Now It Can Be Told Part 18

That was the mise-en-scene of the battle of Loos-those mining towns behind the lines, then a maze of communication trenches entered from a place called Philosophe, leading up to the trench-lines beyond Vermelles, and running northward to Cambrin and Givenchy, opposite Hulluch, Haisnes, and La Ba.s.see, where the enemy had his trenches and earthworks among the slag heaps, the pit-heads, the corons and the cites, all broken by gun-fire, and nowhere a sign of human life aboveground, in which many men were hidden.

Storms of gun-fire broke loose from our batteries a week before the battle. It was our first demonstration of those stores of high-explosive sh.e.l.ls which had been made by the speeding up of munition-work in England, and of a gun-power which had been growing steadily since the coming out of the New Army. The weather was heavy with mist and a drizzle of rain. Banks of smoke made a pall over all the arena of war, and it was stabbed and torn by the incessant flash of bursting sh.e.l.ls. I stood on the slag heap, staring at this curtain of smoke, hour after hour, dazed by the tumult of noise and by that impenetrable veil which hid all human drama. There was no movement of men to be seen, no slaughter, no heroic episode-only through rifts in the smoke the blurred edges of slag heaps and pit-heads, and smoking ruins. German trenches were being battered in, German dugouts made into the tombs of living men, German bodies tossed up with earth and stones-all that was certain but invisible.

"Very boring," said an officer by my side. "Not a d.a.m.n thing to be seen."

"Our men ought to have a walk-over," said an optimist. "Any living German must be a gibbering idiot with sh.e.l.l-shock."

"I expect they're playing cards in their dugouts," said the officer who was bored. "Even high explosives don't go down very deep."

"It's stupendous, all the same. By G.o.d! hark at that! It seems more than human. It's like some convulsion of nature."

"There's no adventure in modern war," said the bored man. "It's a dirty scientific business. I'd kill all chemists and explosive experts."

"Our men will have adventure enough when they go over the top at dawn. h.e.l.l must be a game compared with that."

The guns went on pounding away, day after day, laboring, pummeling, hammering, like Thor with his thunderbolts. It was the preparation for battle. No men were out of the trenches yet, though some were being killed there and elsewhere, at the crossroads by Philosophe, and outside the village of Masingarbe, and in the ruins of Vermelles, and away up at Cambrin and Givenchy. The German guns were answering back intermittently, but holding most of their fire until human flesh came out into the open. The battle began at dawn on September 25th.

VI

In order to distract the enemy's attention and hold his troops away from the main battle-front, "subsidiary attacks" were made upon the German lines as far north as Bellewarde Farm, to the east of Ypres, and southward to La Ba.s.see Ca.n.a.l at Givenchy, by the troops of the Second and Third Armies. This object, wrote Sir John French, in his despatch, "was most effectively achieved." It was achieved by the b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifice of many brave battalions in the 3d and 14th Divisions (Yorkshire, Royal Scots, King's Royal Rifles, and others), and by the Meerut Division of the Indian Corps, who set out to attack terrible lines without sufficient artillery support, and without reserves behind them, and without any chance of holding the ground they might capture. It was part of the system of war. They were the p.a.w.ns of "strategy," serving a high purpose in a way that seemed to them without reason. Not for them was the glory of a victorious a.s.sault. Their job was to "demonstrate" by exposing their bodies to devouring fire, and by attacking earthworks which they were not expected to hold. Here and there men of ours, after their rush over No Man's Land under a deadly sweep of machine-gun fire, flung themselves into the enemy's trenches, bayoneting the Germans and capturing the greater part of their first line. There they lay panting among wounded and dead, and after that shoveled up earth and burrowed to get cover from the sh.e.l.ling which was soon to fall on them. Quickly the enemy discovered their whereabouts and laid down a barrage fire which, with deadly accuracy, plowed up their old front line and tossed it about on the pitchforks of bursting sh.e.l.ls. Our men's bodies were mangled in that earth. High explosives plunged into the midst of little groups crouching in holes and caverns of the ground, and scattered their limbs. Living, unwounded men lay under those screaming sh.e.l.ls with the panting hearts of toads under the beat of flails. Wounded men crawled back over No Man's Land, and some were blown to bits as they crawled, and others got back. Before nightfall, in the dark, a general retirement was ordered to our original line in that northern sector, owing to the increasing casualties under the relentless work of the German guns. Like ants on the move, thousands of men rose from the upheaved earth, and with their stomachs close to it, crouching, came back, dragging their wounded. The dead were left.

