ded the battle of Loos, except for a violent counter--attack
delivered on October 8th all along the line from Fosse 8 on the north
to the right of the French 9th Corps on the south, with twenty-eight
battalions in the first line of assault. It was preceded by a stupendous
bombardment which inflicted heavy casualties upon our 1st Division
in the neighborhood of the chalk-pit, and upon the Guards holding the
Hohenzollern redoubt near Hulluch. Once again those brigades, which had
been sorely tried, had to crouch under a fury of fire, until the living
were surrounded by dead, half buried or carved up into chunks of flesh
in the chaos of broken trenches. The Germans had their own shambles,
more frightful, we were told, than ours, and thousands of dead lay in
front of our lines when the tide of their attack ebbed back and waves
of living men were broken by the fire of our field-guns, rifles, and
machine-guns. Sir John French's staff estimated the number of German
dead as from eight to nine thousand. It was impossible to make any
accurate sum in that arithmetic of slaughter, and always the enemy's
losses were exaggerated because of the dreadful need of balancing
accounts in new-made corpses in that Debit and Credit of war's
bookkeeping.

What had we gained by great sacrifices of life? Not Lens, nor Lille, nor
even Hill 70 (for our line had to be withdrawn from those bloody slopes
where our men left many of their dead), but another sharp-edged salient
enfiladed by German guns for two years more, and a foothold on one slag
heap of the Double Crassier, where our men lived, if they could, a
few yards from Germans on the other; and that part of the Hohenzollern
redoubt which became another Hooge where English youth was blown up by
mines, buried by trench-mortars, condemned to a living death in lousy
caves dug into the chalk. Another V-shaped salient, narrower than that
of Ypres, more dismal, and as deadly, among the pit-heads and the black
dust hills and the broken mine-shafts of that foul country beyond Loos.

The battle which had been begun with such high hopes ended in ghastly
failure by ourselves and by the French. Men who came back from it spoke
in whispers of its generalship and staff work, and said things which
were dangerous to speak aloud, cursing their fate as fighting-men,
asking of God as well as of mortals why the courage of the soldiers they
led should be thrown away in such a muck of slaughter, laughing with
despair