Daylight revealed an irregular line of fifteen field-guns and limbers, weary men piling sandbags round their wheels. Already the sandbags had risen to the gun-axles.

The line of guns lay in the centre of a great shallow saucer of ground, scarred with zig-zag trenches; and as the first blue of dawn cleared to white, the men who laboured could see, straight to their front and on the lip of the saucer, the shattered top of a solitary tree. And looking to the left of the tree, they saw,—first of all—a road, and then a big battered farm-house, beyond which—miles away as it seemed to the weary men—rose over the ultimate edge of the huge saucer a something which Gunner Mucksweat, miner by trade, pronounced to be the wheel of a pithead. Had Gunner Mucksweat been able to read a map, he would have known the pithead wheel for the top of Fosse Eight.

Prolonging the line of guns on the left ran the road they had traversed during the night—at its end, the torn roofs of Vermelles; and behind the guns, bunched together over a square mile of ground, stood horses—hundreds and hundreds of horses. For the fourth Southdown Brigade was not alone in that huge saucer of chalk! And behind the horses, parallel to the guns, lay another road, lined with red brick houses, above which towered the huge slag-cone of Fosse Seven.