Chapter III: Part 3

During the night of September 25-26, the general position was something as follows. The enemy, from a point not far south of Fosse 8 to the Double Crassier, had been driven out of his front line to a greater or less distance in rear. Here, many months before this time, he had already constructed a second line of defence in anticipation of such a possibility. We, finding ourselves confronted by this line, were obliged to make some sort of cover for our advanced infantry, using the abandoned German front line and communication trenches as far as they could be adapted for our reserves and supports. Along the whole of this front of advance, therefore, both sides were busily engaged upon strengthening their respective positions, covering meanwhile their working parties with rifle fire. The artillery could not render much direct assistance, the light had failed before the final positions of the infantry on either side were determined, and the risk of injuring friends as much as foes was too great. The function of the guns was to keep a steady fire directed upon the possible lines of approach of hostile reinforcements, which were pouring up on both sides during the whole of the night. The front of advance was something as follows: From the south of the canal we remained in our old trenches to a point just north of the quarries, and from here the position we held ran through the front line of the Hohenzollern Redoubt, of which we held the front and the enemy the rear, thence somewhat to the west of the Lens-La Bassée road in front of Cité St. Elie and Hulluch, through Chalk Pit Wood and Puits XIV his, somewhere over the western slopes of Hill 70, then abruptly back to the Double Crassier, where it joined our old line again.

Up till midnight both sides worked comparatively undisturbed, except on Hill 70, where attacks and counter-attacks followed one another without intermission. But at about 12.30 a.m., the enemy, having apparently succeeded in bringing up sufficient troops for the purpose, made a series of local attacks, the fiercest of which seems to have been on our line from the Bois Hugo to Hill 70. This attack was repulsed, as were the remainder of the series made at the same time. The weather now became even more misty than before, and the cold drizzle that had been falling all the evening increased in intensity. Shortly after dawn, at 5.30 a.m., the enemy made a more determined attack from much the same part of his line, in which he scored some initial successes, afterwards retrieved, and by 6.30 a.m. the position was the same as it had been all night. Observation was extremely bad on the morning of the 26th, so much so that it was fully 8 a.m. before artillery could be effectively used. But at this hour we again assumed the offensive, and opened a furious bombardment upon the redoubt on the summit of Hill 70, a work already of extreme strength, and now doubly so after the feverish energies of large working parties during the night. At nine o'clock the bombardment ceased, and the infantry rushed to the assault, but were unable to penetrate the hostile defences. They were re-formed and the attempt was repeated, again unsuccessfully.

Towards mid-day the local offensive passed into the hands of the enemy, who made a determined attack from the Bois Hugo and succeeded in driving our line back a considerable distance and recapturing Puits XIV bis. This was a distinct advantage to him, for it gave him a point of vantage from which he could direct machine-gun fire upon the flank of troops moving to the assault of Hill 70. No further determined attacks were made by either side on the afternoon of the 26th or the night 26th-27th, although desultory fighting continued, and various reliefs and reinforcements were made amongst our own troops. The 3rd Cavalry Division, who up till now had been waiting for the chance that would have been theirs had we succeeded in piercing the German line, were dismounted and relieved the troops holding Loos, where they remained for a couple of days, some of them taking part in the final assault upon Hill 70 on the 27th.

On the afternoon of the 27th every gun that could possibly be brought to bear opened a furious fire upon the Hill 70 Redoubt. For two hours the bombardment continued in a light that nearly broke the observers' hearts, so early did the evening close in, and so persistently hung the mist. Then, with one earth-shaking salvo from the massed batteries, it ceased, and the Guards Division rushed to the assault. What they achieved will probably never be accurately known, undoubtedly they penetrated the first line of the redoubt, but the enemy, continually reinforced from his fortress of Cité St. Auguste, contrived to expel them, and slowly they were swept back, in the gathering darkness of night, to the positions from which they had sprung. The attack had failed, Hill 70, the key of Lens, was still in the enemy's hands.

The strength of this position lay perhaps not so much in its natural advantages, as in the artificial means which had been employed to render it capable of effective defence. Its position upon one of the main arteries leading from the fortress of Lens made it easy to reinforce from Cité St. Auguste, one of the outliers of that fortress. The western slopes of the hill, up which the attack must come, formed a sort of glacis to the redoubt, on to which observers in the redoubt itself or in the woods around La Ferme des Mines de Lens could direct fire from their batteries at Pont-a-Vendin, Cité St. Emile and Cité St. Laurent. The work itself was of considerable extent and exceptionally formidable, and was probably impregnable by frontal attack when fully manned. Further, all possible approaches to it were enfiladed from the northward by machine-gun fire from Puits XIV bis and some ruined houses at the edge of a small wood, and from the southward by the strong works at the edge of Cité St. Auguste, namely Puits XI and a building known as the Dynamitière. Our failure to capture this important strategical point was therefore regrettable, but not incomprehensible.

