like a blood-stained presence! While to the south-east, I make out
Kemmel, Scherpenberg, and the Mont des Cats and in the far north-west
a faint line with a few trees on it--_Passchendaele_!

Passchendaele!--name of sorrow and of glory. What were the British
losses, in that three months' fighting from June to November, 1917,
which has been called the "Third Battle of Ypres," which began with
the victory of the Messines ridge and culminated in the Canadian
capture of Passchendaele?[4] Outside the inner circle of those who
know, there are many figures given. They are alike only in this that
they seem to grow perpetually. Heroic, heart-breaking wrestle with the
old hostile forces of earth and water--black earth and creeping water
and strangling mud! We won the ridge and we held it till the German
advance in April last forced our temporary withdrawal; we had pushed
the Germans off the high ground into the marsh lands beyond; but we
failed, as everyone knows, in the real strategic objects of the
attack, and the losses in the autumn advance on Passchendaele were an
important and untoward factor in the spring fighting of 1918.

[4] Mr. Bonar Law has stated in the House of Commons since these
lines were written that the losses in the third battle of Ypres,
from Messines to Passchendaele, July--October, 1917, were 228,000.

How deeply this Ypres salient enters into the war-consciousness of
Britain and the Empire! As I stand looking over the black stretches of
riddled earth, at the half-demolished pill-boxes in front, at the
muddy pools in the shell-holes under a now darkening sky; at the flat
stretches between us and Kemmel where lie Zillebeke and St. Eloi, and
a score of other names which will be in the mouth of history hundreds
of years hence, no less certainly than the names of those little