The French Gains in the Artois Region, September, 1915.
At the end of the month Haisnes, on the northern flank of the new British line, was still for the greater part in German possession; on the right flank the British were across the Lens-La Bassée road. The British had captured not only the first position of their enemy, but also a second or supporting line which ran west of Loos. They were now up against the third line. Sir John French reported having taken so far over 3,000 prisoners, twenty-one guns, and forty machine guns. The French in Artois had taken a matter of 15,000 prisoners and a number of guns. After obstinate day and night fighting they had reached Hill 140, the culminating point of the crests of Vimy, and the orchards to the south. The crown prince still plugged away on this front with heavy artillery and aerial torpedoes. Columns of flames began to issue from his trenches on September 27, 1915—the inflammable liquid appeared to be a composition of tar and petrol—and the smoke and flames, carried by the wind blowing from the German trenches, soon reached the French line and made the atmosphere intolerably hot and suffocating for the French troops. Then suddenly out of the thick fumes began to appear German infantry with fixed bayonets, sent forward to the attack. They were literally mown down by the fire from the French machine guns and rifles, but the wave of attackers seemed unending, and by dint of overwhelming numbers it poured into the French trenches. A terrible hand-to-hand fight then ensued in an atmosphere so thick that it was difficult to distinguish friend from foe. These clouds were not poisonous, for the Germans had themselves to fight in them; they were let loose to cover the infantry charge.
The French were compelled to retire, which they did, contesting every foot of ground. Meanwhile, reenforcements had arrived and these were at once thrown into the fighting line. The French, however, were soon brought to a halt. Asphyxiating and lachrymatory bombs, which emitted bluish smoke as they exploded, began to fall in their midst. Spurred on by their leaders the men dashed on, passing through yet another of these barriers of smoke until they came to grips with the attackers, who were now coming on like a torrent, in close formation, shouting wildly. Altogether, the scene was one that vividly brings to the imagination the truth of Sherman's dictum that "war is hell." A mad potpourri of dimly visible forms, struggling like demons, shooting, stabbing, hacking and roaring in an infernal caldron of tar, poison, sulphur, tears and blood. Truly a worthy theme for another Dante and a Gustave Doré. For some time it looked as if the French would be crumpled up, but reserves were steadily streaming in, and eventually the attackers began to waver and fall back. The French 75-millimeter Creusots came into play again, and after a battle that lasted in all twenty-four hours, the Germans were driven back to their own trenches.
In the morning of October 2, 1915, the Germans made a demonstration in front of the Belgian trenches at Dixmude, consisting of a bombardment and a violent discharge of bombs. On one small section alone 400 bombs were dropped. The German infantry broke into the Belgian trenches, but were dislodged again in a few minutes.
The position which the British had captured was exceptionally strong, consisting of a double line, including some large redoubts and a network of trenches and bomb-proof shelters. Dugouts were constructed at short intervals all along the line, some of them being large caves thirty feet below the ground. The French capture of Souchez was an event of considerable importance, for the German High Command had issued orders for this section to hold on to the last, that it was to be retained at all costs. The road to the Douai plain was to be barred to the French, who had to be held back behind the advanced works of the Artois plateau. In May, 1915, the problem was to prevent the French setting foot on the summits of Notre Dame de Lorette and of the Topart Mill. The Germans sacrificed many thousands of men with this object, but the French nevertheless made themselves masters of the heights which the Germans considered of capital importance, and dislodged them from Carency and Ablain-St. Nazaire. There remained only one stage to cover—the Souchez Valley—to reach the last crest which dominated the whole country to the east, and beyond which the ground is flat. This task had been accomplished during the last few days of September and the beginning of October. Souchez and its advanced bastion, the Château Carleul, had been made into a formidable fortification by the changing of the course of the Carency streams. The Germans had transformed the marshy ground to the southeast of this front into a perfect swamp, which was regarded as impassable. The German batteries posted at Angres were able to enfilade the valley on the north. From behind the crest of Hill 119 to Hill 140, which were covered with trenches connected by a network of communication trenches, many batteries were engaged against the French in the district of Notre Dame de Lorette, Ablain-St. Nazaire and Carency. To the north of Souchez the German trenches were still clinging to the Notre Dame de Lorette slope.
