It is a gloomy sordid country with dirty mining villages placarded with yellow appeals to the proletariat and "Vive la Russie!" "Vive la revolution sociale!" and dirty homes and black-faced men in sooty coaly shirts--miserable Sailly, miserable Vermelles. Then the road debouches upon wide open country, the terrain and the landscape of the battle. It is a chalky heath interlaced and inter-run with trenches and barbed wire. The trenches were mostly dug by Scottish miners and were said to be the admiration of the troops in 1915. But standards in trench digging were low in the first year of the war, and one does not admire them now. The landmarks of the horizon are peaked coal-heaps. The road which goes to Lens is bare and hard. Loos and Hulluch are on the left, and also the German line. Close in to the suburbs of Lens the line crosses the road. Shells must have come thick and fast on these September days. It is not a covetable country to march over under fire. One wonders what exactly the first divisions accomplished here on the days before the Guards came up. Special correspondents were given facilities at the time and one remembers among other things Mr. Buchan's despatch with its native pride in Highland regiments, and a sort of belief that they themselves had won the day. One had the impression of a sort of trial charge of kilted lads which showed what they would do later on. Indeed some of the Highlanders must have actually got into Lens. Nothing could stop them but death. Were the lines between Vermelles and Loos German? These were supposed to have been captured during the first days of the attack. The Guards in artillery formation swept across leftward to Loos, past the spent legions--to the line, to Hill 70, the barrier to Lens city. It is memorable to be in Loos on the anniversary of the opening of the battle, to walk up Hill 70 by the sharp-dug clumsy communication-trench, to reach the lateral lines on the brow of the hill and look down toward the shattered town. And Loos lies in disruption and dejection. It lost every roof, now it has perhaps a score of new ones visible to the eye. The machinery of the pit-head is all down, likewise the clangorous iron tower which shells seemed unable to destroy. Rusty wreckage runs along the base of the coal heap, the length of a long train. Heavy green shrub almost covers the coal embankment. On Hill 70 itself the old rusty wire remains, though so scanty as if much had corroded away. Shell-holes seem to afford more cover than the pitiful scrapings in the chalk of the old trenches. There is a burnt-out wood on the left; on the right is the insurgent industrialism of unruined fosses; ahead are chalk-pits, chalk-mounds, thistles, dry grass, poppies, all dazzling in a bright September noon. Innumerable grasshoppers are whispering in the breeze, and from all horizons one hears also the softened clatter of building. You can even hear what is going on in Lens.