. . The 47th London Division, going forward
to the battle of Loos, was made up of men whose souls had been shaped
by all the influences of environment, habit, and tradition in which I
had been born and bred. Their cradle had been rocked to the murmurous
roar of London traffic. Their first adventures had been on London
Commons. The lights along the Embankment, the excitement of the
streets, the faces of London crowds, royal pageantry--marriages,
crownings, burials--on the way to Westminster, the little dramas of
London life, had been woven into the fiber of their thoughts, and it
was the spirit of London which went with them wherever they walked in
France or Flanders, more sensitive than country men to the things they
saw. Some of them had to fight against their nerves on the way to
Loos. But their spirit was exalted by a nervous stimulus before that
battle, so that they did freakish and fantastic things of courage.
V
I watched the preliminary bombardment of the Loos battlefields from a
black slag heap beyond Noeux-les-Mines, and afterward went on the
battleground up to the Loos redoubt, when our guns and the enemy's
were hard at work; and later still, in years that followed, when there
was never a silence of guns in those fields, came to know the ground
from many points of view.
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