A couple of days after the failure of our last attack upon Hill 70, a redistribution of the front took place between the Allied Armies. The Tenth French Army took over the new line up to a point near the Chalk Pit Wood, the boundary of their territory, which included the village of Loos, being now roughly a line drawn from this point through Quality Street, and thence along the Lens-Béthune Road. From this time Hill 70 ceased to be a British objective, and the whole of the line in front of Lens came under one command, instead of being divided right in front of the fortress, a change of considerable administrative advantage.

During these days, from the 25th to the end of the month, there had been spasmodic fighting along the rest of the front of advance, especially about the quarries and the Hohenzollern Redoubt. This latter work, in which we had gained a footing on the 25th, was repeatedly reported lost and re-captured, but eventually it was found to be untenable under the enemy's fire from Auchy and Fosse 8, and to a lesser degree from Cité St. Elie and Hulloch. The actual new line as now consolidated was therefore the same as on the evening of the 25th, except that it ran to the westward of the Hohenzollern and at the foot of the slopes of Hill 70.

During the succeeding week no events of outstanding importance took place, the infantry were busy in the improvement of their new trenches, and the artillery in keeping the hostile batteries quiet while they did so. But on October 8, "the lid suddenly came off Hell," as Gunner Wolverhampton aptly expressed it. During the early part of the morning the enemy had been unusually quiet, but about ten o'clock he opened a bombardment upon the whole of the new line, more especially upon that part of it in front of Loos, upon the village itself, and upon the trenches between Hill 70 and the Double Crassier. This bombardment grew in intensity, and towards noon we were ordered to retaliate upon certain parts of his line. A few minutes later, the wind being in his favour, he let loose a dense cloud of smoke and gas, and at the same time lifted his fire on to our batteries and observation stations, employing a large percentage of lachrymatory gas shell. Very shortly after this, his counter-attack was launched. As on the 25th, very little was visible from our observation stations, owing to the obscurity caused by the smoke. It appears, however, that he developed two separate attacks, one issuing from the Bois Hugo and the other from the directions of the Dynamentière and Puits XI. These attacking columns were composed of waves of men in close order, each wave, according to the French observers, who were more suitably placed as far as noting details went than our own, as the smoke did not blow in their direction, being composed of a mass of men six abreast and twenty-five deep. The French field batteries were at that time massed close together, and their commander held their fire until the attackers were well clear of the cover from which they issued. As soon as this was the case, every battery was ordered to open fire at its maximum rate, which they did with results that were nothing short of appalling. Our battery happened to be just in front of them, and anything like their fire cannot be imagined. For fully an hour the continuous roar was such that telephones were useless, orders shouted through a megaphone into the recipient's ear absolutely inaudible. The effect of such a cannonade upon a slow moving mass of men in the open may be imagined. It is said that the loss of one of the attacking columns in dead alone was upwards of six thousand, and this estimate was subsequently largely increased. The hopeless position of these unfortunates, was, curiously enough, enhanced by an accident. One French battery had suffered severely a few days before, having been badly shelled, whereby it had lost all its officers and had had to change its position. Being at this time still somewhat disorganized, it was late in opening fire, and when it did so, opened at the same range as the other batteries had done some minutes before, thereby directing its fire upon a point that the attackers had already passed over, so placing a curtain of fire behind them. Caught thus between two hail-storms of shell, the massed columns had no escape, and were mown down where they stood.

The conditions in the battery during this affair were curious and extremely interesting. Each gun was firing as fast as the shell could be loaded and the round laid, orders being passed by gesticulation as best they could. Behind us the roar of the French batteries grew until it was only by watching for the flashes that we could tell when our own guns had fired. All round the hostile shells were bursting, filling the air with a sweet ether-like vapour that sent a sharp pain shooting through one's eyes until it seemed as if complete blindness must shortly supervene. The tears coursing down the men's faces made strange white tracks through the grime of battle, till the detachments became fierce, ghost-like and terrible, the reeking demons of the pit, striving and sweating that they might slay ever more and more, that the bitter screams of their mutilated victims might swell ever louder into the livid heavens. And the endless succession of ammunition wagons, their drivers clad in gas-helmets till they resembled the Inquisitors of old, lashing their horses into a yet more frantic gallop as they neared their goal, seemed as the shell burst all about them like monstrous chariots of hell. And all the time the French reserves were massing behind us, passing in turn down the _boyaux_ into the threatened trenches, each party as they passed cheering the roaring guns, and winning from the detachments a hoarse shout in return, as for a moment they rested from their ceaseless labour.

