The Scots Guards moved next morning. I stood by the side of the colonel, who was in a gruff mood.
“It looks like rain,” he said, sniffing the air. “It will probably rain like hell when the battle begins.”
I think he was killed somewhere by Fosse 8. The two comrades in the Scots Guards were badly wounded. One of the young brothers was killed and the other maimed. I found their names in the casualty lists which filled columns of The Times for a long time after Loos.
The town of Béthune was the capital of our army in the Black Country of the French coalfields. It was not much shelled in those days, though afterward—years afterward—it was badly damaged by long-range guns, so that its people fled, at last, after living so long on the edge of war.