Now It Can Be Told by Philip Gibbs (page 4)

“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 shell-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 gassed 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 bloody, and plastered in wet chalk, while gassed 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 assaulting brigades of the 15th Division had left the trenches and were in the open. Shriller than the scream of shells 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 Crassier. 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 shells 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 hoarsely 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 hell!” 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 shells 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 pass 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 mass, they were Scots who assaulted Loos itself, and London men who went south of it to the chalk-pits and the Double Crassier.

It was eight o’clock in the morning when the first crowds reached the village, and for nearly two hours afterward there was street-fighting.

It was the fighting of men in the open, armed with bayonets, rifles, and bombs, against men invisible and in hiding, with machine-guns. Small groups of Scots, like packs of wolves, prowled around the houses, where the lower rooms and cellars were crammed with Germans, trapped and terrified, but still defending themselves. In some of the houses they would not surrender, afraid of certain death, anyhow, and kept the Scots at bay awhile until those kilted men flung themselves in and killed their enemy to the last man. Outside those red-brick houses lay dead and wounded Scots. Inside there were the curses and screams of a bloody vengeance. In other houses the machine-gun garrisons ceased fire and put white rags through the broken windows, and surrendered like sheep. So it was in one house entered by a little kilted signaler, who shot down three men who tried to kill him. Thirty others held their hands up and said, in a chorus of fear, “Kamerad! Kamerad!”

A company of the 8th Gordons were among the first into Loos, led by some of those Highland officers I have mentioned on another page. It was “Honest John” who led one crowd of them, and he claims now, with a laugh, that he gained his Military Cross for saving the lives of two hundred Germans. “I ought to have got the Royal Humane Society’s medal,” he said. Those Germans–Poles, really, from Silesia–came swarming out of a house with their hands up. But the Gordons had tasted blood. They were hungry for it. They were panting and shouting, with red bayonets, behind their officer.

That young man thought deeply and quickly. If there were “no quarter” it might be ugly for the Gordons later in the day, and the day was young, and Loos was still untaken.

He stood facing his own men, ordered them sternly to keep steady. These men were to be taken prisoners and sent back under escort. He had his revolver handy, and, anyhow, the men knew him. They obeyed, grumbling sullenly.

There was the noise of fire in other parts of the village, and the tap-tap-tap of machine-guns from many cellars. Bombing-parties of Scots silenced those machine-gunners at last by going to the head of the stairways and flinging down their hand-grenades. The cellars of Loos were full of dead.

In one of them, hours after the fighting had ceased among the ruins of the village, and the line of fire was forward of Hill 70, a living man still hid and carried on his work. The colonel of one of our forward battalions came into Loos with his signalers and runners, and established his headquarters in a house almost untouched by shell- fire. At the time there was very little shelling, as the artillery officers on either side were afraid of killing their own men, and the house seemed fairly safe for the purpose of a temporary signal- station.

But the colonel noticed that shortly after his arrival heavy shells began to fall very close and the Germans obviously were aiming directly for this building. He ordered the cellars to be searched, and three Germans were found. It was only after he had been in the house for forty minutes that in a deeper cellar, which had not been seen before, the discovery was made of a German officer who was telephoning to his own batteries and directing their fire. Suspecting that the colonel and his companions were important officers directing general operations, he had caused the shells to fall upon the house knowing that a lucky shot would mean his own death as well as theirs.

As our searchers came into the cellar, he rose and stood there, waiting, with a cold dignity, for the fate which he knew would come to him, as it did. He was a very brave man.

Another German officer remained hiding in the church, which was so heavily mined that it would have blown half the village into dust and ashes if he had touched off the charges. He was fumbling at the job when our men found and killed him.

In the southern outskirts of Loos, and in the cemetery, the Londoners had a bloody fight among the tombstones, where nests of German machine-guns had been built into the vaults. New corpses, still bleeding, lay among old dead torn from their coffins by shell-fire. Londoners and Siiesian Germans lay together across one another’s bodies. The London men routed out most of the machine-gunners and bayoneted some and took prisoners of others. They were not so fierce as the Scots, but in those hours forgot the flower-gardens in Streatham and Tooting Bec and the manners of suburban drawing rooms. . . It is strange that one German machine-gun, served by four men, remained hidden behind a gravestone all through that day, and Saturday, and Sunday, and sniped stray men of ours until routed at last by moppers-up of the Guards brigade.

As the Londoners came down the slope to the southern edge of Loos village, through a thick haze of smoke from shell-fire and burning houses, they were astounded to meet a crowd of civilians, mostly women and children, who came streaming across the open in panic-stricken groups. Some of them fell under machine-gun fire snapping from the houses or under shrapnel bursting overhead. The women were haggard and gaunt, with wild eyes and wild hair, like witches. They held their children in tight claws until they were near our soldiers, when they all set up a shrill crying and wailing. The children were dazed with terror. Other civilians crawled up from their cellars in Loos, spattered with German blood, and wandered about among soldiers of many British battalions who crowded amid the scarred and shattered houses, and among the wounded men who came staggering through the streets, where army doctors were giving first aid in the roadway, while shells were bursting overhead and all the roar of the battle filled the air for miles around with infernal tumult.

Isolated Germans still kept sniping from secret places, and some of them fired at a dressing-station in the market-place, until a French girl, afterward decorated for valor–she was called the Lady of Loos by Londoners and Scots–borrowed a revolver and shot two of them dead in a neighboring house. Then she came back to the soup she was making for wounded men.

Some of the German prisoners were impressed as stretcher-bearers, and one, “Jock,” had compelled four Germans to carry him in, while he lay talking to them in broadest Scots, grinning despite his blood and wounds.

A London lieutenant called out to a stretcher-bearer helping to carry down a German officer, and was astounded to be greeted by the wounded man.

“Hullo, Leslie!. . . I knew we should meet one day.”

Looking at the man’s face, the Londoner saw it was his own cousin. . . There was all the drama of war in that dirty village of Loos, which reeked with the smell of death then, and years later, when I went walking through it on another day of war, after another battle on Hill 70, beyond.

IX

While the village of Loos was crowded with hunters of men, wounded, dead, batches of panic-stricken prisoners, women, doctors, Highlanders and Lowlanders “fey” with the intoxication of blood, London soldiers with tattered uniforms and muddy rifles and stained bayonets, mixed brigades were moving forward to new objectives. The orders of the Scottish troops, which I saw, were to go “all out,” and to press on as far as they could, with the absolute assurance that all the ground they gained would be held behind them by supporting troops; and having that promise, they trudged on to Hill 70. The Londoners had been ordered to make a defensive flank on the right of the Scots by capturing the chalk-pit south of Loos and digging in. They did this after savage fighting in the pit, where they bayoneted many Germans, though raked by machine-gun bullets from a neighboring copse, which was a fringe of gashed and tattered trees. But some of the London boys were mixed up with the advancing Scots and went on with them, and a battalion of Scots Fusiliers who had been in the supporting brigade of the 15th Division, which was intended to follow the advance, joined the first assault, either through eagerness or a wrong order, and, unknown to their brigadier, were among the leaders in the bloody struggle in Loos, and labored on to Hill 70, where Camerons, Gordons, Black Watch, Seaforths, Argyll, and Sutherland men and Londoners were now up the slopes, stabbing stray Germans who were trying to retreat to a redoubt on the reverse side of the hill.

