We explored the ruins of Vermelles, where many young Frenchmen had fallen in fighting through the walls and gardens. One could see the track of their strife, in trampled bushes and broken walls. Bits of red rag⁠—the red pantaloons of the first French soldiers⁠—were still fastened to brambles and barbed wire. Broken rifles, cartouches, water-bottles, torn letters, twisted bayonets, and German stick-bombs littered the ditches which had been dug as trenches across streets of burned-out houses.

A young gunner officer whom we met was very civil, and stopped in front of the château of Vermelles, a big red villa with the outer walls still standing, and told us the story of its capture.