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Updated: June 6, 2025
Broken rifles, cartouches, water-bottles, torn letters, twisted bayonets, and German stick-bombs littered the ditches which had been dug as trenches across streets of burned-out houses. A young gunner officer whom we met was very civil, and stopped in front of the chateau of Vermelles, a big red villa with the outer walls still standing, and told us the story of its capture. "It was a wild scrap.
From south to north the allied front was commanded by General Maud'huy from Albert to Vermelles; General Smith-Dorrien from Vermelles to Laventie, opposite Lille; General Poultney, from Laventie to Messines; General Haig from Messines to Bixschoote; General de Mitry had French and Belgian mixed troops defending the line from Bixschoote to Nieuport and the sea, supported by an English and French fleet.
I was back again in derelict Vermelles, with its spattered water tower, and the flat desolate plain in front. Loos is out of sight over the hill; only the great slag heap lies squat and menacing on one's left, with the remnants of Big Willie and Little Willie near to its base in the old blood-soaked Hohenzollern redoubt.
The Brigade band accompanied us through Verquin, and a Staffordshire band played us into Sailly Labourse, where General Montagu-Stuart-Wortley watched us turn on to the main road. There was an hour's halt for teas between here and Noyelles, and finally at 10-5 p.m. we marched into Vermelles.
On relief from the Cambrin trenches on the 7th July the Battalion spent a little over a fortnight in Brigade and Divisional Reserves at Sailly Labourse and the Faubourg d'Arras in Bethune respectively. On the 25th it was in line at Vermelles. This sector was quiet except in that portion which was opposite the Hohenzollern Redoubt, from which huge aerial torpedoes were fired.
Northeast of Vermelles small detachments of British troops penetrated the German trenches on March 6, 1916, but were compelled to retire. Active engagements and furious hand-to-hand fighting centered around Maisons de Champagne. The positions the French had taken on February 11, 1916, were recaptured by surprise bayonet attacks, the Germans taking two officers and 150 men prisoners.
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.
I was faintly conscious of this one day in those very early times, when with the officer who had been a ruler in India I went to a brigade headquarters of the 1st Division near Vermelles. It was not easy nor pleasant to get there, though it was a summer day with fleecy clouds in a blue sky.
No men were out of the trenches yet, though some were being killed there and elsewhere, at the crossroads by Philosophe, and outside the village of Masingarbe, and in the ruins of Vermelles, and away up at Cambrin and Givenchy. The German guns were answering back intermittently, but holding most of their fire until human flesh came out into the open. The battle began at dawn on September 25th.
Our sector this time was Cambrin, called after the village next North of Vermelles, and the sector immediately on the left of our last St. Elie. On the morning of the 1st of December we marched to Annequin, on the Beuvry-La Bassée Road, and relieved some Loyal North Lancashires, Worcestershires and Portuguese in the Brigade support positions.
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