Leslie Ernest Lindsay
Private 2488
9th Battalion East Surrey Regiment
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Leslie Ernest Lindsay was the son of George and Mary A. Lindsay, of, 14 Palmer Park Avenue. He died on the 26th September 1915, the second day of the battle of Loos, aged 19. Prior to the war, according to the 1911 census, he had worked for the Co-op. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Loos Memorial Panels 65 -67. Specific details about the death of Leslie Lindsay are not known but a general account of the battle, particularly the second day, is set out below.
The 1915 BEF offensive in Artois was centred around Loos. The Germans held the high ground and their second line of defence was well protected on the reverse slope. They were well aware of the impending attack and their line was strengthened with well constructed concrete machine gun posts. The German artillery tactic was to bombard the assembling British troops and to lay a barrier of fire across no man’s land once the attack had started. Those men of the BEF who penetrated the barrier would be stopped by machine guns. It was at Loos that the British first used chlorine gas in retaliation for the gas attack by the Germans outside Ypres in April 1915. The discharge of gas hung around the battle field and even drifted back into the British trenches, hindering rather than helping the advance.
Loos was to be the first testing ground of the “New Army”. John Keegan in his book “The First World War” (page 218) describes the scene as the New Army 21st and 24th Divisions went into line on the morning of the 26th September and started their attack in early afternoon.
“….they moved forward in ten columns ‘each [of] about a thousand men, all advancing as if carrying out a parade-ground drill’. The German defenders were astounded by the sight of an ‘entire front covered with the enemy’s infantry’. They stood up, some even on the parapet of the trench, and fired triumphantly into the mass of men advancing across the open grassland. The machine gunners had opened fire at 1,500 yards range. Never had machine guns had such straight forward work to do …with barrels becoming hot and swimming in oil, they traversed to and fro along the enemy’s ranks; one machine gun alone fired 12,5000 rounds that afternoon. The effect was devastating. The enemy could be seen falling literally in hundreds, but they continued their march in good order and without interruption’ until they reached the unbroken wire of the Germans’ second position: Confronted by this impenetrable obstacle the survivors turned and began to retire.’
The survivors were a bare majority of those who had come forward. Of the 15,000 infantry in the 21st and 24th Divisions, over 8,000 had been killed or wounded. Their German enemies, nauseated by the spectacle of the ‘corpse field of Loos’, held their fire as the British turned in retreat, ‘so great was the feeling of compassion and mercy after such a victory’.”