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 counterattacks. 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 bis—a mineshaft 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 bis, to the north of it, and the chalk-pit still farther north.
It was the 2nd 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 3rd 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,
