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His close comrade was of more delicate fiber, a gentle soul, not made for soldiering at all, but rather for domestic life, with children about him, and books. As the evenings passed in this French village, drawing him closer to Loos by the flight of time, I saw the trouble in his eyes which he tried to hide by smiling and by courteous conversation.
Without drawing invidious distinctions between pre-war military and public appreciation of chemical science in England and Germany, it would be merely untrue to state that the Germans were not in a position of advantage in this respect. However, chemical mobilisation and co-operation proceeded sufficiently rapidly to provide us with personnel and material for the Loos attack.
It is nine months since Loos, and nearly six since we scraped the nightmare mud of Ypres from our boots, gum, thigh, for the last time. Our recent casualties have been light our only serious effort of late has been the recapture of the Kidney Bean the new drafts have settled down, and the young officers have been blooded. And above all, victory is in the air.
Moreover, their offensive and battle experience gained with the latter was of great value. Six or seven weeks' training witnessed the conversion of a few hundred men of the above type into one or two so called Special Companies. The spirit and work of these men in the Loos attack cannot be spoken of too highly. The Loos Attack, September, 1915.
They were two London boys carrying a gas-cylinder, and whistling as though it were a health resort under the autumn sun... It was not a health resort. It stank of death, from piles of corpses, all mangled and in a mush of flesh and bones lying around the Loos redoubt and all the ground in this neighborhood, and for a long distance north.
Henceforth the men were to know the hardships of a winter campaign. There were no deep dugouts and there were not sufficient shelters for the men to sleep in. During the course of the winter, exposure alone killed some. Ever since the battle the Loos sector had been very active, especially on Sundays, and the trenches and alleys which led up to them were in a very wet condition.
They were the heroes of Loos or some of them Camerons and Seaforths, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Gordons and King's Own Scottish Borderers, who, with the London men, were first on Hill 70 and away to the Cite St.-Auguste.
"My first introduction to the entertaining sport of spy tracking," he mumbled, "was at Loos, where I was sent with several hundred other chaps to help push the Huns out of the Hohenzollern Redoubt.
In the southern outskirts of Loos, and in the cemetery, the Londoners had a bloody fight among the tombstones, where nests of German machine-guns had been built into the vaults. New corpses, still bleeding, lay among old dead torn from their coffins by shell-fire. Londoners and Siiesian Germans lay together across one another's bodies.
The conclusive sign of the Allied reaction to the German poison gas attack appeared at the battle of Loos.
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