o cunningly
hidden away in its pit. There was a great deal of cheery shouting and
waving of hands as we went off. And in two minutes the battery was
out of sight--even though we knew exactly where it was!

We made our way slowly back, through the lengthening shadows, over
the shell-pitted ground. The motor cars were waiting, and Johnson,
too. Everything was shipshape and ready for a new start, and we
climbed in.

As we drove off I looked back at Vimy Ridge. And I continued to gaze
at it for a long time. No longer did it disappoint me. No longer did
I regard it as an insignificant hillock. All that feeling that had
come to me with my first sight of it had been banished by my
introduction to the famous ridge itself.

It had spoken to me eloquently, despite the muteness of the myriad
tongues it had. It had graven deep into my heart the realization of
its true place in history.

An excrescence in a flat country--a little hump of ground! That is
all there is to Vimy Ridge. Aye! It does not stand so high above the
ground of Flanders as would the books that will be written about it
in the future, were you to pile them all up together when the last
one of them is printed! But what a monument it is to bravery and to
sacrifice--to all that is best in this human race of ours!

No human hands have ever reared such a monument as that ridge is and
will be. There some of the greatest deeds in history were done--some
of the noblest acts that there is record of performed. There men
lived and died gloriously in their brief moment of climax--the moment
for which, all unknowing, all their lives before that day of battle
had been lived.

I took off my cap as I looked back, with a gesture and a thought of
deep and solemn reverence. And so I said good-by to Vimy Ridge, and
to the brave men I had known there--living and dead. For I felt that
I had come to know some of the dead as well as the living.

CHAPTER XVIII

"You'll see another phase of the front now, Harry," said Captain
Godfrey, as I turned my eyes to the front once more.

"What's the next stop?" I asked.

"We're heading for a rest billet behind the lines. There'll be lots
of men there who are just out of the trenches. It's a ghastly strain
for even the best and most seasoned troops--this work in the
trenches. So, after a battalion has been in for a certain length of
time, it's pulled out and sent back to a rest billet."

"What do they do there?" I asked.

"Well,