him, as though some obscene
specter barred the way. Rank after rank streamed up, and then a big
tide of men poured through the German trench systems and rushed forward.
Three--quarters of a mile more to Loos. Some of them were panting, out
of breath, speechless. Others talked to the men about them in stray
sentences. Most of them were silent, staring ahead of them and licking
their lips with swollen tongues. They were parched with thirst, some
of them told me. Many stopped to drink the last drop out of their
water-bottles. As one man drank he spun round and fell with a thud on
his face. Machine-gun bullets were whipping up the earth. From Loos came
a loud and constant rattle of machine-guns. Machine-guns were firing
out of the broken windows of the houses and from the top of the "Tower
Bridge," those steel girders which rose three hundred feet high from the
center of the village, and from slit trenches across the narrow streets.
There were one hundred machine-guns in the cemetery to the southwest
of the town, pouring out lead upon the Londoners who had to pass that
place.

Scots and London men were mixed up, and mingled in crowds which
encircled Loos, and forced their way into the village; but roughly
still, and in the mass, they were Scots who assaulted Loos itself,
and London men who went south of it to the chalk-pits and the Double
Crassier.

It was eight o'clock in the morning when the first crowds reached the
village, and for nearly two hours afterward there was street-fighting.

It was the fighting of men in the open, armed with bayonets, rifles,
and bombs, against men invisible and in hiding, with machine-guns. Small
groups of Scots, like packs of wolves, prowled around the houses, where
the lower rooms and cellars were crammed with Germans, trapped and
terrified, but still defending themselves. In some of the houses they
would not surrender, afraid of certain death, anyhow, and kept the Scots
at bay awhile until those kilted men flung themselves in and killed
their enemy to the last man. Outside those red-brick houses lay dead
and wounded Scots. Inside there were the curses and screams of a bloody
vengeance. In other houses the machine-gun garrisons ceased fire and put
white rags through the broken windows, and surrendered like sheep. So
it was in one house entered by a little kilted signaler, who shot down
three men who tried to kill him. Thirty others held their hands up and
said, in a chorus of fear, "Kame