te our sandwiches and drank our bottle of white wine in a sheltered
cut of the road that runs up that other ridge which the French gained at
such an appalling price, Notre Dame de Lorette, while the major described
to me some features of the Lens battle, in which he had taken part.
I discovered incidentally that he had been severely wounded at the Somme.
Though he had been a soldier all his life, and a good soldier, his true
passion was painting, and he drew my attention to the rare greens and
silver-greys of the stones above us, steeped in sunlight--all that
remained of the little church of Notre Dame--more beautiful, more
significant, perhaps, as a ruin. It reminded the major of the Turners he
had admired in his youth. After lunch we lingered in the cemetery, where
the graves and vaults had been harrowed by shells; the trenches ran right
through them. And here, in this desecrated resting-place of the village
dead, where the shattered gravestones were mingled with barbed wire,
death-dealing fragments of iron, and rusting stick-bombs that had failed
to explode, was a wooden cross, on which was rudely written the name of
Hans Siebert. Mouldering at the foot of the cross was a grey woollen
German tunic from which the buttons had been cut.

We kept the road to the top, for Notre Dame de Lorette is as steep as
Vimy. There we looked upon the panorama of the Lens battle-field once
more, and started down the eastern slope, an apparently smooth expanse
covered now with prairie grasses, in reality a labyrinth of deep ditches,
dugouts, and pits; gruesome remnants of the battle lay half-concealed
under the grass. We walked slowly, making desperate leaps over the
trenches, sometimes perforce going through them, treading gingerly on the
"duck board" at the bottom. We stumbled over stick-bombs and unexploded
shells. No plough can be put here--the only solution for the land for
years to come is forest. Just before we gained the road at the bottom,
where the car was awaiting us, we were startled by the sudden flight of a
covey of partridges.

The skies were grey when we reached the banal outskirts of a town where
the bourgeoise houses were modern, commonplace, save those which had been
ennobled by ruin. It was Arras, one of those few magic names, eloquent
with suggestions of mediaeval romance and art, intrigue and chivalry;
while upon their significance, since the war began, has been superimposed
still another, no less eloque