The lighter-coloured masonry halfway up the fine old tower shows where houses were standing built closely round it. Their debris has been entirely cleared away and the Grande Place is as tidy as it is, unhappily, empty.
V.—BETHUNE, LA BASSÉE, AND LOOS
(PLATES 35 TO 42.)
The pleasant little town of Bethune, with its friendly, Scotch-like name, lies just beyond the coal district, a dozen miles north-west of Lens and seven miles west of La Bassée. Our front lines during most of the war crossed the Bethune-La Bassée road about the line of Festubert and Givenchy, two and a half miles short of La Bassée. Although so near the German lines, it was not seriously shelled until the attempted German advance in March and April, 1918, when in two months the whole centre of the town was reduced to ruins. Colonel Gill, taking me through it a few months later, had some difficulty even in recognising "Bond Street," which for years had been a tolerably safe place for buying tobacco, or visiting a barber, or taking lunch, or meeting friends. We walked over 2 feet of brick débris along what must have been the roadway. The outlying parts of the town are comparatively little damaged. The fourteenth-century belfry tower ([Plate 35]) was closely encircled by houses, built up against it, which have altogether disappeared, and the tower itself shows hideous cracks over practically its whole height. The Church of St. Vaast is so completely destroyed that one can only tell one end from the other by the orientation of its site.
In the great German attack of April, 1918, the town was saved by the Lancashires when the Portuguese had failed us near Neuve Chapelle, and when we were compelled to give way from Armentières to Merville, a few miles farther north. The same troops ("second-rate troops" the Germans called them) held Givenchy, on the La Bassée Canal. The village has entirely disappeared. [Plate 36] was taken from a mound on which I believe that the church once stood (but there were not even stones visible on the surface to mark the place), looking back over the British lines. Lord Haig[18] tells how two batteries each left a gun within 500 yards of the draw-bridge at Givenchy, and, assisted by a party of gunners who held the bridge with rifles, succeeded in stopping the German advance at this most critical time.
The country between Bethune and La Bassée and northwards and southwards for miles from that line, was in 1919 a desert, bare of trees, of houses, of crops, of people, growing nothing but shell craters and barbed wire, with thousands of tons of buried broken shells likely to be very offensive to agricultural implements! The seven miles of road between the two towns runs eastward through the desolation, never very far south of the canal, and at Cuinchy close to the brickfields and the "railway triangle," the scene of specially hard fighting in 1915. The triangle again defeated our attack in September, 1916.
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.