To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [93]
Looking through exactly these kinds of high-grade binoculars late on the morning of September 26, 1915, German officers at the front near Loos could not believe what they saw. On the second day of a major battle, roughly 10,000 British troops were walking toward them across more than half a mile of no man's land. This was not a case—as had happened before and would happen again—in which a preliminary bombardment had failed to destroy German machine-gun nests. Before this day's British attack, there had been no bombardment. The German machine guns were in protected bunkers, behind long, intact rolls of barbed wire, in belts sometimes up to 30 feet thick.
The British, according to a German account, moved forward in ten columns, "each about a thousand men, all advancing as if carrying out a parade-ground drill.... Never had machine guns had such straightforward work to do ... with barrels becoming hot ... they traversed to and fro along the enemy's ranks; one machine gun alone fired 12,500 rounds that afternoon. The result was devastating. The enemy could be seen falling literally in hundreds, but they continued to march." Some British officers were mounted on horseback, and so made even more conspicuous targets. German riflemen stood on the parapets of their trenches to fire at the fast-diminishing ranks that kept moving until they reached the first row of unbroken barbed wire. "Confronted by this impenetrable obstacle the survivors turned and began to retire."
These British troops, most of them volunteers who had joined the army after the war broke out, had arrived in France only weeks earlier. As the survivors retreated, the Germans, in a moment of mercy rare for either side, held their fire. "My machine gunners were so filled with pity, remorse and nausea," a German commander later said, "...that they refused to fire another shot."
The battle at Loos had begun the previous day, after Kitchener himself had reviewed the soldiers and congratulated them on the honor that had fallen to them. For Sir Douglas Haig, commanding the troops involved, it was a promising opportunity: if the attack succeeded, he would win great glory; if it failed, the person blamed would likely be the already precarious Sir John French. The two feuding generals did not even have a telephone line connecting their temporary command posts. Meanwhile, the Germans, knowing some sort of an attack was coming, had strengthened their defenses. In photographs from before the attack, the chalky soil around Loos gives the parapets of German trenches the ghostly look of long rows of snowdrifts stretching across the summer fields.
This was the first assault in which British troops used poison gas. For in scientific, industrialized warfare—as would be true four decades later with the atomic bomb—no nation would have a new weapon to itself for long. Haig ordered 5,000 six-foot-long cylinders of chlorine, weighing 150 pounds each, to be transported to the British front line by night, to maintain secrecy. For the last part of the way each of these had to be carried through communication trenches slung from a pole resting on the shoulders of two men. More pairs of soldiers carried lengths of pipe, to be attached to each cylinder, in order to spray the gas over the parapet of the trench and into no man's land. One pipe carrier's memories are a reminder of how much of the war's torment lay in merely getting supplies to the front: "The communication trench is zig-zag from beginning to end. The result was that we had to carry the