.
They were to fight for the glory of the old town... the old town where
they had lived in little suburban houses with flower-gardens, where they
had gone up by the early morning trains to city offices and government
offices and warehouses and shops, in days before they ever guessed they
would go a-soldiering, and crouch in shell-holes under high explosives,
and thrust sharp steel into German bowels. But they would do their best.
They would go through with it. They would keep their sense of humor and
make cockney jokes at death. They would show the stuff of London pride.
“Domine, dirige nos!”
I knew many of those young Londoners. I had sat in tea-shops with them
when they were playing dominoes, before the war, as though that were the
most important game in life. I had met one of them at a fancy-dress ball
in the Albert Hall, when he was Sir Walter Raleigh and I was Richard
Sheridan. Then we were both onlookers of life--chroniclers of passing
history. I remained the onlooker, even in war, but my friend went into
the arena. He was a Royal Fusilier, and the old way of life became
a dream to him when he walked toward Loos, and afterward sat in
shell-craters in the Somme fields, and knew that death would find him,
as it did, in Flanders. I had played chess with one man whom afterward
I met as a gunner officer at Heninel, near Arras, on an afternoon when
a shell had killed three of his men bathing in a tank, and other shells
made a mess of blood and flesh in his wagon-lines. We both wore steel
hats, and he was the first to recognize a face from the world of peace.
After his greeting he swore frightful oaths, cursing the war and the
Staff. His nerves were all jangled. There was another officer in the
47th London Division whom I had known as a boy. He was only nineteen
when he enlisted, not twenty when he had fought through several battles.
He and hundreds like him had been playing at red Indians in Kensington
Gardens a few years before an August in 1914... The 47th London
Division, going forward to the battle of Loos, was made up of men whose
souls had been shaped by all the influences of environment, habit,
and tradition in which I had been born and bred. Their cradle had been
rocked to the murmurous roar of London traffic. Their first adventures
had been on London Commons. The lights along the Embankment,
the excitement of the streets, the faces of London crowds, royal
pageantry--marriages, crownings, burials--on the way to Westminster,
the little dramas of London life, had been woven into the fiber of their
thoughts, and it was the spirit of London which went with them wherever
they walked in France or Flanders, more sensitive than country men to
the things they saw. Some of them had to fight against their nerves
on the way to Loos. But their spirit was exalted by a nervous stimulus
before that battle, so that they did freakish and fantastic things of
courage.
V
I watched the preliminary bombardment of the Loos battlefields from
a black slag heap beyond Noeux-les-Mines, and afterward went on the
battleground up to the Loos redoubt, when our guns and the enemy's were
hard at work; and later still, in years that followed, when there was
never a silence of guns in those fields, came to know the ground from
many points of view. It was a hideous territory, this Black Country
between Lens and Hulluch. From the flat country below the distant ridges
of Notre Dame de Lorette and Vimy there rose a number of high black
cones made by the refuse of the coal-mines, which were called Fosses.
Around those black mounds there was great slaughter, as at Fosse 8 and
Fosse 10 and Puits 14bis, and the Double Crassier near Loos, because
they gave observation and were important to capture or hold. Near them
were the pit-heads, with winding-gear in elevated towers of steel which
were smashed and twisted by gun-fire; and in Loos itself were two of
those towers joined by steel girders and gantries, called the “Tower
Bridge” by men of London. Rows of red cottages where the French miners
had lived were called corons, and where they were grouped into large
units they were called cites, like the Cite St.-Auguste, the Cite
St.-Pierre, and the Cite St.-Laurent, beyond Hill 70, on the outskirts
of Lens. All those places were abandoned now by black-grimed men who had
fled down mine-shafts and galleries with their women and children, and
had come up on our side of the lines at Noeux-les-Mines or Bruay or
Bully-Grenay, where they still lived close to the war. Shells pierced
the roof of the church in that squalid village of Noeux--les-Mines and
smashed some of the cottages and killed some of the people now and then.
Later in the war, when aircraft dropped bombs at night, a new peril
over--shadowed them with terror, and they lived in their cellars after
dusk, and sometimes were buried there. But they would not retreat
farther back--not many of them--and on days of battle I saw groups of
French miners and dirty-bloused girls excited by the passage of our
troops and by the walking wounded who came stumbling back, and by
stretcher cases unloaded from ambulances to the floors of their dirty
cottages. High velocities fell in some of the streets, shrapnel-shells
whined overhead and burst like thunderclaps. Young hooligans of France
slouched around with their hands in their pockets, talking to our men
in a queer lingua franca, grimacing at those noises if they did not come
too near. I saw lightly wounded girls among them, with bandaged heads
and hands, but they did not think that a reason for escape. With
smoothly braided hair they gathered round British soldiers in steel hats
and clasped their arms or leaned against their shoulders. They had known
many of those men before. They were their sweethearts. In those foul
little mining towns the British troops had liked their billets, because
of the girls there. London boys and Scots “kept company” with pretty
slatterns, who stole their badges for keepsakes, and taught them a base
patois of French, and had a smudge of tears on their cheeks when
the boys went away for a spell in the ditches of death. They were
kind-hearted little sluts with astounding courage.
“Aren't you afraid of this place?” I asked one of them in Bully-Grenay
when it was “unhealthy” there. “You might be killed here any minute.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Je m'en fiche de la mort!” (“I don't care a damn about death.”)