Sir John French's staff
estimated the number of German dead as from eight to nine thousand. It
was impossible to make any accurate sum in that arithmetic of
slaughter, and always the enemy's losses were exaggerated because of
the dreadful need of balancing accounts in new-made corpses in that
Debit and Credit of war's bookkeeping.
What had we gained by great sacrifices of life? Not Lens, nor Lille,
nor even Hill 70 (for our line had to be withdrawn from those bloody
slopes where our men left many of their dead), but another sharp-edged
salient enfiladed by German guns for two years more, and a foothold on
one slag heap of the Double Crassier, where our men lived, if they
could, a few yards from Germans on the other; and that part of the
Hohenzollern redoubt which became another Hooge where English youth
was blown up by mines, buried by trench-mortars, condemned to a living
death in lousy caves dug into the chalk. Another V-shaped salient,
narrower than that of Ypres, more dismal, and as deadly, among the
pit-heads and the black dust hills and the broken mine-shafts of that
foul country beyond Loos.
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