LOOS
One of our officers was fortunate enough, very shortly after the events of September 25, to have the opportunity of reconnoitring the village of Loos, with a double purpose in view, namely to verify some landmarks that were doubtful from our observation posts, and to discover if any points existed suitable for permanent occupation as O.Ps. There were two ways open to him of reaching the village from his battery position, of which the first was to proceed to North Maroc and thence take the road to Les Cabarets and from there the track that runs into Loos at its south-western corner, and the second was to walk to Quality Street, thence along the Lens-BÉthune road to the old German front-line, and so through their communication trenches into any required part of the village. Time being of importance, he chose the former method, and set out one morning at about 8 a.m. The narrative of his adventures in Loos, as throwing light upon the conditions obtaining in a place that had been heavily shelled by us until our capture of it, and has ever since been equally heavily shelled by the enemy, may be of some interest.
Once clear of the houses that screened his movements from the hostile lines, the road seemed very lonely and deserted. So far as the eye could see he was the only living person in the whole of the wide valley, and the sense of being under the observation of many pairs of eyes that were to him invisible produced in him a strangely nervous reaction, as though he were the principal actor in some horrible nightmare. It seemed as though every footstep rang upon the hard road with a note audible for miles, as though he were a gigantic black figure upon an unbroken background of white, as though the watching eyes bent such burning rays upon him that he could feel them pierce him as he moved. I have walked that road myself many times since, more than once when it has been under fire, and know now that it is as safe or safer than many others whose dangers never concern the most nervous, yet an echo of these first sensations of his has invariably struck me when I have done so, and I can understand his feelings. It can only be attributed to the fact that being alone in the middle of the valley one imagines that one is a conspicuous target for any one who will to spend a round upon.
The road crosses first our own old front line, then the German, over both of which substantial bridges had been built directly after the advance. It was not until he had crossed our own line that the cost of the battle became evident to him. Then he began to understand. Between the lines a burial party was at work, busy with the task of identifying and interring our own dead. Behind the German line the operation of clearing the battlefield had scarcely begun. Here the dead lay thick, our own and the enemy's in inextricable confusion. Here was a group of three or four, showing where a well-timed shrapnel had burst, there four or five in a line, stricken down as they charged by rifle fire from some fiercely-held support trench. And everywhere, mingling with the dead, were all the many insignia of war, rifles, ammunition, tins of beef, biscuits, cases of bombs, some unopened, some with their contents scattered round them, everything that is carried forward in a modern battle. At Les Cabarets itself, which is in reality the junction of the Lens-BÉthune and Grenay-Hulluch roads, and which lies a few hundred yards south-east of the Lens Road Redoubt, the struggle seemed to have been fiercer. It is probable that the ruins of the houses that once stood at the cross-road had been held by a detachment of the enemy, for lying round them were a heap of dead Germans, their rifles in many cases still in their hands, and about these in a narrow circle the bodies of our attacking troops, some lying as they had fired, their legs spread out, their rifles fallen from their shoulders and their heads resting on them, as though an angel of sleep had touched them even as they pulled the trigger. Close by, two horses bearing the brand of the broad arrow were quietly grazing on the rank grass that covered the fallow land, their broken harness still hanging on their backs, evidently the team of a shell-shattered wagon that lay near by. My friend was tempted to pause and investigate further, but a dozen bullets whizzing by quickly convinced him that the locality was not healthy, and he made haste upon his way. Nor was he more lucky with the track that led from here towards Loos. Some persevering sniper evidently regarded him as fair game, and after this enthusiast had displayed his marksmanship by narrowly missing him twice in quick succession, my friend abandoned the field to him and took to a communication trench that ran in the required direction. He says that he hopes never to take a more hideous walk. The trench was literally paved with dead Germans—it must have been used as a line of defence against the advance of the 47th Division—some lying on their backs with their eyes staring heavenwards, others horribly buried in the thick clay that lay in the lower stretches of the trench, so that his attention was only called to their presence by a sudden dreadful yielding beneath his feet. They lay too thick for it to be possible to avoid treading upon them, and though more than once he deserted the trench for the clean earth of the plains, his friend the sniper was bent on each occasion upon showing him that he was still a happy memory to him, and he was forced to descend again. However, it was over at last, and with the greatest relief that he had ever experienced he found himself in the shelter of the outlying houses of Loos.
