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Ever since the defection of Russia, the Staff had realized the possibility of a German offensive on a large scale, and every effort was being made to organize our defences. With this object, a new "village line" had been built, including Cambrin, Annequin, Vermelles and other villages, and this had now to be wired.
"Before God, Peter," he said, "you're the mightiest hunter since Nimrod. You've often found me game, but never game so big as this!" The Little Hill It was a wise man who said that the biggest kind of courage was to be able to sit still. I used to feel that when we were getting shelled in the reserve trenches outside Vermelles.
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.
Accordingly three companies of the 7th N.F. were detached from the battalion and sent to the forward area. Our daily work was making reserve defences, trenches, deep dugouts, and machine-gun emplacements between Vermelles and Loos. During our stay of about a week at Philosophe the village was quiet.
The red ruins of Vermelles, a mile or so away, were sharply defined, as through stereoscopic lenses, in the quiver of sunlight, and had the sinister look of a death-haunted place. It was where the French had fought their way through gardens, walls, and houses in murderous battle, before leaving it for British troops to hold.
Down south, Vermelles way, the trenches stretch in a comparatively straight line for miles, facing one another squarely, and giving little opportunity for tactical enterprise. The infantry blaze and sputter at one another in front; the guns roar behind; and that is all there is to be said about it. But here, the line follows the curve of each little hill.
A sand-dune was captured near Nieuport, a trench in front of St. Eloi, and ten days' fighting round La Bassée, which severely tried the Indian troops, nearly led to the loss of Givenchy, but quite to the gain of a brickfield. Early in December the French took the château of Vermelles and improved their positions at Lihons and Quesnoy, but suffered in January a reverse north of Vailly.
The chateau of Vermelles, where that had happened, was an empty ruin, and there was no sign of the gilt furniture, or the long mirrors, or the marble Venus when I looked through the charred window-frames upon piles of bricks and timber churned up by shell-fire. The gunner officer took us to the cemetery, to meet some friends of his who had their battery nearby.
Reconnaissances started at once, and on the 8th Col. Jones and all Company Commanders and 2nds in Command went by motor 'bus to Vermelles, and reconnoitred our trenches, held at the time by the Guards Division.
Westwards from this trench ran three communication trenches, all in good condition, Bart's Alley, Left Boyau and Quarry Alley, all leading to the Vermelles broad gauge railway line, whose hedges concealed Sussex trench. Here, in some very elegant, but not very shell-proof dug-outs, lived Battalion Headquarters. The officers' bedrooms, and the Mess were on one side, the offices on the other.
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