It is the loneliness which one hates most in these places, especially when shells come along with a beastly noise which seems a particular menace to one's own body as there is nobody else to be killed. So I was glad to fall in with a young officer who was working his way up the line. He had just brought down a wounded man, and was stopping a while in a wayside dressing-station, where there was a friendly and lonely doctor, who offered the hospitality of his sand-bags and steel girders to any passer-by, and said "Stay a bit longer" when bits of shell could be heard whining outside. We went along the way together, close to the grim old muck-heap, the Double Grassier, where Germans and English lived cheek by jowl for two years until recent weeks, fighting each other with bombs when they were bored with each other's company, and so past the village of Loos. The way up to Hill 70 is historic ground, and every bit of brickwork, every stump of a tree, every yard or so of road, is haunted by the memory of gallant men, who in September just two years ago came this way under frightful shell-fire and fell here in great numbers. Among them were the Londoners of the glorious 47th Division and the Scots of the 15th--as I walked by the village of Loos I thought of some friends of mine in the Gordons who had great adventures there that day amongst those dreadful little ruins--and Hill 70 was taken and lost again after heroic fighting and tragic episodes, which are still remembered with a shudder by men who hate to think of them. It is only a few weeks ago that we took the ground beyond in that great Canadian assault upon Hill 70 which I described at the time, and up there on the hill-side--it is not much of a hill, but goes up very gradually to the crest--the trenches are still littered with German relics, and in the deep dug-outs burnt out and blown out there are still German bodies lying. The smell of death comes out of these holes, and it is not a pleasant place.