At 05.50 on the 25th September the gas was turned on. On the right sector it moved slowly over towards the Germans, but on the left the wind brought the gas cloud back onto the British troops.  This meant many were effected by their own gas, but also, there was now no gas/smoke protection for the troops as they went over the top.  Many fell to the German machine-guns.

Map of battle area Advance of 47th & 15th Divisions Situation with 1st Division 7th Division 9th Division 2nd Division in the north

General Haig’s diary; “I went out at 5 a.m.  Almost a calm.  Alan Fletcher lit a cigarette and the smoke drifted in puffs towards the N.E... At one time, owing to the calm, I feared the gas might simply hang about our trenches.  However, at 5.15 a.m. I said ‘carry on’.  I went to the top of our wooden look-out tower. The wind came gently from S.W. and by 5.40 had increased slightly. The leaves of the poplar trees gently rustled. This seemed satisfactory.  But what a risk I must run of gas blowing back upon our own dense masses of troops!”

Was it only yesterday Lusty comrades marched away? Now they’re covered up with clay. Hearty comrades these have been, But no more will they be seen Drinking wine at Nouex-le-Mines.

“Six-thirty at last. ‘They’re off’ the news flashes along the line. I glance over the top and there in the dense smoke are the Irish advancing in line. Weird and uncanny they look - mere shadows in the curling yellow fog - but they never hesitate; each line adjusts itself and disappears. Here indeed is borne the fruit of all that training at Hatfield, St Albans, and in our days of ‘rest’ behind the line; for nothing but the absolute habit of moving in line at five paces interval could enable men to do so under these hellish conditions. There goes our front line, now the second and third - our turn next. We scramble over the parapet and out of the saps, stumble through a few strands of wire and throw ourselves down for a brief pause.” From Philip Warner’s book.

On this first day the units on the right, 47th and 15th (Scottish) divisions, would make the most headway and the deepest penetration, the gas was also most effective in this area, so helping the start of the attack.  These divisions were expected to take Hill 70 and go on to occupy Cite St. Auguste, and the Scots went in gamely, led as ever by their pipers.

Unfortunately the attack did not go to plan.  By 10.00 the 47th, who were tasked with taking the Double Crassier, had made most of their objectives and were settling in to hold them.  The 15th division were through Loos by 08.00 and reached the Lens-La Bassee road by 9.15, but by now things had started to go awry, the division was starting to lose the direction in which it should be advancing. The 44th and 46th Brigades were veering to the right as they advanced, and ended up going due south towards Cite St Laurent, a heavily defended village that the commanders had been particularly keen to avoid.  The objective set for 15 Division would have taken them into the second German line around Cite St Auguste, a line that was not heavily defended. One result of the loss of direction of the division was that the Germans were able to reinforce this line on the night of the 25th.  Also, the officers in the 44th Brigade who had not realised that their attack line had veered south, and that they were attacking Cite St Laurent instead of Cite St Auguste, signaled back that they were advancing on their final objective, and called in an artillery bombardment. It fell on Cite St Auguste, giving the 44th no support as they were in the wrong place. ‘The Fog of War’. The German machine-guns took a terrible toll and by 11.30 the advance of the Scottish Division had been halted.  Some 124 officers and 4,150 men were killed and wounded.

In Gudmundsson’s ‘Stormtroop Tactics’ he comments; “On September 25, 1915, near Loos, a town not far from Ypres, two British infantry divisions broke through the first German line and ran into the second line.  Caught between a battery of six light field guns and a handful of machine guns sited to catch an attacker in the flank, the British lost 8000 men. It was, to German observers, the Massacre of the Innocents [a reference to German dead at Langemarck] in reverse. This time the British advanced in their antiquated formations and the German sharpshooters mowed them down.”

The map above, from the IWM trench map CD, has Lens in the bottom right hand corner, just off the map above the ‘MN’ is Loos, with Hill 70 just off the map one square to the right of the large ‘N’.  The Double Crassier is the large black feature, while Cite St Laurent is where many of 15 Division ended up by mistake.

The firefly lamps were lighted yet, As we crossed the top of the parapet, But the East grew pale to another fire, As our bayonets gleamed by the foeman’s wire. And the Eastern sky was gold and grey, And under our feet the dead men lay, As we entered Loos in the morning.   From Patrick MacGill’s ‘Great Push’.

On the left of 15 Division, 1st Division was having a bad time and advances from here north were limited.  1st Division was to attack in the area of Lone Tree Ridge, (so called after a flowering cherry tree, damaged by shellfire but still surviving) expecting that the wire had been cut by the artillery barrage, the wire had not been cut, and it was also too hard to cut by hand. Many men were to die in this area, and four VCs would be awarded, two of them posthumously.  In 1 Division’s attack they would have 1st Brigade attacking north of Lone Tree with their line of advance going east; south of Lone Tree 2nd Brigade would advance south easterly to connect with 15 Division on their right. These diverging lines of advance meant that a gap would open up between the two brigades which would be filled by a unit under Lt. Co. Green, “Green’s Force”, which was made up of two battalions, one from each of the 1st and 2nd brigades. The gas released on the front of 1 and 2 Brigades did not blow over to the German lines, it hung about and blew back on to the British. While 1 Brigade made a successful advance, 2 Brigade was faced by thick, uncut wire and was dealt with severely by the German machine-gunners who had them pinned down in the open, and with German units moving to outflank them.  They were in desperate need of support.