Slowly the inferno of sound died away, and with its first ebb came the voice of rumour. We had lost the Double Crassier, and the enemy had gained a footing on the slag-heap of Fosse 5, he was close to us, and we should have to save the guns as best we could! The French had repelled the attack, and, following up their advantage, had swept into Lens! The truth of the affair we did not discover till later, when it appeared that a portion of our new line from the middle of the Double Crassier northwards had been captured, re-occupied and captured again, that the enemy had been finally driven out, but that the trench was now so full of dead as to afford no cover to the living. But for this minor success, if success it was, the furious counter-attack had failed with great loss to the enemy. If our total losses during the operations of September and October were between eighty and ninety thousand, it is believed that the enemy lost about ten thousand upon this one day alone. During the night of the 8th-9th the Germans contrived to establish themselves in the disputed length of trench, but otherwise the position remained for the next two days the same as before the counter-attack.

On the 11th the French developed a fresh attack in this sector, with the primary object of retaking the lost trench, and the secondary object of pushing such successes they might achieve right up past the end of the Double Crassier and Puits XI until they should rest upon the mineral railway running past Puits XI and Cité St. Pierre as far as Cité St. Elisabeth, thus forming an offensive line from which to threaten the Dynamitière and the enemy's approaches to Hill 70. We were called upon to assist in this enterprise, and at 2 p.m. commenced to drop shell along the Lens-La Bassée and Lens-Béthune roads, from their junction in Lens up to Cité St. Auguste and Cité St. Laurent. We also kept the church in the latter place under fire to prevent its use as an observation station. About 3 p.m. the French launched their troops to the assault, and succeeded in recapturing the lost trench, but owing to intense machine-gun fire from Puits XI and XII and from Cité St. Pierre, they failed to advance any further along the line of the Double Crassier towards the mineral railway.

The primary object of the operations so far had been the capture of Lens. The importance of the place can hardly be over-estimated. If we imagine England with Lancashire and the West Riding in hostile occupation, we shall have a parallel to the case of France deprived of the Department du Nord and part of Pas de Calais, except that in our own case we should still have left to us many manufacturing districts, and France has but few. The importance to the economic life of France of the three towns of Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing is comparable to the importance of Manchester to us, and the coal-mining districts lying round Lens, which include such fields as those of Courrières, Drocourt and Dourges occupy relatively a far more important position than those of the West Riding. Lens itself is the key to this productive area, whose energies are at least as valuable to the enemy as to its rightful owners, and Lens has in skilful hands become a fortress in the modern sense, far more difficult of capture than older works at one time deemed impregnable. It is comparatively easy to concentrate fire upon guns whose position is known, as they must be when permanently mounted in the fortifications of the text-books, and once a sufficient concentration of fire has been obtained, guns so sited, being incapable of removal, must sooner or later be put out of action, but it is impossible so utterly to destroy a city and its suburbs that its ruins are no longer sufficient to afford cover to mobile ordnance and machine guns. It has been found that a building that in itself is merely a screen from direct observation, becomes, when destroyed by artillery fire, a heap of ruins amongst which may be concealed artillery and machine guns, and which by its very mass is an excellent protection against hostile fire. Bombard this type of fortress as you will, its defenders are not tied by their gun-mountings to any one position, but can move their batteries from place to place, knowing full well that the attackers, with each round they fire, are preparing fresh situations wherein they may be concealed. It will surely be found that this war has sounded the knell of permanently fixed guns except for purposes of coast defence, where alone the immobile gun has triumphed in the face of many years' accumulation of scornful criticism.

The last phase of the operations was due to a desire on our part to strengthen as much as possible our position from the quarries to the new point of junction with the French. On October 13 our battery was ordered to open a bombardment upon the German trenches that lay along the Lens-La Bassée road to the west of Hulluch. This bombardment continued for an hour or so, and at two o'clock the infantry advanced to the assault, we at the same time lifting our fire on to the village of Hulluch itself, starting at the western end and slowly increasing the range so as gradually to drive through the whole place. But at half-past three our hopes of a capture of Hulluch similar to that of Loos were dashed to the ground by an order from headquarters to come back on to the western edge of the village. This we did until darkness supervened, and we were ordered to cease firing. As far as we were concerned, this was the most exacting day we had yet known, our expenditure of ammunition during the five or six hours that we were in action being greater than that of any previous day. So rapidly were the guns worked that the continual concussion broke the platform of one of the guns, so that in the middle of the action it had to be hauled out of its pit on to a hard road close by, and fired without concealment of any kind, regardless of the risk of observation from hostile captive balloons or aeroplanes. It may be added that next day the detachment found some rafters in a ruined building and from these constructed a new platform for themselves without any form of skilled assistance.

