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The inhabitants of Bethune the shopkeepers, and brave little families of France, and bright-eyed girls, and frowzy women, and heroines, and harlots came out into the streets before the battle of Loos, and watched the British army pouring through battalions of Londoners and Scots, in full fighting-kit, with hot sweat on their faces, and grim eyes, and endless columns of field-guns and limbers, drawn by hard-mouthed mules cursed and thrashed by their drivers, and ambulances, empty now, and wagons, and motor-lorries, hour after hour, day after day.
Vaast and Loos regions, where trenches were invaded, three machine-gun emplacements destroyed, and a large number of prisoners taken. On the same date there was intense artillery activity on the Somme between the French and Germans. The French fought six air fights and bombed the St. Vaast Wood.
I sat huddled in the taxi with my chin on my breast, wishing that I had lost a leg at Loos and been comfortably tucked away for the rest of the war. Sure enough I found my man in the Grill Room. There he was, feeding solemnly, with a napkin tucked under his chin. He was a big fellow with a fat, sallow, clean-shaven face.
No one denies that a diversion of our main effort from France to Laibach in the winter of 1917 would have been fatal to us in the spring of 1918, but it is not clear that the thousands of troops we lost at Loos and the French in Champagne in the autumn of 1915 might not better have been employed in saving Serbia or forcing the Dardanelles. The Dardanelles
I was fighting far away from my friends, far away from the true fronts of battle. It was a side-show which, whatever its importance, had none of the exhilaration of the main effort. But now we had come back to familiar ground. We were like the Highlanders cut off at Cite St Auguste on the first day of Loos, or those Scots Guards at Festubert of whom I had heard.
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.
I had liefer to have been torn with wild horses, than any varlet had won such loos, or any page or priker should have had prize on me.
"I've been overseas," Hollister answered the unspoken question. That strange curiosity, tinctured with repulsion! "The result is obvious." "Most unfortunate," Mr. Lewis murmured. "But your scars are honorable. A brother of mine lost an arm at Loos." "The brothers of a good many people lost more than their arms at Loos," Hollister returned dryly. "But that is not why I called.
"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.
Some of them had to fight against their nerves on the way to Loos. But their spirit was exalted by a nervous stimulus before that battle, so that they did freakish and fantastic things of courage.
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