"On the front of the Third Army," wrote Sir John French, "subsidiary operations of a similar nature were successfully carried out."

From the point of view of high generalship those holding attacks had served their purpose pretty well. From the point of view of mothers' sons they had been a b.l.o.o.d.y shambles without any gain. The point of view depends on the angle of vision.

VII

Let me now tell the story of the main battle of Loos as I was able to piece it together from the accounts of men in different parts of the field-no man could see more than his immediate neighborhood-and from the officers who survived. It is a story full of the psychology of battle, with many strange incidents which happened to men when their spirit was uplifted by that mingling of exultation and fear which is heroism, and with queer episodes almost verging on comedy in the midst of death and agony, at the end of a day of victory, most ghastly failure.

The three attacking divisions from left to right on the line opposite the villages of Hulluch and Loos were the 1st, the 15th (Scottish), and the 47th (London). Higher up, opposite Hulluch and Haisnes, the 9th (Scottish) Division and the 7th Division were in front of the Hohenzollern redoubt (chalky earthworks thrust out beyond the German front-line trenches, on rising ground) and some chalk-quarries.

The men of those divisions were lined up during the night in the communication trenches, which had been dug by the sappers and laid with miles of telephone wire. They were silent, except for the c.h.i.n.k of shovels and side arms, the shuffle of men's feet, their hard breathing, and occasional words of command. At five-thirty, when the guns in all our batteries were firing at full blast, with a constant scream of sh.e.l.ls over the heads of the waiting men, and when the first faint light of day stole into the sky, there was a slight rain falling, and the wind blew lightly from the southwest.

In the front-line trenches a number of men were busy with some long, narrow cylinders, which had been carried up a day before. They were arranging them in the mud of the parapets with their nozles facing the enemy lines.

"That's the stuff to give them!"

"What is it?"

"Poison-gas. Worse than they used at Ypres."

"Christ!... supposing we have to walk through it?"

"We shall walk behind it. The wind will carry it down the throat of the Fritzes. We shall find 'em dead."

So men I met had talked of that new weapon which most of them hated.

It was at five-thirty when the men busy with the cylinders turned on little taps. There was a faint hissing noise, the escape of gas from many pipes. A heavy, whitish cloud came out of the cylinders and traveled aboveground as it was lifted and carried forward by the breeze.

"How's the gas working?" asked a Scottish officer.

"Going fine!" said an English officer. But he looked anxious, and wetted a finger and held it up, to get the direction of the wind.

Some of the communication trenches were crowded with the Black Watch of the 1st Division, hard, bronzed fellows, with the red heckle in their bonnets. (It was before the time of steel hats.) They were leaning up against the walls of the trenches, waiting. They were strung round with spades, bombs, and sacks.

"A queer kind o' stink!" said one of them, sniffing.

Some of the men began coughing. Others were rubbing their eyes, as though they smarted.

The poison-gas... The wind had carried it half way across No Man's Land, then a swirl changed its course, and flicked it down a gully, and swept it right round to the Black Watch in the narrow trenches. Some German sh.e.l.l-fire was coming, too. In one small bunch eight men fell in a mush of blood and raw flesh. But the gas was worse. There was a movement in the trenches, the huddling together of frightened men who had been very brave. They were coughing, spitting, gasping. Some of them fell limp against their fellows, with pallid cheeks which blackened. Others tied handkerchiefs about their mouths and noses, but choked inside those bandages, and dropped to earth with a clatter of shovels. Officers and men were cursing and groaning. An hour later, when the whistles blew, there were gaps in the line of the 1st Division which went over the top. In the trenches lay ga.s.sed men. In No Man's Land others fell, swept by machine-gun bullets, shrapnel, and high explosives. The 1st Division was "checked."...

"We caught it badly," said some of them I met later in the day, bandaged and b.l.o.o.d.y, and plastered in wet chalk, while ga.s.sed men lay on stretchers about them, unconscious, with laboring lungs.

VIII

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 a.s.saulting brigades of the 15th Division had left the trenches and were in the open. Shriller than the scream of sh.e.l.ls 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 Cra.s.sier. 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 hoa.r.s.ely 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 h.e.l.l!" 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 pa.s.s 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 ma.s.s, they were Scots who a.s.saulted Loos itself, and London men who went south of it to the chalk-pits and the Double Cra.s.sier.