I had an astounding view of all this work in Lens, and it was as beautiful as a dream-picture and weird as a nightmare. The snows had melted, and the wind had turned south, and the sun was pouring down under a blue sky across which white fleece sailed. Below, outspread, was a wide panorama of battle, from Loos to Vimy, the great panorama of French mining country, with all its slag-hills casting black shadows across the sun-swept plain, and thousands of miners' cottages, "corons" as they are called, all bright and red as the light poured upon them, all arranged in straight rows and oblong blocks of streets in separate townships. Not one of these houses was without shell-holes and broken walls, for the war has swept round them and over them for two years and more, but they looked strangely new and complete. Between them and beyond them and all about them tall chimneys stood and enormous steel girders and gantries of pit-head and power stations. To the left of Lens the tower of the main waterworks was crowned with a white dome like a Grecian temple, and to the right was Lens Church, behind a hill where I saw our men fighting. It was like looking at war in Bolton or Wigan, but more beautiful than those towns of ours, because the walls were not black and there was a bright, fine light over all this mining country. The Double Crassier on the edge of the Loos battlefields was to the left of where I stood, curiously white and chalky as the sun flung its rays upon those two close hillocks. Moving forward towards Lens I looked straight down the streets of that city. If a cat had moved across one of those roads I should have seen it. If Germans had come out of any of those houses I should have seen them. But nothing moved up the streets or down them. All those straight streets were empty. It looked as if those thousands of red houses were uninhabited. But all the time I watched enormous explosions rose in Lens and Liévin, sending up volumes of curly smoke. The enemy was destroying the city and its priceless mining works. As the mines exploded it looked as if the earth had opened among all this maze of works and cottages, letting forth turbulent clouds of fire and smoke. It was mostly smoke with a stab of flame in the heart of it. Some of these thick, rising clouds were richly coloured with the red dust of cottages, but others were of absolute black, spreading out in mushroom shape monstrously.