That was the mise-en-scene of the battle of Loos--those mining towns
behind the lines, then a maze of communication trenches entered from
a place called Philosophe, leading up to the trench-lines beyond
Vermelles, and running northward to Cambrin and Givenchy, opposite
Hulluch, Haisnes, and La Bassee, where the enemy had his trenches and
earthworks among the slag heaps, the pit-heads, the corons and the
cites, all broken by gun-fire, and nowhere a sign of human life
aboveground, in which many men were hidden.
Storms of gun-fire broke loose from our batteries a week before the
battle. It was our first demonstration of those stores of high-explosive
shells which had been made by the speeding up of munition-work in
England, and of a gun-power which had been growing steadily since
the coming out of the New Army. The weather was heavy with mist and a
drizzle of rain. Banks of smoke made a pall over all the arena of war,
and it was stabbed and torn by the incessant flash of bursting shells.
I stood on the slag heap, staring at this curtain of smoke, hour after
hour, dazed by the tumult of noise and by that impenetrable veil
which hid all human drama. There was no movement of men to be seen,
no slaughter, no heroic episode--only through rifts in the smoke the
blurred edges of slag heaps and pit-heads, and smoking ruins. German
trenches were being battered in, German dugouts made into the tombs of
living men, German bodies tossed up with earth and stones--all that was
certain but invisible.
“Very boring,” said an officer by my side. “Not a damn thing to be
seen.”
“Our men ought to have a walk-over,” said an optimist. “Any living
German must be a gibbering idiot with shell-shock.”
“I expect they're playing cards in their dugouts,” said the officer who
was bored. “Even high explosives don't go down very deep.”
“It's stupendous, all the same. By God! hark at that! It seems more than
human. It's like some convulsion of nature.”
“There's no adventure in modern war,” said the bored man. “It's a dirty
scientific business. I'd kill all chemists and explosive experts.”
“Our men will have adventure enough when they go over the top at dawn.
Hell must be a game compared with that.”
The guns went on pounding away, day after day, laboring, pummeling,
hammering, like Thor with his thunderbolts. It was the preparation for
battle. No men were out of the trenches yet, though some were being
killed there and elsewhere, at the crossroads by Philosophe, and outside
the village of Masingarbe, and in the ruins of Vermelles, and away up
at Cambrin and Givenchy. The German guns were answering back
intermittently, but holding most of their fire until human flesh came
out into the open. The battle began at dawn on September 25th.