traffic policemen one meets at every important corner we climbed the hill
and left the motor among the great trees, which are still fortunately
preserved. And we stood for a few minutes, gazing over miles and miles
of devastation. Then, taking the motor once more, we passed through
wrecked and empty villages until we came to 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