It was not until the next day that we learnt the history of the attack. The intention had been to capture the Hohenzollern Redoubt, and from that as a _point d'appui_ to extend our line along the Lens-La Bassée road as far as Chalk Pit Wood, with the possibility of capturing Cité St. Elie and Hulluch as advance posts. The attempt only partially succeeded. We contrived to advance our line in front of Hulluch almost on to the road, but failed to occupy permanently any of the German trenches. The Hohenzollern was apparently taken, but could not be held, as upon September 25, under concentrated fire from Fosse 8. Between Cité St. Elie and Hulluch, also, history repeated itself. Concealed wire, so placed that the artillery observers could find no place from which satisfactorily to observe the effect of their fire, held up the infantry assault. An attempt had been made to destroy this wire by map shooting combined with the use of high-explosive shell, but the destruction was not complete, and the attack failed. It was said that a handful of men actually penetrated into Hulluch but were never seen again, and that for a short time our infantry held the German trenches in front of the village. But with the enemy established in houses overlooking them, and occupying a strong commanding line along the crassier of Puits XIII bis, these trenches were untenable and had to be evacuated. The net gain of ground during the day was a depth of some two hundred yards on a front of rather less than a mile. At the same time the French, who had been supporting our attack upon the right, reported that the northern suburbs of Lens, Cités St. Auguste, St. Laurent and St. Pierre, had been so carefully prepared and were held in such strength that for the moment a frontal attack upon them was inadvisable.

Here, then, the offensive operations that began with the Four Days' bombardment, may be said to have ended. Although the gain of ground seemed insignificant, consisting as it did of one ruined village and a few square miles of fallowland, and although Lens still stood triumphant and untaken, there is still much to be reckoned in the Allies' favour. Victory it was not, and no amount of advertisement will ever make it so. But it was an exhibition of strength on the part of the Allies, and a stern reminder to the enemy that their power of offensive on the Western Front had permanently passed into our hands. The resources in men, money and munitions of the Central Powers are decreasing, those of the Allies increasing; equal losses on either side, therefore, is a condition favourable to the latter. It is maintained that our losses were too great in proportion to the results achieved. Yes, perhaps they were, but, had they been only slightly greater, had more men been flung into the struggle at the critical time, it is impossible to forecast what the issue of the fighting might have been. The enemy knew this, and was prepared for a substantial retirement. Conjecture is unprofitable, but let us as a nation learn the lesson that men and men alone will terminate this war. Other factors may check it temporarily; it may be to the advantage of the enemy to agree to an apparently disastrous peace in order to gain a respite for fresh preparation. But a certain page of history should harden our resolution, should make us convinced of the bitter fact that there is no peace for the world except in the disappearance of the German Empire or our own. _Delenda est Carthago_--let us preach the lessons of the Punic wars in season and out of season till every soul in these islands realizes their significance at the present day. The world is no larger than it was then, there is still no room in it for two rival World Powers, one must sink into obscurity before the might of its rival. And, accepting this incontrovertible fact as an axiom, let us face our position, let us remember how the power of Rome trembled in the balance as she strained every nerve in her system during Hannibal's Italian campaign, and let us realize at last that the destruction of our rival will demand of us sacrifices compared to which the efforts that we have yet made are nothing, are as the puny efforts of a feeble infant contrasted with the struggle of a strong man wrestling for his life. And if the operations that have been named the Battle of Loos have any share in bringing these things home to us, their effects will be far more beneficial than those of a spectacular victory.

VII

LOOS

One of our officers was fortunate enough, very shortly after the events of September 25, to have the opportunity of reconnoitring the village of Loos, with a double purpose in view, namely to verify some landmarks that were doubtful from our observation posts, and to discover if any points existed suitable for permanent occupation as O.P.s. There were two ways open to him of reaching the village from his battery position, of which the first was to proceed to North Maroc and thence take the road to Les Cabarets and from there the track that runs into Loos at its south-western corner, and the second was to walk to Quality Street, thence along the Lens-Béthune road to the old German front-line, and so through their communication trenches into any required part of the village. Time being of importance, he chose the former method, and set out one morning at about 8 a.m. The narrative of his adventures in Loos, as throwing light upon the conditions obtaining in a place that had been heavily shelled by us until our capture of it, and has ever since been equally heavily shelled by the enemy, may be of some interest.

Once clear of the houses that screened his movements from the hostile lines, the road seemed very lonely and deserted. So far as the eye could see he was the only living person in the whole of the wide valley, and the sense of being under the observation of many pairs of eyes that were to him invisible produced in him a strangely nervous reaction, as though he were the principal actor in some horrible nightmare. It seemed as though every footstep rang upon the hard road with a note audible for miles, as though he were a gigantic black figure upon an unbroken background of white, as though the watching eyes bent such burning rays upon him that he could feel them pierce him as he moved. I have walked that road myself many times since, more than once when it has been under fire, and know now that it is as safe or safer than many others whose dangers never concern the most nervous, yet an echo of these first sensations of his has invariably struck me when I have done so, and I can understand his feelings. It can only be attributed to the fact that being alone in the middle of the valley one imagines that one is a conspicuous target for any one who will to spend a round upon.

