The little town of La Bassée (Plate 37), the name of which was for long so familiar to us, is, of course, a heap of ruins. I remember a statement in a German paper in 1914 to the effect that, La Bassée and the canal (Plate 38, which shows a reconstructed bridge) being in their hands, their final success was quite assured! The eight miles of road from La Bassée to Lens passes Hulloch and Loos and Hill 70, and enters Lens by the Cité St. Laurent, a suburb which was in our hands long before we were in the town itself. The road from Bethune to Lens passes between Loos and the "Double Crassier." The ruined pithead (Plate 39) near Hulloch is only an example of the condition to which the Germans reduced all the colliery workings in the district on which they could lay hands. The story of the great fights at Loos is full of splendid episodes, although the results of the fighting were very much less than had been hoped for. In April, 1915, the German front lay from a point west of Loos and Lens southward nearly as far as Arras, covering the colliery villages and the Lorette and Vimy Ridges. It was first broken by the great attack in 1915, which gave the French all the Lorette Ridge except its extreme east end. Opposite Loos, across the Lens-Béthune road, lay the twin slag heaps known as the Double Crassier (Plate 40), where for many months the opposing front trenches were literally within a few yards of each other, the Germans holding the slag heaps. There are stories of mutual courtesies and jocularity between Saxons and our own men under these conditions, which came to an end (from the German side) when Prussians replaced Saxons. But if the trenches had been in our Midlands, with Yorkshire laid waste beyond them, instead of in a foreign country, probably our boys would have felt differently. We did not hear of, or expect to hear of, any similar friendliness where the French poilus were concerned. Farther north came the strongly fortified "Fosse No. 8" and the Hohenzollern Redoubt close to Haisnes, and just short of the canal at Givenchy. What we got to know as the Loos battle began on the 25th of September, 1915. The Double Crassier was taken at once. A man in the London Irish is said to have kicked off a football from the parapet in this attack and dribbled it across No Man's Land to the German first lines.[19] The Hohenzollern Redoubt was penetrated, the Highlanders got to the northern suburbs of Lens, and the front line passed to the east of the Lens-La Bassée road. But further progress became impossible, and early in October our front line was for the time "stabilised" west of the road. The great redoubt still remained practically in German hands. In this fighting the 47th Division London Territorials took part, the first complete Cockney division to take the field. [19] Buchan, vol. x., p. 174. [Illustration: _PLATE XXXVI._ GIVENCHY.