loud shadows on the sunny plain, and the
faintest shadow of all, far to the eastward, was Lens itself. I marked
it by a single white tower. And suddenly another white tower, loftier
than the first, had risen up! But even as I stared its substance seemed
to change, to dissolve, and the tower was no longer to be seen. Not
until then did I realize that a monster shell had burst beside the
trenches in front of the city. Occasionally after that there came to my
ears the muffed report of some hidden gun, and a ball like a powder-puff
lay lightly on the plain, and vanished. But even the presence of these,
oddly enough, did not rob the landscape of its air of Sunday peace.

We ate our sandwiches and drank our bottle of white wine in a sheltered
cut of the road that runs up that other ridge which the French gained
at such an appalling price, Notre Dame de Lorette, while the major
described to me some features of the Lens battle, in which he had taken
part. I discovered incidentally that he had been severely wounded at the
Somme. Though he had been a soldier all his life, and a good soldier,
his true passion was painting, and he drew my attention to the rare
greens and silver-greys of the stones above us, steeped in sunlight--all
that remained of the little church of Notre Dame--more beautiful, more
significant, perhaps, as a ruin. It reminded the major of the Turners he
had admired in his youth. After lunch we lingered in the cemetery, where
the graves and vaults had been harrowed by shells; the trenches ran
right through them. And here, in this desecrated resting-place of the
village dead, where the shattered gravestones were mingled with barbed
wire, death-dealing fragments of iron, and rusting stick-bombs that had
failed to explode, was a wooden cross, on which was rudely written the
name of Hans Siebert. Mouldering at the foot of the cross was a grey
woollen German tunic from which the buttons had been cut.

We kept the road to the top, for Notre Dame de Lorette is as steep as
Vimy. There we looked upon the panorama of the Lens battle-field once
more, and started down the eastern slope, an apparently smooth expanse
covered now with prairie grasses, in reality a labyrinth of deep
ditches, dugouts, and pits; gruesome remnants of the battle lay
half-concealed under the grass. We walked slowly, making desperate
leaps over the trenches, sometimes perforce going through them, treading
gingerly on the "duck board" at the bottom. We