For a time there was a kind of Bank Holiday crowd on Hill 70. The German gunners, knowing that the redoubt on the crest was still held by their men, dared not fire; and many German batteries were on the move, out of Lens and from their secret lairs in the country thereabouts, in a state of panic. On our right the French were fighting desperately at Souchez and Neuville St.-Vaast and up the lower slopes of Vimy, suffering horrible casualties and failing to gain the heights in spite of the reckless valor of their men, but alarming the German staffs, who for a time had lost touch with the situation–their telephones had been destroyed by gun-fire–and were filled with gloomy apprehensions. So Hill 70 was quiet, except for spasms of machine-gun fire from the redoubt on the German side of the slope and the bombing of German dugouts, or the bayoneting of single men routed out from holes in the earth.

One of our men came face to face with four Germans, two of whom were armed with rifles and two with bombs. They were standing in the wreckage of a trench, pallid, and with the fear of death in their eyes. The rifles clattered to the earth, the bombs fell at their feet, and their hands went up when the young Scot appeared before them with his bayonet down. He was alone, and they could have killed him, but surrendered, and were glad of the life he granted them. As more men came up the slope there were greetings between comrades, of:

“Hullo, Jock!”

“Is that you, Alf?”

They were rummaging about for souvenirs in half-destroyed dugouts where dead bodies lay. They were “swapping” souvenirs–taken from prisoners–silver watches, tobacco-boxes, revolvers, compasses. Many of them put on German field-caps, like schoolboys with paper caps from Christmas crackers, shouting with laughter because of their German look. They thought the battle was won. After the first wild rush the shell-fire, the killing, the sight of dead comrades, the smell of blood, the nightmare of that hour after dawn, they were beginning to get normal again, to be conscious of themselves, to rejoice in their luck at having got so far with whole skins. It had been a fine victory. The enemy was nowhere. He had “mizzled off.”

Some of the Scots, with the hunter’s instinct still strong, decided to go on still farther to a new objective. They straggled away in batches to one of the suburbs of Lens–the Cite St.-Auguste. Very few of them came back with the tale of their comrades’ slaughter by sudden bursts of machine-gun fire which cut off all chance of retreat. . . .

The quietude of Hill 70 was broken by the beginning of a new bombardment from German guns.

“Dig in,” said the officers. “We must hold on at all costs until the supports come up.”

Where were the supporting troops which had been promised? There was no sign of them coming forward from Loos. The Scots were strangely isolated on the slopes of Hill 70. At night the sky above them was lit up by the red glow of fires in Lens, and at twelve-thirty that night, under that ruddy sky, dark figures moved on the east of the hill and a storm of machine-gun bullets swept down on the Highlanders and Lowlanders, who crouched low in the mangled earth. It was a counter- attack by masses of men crawling up to the crest from the reverse side and trying to get the Scots out of the slopes below. Bst the men of the 15th Division answered by volleys of rifle-fire, machine-gun fire, and bombs. They held on in spite of dead and wounded men thinning out their fighting strength. At five-thirty in the morning there was another strong counter-attack, repulsed also, but at another price of life in those holes and ditches on the hillside.

Scottish officers stared anxiously back toward their old lines. Where were the supports? Why did they get no help? Why were they left clinging like this to an isolated hill? The German artillery had reorganized. They were barraging the ground about Loos fiercely and continuously. They were covering a great stretch of country up to Hulluch, and north of it, with intense harassing fire. Later on that Saturday morning the 15th Division received orders to attack and capture the German earthwork redoubt on the crest of the hill. A brigade of the 21st Division was nominally in support of them, but only small groups of that brigade appeared on the scene, a few white- faced officers, savage with anger, almost mad with some despair in them, with batches of English lads who looked famished with hunger, weak after long marching, demoralized by some tragedy that had happened to them. They were Scots who did most of the work in trying to capture the redoubt, the same Scots who had fought through Loos. They tried to reach the crest. Again and again they crawled forward and up, but the blasts of machine-gun fire mowed them down, and many young Scots lay motionless on those chalky slopes, with their kilts riddled with bullets. Others, hit in the head, or arms, or legs, writhed like snakes back to the cover of broken trenches.

“Where are the supports?” asked the Scottish officers. “In God’s name, where are the troops who were to follow on? Why did we do all this bloody fighting to be hung up in the air like this?”

The answer to their question has not been given in any official despatch. It is answered by the tragedy of the 21st and 24th Divisions, who will never forget the misery of that day, though not many are now alive who suffered it. Their part of the battle I will tell later.

X

To onlookers there were some of the signs of victory on that day of September 25th–of victory and its price. I met great numbers of the lightly wounded men, mostly “Jocks,” and they were in exalted spirits because they had done well in this ordeal and had come through it, and out of it–alive. They came straggling back through the villages behind the lines to the casualty clearing–stations and ambulance- trains. Some of them had the sleeves of their tunics cut away and showed brown, brawny arms tightly bandaged and smeared with blood. Some of them were wounded in the legs and hobbled with their arms about their comrades’ necks. Their kilts were torn and plastered with chalky mud. Nearly all of them had some “souvenir” of the fighting– German watches, caps, cartridges. They carried themselves with a warrior look, so hard, so lean, so clear-eyed, these young Scots of the Black Watch and Camerons and Gordons. They told tales of their own adventure in broad Scots, hard to understand, and laughed grimly at the killing they had done, though here and there a lad among them had a look of bad remembrance in his eyes, and older men spoke gravely of the scenes on the battlefield and called it “hellish.” But their pride was high. They had done what they had been asked to do. The 15th Division had proved its quality. Their old battalions, famous in history, had gained new honor.

Thousands of those lightly wounded men swarmed about a long ambulance- train standing in a field near the village of Choques. They crowded the carriages, leaned out of the windows with their bandaged heads and arms, shouting at friends they saw in the other crowds. The spirit of victory, and of lucky escape, uplifted those lads, drugged them. And now they were going home for a spell. Home to bonny Scotland, with a wound that would take some time to heal.

There were other wounded men from whom no laughter came, nor any sound. They were carried to the train on stretchers, laid down awhile on the wooden platforms, covered with blankets up to their chins– unless they uncovered themselves with convulsive movements. I saw one young Londoner so smashed about the face that only his eyes were uncovered between layers of bandages, and they were glazed with the first film of death. Another had his jaw blown clean away, so the doctor told me, and the upper half of his face was livid and discolored by explosive gases. A splendid boy of the Black Watch was but a living trunk. Both his arms and both his legs were shattered. If he lived after butcher’s work of surgery he would be one of those who go about in boxes on wheels, from whom men turn their eyes away, sick with a sense of horror. There were blind boys led to the train by wounded comrades, groping, very quiet, thinking of a life of darkness ahead of them–forever in the darkness which shut in their souls. For days and weeks that followed there was always a procession of ambulances on the way to the dirty little town of Lillers, and going along the roads I used to look back at them and see the soles of muddy boots upturned below brown blankets. It was more human wreckage coming down from the salient of Loos, from the chalkpits of Hulluch and the tumbled earth of the Hohenzollern redoubt, which had been partly gained by the battle which did not succeed. Outside a square brick building, which was the Town Hall of Lillers, and for a time a casualty clearing-station, the “bad” cases were unloaded; men with chunks of steel in their lungs and bowels were vomiting great gobs of blood, men with arms and legs torn from their trunks, men without noses, and their brains throbbing through opened scalps, men without faces . . .

XI

To a field behind the railway station near the grimy village of Choques, on the edge of this Black Country of France, the prisoners were brought; and I went among them and talked with some of them, on a Sunday morning, when now the rain had stopped and there was a blue sky overhead and good visibility for German guns and ours.