The attack of September 25, 1915, was to overcome all these obstacles. The artillery preparation, which lasted five days, was so skillfully handled that, even before it was finished, many German deserters came into the French lines declaring that they had had enough. The infantry attack was delivered at noon on September 25, 1915, and with one rush the French troops reached the objectives which had been marked out for them—the château and grounds of Carleul and the islet south of Souchez. Meanwhile, other detachments carried the cemetery and forced their way to the first slopes of Hill 119. On the left the French troops advanced down the slopes of Notre Dame de Lorette and made a dash at the Hache Wood, the western outskirts of which they reached twenty minutes after the attack began. The capture of the wood has already been described. The French attack on the right, being held up by machine-gun fire, could not be maintained in the cemetery, and it was decided to approach Souchez by the main road so that they might pour in their forces on the east, while, to the north, the French force that had bitten its way into the Hache Wood was to continue its advance. This maneuver decided the day. The Germans, who were in danger of being cut off in Souchez, abandoned their positions, and those who had retaken the cemetery, being in the same perilous circumstances, regained by their communication trenches their second line on the slopes of Hill 119. Thus fell Souchez to the French in two days. The allied offensive was a short and sharp affair, skillfully planned and bravely executed, but disappointing in result. At the great price of 50,000 casualties the British had overthrown the Germans on a front of five miles, and in some places to a depth of 4,000 yards, and had captured many prisoners and guns; but they had not definitely broken the German lines. At a heavy cost the Allies on the western front had captured about 160 German guns and disposed of 150,000 Germans, including some 27,000 prisoners, and the result of their efforts was to shake the Germans in the west very severely and to call back to France many troops from the eastern front. That the blow was regarded by the kaiser as a serious one was shown by an Order of the Day in which he declared that every important success obtained by the Allies on the western front "will be considered as due to the culpable negligence of the German commanders, who will lay themselves open to being punished for incompetence." But if the Allies' successes were due to hard fighting and brilliant dash, the fact that they did not break right through the enemy's lines is an eloquent testimony to the wonderful strength of the German resistance. The marvel was that any were left alive in the first line after the preliminary bombardment to face the bayonets and grenades of the attackers. In a report from German General Headquarters, dated September 29, 1915, Max Osborn, special correspondent of the "Vossische Zeitung," described how the French artillery swept the hinterland of the German positions in Champagne and then concentrated upon these. "The violence of the fire then reached its zenith. Hitherto it had been a raging, searching fire; now it became a mad drumming, beyond all power of imagination. It is impossible to convey any idea of the savagery of this bombardment. Never has this old planet heard such an uproar. An officer who had witnessed during the summer the horrors of Arras, of Souchez, and of the Lorette Heights, told me that those were not in any way to be compared with the present, beyond all conception, appalling artillery onslaught. Day and night for fifty hours, at some points for seventy hours, the guns vomited destruction and murder against the Germans, the German trenches and against the German batteries. Strongly built trenches were covered in and ground to powder; their edges and platforms were shorn off and converted into dust heaps; men were buried, crushed, and inevitably suffocated—but the survivors stood fast." A German soldier told how, in the fierce hand-to-hand fighting which followed, a Frenchman and a German flew at each other's throat, and how they fell, both pierced by the same bullet, still locked in each other's grip. And so, too, they were buried. Courage is not the monopoly of any race or nation.[Back to Contents]
CHAPTER X
THE BATTLE OF LOOS
At 5.50 a. m. on September 25, 1915, a dense, heavy cloud arose slowly from the earth—a whitish, yellowish, all-enveloping cloud that rolled slowly toward the German trenches—a little too much to the north. Thousands of German bullets whistled through that cloud, but it passed on, unheeding. The attack began at 6.30.