(PLATES 35 TO 42.)

The pleasant little town of Bethune, with its friendly, Scotch-like name, lies just beyond the coal district, a dozen miles north-west of Lens and seven miles west of La BassÉe. Our front lines during most of the war crossed the Bethune-La BassÉe road about the line of Festubert and Givenchy, two and a half miles short of La BassÉe. Although so near the German lines, it was not seriously shelled until the attempted German advance in March and April, 1918, when in two months the whole centre of the town was reduced to ruins. Colonel Gill, taking me through it a few months later, had some difficulty even in recognising "Bond Street," which for years had been a tolerably safe place for buying tobacco, or visiting a barber, or taking lunch, or meeting friends. We walked over 2 feet of brick dÉbris along what must have been the roadway. The outlying parts of the town are comparatively little damaged. The fourteenth-century belfry tower (Plate 35) was closely encircled by houses, built up against it, which have altogether disappeared, and the tower itself shows hideous cracks over practically its whole height. The Church of St. Vaast is so completely destroyed that one can only tell one end from the other by the orientation of its site.

In the great German attack of April, 1918, the town was saved by the Lancashires when the Portuguese had failed us near Neuve Chapelle, and when we were compelled to give way from ArmentiÈres to Merville, a few miles farther north. The same troops ("second-rate troops" the Germans called them) held Givenchy, on the La BassÉe Canal. The village has entirely disappeared. Plate 36 was taken from a mound on which I believe that the church once stood (but there were not even stones visible on the surface to mark the place), looking back over the British lines. Lord Haig[18] tells how two batteries each left a gun within 500 yards of the draw-bridge at Givenchy, and, assisted by a party of gunners who held the bridge with rifles, succeeded in stopping the German advance at this most critical time.

The country between Bethune and La BassÉe and northwards and southwards for miles from that line, was in 1919 a desert, bare of trees, of houses, of crops, of people, growing nothing but shell craters and barbed wire, with thousands of tons of buried broken shells likely to be very offensive to agricultural implements! The seven miles of road between the two towns runs eastward through the desolation, never very far south of the canal, and at Cuinchy close to the brickfields and the "railway triangle," the scene of specially hard fighting in 1915. The triangle again defeated our attack in September, 1916.

The little town of La BassÉe (Plate 37), the name of which was for long so familiar to us, is, of course, a heap of ruins. I remember a statement in a German paper in 1914 to the effect that, La BassÉe and the canal (Plate 38, which shows a reconstructed bridge) being in their hands, their final success was quite assured! The eight miles of road from La BassÉe to Lens passes Hulloch and Loos and Hill 70, and enters Lens by the CitÉ St. Laurent, a suburb which was in our hands long before we were in the town itself. The road from Bethune to Lens passes between Loos and the "Double Crassier." The ruined pithead (Plate 39) near Hulloch is only an example of the condition to which the Germans reduced all the colliery workings in the district on which they could lay hands.

The story of the great fights at Loos is full of splendid episodes, although the results of the fighting were very much less than had been hoped for. In April, 1915, the German front lay from a point west of Loos and Lens southward nearly as far as Arras, covering the colliery villages and the Lorette and Vimy Ridges. It was first broken by the great attack in 1915, which gave the French all the Lorette Ridge except its extreme east end. Opposite Loos, across the Lens-BÉthune road, lay the twin slag heaps known as the Double Crassier (Plate 40), where for many months the opposing front trenches were literally within a few yards of each other, the Germans holding the slag heaps. There are stories of mutual courtesies and jocularity between Saxons and our own men under these conditions, which came to an end (from the German side) when Prussians replaced Saxons. But if the trenches had been in our Midlands, with Yorkshire laid waste beyond them, instead of in a foreign country, probably our boys would have felt differently. We did not hear of, or expect to hear of, any similar friendliness where the French poilus were concerned. Farther north came the strongly fortified "Fosse No. 8" and the Hohenzollern Redoubt close to Haisnes, and just short of the canal at Givenchy. What we got to know as the Loos battle began on the 25th of September, 1915. The Double Crassier was taken at once. A man in the London Irish is said to have kicked off a football from the parapet in this attack and dribbled it across No Man's Land to the German first lines.[19] The Hohenzollern Redoubt was penetrated, the Highlanders got to the northern suburbs of Lens, and the front line passed to the east of the Lens-La BassÉe road. But further progress became impossible, and early in October our front line was for the time "stabilised" west of the road. The great redoubt still remained practically in German hands. In this fighting the 47th Division London Territorials took part, the first complete Cockney division to take the field.

