Part 18 (1/2)

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 (Yorks.h.i.+re, 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 generals.h.i.+p 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.”