The villages of Haisnes and Hulluch fretted the skyline, and Fosse 8
was a black wart between them. The "Tower Bridge," close by in the
town of Loos, was the one high landmark which broke the monotony of
this desolation.
No men moved about this ground. Yet thousands of men were hidden about
us in the ditches, waiting for another counter-attack behind storms of
fire. The only moving things were the shells which vomited up earth
and smoke and steel as they burst in all directions over the whole
zone. We were shelling Hulluch and Haisnes and Fosse 8 with an
intense, concentrated fire, and the enemy was retaliating by
scattering shells over the town of Loos and our new line between Hill
70 and the chalk-pit, and the whole length of our line from north to
south.
Only two men moved about above the trenches. They were two London boys
carrying a gas-cylinder, and whistling as though it were a health
resort under the autumn sun. . . It was not a health resort. It stank
of death, from piles of corpses, all mangled and in a mush of flesh
and bones lying around the Loos redoubt and all the ground in this
neighborhood, and for a long distance north.
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