bombardment, may be said to have ended. Although the gain of ground
seemed insignificant, consisting as it did of one ruined village
and a few square miles of fallowland, and although Lens still stood
triumphant and untaken, there is still much to be reckoned in the
Allies' favour. Victory it was not, and no amount of advertisement
will ever make it so. But it was an exhibition of strength on the
part of the Allies, and a stern reminder to the enemy that their
power of offensive on the Western Front had permanently passed into
our hands. The resources in men, money and munitions of the Central
Powers are decreasing, those of the Allies increasing; equal losses
on either side, therefore, is a condition favourable to the latter.
It is maintained that our losses were too great in proportion to the
results achieved. Yes, perhaps they were, but, had they been only
slightly greater, had more men been flung into the struggle at the
critical time, it is impossible to forecast what the issue of the
fighting might have been. The enemy knew this, and was prepared for a
substantial retirement. Conjecture is unprofitable, but let us as a
nation learn the lesson that men and men alone will terminate this
war. Other factors may check it temporarily; it may be to the advantage
of the enemy to agree to an apparently disastrous peace in order to
gain a respite for fresh preparation. But a certain page of history
should harden our resolution, should make us convinced of the bitter
fact that there is no peace for the world except in the disappearance
of the German Empire or our own. _Delenda est Carthago_--let us preach
the lessons of the Punic wars in season and out of season till every
soul in these islands realizes their significance at the present day.
The world is no larger than it was then, there is still no room in
it for two rival World Powers, one must sink into obscurity before
the might of its rival. And, accepting this incontrovertible fact as
an axiom, let us face our position, let us remember how the power of
Rome trembled in the balance as she strained every nerve in her system
during Hannibal's Italian campaign, and let us realize at last that
the destruction of our rival will demand of us sacrifices compared to
which the efforts that we have yet made are nothing, are as the puny
efforts of a feeble infant contrasted with the struggle of a strong
man wrestling for his life. And if the operations that have been named
the Battle of Loos have any share in bringing these things home to us,
their effects will be far more beneficial than those of a spectacular
victory.
VII
LOOS
One of our officers was fortunate enough, very shortly after the events
of September 25, to have the opportunity of reconnoitring the village
of Loos, with a double purpose in view, namely to verify some landmarks
that were doubtful from our observation posts, and to discover if any
points existed suitable for permanent occupation as O.P.s. There were
two ways open to him of reaching the village from his battery position,
of which the first was to proceed to North Maroc and thence take the
road to Les Cabarets and from there the track that runs into Loos at
its south-western corner, and the second was to walk to Quality Street,
thence along the Lens-Béthune road to the old German front-line, and
so through their communication trenches into any required part of the
village. Time being of importance, he chose the former method, and
set out one morning at about 8 a.m. The narrative of his adventures
in Loos, as throwing light upon the conditions obtaining in a place
that had been heavily shelled by us until our capture of it, and has
ever since been equally heavily shelled by the enemy, may be of some
interest.
Once clear of the houses that screened his movements from the hostile
lines, the road seemed very lonely and deserted. So far as the eye
could see he was the only living person in the whole of the wide
valley, and the sense of being under the observation of many pairs of
eyes that were to him invisible produced in him a strangely nervous
reaction, as though he were the principal actor in some horrible
nightmare. It seemed as though every footstep rang upon the hard road
with a note audible for miles, as though he were a gigantic black
figure upon an unbroken background of white, as though the watching
eyes bent such burning rays upon him that he could feel them pierce him
as he moved. I have walked that road myself many times since, more than
once when it has been under fire, and know now that it is as safe or
safer than many others whose dangers never concern the most nervous,
yet an echo of these first sensations of his has invariably struck me
when I have done so, and I can understand his feelings. It can only be
attributed to the fact that being alone in the middle of the valley one
imagines that one is a conspicuous target for any one who will to spend
a round upon.
The road crosses first our own old front line, then the German, over
both of which substantial bridges had been built directly after the
advance. It was not until he had crossed our own line that the cost
of the battle became evident to him. Then he began to understand.
Between the lines a burial party was at work, busy with the task of
identifying and interring our own dead. Behind the German line the
operation of clearing the battlefield had scarcely begun. Here the
dead lay thick, our own and the enemy's in inextricable confusion.
