d I came into the desolate lands of death,
where there is but little movement, and the only noise is that of guns.
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.
The shells of all these batteries went crying through the air with high,
whining sighs, which ended in the cough of death. The roar of the guns
was incessant and very close. The enemy was sweeping a road to my right,
and his shells went overhead with a continual rush, passing our shells,
which answered back. The whole sky was filled with these thunderbolts.
Many of them were "Jack Johnsons," which raised a volume of black smoke
where they fell. I wondered how it would feel to be caught by one of
them, whether one would have any consciousness before being scattered.
Fear, which had walked with me part of the way, left me for a time. I
had a strange sense of exhilaration, an intoxicated interest in this
foul scene and the activity of that shell-fire.

Peering over the parapet, we saw the whole panorama of the battleground.
It was but an ugly, naked plain, rising up to Hulluch and Haisnes on the
north, falling down to Loos on the east, from where we stood, and rising
again to Hill 70 (now in German hands again), still farther east and a
little south.

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