s
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.

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.

A Scottish division had been ordered to take Loos and Hill 70. It
therefore played the first role 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. By 7.05 a. m.
the whole of the first line was captured. The second line, covering
Loos, was carried with the same ease. The Germans, taken by surprise,
were fleeing toward Loos, where they put up a stern rear-guard fight,
and toward Lens, which was strongly fortified.

After the capture of the second line in front of Loos, "X" and "Y"
Brigades separated, "Y" surrounding the village with two battalions,
while the rest captured the village and cleaned it up. It was stiff
street fighting, the Germans being hidden away in all sorts of corners
with plenty of machine guns. The Scots made a quick job of it, not
stopping for trifles. It is