United States or Northern Mariana Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
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.
It was when our front-line ran just outside the village of Martinpuich to Courcelette, on the other side of the Bapaume road, and when the 8th-10th Gordons were there, after their fight through Longueval and over the ridge. It was the little crowd I have mentioned before in the battle of Loos, and it was Lieut.
He and hundreds like him had been playing at red Indians in Kensington Gardens a few years before an August in 1914... The 47th London Division, going forward to the battle of Loos, was made up of men whose souls had been shaped by all the influences of environment, habit, and tradition in which I had been born and bred. Their cradle had been rocked to the murmurous roar of London traffic.
I watched the preliminary bombardment of the Loos battlefields from a black slag heap beyond Noeux-les-Mines, and afterward went on the battleground up to the Loos redoubt, when our guns and the enemy's were hard at work; and later still, in years that followed, when there was never a silence of guns in those fields, came to know the ground from many points of view.
The line was restored to some extent by the Guards on the 27th, and Loos remained firmly in our hands; but a great opportunity had been lost, and the great stroke of the 15th Division had not been turned into a great advance.
"We came in for that Loos show last year. After months and months of stagnation in the trenches, we were suddenly called to Headquarters and told that we were to make an attack in about two hours' time. "I don't know if any of you fellows came in for a bayonet charge when you were out at the Front.
Our route lay along the main Lens road past Fosse III. and Fosse VII., then by tracks past Privet Castle to Railway Alley. This endless communication trench led all the way past the famous Loos Crucifix, still standing, to what had been the front line before the Canadian attack. Thence various other alleys led to the front line. Our new sector was by no means luxurious.
Julien, Festubert, Givenchy, St. Eloi, Sanctuary Wood, Vimy Ridge, Loos, Hill 70, Courcelette, Passchendaele, and the Somme, under General Lord Byng and General Sir Arthur Currie, appear too vivid in the mind as yet to be regarded as history. But the years 1914-20 were constructive ones for Canada.
Ground was also gained by the British between Loos and Lens, and every attempt made by the Germans to regain lost positions was repulsed. On the French front in western Champagne the Germans on the 21st made desperate efforts to recapture the positions on the heights which they had lost in the previous week.
This long-awaited movement was no isolated attack, costly but ineffectual, like those of the English at Neuve Chapelle and Loos, but "a carefully studied and deliberately prepared campaign of severe pressure upon Germany at each of her battle fronts."
Word Of The Day