There were fourteen hundred German prisoners awaiting entrainment, a mass of slate-gray men lying on the wet earth in huddled heaps of misery, while a few of our fresh-faced Tommies stood among them with fixed bayonets. They were the men who had surrendered from deep dugouts in the trenches between us and Loos and from the cellars of Loos itself. They had seen many of their comrades bayoneted. Some of them had shrieked for mercy. Others had not shrieked, having no power of sound in their throats, but had shrunk back at the sight of glinting bayonets, with an animal fear of death. Now, all that was a nightmare memory, and they were out of it all until the war should end, next year, the year after, the year after that–who could tell?

They had been soaked to the skin in the night and their gray uniforms were still soddened. Many of them were sleeping, in huddled, grotesque postures, like dead men, some lying on their stomachs, face downward. Others were awake, sitting hunched up, with drooping heads and a beaten, exhausted look. Others paced up and down, up and down, like caged animals, as they were, famished and parched, until we could distribute the rations. Many of them were dying, and a German ambulanceman went among them, injecting them with morphine to ease the agony which made them writhe and groan. Two men held their stomachs, moaning and whimpering with a pain that gnawed their bowels, caused by cold and damp. They cried out to me, asking for a doctor. A friend of mine carried a water jar to some of the wounded and held it to their lips. One of them refused. He was a tall, evil-looking fellow, with a bloody rag round his head–a typical “Hun,” I thought. But he pointed to a comrade who lay gasping beside him and said, in German, “He needs it first.” This man had never heard of Sir Philip Sidney, who at Zutphen, when thirsty and near death, said, “His need is greater than mine,” but he had the same chivalry in his soul.

The officer in charge of their escort could not speak German and had no means of explaining to the prisoners that they were to take their turn to get rations and water at a dump nearby. It was a war correspondent, young Valentine Williams, afterward a very gallant officer in the Irish Guards who gave the orders in fluent and incisive German. He began with a hoarse shout of “Achtung!” and that old word of command had an electrical effect on many of the men. Even those who had seemed asleep staggered to their feet and stood at attention. The habit of discipline was part of their very life, and men almost dead strove to obey.

The non-commissioned officers formed parties to draw and distribute the rations, and then those prisoners clutched at hunks of bread and ate in a famished way, like starved beasts. Some of them had been four days hungry, cut off from their supplies by our barrage fire, and intense hunger gave them a kind of vitality when food appeared. The sight of that mass of men reduced to such depths of human misery was horrible. One had no hate in one’s heart for them then.

“Poor devils!” said an officer with me. “Poor beasts! Here we see the `glory’ of war! the `romance’ of war!”

I spoke to some of them in bad German, and understood their answer.

“It is better here than on the battlefield,” said one of them. “We are glad to be prisoners.”

One of them waved his hand toward the tumult of guns which were firing ceaselessly.

“I pity our poor people there,” he said.

One of them, who spoke English, described all he had seen of the battle, which was not much, because no man at such a time sees more than what happens within a yard or two.

“The English caught us by surprise when the attack came at last,” he said. “The bombardment had been going on for days, and we could not guess when the attack would begin. I was in a deep dugout, wondering how long it would be before a shell came through the roof and blow us to pieces. The earth shook above our heads. Wounded men crawled into the dugout, and some of them died down there. We sat looking at their bodies in the doorway and up the steps. I climbed over them when a lull came. A friend of mine was there, dead, and I stepped on his stomach to get upstairs. The first thing I saw was a crowd of your soldiers streaming past our trenches. We were surrounded on three sides, and our position was hopeless. Some of our men started firing, but it was only asking for death. Your men killed them with bayonets. I went back into my dugout and waited. Presently there was an explosion in the doorway and part of the dugout fell in. One of the men with me had his head blown off, and his blood spurted on me. I was dazed, but through the fumes I saw an English soldier in a petticoat standing at the doorway, making ready to throw another bomb.

“I shouted to him in English:

“‘Don’t kill us! We surrender!’

“He was silent for a second or two, and I thought he would throw his bomb. Then he said:

“‘Come out, you swine.’

“So we went out, and saw many soldiers in petticoats, your Highlanders, with bayonets. They wanted to kill us, but one man argued with them in words I could not understand-a dialect-and we were told to go along a trench. Even then we expected death, but came to another group of prisoners, and joined them on their way back. Gott sei dank!”

He spoke gravely and simply, this dirty, bearded man, who had been a clerk in a London office. He had the truthfulness of a man who had just come from great horrors.

Many of the men around him were Silesians-more Polish than German. Some of them could not speak more than a few words of German, and were true Slavs in physical type, with flat cheek-bones.

A group of German artillery officers had been captured and they were behaving with studied arrogance and insolence as they smoked cigarettes apart from the men, and looked in a jeering way at our officers.

“Did you get any of our gas this morning?” I asked them, and one of them laughed and shrugged his shoulders.

“I smelled it a little. It was rather nice . . . The English always imitate the German war-methods, but without much success.”

They grinned and imitated my way of saying “Guten Tag” when I left them. It took a year or more to tame the arrogance of the German officer. At the end of the Somme battles he changed his manner when captured, and was very polite.

In another place–a prison in St.-Omer–I had a conversation with two other officers of the German army who were more courteous than the gunners. They had been taken at Hooge and were both Prussians–one a stout captain, smiling behind horn spectacles, with a false, jovial manner, hiding the effect of the ordeal from which he had just escaped, and his hatred of us; the other a young, slim fellow, with clear-cut features, who was very nervous, but bowed repeatedly, with his heels together, as though in a cafe at Ehrenbreitstein, when high officers came in. A few hours before he had been buried alive. One of our mines had exploded under him, flinging a heap of earth over him. The fat man by his side–his captain–had been buried, too, in the dugout. They had scraped themselves out by clawing at the earth.

They were cautious about answering questions on the war, but the younger man said they were prepared down to the last gaiter for another winter campaign and–that seemed to me at the time a fine touch of audacity–for two more winter campaigns if need be. The winter of ’16, after this autumn and winter of ’15, and then after that the winter of ’17! The words of that young Prussian seemed to me, the more I thought of them, idiotic and almost insane. Why, the world itself could not suffer two more years of war. It would end before then in general anarchy, the wild revolutions of armies on all fronts. Humanity of every nation would revolt against such prolonged slaughter. . . It was I who was mad, in the foolish faith that the war would end before another year had passed, because I thought that would be the limit of endurance of such mutual massacre.

In a room next to those two officers–a week before this battle, the captain had been rowing with his wife on the lake at Potsdam–was another prisoner, who wept and wept. He had escaped to our lines before the battle to save his skin, and now was conscience-stricken and thought he had lost his soul. What stabbed his conscience most was the thought that his wife and children would lose their allowances because of his treachery. He stared at us with wild, red eyes.

“Ach, mein armes Weib! Meine Kinder!. . . Ach, Gott in Himmel!”

He had no pride, no dignity, no courage.

This tall, bearded man, father of a family, put his hands against the wall and laid his head on his arm and wept.

XII

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.

XIII

In a despatch by Sir John French, dated October 15, 1915, and issued by the War Office on November 1st of that year, the Commander-in-Chief stated that: “In view of the great length of line along which the British troops were operating it was necessary to keep a strong reserve in my own hand. The 11th Corps, consisting of the Guards, the 21st and the 24th Divisions, were detailed for this purpose. This reserve was the more necessary owing to the fact that the Tenth French Army had to postpone its attack until one o’clock in the day; and further, that the corps operating on the French left had to be directed in a more or less southeasterly direction, involving, in case of our success, a considerable gap in our line. To insure, however, the speedy and effective support of the 1st and 4th Corps in the case of their success, the 21st and 24th Divisions passed the night of the 24th and 25th on the line Beuvry (to the east of Bethune)-Noeux-les- Mines. The Guards Division was in the neighborhood of Lillers on the same night.”

