There is little of the debris of the fight--a rotten butt-end of a rifle, a few shreds of German bombs, an old-fashioned gas bag. One recalls that the British first used gas at Loos. The air on Hill 70 on that September day was pregnant with gas. Many of our fellows died of it. The Germans on their side made much use of stick-bombs. The hill was strewn with "buckshee" bombs. Did not a young soldier valiantly digging drive a pick through one, and send himself and Lord Petre of the Grenadiers to better country? The enemy manufactured vast quantities of this bomb--it was a pet toy of his, curiously exemplifying his mind. Its stated object was to terrify rather than to kill, and Englishmen believing more in iron and "good shrapnel effects" always despised it. But it was responsible for an enormous number of accidents. On the brow of the hill and beyond there are increasing signs of German habitation. Near a vast white wallowing mine-crater there is a barricade of sand-bags and wire, the point of difference 'twixt friend and foe. After that one soon comes upon those wooden framed cellarways which plunge from the side of the trench into the bowels of the earth. They go down and down and are seldom explored by soldier or civilian. Some of these have their gruesome secrets in their dark depths. Many Germans were killed in them. Fear and industry conceived them. They were safe enough at ordinary times, but death-traps in an attack; a man at the bottom of a steep pit stood little chance against an enemy at the door with a bomb. The British and French in this case understood the war better than the Germans. A slighter cover or shelter whilst giving less sense of security did give vigilance and alertness. Germany dug the grave of her cause far from the ends she had in view and settled down to a war of concrete and defence when she should have understood her lines as the merest temporary abiding places on the way to victory. It prolonged the settlement for years. How the cornflowers blossom on the German side! Did not they sow the seeds here for their Kaiser. They sowed the seed--and now it blossoms on the wilderness. Bright blue flowers shine in the midst of withered nature, otherwise in September 1920 the crest of Hill 70 is so covered with brittle yellow weeds that a match would set it aflame from end to end. It is like a dried inland beach of the old war. The waves no longer roll up with thunder and expire as once they did. But you can see in imagination the young Guards officer in his Burberry, cane in hand leading his flower of manhood--forward, forward, toward the shore of Lens--see the expiring first line and the second line that follows passing through and over it, the third that goes again---- They were the waves which at last crumbled all defences.