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Updated: June 6, 2025
In the Château at Boesinghe, where the moss is growing round the broken doors and the rank weeds fill the garden, with the stagnant Yser hard by; in Ypres, where the rooks nest in the crumbling Cloth Hall and a man's footsteps ring loud and hollow on the silent square; in Vermelles, where the chalky plains stretch bare towards the east, and the bloody Hohenzollern redoubt, with the great squat slag heap beside it, lies silent and ominous; in Guillemont and Guinchy, where the sunken road was stiff with German dead and no two bricks remain on top of one another; on Vimy Ridge, in Bullecourt and Croisilles, in all these places, in all the hundred others, the seed has been sown.
We walked down the long straight road toward the ruins of Vermelles with a young soldier-guide who on the outskirts of the village remarked in a casual way: "No one is allowed along this road in daylight, as a rule. It's under hobservation of the henemy." "Then why the devil did you come this way?" asked my companion. "I thought you might prefer the short cut, sir."
On December 7, 1914, the French captured Vermelles, a minor village a few miles southwest of La Bassée. This little village had been the center of a continuous struggle for mastership for nearly two months. At last the French occupied this rather commanding point, important to the Allies, as it afforded an excellent view over a wide stretch of country occupied by the Germans.
Of course you'll take tea in our mess?" I was glad to take tea in a little house at the end of the ruined high-street of Vermelles which had by some miracle escaped destruction, though a shell had pierced through the brick wall of the parlor and had failed to burst. It was there still, firmly wedged, like a huge nail. The tea was good, in tin mugs.
It started at Cambrin, passed the Factory and Factory Dug-outs, and, following the Annequin-Haisnes Railway to its junction with the Vermelles Line, acted as dividing line between the two halves of the Brigade Sector. From the left Battalion Headquarters to the front line, an often much battered part of it, it belonged to the left sector.
The entrance to this tunnel system was at the end of our only communication trench, Stansfield Road, a deep well-gridded trench running all the way from Vermelles. Battalion Headquarters lived in it, in a small deep dug-out, 200 yards from the tunnel entrance, and at its junction with the only real fire trench, O.B.1, the reserve line.
Rations and R.E. material were loaded at Sailly, taken by train to the Mansion House Dump at Vermelles, and then by mule-drawn trucks to the front. The Exeter Dump was lively at times, especially when a machine gunner on Fosse 8 slag heap, popularly known as Ludendorf, was pointing his gun in that direction.
The poor parents were uncertain as to his fate for many weeks, but he finally died of his wounds in a hospital behind the German lines. Then, little more than six months later came the second blow. Geoffrey, the younger brother, aged nineteen, fell on September 29th, near Vermelles. Nothing could be more touching than the letters from officers and men about this brave, sweet-tempered boy.
Between the 1st and 4th of March, 1916, there was sharp grenade fighting southeast of Vermelles, in some mine craters. After severe bombardment the Germans attempted to recapture the craters by infantry attacks, but apparently without success. In Artois they endeavored to drive the French from a crater they occupied near the road from Neuville to La Folie, and failed in the enterprise.
We stumbled over broken walls and pushed through undergrowth to get to the graveyard, where some broken crosses and wire frames with immortelles remained as relics of that garden where the people of Vermelles had laid their dead to rest. New dead had followed old dead. I stumbled over something soft, like a ball of clay, and saw that it was the head of a faceless man, in a battered kepi.
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