The next question was the best way of getting home. The friendly mist had by now disappeared, and it was hardly advisable to face the open road again, even if this had not involved the ghastly walk along the death-strewn communication trench. My friend finally decided to find the end of a communication trench that, starting from a point in the north-western corner of the village, led into the old German front line between the Lens Road and the Loos Road Redoubts. To reach this the greater part of Loos had to be traversed, but the streets in this direction were fairly safe. They were, however, even more encumbered with the dead bodies of men and horses than those in the other half of the town. It seems that a large number of men had been driven to the dug-outs and bombed there, and that when these same dug-outs were required for Allied occupation, their former tenants were evicted into the road, for the burial parties to deal with when time permitted. Wonderful structures were these dug-outs, examples of the enemy's thoroughness. Not content with the protection afforded by a cellar, in many places they had excavated large chambers below the cellars themselves, whose floors they had paved with bricks and whose walls they had lined with boards. Once in them the garrison was perfectly safe from the most furious bombardment. A further example of method was to be seen in the treatment of shells that had fallen blind. When these were of medium size, they had been collected in small heaps and surrounded with barbed wire to prevent inquisitive fingers experimenting with them. In the back yard of a cottage lay the enormous bulk of a fifteen-inch shell, that had judiciously been left where it fell, and had been honoured by a complicated stockade of its own. All this seemed to contrast with the present state of the town, which was everywhere littered with military stores of every conceivable kind. Some attempt had been made to collect them into heaps, but even this attempt had been very half-hearted. War is, anyhow, an expensive amusement, and it seems a pity to make it more so by sheer lack of method. For not only Loos itself, but the whole of the country over which the advance was made was littered with arms, ammunition, equipment, bombs, in prodigious numbers. My friend, having occasion to go into Loos again some weeks later, found these heaps still untouched, and was foolish enough to report their existence and their exact position. As a reward for this unwarranted officiousness, he was requested to escort a wagon to Loos and indicate the localities where these various stores lay, on an evening when the battery was at its busiest, an invitation that he firmly declined.