By seven-forty the two assaulting brigades of the 15th Division had left the trenches and were in the open. Shriller than the scream of shells above them was the skirl of pipes, going with them. The Pipe Major of the 8th Gordons was badly wounded, but refused to be touched until the other men were tended. He was a giant, too big for a stretcher, and had to be carried back on a tarpaulin. At the dressing-station his leg was amputated, but he died after two operations, and the Gordons mourned him. While the Highlanders went forward with their pipes, two brigades of the Londoners, on their right, were advancing in the direction of the long, double slag heap, southwest of Loos, called the Double Crassier. Some of them were blowing mouth-organs, playing the music-hall song of “Hullo, hullo, it's a different girl again!” and the “Robert E. Lee,” until one after another a musician fell in a crumpled heap. Shrapnel burst over them, and here and there shells plowed up the earth where they were trudging. On the right of the Londoners the French still stayed in their trenches--their own attack was postponed until midday--and they cheered the London men, as they went forward, with cries of, “Vivent les Angdais!” “A mort--les Boches!” It was they who saw one man kicking a football in advance of the others. “He is mad!” they said. “The poor boy is a lunatic!” “He is not mad,” said a French officer who had lived in England. “It is a beau geste. He is a sportsman scornful of death. That is the British sport.” It was a London Irishman dribbling a football toward the goal, and he held it for fourteen hundred yards--the best-kicked goal in history. Many men fell in the five hundred yards of No Man's Land. But they were not missed then by those who went on in waves--rather, like molecules, separating, collecting, splitting up into smaller groups, bunching together again, on the way to the first line of German trenches. A glint of bayonets made a quickset hedge along the line of churned-up earth which had been the Germans' front--line trench. Our guns had cut the wire or torn gaps into it. Through the broken strands went the Londoners on the right, the Scots on the left, shouting hoarsely now. They saw red. They were hunters of human flesh. They swarmed down into the first long ditch, trampling over dead bodies, falling over them, clawing the earth and scrambling up the parados, all broken and crumbled, then on again to another ditch. Boys dropped with bullets in their brains, throats, and bodies. German machine-guns were at work at close range.