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I passed by ruined villages and towns.
To the left was Vermelles (two months before death nearly caught me
there), and I stared at those broken houses and roofless farms and
fallen churches which used to make one's soul shiver even when they
stood clear in the daylight.
To the right, a few hundred yards away, was Masingarbe, from which
many of our troops marched out to begin the great attack. Farther back
were the great slag heaps of Noeux-les-Mines, and all around other
black hills of this mining country which rise out of the flat plain.
It was a long walk through narrow trenches toward that Loos redoubt
where at last I stood. There was the smell of death in those narrow,
winding ways. One boy, whom death had taken almost at the entrance-
way, knelt on the fire-step, with his head bent and his forehead
against the wet clay, as though in prayer. Farther on other bodies of
London boys and Scots lay huddled up.
We were in the center of a wide field of fire, with the enemy's
batteries on one side and ours on the other in sweeping semicircles.


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