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Play me false and you had far better never have been born. His ugly sneering face was close above mine. Then he put out his hands and gripped my shoulders as he had done the first afternoon. I forget if I mentioned that part of the damage I got at Loos was a shrapnel bullet low down at the back of my neck. The wound had healed well enough, but I had pains there on a cold day.
Within twenty-four hours the roads were filled with the incoming troops of a new division. We made a rapid march to a rail-head, entrained, and were soon moving southward by an indirect route; southward, toward the sound of the guns, to take an inconspicuous part in the battle at Loos.
The Loos offensive was no exception, and for many days anxious thoughts and prayers had filled our hearts. We went from hope to despondency, and back to hope again. I dare say the talk round the mess table was very foolish. Compared with the earlier days of the war the country seemed full of men, and we heard stories of great accumulation of ammunition. Anything seemed possible.
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.
It therefore played the first rôle in the battle, since it was on Loos, of which Hill 70 is the gateway, that the efforts of all converged from the north as well as the south. Brigade "X" of the Scottish division was to execute an enveloping movement to the north around Loos and to carry Hill 70 by storm. Brigade "Y" meanwhile was to attack the Loos front, Brigade "Z" remaining in reserve.
We've heard nothing from Harold in quite a little while. We have, you know, three of our footmen in the war. Allen was wounded at Loos a flesh, bullet-wound. He's about well now and is soon going back. Leslie is in the trenches and a postal card came from him the other day. The third one, Philip, is a prisoner in Germany.
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.
The battle of Loos and its aftermath of minor massacres in the ground we had gained the 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.
As I went down a road near the lines by Loos I saw, from concealed positions, the flash of gun upon gun. The air was swept by an incessant rush of shells, and the roar of all this artillery stupefied one's sense of sound. All about me in the village of Annequin, through which I walked, there was no other sound, no noise of human life.
When I went into Fricourt on the third day of battle, after the last Germans, who had clung on to its ruins, had been cleared out by the Yorkshires and Lincolns of the 21st Division, that division which had been so humiliated at Loos and now was wonderful in courage, and when the Manchesters and Gordons of the 30th Division had captured Montauban and repulsed fierce counter-attacks.
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