This is not the place, nor is it within my ability, to give an historical study of the varying phases of the battle. Suffice it to say that by noon the 15th Division had swept through the northern end of Loos, and were engaged upon that part of the eastern slope of the valley known as Hill 70. There had been considerable street-fighting in the village, but the enemy had evidently realized that this was not the place to make a determined stand. Their strategy appears to have been to concentrate their forces on the edge of the valley, leaving within it only detachments of such strengths that the loss occasioned by their sacrifice would be altogether outweighed by the gain in time that they secured to the main defence. And nobly these detachments performed the task allotted to them. One battery took up a position along the Loos-Benifontaine road, and remained in action under a fire whose intensity it is impossible to describe until our troops were almost upon it, when its fire ceased, not from lack of courage to continue, but because no single man was left alive to serve the guns. Let us give the enemy his due, we are not fighting a nation of cowards and assassins, as we are so fond of trying to believe, but of brave and determined men, whom to defeat will call from us our utmost energies.
As soon as we had taken Loos, the enemy opened a steady artillery fire upon the village, in order to prevent its use by us as a point d'appui for further attack, and to hinder observation from the various landmarks it contained. There is so little natural cover that this must have been a serious disadvantage to us, as by this time the communication trenches leading from the German front line trenches that we now held up the slopes of the valley were choked with dead, and reinforcements had to run the gauntlet of a well-directed fire in order to reach our line of attack. This may have something to do with that fatal delay that left the attacking divisions unsupported and checked an advance that might well have resulted in the capture of Lens, which would probably in turn have sealed the fate of Lille. We have learnt from prisoners that the enemy anticipated the worst in the early hours of the morning, and that the feebleness of the final blow amazed them. Had fresh divisions poured down the Lens road through Cité St. Auguste and Cité St. Laurent, rolling the enemy back upon the French who were advancing towards Vimy, who knows what might not have happened? Conjecture is useless, regret of a lost opportunity must take its place.
The facts so far as known—and no two accounts, even of those who took part in the struggle, quite agree—are as follows: The 47th Division, London Territorials all of them, the heroes of the day, but of whose performances, because less showy, little has been heard, had by 9.30 a.m. surmounted a series of obstacles, the storming of any one of which would have earned them lasting fame. Like a tide they poured over the western end of the dreaded Double Crassier, utterly regardless of withering machine-gun fire, and swept to the attack of the walled cemetery that stands to the south-west of Loos. From here, after a titanic struggle, they dislodged the strong party of its defenders, and, gaining fresh impetus from the check, irresistibly fought their way through the outskirts of the village, in which every point of vantage was held against them, right up to its heart, the mine buildings that cluster at the foot of the Pylons. This fortress they stormed and won, and the rush of their assault carried them on its crest over the Loos Crassier—another high embankment of refuse and slag—over the exposed surface of the plain, into the copse that stretches westward from Loos Chalk Pit. Here at last for a while they rested, and here for the present we may leave them. May the great city be for ever proud of the achievements of her sons this day, the thousand forgotten deeds of heroism of which her ears will never hear!
Meanwhile the 15th Division, having captured the Lens Road Redoubt that straddled the Lens-Béthune road, were engaged in clearing the northern portion of the village of Loos. The 1st Division, the left wing of the Fourth Corps, had met with varying fortune. The 1st Brigade had penetrated to the enemy's reserve trenches in front of Cité St. Elie and Hulluch, roughly upon the line of the Lens-La Bassée road. The 2nd Brigade, impeded by a mass of concealed wire that our fire had failed to destroy, were held up in the direction of Lone Tree and Bois Carrée. This necessitated the bringing up of the divisional reserve, who managed to advance between the left flank of the 15th Division and the Loos Road Redoubt, a strong point in the German line on the track leading from Loos to Vermelles. This relieved the pressure on the 2nd Brigade, and the Loos Road Redoubt, attacked from the front and both flanks, fell into our hands, compelling some six or seven hundred of the enemy to surrender. But the delay had enabled the Germans to reinforce Hulluch and the Crassier of Puits XIII bis to such an extent that the attack was diverted to the right, in which direction it advanced as far as the Bois Hugo and Puits XIV bis, both being situated on the eastern slope of the valley to the north of Hill 70. Of the events of the afternoon it is impossible to speak with any degree of certainty. It seems most probable that the paths of the three divisions having brought them all on to the rising ground to the eastward and north-eastward of Loos, an attack was made upon the redoubt that existed on Hill 70 at the point where a track from Loos to Cité St. Auguste crosses the Lens-La Bassée road. It also seems probable that after many vicissitudes this redoubt was captured and subsequently held, though by a force utterly inadequate for the purpose. About 8 p.m. a messenger reached one of our batteries, having lost his way in the dark, bearing a message addressed to the headquarters of one of the Brigades forming the 15th Division, to the effect that the sender was holding Hill 70 with a mixed handful of men, numbering a thousand in all, and urgently requesting the immediate supply of sandbags and other material for defence.
In the battery we were, of course, ignorant of all these things at the time, and the progress of events could only be conjectured by the position of the spots upon which we were ordered to fire and the reports of wounded passing by us on their way to the rear. We knew of the fall of Loos by the forlorn procession of refugees who had been living in the village all through the German occupation, but who were sent back immediately upon the capture of the place by our troops. Be it noted in parenthesis that much consternation was caused in a certain office by the arrival of a telephone message to this effect: "The loose women are expected shortly, please arrange for their accommodation!" From the observation post came the news of the taking of the Double Crassier and the Cemetery, but beyond that, and the information that no attack had been launched towards the Puits XVI ridge, the observing officer had nothing further to tell us. But I think that in the ominous absence of any further reference to our projected advance, we all felt something of the chill breath of disappointment, that whispered that our high hopes had somehow failed of their realization.
VI
STRAIGHTENING THE LINE
Straightening out the line is an expression frequently found in official dispatches, and it may usually be understood to cover the operations that take place after a definite attack. In the case of the Battle of Loos, these operations extended into the third week of October, and as a corollary to an account of this great event, and as a study of what was in effect a series of minor battles, the following sketch is intended. There were many events during these days that are not yet fully understood, the time has not yet come when a dispassionate history may be written. Controversy is yet busy with the names of many disputed positions. I make no attempt at contribution to any opinion expressed, but merely endeavour to convey some faint idea of such portions of the drama as were played before the eyes of the artillery observers.