VIII. HOW MY COMRADES FARED 97 IX. AT LOOS 103 X. A NIGHT IN LOOS 123 XI. LOOS 136 XII. RETREAT 149 XIII. A PRISONER OF WAR 165 XIV. THE CHAPLAIN 178 XV. A LOVER AT LOOS 186 XVI. THE RATION PARTY 198 XVII. MICHAELMAS EVE 206 XVIII. BACK AT LOOS 218 XIX. WOUNDED 231 XX. FOR BLIGHTY 239 THE GREAT PUSH CHAPTER I IN THE ADVANCE TRENCHES Now when we take the cobbled road We often took before, Our thoughts are with the hearty lads Who tread that way no more. Oh! boys upon the level fields, If you could call to mind The wine of Café Pierre le Blanc You wouldn't stay behind. But when we leave the trench at night, And stagger neath our load, Grey, silent ghosts as light as air Come with us down the road. And when we sit us down to drink You sit beside us too, And drink at Café Pierre le Blanc As once you used to do. THE Company marched from the village of Les Brebis at nightfall; the moon, waning a little at one of its corners, shone brightly amidst the stars in the east, and under it, behind the German lines, a burning mine threw a flame, salmon pink and wreathed in smoke, into the air. Our Company was sadly thinned now, it had cast off many—so many of its men at Cuinchy, Givenchy, and Vermelles. At each of these places there are graves of the London Irish boys who have been killed in action. We marched through a world of slag heaps and chimney stacks, the moonlight flowing down the sides of the former like mist, the smoke stood up from the latter straight as the chimneys themselves. The whirr of machinery in the mine could be heard, and the creaking wagon wheels on an adjoining railway spoke out in a low, monotonous clank the half strangled message of labour. Our way lay up a hill, at the top we came into full view of the night of battle, the bursting shells up by Souchez, the flash of rifles by the village of Vermelles, the long white searchlights near Lens, and the star-shells, red, green and electric-white, rioting in a splendid blaze of colour over the decay, death and pity of the firing line. We could hear the dull thud of shells bursting in the fields and the sharp explosion they made amidst the masonry of deserted homes; you feel glad that the homes are deserted, and you hope that if any soldiers are billeted there they are in the safe protection of the cellars.