Battle of Loos

“ Another casualty from Loos. The dead are lying all round here; civilians and soldiers. A dead child lying in a trench near Hulluch. I suppose somebody has buried it. I wonder how it got there.... The line of wounded stretches from Lens to Victoria Station on this side, and from Lens to Berlin on the other side.... How many thousand dead are there in the fields round there?... There will be many more, for the battle of Loos is still proceeding.... Who is going to benefit by the carnage, save the rats which feed now as they have never fed before?... ”

“ This seemingly was disproved, and the next theory was that in order to obtain victory there must be overwhelming superiority both in [Pg 63] guns and in men. The Somme battle proved that even these were not enough.
In the battle of Loos however all the interest was centred on men, men personally. The new base was St. Omer, the picturesque ecclesiastical town with its castellated church towers in relief against the sky—all so thronged with khaki—henceforth till the war ends to be a great war centre. ”

“ He was afterwards killed at the Battle of Loos whilst in command of the 12th Division. He was beloved by all who served with him; his gallantry, skill, and dash were spoken of by every one, and his loss was deeply felt.
In the early hours of the 13th, we attacked the river line all along our front. The enemy artillery made a vigorous defence, employing many heavy and other kinds of guns. The German infantry was not very energetic in defence, but the bombardment continued heavily all day on both sides. ”

“ Other civilians crawled up from their cellars in Loos, spattered with German blood, and wandered about among soldiers of many British battalions who crowded amid the scarred and shattered houses, and among the wounded men who came staggering through the streets, where army doctors were giving first aid in the roadway, while shells were bursting overhead and all the roar of the battle filled the air for miles around with infernal tumult. ”

“ At 4.25 a. m. on August 15, 1917, the Canadian corps attacked on a front of 4,000 yards southeast and east of Loos. The objectives consisted of the strongly fortified hill known as Hill 70, which had been reached but not held in the battle of Loos on September 25, 1915, and also the mining suburbs of Cité Ste.-Élizabeth, Cité St.-Emile, and Cité St.-Laurent, together with the whole of Bois Rase and the western half of Bois Hugo. The observation from Hill 70 had been very useful to the enemy, and its possession materially increased the British command over the defenses of Lens. ”

“ Here it had graduated, with first class honours in endurance and cheerfulness, during a season of trench warfare on the Western Front; and was now bracing itself, with incorrigible optimism, for that heroic mess afterwards known as the Battle of Loos. Everywhere the war was consolidating its position. On land the Boche, in a determined effort to recoup himself for his losses on the Western swings by a profitable exploitation of the Eastern roundabouts, had just captured Warsaw ”

“ It was no longer considered de rigueur for the orchestra in public restaurants to bring a docile public to its feet by periodical excursions into patriotic melody. The Battle of Loos had demonstrated once more that the young British soldier never fights better than in his first battle; also, alas! that when a nation goes to war free from the taint of "militarism," soldiers must die that Staffs may learn. Gallipoli had been evacuated, when with a little luck and good management the evacuation might have taken place at the other end. ”

“ The gallant record of the Twenty-fourth Division in the war after the Battle of Loos is a sufficient proof, if any were needed, that the failure of the 73rd Brigade at Loos was entirely due to inexperience.
[19] The machine-gun team never yielded a yard; the gun was destroyed by shell-fire, and all the members of the team were killed or wounded. ”

“ We have learnt that the only method of delivering an infantry attack against prepared positions is to give them a thorough hammering with shells. Every particle of wire should be destroyed, so as to eliminate the risk of men being shot down as they attempt to pass through it. At the Battle of Loos our guns bombarded their lines from Monday morning to Saturday morning, and kept hammering at them so as not to give them a chance to repair either their wire or their parapets. ”

“ They were huge, fierce brutes, and I know of more than one case of a sentry on a lonely post who in the night-time got a bad scare because he thought the Germans were on him, when as a matter of fact it was nothing worse than an enormous rat which was out foraging and made a jump at his face.
More than six months passed between the battle of Neuve Chapelle and the battle of Loos. Of course an ordinary soldier doesn’t know much of what is happening, and he doesn’t pretend to—he has his own business to mind ”

“ When we marched back through Vermelles we were utterly exhausted, and I dare say we looked pitiful objects, for we were thickly covered with clay and were minus the best part of our equipment; but we were proud, all the same, and I think the pride was justified, for it must be remembered that many of the men who took part in the very heavy fighting at Loos were soldiers who, like myself, had only just had their baptism of fire. They had at any rate done [212] their best to uphold the tradition of British courage and endurance. ”

“ They were the heroes of Loos—or some of them—Camerons and Seaforths, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Gordons and King's Own Scottish Borderers, who, with the London men, were first on Hill 70 and away to the Cite St.-Auguste. They left many comrades there, and their battalions have been filled up with new drafts—of the same type as themselves and of the same grit—but that day no ghost of grief, no dark shadow of gloom, was upon any of the faces upon which I looked round a festive board in a long, French hall, to which their wounded came in those days of the September battle. ”

“ We did not hear of, or expect to hear of, any similar friendliness where the French poilus were concerned. Farther north came the strongly fortified "Fosse No. 8" and the Hohenzollern Redoubt close to Haisnes, and just short of the canal at Givenchy. What we got to know as the Loos battle began on the 25th of September, 1915. The Double Crassier was taken at once. A man in the London Irish is said to have kicked off a football from the parapet in this attack and dribbled it across No Man's Land to the German first lines. ”

“ During the course of the winter, exposure alone killed some. Ever since the battle the Loos sector had been very active, especially on Sundays, and the trenches and alleys which led up to them were in a very wet condition. The numbers lost in the recent fighting had not been made up, and "C" Company, the weakest, had a trench strength all told of only 67 officers and men. ”

