h, and into the trenches went the lace-makers of
Nottingham, and the potters of the Five Towns, and the boot-makers of
Leicester, North Staffordshires, and Robin Hoods and Sherwood Foresters,
on the night of the 12th.

On the following morning our artillery concentrated a tremendous fire
upon the redoubt, followed at 1 P.M. by volumes of smoke and gas. The
chief features on this part of the German line were, on the right, a
group of colliers' houses known as the Corons de Pekin, and a slag heap
known as the Dump, to the northeast of that bigger dump called Fosse
8, and on the left another group of cottages, and another black hillock
farther to the right of the Fosse. These positions were in advance of
the Hohenzollern redoubt which our troops were to attack.

It was not an easy task. It was hellish. Intense as our artillery
fire had been, it failed to destroy the enemy's barbed wire and front
trenches sufficiently to clear the way, and the Germans were still
working their machine-guns when the fuses were lengthened, the fire
lifted, and the gas-clouds rolled away.

I saw that bombardment on the morning of Wednesday, October 13th, and
the beginning of the attack from a slag heap close to some of our heavy
guns. It was a fine, clear day, and some of the French miners living
round the pit-heads on our side of the battle line climbed up iron
ladders and coal heaps, roused to a new interest in the spectacle of war
which had become a monotonous and familiar thing in their lives, because
the intensity of our gun-fire and the volumes of smoke-clouds, and a
certain strange, whitish vapor which was wafted from our lines toward
the enemy stirred their imagination, dulled by the daily din of guns, to
a sense of something beyond the usual flight of shells in their part of
the war zone.

"The English are attacking again!" was the message which brought
out these men still living among ruined cottages on the edge of
the slaughter-fields. They stared into the mist, where, beyond the
brightness of the autumn sun, men were about to fight and die. It was
the same scene that I had watched when I went up to the Loos redoubt in
the September battle--a flat, bare, black plain, crisscrossed with
the whitish earth of the trenches rising a little toward Loos and then
falling again so that in the village there only the Tower Bridge was
visible, with its steel girders glinting, high over the horizon line. To
the left the ruins of Hulluch frette