Everywhere, here, were whitened bones of men.  In the wild swirling of the battle, and the confusion of digging in and meeting German counter attacks that had followed it, it had not been possible to bury all the dead.  And so the whitened bones remained, though the elements had long since stripped them bare.  The elements—­and the hungry rats.  These are not pretty things to tell, but they are true, and the world should know what war is to-day.

I almost trod upon one skeleton that remained complete.  It was that of a huge German soldier—­a veritable giant of a man, he must have been.  The bones of his feet were still encased in his great boots, their soles heavily studded with nails.  Even a few shreds of his uniform remained.  But the flesh was all gone.  The sun and the rats and the birds had accounted for the last morsel of it.

Hundreds of years from now, I suppose, the bones that were strewn along that ground will still be being turned up by plows.  The generations to come who live there will never lack relics of the battle, and of the fighting that preceded and followed it.  They will find bones, and shell cases, and bits of metal of all sorts.  Rusty bayonets will be turned up by their plowshares; strange coins, as puzzling as some of those of Roman times that we in Britain have found, will puzzle them.  Who can tell how long it will be before the soil about Vimy Ridge will cease to give up its relics?

That ground had been searched carefully for everything that might conceivably be put to use again, or be made fit for further service.  The British army searches every battlefield so in these days.  And yet, when I was there, many weeks after the storm of fighting had passed on, and when the scavengers had done their work, the ground was still rather thickly strewn with odds and ends that interested me vastly.  I might have picked up much more than I did.  But I could not carry so very much, and, too, so many of the things brought grisly thoughts to my mind!  God knows I needed no reminders of the war!  I had a reminder in my heart, that never left me.  Still, I took some few things, more for the sake of the hame folks, who might not see, and would, surely, be interested.  I gathered some bayonets for my collection—­somehow they seemed the things I was most willing to take along.  One was British, one German—­two were French.

But the best souvenir of all I got at Vimy Ridge I did not pick up.  It was given to me by my friend, the grave major—­him of whom I would like some famous sculptor to make a statue as he sat at his work of observation.  That was a club—­a wicked looking instrument.  This club had a great thick head, huge in proportion to its length and size, and this head was studded with great, sharp nails.  A single blow from it would finish the strongest man that ever lived.  It was a fit weapon for a murderer—­and a murderer had wielded it.  The major had taken it from a Hun, who had meant to use it—­had, doubtless, used it!—­to beat out the brains of wounded men, lying on the ground.  Many of those clubs were taken from the Germans, all along the front, both by the British and the French, and the Germans had never made any secret of the purpose for which they were intended.  Well, they picked poor men to try such tactics on when they went against the Canadians!