The motor stops.  This is a Headquarters, and a staff officer comes out to greet us—­a boy in looks, but a D.S.O. all the same!  His small car precedes us as a guide, and we keep up with him as best we may.  These are mining villages we are passing through, and on the horizon are some of those pyramidal slag-heaps—­the Fosses—­which have seen some of the fiercest fighting of the war.  But we leave the villages behind, and are soon climbing into a wooden upland.  Suddenly, a halt.  A notice-board forbids the use of a stretch of road before us “from sun-rise to sunset.”  Evidently it is under German observation.  We try to find another, parallel.  But here, too, the same notice confronts us.  We dash along it, however, and my pulses run a little quicker, as I realise, from the maps we carry, how near we are to the enemy lines which lie hidden in the haze, eastward; and from my own eyes, how exposed is the hillside.  But we are safely through, and a little further we come to a wood—­a charming wood, to all seeming, of small trees, which in a week or two will be full of spring leaf and flower.  But we are no sooner in it, jolting up its main track, than we understand the grimness of what it holds.  Spring and flowers have not much to say to it!  For this wood and its neighbourhood—­Ablain St. Nazaire, Carency, Neuville St. Vaast—­have seen war at its cruellest; thousands of brave lives have been yielded here; some of the dead are still lying unburied in its furthest thickets, and men will go softly through it in the years to come.  “Stranger, go and tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here, obedient to their will:”—­the immortal words are in my ears.  But how many are the sacred spots in this land for which they speak!

We leave the motor and walk on through the wood to the bare upland beyond.  The wood is still a wood of death, actual or potential.  Our own batteries are all about us; so too are the remains of French batteries, from the days when the French still held this portion of the line.  We watch the gunners among the trees and presently pass an encampment of their huts.  Beyond, a high and grassy plateau—­fringes of wood on either hand.  But we must not go to the edge on our right so as to look down into the valley below.  Through the thin leafless trees, however, we see plainly the ridges that stretch eastward, one behind the other, “suffused in sunny air.”  There are the towers of Mont St. Eloy—­ours; the Bertonval Wood—­ours; and the famous Vimy Ridge, blue in the middle distance, of which half is ours and half German.  We are very near the line.  Notre Dame de Lorette is not very far away, though too far for us to reach the actual spot, the famous bluff, round which the battle raged in 1915.  And now the guns begin!—­the first we have heard since we arrived.  From our left—­as it seemed—­some distance away, came the short sharp reports of the trench mortars, but presently, as we walked on, guns just behind us and below us,