The road crosses first our own old front line, then the German, over both of which substantial bridges had been built directly after the advance. It was not until he had crossed our own line that the cost of the battle became evident to him. Then he began to understand. Between the lines a burial party was at work, busy with the task of identifying and interring our own dead. Behind the German line the operation of clearing the battlefield had scarcely begun. Here the dead lay thick, our own and the enemy's in inextricable confusion. Here was a group of three or four, showing where a well-timed shrapnel had burst, there four or five in a line, stricken down as they charged by rifle fire from some fiercely-held support trench. And everywhere, mingling with the dead, were all the many insignia of war, rifles, ammunition, tins of beef, biscuits, cases of bombs, some unopened, some with their contents scattered round them, everything that is carried forward in a modern battle. At Les Cabarets itself, which is in reality the junction of the Lens-Béthune and Grenay-Hulluch roads, and which lies a few hundred yards south-east of the Lens Road Redoubt, the struggle seemed to have been fiercer. It is probable that the ruins of the houses that once stood at the cross-road had been held by a detachment of the enemy, for lying round them were a heap of dead Germans, their rifles in many cases still in their hands, and about these in a narrow circle the bodies of our attacking troops, some lying as they had fired, their legs spread out, their rifles fallen from their shoulders and their heads resting on them, as though an angel of sleep had touched them even as they pulled the trigger. Close by, two horses bearing the brand of the broad arrow were quietly grazing on the rank grass that covered the fallow land, their broken harness still hanging on their backs, evidently the team of a shell-shattered wagon that lay near by. My friend was tempted to pause and investigate further, but a dozen bullets whizzing by quickly convinced him that the locality was not healthy, and he made haste upon his way. Nor was he more lucky with the track that led from here towards Loos. Some persevering sniper evidently regarded him as fair game, and after this enthusiast had displayed his marksmanship by narrowly missing him twice in quick succession, my friend abandoned the field to him and took to a communication trench that ran in the required direction. He says that he hopes never to take a more hideous walk. The trench was literally paved with dead Germans--it must have been used as a line of defence against the advance of the 47th Division--some lying on their backs with their eyes staring heavenwards, others horribly buried in the thick clay that lay in the lower stretches of the trench, so that his attention was only called to their presence by a sudden dreadful yielding beneath his feet. They lay too thick for it to be possible to avoid treading upon them, and though more than once he deserted the trench for the clean earth of the plains, his friend the sniper was bent on each occasion upon showing him that he was still a happy memory to him, and he was forced to descend again. However, it was over at last, and with the greatest relief that he had ever experienced he found himself in the shelter of the outlying houses of Loos.

Here for a few minutes he stood and studied a plan with which he had been provided. His objective was the Pylons, easy enough to see, certainly, but unfortunately on the far side of an open square or market-place by the church, upon which the German gunners were making very pretty practice with field guns and light howitzers. There was nothing for it but to find a way round, along the streets choked with rubbish and torn by great craters, taking short cuts through gardens converted into cemeteries, in which the dead lying on the surface were more numerous than those below, across courtyards wherein the horses who had been stabled there lay where the flying bullets had found them. Strange work, this threading of the city of the dead, the sense of isolation growing as one advanced until one seemed a visitant to a world struck by a celestial bombardment that had left none alive to tell the tale. Troops there were in plenty, but they remained in the wonderful excavations that had been made; none, save rarely a messenger, crouching behind a wall as the whizz and roar of the shell echoed amongst the torn buildings, racing across an open space in a brief interval of quiet, ventured forth, unless before dawn to relieve his companions who were stationed in the hastily-dug trenches in front of the village. But during the course of this expedition my friend discovered a very valuable fact, namely, that the principal fire of the enemy was directed only upon certain spots, and was not being distributed indiscriminately over the village. Avoid these spots, and except for a few casual "universal" bursting overhead, one was perfectly safe, _voilà tout_! But that same casual universal is a very jumpy toy. You hear it coming, certainly, but far too quickly for you to do anything, and before you know where you are it has burst just over you with an ear-splitting crack, and small fragments hit the ground all round you with a most unpleasant thud. "Woolly bears," the men call them, for they leave a curious cotton-wool-like wreath of smoke in the air for some seconds, much larger and more lasting than the puff of a shrapnel.