“ Two army corps were to attack, on a six mile front, in the neighbourhood of Loos and, if the assault was successful, the corps in reserve, which included our Division, was to go through and exploit the victory to its fullest advantage. We were to take no part in the initial attack.
Large masses of troops were being moved up behind the battle area, and, in order to screen our movements from hostile aircraft, the latter stages of the journey were to be made under cover of darkness, so the whole of the next day was spent in resting. ”

“ But apart from that the whole time-table of the battle was, as it now appears, fatally wrong. To move divisions along narrow roads requires an immense amount of time, even if the roads are clear, and those roads toward Loos were crowded with the transport and gun-limbers of the assaulting troops. To move them in daylight to the trenches meant inevitable loss of life and almost certain demoralization under the enemy's gun-fire.
“Between 11 A.M. and 12 noon the central brigade of these divisions filed past me at Bethune and Noeux-les-Mines, respectively,” wrote Sir John French. ”

“ It was decided that 45 Brigade should hold Hill 70 and that what was left of the Camerons should withdraw. At 11 p.m. Lieut.-Col. Sandilands with 6 officers and 75 men marched back through Loos to La Philosophe. The losses for the day were:—4 officers killed; 6 officers wounded; 4 officers missing; 64 men killed; 253 wounded; 217 missing; total, 14 officers, 534 men.
Sept. 26— Loos Battle Ordered to hold first line of old British trench. Met large numbers of men of the 21st Division retiring from Loos. At 1 p.m. ordered to hold support line of old German trench. ”

“ It is nine months since Loos, and nearly six since we scraped the nightmare mud of Ypres from our boots, gum, thigh, for the last time. Our recent casualties have been light—our only serious effort of late has been the recapture of the Kidney Bean—the new drafts have settled down, and the young officers have been blooded. And above all, victory is in the air. We are going into our next fight with new-born confidence in the powers behind us. Loos was an experimental affair ”

“ At Loos
"The wages of sin and a soldier is death."—Trench Proverb.
For long I had looked on Loos from a distance, had seen the red-brick houses huddled together brooding under the shade of the massive Twin Towers, the giant sentinels of the German stronghold. Between me and the village lurked a thousand rifles and death-dealing maxims; out in the open no understanding could preserve a man from annihilation, luck alone could save him. ”

“ It was partly because Neuve Chapelle had shown the dangers of retaining too close a hold on the immediate reserves that it had been arranged that the troops (immediate reserves included) were to press forward without limitation. Loos showed the advantages of the "limited objective" and of dealing with untaken portions of a hostile line rather by outflanking them than by renewing direct attacks; it also showed that the patterns of grenades in use in the British army were too varied and mostly unsuitable for wet weather, with other lessons major and minor. ”

“ Loos itself was afterwards handed over to the French, who were not, unfortunately, able to retain it. Just beyond Loos, after it had been regained in 1918, I was stumbling over a bit of ground covered with all sorts of débris beside what had been lately German trenches, and which was even then being occasionally enviously shelled, when I saw growing in a crevice below the brick rubbish a garden pansy. ”

“ Smoke rises when the bomb is fired, but a heavy shelling at this spot failed to silence it. Now an Artillery Observation Officer watches the spot all day, and immediately the smoke is observed his battery fires and tries to catch the mortar before it gets back under cover.”
Preparations for the big attack at Loos now overshadowed everything else, and the Battalion was out every night on working or carrying parties—such light jobs as carrying gas cylinders, digging assembly trenches and bridging trenches. ”

“ Then a livid flash lit a near dug-out; lumps of earth, a dozen beams and several sandbags changed their locality, and a man was killed by concussion. When the body was examined no trace of a wound could be seen. Up the street of Loos was a clatter and tumult. A house was flung to earth, making a noise like a statue falling downstairs in a giant's castle; iron girders at the coal-mine were wrenched and tortured, and the churchyard that bordered our trench had the remnants of its headstones flung about and its oft muddled graves dug anew by the shells. ”

“ The British had reached the top of Hill 70 by nine o'clock. The climb was a hard and rough accomplishment, with the right flank under mitrailleuse fire from Loos, and with the left exposed to fire from Pit 14A; but it was accomplished far too quickly. Serious disasters frequently occur in war through tardiness; in this case a possible great victory was missed through being too quick and arriving too early. When the brigadier got up to Loos he saw his men vanishing in the distance. A strong German redoubt, over the other side of the hill crest, was not even defended. ”

“ The outcome of Loos had ended hope of a break-through, and a few thousand yards won there against a few thousand lost out Ypres way represented the balance of the account since November 1914. Therefore, once again, the line had to be held till more men, munitions and materials could be trained, manufactured and accumulated, while the price of making war on the spur of the moment was paid, day in and day out, with the bodies of young men subject to every form of death among the slits in the dirt along which they moved. It bored them extremely, but otherwise did not much affect their morale. ”

“ There entered two rather bewildered young men who had passed during the previous forty-eight hours through every emotion from a desperate fear that the “victory” of Loos would end the war without their firing a shot, to sheer annoyance at being dumped at a railhead and told to find a battalion in the dark. They had lost everything they had except what they carried on them, and were desperately hungry.
The Adjutant surprised even himself at the cordial greeting he gave the two strangers—untried officers from a reserve battalion he had never seen. ”

“ Yet, in spite of rain and great death, there was a spirit of exultation among many fighting-men. At last there was a break in the months of stationary warfare. We were up and out of the trenches. The first proofs of victory were visible there in a long line of German guns captured at Loos, guarded on each side by British soldiers with fixed bayonets. Men moving up did not know the general failure that had swamped a partial success. ”