The trenches proper were for the most part deep and narrow, stout of wall, reinforced with every manner of material likely to strengthen the defensive ramparts and bastions. Here the thickness of a piece of house wall had been doubled by sandbags. There the face of a trench had been reinforced by huge stones, interspersed with all sorts of receptacles, such as water-buckets, cooking utensils, wheel-barrows, and all manner of tins, filled with brick, small stones or cement. A woman's bodice neatly tied about a few pounds of stone, the wooden cover of a household sewing-machine, loaded with brick, and even a stout brown-paper cardboard box full of mortar, caught my eye as I searched the stoutly-built wall curved round and back and round again through what had once been a house-yard. Traverses that demanded admiration from the most apathetic student of engineering, loops of trenches that commanded every front, approach trenches that wriggled like some great yellow-brown snake off toward the rear, were perfect each one in its own way. Practically every point in the town could be reached by a German on tour of inspection of its defences, without the necessity of his leaving cover, save to cross the roadway of the main thoroughfare. Beside all this under-the-surface protection, the shelter of the buildings, all constructed of brick or stone and strongly built, was by no means to be despised. Truly, when the French officer said no place could be made more secure, there was some reason for his words. But strong as it was, and in spite of its splendid artillery support, the position was one that the French had to take, whether or no. Six long weeks of constant work was represented by those torn and wounded fields that stretched away westward to Noyelles. Sapping their way, entrenching and consolidating every forward step, the little men in red and blue crept up to a line varying by from one to two hundred yards, and even nearer at one point, to the German front. [Illustration: A bird's-eye view of shattered Vermelles, January, 1915] [Illustration: Major Desmond Fitzgerald of the Lancers and a gas-pipe trench-mortar] But sapping and mining, and entrenching and consolidating, so valuable in themselves, responsible for the finely fortified position of the Germans in Vermelles, and the splendid mole-advance against them by the French, was not the chief factor that was to play the decisive part in the war-game that culminated in the capture of the town on December 7th. Gun-fire was the decisive element. To the beloved "soixante-quinze" was to go the chief honour. Only a careful personal inspection of the town could tell one the real story of Vermelles as I saw it on January 15th. The camera might assist, and, in spite of the dull weather, I obtained a few pictures with that end in view, but the camera could give one the story only haltingly and in part.