o fall on them. Quickly the
enemy discovered their whereabouts and laid down a barrage fire which,
with deadly accuracy, plowed up their old front line and tossed it about
on the pitchforks of bursting shells. Our men's bodies were mangled
in that earth. High explosives plunged into the midst of little groups
crouching in holes and caverns of the ground, and scattered their limbs.
Living, unwounded men lay under those screaming shells with the panting
hearts of toads under the beat of flails. Wounded men crawled back over
No Man's Land, and some were blown to bits as they crawled, and others
got back. Before nightfall, in the dark, a general retirement was
ordered to our original line in that northern sector, owing to the
increasing casualties under the relentless work of the German guns. Like
ants on the move, thousands of men rose from the upheaved earth, and
with their stomachs close to it, crouching, came back, dragging their
wounded. The dead were left.

"On the front of the Third Army," wrote Sir John French, "subsidiary
operations of a similar nature were successfully carried out."

From the point of view of high generalship those holding attacks had
served their purpose pretty well. From the point of view of mothers'
sons they had been a bloody shambles without any gain. The point of view
depends on the angle of vision.

VII

Let me now tell the story of the main battle of Loos as I was able to
piece it together from the accounts of men in different parts of the
field--no man could see more than his immediate neighborhood--and from
the officers who survived. It is a story full of the psychology of
battle, with many strange incidents which happened to men when their
spirit was uplifted by that mingling of exultation and fear which is
heroism, and with queer episodes almost verging on comedy in the
midst of death and agony, at the end of a day of victory, most ghastly
failure.

The three attacking divisions from left to right on the line opposite
the villages of Hulluch and Loos were the 1st, the 15th (Scottish),
and the 47th (London). Higher up, opposite Hulluch and Haisnes, the
9th (Scottish) Division and the 7th Division were in front of the
Hohenzollern redoubt (chalky earthworks thrust out beyond the German
front-line trenches, on rising ground) and some chalk-quarries.

The men of those divisions were lined up during the night in the
communication trenches, which had been dug by the sappers an