Very shortly after this first discovery, my friend made another, which somewhat counterbalanced his relief in the first, which was that one of the points most distinctly to be avoided was the very place he wished to reach, the Pylons themselves. Round about their base a howitzer battery was methodically placing high-explosive shell, and amongst the upper works a field battery was making very accurate practice with those most undesirable "woolly bears." There was nothing for it, however, and the longer one stopped and looked at it the worse it seemed, so, with feelings utterly unlike those that are popularly supposed to steel the heart of the hero who boldly faces death for his country's sake, he made his way under cover of such houses as still remained, to the mine buildings at the foot of the great steel structure. Here was destruction such as he had never seen. The buildings, strongly as they had been built to withstand the weight of the machinery within them, were completely shattered, their contents strewing the floors like scrap iron in a merchant's yard. Great iron girders were cut as by a knife, the bridge leading from the Pylons to the loading stages on the end of the Crassier, a riveted steel structure, was broken in half, the ends torn and frayed as though made of paper. The towers themselves are so massive and their weight is so distributed among many uprights, that, although many of these latter were bent or broken, the edifice they supported still stood gaunt and menacing, dominating the country-side. But their foot was no place to sit in idle conjecture that morning, as a shell that nearly blocked up the entrance to the shelter into which he had made his way abruptly reminded him. Waiting until its last fragments had fallen--a process that takes a surprisingly long time--he made a bolt over the ruins, climbing and scrambling up a refuse-covered slope, until he reached the foot of the winding stairs that rose up the centre of one of the towers. Fortunately for him, this stairway was partly enclosed by sheets of boiler-plate, for the next shell burst uncomfortably close and the fragments hit the boiler-plate with a sound that left no doubt in his mind of what his fate would have been had this shield not been there. Up the spiral stairway then--was ever such an interminable flight? Surely, notwithstanding the friendly morning mist, the whole German army must see him as he climbed ever higher! Those friendly steel sheets had been hit direct more than once at various times, leaving several turns of the stairway open, plain to everybody's view. However, nothing alarming happened, and the goal was reached--not the top of the tower where the winding pulleys hung, but a gallery that had formed the upper limit of travel of the cage, where the trolleys were unloaded and pushed across the bridge to the loading sheds. This gallery or platform stood perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the ground, and had once been glazed, but long ago every pane of glass had been shattered and the steel floor was thickly carpeted with the fragments. Once in the gallery one was fairly safe, for the floor and roof were of steel and so was the circular wall up to the level of the glazing. Nothing but pieces of shell coming through the windows--and the place was full of fragments showing where this had happened--or a direct hit from a heavy shell could do much damage. But it was not the place for a rest-cure, the moral effect of "woolly bears" bursting amongst the girder-work close to one, although one knew that by the time one heard the report the danger was over, was most disturbing. Once, too, a fairly heavy shell hit the tower itself, causing it to rock like a sapling in a gale, as my friend expressed it afterwards. His first thought was of the delights of his situation had it carried away part of the staircase, when he would be faced by the prospect of staying where he was till dusk or of swarming down the steelwork in full view of the German trenches, but fortunately this contingency did not arise.

But the view that he obtained amply compensated for everything. From the grim black mass of Fosse 8, past the tower of Cité St. Elie, the cupola of Douvrin, the trees, magnificent in their thick verdure, that clothe the banks of a little stream that flows past Hulluch, to the strange medley of chimneys and elevators that gives to the works of the Société Métallurgique de Pont-à-Vendin the appearance of a fore-and-aft rigged vessel under sail, the whole country lay spread as on a map. Further south still, Lens and its thickly-built suburbs could be seen, and towards the west, the well-known country that we held, the high land of the Vimy Ridge, with Souchez at its feet, the tall slag-heaps of Noeux-les-Mines and Auchel, the dark mass of the Bois des Dames, the square tower of Béthune. What an observation post! No wonder that the enemy, whose use of the place for that very purpose was apparent by the presence of German newspapers and a broken table with some scraps of paper upon it, were determined to make it untenable by constant shelling.

For utterly impossible as a permanent observation post it undoubtedly was, and my friend, having verified his geography, left it with a feeling of deep thankfulness at having escaped unhurt. But his adventures were by no means at an end, he had still to find a situation of comparative safety from which he could observe when required under more restful conditions. The first place he selected was a house in the Enclosure, as the buildings near the foot of the Pylons have been termed. This also had been used by the enemy for the same purpose, for the walls were sandbagged, the lower floors were shored up with pit-props, and the basement had evidently been occupied by a fairly large party. Curiously enough, the house was in quite good repair, the walls and half the roof were standing, in contrast to the wreckage that lay around it. Here the explorer received what he describes as "the shock of his life," for on opening the door of one of the upper rooms he found, sprawling over a table as though just fallen asleep, the body of a German officer, still holding a pencil with which he had been addressing a post-card to a girl in Magdeburg. So lifelike was the attitude that it was impossible to realize at first that he was dead, notwithstanding the jagged hole above the temple where the fragment had entered and the blood that stained his right side. From this room a good view of the desired stretch of country could be obtained, there was a plentiful supply of sandbags ready filled in the house, and it seemed in every way desirable. But, just as my friend had determined upon converting it to his own uses, a (fortunately) small shell, evidently intended for the Pylons, but a little "over," entered the ground floor and burst there, wrecking the staircase, bringing down ceilings and tiles all over the house and smashing what was probably the last pane of glass in Loos. If this place was going to play long-stop for all the byes that passed the Pylons, it was distinctly unhealthy. He clambered down the wreckage of the stairs and looked round for a more likely spot, settling upon a tall house some little distance away. But here again he was doomed to disappointment. As he walked towards it a light howitzer shell sang over his head and burst a hundred yards beyond his goal. Instinct told him that this was the first round of a series of which his projected O.P. was the target. Even as he realized that he was standing about the same distance short of the place as the first round had fallen over, and in a direct line, the second shell passed so close to him that he swears he felt the wind of it, and burst in a manure-heap not ten yards away. Thanking heaven that it had found a soft billet that muffled the force of its explosion, he turned and bolted, having no further interest in observing that particular series, the components of the manure-heap dropping in a shower about him.

