On the 18th September the C.O.'s of all the battalions in the Guards Division motored to the Béthune district, where a reconnaissance was made "from convenient observation-posts" of the country between Cuinchy and Loos that they might judge the weight of the task before them.
It was a jagged, scarred, and mutilated sweep of mining-villages, factories, quarries, slag-dumps, pit-heads, chalk-pits, and railway embankments—all the plant of an elaborate mechanical civilization connected above ground and below by every means that ingenuity and labour could devise to the uses of war. The ground was trenched and tunnelled with cemented and floored works of terrifying permanency that linked together fortified redoubts, observation-posts, concealed batteries, rallying-points, and impregnable shelters for waiting reserves. So it ran along our front from Grenay north of the plateau of Notre Dame de Lorette, where two huge slag-heaps known as the Double Crassier bristled with machine-guns, across the bare interlude of crop land between Loos and Hulluch, where a high German redoubt crowned the slopes to the village of Haisnes with the low and dangerous Hohenzollern redoubt south of it. Triple lines of barbed wire protected a system of triple trenches, concrete-faced, holding dug-outs twenty feet deep, with lifts for machine-guns which could appear and disappear in emplacements of concrete over iron rails; and the observation-posts were capped with steel cupolas. In the background ample railways and a multitude of roads lay ready to launch fresh troops to any point that might by any chance be forced in the face of these obstacles.
Our armies were brought up for the most part on their own feet and lay in trenches not in the least concreted; nor were our roads to the front wholly equal to the demands on them. The assaulting troops were the First and Fourth Army Corps (less some troops detached to make a feint at Festubert and Cuinchy) disposed in the trenches south from the line of the Béthune-La Bassée Canal to the Vermelles-Hulluch road.
