_The British positions at Givenchy, north of the La Bassée Canal, looking back from the site of the village. The holding of these positions in April, 1918, prevented Ludendorff's final attack from reaching Bethune._] [Illustration: _PLATE XXXVII._ LA BASSÉE. _The ruined village as it was left, when the roadways were cleared, after the evacuation by the Germans in their retreat in 1918._] [Illustration: _PLATE XXXVIII._ THE LA BASSÉE CANAL. _The temporary lifting bridge over the canal at La Bassée. The buildings are, of course, reconstruction. The German newspapers proclaimed that the capture of the canal here, in 1915, made the result of the war quite certain!_] [Illustration: _PLATE XXXIX._ A PITHEAD. _Pithead work near Hulloch--a fair example of the state to which all pit works in the district were reduced before the Germans left._] Of the Loos episodes there will not be forgotten that which got Piper Laidlaw, of the 7th K.O.S.B., his V.C., for marching up and down on the parapet (close to the Cité St. Laurent, a suburb of Lens) with his pipes until all the men were out of the trenches, and carrying on until he was himself wounded. Nor will it be easily forgotten how Mdlle. Moreau, the daughter of a miner, devoted herself, during the first German occupation, to saving and nursing British wounded soldiers, or how later on, when we arrived there, she met our entering troops and, obtaining a rifle, was able to shoot sundry German soldiers who were attacking wounded men. She lost father and brother during the war. One is glad to know that she was awarded the Croix de Guerre, and that some of the soldiers, to whose welfare she was so devoted, regardless of her own safety, have bought land at Bethune and built a little house on it where she can carry on business, which one hopes will be most successful. The zigzag communication trench, which will be familiar to many of our soldiers (Plate 41), forms a bit of roadside scenery typical of the country here over which the fighting went on in 1915 and for long afterwards. Loos itself was afterwards handed over to the French, who were not, unfortunately, able to retain it. Just beyond Loos, after it had been regained in 1918, I was stumbling over a bit of ground covered with all sorts of débris beside what had been lately German trenches, and which was even then being occasionally enviously shelled, when I saw growing in a crevice below the brick rubbish a garden pansy. I was, no doubt, walking over some cottager's garden, but garden and cottage were all now the same and all equally unrecognisable. The bright little flower, blowing uninjured at the bottom of its rubbish heap, seemed a pleasant emblem of the freeing and recovery of France which was just then coming so near.