By that statement, and by the facts that happened in accordance with it, the whole scheme of attack in the battle of Loos will stand challenged in history. Lord French admits in that despatch that he held his reserves “in his own hand,” and later he states that it was not until nine-thirty on the morning of battle that “I placed the 21st and 24th Divisions at the disposal of the General Officer commanding First Army.” He still held the Guards. He makes, as a defense of the decision to hold back the reserves, the extraordinary statement that there “would be a considerable gap in our line in case of our success.” That is to say, he was actually envisaging a gap in the line if the attack succeeded according to his expectations, and risking the most frightful catastrophe that may befall any army in an assault upon a powerful enemy, provided with enormous reserves, as the Germans were at that time, and as our Commander-in-Chief ought to have known.

But apart from that the whole time-table of the battle was, as it now appears, fatally wrong. To move divisions along narrow roads requires an immense amount of time, even if the roads are clear, and those roads toward Loos were crowded with the transport and gun-limbers of the assaulting troops. To move them in daylight to the trenches meant inevitable loss of life and almost certain demoralization under the enemy’s gun-fire.

“Between 11 A.M. and 12 noon the central brigade of these divisions filed past me at Bethune and Noeux-les-Mines, respectively,” wrote Sir John French. It was not possible for them to reach our old trenches until 4 P.M. It was Gen. Sir Frederick Maurice, the Chief of Staff, who revealed that fact to me afterward in an official explanation, and it was confirmed by battalion officers of the 24th Division whom I met.

That time-table led to disaster. By eight o’clock in the morning there were Scots on Hill 70. They had been told to go “all out,” with the promise that the ground they gained would be consolidated by following troops. Yet no supports were due to arrive until 4 P.M. at our original line of attack–still away back from Hill 70–by which time the enemy had recovered from his first surprise, had reorganized his guns, and was moving up his own supports. Tragedy befell the Scots on Hill 70 and in the Cite St.-Auguste, as I have told. Worse tragedy happened to the 21st and 24th Divisions. They became hopelessly checked and tangled in the traffic of the roads, and in their heavy kit were exhausted long before they reached the battlefield. They drank the water out of their bottles, and then were parched. They ate their iron rations, and then were hungry. Some of their transport moved too far forward in daylight, was seen by German observers, ranged on by German guns, and blown to bits on the road. The cookers were destroyed, and with them that night’s food. None of the officers had been told that they were expected to attack on that day. All they anticipated was the duty of holding the old support trenches. In actual fact they arrived when the enemy was preparing a heavy counter- attack and flinging over storms of shell-fire. The officers had no maps and no orders. They were utterly bewildered with the situation, and had no knowledge as to the where-abouts of the enemy or their own objectives. Their men met heavy fire for the first time when their physical and moral condition was weakened by the long march, the lack of food and water, and the unexpected terror ahead of them. They crowded into broken trenches, where shells burst over them and into them. Young officers acting on their own initiative tried to lead their men forward, and isolated parties went forward, but uncertainly, not knowing the ground nor their purpose. Shrapnel lashed them, and high-explosive shells plowed up the earth about them and with them. Dusk came, and then darkness. Some officers were cursing, and some wept, fearing dishonor. The men were huddled together like sheep without shepherds when wolves are about, and saw by the bewilderment of the officers that they were without leadership. It is that which makes for demoralization, and these men, who afterward in the battle of the Somme in the following year fought with magnificent valor, were on that day at Loos demoralized in a tragic and complete way. Those who had gone forward came back to the crowded trenches and added to the panic and the rage and the anguish. Men smashed their rifles in a kind of madness. Boys were cursing and weeping at the same time. They were too hopelessly disordered and dismayed by the lack of guidance and by the shock to their sense of discipline to be of much use in that battle. Some bodies of them in both these unhappy divisions arrived in front of Hill 70 at the very time when the enemy launched his first counter-attack, and were driven back in disorder. . . Some days later I saw the 21st Division marching back behind the lines. Rain slashed them. They walked with bent heads. The young officers were blanched and had a beaten look. The sight of those dejected men was tragic and pitiful.

XIV

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.

Part Four

A WINTER OF DISCONTENT

I

The winter of 1915 was, I think, the worst of all. There was a settled hopelessness in it which was heavy in the hearts of men–ours and the enemy’s. In 1914 there was the first battle of Ypres, when the bodies of British soldiers lay strewn in the fields beyond this city and their brown lines barred the way to Calais, but the war did not seem likely to go on forever. Most men believed, even then, that it would end quickly, and each side had faith in some miracle that might happen. In 1916-17 the winter was foul over the fields of the Somme after battles which had cut all our divisions to pieces and staggered the soul of the world by the immense martyrdom of boys–British, French, and German–on the western front. But the German retreat from the Somme to the shelter of their Hindenburg line gave some respite to our men, and theirs, from the long-drawn fury of attack and counter- attack, and from the intensity of gun-fire. There was at best the mirage of something like victory on our side, a faint flickering up of the old faith that the Germans had weakened and were nearly spent.

But for a time in those dark days of 1915 there was no hope ahead. No mental dope by which our fighting-men could drug themselves into seeing a vision of the war’s end.

The battle of Loos and its aftermath of minor massacres in the ground we had gained–he new horror of that new salient–had sapped into the confidence of those battalion officers and men who had been assured of German weakness by cheery, optimistic, breezy-minded generals. It was no good some of those old gentlemen saying, “We’ve got ’em beat!” when from Hooge to the Hohenzollern redoubt our men sat in wet trenches under ceaseless bombardment of heavy guns, and when any small attack they made by the orders of a High Command which believed in small attacks, without much plan or purpose, was only “asking for trouble” from German counterattacks by mines, trench-mortars, bombing sorties, poison-gas, flame-throwers, and other forms of frightfulness which made a dirty mess of flesh and blood, without definite result on either side beyond piling up the lists of death.

“It keeps up the fighting spirit of the men,” said the generals. “We must maintain an aggressive policy.”

They searched their trench maps for good spots where another “small operation” might be organized. There was a competition among the corps and divisional generals as to the highest number of raids, mine explosions, trench-grabbings undertaken by their men.

“My corps,” one old general told me over a cup of tea in his headquarters mess, “beats the record for raids.” His casualties also beat the record, and many of his officers and men called him, just bluntly and simply, “Our old murderer.” They disliked the necessity of dying so that he might add one more raid to his heroic competition with the corps commander of the sector on the left. When they waited for the explosion of a mine which afterward they had to “rush” in a race with the German bombing-parties, some of them saw no sense in the proceeding, but only the likelihood of having legs and arms torn off by German stick-bombs or shells. “What’s the good of it?” they asked, and could find no answer except the satisfaction of an old man listening to the distant roar of the new tumult by which he had “raised hell” again.

II

The autumn of 1915 was wet in Flanders and Artois, where our men settled down–knee-deep where the trenches were worst–for the winter campaign. On rainy days, as I remember, a high wind hurtled over the Flemish fields, but it was moist, and swept gusts of rain into the faces of men marching through mud to the fighting-lines and of other men doing sentry on the fire-steps of trenches into which water came trickling down the slimy parapets.