Here for a few minutes he stood and studied a plan with which he had been provided. His objective was the Pylons, easy enough to see, certainly, but unfortunately on the far side of an open square or market-place by the church, upon which the German gunners were making very pretty practice with field guns and light howitzers. There was nothing for it but to find a way round, along the streets choked with rubbish and torn by great craters, taking short cuts through gardens converted into cemeteries, in which the dead lying on the surface were more numerous than those below, across courtyards wherein the horses who had been stabled there lay where the flying bullets had found them. Strange work, this threading of the city of the dead, the sense of isolation growing as one advanced until one seemed a visitant to a world struck by a celestial bombardment that had left none alive to tell the tale. Troops there were in plenty, but they remained in the wonderful excavations that had been made; none, save rarely a messenger, crouching behind a wall as the whizz and roar of the shell echoed amongst the torn buildings, racing across an open space in a brief interval of quiet, ventured forth, unless before dawn to relieve his companions who were stationed in the hastily-dug trenches in front of the village. But during the course of this expedition my friend discovered a very valuable fact, namely, that the principal fire of the enemy was directed only upon certain spots, and was not being distributed indiscriminately over the village. Avoid these spots, and except for a few casual "universal" bursting overhead, one was perfectly safe, voilÀ tout! But that same casual universal is a very jumpy toy. You hear it coming, certainly, but far too quickly for you to do anything, and before you know where you are it has burst just over you with an ear-splitting crack, and small fragments hit the ground all round you with a most unpleasant thud. "Woolly bears," the men call them, for they leave a curious cotton-wool-like wreath of smoke in the air for some seconds, much larger and more lasting than the puff of a shrapnel.
Very shortly after this first discovery, my friend made another, which somewhat counterbalanced his relief in the first, which was that one of the points most distinctly to be avoided was the very place he wished to reach, the Pylons themselves. Round about their base a howitzer battery was methodically placing high-explosive shell, and amongst the upper works a field battery was making very accurate practice with those most undesirable "woolly bears." There was nothing for it, however, and the longer one stopped and looked at it the worse it seemed, so, with feelings utterly unlike those that are popularly supposed to steel the heart of the hero who boldly faces death for his country's sake, he made his way under cover of such houses as still remained, to the mine buildings at the foot of the great steel structure. Here was destruction such as he had never seen. The buildings, strongly as they had been built to withstand the weight of the machinery within them, were completely shattered, their contents strewing the floors like scrap iron in a merchant's yard. Great iron girders were cut as by a knife, the bridge leading from the Pylons to the loading stages on the end of the Crassier, a riveted steel structure, was broken in half, the ends torn and frayed as though made of paper. The towers themselves are so massive and their weight is so distributed among many uprights, that, although many of these latter were bent or broken, the edifice they supported still stood gaunt and menacing, dominating the country-side. But their foot was no place to sit in idle conjecture that morning, as a shell that nearly blocked up the entrance to the shelter into which he had made his way abruptly reminded him. Waiting until its last fragments had fallen—a process that takes a surprisingly long time—he made a bolt over the ruins, climbing and scrambling up a refuse-covered slope, until he reached the foot of the winding stairs that rose up the centre of one of the towers. Fortunately for him, this stairway was partly enclosed by sheets of boiler-plate, for the next shell burst uncomfortably close and the fragments hit the boiler-plate with a sound that left no doubt in his mind of what his fate would have been had this shield not been there. Up the spiral stairway then—was ever such an interminable flight? Surely, notwithstanding the friendly morning mist, the whole German army must see him as he climbed ever higher! Those friendly steel sheets had been hit direct more than once at various times, leaving several turns of the stairway open, plain to everybody's view. However, nothing alarming happened, and the goal was reached—not the top of the tower where the winding pulleys hung, but a gallery that had formed the upper limit of travel of the cage, where the trolleys were unloaded and pushed across the bridge to the loading sheds. This gallery or platform stood perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the ground, and had once been glazed, but long ago every pane of glass had been shattered and the steel floor was thickly carpeted with the fragments. Once in the gallery one was fairly safe, for the floor and roof were of steel and so was the circular wall up to the level of the glazing. Nothing but pieces of shell coming through the windows—and the place was full of fragments showing where this had happened—or a direct hit from a heavy shell could do much damage. But it was not the place for a rest-cure, the moral effect of "woolly bears" bursting amongst the girder-work close to one, although one knew that by the time one heard the report the danger was over, was most disturbing. Once, too, a fairly heavy shell hit the tower itself, causing it to rock like a sapling in a gale, as my friend expressed it afterwards. His first thought was of the delights of his situation had it carried away part of the staircase, when he would be faced by the prospect of staying where he was till dusk or of swarming down the steelwork in full view of the German trenches, but fortunately this contingency did not arise.
