Vimy Ridge!  I could see it.  And above it, and beyond it, now, for the front had been carried on, far beyond, within what used to be the lines of the Hun, the airplanes circled.  Very quiet and lazy they seemed, for all I knew of their endless activity and the precious work that they were doing.  I could see how the Huns were shelling them.  You would see an airplane hovering, and then, close by, suddenly, a ball of cottony white smoke.  Shrapnel that was, bursting, as Fritz tried to get the range with an anti-aircraft gun—­an Archie, as the Tommies call them.  But the plane would pay no heed, except, maybe, to dip a bit or climb a little higher to make it harder for the Hun.  It made me think of a man shrugging his shoulders, calmly and imperturbably, in the face of some great peril, and I wanted to cheer.  I had some wild idea that maybe he would hear me, and know that someone saw him, and appreciated what he was doing—­someone to whom it was not an old story!  But then I smiled at my own thought.

Now it was time for us to leave the cars and get some exercise.  Our steel helmets were on, and glad we were of them, for shrapnel was bursting nearby sometimes, although most of the shells were big fellows, that buried themselves in the ground and then exploded.  Fritz wasn’t doing much casual shelling the noo, though.  He was saving his fire until his observers gave him a real target to aim at.  But that was no so often, for our airplanes were in command of the air then, and his flyers got precious little chance to guide his shooting.  Most of his hits were due to luck.

“Spread out a bit as you go along here,” said Captain Godfrey.  “If a crump lands close by there’s no need of all of us going!  If we’re spread out a bit, you see, a shell might get one and leave the rest of us.”

It sounded cold blooded, but it was not.  To men who have lived at the front everything comes to be taken as a matter of course.  Men can get used to anything—­this war has proved that again, if there was need of proving it.  And I came to understand that, and to listen to things I heard with different ears.  But those are things no one can tell you of; you must have been at the front yourself to understand all that goes on there, both in action and in the minds of men.

We obeyed Captain Godfrey readily enough, as you can guess.  And so I was alone as I walked toward Vimy Ridge.  It looked just like a lumpy excrescence on the landscape; at hame we would not even think of it as a foothill.  But as I neared it, and as I rememered all it stood for, I thought that in the atlas of history it would loom higher than the highest peak of the great Himalaya range.

Beyond the ridge, beyond the actual line of the trenches, miles away, indeed, were the German batteries from which the shells we heard and saw as they burst were coming.  I was glad of my helmet, and of the cool assurance of Captain Godfrey.  I felt that we were as safe, in his hands, as men could be in such a spot.