When the wind dropped at dusk or dawn a whitish fog crept out of the ground, so that rifles were clammy to the touch and a blanket of moisture settled on every stick in the dugouts, and nothing could be seen through the veil of vapor to the enemy’s lines, where he stayed invisible.

He was not likely to attack on a big scale while the battlefields were in that quagmire state. An advancing wave of men would have been clogged in the mud after the first jump over the slimy sand-bags, and to advance artillery was sheer impossibility. Nothing would be done on either side but stick-in-the-mud warfare and those trench-raids and minings which had no object except “to keep up the spirit of the men.” There was always work to do in the trenches–draining them, strengthening their parapets, making their walls, tiling or boarding their floorways, timbering the dugouts, and after it was done another rainstorm or snowstorm undid most of it, and the parapets slid down, the water poured in, and spaces were opened for German machine-gun fire, and there was less head cover against shrapnel bullets which mixed with the raindrops, and high explosives which smashed through the mud. The working parties had a bad time and a wet one, in spite of waders and gum boots which were served out to lucky ones. Some of them wore a new kind of hat, seen for the first time, and greeted with guffaws–the “tin” hat which later became the headgear of all fighting-men. It saved many head wounds, but did not save body wounds, and every day the casualty lists grew longer in the routine of a warfare in which there was “Nothing to report.”

Our men were never dry. They were wet in their trenches and wet in their dugouts. They slept in soaking clothes, with boots full of water, and they drank rain with their tea, and ate mud with their “bully,” and endured it all with the philosophy of “grin and bear it!” and laughter, as I heard them laughing in those places between explosive curses.

On the other side of the barbed wire the Germans were more miserable, not because their plight was worse, but because I think they lacked the English sense of humor. In some places they had the advantage of our men in better trenches, with better drains and dugouts–due to an industry with which ours could never compete. Here and there, as in the ground to the north of Hooge, they were in a worse state, with such rivers in their trenches that they went to enormous trouble to drain the Bellewarde Lake which used to slop over in the rainy season. Those field-gray men had to wade through a Slough of Despond to get to their line, and at night by Hooge where the lines were close together- -only a few yards apart–our men could hear their boots squelching in the mud with sucking, gurgling noises.

“They’re drinking soup again!” said our humorists.

There, at Hooge, Germans and English talked to one another, out of their common misery.

“How deep is it with you?” shouted a German soldier.

His voice came from behind a pile of sand-bags which divided the enemy and ourselves in a communication trench between the main lines.

“Up to our blooming knees,” said an English corporal, who was trying to keep his bombs dry under a tarpaulin.

“So? . . . You are lucky fellows. We are up to our belts in it.”

It was so bad in parts of the line during November storms that whole sections of trench collapsed into a chaos of slime and ooze. It was the frost as well as the rain which caused this ruin, making the earthworks sink under their weight of sand-bags. German and English soldiers were exposed to one another like ants upturned from their nests by a minor landslide. They ignored one another. They pretended that the other fellows were not there. They had not been properly introduced. In another place, reckless because of their discomfort, the Germans crawled upon their slimy parapets and sat on top to dry their legs, and shouted: “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

Our men did not shoot. They, too, sat on the parapets drying their legs, and grinning at the gray ants yonder, until these incidents were reported back to G. H. Q.–where good fires were burning under dry roofs–and stringent orders came against “fraternization.” Every German who showed himself was to be shot. Of course any Englishman who showed himself–owing to a parapet falling in–would be shot, too. It was six of one and half a dozen of the other, as always, in this trench warfare, but the dignity of G. H. Q. would not be outraged by the thought of such indecent spectacles as British and Germans refusing to kill each other on sight. Some of the men obeyed orders, and when a German sat up and said, “Don’t shoot!” plugged him through the head. Others were extremely short-sighted. . . Now and again Germans crawled over to our trenches and asked meekly to be taken prisoner. I met a few of these men and spoke with them.

“There is no sense in this war,” said one of them. “It is misery on both sides. There is no use in it.”

That thought of war’s futility inspired an episode which was narrated throughout the army in that winter of ’15, and led to curious conversations in dugouts and billets. Above a German front-line trench appeared a plank on which, in big letters, was scrawled these words

“The English are fools.”

“Not such bloody fools as all that!” said a sergeant, and in a few minutes the plank was smashed to splinters by rifle-fire.

Another plank appeared, with other words:

“The French are fools.”

Loyalty to our allies caused the destruction of that board.

A third plank was put up:

“We’re all fools. Let’s all go home.”

That board was also shot to pieces, but the message caused some laughter, and men repeating it said: “There’s a deal of truth in those words. Why should this go on? What’s it all about? Let the old men who made this war come and fight it out among themselves, at Hooge. The fighting-men have no real quarrel with one another. We all want to go home to our wives and our work.”

But neither side was prepared to “go home” first. Each side was in a trap–a devil’s trap from which there was no escape. Loyalty to their own side, discipline, with the death penalty behind it, spell words of old tradition, obedience to the laws of war or to the caste which ruled them, all the moral and spiritual propaganda handed out by pastors, newspapers, generals, staff-officers, old men at home, exalted women, female furies, a deep and simple love for England and Germany, pride of manhood, fear of cowardice–a thousand complexities of thought and sentiment prevented men, on both sides, from breaking the net of fate in which they were entangled, and revolting against that mutual, unceasing massacre, by a rising from the trenches with a shout of, “We’re all fools! . . . Let’s all go home!”

In Russia they did so, but the Germans did not go home, too. As an army and a nation they went on to the Peace of Brest-Litovsk and their doom. But many German soldiers were converted to that gospel of “We’re all fools!” and would not fight again with any spirit, as we found at times, after August 8th, in the last year of war.

III

The men remained in the trenches, and suffered horribly. I have told about lice and rats and mine-shafts there. Another misery came to torture soldiers in the line, and it was called “trench-foot.” Many men standing in slime for days and nights in field boots or puttees lost all sense of feeling in their feet. These feet of theirs, so cold and wet, began to swell, and then to go “dead,” and then suddenly to burn as though touched by red-hot pokers. When the “reliefs” went up scores of men could not walk back from the trenches, but had to crawl, or be carried pick-a-back by their comrades, to the field dressing stations. So I saw hundreds of them, and, as the winter dragged on, thousands. The medical officers cut off their boots and their puttees, and the socks that had become part of their skins, exposing blackened and rotting feet. They put oil on them, and wrapped them round with cotton-wool, and tied labels to their tunics with the name of that new disease–“trench-foot.” Those medical officers looked serious as the number of cases increased.

“This is getting beyond a joke,” they said. “It is pulling down the battalion strength worse than wounds.”

Brigadiers and divisional generals were gloomy, and cursed the new affliction of their men. Some of them said it was due to damned carelessness, others were inclined to think it due to deliberate malingering at a time when there were many cases of self-inflicted wounds by men who shot their fingers away, or their toes, to get out of the trenches.

There was no look of malingering on the faces of those boys who were being carried pick-a-back to the ambulance-trains at Remy siding, near Poperinghe, with both feet crippled and tied up in bundles of cotton- wool. The pain was martyrizing, like that of men tied to burning fagots for conscience’ sake. In one battalion of the 49th (West Riding) Division there were over four hundred cases in that winter of ’15. Other battalions in the Ypres salient suffered as much.

It was not until the end of the winter, when oil was taken up to the trenches and rubbing drill was ordered, two or three times a day, that the malady of trench-foot was reduced, and at last almost eliminated.

The spirit of the men fought against all that misery, resisted it, and would not be beaten by it.

