Meanwhile, at 6 P.M. on the evening of the first day of battle, the
Guards arrived at Noeux-les-Mines. As I saw them march up, splendid
in their height and strength and glory of youth, I looked out for the
officers I knew, yet hoped I should not see them--that man who had given
a farewell touch to the flowers in the garden of our billet, that other
one who knew he would be wounded, those two young brothers who had
played cricket on a sunny afternoon. I did not see them, but saw only
columns of men, staring grimly ahead of them, with strange, unspeakable
thoughts behind their masklike faces.
It was not until the morning of the 26th that the Commander-in-Chief
“placed them at the disposal of the General Officer commanding First
Army,” and it was on the afternoon of Monday, the 27th, that they were
ordered to attack.
By that time we had lost Fosse 8, one brigade of the 9th Scottish
Division having been flung back to its own trenches after desperate
fighting, at frightful cost, after the capture of the Hohenzollern
redoubt by the 26th Brigade of that division. To the north of them the
7th Division was also suffering horrible losses after the capture of the
quarries, near Hulluch, and the village of Haisnes, which afterward was
lost. The commanding officers of both divisions, General Capper of the
7th, and General Thesiger of the 9th, were killed as they reconnoitered
the ground, and wounded men were pouring down to the casualty clearing
stations if they had the luck to get so far. Some of them had not
that luck, but lay for nearly two days before they were rescued by the
stretcher-bearers from Quality Street and Philosophe.
It was bad all along the line. The whole plan had gone astray from
the beginning. With an optimism which was splendid in fighting-men and
costly in the High Command, our men had attacked positions of enormous
strength--held by an enemy in the full height of his power--without
sufficient troops in reserve to follow up and support the
initial attack, to consolidate the ground, and resist inevitable
counter-attacks. What reserves the Commander-in-Chief had he held “in
his own hand” too long and too far back.
The Guards went in when the enemy was reorganized to meet them. The 28th
Division, afterward in support, was too late to be a decisive factor.
I do not blame Lord French. I have no right to blame him, as I am not
a soldier nor a military expert. He did his best, with the highest
motives. The blunders he made were due to ignorance of modern battles.
Many other generals made many other blunders, and our men paid with
their lives. Our High Command had to learn by mistakes, by ghastly
mistakes, repeated often, until they became visible to the military mind
and were paid for again by the slaughter of British youth. One does not
blame. A writing-man, who was an observer and recorder, like myself,
does not sit in judgment. He has no right to judge. He merely cries out,
“O God!... O God!” in remembrance of all that agony and that waste of
splendid boys who loved life, and died.
On Sunday, as I have told, the situation was full of danger. The Scots
of the 15th Division, weakened by many losses and exhausted by their
long fatigue, had been forced to abandon the important position of Puits
14--a mine-shaft half a mile north of Hill 70, linked up in defense with
the enemy's redoubt on the northeast side of Hill 70. The Germans had
been given time to bring up their reserves, to reorganize their broken
lines, and to get their batteries into action again.
There was a consultation of anxious brigadiers in Loos when no man could
find safe shelter owing to the heavy shelling which now ravaged among
the houses. Rations were running short, and rain fell through the
roofless ruins, and officers and men shivered in wet clothes. Dead
bodies blown into bits, headless trunks, pools of blood, made a ghastly
mess in the roadways and the houses. Badly wounded men were dragged down
into the cellars, and lay there in the filth of Friday's fighting. The
headquarters of one of the London brigades had put up in a roofless
barn, but were shelled out, and settled down on some heaps of brick in
the open. It was as cold as death in the night, and no fire could be
lighted, and iron rations were the only food, until two chaplains, “R.
C.” and Church of England (no difference of dogma then), came up
as volunteers in a perilous adventure, with bottles of hot soup in
mackintoshes. They brought a touch of human warmth to the brigade
staff, made those hours of the night more endurable, but the men farther
forward had no such luck. They were famishing and soaked, in a cold hell
where shells tossed up the earth about them and spattered them with the
blood and flesh of their comrades.