Of the Loos episodes there will not be forgotten that which got Piper Laidlaw, of the 7th K.O.S.B., his V.C., for marching up and down on the parapet (close to the CitÉ St. Laurent, a suburb of Lens) with his pipes until all the men were out of the trenches, and carrying on until he was himself wounded. Nor will it be easily forgotten how Mdlle. Moreau, the daughter of a miner, devoted herself, during the first German occupation, to saving and nursing British wounded soldiers, or how later on, when we arrived there, she met our entering troops and, obtaining a rifle, was able to shoot sundry German soldiers who were attacking wounded men. She lost father and brother during the war. One is glad to know that she was awarded the Croix de Guerre, and that some of the soldiers, to whose welfare she was so devoted, regardless of her own safety, have bought land at Bethune and built a little house on it where she can carry on business, which one hopes will be most successful.

The zigzag communication trench, which will be familiar to many of our soldiers (Plate 41), forms a bit of roadside scenery typical of the country here over which the fighting went on in 1915 and for long afterwards. Loos itself was afterwards handed over to the French, who were not, unfortunately, able to retain it. Just beyond Loos, after it had been regained in 1918, I was stumbling over a bit of ground covered with all sorts of dÉbris beside what had been lately German trenches, and which was even then being occasionally enviously shelled, when I saw growing in a crevice below the brick rubbish a garden pansy. I was, no doubt, walking over some cottager's garden, but garden and cottage were all now the same and all equally unrecognisable. The bright little flower, blowing uninjured at the bottom of its rubbish heap, seemed a pleasant emblem of the freeing and recovery of France which was just then coming so near.

Near to my discovery of the heartsease I found some of Colonel Gill's men in charge of a height-finder. They had comfortable enough quarters in a German dugout in which I found, and secured as a prize, a little booklet left behind by its late occupants. It is entitled "Wer da?" ("Who goes there?"), and contains a dozen chapters of a very pious and didactic kind on the duties of a soldier, his oath, his honour, his religion, and so on. The chapter on "Der Kriegsherr und der Eid" is rather pathetic in view of subsequent events. Here is a paragraph from it:

What a cynical comment on this sort of stuff that the precious Kriegsherr ran away from his country and his beloved army a few weeks later! Then, again:

Presumably this particular oath did not belong to the category of scraps of paper. Ninety-eight pages out of the hundred of which the book consists are devoted to this sort of statement and exhortation. But it is only fair to the reverend author to mention that, on the last two pages, under the heading "Im Krieg," he enjoins consideration, as a matter of "Christliche Liebe," for the people of the conquered countries, ending by an emphatic warning that the soldiers should think what would happen to their homes if the enemy were not imbued with the same Christian spirit! Unfortunately, this not very exalted motive for decent behaviour did not prove itself sufficiently vigorous to have any effect on the people whose parsons had gloried in the "merriness of war" four years earlier, when they thought that the fighting would be over and their own side victorious in a couple of months.

When one passes beside or over miles of No Man's Land, such as looks picturesque enough in Plate 42, one has to remember that one is not seeing a miniature landscape of chalk hills, such as would delight any youngster on Hampstead Heath, but seeing, perhaps, a garden, perhaps a cottage home, an orchard, a piece of green meadow, turned into ruin by the Huns. Surely the ghosts of these inanimate things must haunt, with the ghosts of thousands of innocent men, the people who turned their neighbour's country, animate and inanimate, from a joyful and living reality into wilderness and a graveyard!