sion when, in a message to our
Commander-in-Chief on March 2d, he said that "the French army remembered
that its recent call on the comradeship of the British army met with an
immediate and complete response."

By liberating an immense number of French troops of the Tenth Army and
a mass of artillery from this part of the front, we had the good fortune
to be of great service to France at a time when she needed many men and
guns to repel the assault upon Verdun.

Some of her finest troops--men who had fought in many battles and had
held the trenches with most dogged courage--were here in this sector of
the western front, and many batteries of heavy and light artillery
had been in these positions since the early months of the war. It was,
therefore, giving a new and formidable strength to the defense of Verdun
when British troops replaced them at the time the enemy made his great
attack.

The French went away from this part of their battlefront with regret and
emotion. To them it was sacred ground, this line from the long ridge
of Notre Dame de Lorette, past Arras, the old capital of Artois, to
Hebuterne, where it linked up with the British army already on the
Somme. Every field here was a graveyard of their heroic dead.

I went over all the ground which we now held, and saw the visible
reminders of all that fighting which lay strewn there, and told the
story of all the struggle there by the upheaval of earth, the wreckage
of old trenches, the mine--craters and shell-holes, and the litter of
battle in every part of that countryside.

I went there first--to the hill of Notre Dame de Lorette looking
northward to Lens, and facing the Vimy Ridge, which the enemy held as
a strong barrier against us above the village of Souchez and Ablain
St.-Nazaire and Neuville St.-Vaast, which the French had captured--when
they were still there; and I am glad of that, for I saw in their places
the men who had lived there and fought there as one may read in the
terrible and tragic narrative of war by Henri Barbusse in Le Feu.

I went on such a day as Barbusse describes. (Never once did he admit
any fine weather to alleviate the suffering of his comrades, thereby
exaggerating their misery somewhat.) It was raining, and there was a
white, dank mist through the trees of the Bois de Bouvigny on the way to
the spur of Notre Dame. It clung to the undergrowth, which was torn by
shell-fire, and to every blade of grass growing rankly round the l