llows, with pallid cheeks which blackened. Others tied
handkerchiefs about their mouths and noses, but choked inside those
bandages, and dropped to earth with a clatter of shovels. Officers and
men were cursing and groaning. An hour later, when the whistles blew,
there were gaps in the line of the 1st Division which went over the top.
In the trenches lay gassed men. In No Man's Land others fell, swept by
machine-gun bullets, shrapnel, and high explosives. The 1st Division was
"checked."...

"We caught it badly," said some of them I met later in the day,
bandaged and bloody, and plastered in wet chalk, while gassed men lay on
stretchers about them, unconscious, with laboring lungs.

VIII

Farther south the front-lines of the 15th (Scottish) Division climbed
over their parapets at six-thirty, and saw the open ground before them,
and the dusky, paling sky above them, and broken wire in front of the
enemy's churned-up trenches; and through the smoke, faintly, and far
away, three and a half miles away, the ghostly outline of the "Tower
Bridge" of Loos, which was their goal. For an hour there were steady
tides of men all streaming slowly up those narrow communication ways,
cut through the chalk to get into the light also, where death was in
ambush for many of them somewhere in the shadows of that dawn.

By seven-forty the two assaulting brigades of the 15th Division had left
the trenches and were in the open. Shriller than the scream of shells
above them was the skirl of pipes, going with them. The Pipe Major of
the 8th Gordons was badly wounded, but refused to be touched until the
other men were tended. He was a giant, too big for a stretcher, and had
to be carried back on a tarpaulin. At the dressing-station his leg was
amputated, but he died after two operations, and the Gordons mourned
him.

While the Highlanders went forward with their pipes, two brigades of the
Londoners, on their right, were advancing in the direction of the long,
double slag heap, southwest of Loos, called the Double Crassier. Some of
them were blowing mouth-organs, playing the music-hall song of "Hullo,
hullo, it's a different girl again!" and the "Robert E. Lee," until one
after another a musician fell in a crumpled heap. Shrapnel burst over
them, and here and there shells plowed up the earth where they were
trudging. On the right of the Londoners the French still stayed in their
trenches--their own attack was postponed until midday--an