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.