Vermelles is the best example I have seen of the important rôle that sapping plays in this siege warfare. Indeed, this little village, which the French wrested from the Germans by sapping along and blowing it up house by house, is renowned along the entire front of the Allies as a kind of exhibition model of fighting typical of the war of positions. Vermelles is in the Black Country of the North of France, five miles south-east of Béthune, a pretty little village lying on a small ridge running up from a fertile plain. The French Tenth Army, under General Maud’huy, advancing after the failure of the great German thrust against Arras in October, found their passage barred at Vermelles by the Germans, whose machine-guns, their muzzles thrust out of the cellar openings of the houses, held them up at the very entrance to the village. A French frontal attack from the western approaches to the place failed with heavy loss, and tentative attempts from the flanks to carry the village by assault were fruitless. Every house was a German stronghold, bristling with machine-guns, defended by deep trenches, and linked up by telephone with the _poste de commandement_, which was installed in the cellars of the Château of Vermelles under the front steps. [Illustration: _“Daily Mail” phot._ A BURSTING MINE.] To visit Vermelles, as I was privileged to do, is to get an object-lesson of the methods of the new French Army, that wonderful weapon of efficiency which has emerged finely tempered, pliant, and sharp from the furnace of those first disastrous months of war. Never was the painstaking thoroughness of the French mind seen to better advantage than in the patient and elaborate operations which culminated in the two centres of German resistance in Vermelles, the brewery and the château respectively, being squeezed in a pair of pincers, as it were, and crushed. The French, recognizing that the German machine-guns made a direct attack practically hopeless, sapped their way under each German stronghold in turn, and, having made a breach, rushed in with bomb and bayonet, and made good the position, afterwards sapping on to the next. I found practically every house in Vermelles roofless, every window broken, every wall pierced with loopholes and pitted with shell-holes and bullet-marks. There were long, narrow trenches innumerable, marking the line of the French saps, and ending in deep, wide craters where the explosion had taken place and opened a passage for the French infantry. Four bleak walls surrounding an immense tumulus of rubbish were all that was left of the château, whose grounds were literally honeycombed with trenches in all directions. The Germans made their last stand here, holding in turn the two high red-brick walls surrounding the château grounds until the French, by means of a sap more than 100 yards long, blew a breach and rushed the place.