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. But 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.
Thousands of those lightly wounded men swarmed about a long
ambulance-train standing in a field near the village of Choques. They
crowded the carriages, leaned out of the windows with their bandaged
heads and arms, shouting at friends they saw in the other crowds. The
spirit of victory, and of lucky escape, uplifted those lads, drugged
them. And now they were going home for a spell. Home to bonny Scotland,
with a wound that would take some time to heal.
There were other wounded men from whom no laughter came, nor any sound.
They were carried to the train on stretchers, laid down awhile on the
wooden platforms, covered with blankets up to their chins--unless they
uncovered themselves with convulsive movements. I saw one young Londoner
so smashed about the face that only his eyes were uncovered between
layers of bandages, and they were glazed with the first film of death.
Another had his jaw blown clean away, so the doctor told me, and the
upper half of his face was livid and discolored by explosive gases. A
splendid boy of the Black Watch was but a living trunk. Both his arms
and both his legs were shattered. If he lived after butcher's work of
surgery he would be one of those who go about in boxes on wheels, from
whom men turn their eyes away, sick with a sense of horror. There were
blind boys led to the train by wounded comrades, groping, very quiet,
thinking of a life of darkness ahead of them--forever in the darkness
which shut in their souls. For days and weeks that followed there was
always a procession of ambulances on the way to the dirty little town of
Lillers, and going along the roads I used to look back at them and see
the soles of muddy boots upturned below brown blankets. It was more
human wreckage coming down from the salient of Loos, from the chalkpits
of Hulluch and the tumbled earth of the Hohenzollern redoubt, which had
been partly gained by the battle which did not succeed. Outside a square
brick building, which was the Town Hall of Lillers, and for a time
a casualty clearing-station, the “bad” cases were unloaded; men with
chunks of steel in their lungs and bowels were vomiting great gobs of
blood, men with arms and legs torn from their trunks, men without noses,
and their brains throbbing through opened scalps, men without faces...