of covering smoke through which our attacks had been launched after two hours of preliminary bombardment. Our troops there found, as chance and accident decreed, either broken wire and half-obliterated trenches easy to overpass for a few hundred yards till they came to the uncut stuff before which the men perished as their likes had done on like fields. So it happened that day to the 6th Brigade of the First Division north of La Bassée, and the 19th Brigade south of it; to the 28th Brigade of the Ninth Division by the Hohenzollern redoubt and Pit 8. These all met wire uncut before trenches untouched, and were slaughtered. The 26th Brigade of the Ninth Division broke through at a heavy cost as far as Pit 8, and, for the moment, as far as the edge of the village of Haisnes. The Seventh Division, working between the Ninth Division and the road from Vermelles to Hulluch, had better fortune. They penetrated as far as the edge of Hulluch village, but were driven back, ere the day’s end, to the quarries a thousand yards in the rear. One brigade, the 1st of the First Division of the Fourth Army on their right, had also penetrated as far as the outskirts of Hulluch. Its 2nd Brigade was hung up in barbed wire near Lone Tree to the southward, which check again exposed the left flank of the next (Fifteenth Highland) Division as that (44th, 45th, and 46th Brigades) made its way into Loos, carried Hill 70, the Chalk Pit, and Pit 14. The Forty-seventh Division on the extreme right of the British line at its junction with the French Tenth Army had to be used mainly as a defensive flank to the operation, since the French attack, which should have timed with ours, did not develop till six hours after our troops had got away, and was then limited to Souchez and the Vimy Ridge.
At noon on the 25th September the position stood thus: The First Army Corps held up between the Béthune–La Bassée Canal and the Hohenzollern redoubt; the Seventh Division hard pressed among the quarries and houses by Hulluch; the Ninth in little better case as regarded Pit 8 and the redoubt itself; the Highland Division pushed forward in the right centre holding on precariously in the shambles round Loos and being already forced back for lack of supports.
All along the line the attack had spent itself among uncut wire and unsubdued machine-gun positions. There were no more troops to follow at once on the heels of the first, nor was there time to dig in before the counter-attacks were delivered by the Germans, to whom every minute of delay meant the certainty of more available reserves fresh from the rail. A little after noon their pressure began to take effect, and ground won during the first rush of the advance was blasted out of our possession by gunfire, bombing, and floods of enemy troops arriving throughout the night.
Both sides were now bringing up reserves: but ours seem to have arrived somewhat more slowly than the Germans’.
The Guards Division had come up on foot as quickly as the traffic on the roads allowed, and by the morning of the 26th the 1st Brigade (2nd Grenadiers, 2nd and 3rd Coldstream, and 1st Irish) were marched to Sailly-Labourse. The weather had improved, though the ground was heavy enough. Loos still remained to us, Hulluch was untaken. The enemy were well established on Hill 70 and had driven us out of Pit 14 and the Chalk Pit quarry on the Lens–La Bassée road which had been won on the previous day. It was this sector of the line to which the 2nd and 3rd Brigades of the Guards Division were directed. The local reserves (21st and 24th Divisions) had been used up, and as the Brigade took over the ground were retiring directly through them. The 1st Guards Brigade was employed in the work of holding the ground to the left, or north, of the other two brigades. Their own left lay next what remained of the Seventh Division after the furious wastage of the past two days.
On the afternoon of the 26th September the 2nd and 3rd Coldstream, with the 2nd Grenadiers in support, occupied some trenches in a waste of cut-up ground east of a line of captured German trenches opposite Hulluch. The 1st Irish Guards lay in trenches close to the wrecked water-tower of the village of Vermelles, while the confused and irregular attacks and counterattacks broke out along the line, slackened and were renewed again beneath the vault of the overhead clamour built by the passage of countless shells.
The field of battle presented an extraordinary effect of dispersion and detachment. Gas, smoke, and the continuous splash and sparkle of bombs marked where the lines were in actual touch, but behind and outside this inferno stretched a desolation of emptiness, peopled with single figures “walking about all over the place,” as one observer wrote, with dead and wounded on the ground, and casualties being slowly conveyed to dressing-stations—every one apparently unconcerned beneath shell-fire, which in old-time battles would have been reckoned heavy, but which here, by comparison, was peace.
A premature burst of one of our own shells wounded four men of the Battalion’s machine-gun group as it was moving along the Hulluch road, but there were no other casualties reported, and on Sunday 27th, while the village of Vermelles was being heavily shelled, No. 2 and half of No. 3 Company were sent forward to fetch off what wounded lay immediately in front of them on the battle-field. There was need. Throughout that long Sunday of “clearing up” at a slow pace under scattered fire, the casualties were but eleven in all—2nd Lieutenant Grayling-Major, slightly wounded, one man killed and nine wounded. Three thousand yards to the left their 2nd Battalion, which, with the 2nd and 3rd Guards Brigades, had been set to recapture Pit 14 and Chalk-Pit Wood, lost that evening eight officers and over three hundred men killed and wounded. Officer-losses had been very heavy, and orders were issued, none too soon, to keep a reserve of them, specially in the junior ranks. Lieutenants Yerburgh and Rankin, with 2nd Lieutenants Law, Langrishe, and Walker, were thus sent back to the first-line Transport to be saved for contingencies. 2nd Lieutenant Christie and twenty men from the base joined on the same day. The Battalion lay at that time behind the remnants of the 20th Brigade of the Seventh Division, whose Brigadier, Colonel the Hon. J. Trefusis, had been their old C.O. His brigade, which had suffered between two and three thousand casualties, was in no shape for further fighting, but was hanging on in expectation of relief, if possible, from the mixed duties of trying to establish a line and sending out parties to assist in repelling the nearest counter-attack. Fighting continued everywhere, especially on the left of the line, and heavy rain added to the general misery.
By the 28th September we might have gained on an average three thousand yards on a front of between six and seven thousand, but there was no certainty that we could hold it, and the front was alive with reports—some true, others false—that the enemy had captured a line of trench here, broken through there, or was massing in force elsewhere. As a matter of fact, the worst of the German attacks had spent themselves, and both sides were, through their own difficulties, beginning to break off their main engagements for the bitter localised fightings that go to the making of a new front.
In rain, chalky slime, and deep discomfort, after utter exhaustion, the broken battalions were comparing notes of news and imperturbably renewing their social life. Brigadier-General Trefusis slips, or wades, through rain and mud to lunch with his old battalion a few hundred yards away, and one learns indirectly what cheer and comfort his presence brings. Then he goes on with the remnants of his shattered brigade, to take over fresh work on a quieter part of the line and en route “to get his hair cut.”
The Battalion, after (Sept. 29) another day’s soaking in Vermelles trenches, relieved the 3rd Brigade, First Division, in front-line trenches just west of Hulluch.
The ground by Le Rutoire farm and Bois Carré between the battered German trenches was a sea of shell craters and wreckage, scorched with fires of every sort which had swept away all landmarks. Lone Tree, a general rendezvous and clearing-station for that sector of the line and a registered mark for enemy guns, was the spot where their guides met them in the rainy, windy darkness. The relief took four hours and cost Drill-Sergeant Corry, another N.C.O., and a private wounded. All four company commanders went ahead some hours before to acquaint themselves with the impassable trenches, the battalions being brought on, in artillery formation, by the Adjutant.
On the 30th September, the English losses having brought our efforts to a standstill, the troops of the Ninth French Army Corps began to take over the trenches defending Loos and running out of the ruins of that town to Hill 70. Foch and D’Untal in their fighting since the 27th had driven, at a price, the Germans out
