“It was obliging of him, to be sure,” I said, rather dryly.

“That’s what we said,” said the officer.  “Why, as soon as I saw the hole that shell had made, I said to Campbell:  ’By Jove—­there’s the very place for Harry Lauder’s concert to-morrow!’ And he agreed with me!”

Now it was time for handshaking and good-bys.  I said farewell all around, and wished good luck to that brave battery, so cunningly hidden away in its pit.  There was a great deal of cheery shouting and waving of hands as we went off.  And in two minutes the battery was out of sight—­even though we knew exactly where it was!

We made our way slowly back, through the lengthening shadows, over the shell-pitted ground.  The motor cars were waiting, and Johnson, too.  Everything was shipshape and ready for a new start, and we climbed in.

As we drove off I looked back at Vimy Ridge.  And I continued to gaze at it for a long time.  No longer did it disappoint me.  No longer did I regard it as an insignificant hillock.  All that feeling that had come to me with my first sight of it had been banished by my introduction to the famous ridge itself.

It had spoken to me eloquently, despite the muteness of the myriad tongues it had.  It had graven deep into my heart the realization of its true place in history.

An excrescence in a flat country—­a little hump of ground!  That is all there is to Vimy Ridge.  Aye!  It does not stand so high above the ground of Flanders as would the books that will be written about it in the future, were you to pile them all up together when the last one of them is printed!  But what a monument it is to bravery and to sacrifice—­to all that is best in this human race of ours!

No human hands have ever reared such a monument as that ridge is and will be.  There some of the greatest deeds in history were done—­some of the noblest acts that there is record of performed.  There men lived and died gloriously in their brief moment of climax—­the moment for which, all unknowing, all their lives before that day of battle had been lived.

I took off my cap as I looked back, with a gesture and a thought of deep and solemn reverence.  And so I said good-by to Vimy Ridge, and to the brave men I had known there—­living and dead.  For I felt that I had come to know some of the dead as well as the living.

CHAPTER XVIII

“You’ll see another phase of the front now, Harry,” said Captain Godfrey, as I turned my eyes to the front once more.

“What’s the next stop?” I asked.

“We’re heading for a rest billet behind the lines.  There’ll be lots of men there who are just out of the trenches.  It’s a ghastly strain for even the best and most seasoned troops—­this work in the trenches.  So, after a battalion has been in for a certain length of time, it’s pulled out and sent back to a rest billet.”