hat a lucky shot would
mean his own death as well as theirs.

As our searchers came into the cellar, he rose and stood there, waiting,
with a cold dignity, for the fate which he knew would come to him, as it
did. He was a very brave man.

Another German officer remained hiding in the church, which was so
heavily mined that it would have blown half the village into dust and
ashes if he had touched off the charges. He was fumbling at the job when
our men found and killed him.

In the southern outskirts of Loos, and in the cemetery, the Londoners
had a bloody fight among the tombstones, where nests of German
machine-guns had been built into the vaults. New corpses, still
bleeding, lay among old dead torn from their coffins by shell-fire.
Londoners and Siiesian Germans lay together across one another's bodies.
The London men routed out most of the machine-gunners and bayoneted some
and took prisoners of others. They were not so fierce as the Scots, but
in those hours forgot the flower-gardens in Streatham and Tooting Bec
and the manners of suburban drawing rooms.. . It is strange that
one German machine-gun, served by four men, remained hidden behind a
gravestone all through that day, and Saturday, and Sunday, and sniped
stray men of ours until routed at last by moppers-up of the Guards
brigade.

As the Londoners came down the slope to the southern edge of Loos
village, through a thick haze of smoke from shell-fire and burning
houses, they were astounded to meet a crowd of civilians, mostly women
and children, who came streaming across the open in panic-stricken
groups. Some of them fell under machine-gun fire snapping from the
houses or under shrapnel bursting overhead. The women were haggard
and gaunt, with wild eyes and wild hair, like witches. They held their
children in tight claws until they were near our soldiers, when they all
set up a shrill crying and wailing. The children were dazed with terror.
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.

Isolated Germans still kept sniping from secret places, and some of them
fired