The next place he came to was a biggish building in a part of the town that seemed to be immune from shelling. He walked boldly into it and climbed up to an attic in the roof. Here were more signs of German occupation, a window that faced towards our old line being heavily sandbagged, whilst behind it was a neatly constructed platform and rest. Hundreds of empty cartridge-cases scattered over the floor and a few loaded clips still lying on the platform showed that the sniper whose lair it had been had known good sport there. But even here my friend was not destined to rest undisturbed. Hardly had his eye taken in these details than a sound of hurried whispers below burst upon his ears, and a peremptory voice bade him "Descendez, vite!" "Qu'est-ce qu'il-y-a?" he replied. "Descendez, vite, vite, ou nous allons tirer!" Discretion was by far the better part of valour, so down he came, to be surrounded at once by a number of French soldiers armed with rifles and fixed bayonets. To his enquiries as to what they wanted, the only reply was, "Vous pouvez dire ce que vous voulez à M. le Commandant." The latter gentleman was very comfortably installed in a roomy cellar, and my friend was ushered into his presence with the significant words, "C'est un espion que nous avons attrapé en haut, mon Commandant, regardez ces machines-là qu'il porte!" The latter presumably in reference to the sextant, compass and other strange-looking impedimenta that he carried. It was an uncomfortable moment, but he managed to establish his identity, and mutual explanations followed, to the satisfaction of all parties, and my friend was told that he might make himself free of the place whenever he liked--"Mais, monsieur, je crains que vous avez trouvé en Loos que les français sont plus dangereux que les allemands. Mais, peste, vous êtes vraiment monté dans les Pylons! J'ose bien dire, comme disent les Anglais, que c'etait un endroit 'not sanitary'!" As a variant upon the hackneyed phrase "not healthy," I think that this is hard to beat.

The next question was the best way of getting home. The friendly mist had by now disappeared, and it was hardly advisable to face the open road again, even if this had not involved the ghastly walk along the death-strewn communication trench. My friend finally decided to find the end of a communication trench that, starting from a point in the north-western corner of the village, led into the old German front line between the Lens Road and the Loos Road Redoubts. To reach this the greater part of Loos had to be traversed, but the streets in this direction were fairly safe. They were, however, even more encumbered with the dead bodies of men and horses than those in the other half of the town. It seems that a large number of men had been driven to the dug-outs and bombed there, and that when these same dug-outs were required for Allied occupation, their former tenants were evicted into the road, for the burial parties to deal with when time permitted. Wonderful structures were these dug-outs, examples of the enemy's thoroughness. Not content with the protection afforded by a cellar, in many places they had excavated large chambers below the cellars themselves, whose floors they had paved with bricks and whose walls they had lined with boards. Once in them the garrison was perfectly safe from the most furious bombardment.

A further example of method was to be seen in the treatment of shells that had fallen blind. When these were of medium size, they had been collected in small heaps and surrounded with barbed wire to prevent inquisitive fingers experimenting with them. In the back yard of a cottage lay the enormous bulk of a fifteen-inch shell, that had judiciously been left where it fell, and had been honoured by a complicated stockade of its own. All this seemed to contrast with the present state of the town, which was everywhere littered with military stores of every conceivable kind. Some attempt had been made to collect them into heaps, but even this attempt had been very half-hearted. War is, anyhow, an expensive amusement, and it seems a pity to make it more so by sheer lack of method. For not only Loos itself, but the whole of the country over which the advance was made was littered with arms, ammunition, equipment, bombs, in prodigious numbers. My friend, having occasion to go into Loos again some weeks later, found these heaps still untouched, and was foolish enough to report their existence and their exact position. As a reward for this unwarranted officiousness, he was requested to escort a wagon to Loos and indicate the localities where these various stores lay, on an evening when the battery was at its busiest, an invitation that he firmly declined.

The way home, although much longer, proved to be cleaner and more secure, besides having the interest of leading through the old German front line. This was then in the occupation of our reserves, and had consequently been considerably tidied up, but large parts of it were still completely broken down, showing the effect of our bombardment. The shooting had been distinctly good, very few shell-craters were far from the trenches, and a large proportion of the projectiles had either fallen into them or blown in the parapet. But here again the dug-outs must have afforded very excellent protection. Wide shafts, driven straight down from the front wall of the trench at an angle of forty-five degrees with the horizontal, led into hollowed-out chambers twenty feet below the surface that would easily accommodate a couple of dozen men. Each dug-out had more than one shaft, to reduce the chances of men being buried by an explosion filling in the only means of exit. The trenches were everywhere revetted with timber or hurdles, and had a false bottom of wooden gratings to keep the men's feet as dry as possible. If only from the point of view of comfort they contrasted very favourably with our own, through which the homeward track next lay.

