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.