During the battle, for several days I went with other men to various
points of view, trying to see something of the human conflict from slag
heaps and rising ground, but could only see the swirl and flurry of
gun-fire and the smoke of shells mixing with wet mist, and the backwash
of wounded and prisoners, and the traffic of guns, and wagons, and
supporting troops. Like an ant on the edge of a volcano I sat among
the slag heaps with gunner observers, who were listening at telephones
dumped down in the fields and connected with artillery brigades and
field batteries.
“The Guards are fighting round Fosse 8,” said one of these observers.
Through the mist I could see Fosse 8, a flat-topped hill of coal-dust.
Little glinting lights were playing about it, like confetti shining
in the sun. That was German shrapnel. Eruptions of red flame and black
earth vomited out of the hill. That was German high explosive. For a
time on Monday, September 27th, it was the storm-center of battle.
“What's that?” asked an artillery staff-officer, with his ear to the
field telephone. “What's that?... Hullo!... Are you there?... The Guards
have been kicked off Fosse 8... Oh, hell!”
From all parts of the field of battle such whispers came to listening
men and were passed on to headquarters, where other men listened. This
brigade was doing pretty well. That was hard pressed. The Germans were
counter-attacking heavily. Their barrage was strong and our casualties
heavy. “Oh, hell!” said other men. From behind the mist came the news of
life and death, revealing things which no onlooker could see.
I went closer to see--into the center of the arc of battle, up by the
Loos redoubt, where the German dead and ours still lay in heaps. John
Buchan was my companion on that walk, and together we stood staring
over the edge of a trench to where, grim and gaunt against the gray sky,
loomed the high, steel columns of the “Tower Bridge,” the mining-works
which I had seen before the battle as an inaccessible landmark in the
German lines. Now they were within our lines in the center of Loos, and
no longer “leering” at us, as an officer once told me they used to do
when he led his men into communication trenches under their observation.
Behind us now was the turmoil of war--thousands and scores of thousands
of men moving in steady columns forward and backward in the queer,
tangled way which during a great battle seems to have no purpose or
meaning, except to the directing brains on the Headquarters Staff, and,
sometimes in history, none to them.
Vast convoys of transports choked the roads, with teams of mules
harnessed to wagons and gun-limbers, with trains of motor ambulances
packed with wounded men, with infantry brigades plodding through the
slush and slime, with divisional cavalry halted in the villages, and
great bivouacs in the boggy fields.
The men, Londoners, and Scots, and Guards, and Yorkshires, and
Leinsters, passed and repassed in dense masses, in small battalions, in
scattered groups. One could tell them from those who were filling their
places by the white chalk which covered them from head to foot, and
sometimes by the blood which had splashed them.
Regiments which had lost many of their comrades and had fought in attack
and counter-attack through those days and nights went very silently,
and no man cheered them. Legions of tall lads, who a few months
before marched smart and trim down English lanes, trudged toward the
fighting-lines under the burden of their heavy packs, with all their
smartness befouled by the business of war, but wonderful and pitiful to
see because of the look of courage and the gravity in their eyes as they
went up to dreadful places. Farther away within the zone of the enemy's
fire the traffic ceased, and I came into the desolate lands of death,
where there is but little movement, and the only noise is that of guns.
I passed by ruined villages and towns.
To the left was Vermelles (two months before death nearly caught me
there), and I stared at those broken houses and roofless farms and
fallen churches which used to make one's soul shiver even when they
stood clear in the daylight.
To the right, a few hundred yards away, was Masingarbe, from which many
of our troops marched out to begin the great attack. Farther back were
the great slag heaps of Noeux-les-Mines, and all around other black
hills of this mining country which rise out of the flat plain. It was a
long walk through narrow trenches toward that Loos redoubt where at last
I stood. There was the smell of death in those narrow, winding ways.
One boy, whom death had taken almost at the entrance-way, knelt on the
fire-step, with his head bent and his forehead against the wet clay, as
though in prayer. Farther on other bodies of London boys and Scots lay
huddled up.
We were in the center of a wide field of fire, with the enemy's
batteries on one side and ours on the other in sweeping semicircles.
The shells of all these batteries went crying through the air with high,
whining sighs, which ended in the cough of death. The roar of the guns
was incessant and very close. The enemy was sweeping a road to my right,
and his shells went overhead with a continual rush, passing our shells,
which answered back. The whole sky was filled with these thunderbolts.