But the view that he obtained amply compensated for everything. From the grim black mass of Fosse 8, past the tower of CitÉ St. Elie, the cupola of Douvrin, the trees, magnificent in their thick verdure, that clothe the banks of a little stream that flows past Hulluch, to the strange medley of chimneys and elevators that gives to the works of the SociÉtÉ MÉtallurgique de Pont-À-Vendin the appearance of a fore-and-aft rigged vessel under sail, the whole country lay spread as on a map. Further south still, Lens and its thickly-built suburbs could be seen, and towards the west, the well-known country that we held, the high land of the Vimy Ridge, with Souchez at its feet, the tall slag-heaps of Noeux-les-Mines and Auchel, the dark mass of the Bois des Dames, the square tower of BÉthune. What an observation post! No wonder that the enemy, whose use of the place for that very purpose was apparent by the presence of German newspapers and a broken table with some scraps of paper upon it, were determined to make it untenable by constant shelling.
For utterly impossible as a permanent observation post it undoubtedly was, and my friend, having verified his geography, left it with a feeling of deep thankfulness at having escaped unhurt. But his adventures were by no means at an end, he had still to find a situation of comparative safety from which he could observe when required under more restful conditions. The first place he selected was a house in the Enclosure, as the buildings near the foot of the Pylons have been termed. This also had been used by the enemy for the same purpose, for the walls were sandbagged, the lower floors were shored up with pit-props, and the basement had evidently been occupied by a fairly large party. Curiously enough, the house was in quite good repair, the walls and half the roof were standing, in contrast to the wreckage that lay around it. Here the explorer received what he describes as "the shock of his life," for on opening the door of one of the upper rooms he found, sprawling over a table as though just fallen asleep, the body of a German officer, still holding a pencil with which he had been addressing a post-card to a girl in Magdeburg. So lifelike was the attitude that it was impossible to realize at first that he was dead, notwithstanding the jagged hole above the temple where the fragment had entered and the blood that stained his right side. From this room a good view of the desired stretch of country could be obtained, there was a plentiful supply of sandbags ready filled in the house, and it seemed in every way desirable. But, just as my friend had determined upon converting it to his own uses, a (fortunately) small shell, evidently intended for the Pylons, but a little "over," entered the ground floor and burst there, wrecking the staircase, bringing down ceilings and tiles all over the house and smashing what was probably the last pane of glass in Loos. If this place was going to play long-stop for all the byes that passed the Pylons, it was distinctly unhealthy. He clambered down the wreckage of the stairs and looked round for a more likely spot, settling upon a tall house some little distance away. But here again he was doomed to disappointment. As he walked towards it a light howitzer shell sang over his head and burst a hundred yards beyond his goal. Instinct told him that this was the first round of a series of which his projected O.P. was the target. Even as he realized that he was standing about the same distance short of the place as the first round had fallen over, and in a direct line, the second shell passed so close to him that he swears he felt the wind of it, and burst in a manure-heap not ten yards away. Thanking heaven that it had found a soft billet that muffled the force of its explosion, he turned and bolted, having no further interest in observing that particular series, the components of the manure-heap dropping in a shower about him.
The next place he came to was a biggish building in a part of the town that seemed to be immune from shelling. He walked boldly into it and climbed up to an attic in the roof. Here were more signs of German occupation, a window that faced towards our old line being heavily sandbagged, whilst behind it was a neatly constructed platform and rest. Hundreds of empty cartridge-cases scattered over the floor and a few loaded clips still lying on the platform showed that the sniper whose lair it had been had known good sport there. But even here my friend was not destined to rest undisturbed. Hardly had his eye taken in these details than a sound of hurried whispers below burst upon his ears, and a peremptory voice bade him "Descendez, vite!" "Qu'est-ce qu'il-y-a?" he replied. "Descendez, vite, vite, ou nous allons tirer!" Discretion was by far the better part of valour, so down he came, to be surrounded at once by a number of French soldiers armed with rifles and fixed bayonets. To his enquiries as to what they wanted, the only reply was, "Vous pouvez dire ce que vous voulez À M. le Commandant." The latter gentleman was very comfortably installed in a roomy cellar, and my friend was ushered into his presence with the significant words, "C'est un espion que nous avons attrapÉ en haut, mon Commandant, regardez ces machines-lÀ qu'il porte!" The latter presumably in reference to the sextant, compass and other strange-looking impedimenta that he carried. It was an uncomfortable moment, but he managed to establish his identity, and mutual explanations followed, to the satisfaction of all parties, and my friend was told that he might make himself free of the place whenever he liked—"Mais, monsieur, je crains que vous avez trouvÉ en Loos que les franÇais sont plus dangereux que les allemands. Mais, peste, vous Êtes vraiment montÉ dans les Pylons! J'ose bien dire, comme disent les Anglais, que c'etait un endroit 'not sanitary'!" As a variant upon the hackneyed phrase "not healthy," I think that this is hard to beat.
