This
brigade was doing pretty well. That was hard pressed. The Germans were
counter-attacking heavily. Their barrage was strong and our casualties
heavy. "Oh, hell!" said other men. From behind the mist came the news of
life and death, revealing things which no onlooker could see.

I went closer to see--into the center of the arc of battle, up by the
Loos redoubt, where the German dead and ours still lay in heaps. John
Buchan was my companion on that walk, and together we stood staring
over the edge of a trench to where, grim and gaunt against the gray sky,
loomed the high, steel columns of the "Tower Bridge," the mining-works
which I had seen before the battle as an inaccessible landmark in the
German lines. Now they were within our lines in the center of Loos, and
no longer "leering" at us, as an officer once told me they used to do
when he led his men into communication trenches under their observation.

Behind us now was the turmoil of war--thousands and scores of thousands
of men moving in steady columns forward and backward in the queer,
tangled way which during a great battle seems to have no purpose or
meaning, except to the directing brains on the Headquarters Staff, and,
sometimes in history, none to them.

Vast convoys of transports choked the roads, with teams of mules
harnessed to wagons and gun-limbers, with trains of motor ambulances
packed with wounded men, with infantry brigades plodding through the
slush and slime, with divisional cavalry halted in the villages, and
great bivouacs in the boggy fields.

The men, Londoners, and Scots, and Guards, and Yorkshires, and
Leinsters, passed and repassed in dense masses, in small battalions, in
scattered groups. One could tell them from those who were filling their
places by the white chalk which covered them from head to foot, and
sometimes by the blood which had splashed them.

Regiments which had lost many of their comrades and had fought in attack
and counter-attack through those days and nights went very silently,
and no man cheered them. Legions of tall lads, who a few months
before marched smart and trim down English lanes, trudged toward the
fighting-lines under the burden of their heavy packs, with all their
smartness befouled by the business of war, but wonderful and pitiful to
see because of the look of courage and the gravity in their eyes as they
went up to dreadful places. Farther away within the zone of the enemy's
fire the traffic ceased, an