Many of them were “Jack Johnsons,” which raised a volume of black smoke
where they fell. I wondered how it would feel to be caught by one of
them, whether one would have any consciousness before being scattered.
Fear, which had walked with me part of the way, left me for a time. I
had a strange sense of exhilaration, an intoxicated interest in this
foul scene and the activity of that shell-fire.
Peering over the parapet, we saw the whole panorama of the battleground.
It was but an ugly, naked plain, rising up to Hulluch and Haisnes on the
north, falling down to Loos on the east, from where we stood, and rising
again to Hill 70 (now in German hands again), still farther east and a
little south.
The villages of Haisnes and Hulluch fretted the skyline, and Fosse 8 was
a black wart between them. The “Tower Bridge,” close by in the town
of Loos, was the one high landmark which broke the monotony of this
desolation.
No men moved about this ground. Yet thousands of men were hidden about
us in the ditches, waiting for another counter-attack behind storms of
fire. The only moving things were the shells which vomited up earth and
smoke and steel as they burst in all directions over the whole zone.
We were shelling Hulluch and Haisnes and Fosse 8 with an intense,
concentrated fire, and the enemy was retaliating by scattering
shells over the town of Loos and our new line between Hill 70 and the
chalk-pit, and the whole length of our line from north to south.
Only two men moved about above the trenches. They were two London boys
carrying a gas-cylinder, and whistling as though it were a health resort
under the autumn sun... It was not a health resort. It stank of death,
from piles of corpses, all mangled and in a mush of flesh and bones
lying around the Loos redoubt and all the ground in this neighborhood,
and for a long distance north.
Through the streets of Bethune streamed a tide of war: the transport
of divisions, gun-teams with their limber ambulance convoys,
ammunition wagons, infantry moving up to the front, despatch riders,
staff-officers, signalers, and a great host of men and mules and
motor-cars. The rain lashed down upon the crowds; waterproofs and
burberries and the tarpaulin covers of forage-carts streamed with water,
and the bronzed faces of the soldiers were dripping wet. Mud splashed
them to the thighs. Fountains of mud spurted up from the wheels
of gun-carriages. The chill of winter made Highlanders as well as
Indians--those poor, brave, wretched Indians who had been flung into
the holding attack on the canal at La Bassee, and mown down in the
inevitable way by shrapnel and machine-gun bullets--shiver in the wind.
Yet, in spite of rain and great death, there was a spirit of exultation
among many fighting-men. At last there was a break in the months of
stationary warfare. We were up and out of the trenches. The first proofs
of victory were visible there in a long line of German guns captured at
Loos, guarded on each side by British soldiers with fixed bayonets. Men
moving up did not know the general failure that had swamped a partial
success. They stared at the guns and said, “By God--we've got 'em going
this time!”
A group of French civilians gathered round them, excited at the sight.
Artillery officers examined their broken breech-blocks and their
inscriptions:
“Pro Gloria et Patria.”
“Ultima ratio regis.”
The irony of the words made some of the onlookers laugh. A French
interpreter spoke to some English officers with a thrill of joy in
his voice. Had they heard the last news from Champagne? The French had
broken through the enemy's line. The Germans were in full retreat.. .
It was utterly untrue, because after the desperate valor of heroic youth
and horrible casualties, the French attack had broken down. But the
spirit of hope came down the cold wind and went with the men whom I saw
marching to the fields of fate in the slanting rain, as the darkness and
the mist came to end another day of battle.
Outside the headquarters of a British army corps stood another line of
captured field-guns and several machine-guns, of which one had a strange
history of adventure. It was a Russian machine-gun, taken by the Germans
on the eastern front and retaken by us on the western front.
In General Rawlinson's headquarters I saw a queer piece of booty. It
was a big bronze bell used by the Germans in their trenches to signal a
British gas-attack.
General Rawlinson was taking tea in his chateau when I called on him,
and was having an animated argument with Lord Cavan, commanding the
Guards, as to the disposal of the captured artillery and other trophies.
Lord Cavan claimed some for his own, with some violence of speech. But
General Rawlinson was bright and breezy as usual. Our losses were not
worrying him. As a great general he did not allow losses to worry him.
He ate his tea with a hearty appetite, and chaffed his staff-officers.
They were anticipating the real German counter-attack--a big affair.
Away up the line there would be more dead piled up, more filth and
stench of human slaughter, but the smell of it would not reach back to
headquarters.