The next question was the best way of getting home. The friendly mist had by now disappeared, and it was hardly advisable to face the open road again, even if this had not involved the ghastly walk along the death-strewn communication trench. My friend finally decided to find the end of a communication trench that, starting from a point in the north-western corner of the village, led into the old German front line between the Lens Road and the Loos Road Redoubts. To reach this the greater part of Loos had to be traversed, but the streets in this direction were fairly safe. They were, however, even more encumbered with the dead bodies of men and horses than those in the other half of the town. It seems that a large number of men had been driven to the dug-outs and bombed there, and that when these same dug-outs were required for Allied occupation, their former tenants were evicted into the road, for the burial parties to deal with when time permitted. Wonderful structures were these dug-outs, examples of the enemy's thoroughness. Not content with the protection afforded by a cellar, in many places they had excavated large chambers below the cellars themselves, whose floors they had paved with bricks and whose walls they had lined with boards. Once in them the garrison was perfectly safe from the most furious bombardment.
A further example of method was to be seen in the treatment of shells that had fallen blind. When these were of medium size, they had been collected in small heaps and surrounded with barbed wire to prevent inquisitive fingers experimenting with them. In the back yard of a cottage lay the enormous bulk of a fifteen-inch shell, that had judiciously been left where it fell, and had been honoured by a complicated stockade of its own. All this seemed to contrast with the present state of the town, which was everywhere littered with military stores of every conceivable kind. Some attempt had been made to collect them into heaps, but even this attempt had been very half-hearted. War is, anyhow, an expensive amusement, and it seems a pity to make it more so by sheer lack of method. For not only Loos itself, but the whole of the country over which the advance was made was littered with arms, ammunition, equipment, bombs, in prodigious numbers. My friend, having occasion to go into Loos again some weeks later, found these heaps still untouched, and was foolish enough to report their existence and their exact position. As a reward for this unwarranted officiousness, he was requested to escort a wagon to Loos and indicate the localities where these various stores lay, on an evening when the battery was at its busiest, an invitation that he firmly declined.
The way home, although much longer, proved to be cleaner and more secure, besides having the interest of leading through the old German front line. This was then in the occupation of our reserves, and had consequently been considerably tidied up, but large parts of it were still completely broken down, showing the effect of our bombardment. The shooting had been distinctly good, very few shell-craters were far from the trenches, and a large proportion of the projectiles had either fallen into them or blown in the parapet. But here again the dug-outs must have afforded very excellent protection. Wide shafts, driven straight down from the front wall of the trench at an angle of forty-five degrees with the horizontal, led into hollowed-out chambers twenty feet below the surface that would easily accommodate a couple of dozen men. Each dug-out had more than one shaft, to reduce the chances of men being buried by an explosion filling in the only means of exit. The trenches were everywhere revetted with timber or hurdles, and had a false bottom of wooden gratings to keep the men's feet as dry as possible. If only from the point of view of comfort they contrasted very favourably with our own, through which the homeward track next lay.
Loos, City of the Dead! If in years to come you are ever rebuilt, a task that to the observer of your utter destruction and desolation seems impossible, what strange and gruesome relics will your workmen find! Surely the Spirit of Carnage will for ever haunt those narrow streets and open widespread fields, surely your inhabitants of the future will wake in terror in the September nights to hear ghostly echoes of the then-forgotten struggle, the unceasing whistle and roar of the shells, the rushing footsteps of the charging men, the despairing cries of the bombed wretches in the cellars! And if timid eyes dare lift the curtain to peep fearfully through the windows, will they not see a blood-red moon shining upon streets through which pour the serried columns of the victors, and scent the night air tainted with a faint sickening odour of slaughter? But not alone shall Loos bear its burden of horror, for in how many towns and villages must these scenes be repeated before Peace comes again!