A sergeant of the West Riding Division was badly wounded as he stood thigh-high in water. A bomb or a trench-mortar smashed one of his legs into a pulp of bloody flesh and splintered bone. Word was passed down to the field ambulance, and a surgeon came up, splashed to the neck in mud, with his instruments held high. The operation was done in the water, red with the blood of the wounded man, who was then brought down, less a leg, to the field hospital. He was put on one side as a man about to die. . . But that evening he chattered cheerfully, joked with the priest who came to anoint him, and wrote a letter to his wife.

“I hope this will find you in the pink, as it leaves me,” he began. He mentioned that he had had an “accident” which had taken one of his legs away. “But the youngsters will like to play with my wooden peg,” he wrote, and discussed the joke of it. The people round his bed marveled at him, though day after day they saw great courage; such courage as that of another man who was brought in mortally wounded and lay next to a comrade on the operating table.

“Stick it, lad!” he said, “stick it!” and turned his head a little to look at his friend.

Many of our camps were hardly better than the trenches. Only by duck- boards could one walk about the morass in which huts were built and tents were pitched. In the wagon lines gunners tried in vain to groom their horses, and floundered about in their gum boots, cursing the mud which clogged bits and chains and bridles, and could find no comfort anywhere between Dickebusch and Locre.

IV

The Hohenzollern redoubt, near Fosse 8, captured by the 9th Scottish Division in the battle of Loos, could not be held then under concentrated gun-fire from German batteries, and the Scots, and the Guards who followed them, after heavy losses, could only cling on to part of a communication trench (on the southeast side of the earthworks) nicknamed “Big Willie,” near another trench called “Little Willie.” Our enemies forced their way back into some of their old trenches in this outpost beyond their main lines, and in spite of the chaos produced by our shell-fire built up new parapets and sand-bag barricades, flung out barbed wire, and dug themselves into this graveyard where their dead and ours were strewn.

Perhaps there was some reason why our generals should covet possession of the Hohenzollern redoubt, some good military reason beyond the spell of a high-sounding name. I went up there one day when it was partly ours and stared at its rigid waves of mine-craters and trench parapets and upheaved chalk, dazzling white under a blue sky, and failed to see any beauty in the spot, or any value in it–so close to the German lines that one could not cough for fear of losing one’s head. It seemed to me a place not to gain and not to hold. If I had been a general (appalling thought!) I should have said: “Let the enemy have that little hell of his. Let men live there among half-buried bodies and crawling lice, and the stench of rotting flesh. There is no good in it for us, and for him will be an abomination, dreaded by his men.”

But our generals desired it. They hated to think that the enemy should have crawled back to it after our men had been there. They decided to “bite it off,” that blunt nose which was thrust forward to our line. It was an operation that would be good to report in the official communique. Its capture would, no doubt, increase the morale of our men after their dead had been buried and their wounded patched up and their losses forgotten.

It was to the 46th Midland Division that the order of assault was given on October 13th, and into the trenches went the lace-makers of Nottingham, and the potters of the Five Towns, and the boot-makers of Leicester, North Staffordshires, and Robin Hoods and Sherwood Foresters, on the night of the 12th.

On the following morning our artillery concentrated a tremendous fire upon the redoubt, followed at 1 P.M. by volumes of smoke and gas. The chief features on this part of the German line were, on the right, a group of colliers’ houses known as the Corons de Pekin, and a slag heap known as the Dump, to the northeast of that bigger dump called Fosse 8, and on the left another group of cottages, and another black hillock farther to the right of the Fosse. These positions were in advance of the Hohenzollern redoubt which our troops were to attack.

It was not an easy task. It was hellish. Intense as our artillery fire had been, it failed to destroy the enemy’s barbed wire and front trenches sufficiently to clear the way, and the Germans were still working their machine-guns when the fuses were lengthened, the fire lifted, and the gas-clouds rolled away.

I saw that bombardment on the morning of Wednesday, October 13th, and the beginning of the attack from a slag heap close to some of our heavy guns. It was a fine, clear day, and some of the French miners living round the pit-heads on our side of the battle line climbed up iron ladders and coal heaps, roused to a new interest in the spectacle of war which had become a monotonous and familiar thing in their lives, because the intensity of our gun-fire and the volumes of smoke- clouds, and a certain strange, whitish vapor which was wafted from our lines toward the enemy stirred their imagination, dulled by the daily din of guns, to a sense of something beyond the usual flight of shells in their part of the war zone.

“The English are attacking again!” was the message which brought out these men still living among ruined cottages on the edge of the slaughter-fields. They stared into the mist, where, beyond the brightness of the autumn sun, men were about to fight and die. It was the same scene that I had watched when I went up to the Loos redoubt in the September battle–a flat, bare, black plain, crisscrossed with the whitish earth of the trenches rising a little toward Loos and then falling again so that in the village there only the Tower Bridge was visible, with its steel girders glinting, high over the horizon line. To the left the ruins of Hulluch fretted the low-lying clouds of smoke, and beyond a huddle of broken houses far away was the town of Haisnes. Fosse 8 and the Hohenzollern redoubt were hummocks of earth faintly visible through drifting clouds of thick, sluggish vapor.

On the edge of this battleground the fields were tawny under the golden light of the autumn sun, and the broken towers of village churches, red roofs shattered by shell-fire, trees stripped bare of all leaves before the wind of autumn touched them, were painted in clear outlines against the gray-blue of the sky.

Our guns had been invisible. Not one of all those batteries which were massed over a wide stretch of country could be located before the battle by a searching glass. But when the bombardment began it seemed as though our shells came from every field and village for miles back, behind the lines.

The glitter of those bursting shells stabbed through the smoke of their explosion with little, twinkling flashes, like the sparkle of innumerable mirrors heliographing messages of death. There was one incessant roar rising and falling in waves of prodigious sound. The whole line of battle was in a grayish murk, which obscured all landmarks, so that even the Tower Bridge was but faintly visible.

Presently, when our artillery lifted, there were new clouds rising from the ground and spreading upward in a great dense curtain of a fleecy texture. They came from our smoke-shells, which were to mask our infantry attack. Through them and beyond them rolled another wave of cloud, a thinner, whiter vapor, which clung to the ground and then curled forward to the enemy’s lines.

“That’s our gas!” said a voice on one of the slag heaps, amid a group of observers–English and French officers.

“And the wind is dead right for it,” said another voice. “The Germans will get a taste of it this time!”

Then there was silence, and some of those observers held their breath as though that gas had caught their own throats and choked them a little. They tried to pierce through that bar of cloud to see the drama behind its curtain–men caught in those fumes, the terror- stricken flight before its advance, the sudden cry of the enemy trapped in their dugouts. Imagination leaped out, through invisibility, to the realization of the things that were happening beyond.

From our place of observation there were brief glimpses of the human element in this scene of impersonal powers and secret forces. Across a stretch of flat ground beyond some of those zigzag lines of trenches little black things were scurrying forward. They were not bunched together in close groups, but scattered. Some of them seemed to hesitate, and then to fall and lie where they fell, others hurrying on until they disappeared in the drifting clouds.

It was the foremost line of our infantry attack, led by the bombers. The Germans were firing tempests of shells. Some of them were curiously colored, of a pinkish hue, or with orange-shaped puffs of vivid green. They were poison-shells giving out noxious gases. All the chemistry of death was poured out on both sides–and through it went the men of the Midland Division.

