So ended the battle of Loos, except for a violent counter—attack delivered on October 8th all along the line from Fosse 8 on the north to the right of the French 9th Corps on the south, with twenty-eight battalions in the first line of assault. It was preceded by a stupendous bombardment which inflicted heavy casualties upon our 1st Division in the neighborhood of the chalk-pit, and upon the Guards holding the Hohenzollern redoubt near Hulluch. Once again those brigades, which had been sorely tried, had to crouch under a fury of fire, until the living were surrounded by dead, half buried or carved up into chunks of flesh in the chaos of broken trenches. The Germans had their own shambles, more frightful, we were told, than ours, and thousands of dead lay in front of our lines when the tide of their attack ebbed back and waves of living men were broken by the fire of our field-guns, rifles, and machine-guns. Sir John French's staff estimated the number of German dead as from eight to nine thousand. It was impossible to make any accurate sum in that arithmetic of slaughter, and always the enemy's losses were exaggerated because of the dreadful need of balancing accounts in new-made corpses in that Debit and Credit of war's bookkeeping.
What had we gained by great sacrifices of life? Not Lens, nor Lille, nor even Hill 70 (for our line had to be withdrawn from those bloody slopes where our men left many of their dead), but another sharp-edged salient enfiladed by German guns for two years more, and a foothold on one slag heap of the Double Crassier, where our men lived, if they could, a few yards from Germans on the other; and that part of the Hohenzollern redoubt which became another Hooge where English youth was blown up by mines, buried by trench-mortars, condemned to a living death in lousy caves dug into the chalk. Another V-shaped salient, narrower than that of Ypres, more dismal, and as deadly, among the pit-heads and the black dust hills and the broken mine-shafts of that foul country beyond Loos.
The battle which had been begun with such high hopes ended in ghastly failure by ourselves and by the French. Men who came back from it spoke in whispers of its generalship and staff work, and said things which were dangerous to speak aloud, cursing their fate as fighting-men, asking of God as well as of mortals why the courage of the soldiers they led should be thrown away in such a muck of slaughter, laughing with despairing mirth at the optimism of their leaders, who had been lured on by a strange, false, terrible belief in German weakness, and looking ahead at unending vistas of such massacre as this which would lead only to other salients, after desperate and futile endeavor.
PART FOUR. A WINTER OF DISCONTENT
I
The winter of 1915 was, I think, the worst of all. There was a settled hopelessness in it which was heavy in the hearts of men—ours and the enemy's. In 1914 there was the first battle of Ypres, when the bodies of British soldiers lay strewn in the fields beyond this city and their brown lines barred the way to Calais, but the war did not seem likely to go on forever. Most men believed, even then, that it would end quickly, and each side had faith in some miracle that might happen. In 1916-17 the winter was foul over the fields of the Somme after battles which had cut all our divisions to pieces and staggered the soul of the world by the immense martyrdom of boys—British, French, and German—on the western front. But the German retreat from the Somme to the shelter of their Hindenburg line gave some respite to our men, and theirs, from the long-drawn fury of attack and counter-attack, and from the intensity of gun-fire. There was at best the mirage of something like victory on our side, a faint flickering up of the old faith that the Germans had weakened and were nearly spent.
But for a time in those dark days of 1915 there was no hope ahead. No mental dope by which our fighting-men could drug themselves into seeing a vision of the war's end.
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. It was no good some of those old gentlemen saying, “We've got 'em beat!” when from Hooge to the Hohenzollern redoubt our men sat in wet trenches under ceaseless bombardment of heavy guns, and when any small attack they made by the orders of a High Command which believed in small attacks, without much plan or purpose, was only “asking for trouble” from German counterattacks by mines, trench-mortars, bombing sorties, poison-gas, flame-throwers, and other forms of frightfulness which made a dirty mess of flesh and blood, without definite result on either side beyond piling up the lists of death.