To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [95]
...It was nerve racking to hear the cries of the men lying wounded on the slope. Even if the Germans had allowed us to help them—which I believe they would—we had no stretchers....
Looking around I was pleased to see that Captain Pole was safe and remembering the message I still had for him I handed it to him with an apology for the delay. After reading it he said, with a tremor in his voice, "It doesn't matter now. But isn't that just what we tried to do?"
In this brief spasm of carnage, out of 10,000 British officers and men, more than 8,000 were killed, wounded, or missing.
As with many episodes from this war, it is hard for us to see the attack on September 26, 1915, as anything other than a blatant, needless massacre initiated by generals with a near-criminal disregard for the conditions their men faced. Strikingly, however—and this is especially typical of the war's early battles, when all soldiers were professionals or volunteers—few survivors talked of it in this way. For them to question the generals' judgment would have meant, of course, asking if their fellow soldiers had died in vain. From the need to avoid such questions are so many myths about wars born.
One of the units ravaged that day, for instance, was the 8th Battalion of the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment. Of its 25 officers, 24 were casualties in little more than an hour, along with 556—a majority—of its enlisted men. The battalion commander, Colonel Eden Vansittart, who had spent most of his long army career in India, witnessed much of the killing before being himself severely wounded. But in a long report on the battle he wrote two years later, he revealed not the slightest anger at the suicidal position he and his men were put in, only praise for their good form. "They advanced as if on parade, and under perfect discipline, till they reached the enemy's undamaged barbed wire entanglements, beyond which they were unable to go, and here our losses were very great." A decade later, when he was retired, he still did not question the decision to attack; his main concern remained that the authors of the multivolume official history of the war, for whom he prepared another report, "bring out more sharply the gallant conduct" of the battalion.
The fighting at Loos continued sporadically for several weeks more. Among the British soldiers killed whose bodies were never found was Captain Fergus Bowes-Lyon of the 8th Black Watch, whose sister, when she was married a few years later in Westminster Abbey, placed her wedding bouquet on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in his memory. She would survive into the next century as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
Riding a white horse, Sir John French visited the troops several times, at one point spending two hours talking to injured men at a first-aid station near the front. "Dead, dying and badly wounded all mixed up together," he wrote to Winifred Bennett. "Poor dear fellows they bear their pain gloriously and many of them gave me a smile of recognition."
In the end, the Allies gained a mile or two of ground, but once again, the losses were overwhelmingly on the attackers' side, with more than 61,000 British casualties. "It was impossible to bury them all.... You'd go along the trenches and you'd see a boot and puttee sticking out, or an arm or a hand, sometimes faces," remembered one soldier. "Not only would you see, but you'd be walking on them, slipping and sliding.... But if you ever had to write home about a particular mate you'd always say that he got it cleanly and quickly with a bullet and he didn't know what had happened." Bloated to the