at a dressing-station in the market-place, until a French girl,
afterward decorated for valor--she was called the Lady of Loos by
Londoners and Scots--borrowed a revolver and shot two of them dead in
a neighboring house. Then she came back to the soup she was making for
wounded men.

Some of the German prisoners were impressed as stretcher-bearers, and
one, "Jock," had compelled four Germans to carry him in, while he
lay talking to them in broadest Scots, grinning despite his blood and
wounds.

A London lieutenant called out to a stretcher-bearer helping to carry
down a German officer, and was astounded to be greeted by the wounded
man.

"Hullo, Leslie!... I knew we should meet one day."

Looking at the man's face, the Londoner saw it was his own cousin...
There was all the drama of war in that dirty village of Loos, which
reeked with the smell of death then, and years later, when I went
walking through it on another day of war, after another battle on Hill
70, beyond.

IX

While the village of Loos was crowded with hunters of men, wounded,
dead, batches of panic-stricken prisoners, women, doctors, Highlanders
and Lowlanders "fey" with the intoxication of blood, London soldiers
with tattered uniforms and muddy rifles and stained bayonets, mixed
brigades were moving forward to new objectives. The orders of the
Scottish troops, which I saw, were to go "all out," and to press on as
far as they could, with the absolute assurance that all the ground they
gained would be held behind them by supporting troops; and having that
promise, they trudged on to Hill 70. The Londoners had been ordered
to make a defensive flank on the right of the Scots by capturing the
chalk-pit south of Loos and digging in. They did this after savage
fighting in the pit, where they bayoneted many Germans, though raked
by machine-gun bullets from a neighboring copse, which was a fringe of
gashed and tattered trees. But some of the London boys were mixed up
with the advancing Scots and went on with them, and a battalion of Scots
Fusiliers who had been in the supporting brigade of the 15th Division,
which was intended to follow the advance, joined the first assault,
either through eagerness or a wrong order, and, unknown to their
brigadier, were among the leaders in the bloody struggle in Loos, and
labored on to Hill 70, where Camerons, Gordons, Black Watch, Seaforths,
Argyll, and Sutherland men and Londoners were now up the slopes,
sta