1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [291]
They told us it would be a bit of cake and all we’d got to do for this attack was to dawdle along and take these trenches which we’d find pulverised by our guns. Every other blooming shot was a dud, I think. You could hear them hit bomp, bang– that was a live one – but most of them went bomp– then dead silence. A dud blooming shell! Lloyd George took it up. Most of the stuff wasn’t worth sending out. They said that these trenches were so pulverised that we’d just walk into them and take over. When we did start the attack, my battalion lost hundreds of men in the first hour or so. The whole thing was a waste of lives.
Six of us were going along with bags of bombs. We were to follow the first wave with these bombs, because they soon go and they weigh about a pound each, so the bombers can’t carry too many. All Hell was let loose. There were five ahead of me. The chap in front of me had the whole of his face blown away. I’ve never seen anything so horrible in all my life. It was just a red mass, his face. He sunk down moaning, making a horrible noise and I had to push on. The bag of bombs was blown out of my hand, and I picked it up again and had to walk on with it.
We were all in extended order, waiting to push on further, and a sergeant came in and said, ‘You’d better wait until they sing out where they want the bombs.’ So we waited there a bit and after a time we went forward again. Reinforcements never came. Another officer joined us. He wasn’t one of our officers, quite a decent bloke though, and he said, ‘Well, we’ve got to hang on here, we may have to push forward later on.’ But we had to make an orderly retirement back again, because the attack failed altogether. They mowed them down.
The right-hand divisions of the 47th London Division were to steady and form a hinge on which the whole assault could pivot as it went forward. On their right the Londoners were to sweep ahead to capture the Double Crassier and the outskirts of Loos village. They had done just that, the assault had succeeded and now they were in the third German line. They were not intended to advance any further and, having gained their objectives, they were instructed to stop and to form a defensive flank at the southern end of the battle. The orders of the 15th Division had not made this clear to them. They were merely told that the 47th Division would be attacking on their right, and this half-information had given the Jocks the impression that the Londoners would continue to advance alongside them. But, as they advanced looking for the Londoners on their right, they found nobody there. Nor was there anyone to be found on their left, so both flanks of the 15th Scottish Division were ‘in the air’. But still they plunged on and, in the excitement of their advance, they drifted well away from the route they should have followed. It was a long time before anyone realised that the Scots had lost direction.
Chapter 34
By nine o’clock in the morning of 25 September the flag of the 7th Cameron Highlanders was flying on Hill 70 and Sergeant Tommy Lamb had planted it there with his own hands. The remnants of two brigades were plodding up the hill and they were horribly mixed up, for the 44th Brigade should have advanced in a straight line due east and dead ahead, past the chalk pit near Puits 14 and on across the la Bassée road to Bois Hugo – a long strip of woodland that ran over the crest of the ridge. There had been nothing, or almost nothing to stop them. But, like iron filings drawn towards a magnet, the fighting in Loos had pulled them to their right and into the joyous mêlée of Scots fighting their way through the village. Now the two brigades whose disciplined ranks should have advanced on a broad front were crowded into a space of some six hundred yards, streaming up Hill 70 in a wild confusion of companies