d they cheered
the London men, as they went forward, with cries of, "Vivent les
Angdais!" "A mort--les Boches!" It was they who saw one man kicking a
football in advance of the others.

"He is mad!" they said. "The poor boy is a lunatic!"

"He is not mad," said a French officer who had lived in England. "It is
a beau geste. He is a sportsman scornful of death. That is the British
sport."

It was a London Irishman dribbling a football toward the goal, and he
held it for fourteen hundred yards--the best-kicked goal in history.

Many men fell in the five hundred yards of No Man's Land. But they were
not missed then by those who went on in waves--rather, like molecules,
separating, collecting, splitting up into smaller groups, bunching
together again, on the way to the first line of German trenches. A glint
of bayonets made a quickset hedge along the line of churned-up earth
which had been the Germans' front--line trench. Our guns had cut the
wire or torn gaps into it. Through the broken strands went the Londoners
on the right, the Scots on the left, shouting hoarsely now. They saw
red. They were hunters of human flesh. They swarmed down into the first
long ditch, trampling over dead bodies, falling over them, clawing the
earth and scrambling up the parados, all broken and crumbled, then
on again to another ditch. Boys dropped with bullets in their brains,
throats, and bodies. German machine-guns were at work at close range.

"Give'em hell!" said an officer of the Londoners--a boy of nineteen.
There were a lot of living Germans in the second ditch, and in holes
about. Some of them stood still, as though turned to clay, until they
fell with half the length of a bayonet through their stomachs. Others
shrieked and ran a little way before they died. Others sat behind
hillocks of earth, spraying our men with machine-gun bullets until bombs
were hurled on them and they were scattered into lumps of flesh.

Three lines of trench were taken, and the Londoners and the Scots went
forward again in a spate toward Loos. All the way from our old lines men
were streaming up, with shells bursting among them or near them.

On the way to Loos a company of Scots came face to face with a tall
German. He was stone-dead, with a bullet in his brain, his face all
blackened with the grime of battle; but he stood erect in the path,
wedged somehow in a bit of trench. The Scots stared at this figure, and
their line parted and swept each side of