is Black Country
between Lens and Hulluch. From the flat country below the distant ridges
of Notre Dame de Lorette and Vimy there rose a number of high black
cones made by the refuse of the coal-mines, which were called Fosses.
Around those black mounds there was great slaughter, as at Fosse 8 and
Fosse 10 and Puits 14bis, and the Double Crassier near Loos, because
they gave observation and were important to capture or hold. Near them
were the pit-heads, with winding-gear in elevated towers of steel which
were smashed and twisted by gun-fire; and in Loos itself were two of
those towers joined by steel girders and gantries, called the "Tower
Bridge" by men of London. Rows of red cottages where the French miners
had lived were called corons, and where they were grouped into large
units they were called cites, like the Cite St.-Auguste, the Cite
St.-Pierre, and the Cite St.-Laurent, beyond Hill 70, on the outskirts
of Lens. All those places were abandoned now by black-grimed men who had
fled down mine-shafts and galleries with their women and children, and
had come up on our side of the lines at Noeux-les-Mines or Bruay or
Bully-Grenay, where they still lived close to the war. Shells pierced
the roof of the church in that squalid village of Noeux--les-Mines and
smashed some of the cottages and killed some of the people now and then.
Later in the war, when aircraft dropped bombs at night, a new peril
over--shadowed them with terror, and they lived in their cellars after
dusk, and sometimes were buried there. But they would not retreat
farther back--not many of them--and on days of battle I saw groups of
French miners and dirty-bloused girls excited by the passage of our
troops and by the walking wounded who came stumbling back, and by
stretcher cases unloaded from ambulances to the floors of their dirty
cottages. High velocities fell in some of the streets, shrapnel-shells
whined overhead and burst like thunderclaps. Young hooligans of France
slouched around with their hands in their pockets, talking to our men
in a queer lingua franca, grimacing at those noises if they did not come
too near. I saw lightly wounded girls among them, with bandaged heads
and hands, but they did not think that a reason for escape. With
smoothly braided hair they gathered round British soldiers in steel hats
and clasped their arms or leaned against their shoulders. They had known
many of those men before. They were their sweethearts. In those foul