Here was a group of three or four, showing where a well-timed shrapnel
had burst, there four or five in a line, stricken down as they charged
by rifle fire from some fiercely-held support trench. And everywhere,
mingling with the dead, were all the many insignia of war, rifles,
ammunition, tins of beef, biscuits, cases of bombs, some unopened,
some with their contents scattered round them, everything that is
carried forward in a modern battle. At Les Cabarets itself, which is
in reality the junction of the Lens-Béthune and Grenay-Hulluch roads,
and which lies a few hundred yards south-east of the Lens Road Redoubt,
the struggle seemed to have been fiercer. It is probable that the
ruins of the houses that once stood at the cross-road had been held by
a detachment of the enemy, for lying round them were a heap of dead
Germans, their rifles in many cases still in their hands, and about
these in a narrow circle the bodies of our attacking troops, some lying
as they had fired, their legs spread out, their rifles fallen from
their shoulders and their heads resting on them, as though an angel
of sleep had touched them even as they pulled the trigger. Close by,
two horses bearing the brand of the broad arrow were quietly grazing
on the rank grass that covered the fallow land, their broken harness
still hanging on their backs, evidently the team of a shell-shattered
wagon that lay near by. My friend was tempted to pause and investigate
further, but a dozen bullets whizzing by quickly convinced him that
the locality was not healthy, and he made haste upon his way. Nor was
he more lucky with the track that led from here towards Loos. Some
persevering sniper evidently regarded him as fair game, and after
this enthusiast had displayed his marksmanship by narrowly missing him
twice in quick succession, my friend abandoned the field to him and
took to a communication trench that ran in the required direction. He
says that he hopes never to take a more hideous walk. The trench was
literally paved with dead Germans--it must have been used as a line of
defence against the advance of the 47th Division--some lying on their
backs with their eyes staring heavenwards, others horribly buried in
the thick clay that lay in the lower stretches of the trench, so that
his attention was only called to their presence by a sudden dreadful
yielding beneath his feet. They lay too thick for it to be possible
to avoid treading upon them, and though more than once he deserted
the trench for the clean earth of the plains, his friend the sniper
was bent on each occasion upon showing him that he was still a happy
memory to him, and he was forced to descend again. However, it was over
at last, and with the greatest relief that he had ever experienced he
found himself in the shelter of the outlying houses of Loos.
Here for a few minutes he stood and studied a plan with which he had
been provided. His objective was the Pylons, easy enough to see,
certainly, but unfortunately on the far side of an open square or
market-place by the church, upon which the German gunners were making
very pretty practice with field guns and light howitzers. There was
nothing for it but to find a way round, along the streets choked with
rubbish and torn by great craters, taking short cuts through gardens
converted into cemeteries, in which the dead lying on the surface were
more numerous than those below, across courtyards wherein the horses
who had been stabled there lay where the flying bullets had found
them. Strange work, this threading of the city of the dead, the sense
of isolation growing as one advanced until one seemed a visitant to
a world struck by a celestial bombardment that had left none alive
to tell the tale. Troops there were in plenty, but they remained in
the wonderful excavations that had been made; none, save rarely a
messenger, crouching behind a wall as the whizz and roar of the shell
echoed amongst the torn buildings, racing across an open space in a
brief interval of quiet, ventured forth, unless before dawn to relieve
his companions who were stationed in the hastily-dug trenches in front
of the village. But during the course of this expedition my friend
discovered a very valuable fact, namely, that the principal fire of
the enemy was directed only upon certain spots, and was not being
distributed indiscriminately over the village. Avoid these spots,
and except for a few casual "universal" bursting overhead, one was
perfectly safe, _voilà tout_! But that same casual universal is a very
jumpy toy. You hear it coming, certainly, but far too quickly for you
to do anything, and before you know where you are it has burst just
over you with an ear-splitting crack, and small fragments hit the
ground all round you with a most unpleasant thud. "Woolly bears," the
men call them, for they leave a curious cotton-wool-like wreath of
smoke in the air for some seconds, much larger and more lasting than
the puff of a shrapnel.
Very shortly after this first discovery, my friend made another, which
somewhat counterbalanced his relief in the first, which was that one of
the points most distinctly to be avoided was the very place he wished
to reach, the Pylons themselves. Round about their base a howitzer
battery was methodically placing high-explosive shell, and amongst
the upper works a field battery was making very accurate practice
with those most undesirable "woolly bears." There was nothing for
it, however, and the longer one stopped and looked at it the worse
it seemed, so, with feelings utterly unlike those that are popularly
supposed to steel the heart of the hero who boldly faces death for
his country's sake, he made his way under cover of such houses as
still remained, to the mine buildings at the foot of the great steel
structure. Here was destruction such as he had never seen. The
buildings, strongly as they had been built to withstand the weight of
the machinery within them, were completely shattered, their contents
strewing the floors like scrap iron in a merchant's yard. Great iron
girders were cut as by a knife, the bridge leading from the Pylons
to the loading stages on the end of the Crassier, a riveted steel
structure, was broken in half, the ends torn and frayed as though made
of paper. The towers themselves are so massive and their weight is so
distributed among many uprights, that, although many of these latter
were bent or broken, the edifice they supported still stood gaunt and
menacing, dominating the country-side. But their foot was no place to
sit in idle conjecture that morning, as a shell that nearly blocked
up the entrance to the shelter into which he had made his way abruptly
reminded him. Waiting until its last fragments had fallen--a process
that takes a surprisingly long time--he made a bolt over the ruins,
climbing and scrambling up a refuse-covered slope, until he reached
the foot of the winding stairs that rose up the centre of one of the
towers. Fortunately for him, this stairway was partly enclosed by
sheets of boiler-plate, for the next shell burst uncomfortably close
and the fragments hit the boiler-plate with a sound that left no doubt
in his mind of what his fate would have been had this shield not been
there. Up the spiral stairway then--was ever such an interminable
flight? Surely, notwithstanding the friendly morning mist, the whole
German army must see him as he climbed ever higher! Those friendly
steel sheets had been hit direct more than once at various times,
leaving several turns of the stairway open, plain to everybody's view.
