had dashed itself in vain; the hillside was white with the unburied bones of the men who won the ridge in October, 1915, for a day, only to be swept back by a German counter-attack of overwhelming force. The Germans proudly boasted the impregnability of a position which protected their strangle-hold upon the coalfields of Lens and gave them a jumping-off place for a further adventure westward to the Channel ports. When the greater portion of the Ridge was stormed in a fierce sustained assault by the Canadian troops on the morning of April 9, 1917, the reverberation of the achievement went round the world; and its echoes will long persist.

Vimy Ridge—a swell of land five miles in length which rises so gradually on the southern slopes that one hardly realizes the elevation until he stands upon the crest and notes how the ground falls sheer away to the eastward—marks the eastern rim of one of the bloodiest battlegrounds of the whole war. Many Canadians have but the haziest knowledge of the battles that were fought hereabouts in the early summer of 1915; but the flower of the highly trained armies with which France and Germany entered the war lie buried here.

When, after the German defeat on the Marne in September, 1914, and the check to the Allies on the Aisne, the race to the northern sea began with the Germans keeping a step in advance and thus blocking the constant French attempt to outflank them from the west, all the high ground in this region was occupied by the Germans; and when the fronts became rigid the French found themselves in a dangerously insecure position with the German possession of the high hill of Notre Dame de Lorette threatening all the coal fields of northern France and the southern shore of the Channel. During the winter of 1914-15 the French organized their attack, and in the early summer they set themselves doggedly to the task of turning the Germans out of these strong places. The enemy held the towering hill of Notre Dame and the cluster of houses known as Ablain St. Nazaire at its foot; across the little Souchez river the village of Carency on a slight eminence; a mile or so to the south the hamlet of Neuville St. Vaast, on the crest of a swell in the ground; southward from the latter point and stretching eastward almost to the base of Vimy Ridge they had prepared a huge network and maze of trenches and redoubts which acquired a sinister renown under the name of the Labyrinth.

For weeks during the summer of 1915 the battle raged here continuously; and literally the French drove the Germans foot by foot and yard by yard from these positions; out of Carency and down the Souchez valley; back step by step from the heights of Notre Dame; trench by trench the Labyrinth was wrested from them; and by the late summer the Germans had withdrawn behind the great ridge of Vimy which lay athwart the path of the advancing French. There they stood savagely at bay, and when the French, in unison with the British attack at Loos, north of Lens, essayed in October to storm the hill, they exacted a bloody revenge for their earlier defeats. Afterwards this area became part of the British front, when the French moved to the south bank of the Somme; and after a year of inactivity, varied by a single unsuccessful attack upon a portion of the ridge's defences by a British brigade, the Canadians, in the winter of 1916-17, took over this sector and set themselves the task of taking the Ridge as their initial contribution to the great spring offensive that was foreshadowed.

I stood almost in the centre of this huge battlefield in the closing hours of a sombre March day; a light mist was shrouding the crests of the uplands; in the valleys the darkness of night was already falling; for fleeting moments the dying sun, through a breach in the cloud battlements, threw gleams of wintry sunshine over the scene. Nearby were the abandoned ruins of what was once the hamlet of Carency. To the right Vimy Ridge rose slowly to the sky line, flaring up at its northern end into the steeper slopes of "the Pimple." Next came a narrow valley; and then the ridge resumed, turning now almost due west and rising to the height of Notre Dame de Lorette that dominated the landscape. At the base of the sloping terraces that came down from the hill-top the little river Souchez ran, turning north-easterly through the gorge and onward towards Lens. This little stream has known its current dammed by the wedged bodies of dead men; its banks have brimmed with human blood. Beyond the stream at the foot of the hill were the ruins of Ablain St. Nazaire; and nearby all that remained of the sugar factory about which raged an Homeric struggle, noted in the battle bulletins of those days. Up those slopes, now so still in the fading daylight, the French pushed their way day by day and week by week until they planted their flag on its crest. To the south and east they fought their way over Neuville St. Vaast and through the tangled mazes of the Labyrinth. Within a radius of three miles from the place upon which we stood, over one hundred thousand French soldiers who fell in six months' fighting in 1915 lie buried. These incredible figures were vouched for by an officer of high rank.

When the Canadians moved into this area in the winter of 1916-17 they made their homes amidst the wreckage of these battlefields. They took over the trenches along the lower slopes of Vimy Ridge which were reachable only by communication trenches and sunken roads over open ground in plain view in daylight of the Germans who held the crest of the ridge and its western slopes half-way down. Behind this active front they built their secondary positions on the battlegrounds of 1915. Thus the First Division was encamped upon the ground of the Labyrinth; the divisional headquarters were in a German dug-out thirty-nine steps downward from the surface. The reshifting of trenches and dugouts in this neighborhood was not, the Canadians found, to be lightly attempted; for the place was one huge—if unmarked—cemetery where French and Germans by the thousand had been buried where they fell.

Over this area for a distance of miles the Canadian corps had planted its camps as the line moved forward in front. Along the roads which cross in all directions one could read the sign-posts of the regiments pointing the way to collections of Nissen huts and smaller wooden structures. Here, too, were defensive trenches and strong redoubts prepared for the reception of the enemy in the event of a German advance. One could easily imagine how busy this scene had been in the summer and autumn of 1917 when the Canadian corps were encamped hereabouts. But on the March evening when I saw it, it was bleak and cheerless beyond the power of words to express. The tide of war had flowed past and left the wrecked countryside vacant—the huts empty and the camps abandoned save for, here and there, a handful of men engaged in salvage work; the roadways, once swarming with life, deserted and silent! Over all desolation and loneliness rested like a pall; everywhere the wreckage of battle, the debris of destruction; everywhere the sense of man's mortality! A grim and melancholy expanse; yet withal holy ground, for here men by the tens of thousands died for mankind!

CHAPTER III

THE ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION

Wherever in our flying trip we touched the border line between the actual battlefields and the secondary districts of the war—as for instance Amiens and Valenciennes—we saw human life finding its way into normal channels; but over the areas of continued and desperate fighting there was still the abomination of desolation. Here