On Monday morning the situation was still more critical, all along the
line, and the Guards were ordered up to attack Hill 70, to which only
a few Scots were clinging on the near slopes. The 6th Cavalry Brigade
dismounted--no more dreams of exploiting success and galloping round
Lens--were sent into Loos with orders to hold the village at all cost,
with the men of the 15th Division, who had been left there.
The Londoners were still holding on to the chalk-pit south of Loos,
under murderous fire.
It was a bad position for the troops sent into action at that stage.
The result of the battle on September 25th had been to create a salient
thrust like a wedge into the German position and enfiladed by their
guns. The sides of the salient ran sharply back--from Hulluch in the
north, past the chalk-quarries to Givenchy, and in the south from the
lower slopes of Hill 70 past the Double Crassier to Grenay. The orders
given to the Guards were to straighten out this salient on the north by
capturing the whole of Hill 70, Puits 14, to the north of it, and the
chalk-pit still farther north.
It was the 2d Brigade of Guards, including Grenadiers, Welsh and Scots
Guards, which was to lead the assault, while the 1st Brigade on the
left maintained a holding position and the 3d Brigade was in support,
immediately behind.
As soon as the Guards started to attack they were met by a heavy storm
of gas-shells. This checked them for a time, as smoke-helmets--the old
fashioned things of flannel which were afterward changed for the masks
with nozzles--had to be served out, and already men were choking and
gasping in the poisonous fumes. Among them was the colonel of the
Grenadiers, whose command was taken over by the major. Soon the men
advanced again, looking like devils, as, in artillery formation (small
separate groups), they groped their way through the poisoned clouds.
Shrapnel and high explosives burst over them and among them, and many
men fell as they came within close range of the enemy's positions
running from Hill 70 northward to the chalk-pit.
The Irish Guards, supported by the Coldstreamers, advanced down the
valley beyond Loos and gained the lower edge of Bois Hugo, near the
chalk-pit, while the Scots Guards assaulted Puits 14 and the building in
its group of houses known as the Keep. Another body of Guards, including
Grenadiers and Welsh, attacked at the same time the lower slopes of Hill
70.
Puits 14 itself was won by a party of Scots Guards, led by an officer
named Captain Cuthbert, which engaged in hand-to-hand fighting, routing
out the enemy from the houses. Some companies of the Grenadiers came to
the support of their comrades in the Scots Guards, but suffered heavy
losses themselves. A platoon under a young lieutenant named Ayres
Ritchie reached the Puits, and, storming their way into the Keep,
knocked out a machine-gun, mounted on the second floor, by a desperate
bombing attack. The officer held on in a most dauntless way to the
position, until almost every man was either killed or wounded, unable to
receive support, owing to the enfilade fire of the German machine-guns.
Night had now come on, the sky lightened by the bursting of shells and
flares, and terrible in its tumult of battle. Some of the Coldstreamers
had gained possession of the chalk-pit, which they were organizing
into a strong defensive position, and various companies of the Guards
divisions, after heroic assaults upon Hill 70, where they were shattered
by the fire which met them on the crest from the enemy's redoubt on the
northeast side, had dug themselves into the lower slopes.
There was a strange visitor that day at the headquarters of the Guards
division, where Lord Cavan was directing operations. A young officer
came in and said, quite calmly: “Sir, I have to report that my battalion
has been cut to pieces. We have been utterly destroyed.”
Lord Cavan questioned him, and then sent for another officer. “Look
after that young man,” he said, quietly. “He is mad. It is a case of
shell-shock.”
Reports came through of a mysterious officer going the round of the
batteries, saying that the Germans had broken through and that they had
better retire. Two batteries did actually move away.
Another unknown officer called out, “Retire! Retire!” until he was shot
through the head. “German spies!” said some of our officers and men, but
the Intelligence branch said, “Not spies... madmen... poor devils!”
Before the dawn came the Coldstreamers made another desperate attempt to
attack and hold Puits 14, but the position was too deadly even for their
height of valor, and although some men pushed on into this raging fire,
the survivors had to fall back to the woods, where they strengthened
their defensive works.
