THE GROUND OF HEROIC DEEDS.

Last year the ground that we are treading, this cold and rainy December day, saw played out one of the most terrible acts of this terrible war. It shook for weeks together during May and June, 1915, to the thunder of vast opposing artilleries. Thousands of men moved over it and drenched it with their blood.

This ground has seen the French Army, in a transport of courage, bind for an instant the wings of victory; it has seen our battalions burst at racing speed over trenches that were deemed impregnable; it has seen Petain's men storm the Vimy Ridge and win a sight of the plain, the goal of their desires, their promised land....

It has seen that!

I own frankly that, as I write these impressions, I am in the grip of an emotion which I do not even try to conquer. Perhaps it is because these events of May and June, 1915, are already so distant that time has magnified their tragic splendour till they have acquired a sort of legendary quality.

We reached this battlefield through the wood of Bouvigny, which lies to the North-westwards of the crest of Notre Dame de Lorette. In this wood, which is all close thickets and has few large trees, just before the attack of May, an entire French division succeeded in gathering without being discovered by the enemy.

You can still see clearly, at the Southern edge of the wood, the first French trenches, in front of which, in October, 1914, after the evacuation of Lille, the German hosts were stopped in their march to the West. The breaking flood has eaten deeply into the slopes, as the sea has done along the Breton Coast.

Two years will soon have passed over this devastated spot. The grass and the moss have begun to take possession of the abandoned trenches, to conceal the shell-holes and the dug-outs, to cover up the vast wreckage of the battle, the dear relics of our soldiers. Nevertheless, we see everywhere evidence of the madness with which they fought hereabouts in May and June, 1915. Years, centuries, I believe, must pass before every sign of these things will be gone.

No doubt the bones that one often finds scattered here and there, refused by the ground, will crumble away and will return little by little to the dust from which they came; these little nameless crosses, made out of two sticks of different lengths fastened together, will vanish; but on the spurs of Lorette, as at Carency, or at Ablain Saint-Nazaire, there will always be something that will speak of the spring of 1915—the ground.

We were anxious to see the ruins of the chapel. We found them only with great difficulty. At last at the angle of a trench we came upon its brick foundations and a small monument, set up since 1915 by some pious hand. In a frame of wood and corrugated iron are three plaster figures, the Holy Family, which were formerly in the chapel, with this inscription:

"Memorial of the Holy Family of the Santa Casa of Notre Dame de Lorette. August, 1916. The Guides and Protectors of valiant soldiers."

This monument cannot be said to be erected—since it is buried—but it hides itself away in that part of the spurs of Lorette whence the eye looks out beyond over the whole district. In clear weather one sees the whole panorama of the German and French lines. One can trace their windings by Angres, Lievin and Lens, and good eyes can follow them right up to Lille. It is quite common, at any rate, to see the people of this invaded piece of France going about their business in the streets of, for example, Lens.

Opposite, to the East, are the chalky heights of Vimy, a little higher than the ridge of Lorette, on which we are standing. Their summits are at present held by the enemy.

We could not fail, while we were at Ablain, to compare the effect of the 1915 gunfire with that of 1916. This comparison can, indeed, be made wherever fighting had taken place before the Somme offensive.

In the sector of Ablain, Carency and Souchez our artillery had delivered a weight of shell, in May and June 1915, such as had never been known before. The enemy had been stunned by it. Yet, what a different effect was wrought by the artillery during the Somme offensive. At either Ablain, Carency or Souchez it is still possible to see that there is a village, and even to rebuild it in imagination. The skeletons are still standing.

But in Fricourt, Mametz, Thiepval and all the other villages which were under fire in 1916, not one stone remains upon another. In 1915 it was destruction; in 1916 annihilation. The advance made in the construction of artillery is written in the soil in unmistakable characters, and no one who is not an expert can conceive how the science of levelling things with the earth might be brought to any greater perfection. Our further advance along these lines must, one would say, be made downwards.

It is with deep regret that we leave these immense cities of the dead, where so many Frenchmen sleep under the sympathetic wardenship of our Allies.