Weel, I was under fire.  There was no doubt about it.  There was a droning over us now, like the noise bees make, or many flies in a small room on a hot summer’s day.  That was the drone of the German shells.  There was a little freshening of the artillery activity on both sides, Captain Godfrey said, as if in my honor.  When one side increased its fire the other always answered—­played copy cat.  There was no telling, ye ken, when such an increase of fire might not be the first sign of an attack.  And neither side took more chances than it must.

I had known, before I left Britain, that I would come under fire.  And I had wondered what it would be like:  I had expected to be afraid, nervous.  Brave men had told me, one after another, that every man is afraid when he first comes under fire.  And so I had wondered how I would be, and I had expected to be badly scared and extremely nervous.  Now I could hear that constant droning of shells, and, in the distance, I could see, very often, powdery squirts of smoke and dirt along the ground, where our shells were striking, so that I knew I had the Hun lines in sight.

And I can truthfully say that, that day, at least, I felt no great fear or nervousness.  Later I did, as I shall tell you, but that day one overpowering emotion mastered every other.  It was a desire for vengeance!  You were the Huns—­the men who had killed my boy.  They were almost within my reach.  And as I looked at them there in their lines a savage desire possessed me, almost overwhelmed me, indeed, that made me want to rush to those guns and turn them to my own mad purpose of vengeance.

It was all I could do, I tell you, to restrain myself—­to check that wild, almost ungovernable impulse to rush to the guns and grapple with them myself—­myself fire them at the men who had killed my boy.  I wanted to fight!  I wanted to fight with my two hands—­to tear and rend, and have the consciousness that I flash back, like a telegraph message from my satiated hands to my eager brain that was spurring me on.

But that was not to be.  I knew it, and I grew calmer, presently.  The roughness of the going helped me to do that, for it took all a man’s wits and faculties to grope his way along the path we were following now.  Indeed, it was no path at all that led us to the Pimple—­the topmost point of Vimy Ridge, which changed hands half a dozen times in the few minutes of bloody fighting that had gone on here during the great attack.

The ground was absolutely riddled with shell holes here.  There must have been a mine of metal underneath us.  What path there was zigzagged around.  It had been worn to such smoothness as it possessed since the battle, and it evaded the worst craters by going around them.  My madness was passed now, and a great sadness had taken its place.  For here, where I was walking, men had stumbled up with bullets and shells raining about them.  At every step I trod ground that must have been the last resting-place of some Canadian soldier, who had died that I might climb this ridge in a safety so immeasurably greater than his had been.