The attack on the right was delivered by a brigade of Staffordshire men, who advanced in four lines toward the Big Willie trench which formed the southeast side of the Hohenzollern redoubt. The leading companies, who were first over our own parapets, made a quick rush, half blinded by the smoke and the gaseous vapors which filled the air, and were at once received by a deadly fire from many machine-guns. It swept their ranks, and men fell on all sides. Others ran on in little parties flung out in extended order.

Young officers behaved with desperate gallantry, and as they fell cheered their men on, while others ran forward shouting, followed by numbers which dwindled at every yard, so that only a few reached the Big Willie trench in the first assault.

A bombing-party of North Staffordshire men cleared thirty yards of the trench by the rapidity with which they flung their hand-grenades at the German bombers who endeavored to keep them out, and again and again they kept at bay a tide of field-gray men, who swarmed up the communication trenches, by a series of explosions which blew many of them to bits as bomb after bomb was hurled into their mass. Other Germans followed, flinging their own stick-bombs.

The Staffordshires did not yield until nearly every man was wounded and many were killed. Even then they retreated yard by yard, still flinging grenades almost with the rhythm of a sower who scatters his seed, each motion of the hand and arm letting go one of those steel pomegranates which burst with the noise of a high-explosive shell.

The survivors fell back to the other side of a barricade made in the Big Willie trench by some of their men behind. Behind them again was another barrier, in case the first should be rushed.

It seemed as if they might be rushed now, for the Germans were swarming up Big Willie with strong bombing-parties, and would soon blast a way through unless they were thrust beyond the range of hand- grenades. It was a young lieutenant named Hawker, with some South Staffordshire men, who went forward to meet this attack and kept the enemy back until four o’clock in the afternoon, when only a few living men stood among the dead and they had to fall back to the second barrier.

Darkness now crept over the battlefield and filled the trenches, and in the darkness the wounded men were carried back to the rear, while those who had escaped worked hard to strengthen their defenses by sand-bags and earthworks, knowing that their only chance of life lay in fierce industry.

Early next morning an attempt was made by other battalions to come to the relief of those who held on behind those barriers in Big Willie trench. They were Nottingham men–Robin Hoods and other Sherwood lads- -and they came across the open ground in two directions, attacking the west as well as the east ends of the German communication trenches which formed the face of the Hohenzollern redoubt.

They were supported by rifle grenade-fire, but their advance was met by intense fire from artillery and machine-guns, so that many were blown to bits or mangled or maimed, and none could reach their comrades in Big Willie trench.

While one brigade of the Midland men had been fighting like this on the right, another brigade had been engaged on the left. It contained Sherwood, Leicester, and Lincoln men, who, on the afternoon of October 13th, went forward to the assault with very desperate endeavor. Advancing in four lines, the leading companies were successful in reaching the Hohenzollern redoubt, smashed through the barbed wire, part of which was uncut, and reached the Fosse trench which forms the north base of the salient.

Machine-gun fire cut down the first two lines severely and the two remaining lines were heavily shelled by German artillery. It was an hour in which the courage of those men was agonized. They were exposed on naked ground swept by bullets, the atmosphere was heavy with gas and smoke; all the abomination of battle–he moaning of the wounded, the last cries of the dying, the death-crawl of stricken beings holding their broken limbs and their entrails–was around them, and in front a hidden enemy with unlimited supplies of ammunition and a better position.

The Robin Hoods and the men of Lincoln and Leicestershire were sustained in that shambles by the spirit that had come to them through the old yeoman stock in which their traditions were rooted, and those who had not fallen went forward, past their wounded comrades, past these poor, bloody, moaning men, to the German trenches behind the redoubt.

At 2.15 P.M. some Monmouth men came up in support, and while their bombers were at work some of the Lincolns pushed up with a machine-gun to a point within sixty yards from the Fosse trench, where they stayed till dark, and then were forced to fall back.

At this time parties of bombers were trying to force their way up the Little Willie trench on the extreme left of the redoubt, and here ghastly fighting took place. Some of the Leicesters made a dash three hundred yards up the trench, but were beaten back by overpowering numbers of German bombers and bayonet-men, and again and again other Midland lads went up that alleyway of death, flinging their grenades until they fell or until few comrades were left to support them as they stood among their dead and dying.

Single men held on, throwing and throwing, until there was no strength in their arms to hurl another bomb, or until death came to them. Yet the business went on through the darkness of the afternoon, and into the deeper darkness of the night, lit luridly at moments by the white illumination of German flares and by the flash of bursting shells.

Isolated machine-guns in uncaptured parts of the redoubt still beat a tattoo like the ruffle of war-drums, and from behind the barriers in the Big Willie trench came the sharp crack of English rifles, and dull explosions of other bombs flung by other Englishmen very hard pressed that night.

In the outer trenches, at the nose of the salient, fresh companies of Sherwood lads were feeling their way along, mixed up confusedly with comrades from other companies, wounded or spent with fighting, but determined to hold the ground they had won.

Some of the Robin Hoods up Little Willie trench were holding out desperately and almost at the last gasp, when they were relieved by other Sherwoods, and it was here that a young officer named Vickers was found in the way that won him his V.C.

Charles Geoffrey Vickers stood there for hours against a horde of men eager for his death, eager to get at the men behind him. But they could not approach. He and his fellow-bombers kept twenty yards or more clear before them, and any man who flung himself forward was the target of a hand-grenade.

From front and from flank German bombs came whizzing, falling short sometimes, with a blasting roar that tore down lumps of trench, and sometimes falling very close–close enough to kill.

Vickers saw some of his best men fall, but he kept the barrier still intact by bombing and bombing.

When many of his comrades were dead or wounded, he wondered how long the barrier would last, and gave orders for another to be built behind him, so that when the rush came it would be stopped behind him–and over him.

Men worked at that barricade, piling up sand-bags, and as it was built that young lieutenant knew that his own retreat was being cut off and that he was being coffined in that narrow space. Two other men were with him–I never learned their names–and they were hardly enough to hand up bombs as quickly as he wished to throw them.

Away there up the trench the Germans were waiting for a pounce. Though wounded so that he felt faint and giddy, he called out for more bombs. “More!” he said, “More!” and his hand was like a machine reaching out and throwing.

Rescue came at last, and the wounded officer was hauled over the barricade which he had ordered to be built behind him, closing up his way of escape.

All through October 14th the Midland men of the 46th Division held on to their ground, and some of the Sherwoods made a new attack, clearing the enemy out of the east portion of the redoubt.

It was lucky that it coincided with a counter-attack made by the enemy at a different point, because it relieved the pressure there. Bombing duels continued hour after hour, and human nature could hardly have endured so long a struggle without fatigue beyond the strength of men.

So it seems; yet when a brigade of Guards came up on the night of October 15th the enemy attacked along the whole line of redoubts, and the Midland men, who were just about to leave the trenches, found themselves engaged in a new action. They had to fight again before they could go, and they fought like demons or demigods for their right of way and home, and bombed the enemy back to his holes in the ground.

So ended the assault on the Hohenzollern by the Midland men of England, whose division, years later, helped to break the Hindenburg line along the great canal south of St.-Quentin.

What good came of it mortal men cannot say, unless the generals who planned it hold the secret. It cost a heavy price in life and agony. It demonstrated the fighting spirit of many English boys who did the best they could, with the rage, and fear, and madness of great courage, before they died or fell, and it left some living men, and others who relieved them in Big Willie and Little Willie trenches, so close to the enemy that one could hear them cough, or swear in guttural whispers.