However, nothing alarming happened, and the goal was reached--not the
top of the tower where the winding pulleys hung, but a gallery that
had formed the upper limit of travel of the cage, where the trolleys
were unloaded and pushed across the bridge to the loading sheds. This
gallery or platform stood perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the
ground, and had once been glazed, but long ago every pane of glass
had been shattered and the steel floor was thickly carpeted with the
fragments. Once in the gallery one was fairly safe, for the floor and
roof were of steel and so was the circular wall up to the level of the
glazing. Nothing but pieces of shell coming through the windows--and
the place was full of fragments showing where this had happened--or
a direct hit from a heavy shell could do much damage. But it was not
the place for a rest-cure, the moral effect of "woolly bears" bursting
amongst the girder-work close to one, although one knew that by the
time one heard the report the danger was over, was most disturbing.
Once, too, a fairly heavy shell hit the tower itself, causing it to
rock like a sapling in a gale, as my friend expressed it afterwards.
His first thought was of the delights of his situation had it carried
away part of the staircase, when he would be faced by the prospect of
staying where he was till dusk or of swarming down the steelwork in
full view of the German trenches, but fortunately this contingency did
not arise.
But the view that he obtained amply compensated for everything. From
the grim black mass of Fosse 8, past the tower of Cité St. Elie, the
cupola of Douvrin, the trees, magnificent in their thick verdure, that
clothe the banks of a little stream that flows past Hulluch, to the
strange medley of chimneys and elevators that gives to the works of the
Société Métallurgique de Pont-à-Vendin the appearance of a fore-and-aft
rigged vessel under sail, the whole country lay spread as on a map.
Further south still, Lens and its thickly-built suburbs could be seen,
and towards the west, the well-known country that we held, the high
land of the Vimy Ridge, with Souchez at its feet, the tall slag-heaps
of Noeux-les-Mines and Auchel, the dark mass of the Bois des Dames, the
square tower of Béthune. What an observation post! No wonder that the
enemy, whose use of the place for that very purpose was apparent by
the presence of German newspapers and a broken table with some scraps
of paper upon it, were determined to make it untenable by constant
shelling.
For utterly impossible as a permanent observation post it undoubtedly
was, and my friend, having verified his geography, left it with a
feeling of deep thankfulness at having escaped unhurt. But his
adventures were by no means at an end, he had still to find a situation
of comparative safety from which he could observe when required under
more restful conditions. The first place he selected was a house in
the Enclosure, as the buildings near the foot of the Pylons have been
termed. This also had been used by the enemy for the same purpose,
for the walls were sandbagged, the lower floors were shored up with
pit-props, and the basement had evidently been occupied by a fairly
large party. Curiously enough, the house was in quite good repair, the
walls and half the roof were standing, in contrast to the wreckage
that lay around it. Here the explorer received what he describes as
"the shock of his life," for on opening the door of one of the upper
rooms he found, sprawling over a table as though just fallen asleep,
the body of a German officer, still holding a pencil with which he
had been addressing a post-card to a girl in Magdeburg. So lifelike
was the attitude that it was impossible to realize at first that he
was dead, notwithstanding the jagged hole above the temple where the
fragment had entered and the blood that stained his right side. From
this room a good view of the desired stretch of country could be
obtained, there was a plentiful supply of sandbags ready filled in the
house, and it seemed in every way desirable. But, just as my friend
had determined upon converting it to his own uses, a (fortunately)
small shell, evidently intended for the Pylons, but a little "over,"
entered the ground floor and burst there, wrecking the staircase,
bringing down ceilings and tiles all over the house and smashing what
was probably the last pane of glass in Loos. If this place was going
to play long-stop for all the byes that passed the Pylons, it was
distinctly unhealthy. He clambered down the wreckage of the stairs and
looked round for a more likely spot, settling upon a tall house some
little distance away. But here again he was doomed to disappointment.
