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He reaches the ruins after ten miles from the fort, when they lie between twelve and thirteen from El-Wijh. He calls the porphyritic trap "dark granite." He descends the "caves" with ropes and lights; yet he does not perceive that they are mining shafts and tunnels, puits d'air, adits for the workmen, and pits by which the ore was "brought to grass." And the Hydrographic Chart is as bad.
There was a front line trench and portions of a reserve line, all rather the worse for wear, while the communication trenches, "Hurrah" and "Humbug" Alleys, were unspeakably filthy. The whole area at the top of the hill was an appalling mess of tangled machinery from Puits 14 bis, battered trenches, the remains of two woods, Bois Hugo and Bois Razé, and shell holes of every size and shape.
Before Francis I with his habitual initiative had pierced the eight great forest roads which come together at the octagon called the Puits du Roi, the forest was not crossed by any thoroughfare; the nearest thing thereto was the Chaussée de Brunhaut, a Roman way which bounded it on the south and east.
The Scots of the 15th Division, weakened by many losses and exhausted by their long fatigue, had been forced to abandon the important position of Puits 14 a mine-shaft half a mile north of Hill 70, linked up in defense with the enemy's redoubt on the northeast side of Hill 70.
The orders given to the Guards were to straighten out this salient on the north by capturing the whole of Hill 70, Puits 14, to the north of it, and the chalk-pit still farther north.
I speak as a man who for some reason which he doesn't remem- ber now, did not pay a visit to the celebrated Puits de Moise, an ancient cistern, embellished with a sculp- tured figure of the Hebrew lawgiver.
More than that, as has been proved by the recent observations of Puits of Paris, its orbit is steadily but surely advancing sunward. That is to say, it is rapidly becoming too hot for clothes to be worn at all; and this, to the Wenuses, was so alarming a prospect that the immediate problem of life became the discovery of new quarters notable for a gentler climate and more copious fashions.
Puits 14 itself was won by a party of Scots Guards, led by an officer named Captain Cuthbert, which engaged in hand-to-hand fighting, routing out the enemy from the houses. Some companies of the Grenadiers came to the support of their comrades in the Scots Guards, but suffered heavy losses themselves.
The ruins of this establishment are scarcely more than two miles from La Haye du Puits, but they unfortunately consist of little more than some arches of the abbey church and some of the walls of the lesser buildings. Immediately north of La Haye there is some more heathy ground, but it is higher than the country surrounding Lessay.
"We have no very authentic records of these two basilicas; at most are we certain that the Roman Governor of the land of Chartres completely destroyed the first and at the same time slaughtered a great number of Christians, among them his own daughter Modesta, throwing the corpses into a well dug near the cave, and thence known as le Puits des Saints Forts.
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