And through the winter of ’15, and the years that followed, the Hohenzollern redoubt became another Hooge, as horrible as Hooge, as deadly, as damnable in its filthy perils, where men of English blood, and Irish, and Scottish, took their turn, and hated it, and counted themselves lucky if they escaped from its prison-house, whose walls stank of new and ancient death.

* * *

Among those who took their turn in the hell of the Hohenzollern were the men of the 12th Division, New Army men, and all of the old stock and spirit of England, bred in the shires of Norfolk and Suffolk, Gloucester and Bedford, and in Surrey, Kent, Sussex, and Middlesex (which meant London), as the names of their battalions told. In September they relieved the Guards and cavalry at Loos; in December they moved on to Givenchy, and in February they began a long spell at the Hohenzollern. It was there the English battalions learned the worst things of war and showed the quality of English courage.

A man of Kent, named Corporal Cotter, of the Buffs, was marvelous in spirit, stronger than the flesh.

On the night of March 6th an attack was made by his company along an enemy trench, but his own bombing–party was cut off, owing to heavy casualties in the center of the attack. Things looked serious and Cotter went back under heavy fire to report and bring up more bombs.

On the return journey his right leg was blown off close below the knee and he was wounded in both arms. By a kind of miracle–the miracle of human courage–he did not drop down and die in the mud of the trench, mud so deep that unwounded men found it hard to walk–but made his way along fifty yards of trench toward the crater where his comrades were hard pressed. He came up to Lance-corporal Newman, who was bombing with his sector to the right of the position. Cotter called to him and directed him to bomb six feet toward where help was most needed, and worked his way forward to the crater where the Germans had developed a violent counter-attack.

Men fell rapidly under the enemy’s bomb-fire, but Cotter, with only one leg, and bleeding from both arms, steadied his comrades, who were beginning to have the wind-up, as they say, issued orders, controlled the fire, and then altered dispositions to meet the attack. It was repulsed after two hours’ fighting, and only then did Cotter allow his wounds to be bandaged. From the dug–out where he lay while the bombardment still continued he called out cheery words to the men, until he was carried down, fourteen hours later. He received the V. C., but died of his wounds.

Officers and men vied with one another, yet not for honor or reward, round these craters of the Hohenzollern, and in the mud, and the fumes of shells, and rain-swept darkness, and all the black horror of such a time and place, sometimes in groups and sometimes quite alone, did acts of supreme valor. When all the men in one of these infernal craters were dead or wounded Lieut. Lea Smith, of the Buffs, ran forward with a Lewis gun, helped by Private Bradley, and served it during a fierce attack by German bombers until it jammed.

Then he left the gun and took to bombing, and that single figure of his, flinging grenades like an overarm bowler, kept the enemy at bay until reinforcements reached him.

Another officer of the Buff’s–by name Smeltzer–withdrew his platoon under heavy fire, and, although he was wounded, fought his way back slowly to prevent the enemy from following up. The men were proud of his gallantry, but when he was asked what he had done he could think of nothing except that “when the Boches began shelling I got into a dugout, and when they stopped I came out again.”

There were many men like that who did amazing things and, in the English way, said nothing of them. Of that modesty was Capt. Augrere Dawson, of the West Kents, who did not bother much about a bullet he met on his way to a crater, though it traveled through his chest to his shoulder-blade. He had it dressed, and then went back to lead his men, and remained with them until the German night attack was repulsed. He was again wounded, this time in the thigh, but did not trouble the stretcher-men (they had a lot to do on the night of March 18th and 19th), and trudged back alone.

It was valor that was paid for by flesh and blood. The honors gained by the 12th Division in a few months of trench warfare–one V. C., sixteen D. S. C.’s, forty-five Military Crosses, thirty-four Military Medals–were won by the loss in casualties of more than fourteen thousand men. That is to say, the losses of their division in that time, made up by new drafts, was 100 per cent.; and the Hohenzollern took the highest toll of life and limbs.

V

I heard no carols in the trenches on Christmas Eve in 1915, but afterward, when I sat with a pint of water in each of my top-boots, among a company of men who were wet to the knees and slathered with moist mud, a friend of mine raised his hand and said, “Listen!”

Through the open door came the music of a mouth–organ, and it was playing an old tune:

God rest ye, merry gentlemen. Let nothing you dismay, For Jesus Christ, our Saviour, Was born on Christmas Day.

Outside the wind was howling across Flanders with a doleful whine, rising now and then into a savage violence which rattled the window- panes, and beyond the booming of its lower notes was the faint, dull rumble of distant guns.

“Christmas Eve!” said an officer. “Nineteen hundred and fifteen years ago . . . and now–this!”

He sighed heavily, and a few moments later told a funny story, which was followed by loud laughter. And so it was, I think, in every billet in Flanders and in every dugout that Christmas Eve, where men thought of the meaning of the day, with its message of peace and goodwill, and contrasted it with the great, grim horror of the war, and spoke a few words of perplexity; and then, after that quick sigh (how many comrades had gone since last Christmas Day!), caught at a jest, and had the courage of laughter. It was queer to find the spirit of Christmas, the little tendernesses of the old tradition, the toys and trinkets of its feast-day, in places where Death had been busy–and where the spirit of evil lay in ambush!

So it was when I went through Armentieres within easy range of the enemy’s guns. Already six hundred civilians–mostly women and children–had been killed there. But, still, other women were chatting together through broken window-panes, and children were staring into little shops (only a few yards away from broken roofs and shell-broken walls) where Christmas toys were on sale.

A wizened boy, in a pair of soldier’s boots–a French Hop o’ My Thumb in the giant’s boots–was gazing wistfully at some tin soldiers, and inside the shop a real soldier, not a bit like the tin one, was buying some Christmas cards worked by a French artist in colored wools for the benefit of English Tommies, with the aid of a dictionary. Other soldiers read their legends and laughed at them: “My heart is to you.” “Good luck.” “To the success!” “Remind France.”

The man who was buying the cards fumbled with French money, and looked up sheepishly at me, as if shy of the sentiment upon which he was spending it.

“The people at home will be glad of ’em,” he said. “I s’pose one can’t forget Christmas altogether. Though it ain’t the same thing out here.”

Going in search of Christmas, I passed through a flooded countryside and found only scenes of war behind the lines, with gunners driving their batteries and limber down a road that had become a river-bed, fountains of spray rising about their mules and wheels, military motor-cars lurching in the mud beyond the pave, despatch-riders side- slipping in a wild way through boggy tracks, supply–columns churning up deep ruts.

And then into the trenches at Neuve Chapelle. If Santa Claus had come that way, remembering those grown-up boys of ours, the old man with his white beard must have lifted his red gown high–waist-high–when he waded up some of the communication trenches to the firing-lines, and he would have staggered and slithered, now with one top-boot deep in sludge, now with the other slipping off the trench boards into five feet of water, as I had to do, grasping with futile hands at slimy sandbags to save a headlong plunge into icy water.

And this old man of peace, who loved all boys and the laughter of youth, would have had to duck very low and make sudden bolts across open spaces, where parapets and earthworks had silted down, in order to avoid those sniping bullets which came snapping across the dead ground from a row of slashed trees and a few scarred ruins on the edge of the enemy’s lines.

But sentiment of that sort was out of place in trenches less than a hundred yards away from men lying behind rifles and waiting to kill.

There was no spirit of Christmas in the tragic desolation of the scenery of which I had brief glimpses when I stood here and there nakedly (I felt) in those ugly places, when the officer who was with me said, “It’s best to get a move on here,” and, “This road is swept by machine–gun fire,” and, “I don’t like this corner; it’s quite