Loos, City of the Dead! If in years to come you are ever rebuilt, a task that to the observer of your utter destruction and desolation seems impossible, what strange and gruesome relics will your workmen find! Surely the Spirit of Carnage will for ever haunt those narrow streets and open widespread fields, surely your inhabitants of the future will wake in terror in the September nights to hear ghostly echoes of the then-forgotten struggle, the unceasing whistle and roar of the shells, the rushing footsteps of the charging men, the despairing cries of the bombed wretches in the cellars! And if timid eyes dare lift the curtain to peep fearfully through the windows, will they not see a blood-red moon shining upon streets through which pour the serried columns of the victors, and scent the night air tainted with a faint sickening odour of slaughter? But not alone shall Loos bear its burden of horror, for in how many towns and villages must these scenes be repeated before Peace comes again!

VIII

IN FRENCH TERRITORY

At the beginning of October our battery, owing to reasons of strategy and convenience, changed its position by a matter of about a mile-and-a-half, and by so doing entered an area where the right of the British line joined the left of the French line. The actual point of junction of the lines varies from time to time, as much owing to the two armies' requirements in the matter of billets as for any other reason, and, as it happened, on the very day we moved into our new position, this point was in process of being moved a mile or so northwards. We saw, therefore, the familiar khaki give place to the looped-up blue greatcoat, and when, the desperate struggle to get the battery in order in the minimum time being over, we had time to look round and take note of our surroundings, we found ourselves in French Territory.

I think that the weeks we spent there were the happiest we have ever known, although the life of a gunner is a rough paradise for a man with health and strength--plenty of work, plenty of sport, and complete freedom from the cares of an artificial existence, there being nothing artificial about war. Our position was amongst ruined _corons_, not so badly damaged but that they could with very little trouble be made into very comfortable billets, and owing to the fact that it was in French territory, was immune from the visits of predatory "brass hats." Further, in our group commander we had a strong buckler against interference and aggression, and one in whom we all placed implicit confidence. His kindness to us all will be amongst the most precious memories of those happy days.

We found the change of tenants in the villages round us extremely advantageous in many ways, not the least of which was the amount of loot we acquired. It seems curious that the British Army, equipped as it is with a more copious transport than has ever before been imagined, should invariably leave in its wake enormous quantities of perfectly serviceable stores. On this particular occasion we found abandoned more than enough overcoats and waterproof capes to fit out the whole battery, and collected from the billets into which we moved over a hundred thousand rounds of small-arm ammunition alone. Although these matters were reported, no steps were ever taken to remove the stores, and subsequent discoveries of hundreds of boxes of unused bombs met with the same indifference. What wonder that the thrifty French regard it as the best fortune that can befall them to take over any part of our line, or that French officers to whom I have spoken are inclined to base their opinions of our conduct of the war upon such indications of our national habits. "No army before has ever wasted as you waste," said one to me; "the food you reject would feed half the French Forces, the rifles you failed to collect after Loos would equip many battalions of your New Army. What is your proverb--'Straws show which way the wind blows'--is it not?" Nor did the British troops leave only stores behind in their evacuation. Two days after the exchange, an officer arrived in the battery with a strange tale of woe. He was in command of a picquet in a certain village, from where he had watched his own people depart and the French arrive, expecting every moment to be relieved. Since that time he had received neither orders nor rations, and he and his men had lived upon the charity of a French regiment. We fed him and sent him back to his lonely vigil with an armful of provisions and a promise to report his troubles through our headquarters. I heard subsequently that his patrol had been forgotten and never missed, so presumably he might have been there now but for his own action.

The first and greatest Commandment when on active service is this, "Thou shalt covet thy neighbour's goods, and if he doesn't keep his eye on them, thou shalt possess them." Nationality seems to have no effect upon the speed with which the soldier assimilates this doctrine. The French _piou-piou_ is as great a follower of it as the British Tommy, but his native politeness lends to the act a more distinguished air. Of course, British troops with their wasteful ways are to him lawful game, and the first couple of days in his company taught our people habits of carefulness that were never learnt before. Our most experienced marauders returned empty-handed from raids into the French lines, and this bred a respect for our Allies that rapidly blossomed into genuine friendship. And undoubtedly the French soldier, taking him all round, is a most charming person and an almost perfect fighting man. He takes life very seriously, and is frequently scandalized by our behaviour, not quite understanding that a mask of frivolity may be only the result of a desire to make light of difficulties and to hearten others, hiding in reality an immovable determination to do one's duty. "Pour vous, la guerre n'est pas sérieuse," said a big Breton to me once, and I, knowing the melancholy tendencies of his race, knew not what to reply. But next day a party of which he formed one, doubled past the battery. "Que faites-vous?" I called as he passed. With a face wreathed in smiles he replied, "Nous allons donner aux Bosches un petit coup de fusil, ça sera très amusant, hein?"