s so imperceptibly from the Arras road that the
legend which describes the Commander-in-Chief, approaching it from
that side, as asking of the officers assembled to meet him after the
victory--"And where is this ridge that you say you have taken?" seems
almost a reasonable tale. But to east and west there is no doubt about
it. One climbs up the side overlooking Ablain St. Nazaire through
shell-holes and blurred trenches, over snags of wire, and round the
edges of craters, till on the top one takes breath on the wide plateau
where stands the Canadian monument to those who fell in the glorious
fight of April 9th, 1917, and whence the eye sweeps that wide northern
and eastern plain, towards Lille on the one side and Douai on the
other, which to our war-beaten and weary soldiers, looking out upon it
when the ridge at last was theirs, was almost as new and strange a
world as the Pacific was to its first European beholders.

Westwards across the valley whence our troops stormed the hill, rises
the Bouvigny Wood, and the long, blood-stained ridge of Notre Dame de
Lorette, where I stood just before the battle, in 1917. To the north
we are looking through the horizon shadows to La Bassee, Bailleul, and
the Salient. Immediately below the hill, in the same direction, lie
the ruin heaps of Lens, and of the mining towns surrounding it; while
behind us the ground slopes south and south-east to Arras and the
Scarpe.

It is a tremendous position. That even the merest outsider can see. In
old days the hill must have been a pleasant rambling ground for the
tired workers of the coal-mining districts. Then the war-blast at its
fiercest passed over it. To-day in its renewed solitude, its sacred
peace, it represents one of the master points of the war, bought and
held by a sacrifice of life and youth, the thought of which holds one's
heart in grip, as one stands there, trying to gather in the meaning of
the scene. Not one short year ago it was in the very centre of the
struggle. If Arras and Vimy had not held, things would have been grave
indeed. Had they been captured, says the official report of the Third
Army, "our main lateral communications--Amiens--Doullens--St. Pol--St.
Omer--would have been seriously threatened if not cut." The Germans
were determined to have them, and they fought for them with a
desperate courage. Three assault divisions were to have carried the
Vimy Ridge, while other divisions were to have captured Arras and the