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At night, as dark fell, the people of Bethune gathered in the great square by the Hotel de Ville, which afterward was smashed, and listened to the laboring of the guns over there by Vermelles and Noeux-les-Mines, and Grenay, and beyond Notre Dame de Lorette, where the French guns were at work. There were loud, earth shaking rumblings, and now and then enormous concussions.
To move them in daylight to the trenches meant inevitable loss of life and almost certain demoralization under the enemy's gun-fire. "Between 11 A.M. and 12 noon the central brigade of these divisions filed past me at Bethune and Noeux-les-Mines, respectively," wrote Sir John French. It was not possible for them to reach our old trenches until 4 P.M. It was Gen.
It was relieved from the trenches on the 30th September, and after one night spent in the ruined houses of Loos went to Noeux-les-Mines for a few days to re-organise and re-equip. On the 7th October the Battalion returned to the front line which was alongside the Lens-Hulluch Road to the north of Loos. The trench had evidently once been the ditch on the side of the road.
This ground was the scene of the main British attack on Loos two months later, and the building was the famous Tower Bridge. The squalid little town between Houchin and Sailly, at whose busy coal-mine the enemy intermittently threw shells, was Noeux-les-Mines, where Lord French had his forward headquarters during the fighting.
The sight of those dejected men was tragic and pitiful. Meanwhile, at 6 P.M. on the evening of the first day of battle, the Guards arrived at Noeux-les-Mines.
Machine guns were kept in the first trench and on account of the intense cold had to be dismounted and kept by lighted braziers to keep the lubricating oil and water in their jackets from freezing. The entanglement in front was very poor and consisted only of one fence. When not in the line the Battalion rested at Noeux-les-Mines or Mazingarbe. At this latter village Christmas Day was spent.
The 9th was held in close support, ready to exploit any success that was gained, but, unfortunately, the attack was a total failure. The Battalion came in for some very heavy retaliatory shell fire. On the 14th October the Battalion was taken out of the line and marched to Noeux-les-Mines, where it entrained for Lillers.
I watched the preliminary bombardment of the Loos battlefields from a black slag heap beyond Noeux-les-Mines, and afterward went on the battleground up to the Loos redoubt, when our guns and the enemy's were hard at work; and later still, in years that followed, when there was never a silence of guns in those fields, came to know the ground from many points of view.
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.
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.
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