As he walked towards it a light howitzer shell sang over his head
and burst a hundred yards beyond his goal. Instinct told him that
this was the first round of a series of which his projected O.P. was
the target. Even as he realized that he was standing about the same
distance short of the place as the first round had fallen over, and in
a direct line, the second shell passed so close to him that he swears
he felt the wind of it, and burst in a manure-heap not ten yards away.
Thanking heaven that it had found a soft billet that muffled the force
of its explosion, he turned and bolted, having no further interest in
observing that particular series, the components of the manure-heap
dropping in a shower about him.
The next place he came to was a biggish building in a part of the town
that seemed to be immune from shelling. He walked boldly into it and
climbed up to an attic in the roof. Here were more signs of German
occupation, a window that faced towards our old line being heavily
sandbagged, whilst behind it was a neatly constructed platform and
rest. Hundreds of empty cartridge-cases scattered over the floor and
a few loaded clips still lying on the platform showed that the sniper
whose lair it had been had known good sport there. But even here my
friend was not destined to rest undisturbed. Hardly had his eye taken
in these details than a sound of hurried whispers below burst upon his
ears, and a peremptory voice bade him "Descendez, vite!" "Qu'est-ce
qu'il-y-a?" he replied. "Descendez, vite, vite, ou nous allons tirer!"
Discretion was by far the better part of valour, so down he came, to be
surrounded at once by a number of French soldiers armed with rifles
and fixed bayonets. To his enquiries as to what they wanted, the only
reply was, "Vous pouvez dire ce que vous voulez à M. le Commandant."
The latter gentleman was very comfortably installed in a roomy cellar,
and my friend was ushered into his presence with the significant words,
"C'est un espion que nous avons attrapé en haut, mon Commandant,
regardez ces machines-là qu'il porte!" The latter presumably in
reference to the sextant, compass and other strange-looking impedimenta
that he carried. It was an uncomfortable moment, but he managed to
establish his identity, and mutual explanations followed, to the
satisfaction of all parties, and my friend was told that he might make
himself free of the place whenever he liked--"Mais, monsieur, je crains
que vous avez trouvé en Loos que les français sont plus dangereux que
les allemands. Mais, peste, vous êtes vraiment monté dans les Pylons!
J'ose bien dire, comme disent les Anglais, que c'etait un endroit 'not
sanitary'!" As a variant upon the hackneyed phrase "not healthy," I
think that this is hard to beat.
The next question was the best way of getting home. The friendly mist
had by now disappeared, and it was hardly advisable to face the open
road again, even if this had not involved the ghastly walk along the
death-strewn communication trench. My friend finally decided to find
the end of a communication trench that, starting from a point in the
north-western corner of the village, led into the old German front
line between the Lens Road and the Loos Road Redoubts. To reach this
the greater part of Loos had to be traversed, but the streets in this
direction were fairly safe. They were, however, even more encumbered
with the dead bodies of men and horses than those in the other half
of the town. It seems that a large number of men had been driven to
the dug-outs and bombed there, and that when these same dug-outs were
required for Allied occupation, their former tenants were evicted into
the road, for the burial parties to deal with when time permitted.
Wonderful structures were these dug-outs, examples of the enemy's
thoroughness. Not content with the protection afforded by a cellar,
in many places they had excavated large chambers below the cellars
themselves, whose floors they had paved with bricks and whose walls
they had lined with boards. Once in them the garrison was perfectly
safe from the most furious bombardment.
A further example of method was to be seen in the treatment of shells
that had fallen blind. When these were of medium size, they had been
collected in small heaps and surrounded with barbed wire to prevent
inquisitive fingers experimenting with them. In the back yard of
a cottage lay the enormous bulk of a fifteen-inch shell, that had
judiciously been left where it fell, and had been honoured by a
complicated stockade of its own. All this seemed to contrast with the
present state of the town, which was everywhere littered with military
stores of every conceivable kind. Some attempt had been made to collect
them into heaps, but even this attempt had been very half-hearted. War
is, anyhow, an expensive amusement, and it seems a pity to make it more
so by sheer lack of method. For not only Loos itself, but the whole of
the country over which the advance was made was littered with arms,
ammunition, equipment, bombs, in prodigious numbers. My friend, having
occasion to go into Loos again some weeks later, found these heaps
still untouched, and was foolish enough to report their existence and
their exact position. As a reward for this unwarranted officiousness,
he was requested to escort a wagon to Loos and indicate the localities
where these various stores lay, on an evening when the battery was at
its busiest, an invitation that he firmly declined.