1st Division was commanded by Maj. Gen. Holland and he was aware of the situation that 2 Brigade was in, but in attempting to relieve the situation he only compounded the problem. He had 3 Brigade in reserve, and he also had ‘Green’s Force’, and he knew that to the south the 15th Division had made it to Loos, but where would he use these supporting units.  He could either send 3 Brigade in behind the successful advance of 1 Brigade and for it to then work south towards 3 Brigade, or he could send it into the gap on his right between his division and the 15th, and they should then swing north.  Either would be likely to have the desired effect.  However, he chose differently; ‘Green’s Force’ would go in on the left of 2 Brigade to make another direct assault on the uncut wire and 3 Brigade would go in on the right of 1 Brigade. Again units going in either side of Lone Tree.  His reasoning was that he believed the German units facing 2 Brigade would find themselves being outflanked by units of his own division and the 15th, and so would meekly surrender!  He ordered the start of the attack a little before 10 a.m. but the runners taking the order were killed and it was another hour before the orders got through. It would be around 17.30 before those who were still attacking from 2 Brigade and Green’s Force eventually made it to the Lens - La Bassee road; some 400 men of the German 157 Regiment had held up the divisional attack for some nine hours before they were overrun.  At the end of the day there were only some 1,500 men able to fight out of the 6,000 who had started out that morning in 1 and 2 Brigades.

The map above shows Lone Tree middle left and Hulluch top right. This is the area where 1 & 2 Brigades were fighting.

General Jack, while a Major, described in his diary the responsibility on an officer to make decisions regarding whether or not to attack, and the timing of it; “With evidence pointing in opposite directions the strain of deciding where one’s duty lay was very great. On the one hand, was it pure madness to take my companies forward?  On the other, what would be said of the 90th.....were they in any manner to desert comrades on the battlefield or evade making an effort to carry out at least part of their orders? ......when a signaller thrust into my hand a message..... saying that no further advance was to take place without fresh orders.  What a relief to be rid of such a grim responsibility!” This was written just after the Somme offensive, July 1 1916.

To the left of IV Corps was I Corps commanded by Lt. Gen. Gough and under him were the 2nd, 7th and 9th Divisions.  Although these three divisions were only faced by three German regiments, the ground over which Gough had to advance gave an advantage to the defenders because of all the slag heaps, miners cottages and quarries; also, in front of the 9th division was a formidable strong point, the Hohenzollern Redoubt.

Working northwards through the three divisions, the 7th was between the Vermelles - Hulluch road and the Hohenzollern Redoubt. This division advanced quickly, but at great loss; within 15 minutes it was into the German front line. Their objective for the day was to go on to the German second line and then to the Haute-Deule Canal, an advance of about 5 miles. However, having lost some 5,000 men they were halted, at the end of the day, north west of Hulluch and were able to bring up their artillery during the night. Another advance at great cost.

On the left of the 7th was the 9th division, facing the Hohenzollern and a slag heap called ‘The Dump’, they also had an objective that required them to reach the Haute-Deule Canal by the end of the day, an objective as over ambitious as it was for the 7th. The two brigades, the 26th and the 28th fared differently; the 26th were covered by a successful release of gas and in the first hour they were into the Hohenzollern Redoubt.  However, they could not continue their advance because the 28th on their left had not had a successful advance, for them the gas release had not gone according to plan. The wind had not been in their favour when the smoke and gas were released, so giving them less cover, and they had met very stiff opposition from the enemy in Madagascar Trench. The 28th suffered dreadful losses but were still ordered to make another advance, this also failed and by 13.30 the Brigade had to go on to the defensive. The 27th Brigade was the divisional reserve but the deployment of the brigade was a period of confusion and conflicting orders as the Brigade commander, the Divisional Commander and Gough, the Corps Commander, all got involved. A classic case of ‘too many cooks...’ and at the end of the day, while advances had been made, they were not as far as planned and were again with great loss of life.

In the map above the Hohenzollern Redoubt is circled in blue, just on the bottom edge of the map.

From a different IWM trench map, corrected for 25th August 1915.

On the northern flank of the Army was 2nd Division who were to provide flank protection to the advances to their south.  On this front the wind was in the wrong direction and the gas was blown back into the British trenches so that when the attack began, 40 minutes after the start of the gas release, the troops were suffering from the gas itself and from the effects of wearing the gas hoods for 40 minutes. One element of their attack was the blowing of mines under the German front line trenches 10 minutes before the general attack.  However, the Germans had withdrawn from this trench line to a stronger position, so the mines served only to give warning of an impending attack. The result was that the Germans took a tremendous toll of the advancing troops with machine-gun fire, and on top of this the wire had not been cut; the attack stalled. Although artillery barrages were laid down on the German lines, they did nothing to relieve the situation and by 9.45 the attack of 2 Division had failed.

At the end of the day advances had been made, most of them in the south where Loos had been taken, but nowhere had the advance been as far as the planners had hoped for, and they had all been made at tremendous cost in lives lost. However, the decision was taken to continue the attack the next day and for this the reserves, XI Corps, would need to be brought forward and into the action.

Seven supple lads and clean    Sat down to drink one night, Sat down to drink at Nouex-les-Mines,    Then went away to fight.   Seven supple lads and clean    Are finished with the fight; But only three at Nouex-les-Mines    Sit down to drink to-night.