Now it can be Told by Philip Gibbs — Read

I watched the preliminary bombardment of the Loos battlefields from a black slag heap beyond Nœux-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. It was a hideous territory, this Black Country between Lens and Hulluch. From the flat country below the distant ridges of Notre Dame de Lorette and Vimy there rose a number of high black cones made by the refuse of the coal-mines, which were called Fosses. Around those black mounds there was great slaughter, as at Fosse 8 and Fosse 10 and Puits 14 bis, and the Double Crassier near Loos, because they gave observation and were important to capture or hold. Near them were the pitheads, with winding-gear in elevated towers of steel which were smashed and twisted by gunfire; and in Loos itself were two of those towers joined by steel girders and gantries, called the "Tower Bridge" by men of London. Rows of red cottages where the French miners had lived were called corons, and where they were grouped into large units they were called cités, like the Cité St.

-Auguste, the Cité St.