On the following day the position was the same, the sufferings of
our men being still further increased by heavy shelling from 8-inch
howitzers. Colonel Egerton of the Coldstream Guards and his adjutant
were killed in the chalk-pit.
It was now seen by the headquarters staff of the Guards Division that
Puits 14 was untenable, owing to its enfilading by heavy artillery, and
the order was given for a retirement to the chalk-pit, which was a place
of sanctuary owing to the wonderful work done throughout the night to
strengthen its natural defensive features by sand--bags and barbed wire,
in spite of machine-guns which raked it from the neighboring woods.
The retirement was done as though the men were on parade, slowly, and
in perfect order, across the field of fire, each man bearing himself, so
their officers told me, as though at the Trooping of the Colors, until
now one and then another fell in a huddled heap. It was an astonishing
tribute to the strength of tradition among troops. To safeguard the
honor of a famous name these men showed such dignity in the presence of
death that even the enemy must have been moved to admiration.
But they had failed, after suffering heavy losses, and the
Commander-in-Chief had to call upon the French for help, realizing that
without strong assistance the salient made by that battle of Loos would
be a death-trap. The French Tenth Army had failed, too, at Vimy, thus
failing to give the British troops protection on their right flank.
“On representing this to General Joffre,” wrote Sir John French, “he was
kind enough to ask the commander of the northern group of French armies
to render us assistance. General Foch met those demands in the same
friendly spirit which he has always displayed throughout the course
of the whole campaign, and expressed his readiness to give me all the
support he could. On the morning of the 28th we discussed the situation,
and the general agreed to send the 9th French Corps to take over
the ground occupied by us, extending from the French left up to and
including that portion of Hill 70 which we were holding, and also
the village of Loos. This relief was commenced on September 30th, and
completed on the two following nights.”
So ended the battle of Loos, except for a violent counter--attack
delivered on October 8th all along the line from Fosse 8 on the north
to the right of the French 9th Corps on the south, with twenty-eight
battalions in the first line of assault. It was preceded by a stupendous
bombardment which inflicted heavy casualties upon our 1st Division
in the neighborhood of the chalk-pit, and upon the Guards holding the
Hohenzollern redoubt near Hulluch. Once again those brigades, which had
been sorely tried, had to crouch under a fury of fire, until the living
were surrounded by dead, half buried or carved up into chunks of flesh
in the chaos of broken trenches. The Germans had their own shambles,
more frightful, we were told, than ours, and thousands of dead lay in
front of our lines when the tide of their attack ebbed back and waves
of living men were broken by the fire of our field-guns, rifles, and
machine-guns. Sir John French's staff estimated the number of German
dead as from eight to nine thousand. It was impossible to make any
accurate sum in that arithmetic of slaughter, and always the enemy's
losses were exaggerated because of the dreadful need of balancing
accounts in new-made corpses in that Debit and Credit of war's
bookkeeping.
What had we gained by great sacrifices of life? Not Lens, nor Lille, nor
even Hill 70 (for our line had to be withdrawn from those bloody slopes
where our men left many of their dead), but another sharp-edged salient
enfiladed by German guns for two years more, and a foothold on one slag
heap of the Double Crassier, where our men lived, if they could, a
few yards from Germans on the other; and that part of the Hohenzollern
redoubt which became another Hooge where English youth was blown up by
mines, buried by trench-mortars, condemned to a living death in lousy
caves dug into the chalk. Another V-shaped salient, narrower than that
of Ypres, more dismal, and as deadly, among the pit-heads and the black
dust hills and the broken mine-shafts of that foul country beyond Loos.
The battle which had been begun with such high hopes ended in ghastly
failure by ourselves and by the French. Men who came back from it spoke
in whispers of its generalship and staff work, and said things which
were dangerous to speak aloud, cursing their fate as fighting-men,
asking of God as well as of mortals why the courage of the soldiers they
led should be thrown away in such a muck of slaughter, laughing with
despairing mirth at the optimism of their leaders, who had been lured
on by a strange, false, terrible belief in German weakness, and looking
ahead at unending vistas of such massacre as this which would lead only
to other salients, after desperate and futile endeavor.