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Updated: May 25, 2025
Our line ran through the houses of Liévin, across the Lens road, round the Eastern edge of Cité St. Pierre, and through Cité St. Edouard to the slopes of "Hill 70." The whole neighbourhood was covered with coal mines. Each had its machine buildings, its slag heap, and its rows of miners' cottages, called "Corons," all in perfectly straight lines.
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.
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.
Fosse 3 had a large group of mine buildings standing on a slag heap, which ran Southwards from "Hill 65," ending above the river with a thirty foot slope. The Western face was the same height, and at its foot on our side was a large lake. The Corons were on the slopes of the Hill and round its base on the Western side.
That was the mise-en-scene of the battle of Loos those mining towns behind the lines, then a maze of communication trenches entered from a place called Philosophe, leading up to the trench-lines beyond Vermelles, and running northward to Cambrin and Givenchy, opposite Hulluch, Haisnes, and La Bassee, where the enemy had his trenches and earthworks among the slag heaps, the pit-heads, the corons and the cites, all broken by gun-fire, and nowhere a sign of human life aboveground, in which many men were hidden.
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