In one small bunch eight men
fell in a mush of blood and raw flesh. But the gas was worse. There
was a movement in the trenches, the huddling together of frightened
men who had been very brave. They were coughing, spitting, gasping.
Some of them fell limp against their fellows, with pallid cheeks which
blackened. Others tied handkerchiefs about their mouths and noses, but
choked inside those bandages, and dropped to earth with a clatter of
shovels. Officers and men were cursing and groaning. An hour later,
when the whistles blew, there were gaps in the line of the 1st
Division which went over the top. In the trenches lay gassed men. In
No Man's Land others fell, swept by machine-gun bullets, shrapnel, and
high explosives. The 1st Division was "checked." . . .
"We caught it badly," said some of them I met later in the day,
bandaged and bloody, and plastered in wet chalk, while gassed men lay
on stretchers about them, unconscious, with laboring lungs.
VIII
Farther south the front-lines of the 15th (Scottish) Division climbed
over their parapets at six-thirty, and saw the open ground before
them, and the dusky, paling sky above them, and broken wire in front
of the enemy's churned-up trenches; and through the smoke, faintly,
and far away, three and a half miles away, the ghostly outline of the
"Tower Bridge" of Loos, which was their goal.
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