o the foot of Vimy
Ridge. Notre Dame de Lorette rose against the sky-line to the north.

Vimy and Notre Dame de Lorette--sweet but terrible names! Only a summer
had passed since Vimy was the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of
the war. From a distance the prevailing colour of the steep slope is
ochre; it gives the effect of having been scraped bare in preparation
for some gigantic enterprise. A nearer view reveals a flush of green;
nature is already striving to heal. From top to bottom it is pockmarked
by shells and scarred by trenches--trenches every few feet, and between
them tangled masses of barbed wire still clinging to the "knife
rests" and corkscrew stanchions to which it had been strung. The huge
shell-holes, revealing the chalk subsoil, were half-filled with water.
And even though the field had been cleaned by those East Indians I had
seen on the road, and the thousands who had died here buried, bits of
uniform, shoes, and accoutrements and shattered rifles were sticking
in the clay--and once we came across a portion of a bedstead, doubtless
taken by some officer from a ruined and now vanished village to his
dugout. Painfully, pausing frequently to ponder over these remnants, so
eloquent of the fury of the struggle, slipping backward at every step
and despite our care getting tangled in the wire, we made our way up
the slope. Buttercups and daisies were blooming around the edges of the
craters.

As we drew near the crest the major warned me not to expose myself. "It
isn't because there is much chance of our being shot," he explained,
"but a matter of drawing the German fire upon others." And yet I found it
hard to believe--despite the evidence at my feet--that war existed here.
The brightness of the day, the emptiness of the place, the silence--save
for the humming of the gale--denied it. And then, when we had cautiously
rounded a hummock at the top, my steel helmet was blown off--not by a
shrapnel, but by the wind! I had neglected to tighten the chin-strap.

Immediately below us I could make out scars like earthquake cracks
running across the meadows--the front trenches. Both armies were buried
like moles in these furrows. The country was spread out before us,
like a map, with occasionally the black contour of a coal mound rising
against the green, or a deserted shaft-head. I was gazing at the famous
battlefield of Lens. Villages, woods, whose names came back to me as the
major repeated them, lay like c